judgments as to what is and what is not religious art. I know what is religious art for me. You know what is religious art for you. And they are not necessarily the same. Not everybody feels pulled up to heavenly heights in listening to the pellucid, mathematically precise structure of a Bach fugue. The smarmy picture of Jesus which I find nauseating may be for someone else a true icon.
—
Another problem about identifying what is and what is not religious art is that religious art transcends its culture and reflects the eternal, and while we are alive we are caught within our culture. All artists reflect the time in which they live, but whether or not their work also has that universality which lives in any generation or culture is nothing we can know for many years. Also, art which is truly iconographic for one period may have little to say to another. My parents, who were in their thirties at the time of the First World War, loved Romantic music, Chopin, Wagner—how they loved Wagner! But Wagner has little to say to me. The reasonable, peaceful world in which my parents grew up, the world which was far too civilized for war, was broken forever by the horror of World War I. My father went to fight in the war to end war, and for the rest of his life he had to live with the knowledge that not only had his war not ended war, it was the beginning of a century of near-total war.
My generation, and my children’s, living in this embattled and insane period, finds more nourishment in the structure of Bach and Mozart than in the lush romanticism of Wagner. Wagner is fine if the world around one is stable. But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential.
Usually, after the death of a well-known artist, there comes a period of eclipse of his work. If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive. It’s difficult to believe that for several centuries after Shakespeare’s death he was virtually unknown. William Green, his contemporary, was considered a better playwright than the too-popular Will, who pandered to public taste. But was it pandering? Art should communicate with as many people as possible, not just with a group of the esoteric elite. And who remembers Green today?
Bach, too, was eclipsed and remembered as a good church organist rather than a composer, and for a long time that putting of the thumb under the fingers was held against him; no wonder the thumb had been very little used in keyboard music until Bach came along with this “radical” departure from custom.
Bach might have been forgotten forever had not Mendelssohn discovered some monks wrapping parcels in music manuscript—and given the
St. Matthew Passion
back to the world.
The
St. Matthew Passion
is an icon of the highest quality for me, an open door into the realm of the numinous. Bach, of course, was a man of deep and profound religious faith, a faith which shines through his most secular music. As a matter of fact, the melody of his moving chorale “O sacred head now wounded” was the melody of a popular street song of the day, but Bach’s religious genius was so great that it is now recognized as one of the most superb pieces of religious music ever written.
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.
All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older. But they start off without self-consciousness as they paint their purple flowers, their anatomically impossible people, their thunderous, sulphurous skies. They don’t worry that they may not be as good as Di Chirico or Bracque; they know intuitively that it is folly to make comparisons, and they go ahead and say what they want to say. What looks like a hat to a grownup
—
Another problem about identifying what is and what is not religious art is that religious art transcends its culture and reflects the eternal, and while we are alive we are caught within our culture. All artists reflect the time in which they live, but whether or not their work also has that universality which lives in any generation or culture is nothing we can know for many years. Also, art which is truly iconographic for one period may have little to say to another. My parents, who were in their thirties at the time of the First World War, loved Romantic music, Chopin, Wagner—how they loved Wagner! But Wagner has little to say to me. The reasonable, peaceful world in which my parents grew up, the world which was far too civilized for war, was broken forever by the horror of World War I. My father went to fight in the war to end war, and for the rest of his life he had to live with the knowledge that not only had his war not ended war, it was the beginning of a century of near-total war.
My generation, and my children’s, living in this embattled and insane period, finds more nourishment in the structure of Bach and Mozart than in the lush romanticism of Wagner. Wagner is fine if the world around one is stable. But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential.
Usually, after the death of a well-known artist, there comes a period of eclipse of his work. If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive. It’s difficult to believe that for several centuries after Shakespeare’s death he was virtually unknown. William Green, his contemporary, was considered a better playwright than the too-popular Will, who pandered to public taste. But was it pandering? Art should communicate with as many people as possible, not just with a group of the esoteric elite. And who remembers Green today?
Bach, too, was eclipsed and remembered as a good church organist rather than a composer, and for a long time that putting of the thumb under the fingers was held against him; no wonder the thumb had been very little used in keyboard music until Bach came along with this “radical” departure from custom.
Bach might have been forgotten forever had not Mendelssohn discovered some monks wrapping parcels in music manuscript—and given the
St. Matthew Passion
back to the world.
The
St. Matthew Passion
is an icon of the highest quality for me, an open door into the realm of the numinous. Bach, of course, was a man of deep and profound religious faith, a faith which shines through his most secular music. As a matter of fact, the melody of his moving chorale “O sacred head now wounded” was the melody of a popular street song of the day, but Bach’s religious genius was so great that it is now recognized as one of the most superb pieces of religious music ever written.
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.
All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older. But they start off without self-consciousness as they paint their purple flowers, their anatomically impossible people, their thunderous, sulphurous skies. They don’t worry that they may not be as good as Di Chirico or Bracque; they know intuitively that it is folly to make comparisons, and they go ahead and say what they want to say. What looks like a hat to a grownup
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