How To Become a Work of Art
“Revealed Religion should be especially poetical,” says John Henry Newman. This is because religion, “Presents us with those ideal forms of excellence in which a poetical mind delights, and with which all grace and harmony are associated. It brings us into a new world—a world of overpowering interest, of the sublimest views, and the tenderest and purest feelings.”
In other words, religious faith isn't a matter of believing the right things or saying the right things. As Pope Benedict XVI comments, we aren't converted to an idea but to a relationship with a living person. Catholicism, in particular, situates belief within an incarnational view of the world. Creation is filled to the brim with the presence of God, and those who accept the grace Christ offers through his Church have his form impressed upon them. They are remade in his likeness. It's a process that demands everything of us – body and soul – and in return God vouchsafes the same. He offers union with him, not merely of the intellect but to join our whole selves to him. It's not a fair trade.
This incarnational search for the whole is why the Church is, historically, such a strong patron of the arts. Our faith is poetic.
As the pastor of a Catholic parish, Epiphany of Our Lord in St. Louis, I've put my aesthetic theory that beauty is evangelistic into action. I often brag on my parish - how the young adult population has reappeared at our masses, how children and families have crowded in, how the sanctuary at Mass is overflowing with altar boys, how our community has learned to strive for a reverent and beautiful Mass to offer to God. To paraphrase St. Paul, I'm allowed to brag because it has nothing to do with me. We've experienced success not because of the priest but because of the Mass itself. Our Mass is poetic - clouds of incense everywhere, the sound of the organ and chant modulating the silence into the undulating waves of a lullaby, bells ringing, gorgeous vestments. We're still working at it. After all, beauty is a discipline, a craft to be practiced over a lifetime. Our progress, though, has been astounding.
It's not about the beauty itself, as if we're playacting aesthetes seeking only a pleasant veneer. It's beauty as the radiance of truth. The imaginative quality of how the truth is presented by the Church literally changes lives and transforms personal devotion. This is the value of sacred art. It's a living revelation of the truth, and it preaches in a way that prosaic statements of belief – as necessary as they are – cannot.
This is why I appreciate the work of art historian Elizabeth Lev. She emphasizes the integral nature of sacred art to the development of the faith. Her new book, The Silent Knight, specifically traces the development of St. Joseph. Lev has always taken great pains to show the catechetical nature of Catholic art as it developed through the centuries. As the allusion in the book title points out, St. Joseph has had a strange historical journey and is often seen as a silent partner next to the Blessed Virgin Mary. In fact, it wasn't until the first mosaics were put into the Church of Mary Major that St. Joseph even appeared visually. Before that, it was always Christ and his mother making a pair. Once Joseph finally appears, he maintains a safe distance, far from stage center. Why? Because his distance protected Mary's purity at a time when the Church was defending the full divinity of the Second Person of the Trinity.
From that point on, the figure of St. Joseph radically changed throughout the years as he met the theological needs of the age. You can trace the doctrinal emphasis as sacred art responded to controversial issues - The divinity of Christ, the Virgin birth, a young strong Joseph as a figure of a chivalrous knight, a sleeping Joseph to illustrate contemplative action, a handsome Joseph putting a wedding ring on his bride's finger while the Holy Spirit hovers. The point being that the truth of the faith is strongly expressed in its imaginative, creative activity. Gothic cathedrals, statuary, paint, and stained glass are catechetical in a way that a university lecture is not. Joseph, as a flesh and blood man, a poetic image captured in pigment and glass, presents a number of faces to the world. None of them contradictory but, rather, different facets to be emphasized, each one a particular reaching out for the whole, true in the way that one person is true to another and yet retains hidden reservoirs mystery.
Through sacred art we come to know St. Joseph and the aspects of the faith he represents, but we don't read him like a book. He's a gesture towards the transcendent.
So are you, really.
Our lives are iconographic windows into Heaven. The culture we create and the imagination that reaches out in love teach more than we can guess. I often reference sacred art in my homilies because I find that the appeal to the imagination helps my parishioners far more than a purely intellectual approach to the homily ever would. I tell the kids in our parish school of religion about the pomegranates that the infant Christ holds and show them how there's a little cross stitched on the corporal right where the Eucharistic Host rests on the altar. I let them see the metalwork on my chalice that looks like leaves on a flower and I let them smell the beads of frankincense we burn at Mass.
Everything we know arrives to us first through the senses – what we see, taste, smell, hear, and touch. This is the language of the faith, these tactile, beautiful, sacred objects. This is why children love reverent Masses full of the imaginative glory of Catholicism and families flock to these types of parishes. It's why adults love churches that are full of sacred art and it's such a shameful act of vandalism that many churches were whitewashed. It's why people sneak into the church alone to leave flowers at the foot of St. Joseph's statue and light candles to plead for his intercession.
St. Joseph is a man who lived the faith as authentically as he could. This simple heroic action, to live as God would have him live, transformed his life into a work of art. Throughout the centuries, artists of the Church have lovingly depicted aspects of his life that can teach us how we, too, might live our lives.
