Thirty years after the close of the Second Vatican Council, liturgical reform, or better said, reform of the reforms, remains one of the most contested topics of Catholic debate. The subject, most often discussed from either the dogmatic or historical perspective, leaves little time for the powerful role played by visual imagery in worship. Although it is universally conceded that the visual arts were a vital part of Catholic as well as Orthodox liturgies throughout history, many contemporary writers on liturgical reform, tainted by a strain of iconoclasm, view liturgical art as decoration at best, or an unwarranted distraction at worst. Yet, in truth, imagery, rightly analyzed, is inseparable from the fundamental theological expression embodied in a given liturgy. But before looking at modern visual art and some current liturgical innovations, an historical perspective must be probed.

The use of images with liturgical worship dates to the earliest days of Christianity in Rome. In the second and third century catacomb known as the Capilla Greca, for example, you can see a clear depiction of The Last Supper painted above the altar. (Figure 1) Is this a decorative element, a simple didactic tool, or an integral part of the lex orandi, lex credendi (as one prays, so one believes) of the primitive Church ?

It is undoubtedly true that, philosophically speaking, the end of art is beauty, but images may be employed for pedagogical reasons as well. Moreover, our present knowledge of psychology and brain function includes a further level of understanding; the visual arts are a powerful means of human communication, both conscious and unconscious; which can transmit the innermost fears, desires, aspirations, and inspirations of both individuals and communities. Some of this century's leading art historians have alluded to this most fascinating, yet little understood aspect of art. Irwin Panofsky in the introduction to his Studies in Iconology (Harper & Row) describes the three levels of understanding while viewing a picture. The first or primary level is that of the natural subject matter. At this level the viewer identifies pure forms, that is, certain configurations of line and color, or certain peculiarly shaped lumps of bronze or stone, as natural objects, -- human beings, animals, plants, and so on -- and notes their mutual relations. At a secondary level the viewer is aware that the conventional subject matter identifies iconographical motifs, i.e., a group of figures seated around a dinner table in a certain way represents the Last Supper. The third level brings the viewer closer to the true message of a painting or sculpture, what Panofsky calls "intrinsic meaning or content." This "is apprehended by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion--unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed into one work."

It is at this level of intrinsic meaning that art and liturgy are fused into an organic statement about the lex orandi of a given time and place. Thus the painting of the Last Supper over the altar in the Capilla Greca is more than a decorative motif or tool of instruction; it is a genuine manifestation of the very core of Catholic devotion -- the Eucharist. In short, the artwork itself forms part of the latreia, the true praise, of the liturgical action, the other parts being the rubrics and music.

If art, then, is integral to the lex orandi of the Church, it is also tied inexorably to her lex credendi since the two are inseparable. The age-old axiom lex orandi, lex credend originated with the solemn pronouncement of Pope Celestine I, legem credendi statuit lex orandi, regarding the definition of Mary as Theotokos, Mother of God (Council of Ephesus 431).Then, as now , the liturgy of the Universal Church praised Mary as the "Mother of God" and Pope Celestine called the Nestorians heretical for challenging an article of faith that was so deeply ingrained in the prayer life of the Christian community. His words implied then, as now, that the liturgy of worship is a chief instrument in the perpetuation of true doctrine. Many centuries later, Pope Pius XII in his 1947 encyclical on the liturgy, Mediator Dei pointed out that the reverse is also true: Lex credendi legem statuat supplicandi (the true faith must establish the mode of prayer). In short, what the Church believes and how it prays are intrinsically one -- and the arts form a part of this union. Once the doctrine of the Divine Motherhood of Mary was proclaimed at Ephesus, art came immediately into play. When the Basilica of Santa Maria Magiore was raised at this time in Rome, it was adorned with mosaics depicting the life of Our Lord and the Blessed Mother in accordance with the then- defined doctrine. (Figure 2)

As fast as the doctrine of the Church took form in the great conciliar pronouncements from Nicea right up through Trent, so Church art and architecture kept pace, faithfully mirroring these refinements of theology. Interestingly, even prior to Christianity, shapes had been used to reflect spiritual realities. In the West, the Greeks, following the Pythagorean Table of Opposites (Odd-Even, Straight-Curved, Right-Left, Male-Female, etc.), built their temples to male deities ( Zeus, Apollo, etc.) with straight lines and angles, and temples to female deities of desire and fecundity (Aphrodite, Demeter, etc.) in the form of a circular tholos.These shapes were adopted by the early Roman Church which used the rectangular basilica for Eucharistic celebration and the round tholos for burial sites "The seed must die in the earth to rise again in glory". A third form, the octanglular church, was built over the birth site of a recognized saint, eight being the day after the Sabbath, or Easter--the beginning of the new dispensation. (Baptismal fonts were made in this shape for the same reason.)

In the East, especially in India, the stupa, a square base surmounted with a dome, emerged as the basic architectural form for religious worship. This was adapted by the Eastern Byzantine Church and became the official architectural form for the Divine Liturgy. (Figure 3) The square base represented the earth with its four corners and the circular dome the heavens above. At the center of the dome was the Christ, Jesus as Pantocrator, Lord of All (Figure 4), and below, the faithful were separated from the priests celebrating the Divine Mysteries by a screen called an iconostasis, reminiscent of the veil before the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem. This screen was gilded and adorned with images of Jesus, the Blessed Mother, and the Saints--reminders of the mysteries being reenacted in the sanctuary behind it. To reach the sanctuary, the holy space imbued during the liturgy with the True Presence it was necessary to pass through the gilded Royal Doors, which in Byzantine symbolism represent of the Gates of Heaven made present here on earth. Within the sanctuary, behind the altar, on a golden background of Heaven was an image of Mary Panagea raising her arms in prayer, offering the Divine Sacrifice to her Son above. (Figure 5)

This basic shape with its iconographic content has not significantly changed, nor has the fourth century liturgy of St. John Chrisostom. The lex orandi, lex credendi of the Byzantine Church has remained consistently faithful, visibly and verbally, to the teachings of the Eastern Fathers from St. Ignatius of Antioch (60-107 AD) onward. This is not to say that there have not been heterodox or innovative impulses, or influences, or theological speculations within Eastern Orthodoxy. For example Palamite Hesychasm, introduced in the fourteenth century, taught the use of verbal repetitions and controlled breathing to be used in achieving a vision of the "uncreated light" of God that is not "of the essence." This mystical approach closely resembles both the Hindu Hatha Yoga and Jewish Kabbalistic kavod (glory)Theosophy of the same period in both technique and object. On the other hand, the writings of V.S. Soloviev and Nicolai Berdyaev in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries show the influence of Western philosophical concepts that sprang from the monistic world-view of Baruch Spinoza and Hegel. But, these speculations had little or no influence on the faith or liturgical prayer of the people.

This was not the case in the West. The turbulent dynamics of Western civilization and Roman Catholicism have lived in a symbiotic relationship from the beginning. Whereas in the East, Church and state were inexorably enmeshed with the emperor as Pontifex Maximus, in the West, the Pope as supreme spiritual authority oversaw, but had no control over, secular developments. St. Augustine believed that the City of God must live in an uneasy but enduring relationship with the City of Man until the end of time. As indicated, the first houses built for liturgical worship were based on classical shapes, emulating the Roman courts of law, or basilicas. By the fourth century, the time of St. Ambrose, cruciform churches had appeared. These became the dominant form of ecclesiastical architecture up through the Middle Ages and beyond. (Figure 6)

This shape best reflected the theology of the Church as Mystical Body of Christ on earth, formulated by St. Paul and reiterated by the vast majority of Church Fathers , East and West. Within the stone walls of the cross, the body of the faithful assembled as members of the Mystical Body around the altar of sacrifice, where Christ, the "Head," was eucharistically offered by the priest, in persona Cristi, for the salvation of the faithful.

As in the Eastern Church, the sanctuary was set off from the rest of the church by a rood screen reminiscent of the iconostasis. Although diminished in size over the years, this separation, in the form of an altar rail, continued to differentiate the distinct realms of nature and Divine Grace. And, unlike in the East where they were proscribed, statues were used to fill the mind and imbue the imagination with, the virtues of the saints and the mystery of redemption. The use of statuary in the West can be traced back to the year 596. In that year Pope St. Gregory the Great issued his famous edict to the bishops of Gaul and Britain proclaiming that the temples of idolatrous pagans were not to be destroyed but reformed and that the images after being smashed should be replaced by figures of Christ, the Blessed Mother, the martyrs, and the saints. This continuity, he maintained, would not only ease the entry of these barbarous folk into the True Faith, but acquaint them through their eyes --through art--with the history of salvation.

By the High Middle Ages, the cruciform church, its exterior covered with scenes from both the Old and New Testaments, and the lives of prophets and saints, reached its zenith in the Gothic Cathedral. (Figure 7) These churches were a visual lesson in medieval theology. To quote again from art historian Irwin Panofsky, the task of the cathedral builder was... to make reason clearer by an appeal to the imagination; [he] sought to embody in stone and glass the whole Christian knowledge, theological, moral, natural, and historical, with everything in its place and with all that no longer found its place suppressed ... a Summa Theologiae to be visually apprehended"

Between the years 1140 and 1280, some eighty of these magnificent structures were built and dedicated to the Most Holy Virgin, as had been the great Basilica of Santa Maria Magiore in Rome in the fourth century. The driving force behind the Gothic movement, and its abundant use of imagery rising heavenward in ordered hierarchy of splendor, was the Promethean figure of the Abbe Suger (1081 - 1151) of the Benedictine Abby of St. Denis on the Ile de France. In contrast to the visual austerity of the burgeoning Cistercian piety, and basing his love of beauty in the service of God on the writings of Dionysius the Pseudo-Aeropagite , Abbe Suger not only affirmed the popular devotion of venerating images, but extolled splendor in liturgical settings as an aid to raising mind and heart in contemplation of Divine Truth:

"When `out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God the loveliness of the many-colored stones has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to the higher world in an analogical manner

This perception of Suger--that the soul ascends to contemplation of supernatural Truth through contemplation of natural beauty--became an accepted part of the Roman Catholic tradition and was echoed in philosophic terms by the thirteenth century Scholastic, Duns Scotus: "It is impossible for our mind to rise to the imitation and contemplation of the celestial hierarchies unless it relies upon the material guidance that is commensurate to it."

Of all these great cathedrals, perhaps the most perfect exemplar is the cathedral of Chartres, southwest of Paris. At this shrine to the Queen of Heaven and Earth, the visual fusion of the lex orandi and lex credendi is complete. The two towers, God and creation, stand stage right and stage left as in a Byzantine icon. Between them is the Rose Window (Figure 8)--Mary, the Rose (perfection) of Creation. She is, in the words of Dante: "the rose in which the Word was made flesh." (Paradiso XXIII). From the entrance which is dominated by Mary, the eye is drawn along the aisle right up to the sanctuary where Christ Himself is offered up daily at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Henry Adams, a non-Catholic, looked up at the Rose Window of Chartres and exclaimed "[It is] a jewel so gorgeous that no earthly majesty could bear comparison with It...Never in seven hundred years has one looked up at this Rose without feeling it to be Our Lady's promise of paradise." (Mont -Saint Michel and Chartres)

On the floor of the cathedral, bathed in the light of the great Rose Window, a forty-foot labyrinth is engraved in the pavement. (Figure 9) Contrary to some modern speculation, in medieval times the labyrinth was a symbol of the dark forces ascribed to Hell. This certainly holds true for the labyrinth at the great Marian Cathedral of Chartres. At the center of this configuration an inscription, now lost, read: "This stone represents the Cretan's Labyrinth. Those who enter cannot leave unless they be helped, like Theseus by Ariadne's thread. The analogy was clear to the medieval mind: to escape the entrapment of the bestial demons, one must place one's destiny in the hands of the Woman, Mary.

With the advent of the Dominican and Franciscan renewal in the thirteenth century, a subtle shift occurred in the lex credendi which affected both the lex orandi and the art of the Church. In contrast to the Byzantine and early Medieval traditions, St. Francis and Dominic saw God's glory in all of His creation. Francis pointed out that through the Incarnation nature itself might be transformed and elevated to a new level. Artists of the period, starting in Italy with Ducio and Giotto, infused their art with this new spirituality. Instead of painting Our Lord, the Blessed Mother, and the saints on the golden background of Heaven, artists depicted them with a new psychological depth in a natural setting bathed in sunlight and a blue sky. But although the perspective was altered, the truths remained the same and churches generally continued to be in the cruciform or basilican shape, and the art continued both didactic and beautiful to the beholder. (Figure 10)

  High Renaissance art, albeit with some heretical aberrations based on extrinsic influences such as Cabala and pseudo Egyptian lore, reflected the Catholic Tradition with its own unique perspective. While the scales tipped in favor of the contemplation of beauty rather than dogmatic representation as a means of ascent to the divine, even an aesthetic masterpiece such as Michelangelo's frescos in the Sistine Chapel (Figure 11) painted between 1508 - 1512 have a powerful theological message reflecting the hopes of the Roman Papacy of that time. Building on Dante Alighieri's De Monarchia and following the speculations of Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo--that the tenth age of the world and the ultimate triumph of the Church was at hand--the Sistine Chapel was decorated to prelude this event. Michelangelo thus went about painting the history of the world from the creation up to the golden age of Christianity centered in Rome. Michelangelo painted his terrifying Last Judgement begun in 1534 (Figure 12) only after the Protestant revolt of 1517 and the sack of Rome by the Emperor Charles V, which temporarily destroyed all hope in the Roman hegemony.

The Council of Trent was convened in 1545 in response both to the deteriorating situation provoked by Renaissance unorthodox speculation, and to the Protestant revolt, and it continued off and on until 1562. The philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas was reestablished as authoritative, the nature of the sacraments was defined, and the authority of the hierarchy and magisterium was affirmed.

In order to implement the decrees of the Council, theChurch in general and the Jesuits in particular launched the Counter Reformation. As St. Ignatius insistence on compositio loci- placing oneself visually in the presence of the Divine events of Salvation right up to the Beatific Vision-- gave rise to a new style in art now known as the 

Baroque. The term, originally meaning irregular, contorted, or grotesque, was coined as an epithet by nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon Protestant art historians. It was used to denounce the rich ornamentation of the style in contrast to the supposed purity oh High Renaissance and later Neoclassical art. The Baroque style is, in fact, the spirit of the Council of Trent displayed in art and architecture. It is an affirmation of the goodness of nature arranged in a hierarchical ordered ascent. The ceiling frescoes in the church of Sant'Ignatio (Figure 13) depict the skies opening to the heavenly realm, which grows organically out of the church structure itself, and it is filled from bottom to top with saints and angels. The Church, embodying a renewed and sanctified nature is presented analogically as the antechamber of heaven. The Reformers--Luther and Calvin as well as their followers--had denounced the world for having been corrupted through original sin, and man for having been totally deformed in both intellect and will. But the Catholic Church affirmed (dogmatically at the Council of Trent) that the world, made by God, was good and that man, though wounded in both intellect and will, was indeed capable of good work--on the natural order according to his nature and on the supernatural order through the action of God's grace. It all hinged on the nature of grace. Luther claimed that corrupt man must "put on" grace as an external cover of his sinful nature and thus become agreeable to God and the Church said that grace worked from within by activating the soul to faith and good works.

 These two distinct visions sparked two very different world views, especially in the arts. The Protestants, mainly in Northern Europe, England, and North America, considered the material world a slippery place where human existence was immersed in the Bible and Business, i.e., bourgeois culture; the Catholics, mainly in Southern Europe, Austria, Bavaria, Eastern Europe, and South America, were eager to celebrate all

creation, as had Francis and Dominic, bathed in the light of God's providence, i.e. Baroque

culture. While Protestant churches became more and more to resemble no nonsense meeting halls, Baroque churches were filled to overflowing with organic forms and spiral columns, covered in vines and swathed in gold to show the transforming power of grace upon nature. Images of Mary held a special place of honor for she, fully open to grace, was the highest exponent of the natural order. (Figure 14) The Blessed Sacrament, however, reigned supreme --the very reality of the Word made flesh, the presence of God and His grace in the world-- represented in the Cathedral of Seville by a forty foot silver monstrance. (Figure 15)

While the Protestants in their Hebraic zeal, smashed all the graven images they could find, starting with the decapitation and mutilation of the statue of the Blessed Mother in Paris on Pentecost Sunday 1528, Baroque princes and prelates outdid themselves in producing new ever more glorious works of art. A wonderful example of this contrast between the Baroque and bourgeois spirit is the jewel encrusted statue of St. George (figure 16), which cost the Catholic kings of Bavaria 300,000 florins, more than enough money to field a whole army. Crafted in 1587 it measures only 12 by 20 inches, but, it is encrusted with 36 large diamonds of 40 carats, 2,613 small diamonds, 130 emeralds, 430 rubies, 32 large pearls, etc. all set in pure gold. This little treasure was not created just to be beautiful but as a token symbol of Bavaria as St, George slaying the dragon of Protestantism in order to save Holy Mother Church.

 Pushed to the limits of decorative embellishment the Baoque reached its final form in the eighteenth century as what is known as Rococo. The Wieskirche of Bavaria. (figure 17) finished in 1757, is one of its most spectacular achievements. The walls which represent the antechamber of Heaven are painted pure white. The nave is filled with gilded statues of the saints and angels of the heavenly court. On the frescoed ceiling are the gates of heaven seperating the blue sky of this world from the transcendental world of God. Just as in the Byzantine East-- where the portrayal of the savific mysteries continued to be expressed by Christ Pantocrator, Lord of all, bringing the vision of glory down to earth through the Divine Liturgy--so, in the Baroque West, the earth was raised up to the opening heavens through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It was to be the last definitive statement of a universal Catholic Liturgical art. Although individual artists have produced innovative and personal expressions of

faith, there has been no movement in art since the Baroque that can be said to have an overall Catholic impetus. Indeed, since the time of the French Revolution and the secularization of culture, all Catholic Churches were built in one of the afore-mentioned styles until the middle of this century.

The new ecclesiastical art and architecture of the mid to late twentieth century shows much to clearly that there has been a dramatic break with all past Catholic artistic and architectural traditions. This change is usually discussed in purely aesthetic or sociological terms. In order to speak to twentieth century man, we are told, the Church must use the visual idiom of the times. But this argument fails to address one of the most crucial factors in the drastically different way churches are built and decorated since the 1950s.

Prior to World War II there began to emerge something which would become generically known as nouvelle theologie, a new theology, in the thinking of some of the brightest Catholic thinkers on the European continent. The matter hinged, as in the Protestant Reformation, on the nature of supernatural grace. The Protestants denied the ability of grace to operate in and through nature due to original sin, and now some of the new thinkers questioned the nature of original sin and posited the idea that, through Christ, grace can, not only operate in the natural order, but is in some way intrinsic to it. Christ thus became not the Redeemer of fallen man, but the ideal model of man's perfection and self transcendence. Christianity as such came to be seen not as the sacramental incorporation into the Body of Christ through baptism and eucharist but as an explicit reflection of what man really is. Although these ideas ran counter to the received Tradition and were formally denounced by Pope Pius XII in his seminal encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ: "on the other hand there is a false mysticism creeping in [to the Church], which, in its attempt to eliminate the immovable frontier that separates creatures from their Creator, falsifies Scripture. .. a distorted idea, a false teaching, impious and sacrilegious." ( Mystici Corporis 9., 86.)

Some of these theologians nevertheless went on to become leading figures in the post- conciliar Church. The "new theology" became in many instances the unofficially taught doctrine known as "the spirit of Vatican II." Jesuit professor John Mahoney in England wrote that, "continuity and the interpretation of history of God's work as both Creator and Savior have the effect of if not blurring, at least rendering academic the conceptual distinction between nature and supernature." And professor Richard McBrien stated much the same here in the United States: "There is now a radical capacity in nature itself, and not superadded to nature, by which we are ordained to the knowledge of God. Thus all dualism between nature and grace is eliminated. Human nature is already graced existence..."The new theology greatly affected some post concilliar liturgical thinking. This is clearly seen in the writing of Ralph Keifer who in his 1982 treatise on the Eucharist, Blest and Broken has this to say: "In a liturgy where Christ is understood as present first of all within the world and the assembly, and present on the altar because of that presence first in the church, the event of consecration is simply an unfolding of the presence from within... The high drama of the new eucharistic rite comes less at the elevation of the host and chalice at the consecration, which is very modest, than at the doxology, where, identifying ourselves with Christ (through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit), we present ourselves to the Father. This speaks eloquently for a Christ within the community, and for a eucharistic celebration that speaks, not for a God who intervenes from without, but who is present to his people in all their time of sorrow and joy."

The effects of this new "lex credendi" have been seen for some time in art and architecture, these, dumped on the ever-docile faithful, distort the traditional "lex orandi" of the Church. First off, if man already lives an "engraced" existence, and the sacramental union with Christ is ontologically superfluous, a mere symbol of entrance into a "faith community" then the altar rail (iconostasis, the rood screen) which separates the natural world of the faithful and the supernatural world of the Divine mysteries must go. The Priest is no longer the unique mediator, in persona Cristi , of the Holy Sacrifice but the "presider." The altar, just as in Protestant usage but for diametrically opposed reasons, becomes the "holy table" for the shared meal. Then too, since Christ is already present in the community, the sacramental presence of Our Lord in the tabernacle is now superfluous and can therefore be removed from the sanctuary precinct. Confessionals, for their part, are either ignored or changed into community reconciliation rooms because, the new theology informs us, sin is not a punishable offense against God but a human imperfection. With the traditional concept of the Mystical Body obscured, the images of saints and holy mysteries, a tradition going back to the catacombs, ought also to be removed. This leaves the single figure of the "Risen Lord," or perhaps a crucifix from which the regal title has been stripped, for He is no more than the archetype of divinized humanity. Finally--and, indeed needless to say, if man contains within his own nature the seed of his own salvation--the hierarchy, the priesthood and the sacraments hold only a changeable symbolic nature to be worked out by individual "faith communities" according to their needs. This appears to be what the 1978 U.S. Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy document Environment and Art in Catholic Worship proposed: "Because liturgical celebration is the worship action of the entire Church, it is desirable that persons representing the diversity of ages, sexes, ethnic and cultural groups in the congregation should be involved in planing and ministering in liturgies of the community" (Art, 30)

The sincerity of the original authors of such theological sentiments aside, the results do not appear to lead to a heightened collective piety. Quite the contrary, according to the the reflections of Cardinal Ratzinger regarding an Italian document titled Nuevo dizionario di Liturgia. (See Communio, Winter 1986) This document Cardinal Ratzinger writes, maintains that Vatican II express "two souls" which may be defined as "the letter" and "the spirit." "The letter"is maintained by the Roman hierarchy and its priests who strive for self-preservation and the conservation of their power. "The spirit" on the other hand, strives to break this bondage in the name of freshness and freedom. It is not, therefore, obedience to the magisterium that gives validity to the liturgy, but, the spontaneity and creativity of the community to celebrate its own identity. Cardinal Ratzinger goes on to deplore the lack of rationality in many of these "spirit-guided liturgies" which, lowering the barriers of individual consciousness, lead to Dionysian ecstasy, liberation of the ego from personal responsibility, and a sense of spiritual unification with the universe akin to Eastern theosophy.

Given this emphasis on freedom and creativity in the new liturgies, it is no wonder that the proponents of the "new theology" embraced the simultaneously evolving theories of "modern art". The rebellion against tradition and glorification of the "inner spirit" of creativity were the central tenets of both movements. Like the new liturgists, the promoters of "modern" art and architecture are iconoclastic and disdainful of` all traditions. But contrary to popular belief, virtually every movement in modern art, from Bauhaus to Surrealism is steeped, not in materialism, but in gnostic spirituality--the unlocking of the divine in the human. Wasilly Kandinsky, a founding father of modern art, wrote in his seminal 1911 work, Uber das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art): "[The vast majority of the lowest level of the spiritual pyramid] call themselves Jews, Catholics, Protestants, etc. But they are really atheists...[By contrast] the Theosophical Society approaches the problem of the spirit by way of the. inner knowledge...That which belongs to the spirit of the future can only be realized in feeling, and to this feeling the talent of the artist is the only road" (emphasis in the original). He had written earlier in Whither the New Art?: "Our epoch is a time of tragic collision between matter and spirit and of the downfall of purely material world view; for many people it is a time of terrible, inescapable vacuum, a time of questions; but for a few it is a time of presentiment or precognition of the path to truth...movement toward the spiritual, and in the forms of occultism, spiritualism, monism, the "New" Christianity, theosophy, and religion in the broadest sense.

Picasso, the best-known of all the artists of the period, whose very name has become synonymous with "modern art" believed that art had nothing to do with aesthetics but was in his words, "a sacred and mysterious process," a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires." Walter Gropius, director and leading light of the Bauhaus, the influential school of architecture established in Weimar Germany in the 1920s, is generally remembered for his dictates on form and function in the modern machine age. Underlying these premises, was a belief in a utopian future based on the assumption that after the misery of the times, "spiritual and religious ideas" (based on oriental theosophy) would find their "crystalline expression" in a "great cathedral shining its light into the smallest things of everyday life." This "cathedral of the future" would be built by artists of all classes and backgrounds as a "secret lodge" dedicated to the "new, great, world idea."

Examples from those halcyon times help us to understand more fully this fusion of modern art and liturgy. The chasuble designed by Matisse for the Dominican chapel at Vence (Figure 18), save for a small cross, has no symbolic point of reference to the sacramental action of the mass. The priest is seen as a mannequin who plays a minor role in the display of creative "holy art" by a consecrated secular genius. Likewise Le Corbusier's ground-breaking design for the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp (Figure 19) is totally unrelated the developing but unbroken tradition of Western church architecture: it is simply a project built to his own satisfaction in celebration of his own creative genius. The Italian modernist thinker BenedettoCroce summed it up thus: "And the Christian God is still ours and our refined philosophies call him the spirit which takes us over but which is always us, ourselves. "(emphasis added) The list could go on and on.

 But surely, the reductio ad absurdam of this inward journey in ecclesiastical art is the Houston chapel designed by Philip Johnson and decorated by Mark Rothko in the late 1960s. Built expressly as a symbolic fusion of art and religion, "a non-secular spiritual space," "a unique chapel belonging to no one and everyone," the octagonal (symbol of regeneration) interior space is imageless save for 14 nearly pure black (color of negation and death) monotone panels. Mr. Rothko, well grounded in many mythic belief systems and in Jungian psychology, unfortunately, yet perhaps understandably, committed suicide in 1970 just before its completion.

Without the salvic hope in Christ=s redemption, of which the sacred liturgy is the efficacious model, the culture of death is inevitable. Eros and Thanatos, desire and self destruction form the final cause and consummation of the "inner" god. In the words of G.K. Chesterton from Orthodoxy: "Of all the horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within...That Jones shall worship the god within turns out ultimately to mean that Jones worships Jones...Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards but outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine Captain"

Fortunately, the faithful, having not altogether succumbed to these strange and alien ideologies imposed arbitrarily by an intelligentsia from above, are looking outward once again. Just as in the past in the defense of the Divine Motherhood of Mary at Ephesus in the fourth century, the traditional lex orandi of the faithful is being heard. Slowly but surely, the old faith and devotions are returning. Millions of letters have been received by the Vatican in petition for new pronouncements regarding the dignity and power of Mary. There is a renewed interest in the Eucharist as well. Not only have writers such as Msgr. Robert Sokolowski and Fr. Benedict Groeschel brought fresh insights from phenomenology and psychology to our understanding of this sublime mystery, but the practice of perpetual devotion is spreading rapidly and with it, innumerable conversions.

The results of this renewal are not ours to foretell, however, if the dream vision of St. John Bosco referring to our times is to be believed, there are the two pillars on which the embattled ship of the Church, after great turmoil and strife, will be moored in safe haven. As explained by Don Bosco himself (Figure 20), atop the larger pillar is seen the Eucharist as the ultimate self-abasement of God giving himself to us under the appearance of a wafer of bread; and atop the smaller pillar an image of Mary, archetype of the Church, raised up in exaltation.

As the true faith returns with vigor the liturgy will be revitalized-- and with it fresh visions from the artists. Artistic talent has not disappeared, it only needs to be focussed. With this in mind as we enter the third millennium with the trust and hope so dear to the Holy Father, let us echo the words of Paul Claudel written earlier this century when the upheavals began: "Even today, in this age of iron or, let us say, white metal, the Temple of Solomon and the Cathedral of Chartres have not exhausted all the possibilities of getting back to God. There is still something to be garnered from those people with plaster in their hair and fingers full of paint."

H.R.A. 1997

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