I react to a post over at Rod Dreher's blog, which discusses use of modern art and architecture in the Church, and thought I'd share it:
There are many things to say here, too many really, but I’ll restrict myself to a few, and begin with a sharp sarcastic dissent:
Contra Julien Meyrat, Ronchamp’s Notre Dame is not a “success.” It’s an ugly hideous distortion that is only recognizable as a church due to its culling a few brutalized references to traditional Western ecclesial architectural idioms. It has a blunt dumboized steeple, and a nave. Apart from that, it looks like a inflatable funland castle, a parody and mockery of a church, not a place of Catholic worship.
Also, while I absolutely agree with Bob Dugan when he says that art must be “religious” to be meaningful – vested with the transcendent, metaphysically charged – I say his idea that the artist is always necessarily seeking individual immortality thru fame is vulgar, stupid and trite. Prior to the High Middle Ages/Renaissance, most “artists” where anonymous, from Greece to Chartres sculptors and painters (iconographers) and architects are most often unknown to us, posterity.
It is, contra Bob, exactly in the early Renaissance, with artists like Giotto, then all the “Renaissance masters” where “individual expression” and celebrity status for artists begins to trump the purity of religious expression (“look at me! See how *I* can paint!” “See how beautiful my mistress is as a model for the Virgin!”) that throws the emphasis off the numinous, the Divine, and upon themselves, beginning the great sucking cycle of solipsism that is “modern art.”
It is no longer a Divine iconography, but a masturbatory celebration of self. *That* is why it fails, and why anything that breaks with tradition as an unique expression of some individual, without deep reference to the inherited idiom, the symbolic and aesthetic patrimony we have received, will fail. It has become a form of idolatry, not liturgy.
Liturgia after all is the work of the people throughout all time and space worshipping our God: the opposite of solipsism, idolatry.
And this – most viscerally and radically of all – is why I dissent from Fr. Reese’s ideas on how to “reform” the liturgy. He is more of the same. More hermetic rejection of tradition, more self referential disdain for what has been received, more arrogant presumption that we can and should radically alter everything so that it can work better for us, now. There is no regard on his part for the future, no regard for what we have been entrusted to pass on to our children. There is, in short, absolutely no humility in him.
This spiritual positivism is the cancer of the age, what is killing art, what is killing mystery, what is killing faith. His is the same mentality that sees myth as being synonymous with falsehood, rather than being the heart of all meaning and truth.
I cannot express how much his attitude disgusts and angers me. Enough already. Enough. Leave us our myths. Leave us our sacraments, our mysteries. Let the dusk and tallow smoke envelope us, let the silence embrace us, let the song of God blossom in the quiet of our hearts.. Just leave us alone with our saints and God. Just take your noise and struck awkward poses and go, already, will you?
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