Liturgical Art and Its Discontents 0 comments

From time to time the editors of Image are asked why we don’t cover liturgical art in our pages. It’s a good question. Since Image is a journal of “the arts and religion” it would seem only natural for us to focus on liturgical art, which acts as a bridge linking the journal’s two themes.

Actually, we’ve come close a few times. My own essay on the art of William Schickel (issue #15) contained references to his many liturgical designs, from the simplest candleholder to the monastery chapel at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky. But Bill Schickel’s work ranges far beyond the liturgical, so my essay dealt with all aspects of his distinguished career. Other artists we’ve covered have had their works displayed in churches and synagogues—sometimes permanently, but more often on a temporary basis. These encounters between artists and worshiping communities have not always been happy.

Liturgical art is an important, but often neglected, topic. Those of us who worship every Saturday or Sunday have to live with liturgical art in one fashion or another, whether we go to the plainest meeting house or the most extravagantly ornate baroque cathedral. Moreover, churches and synagogues constitute significant architectural presences on our public squares—these buildings speak volumes about the intersection between faith and culture.

Yet another reason to pay attention to liturgical art is that so much of it is either banal, controversial, or ugly. Nearly everyone has a collection of stories about their favorite liturgical art nightmares: dreary churches that look like roller rinks, lumpy sculptures that were better left on the potter’s wheel, felt banners with sentimental mottoes in Day-Glo colors.

At the other end of the aesthetic spectrum are the controversies that involve art of a high order. We at Image have collected a depressingly large number of anecdotes about the failure of talented (and devout) artists to find churches interested in commissioning or using their work.

Of course, liturgical art isn’t limited to the visual arts. There is also the artistry of language that goes into biblical translations and the spoken rites of the church. As Kathleen Norris and others have pointed out, the ancient precept of the church says that the lex orandi, the order of prayer, helps to shape and define the lex credendi, the order of belief. As Norris reminds us, the crisis in liturgy is not centered in the debates over inclusive language and other such political issues, but in the sheer mediocrity and dullness of the words we speak in church. Nowadays the guardians of the church’s language are not poets but professional “liturgical consultants” and activists whose background is more likely to be in sociology than in literature. Under such a regime, metaphor and mystery have given way to ideology and condescending ideas about how to make language accessible to the people in the pews.

The subject of liturgical art will always be tangled in a number of subtle aesthetic issues. Because it is art with a purpose—as an aid to worship—liturgical art subordinates the free play of the imagination to a specific end. Having to serve two masters—the intrinsic dictates of art and the needs of a worshipping community—liturgical art often becomes mired in contention and confusion. Can a complicated work of art that evokes in the viewer a savoring of irony, allusion, and form be conducive to the spiritual single-mindedness of prayer? To put it differently, can one really pray in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel? These and a host of related questions rarely get the attention they deserve.

So, why doesn’t Image cover this range of important issues relating to liturgical art? My answers to this question won’t satisfy everyone; they don’t even completely satisfy me. But I’ll share them with you nonetheless.

Too many efforts to relate religion and the arts have stumbled because they attempt to channel the imagination into pious patterns. At the root of this failure is an underlying fear of the imagination itself—a force that can’t be tamed or made to fit into comforting, predictable categories. Believers who fear the imagination prefer art that doesn’t stray too far from the church porch; they want to see things they already know gussied up with ornaments and flourishes. But art at its highest pitch tries to tell us things we don’t know, or have forgotten, and that can be unsettling. Also, the majority of our waking hours are not spent in church, but in the world. And if religion is too important to be confined to church services, then so is art that grapples with religious themes.

Image tries to maintain a delicate balance: the editors believe that art should nurture faith, but at the same time we explore art that is not subordinated to the liturgical needs of a particular church or community.

We hope that the work featured in Image will have a profound and beneficial impact on liturgical art. Jacques Maritain once wrote: “Religious art is not a thing that can be isolated from art itself, from the general movement of an age: isolate it, and it grows corrupt, becomes dead letter.” If that’s true, then Image may already be making a significant contribution to the enhancement of liturgical art by focusing on the larger movements of our time.

A new journal, one that focuses on liturgical art, is desperately needed. Meanwhile, Image will cultivate its own garden and hope that its influence on liturgical art, however indirect, is for the good.