A Course on the Poetry Inspired by the Mystical Tradition of the Church - Offered by Andrew Thornton-Norris

A new liturgically centered approach to teaching  literature. The first in a series offered by Andrew Thornton-Norris - Resident Poet of the Imaginative Conservative and author of A Spiritual History of English

Pontifex.University, is offering a new course entitled The Romance of the Soul - the Mystical in Verse, Spiritual Approaches to Literature. This one is for personal enrichment, and costs just $99 - a for anyone interested in understanding what makes great literature and especially those who wish to be creators of beautiful poetry and prose.

This is the introductory course to a series that are planned which will give a new exciting approach to teaching literature. The goal is to impart wonder at the beauty of the literary tradition that is derived from and points us to the words of the Poet - the Holy Spirit who speaks in the Sacred Liturgy especially through the psalms. The hope is that through this it will deepen are participation in the liturgy and help lead us to our ultimate end. Poets considered in this introductory course include Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dante, St John of the Cross, T.S. Eliot and John Burnside.

This particular course is an introduction the poetry that arises from the mystical tradition of the Church. It is  presented through the prism of Andrew Thornton-Norris's general thesis on literature, articulated in his excellent book the Spiritual History of Literature. In this slim volume,  Andrew Thornton-Norris does for poetry and prose what I have been trying to do with art. He relates the actual structure of the writing and the vocabulary used to the worldview of the time. See he shows us, for example, how even if the poet or novelist is sincerely Catholic and trying to express truths that are consistent with the Faith, he is at a great disadvantage if he is seeking to express those truths with the vocabulary and poetic form that reflect a post-Enlightenment culture. He takes us through a philosophical and literary journey from Bede through to the present day. 

The true purpose of literature is to instill wonder in those who read it and a desire for God. It ought to direct us therefore to the place where, in this life we have the most profound encounter with God, the Sacred Liturgy. The poetry of the mystical tradition of the Church arises from the tradition of contemplative prayer. This is the prayer whereby we develop the faculty for the reception of God as He gives himself to us through his love. Its consummation is in the liturgy and when written well it allows for an ever deeper and more active (in the true sense of the word) participation in the liturgy where there is the most profound encounter with God. Contemplation itself is that reception of God and it can only be realized by the action of God himself. All we can do is increase our readiness for him, until He chooses to give to us. When he does so we are have peace and joy and this is the heavenly state that is only fully realised in the next life. However, on our journey towards that point, we can have it by degrees and some might experience temporary anticipations of that ecstasy.

The poetry is the work of mystics who specialize in this prayer and it reflects their experiences and directs us to us - helping us to in our own contemplative prayer and inspiring us to make the attempt. In the hierarchy of literature it might be considered the highest outside the inspired work of the Poet Himself and especially the psalms when sung in the liturgy. It is the psalms that they direct us to.

Here is Andrew's introduction to the course:

'The most profound meeting place between the spiritual and literature is where the mystical tradition inspires poetry. This course will introduce you to some of the key texts and principles of this tradition and the poetry it has inspired. We begin with an introduction to the central concept of mysticism, contemplation, and look at how this relates to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Then we will consider the emergence of the subjective perspective characteristic of modernity, in the thought and feeling of the twelfth century. Then we look at the poetic tradition this inspired, from that of the time of Dante, through the English Renaissance, to the emergence of modern poetry at the time of Baudelaire and Eliot. Then we will consider two contemporary accounts of this meeting in the theology of John Paul II and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, which provides the spiritual context for creative activity today. The two further planned courses in this series will cover the same ground, but in greater detail. You can progress from one to the other, and have the cost of the earlier ones discounted from the later, or take any of them individually.'

For more details and to take the course go to Pontifex.University.

The Christian Environmentalism the Media Chooses to Ignore - Man is the Answer, Not the Problem

We need more people in the world, not less, if we are to solve the world's problems. And we need more gardeners - I am serious here. For the true gardener is the man transformed in Christ who works in the world to raise it up to what it is meant to be.

It is common nowadays for people to think of man as an unnatural animal whose work necessarily destroys the environment. Much of the back to the land movement, I always feel, has a romantic vision of the past and assumes that only a man who lives as he did before industrialization can live in harmony with nature. This pessimistic view of modern man could be seen in various influential figures going back to to Rousseau in 18th century France who hated industrialization and thought that all modern society corrupted ideal man. The ideal for Rousseau was the noble savage  who could be conceived, unlike modern man, of living as an intrinsic part of nature as the animals do, rather than in opposition to it.

This may all sound fairly innocuous stuff - a high regard for the environment is good thing, surely? But in fact it is the neo-paganism we see today, that removes man from his a place as the highest part of creation to something separate from it, and lower than it. This false elevation of the rest of creation to something greater than man in the hierarchy of being has serious, deadly consequences. And I do mean deadly.

Man is not only part of nature, he is absolutely necessary to it - the eco-system needs the interaction of man in order to be complete. Through God's grace human activity is the answer to all the environmental problems we have, not the cause. This is the part of Pope Francis's message in his latest encyclical; a part that so many eco-warriors who were enthusiastic about the encyclical seem not to have noticed...or to have ignored. It is possible to have cities, heavy industry, mass production, and forms of capitalism that are creative expressions of the God's plan for the world, and which add to the beauty and the stability of nature. But, we do need a transformation of the culture in order to see a greater realization of this. The formation that I believe will lead to such an evangelization of the culture is derived from a liturgically centered piety and is described in the book the Way of Beauty.

For me, the flower garden is the model of natural beauty in so many ways. First, It symbolizes the true end of the natural world in which its beauty can only be realised through the inspired work of man. It symbolizes what Eden was to become. It is worth noting that Adam was the first gardener and Christ, the new Adam, prayed in the garden during the passion, was buried and resurrected in the garden and after the resurrection was mistaken by Mary Magdalene for the gardener.

Here is a quote from St Augustine from the Office of Readings on the Feast of St Lawrence, August 10th:

'The garden of the Lord, brethren, includes – yes, it truly includes – includes not only the roses of martyrs but also the lilies of virgins, and the ivy of married people, and the violets of widows. There is absolutely no kind of human beings, my dearly beloved, who need to despair of their vocation; Christ suffered for all. It was very truly written about him: who wishes all men to be saved, and to come to the acknowledgement of the truth.'

This may seem a rather innocent little quote about flowers and the things of religion - martyrs and virgins and so on, but in fact reveals so much about the difference in attitudes between one of the Faith, and the modern world. Here's how: we see Rousseau's worldview today in many of the green movements that assume that any influence that man has on the eco-system is bad, because man himself is an unnatural entrant into it, he is not part of it.

Millions of people have been killed as a result of a simple philosophical error. If we believe that  civilized man's effect on the environment is necessarily destructive, then the only method of an effective damage limitation is to limit the number of people in the world. The most effective way to do this is to control the population and, because they do not wish to dispense of the pleasure of sex, the solutions offered are contraception and abortion.

The Christian understanding of man and his interaction with the natural world is very different. The first point to make is that both are imperfect. We are fallen and we live in a fallen world. Man is part of nature, and it is certainly true that his activity can be destructive on the environment (just as he commit the gravest crimes against his fellows). However, through God's grace and the proper exercise of free will, he can choose to behave differently. He can work to perfect nature. He has the privilege of participating in the work of God that will eventually lead to the perfection of all things in Christ. Then all man does is in harmony with nature, and with the common good. This is the via pulchritudinis, the Way of Beauty.

There are so many signs in modern culture that reveal this flawed perception of the place of man in relation to his fellows, The changing attitude to the garden is one of these. Even in something that seems so far removed from the issue of abortion, we can see a change which has at its root, in my opinion, the same flaw.

What is the model of natural beauty? For the modern green, neo-pagan it is the wilderness. National parks in the US seek to preserve nature in a way that they perceive as unaffected by man (although this is an impossibility, even the most remote national park is managed wilderness!). I do not say that is a bad thing that some part of nature is preserved, or that the wilderness is not beautiful. Rather, the point is that it is not the pinnacle of nature and it is not the standard of natural beauty. When man works harmoniously with the environment, then he makes something more beautiful. Beautifully and harmoniously farmed land takes the breath away - as we might see in the countryside of France, Spain, England and Italy for example, places of which I am familiar. This the sort of landscape in which Wordsworth saw his host of wild golden daffodils.

Higher still is the garden that is cultivated for beauty alone. A garden is a symbol of the Church. Each part, each plant is in harmony with every other just as every person who is unique has his place in God's plan, as St Augustine points out in the quote given above.  Gardens will have their place in the New Jerusalem. We know this because the description of the City of God in the Book of Revelation contains gardens.

The activity of gardening for beauty is a symbolic participation in the completion of the work of God in the world for it raises creation up to what it ought to be, through God's grace. The garden itself is a sign to all others of the fact that all of creation is to be transfigured supernaturally. The act of gardening is both reflective of and points to, therefore our participation in the Sacred Liturgy by which we are transfigured and by which we participate in the work of God. Gardening for beauty is an act of love that is formed by our greatest act of love, the worship of God in the Sacred Liturgy. It can be likened to the action of Mary with our Lord, anointing his feet; and contrasted with the cultivation of the land in order to create produce to eat, which can be likened to an action of Martha. Both are good, but Mary's is the highest.

Pius X likens the activity of gardening to that of singing the Psalms in the liturgy: 'The psalms have also a wonderful power to awaken in our hearts the desire for every virtue. Athanasius says: Though all Scripture, both old and new, is divinely inspired and has its use in teaching, as we read in Scripture itself, yet the Book of Psalms, like a garden enclosing the fruits of all the other books, produces its fruits in song, and in the process of singing brings forth its own special fruits to take their place beside them.' (This is taken from the Office of Readings for August 21st, the Feast of Pius X).

The gardener is the symbol of the transfigured man who works in harmony with nature to create something greater for the delight and good of man and for the greater glory of God. The highest aspect of what he does is the beauty that he creates. This beauty has the noblest utility, one that takes into account our supernatural end for it prepares the souls of men to be receptive to the love of God in the Sacred Liturgy.

Leo XIII said in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, that man should be encouraged to cultivate the land. I have heard this cited by some Catholics in the back-to-land movement so as to imply that it is almost a moral obligation to have chickens in your backyard, to keep bees or to grow vegetables. I say, if you enjoy those things then go ahead and do it, but I feel no such obligation myself. I for one have little interest. I am perfectly happy to buy a ready-cooked chicken for under $5, jars of honey and vegetables and fruit from all over the world year round from the local supermarket.

However, what is not so often remarked upon is that Leo says that in cultivating the land, man will, 'learn to love the very soil that yields in response to the labor of their hands, not only food to eat, but an abundance of good things for themselves and those that are dear to them [my emphasis].' I suggest we learn to love the soil especially when it yields beauty; and when it is through our own efforts that it does so. There is no need for three acres and a cow for this to happen. For some this might mean the tiniest patch of land around your house, or if you don't have that a window box; or if you can't do that some well tended plant pots inside your high-rise apartment. We don't need to head for the outback or escape from the cities or the suburbs. However, modest our resources, this can be an act for love for the glory of God and for the enjoyment of those dear to us. When this is done it can have the profoundest effect on a neighborhood, as we can read by this example in Boston.

When the garden is enjoyed for its beauty it can be a contemplation by which we are passively open to the reception of Beauty itself. This is why it is a good thing to approach a church through a cloister that looks onto a 'garden enclosed'. The garden enclosed from the Song of Songs, is seen by the Church Fathers as a reference to Mary, the Mother of God, by whom we approach the Son.

It is no accident, I suggest that today even botanical gardens and public gardens which used to be formally laid out, are now being turned into 'natural' or wild gardens, in which the aim is, it seems, is to reduce it's beauty (although they would probably argue that it is the opposite) and resemble something that is like the wilderness - base nature, unaffected by the inspired work of man. Even the lowest form of nature is beautiful, I don't deny it. But that is not a garden. When we make the standard of natural beauty its lowest form, then such a garden is a symbol of the banishing of man from the world altogether, of Unnatural Man so to speak, and an emblem of the culture of death. The next logical step after the misguided  glorification of Unnatural Man is to strive for the absence of man altogether and this is what we see through our abortion clinics.

Who would have thought that the simple cultivation of ivy, roses, lilies and violets could say so much! I would consider it the greatest compliment if someone would mistake me for the gardener.

Cristo appare a Maria Maddalena (Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene)" by Pietro da Cortona from Wiki commons 

I have written about this painting in more detail here.

— ♦—

My book the Way of Beauty is available from Angelico Press and Amazon.

Baroque case study and meditation: Pietro da Cortona's Christ Appearing to Mary Magadalene

I will post an article next week about Christian environmentalism. I believe that this scene, portrayed in this beautiful example of 17th baroque painting, in which Mary Magdalene sees Christ in the garden and mistaking him for the gardener gives us insights into the Christian understanding of man's relationship with the rest of creation, and so to a Christian environmentalism. You can read how when it comes out on Monday. Here is the account from St John's gospel, Chapter 20: 11 Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb 12 and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. 13 They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” 14 At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. 15 He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”). 17 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

In this painting, painted around 1645 by the Italian Pietro da Cortona, he uses the classic elements of the baroque style, the deep shadow contrasted with the light, which represents, in this case literally, the Light, that overcomes the darkness. He ensures that the main focus is on the person of Christ by retaining the sharpest focus and the most colour around him and his garments. Much of the parts in the periphery of the painting are painted in monochrome (in one colour, in this case sepia) and are blurred. This draws the eye to the most important part of the painting that is lighter, more coloured, and in sharper focus.. The only other part which is in light is the upper body and face of Mary Magdalene. The deep shadow and murky light in the rest of the composition, which is so prevalent in baroque painting (the style that originated in the 17th century) is appropriate for this - we are told by John that this took place 'early on the first day of the week' that is Sunday. The medium in which it is painted - oil on canvas - is ideal for for this shadowy light. It allow the smooth blending of tone and colour over long distances (in contrast with egg tempera, the medium of icons which is very difficult to blend).

All of these stylistic elements are derived from a theology whereby the artist is seeking to represent heavenly and supernatural truths via the visual. In order to do so he does not paint photographically, but deliberately alters the appearances from what is seen so that we infer invisible truths also. The theology behind the style of baroque painting and the dynamic by which we pray with it in the liturgy is described in detail in my book, the Way of Beauty.

The artist, Pietro da Cortona was one of the leading artists of the Italian baroque and was seen in his time as a rival in fame and reputation of Bernini (who is more well known today). Like Bernini he was an architect as well as an artist (Bernini being primarily a sculptor). He lived from 1596-1669.  Below we see the church of Santi Luca e Martina in Rome, which was designed by Cortona.

— ♦—

My book the Way of Beauty is available from Angelico Press and Amazon.

—JAY W. RICHARDS, Editor of the Stream and Lecturer at the Business School fo the Catholic University of America said about it: “In The Way of Beauty, David Clayton offers us a mini-liberal arts education. The book is a counter-offensive against a culture that so often seems to have capitulated to a ‘will to ugliness.’ He shows us the power in beauty not just where we might expect it — in the visual arts and music — but in domains as diverse as math, theology, morality, physics, astronomy, cosmology, and liturgy. But more than that, his study of beauty makes clear the connection between liturgy, culture, and evangelization, and offers a way to reinvigorate our commitment to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the twenty-first century. I am grateful for this book and hope many will take its lessons to heart.”

Does it really matter what Pixar do? Lighten up, it's just a children's movie...

Thanks to Rick, whoever you are for your comment on the review of Inside Out, posted on August 17th. I responded to it in the comments page, but I think his simple remarks highlight some good discussion points that are worthy of wider consideration. Is the film industry important? Am I just over analyzing an innocent children's film?  Here is Rick's comment, he first pulls a quote out of my blogpost:

' "No wonder Riley was struggling with life, she was living in miserable isolation! May the Lord be with your spirit." Just a thought, you might want to know that Riley is not real. It's just a movie mate, take it easy. There are bigger battles to fight.'

And here is my reaction. First the quick reply to this is: '...And this is just a movie review Rick, and that line you quoted was a joke! Lighten up and take it easy yourself…mate  .'

But there is a serious point here and in this I am not joking. In what was an entertaining film (although by Pixar’s high standards I would say only moderately entertaining) is the propagation of a false worldview. How important you think this is depends on how influential you think that such film will be. As a general point I would say that clearly certain parts of the film industry take it very seriously because they go to great lengths to engage the mass population with films that reinforce a false worldview in so many aspects – faith, morals, and attitude to the environment, for example. I would say that they have doing this very very successfully over the last 50 years particularly. This can be done sometimes subtly – as with this film – and sometimes more stridently.

For good or ill, popular culture both reflects and propagates a worldview as powerfully as any essay in an academic journal. If we do not like the wider culture, we cannot disengage from the culture, even if we wanted to. Even the most cloistered monk is product of the greater society of which he is part. The question is not whether or not to engage, therefore, but how do we engage? Are we going to do it well, or badly? How can we transform it so that it becomes one of truth and beauty?

Speaking generally, without having any particular film in mind, the degree of misery and death  that results from the propagation of a false psychology, or false morality, or a false environmentalism, or falsity of any form, is immeasurable (I do not exaggerate on this, see my posting on environmentalism next week), and that is what I care about. I am not suggesting that every film is a cynical attempt to manipulate. Very often it is an innocent and well meaning effort to entertain and make money (not bad things in themselves), by appealing to and reflecting the attitudes that it believes its market already has. When the seemingly innocuous presentations are taken to their logical conclusion, however, regardless of motives, the end result is the same in both cases.

The evangelization of the culture is the battle we must engage in and I would say that there are fewer battles that are more important or bigger.

Believe it or not, in the 1930s Pius XI praised Hollywood for the influence of the its films on society. However well or badly I am doing it, my motivation in doing a review like this is to try to encourage Christian filmmakers to be involved again and start propagating a worldview that will actually promote the general happiness and harmony in society and ultimately, the salvation of souls. I want to see them engaging as skillfully, as subtly and as engagingly as the secular materialists have been doing in film, music and all aspects of the popular culture. I am not thinking of in-your-face accounts of the gospel, so much as films like Inside Out, which are so engaging that they draw in and influence people without resistance.

Family films and films for children, incidentally, are an important battleground in this context for two reasons: first, as the Jesuits used to say, give the child and I'll give you the man. Children are the most easily influenced at will grow up to make future society reflect what they believe. Second, few children watch these movies on their own. There are usually adults with them. One of the ways of making these films so popular is to make them appeal simultaneously at different levels. They are designed to engage the adults too. If the parents are entertained also, then they are more likely to want to take their children to the film. This need to build in a dual appeal means that the genre automatically engages the creators philosophically - they have to be able to think about concepts at different levels; and it is what makes children's entertainment simultaneously some of the most sophisticated, engaging and powerful there is. At the root of every story are some assumed facts, premises about the nature of reality that govern the logic of the progression of the story and make it either convincing or not as the case may be. This is inescapable. If we ignore this then we risk inadvertently promoting falsity. If we use it, we can create a beautiful, wonderful, entertaining and stimulating culture that influences for the good.

Just to redress the balance, here is a Pixar movie I loved (and, I'm going to admit it, I saw it on my own, as an adult and went to see it twice!).

— ♦—

My book the Way of Beauty is available from Angelico Press and Amazon.

—JAY W. RICHARDS, Editor of the Stream and Lecturer at the Business School fo the Catholic University of America said about it: “In The Way of Beauty, David Clayton offers us a mini-liberal arts education. The book is a counter-offensive against a culture that so often seems to have capitulated to a ‘will to ugliness.’ He shows us the power in beauty not just where we might expect it — in the visual arts and music — but in domains as diverse as math, theology, morality, physics, astronomy, cosmology, and liturgy. But more than that, his study of beauty makes clear the connection between liturgy, culture, and evangelization, and offers a way to reinvigorate our commitment to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the twenty-first century. I am grateful for this book and hope many will take its lessons to heart.”

Adoremus Bulletin - the July edition is now out. Take a look!

 The July edition of the Adoremus Bulletin is now out, produced under the leadership of its new editor Chris Carstens. Articles include translations of public statements by Cardinal George Sarah as well as original articles by Adam Bartlett and Joseph O'Brien.

If you are not yet aware of the great work that Adam Bartlett is doing for chant in the vernacular then you should be!. I only found out recently the full extent of his work. His compositions are published by Illuminare Publications. He is creating excellent chants for the Ordinaries and Propers of the Mass and responsorial psalms available through the Missal, Hymnal and Simple Gradual. Additionally he is composing constantly and four-part arrangements for accompaniment and singing are posted on the Illuminare website score library weekly and are available free of charge until they are published as a collection. These are available to be downloaded free of charge from their . Through the work that he and others are doing,along with others, I think that there is real hope for the establishment of an authentic tradition of chant for English language in the Roman Rite. What he does sits alongside what is happening in the Anglican Ordinariate. One hopes that development in each will nourish the other in the future. I am great believer in the importance of the vernacular in the liturgy alongside - not replacing - the Latin, and among these English is in a uniquely important position at the moment. I have written here in the past of the importance of this not just in liturgical renewal, but also the evangelization of the culture (Has Pope Francis Saved Western Culture?). In his article for Adoremus  Bartlett considers the place of hymnody in the Liturgy of the Hours, not only by examining its history but by providing a contemporary context for hymns in the upcoming edition of the Liturgy of the Hours in English.

The second story, by Joseph O’Brien, tells of the newly-dedicated Newman Center church on the campus of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and how beauty of the architecture and stained glass windows is intended as a key element in the liturgical formation of college students. While the images in the windows, for example, will communicate and reinforce the truths of the Faith through their content pedagogically, that is not their sole purpose or even their highest purpose. The beauty of the form communicates something that, to paraphrase of the Catechism, words cannot. Content and form combine beautifully in their profoundly thought out liturgical context so as to encourage in the students to a deep and authentic participation in the liturgy. This is the ultimate purpose of beauty in the liturgy. As Chris Cartens points out in his editorial, it is the transfiguration of the students through the worship of God in the Sacred Liturgy as part of the body of Christ that is the ultimate aim of this. One hopes that the new Newman Center in Lincoln will have lasting effect so that many students will go on to be part of a growing body of people who will contribute to the transformation of the whole culture.

— ♦—

My book the Way of Beauty is available from Angelico Press and Amazon.

—JAY W. RICHARDS, Editor of the Stream and Lecturer at the Business School fo the Catholic University of America said about it: “In The Way of Beauty, David Clayton offers us a mini-liberal arts education. The book is a counter-offensive against a culture that so often seems to have capitulated to a ‘will to ugliness.’ He shows us the power in beauty not just where we might expect it — in the visual arts and music — but in domains as diverse as math, theology, morality, physics, astronomy, cosmology, and liturgy. But more than that, his study of beauty makes clear the connection between liturgy, culture, and evangelization, and offers a way to reinvigorate our commitment to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the twenty-first century. I am grateful for this book and hope many will take its lessons to heart.”

Film review: Pixar's Inside Out - watch out, it's teaching your kids to behave like animals!

In this animation by Pixar we see how a little girl called Riley copes with a family move from the Midwest to the San Francisco when her father starts a new job. Initially she finds the move difficult and through the film gradually comes to terms with it. The process by which she does so is portrayed as one of conflicting emotions. We look into her mind and see five personifications, of Joy, Fear, Sadness, Disgust and Anger which respond events happening to her as she perceives them, and information fed to her by the subconscious memory. Each battles to be the dominant and so control he mood and actions of Riley. The film seems to have been universally well received with most reviewers I have seen give it four or five stars. Although there are some great, funny lines in it, as with all the Pixar offerings I have seen, I did not share this view unreservedly. I thought the story was dull and the imaginary rules by which the competing elements of each emotion responded to the influence of the information seemed inconsistent and so it was unconvincing as an imaginary world inside the mind. You may feel different about that and side with the mainstream reviewers. In the little crowd with whom saw it I was probably the least entertained.

However, I would say that for other reasons, going beyond entertainment, that this is not a film to show your children. I thought it portrayed a flawed anthropology. Read this sentence from the Rotton Tomatoes summary: 'Like all of us, Riley is guided by her emotions - Joy (Amy Poehler), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith). The emotions live in Headquarters, the control center inside Riley's mind, where they help advise her through everyday life.'

And therein lies the problem for me. This is a portrayal of the modern obsession with passion and emotion that has been handed on to us from the Romantics of the 19th century and Rousseau in the 18th. In my understanding (supported by my own experience, even as an eleven year old), we are not all subject to our emotions in the way that the reviewer supposes and film makers want us to believe. We have reason, we have a will. We assess all the information and although we might choose to do sometimes, we are not bound to follow the dictates whichever emotion is the strongest. That puts us at the level of animals.

There is something important missing in Inside Out. There is a part of the soul that can make judgments and which, in some way, steps back from our instinctive reactions to things and influence of the memories. It observes all the information coming into the mind and then decides what to do. This the spirit. The spirit ican look to others in love and it is by the spirit that we relate to others and to God as a human person, (just as the persons of the Trinity relate to each other). This is what is special to man among creatures: he is able to observe himself. I once heard it put like this. Animals are aware of things, like man; but unlike man they are not aware that they are aware.

Pope Benedict XVI (as Cardinal Ratzinger) wrote about the spirit as the aspect of the soul by which we relate to other in an essay for the journal Communio published in 1990 (p 439, Communio 17, Fall 1990). In reference to the spirit he wrote: 'It is the nature of the spirit to put itself in relation, the capacity to see itself and the other...the spirit is not merely there, it goes back on itself, as it were; it knows about itself. It constitutes a double existence which not only is, but knows about itself, has itself.' In icons, you often see faces portrayed with a slight lump or dimple in the middle of the forehead just above the bridge of the nose. This can be thought of as a symbol of the spirit. My teacher would refer to it with the Greek term, the nous, (meaning literally 'mind') and call it the the 'spiritual eye'.

This is the spirit which is referred to by St Paul in Thessalonians, and by the writer of the letter to the Hebrews. It is referred to by Our Lady in the Magnificat, which is sung in Vespers every day, when she says: 'My spirit rejoices in God my saviour.' In the Mass, the priest turns to us and says, 'The Lord be with you.' And we reply, 'And with your spirit.' In both cases the spirit is instrumental in being in relationship with God.

Christian commentators can differ on precisely which aspects of soul reside in the spirit, but St Thomas, for example, says that it is the intellect and the will, by which we know and love, constitute the spirit. It is the spirit, he says, that separates man from 'brute animals' and likens us to angels. (I wrote a longer article on this anthropology, here.)

This is the great problem with Inside Out, in the child Riley there is no sixth personification. This sixth aspect of the soul should have been there, detached from the emotions and able to reason and to  love and be open to the promptings of grace and the Holy Spirit.

No wonder Riley was struggling with life, she was living in miserable isolation! May the Lord be with your spirit.

— ♦—

My book the Way of Beauty is available from Angelico Press and Amazon.

—JAY W. RICHARDS, Editor of the Stream and Lecturer at the Business School fo the Catholic University of America said about it: “In The Way of Beauty, David Clayton offers us a mini-liberal arts education. The book is a counter-offensive against a culture that so often seems to have capitulated to a ‘will to ugliness.’ He shows us the power in beauty not just where we might expect it — in the visual arts and music — but in domains as diverse as math, theology, morality, physics, astronomy, cosmology, and liturgy. But more than that, his study of beauty makes clear the connection between liturgy, culture, and evangelization, and offers a way to reinvigorate our commitment to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the twenty-first century. I am grateful for this book and hope many will take its lessons to heart.”

Divine Wisdom, Maximilian Kolbe, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and Mundelein Seminary's Chapel for the New Evangelization

Love of God in the Sacred Liturgy - this is the source of Divine Wisdom and the goal of a good education...for lay people and seminarians alike. Today, 14th August, is the commemoration of St Maximilian Kolbe. When I read through the account of his life given in Universalis most of it surprised me. I was aware of his heroic martyrdom in Auschwitz. What I hadn't realized was the extent of his achievements prior to this. Here was a Franciscan friar who was tirelessly following his mission of evangelization in Europe and in Japan; he founded a sodality that attracted great many devotees to Our Lady and even a community which became a 'Marian city' that attracted many lay people and published books and journals that were read widely. Here is man who not only found his 'vocation' (in the tradition sense of the word) so that he became a religious in the Franciscan order; but also in the broader sense in that he found his personal vocation. Clearly he had a special charism. He found out what it was and he understood how to direct it so that all these initiatives grew up around him.

And here is the amazing fact. Every single one of us has a personal vocation by which we flourish and complete the work of God. Sometimes the effects will be visible, as with St Maximilian, and sometimes veiled and perhaps only visible in time. But always the effect is a dramatic in the divine economy and is as profound as that which allowed St Maximilian to volunteer himself for execution in order to save the life of a fellow prisoner. This is the Christian life: centered on the love of God in the Sacred Liturgy by which we are transfigured so that we can love man so profoundly, and in accordance with our own calling, create a culture of beauty around us.

A true Christian education is a formation that directs us to this supernatural end so that all we do in this life is done in accord with the divine will. The book, the Way of Beauty, recently published by Angelico Press, describes this formation and this is taught at Thomas More College of Liberal arts as part of the curriculum, where I am a Fellow. The book, the Little Oratory - a Beginner's Guide to Praying in the Home, describes a pattern of worship and prayer by which this is possible if we participate freely in it.

St Maximilian Kolbe understood that the power and the insight that we are given goes beyond what is otherwise humanly possible. It is divine. We become 'vice-gerents' - earthly representatives of God (I had to look up the meaning for this article in case your wondering - one aspect of wisdom which was not conveyed supernaturally to me!). Here is an excerpt from today's Office of Readings in which he describes it:

'God himself is the one infinite, wise, holy, and merciful Lord, our Creator and our Father, the beginning and the end, wisdom, power, and love – God is all these. Anything that is apart from God has value only in so far as it is brought back to him, the Founder of all things, the Redeemer of mankind, the final end of all creation. Thus he himself makes his holy will known to us through his vice-gerents on Earth and draws us to himself, and through us – for so he has willed – draws other souls too, and unites them to himself with an ever more perfect love. See then, brother, the tremendous honour of the position that God in his kindness has placed us in. Through obedience we transcend our own limitations and align ourselves with God’s will, which, with infinite wisdom and prudence, guides us to do what is best. Moreover, as we become filled with the divine will, which no created thing can resist, so we become stronger than all others.'

Incidentally, the image shown is one of the beautiful stained glass windows from the recently completed John Paul II chapel at the Mundelein Seminary in Chicago (an educational institution!). The chapel is the inspiration of the rector of the seminary, Fr Robert Barron (perhaps already 'former rector', he was recently named as auxiliary bishop for Los Angeles archdiocese). The page from the blog of the company that made the window (as part of a whole series in the chapel) explains that Fr. Barron envisioned the chapel to 'serve as an inspiration to generations of seminarians and a physical embodiment of the New Evangelization'.

Fr Barron and the architectural historian and sacred art expert Denis McNamara (who teaches at the Liturgical Institute at Mundelein) ensured that the symbolism of the imagery was in full accord with Christian tradition and fully liturgical. If these fulfill their function they they will engender in the worship of those seminarians undergoing their priestly education a deeper participation in the sacred liturgy that will lead them to that supernatural transformation in Christ; so forming them as agents of the New Evangelization who are, in turn, capable of transfiguring the whole culture. One hopes that this focus on the centrality of the sacred liturgy in the life of man will continue at the seminary for years to come even with the departure of Fr Barron.

There are strong connections to the saint in this northern suburb of Chicago. The Franciscan friars of Marytown church which is next to the seminary are custodians to the US national shrine to St Maximilian!

Business, Beauty and Liturgy - a Theology of Work and the Entrepreneur

In his book the Wellspring of Worship, Jean Corbon (who also wrote the section on prayer in the Catechism) wrote the following: 'Work and culture are the place where men and the world meet in the glory of God. This encounter fails or is obscured to the degree that men "lack God's glory" (Rom 3:23)... If the experience is to be filled with glory, men must first become once again the dwelling places of this glory and be clothed in it; that is why, existentially, everything begins with the liturgy of the heart and the divinisation of the human person.' Elsewhere he states that an absence of communion through Eucharistic liturgy 'that is at the root of injustices in the workplace, with its alienating structures and disorders in the economy.' (pp 225, 229)

How can we change society and the culture into one that is beautiful, is just and is built on true community? I say, following on from Corbon, that if we wish to change society we look to ourselves first so that we become the people who are transformed in Christ - transfigured - and show him to others by our actions and interactions. Society is network of personal interactions, and we change society, therefore by changing the way we interact with others. There is no aspect of human life to which this does not apply.

Only God's grace can do this for us, and it is by prayer, or more precisely, by worship of God that we encounter Christ in such a way that it can happen. When we can be one of those people, then people will be drawn to the Church through us and join us. To the degree that anyone is participating in the divine nature and showing people the transfigured Christ in their daily lives, he is someone who, by grace, will relate to others in properly ordered love. This is what attracts people to the faith. This will be evident in the workplace as much as anywhere else. All economic interactions ought to be personal and loving as much as any other in a good society. In the sphere of economics this is how the principle of superabundance is invoked that creates prosperity for society. This principle of superabundance is the great untold secret for the creation for wealth; if it isn't actually the pearl of great price it will certainly give you means to buy it!

None of us should ignore this, for we are all involved in economic interactions of some sort and we all need to flourish and make sufficient wealth to live on. However, some people have a particular calling to be entrepreneurs. They have a special grace, an ability to make money beyond their personal needs and in a way that encourages human flourishing at all levels. When they do this they are participating in the creative work of God and contributing to the culture by creating something of beauty. However, for that calling to be realized, they need also to be aware of not only how to make money in a way that is in accord with the common good, but also, the end to which that money should be directed responsibly. They must be good stewards.  It is the nature of charisms that unless they are directed in love, they evapourate, ie they cannot be misused. So while it is possible for someone to make money selfishly, or course, and also for people who do not have this particular calling to develop the skill of entrepeneurship and be driven by good motives. The person who has this charism, however, and special calling, will generate wealth almost effortlessly (compared to others) and in great abundance when does so in accordance with the principle of love.

Benedict XVI describes this ideal for personal interactions in economic activity in his encyclical, Caritas in veritate. It is a network of such personal interactions that in aggregate form a free society and the free economy described by John Paul II in Centesimus annus.

Benedict describes how Christians are transformed in Christ in this life by degrees and by grace - transfigured and participating in the divine nature - through a personal encounter with God in the Eucharist. To the degree that human relationships are driven by concern for the other person, they are in accordance with the Trinitarian dynamic of love that is the model for the loving component of personal relationships. When this Love is present it is always superabundant. Love is superabundant  - fruitful without measure - because of the generosity of God who can give beyond all limitations and creates out of nothing. It is by this principle that wealth is generated in properly ordered economic transactions.

Though we may not think of it as such, the ordinary exchange of goods for money that we are daily engaged in does not redistribute wealth, it creates wealth. By this simple exchange both parties have something they value more than before and so wealth has been created (otherwise they would not both choose to make the exchange). There is a caveat. This is true provided that there is personal freedom (understood not simply as lack of constraint, but also full knowledge of the practicable best).

One of the beauties of the participating in the market in a free economy is that if I am dealing with someone in such a transaction who is genuinely free to choose whether or not he trades with me, then even if I am driven by selfish ends I am forced to consider his needs and what is good from his point of view. If I don't then the chances are that he will choose not to trade with me because he is free not to do so. So provided that freedom is present, even the selfish like me are forced to some degree at least into loving action. Even in this minimal form of love there is superabundance. In practice, rarely is someone wholly driven by selfish interests, just as it is rare that is someone wholly loving in action and thought. Superabundance is maximized to the degree that both parties are genuinely interested in the well being of the other as they engage in the transaction. This is when all the aspects for which a price cannot be paid - at a simple level a genuine care and attention, for example are given freely too. To the degree that the loving component grows then people relate to each other so that the other flourishes. When the conditions exist that allow for this to happen, people will naturally seek out others who interact in this way and the complexion of the economy gradually changes. Economic prosperity is maximized to the extent that the activity that creates it is in harmony with a flourishing of the society of human persons. When people are transformed in Christ, then they are more naturally inclined to consider the other in what they do and go beyond the simple contractual elements of trade, and create an economy that is rooted in a love which goes beyond the minimum requirement of justice.

One might refer to this as a covanental economy, one that is ordered to mutual giving, rather than one that is purely contractual and relies on the alignment of self-interest alone.

John Paul II pointed out in Centesimus annus that the market is the most efficient and best way to distribute goods for which a price can be paid. He then stated that this also defines the limitations of the market, it cannot distribute those things for which a price cannot be paid which are also vital in life and the flourishing of the human person. That is why he said that this market will be in the context of what he called a 'free economy'. Benedict in Caritas in Veritate connects the two much more directly in each economic transaction and says that unless those aspects for which money is not paid are present there too (he calls this additional element one of gratuitousness) then there is no superabundance. In fact he goes on to say that gratuitousness must be present if wealth is to be created.

When freedom is lacking - as it would be even in an otherwise free society in the case of an addict buying illegal drugs for example, the result is not the superabundant creation of wealth, but an enforced redistribution of wealth that favors one party more than the other inequitably. The party that gains is not just taking advantage of the other person in the exchange, but is parasitical upon society as a whole , drawing from it, rather than contributing to it; one only needs to look at a neighborhood in which drug dealing is rife to see the effects. Similarly, government taxation directed towards paying for activities that go beyond the natural role of government (which  should be limited to the regulating for and protecting personal freedom) are also acts against the common good that go against freedom, are contrary to what a government's role should be and will have the stultifying effects on society as whole that we see, for example, in Venezuela today and we saw in the Eastern bloc countries of the past so markedly.

Benedict describes in many places in his writings how the personal transformation, by which a person is capable of and inclined to interact lovingly with his neighbors, will occur. Perhaps one of the most simply and concisely present examples is his little paper on the New Evangelization. We must first look at ourselves; we must learn to pray. It is through prayer, and to be precise a liturgically centered piety that we are transformed.

Not all prosperous societies are Catholic societies (whatever we mean by that) and not all Catholic societies are prosperous. But it is to the degree that any earthly city and its people participate in those ideals of the City of God, Catholic or not, that it is prosperous and stable.

It is the beauty of the culture, and especially the culture of Faith that will inspire Christians to pray well, and non-believers to pray at all. Beauty engenders creativity, inspires us to love and so to participate in the superabundant love in anything we do, including trade. This is why beauty, the free economy and the liturgy are inseparable.

People today yearn for community and for a beautiful culture that they feel is absent from their lives. This is not a new thing, this is what people have yearned for since their were people around to yearn for anything in life. The answer lies in each of us looking to ourselves. We must retreat to the wilderness symbolically in prayer, the place where Christ engaged with the devil, then transformed, we emerge and engage with our fellow man. We do not need to flee further at this point. We engage wherever we happen to be, wherever there are people. In doing so we will create the culture and the community we yearn for around us, where we are now, right here and right now. If this is not happening, then we look afresh at ourselves. While this mean that work becomes that of the artisan, like St Joseph, which we tend to romanticise today, we do not need to think that this is a process of turning back the clock. Rather it is one of adding to the workplaces that we are already in, the factory, shop, office, building site and so on and raising it up to a place of beauty and love.

Even in these workplaces, which are often seen as places that are opposed to Christian values, we can be that person, clothed in glory, who transforms those around them and transform the work culture. This is the message of the Church and of the New Evangelization. It begins with us being transformed in the liturgy and the hope is that after we engage with them we lead others back to the liturgy. It will be by the grace, beauty and love that others see in our work that they will let us do so.

A word on the pictures: the first is Titian's Transfiguration, the second by the 20th century Italian artist Pietro Annigoni is St Joseph the Worker with Our Lord. The other three photographs are of a car production line, a NY trading floor and a clothes factory in India. It is easy in some ways to look back on the work of St Joseph as a carpenter and see this as participating in the Transfiguration, and this is reflected brilliantly by Annigoni. We tend to romanticise the work of the artisan nowadays and assume that somehow this work is intrinsically different from the work most people do today. This is why, supposedly, the factory worker is more alienated today than the agricultural worker of the 16th century. I am not persuaded of this. I think it depends as much on the people involved as the nature of the work. I suggest that we should not seek to eliminate or escape from the modern workplace, but work for its transformation with our participation in the liturgy at the heart of what we do. Then by our engagement with them, these places too can be in harmony with the life of the world to come. I hope that when we look back on the work of the sacred artist if the 21st century, it will portray saints on the trading floor with as much empathy as the man tilling the land; or the seamstress on the shop floor with the same light of grace as Our Lady sewing the curtains for the temple.

— ♦—

The book, the Way of Beauty is a manual for a formation in beauty that explains how the whole culture is a reflection of divine love, how we can become agents of that change  as well as educators who can form offer that formation to others. It is available from Angelico Press and Amazon.

—JAY W. RICHARDS, Editor of the Stream and Lecturer at the Business School of the Catholic University of America said about it: “In The Way of Beauty, David Clayton offers us a mini-liberal arts education. The book is a counter-offensive against a culture that so often seems to have capitulated to a ‘will to ugliness.’ He shows us the power in beauty not just where we might expect it — in the visual arts and music — but in domains as diverse as math, theology, morality, physics, astronomy, cosmology, and liturgy. But more than that, his study of beauty makes clear the connection between liturgy, culture, and evangelization, and offers a way to reinvigorate our commitment to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the twenty-first century. I am grateful for this book and hope many will take its lessons to heart.”

The Way of Beauty - a book to inspire the transfiguration of our culture

How to be part of the New Evangelization - for educators and for all who are interested in a formation in beauty; and for those who want to contribute creatively to a culture of beauty and abundance - teachers, artists, entrepreneurs, parents...

The Way of Beauty - Liturgy, Education and Inspiration for Family, School and College is available from Angelico Press. This is the book that contains the ideas by which I believe we can transform the culture by beauty.

In the book, I describe how a true Catholic education is both a program of liturgical formation and an inculturation that aims for the supernatural transformation of the person so that he can in turn transfigure the whole culture through the divine beauty of his daily action. As Pope Benedict has told us, there is no human activity, no matter how mundane, that cannot be enhanced by this formation in beauty. Such enhanced activity then resonates in harmony with the common good and, through its beauty, draws all people to the Church — and ultimately to the worship of God in the Sacred Liturgy.

The Way of Beauty will be of profound interest not only to artists, architects, and composers, but also to educators, who can apply its principles in home and classroom for the formation and education of children and students of all ages and at all levels — family, homeschooling, high school, college, and university. You can order from the Angelico Press website here

Praise for the Way of Beauty:

“Since the good, the true, and the beautiful are a manifestation of the Trinity, it is always a grievous fault to leave beauty out of any discussion of the relationship between faith and reason. This being so, I am thrilled at the way David Clayton illustrates how beauty stands in eternal communion with the good and the true.”

—JOSEPH PEARCE, Aquinas College

“In spite of the great proclamation that the sacred liturgy is the font and apex of all we are about as Catholics, fifty years after the Council we still seem far from seeing and living this truth in all its fullness. Drawing upon years of experience as artist and teacher, David Clayton thoroughly unpacks this truth and shows, with an impressive range of examples, how it can and should play out every day in our schools, academic curricula, cultural endeavors, and practice of the fine arts. His treatment of the ways in which architecture, liturgy, and music reflect the mathematical ordering of the cosmos and the hierarchy of created being is illuminating and exciting. The Way of Beauty is a manifesto for the re-integration of the truth laid hold of in intellectual disciplines, the beauty aspired to in art and worship, and the good embodied in morals and manners. Ambitiously integrative yet highly practical, this book ought to be in the hands of every Catholic educator, pastor, and artist.”

—PETER KWASNIEWSKI, Wyoming Catholic College and writer for the New Liturgical Movement

Order here

“In The Way of Beauty, David Clayton offers us a mini-liberal arts education. The book is a counter-offensive against a culture that so often seems to have capitulated to a ‘will to ugliness.’ He shows us the power in beauty not just where we might expect it — in the visual arts and music — but in domains as diverse as math, theology, morality, physics, astronomy, cosmology, and liturgy. But more than that, his study of beauty makes clear the connection between liturgy, culture, and evangelization, and offers a way to reinvigorate our commitment to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the twenty-first century. I am grateful for this book and hope many will take its lessons to heart.”

—JAY W. RICHARDS, Catholic University of America and Editor of The Stream.

Order here

“David Clayton has written an inspirational and thought-provoking book about the connections among faith, education, culture, and art.   As a parent whose two daughters attend Catholic school, I found his work on formation, education, and the liturgy very interesting.   As an academic, I am impressed with the research and intellectual rigor.   Clayton has made an important contribution to the Catholic faith community with this book.”

—MICHAEL ROBERTO, Professor of Management, Bryant University

“Every pope who has promoted the new evangelization has spoken about how essential ‘the way of beauty’ is in engaging the modern world with the Gospel. What is it about the experience of beauty that can arrest the heart, crack it open, and stir its deepest longings, leading us on a pilgrimage to God? David Clayton’s book provides compelling answers.”

—CHRISTOPHER WEST, Founder and President of The Cor Project

Order here

“David Clayton has written a wonderful new book that highlights the centrality of beauty and art in education and human formation. He explains the deep relationship between liturgy and culture, while offering practical ways to educate a new generation of artists who can bring about what St. John Paul called a ‘new epiphany of beauty.’”

—MICHAEL MATHESON MILLER, Acton Institute, writer and presentor of PovertyCure

Order here

Order here

Should We Paint God the Father?

One of the most famous pieces of sacred art that exists is Michelangelo’s fresco, in the Sistine Chapel, of God giving the spark of life to Adam. Despite its popularity and familiarity, I had often wondered about the validity of representing God the Father. My own instincts run against the idea of portraying God the Father in a painting at all, even when I was a child (I always thought that the white-whiskered God looked more like God the Grandfather, than God the Father). Later on in life, this was reinforced by the fact that my icon painting training led me to believe that it was wrong.  I was pretty sure, but not certain, that it was not part of the tradition. Certainly, I have never painted an icon of God the Father. Furthermore, the theology of Theodore the Studite in regard to sacred imagery, which is accepted by both Eastern and Western Churches, bases the argument for the creation of any figurative art upon the fact that we can portray the person of Christ as man. The person of God the Father is a spiritual being and most certainly not man. This would seem to suggest that we should not portray the Father as man either.

I quietly suspected that the white-bearded God of Michelangelo or William Blake or even my favourite baroque artist Velazquez were all in error, his Crowning of the Virgin by the Trinity is to the right. I wasn't too worried about Blake, an eccentric non-Catholic, but Michelangelo and Velazquez?

I was approached recently to do a commission that involves the portrayal of the Father. Rather than reject it out of hand, I thought I had better find out where the Church stands on this.

Here’s what my first investigations have revealed. For the first thousand years or so of Christianity, East and West, there was little portrayal of the Father figuratively. Then images started to appear in both the Eastern and Western traditions, though it was more common in the West.

There are two simple arguments that I have found for the representation of the Father: the first is that Christ said in John 14:9 that whoever has seen me has seen the Father. This would seem to open up to a representation of the Father as the Son. So, one could say, seeing an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is also seeing one of the Sacred Heart of the Father, with the heart of the Father understood as a symbol of His love.

The second is that the white-bearded figure, which we are all familiar with is the Ancient of Days in the book of Daniel (7:9, 13, 22). This is the source of so many familiar portrayals of the Father. In the East there is a tradition known as the New Testament Trinity. This title would distinguish it from the Hospitality of Abraham (in which three angelic strangers represent the three persons of the Trinity). Right is a Greek Orthodox New Testament Trinity from the ceiling of the entrance Vatopedion Monastery at Agion Oros (Mount Athos), Greece. The Catholic Church, allows for the interpretation of the Ancient of Days as the Father, which justifies the portrayal of the Father. (I have been told that Pope Benedict XIV [fourteenth, not sixteenth!] in 1745 pronounced this, though beyond a Wikipedia reference I have not been able to validate this). It also allows for the interpretation of the Ancient of Days as Christ. The Russian Orthodox Church, since the synod of Moscow in 1667 has forbidden the portrayal of God the Father as a man. Consistent with this it interprets the Ancient of Days strictly as the Son. It is this decision of the pronouncement by the Russian church that gave me the idea, wrongly, that it had never been part of the Eastern tradition and that the whole present Eastern Church forbids it.

There is a Western tradition of portrayal of the trinity in a type known as the Throne of Mercy, in which the Father sits on his throne and presents his crucified son to the viewer while a dove rests on the cross or hovers just above it. It was this that was explicitly mentioned by Benedict XIV. A 16th century German version is shown left. This tradition goes right back the Medieval times in the Western Church and we have this continued even into the 20^th century with Eric Gill in England doing woodcut of this image in a modern gothic style.

So where do I stand on this now? Clearly the portrayal of the Father as a grey-haired man is permitted. I would feel on safest ground following the traditional presentations, such as the Mercy Throne image. Outside that, I would be consider images, but would be cautious, unwilling to promote, as Caroline Farey of the School of the Annunciation put it to me, ‘any trend of anthropomorphizing God the Father in case the transcendence of God is further compromised in people's imaginations.’

It is worth pointing out also, that when God is portrayed as a single person in the form of the Ancient of Days, we cannot be sure that it is the Father who is portrayed. The artist might, quite justifiably, have the intention of representing the Son. I have not, for example, been able to find an authoritative text that tells us precisely which person of the Trinity either Michelangelo or Blake intended us to be looking at (I would welcome comments from readers on this point).

Below: an early gothic Mercy Throne; a 20th century version by the Englishman, Eric Gill; an early gothic pieta in which God the Father supports the son; a baroque Mercy Throne by Ribera, 17th century; and William Blake's Ancient of Days.

Don't Beat About the Bush...Change the Culture! More on Land and the Common Good

Landowners have a duty to leave some food for the poor and give people access to get it. Or that's what it looks like at least. Here are two scriptural passages taken from the Office of Readings (part of the Liturgy of the Hours) that  caught my eye when I read them. One is from January and the other is a Lenten reading. Office of Readings 24^th Jan 2011, Commemoration of St Francis de Sales: "You must not pervert justice in dealing with a stranger or an orphan, nor take a widow’s garment in pledge. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I lay this charge on you. When reaping the harvest in your field, if you have overlooked a sheaf in that field, do not go back for it. Leave it for the stranger, the orphan and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings. When you beat your olive trees you must not go over the branches twice. Let anything left be for the stranger, the orphan and the widow. When you harvest your vineyard you must not pick it over a second time. Let anything left be for the stranger, the orphan and the widow. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. That is why I lay this charge on you." (Dueteronomy 24) And Tuesday 4^th week of Lent “When you gather the harvest of your land, you are not to harvest to the very end of the field. You are not to gather the gleanings of the harvest. You are neither to strip your vine bare nor to collect the fruit that has fallen in your vineyard. You must leave them for the poor and the stranger. I am the Lord your God.(Leviticus 19) I have written on a number of occasions, here, that land is considered by the Church a common good. This means that like air and food it is something that should be available to all people. This does not mean that there should not be private property however, provided that private ownership of property is viewed as an entitlement to work the land. This privilege of ownership brings obligations. Its use should be for the benefit of the common good. This is not so completely counter cultural as it might sound at first. Generally, growing crops on a farm; and then selling anything (beyond what is needed for personal consumption) for distribution through the market is in accord with this. This entitlement, however, and this part might be counter cultural in some parts of the world, is not always seen as extending to allowing the owner to exclude others from his land all the time, as the quoted passages above indicate.

In a number of European countries (I know of England, Scotland, Spain and Italy specifically) there is public right of way preserved in law, on privately owned land. This is a tradition that goes back to medieval times. While the landowner is obliged to allow people on his land, those who go onto the land are also obliged to respect the property and the crops that are growing respecting it's function as contributing to the common good. I don't know if any applications of this extend to being in accord with the passages from the bible, which clearly allow for "the stranger, the orphan and the widow" to go onto the land and gather food.

There is an American version of this approach, as I understand it whereby in some states the default situation is that people do have access to private land to hunt. In New Hampshire there is an option to pay a higher land tax and that allows you then to bar everyone else from your land. I wouldn't be interested in hunting, just the chance of finding a walkable path across farmland. I did find one farm west of Nashua, NH when I was living there that had a notice saying. Please do come an enjoy our farm land but we ask that you respect it. I don't know if it was a coincidence, but the was a large statue of he Virgin Mary very visible next to the farmhouse as we walk off the land.

It seems that perhaps the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council and those subsequently who actually revised the Office of Readings considered this an important principle for today; otherwise it would not have been included in regular readings in the Church's liturgy. I believe that access to the land is important even for those who are not so poor that they need to pick the crops for personal use. It is important for the soul, I think. And this means access to cultivated land, productive land, not the wilderness. It is good to have firsthand experience of man's productive and harmonious activities with nature. This shapes not only the view of nature, but the view of man's proper relationship with the land. This access will also, I believe raise people's wonder at the beauty of cultivated land (whether ornamental garden or agricultural) and so perhaps help to offset the neopaganism that gives rise ultimately to the culture of death.  When the only country landscape available to man is wilderness, and all else he sees is modern suburbia or a cityscape, then it reinforces the idea that the standard of beauty is that land which is untouched by man, that is wilderness. This in turn reinforces the idea that man's influence on nature is always detrimental and the natural extension of this idea is profound evil: the most effective way to restrict man's bad influence on nature, so the logic runs, is to restrict his activity through population control, which means contraception, abortion and euthanasia.

I do not believe that this alone will reverse the culture of death (abortion exists in Europe too). However, if any discussion of these ideas in both Europe and the New World is combined with the example  of what people see if they have access to cultivated land it will, I feel,  speak of man's positive impact on the natural world. This then could help to change views on man's relationship with Creation. The change will not occur through engagement in discussion, so much as through a subtle influence that seeps into the thinking of society. Then perhaps, in some small way at least, it could contribute to the transformation a culture in the reverse direction to what is happening now and which is so anti-human.

So it seems that the dictum, spare the rod and spoil the child doesn't extend to olive trees! The photograph below of the Tuscan countryside. Above that we have Spanish olive groves and an illumination from Crete dating from the Byzantine rule.

Promoting Chivalry and the Ideal of the Catholic Gentleman

Recently I was approached by Sam Guzman who has a blog called The Catholic Gentleman. He is promoting the idea that virtue, sanctity and chivalry are ideals that men ought to aim for if they are to be fully masculine because they are ideals that all people should subscribe to. I would encourage men (and women too) to check it out.

Recently Sam has created a subscription based online community of his readers called Fraternitas. As part of the membership there is a book club in which each person can receive free copies of the monthly book. I was honored that for the inaugural book club webinar, he chose The Little Oratory, the book I co-wrote with Leila Lawler and which is published by Sophia Institute Press. Sam wanted me to talk about beauty and masculinity.

He wanted the highlighting of this book to be the starting point for a discussion about beauty in family prayer, liturgical prayer and then how men in particular can contemplate beauty.

We discussed how a prayer life centered on the Sacred Liturgy, especially that which includes prayer in the home with the Liturgy of the Hours - can form us and that this is something that forms us so that we appreciate beauty more and become more inspired in our contributions to a beautiful culture. Also, I was at pains to point out that if we do anything beautifully - gracefully - we are doing it better even in narrow utilitarian terms. That includes activities that we think of innately masculine and not normally associated with beauty.

I also discussed how gardening for beauty, and yes I mean growing flowers, is as much a masculine thing to do with your backyard as cultivating vegetables or chickens. And if you don't have a backyard it can be in a plant pot on the windowsill of you 5th floor apartment!

To hear the webinar, which includes Sam's fascinating insights and responses to my points, you should go to his Fraternitas page, here. 

While you ponder over it. Here is my artistic contribution. The chivalrous knight of the New Evangelization, with his copy of the Divine Office next to him as he prays in the Spirit, through Christ, and to the Father.

Farms, Country Walks, Private Property and the Common Good

I am a keen walker and when I moved to the United States ago to take up my position as Artist-in-Residence at Thomas More College, I immediately started to investigate the local country walks. I lived Nashua, a town in New Hampshire, very close to its southern border with Massachussetts. Both are beautiful states and there are state and national parks with developed paths within striking distance of here. These are very different from the British country walks that I am used to however. The countryside in Britain is almost all farmland of some description. So whereas in the US, as a general principle, the state and national parks aim to present man with a ‘wilderness’, that is countryside unaffected by man, the British national parks preserve a traditionally farmed landscape.Creating a network of walks across privately owned farms is possible in Britain because in this respect the attitude to private ownership of land is different in England to that in the US. In England there are public rights of way across private land which the landowner is obliged by law to maintain. In return, the public is expected to respect the land and the farmer’s crops and animals and stick to the path. There are many thousands of miles of public footpath across private land. This is a system which would be impossible to police effectively, yet it works. On the whole the farmers happily keep the paths open and maintain them for the benefit of walkers, and the whole the public respects the farmers’ land, crops and animals. So although backed up by law, it is founded mainly on mutual trust and respect. It is working example of the good that arises when individuals go beyond a strict interpretation of the law and create a covenantal approach for the benefit of the common good.

As a result, everyone in Britain has the chance to see firsthand how man can cultivate and work the land for benefit of all of us. This goes further than simple recreation. For those who wish to accept it, there is profound lesson to be learnt. Creating the possibility for all people to come into direct contact with land that has been worked by man beautifully will teach us that man is capable of working productively with the land in harmony with it. This counters the false idea that man’s activity is necessarily destructive and ‘unnatural’. This latter point is one of the fundamental premises of neo-paganism. It is an anti-human principle, which leads ultimately to the culture of death.

Some Americans might react sharply and suspect that this an example of the state overreaching itself. However, the idea of the right of the public to cross private land goes back to medieval times. It could not be enforced by the state anyway, because as explained earlier, it relies not so much on the law, but on mutual respect for its effectiveness. The way it worked was this. The landowner, perhaps the lord of the manor, agreed to allow men to farm a strip of his land to grow food in exchange for a tithe, a taxation of a tenth of the produce. The tithes were collected in huge barns – ‘tithebarns’- the photographs, above and below show one example that still exists in Oxfordshire in England. However, there was a problem. Our serf might have the land to grow his food, but if it is situated in the middle of a large estate owned by someone else, how is he going to get to it without trespassing? To overcome this, a system of pathways developed that ensured that people could get to their land without fear of prosecution. They were allowed ‘right of way’. They could cross someone else’s land provided they followed the path and respected the property. This is part of an old tradition of noblesse oblige. This is a French phrase which means literally, ‘nobility obliges’. It communicates the idea that with privilege comes the responsibility to use it well in service of the common good.

The idea of a public right of way survived, surprisingly, the industrial revolution right through to the 20^th century. By the 20^th century, however, many landowners were doing the best to close the paths down and stop public access. The demand for access to the land arose now not from the need to cultivate a leased strip of land, but for the desire for recreation by city dwellers, who otherwise had no chance to experience the countryside. This natural desire to be in contact with the land was being thwarted. There were mass peaceful protest walks. This resulted in Britain’s national parks being set up in which not just the paths, but the traditional beauty of the farmed landscape was protected, as well as the maintenance of traditional public footpaths throughout the whole countryside (not just within the park boundaries).

As you can imagine, I would love to see a similar system set up in the US but was told that Americans' understanding of what private ownership of land means, as well as fear of litigation is less likely to allow this. To my surprise, however, I have found out that in New Hampshire at least allows there is the possibility of such a system. By New Hampshire law, the citizens have access to any land provided they respect what is on it. The same law protects landowners from litigation if the person who goes on to his land is injured in some way. The landowner can bar people from his land if he wishes however, by ‘posting’ it – putting up a publicly displayed notice which tells people that they are trespassing and if they encroach and they will be prosecuted. Landowners exercise this option by paying a higher rate of property tax to the state.

Also, I have recently seen some similar attempts working within American law in California, around the San Francisco Bay area, to create walks across pasture land rather than always 'wilderness'.

According to Catholic social teaching, land is a common good. It is created by God and all people therefore should have access to it. This would seem to mitigate against the idea of private ownership of land. However, in practice this is not the case. The best way to have a plot of land developed for the common good is to give favoured person the freedom to develop it and to exclude others only so far as they do not interfere with this. This is not a right to private property as many envisage it today, however. It is better seen as a privilege, an entitlement to develop it in accordance with the common good (and farming it for profit would qualify in this respect). In medieval times there was also ‘common’ ground, preserved for commoners who did not own the land, so that there was always somewhere for them to put their animals to pasture. Sadly, much common pasture land was seized for private ownership after the industrial revolution. There are exceptions however and Port Meadow in Oxford is one. You can walk across it today and see a charming hotchpotch of ponies, horses and cows grazing on this huge flat open expanse of grassland next to the Thames that reaches right into the city. Here in the US Boston Common exists right in the centre of the city today, admittedly as a public park and clearly it gets its name from the tradition of common pasture land. I do not know of its current status in law in regard to free pasture however. If any inner city goatherds can enlighten me in this respect, I would be grateful.

What is attractive about the medieval balance between practicalities and the preservation of land for the common good is that it allows for a blurring of the division between the two extremes of complete public access one hand and on the other a total exclusion of all those who d0 not own land.

It may be an unrealizable dream, but nevertheless I will end by encourage all landowners to consider the idea of noblesse oblige in regard to their land.  At the same time I would like to encourage citizens, if accorded this privilege, to respect the land they go on to. I am aware that the Americans' love of hunting with guns might during deer season might need thinking about if this is going to work - perhaps this might have to restrained as a condition of access in some cases - but if we can find a way of making it happen, I believe that we will have an even happier nation if we do!

Photographs: aside from the tithebarn in Great Coxwell, Oxfordshire, the others are from a day's walk in the English county of Northumberland. It was a wet day (well this is Britain!) with only a few breaks in the clouds. The purple flowers are of heather in bloom. The rougher looking areas are sheep fells (pasture) and the building at the top is a shepherd's shelter in the moorlands on the Pennine hills the form the division between east and west in northern England. The greener, lusher areas are given over to cows as well.

Spanish Polychrome Sculpture, Ancient and Modern

When I think of sculpture, I usually think first of something that is monochrome - in one colour, that of the material that it is made from. Perhaps stone or cast in bronze. If I think of coloured sculpture, what probably comes to mind is the kitsch stuff of gift shops. There is however, a wonderful tradition of  ‘polychrome’ meaning many colours sculpture. First, many of the statues that we now see in just stone would have originally been painted (for example the pre Renaissance sculpture of the Middle Ages. There is also a great baroque tradition of polychrome carving and some of the greatest examples are from the Spain in the 17th century.

In the examples show, which are from this period, you can see the same stylistic features used by the stone sculptors of the time, even though these artists are not ‘painting in shadow’, as stone sculptors such as Bernini did (as I wrote about last week, here). For example, they display the same exaggerated angular folds in the cloth to give the form vigour. One of the greatest of these Spanish artists is a man called Alonso Cano.

There is an artist in Spain today who is producing work in a similar vein called Dario Fernandez. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any images that I am able to reproduce here, but there are plenty on his website www.dariofernandez.com and he is well worth looking up.

Works shown (all from the 17th century), from top: Scourging at the Pillar, Gregorio Fernandez; John of God, Alonso Cano; The Scourging at the Pillar, Alonso Cano; Suffering Christ, Gregorio Fernandez; St Teresa of Avila, Gregorio Fernandez; Christ of Sorrows, Pedro de Mena; Crucifixion, Juan Martinez-Montanez

Chance to get free Scott Hahn book and up to 50% off Emmaus Road Publishing books

I have just been told about the news that Scott Hahn’s St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology has merged with Emmaus Road Publishing. They are also partnering with Lighthouse Catholic Media, who many will know for the recorded talks sitting in racks at the back of churches. Lighthouse will serve as their distributor for their products. I am a great fan of all of Scott Hahn's books. He has a great gift for articulating what can ordinarily be quite dry and abstract subjects in a way that is accessible and interesting. His book the Lamb's Supper - the Mass as Heaven on Earth was a revelation (if you'll forgive the pun). It was the first time that the Book of Revelation had made any sense to me and it changed dramatically my whole idea of what the liturgy is.

The St. Paul Center was founded by Dr. Hahn to promote Scripture Study from the heart of the Church’s tradition. Similarly, Emmaus Road publishes authentically Catholic books that make all aspects of the faith accessible - as they put it, everything from sacraments to social issues, Church history to arts and culture.

I am happy therefore to give this project my support and wish it every success.

In order to attract attention to what they are doing at this early stage, EmmausRoad.org is offering all books at discounted prices. All books are discounted up to 50%. Their catalog includes books by Mike Aquilina, Ralph Martin, Dan Burke, Emily Stimpson, Ted Sri, and many other popular Catholic writers. They are also giving away a free Scott Hahn book (Understanding “Our Father”) and will give you free shipping on one order.

He tells you about it here:

https://youtu.be/8RZZ3ZuKSjM

The Hermeneutic of Continuity in Sacred Art - a forthcoming lecture by Clemens Fuchs in New York City

Clemens Fuchs, the Austrian artist who works in the baroque tradition, will be giving a lecture at the Catholic Center and New York University, 238 Thompson Street, New York City on June 27th at 6pm.

I met Clemens first about 10 years ago. He and I were both studying the academic tradition at an atelier in Florence. We had a lot in common and became friends as we were both interested in how to direct the skills we were learning to the service of the Church. We grappling with the idea of working within tradition on the one hand and avoiding a limited, backward looking historicism on the other. This promises to be a very interesting lecture.

Clemens is exhibiting in the One Faith: East Meets West art exhibition and this the closing event for an exhibition that has travelled from New York, through Europe to China and Russia and back again in past months.

RSVP to onefaithexhibition@gmail.com by June 24th to reserve a place for the lecture and reception.

The event is co-sponsored by the Catholic Artists' Society the Catechetical Institute and the Catholic Center at NYU.

Dionysius, a poem by Andrew Thornton-Norris

I know I said I wasn't going to write much, but I just saw this. It's a poem that I actually like. It's by Andrew Thornton-Norris. He wrote it after reading Hans Urs von Balthasar's description of the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Von Balthasar is almost as always hard work for me . He seems to be saying the right sort of things and I know that because all right sorts of people quote him when talking about beauty, so he must be good...but when you actually get to his texts I find he's very difficult to understand. Perhaps it is a mark of his genius, that H U von B has managed to produce a valid commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius that is even less intelligible than the original.

So, it's always a relief to let somebody else you can trust do all the hard work of reading Hans Urs von B. and then condense it and explain it you. This was once reason I am so glad that we have Pope Benedict. Anyway here's Andrew's succinct poetic summarization.

As he says, heaven is revealed in the liturgy......

Dionysius

As form contains the meaning of the work

So heaven is revealed in liturgy

The inward grace in sacramental sign

The mystery of being uncovering.

...

Ineluctable trinitarian light

The beatific vision happiness

The love that moves the sun and other stars

Our brother sun and sister moon and stars

Andrew is an Englishman and Resident Poet at the Imaginative Conservative (where this poem was published). He is also the author of a Spiritual History of English which has been endorsed by no less than Roger Scruton and Fr Aidan Nichols and was reviewed by the Times (that's the 'London Times' to Americans).. and amongst many others, myself. My review of his book is called - A Book for Anyone Interested in the Evangelization of the Culture.

I like the way he talks about literature and poetry. He analyses content and form and relates them to the world view of the poet or author. In this there are many parallels to my own analysis of art. In his book he describes how the structure of the English language and the use of vocabulary has changed to reflect the broadly held worldview of the English speaking peoples of the time. In his analysis, the language itself, and not just the way it is used has become gradually more impoverished since the time of Shakespeare and the language we speak today is a direct reflection of the cumulative effects of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Modernity.

So if you have complaints about my prose, I say it's not my fault... it was the Reformation wot dunnit.

Lessons from Baroque Sculpture

The first name that comes to mind when thinking of great sculptors is Bernini. When we look at his sculptures there are parallels to the baroque approach to painting. Although he is creating form in three dimensions, he still ‘paints’ in light and dark so that the baroque symbolism of the Light overcoming the darkness is there. He is quoted as having deliberately cut the lines in his statues deeper to accentuate his shadow, especially, as he said, that he did not have coloured paint to work with, only contrast of light and dark. This is why he took such care to consider that placement of his works relative to the source of light. Some artists, such as Alonso Cano and the other Spanish workers in wood of the baroque period did paint their work (hence the name ‘polychrome’ – many coloured). Unless the sculptor intends to follow Cano and paint his work then he must consider how the interplay of light and shadow in his work will affect the ability of the viewer to see what is intended. One of the great problems that we see in modern attempts to create beautiful art is that it lacks power. The visual vocabulary of modern art has been developed to communicate what is bad. It cannot communicate goodness and truth well (ie beautifully) and retain its power, so if we try the result always seems to be sentimentality. We are all a product of our times, and will be influenced by the culture of the day whether we wish to be or not. This means the Christian artist must be especially aware of this tendency to sentimentality in his work.

When I was learning to paint icons, my teacher Aidan Hart, told me to break curves up into a series of straight lines in order as a way of avoiding sentimentality and giving the painting rhythm and power. Later, when I was studying Western naturalism in Florence, part of my study involved drawing casts of Bernini statues. I saw that he had done something similar. The lines of drapery are usually represented not as curves, but as a series of intersecting lines (or perhaps more accurately, as series of broader arcs). It might be surprising to some that there are such parallels between iconography and the baroque, but I discovered a number which I recognised because of my exposure to both traditions. This common ground helped to reinforce the common threads of Christian art and to distinguish the naturalism of the 19th century from the baroque of the 17th century. It is why I would always say that even those artists who wish to specialize in the baroque style would benefit from learning iconography to a foundational level as well; or at the least from a study so that those stylistic features are better understood. We live in a different atmosphere from the 17th century and a clearer, more conscious recognition of what consitutes Christian culture is probably more important now than it was then, when just to be alive would have enabled people to soak up the essence of Christian culture without even thinking about it.

The other thing that is of interest is in connection with the training and working methods of artists at that time. Bernini is known today for his dazzling technique, but at the time, his genius was considered to be the ideas and vision that he had rather than in the skill in realizing it. There were other great sculptors whose style was similar and had great skill, for example Algardi and Finelli (in fact it is his sculpture of Cardinal Scipione Borghese shown above and not Bernini's, which is right).

One of my teachers in Florence, and American called Matt Collins who still lives in Italy, wrote to me about this recently. I thought I would pass on part of the correspondence, which I found interesting and surprising. He described how Bernini ran a workshop and that for a while Bernini was not the greatest technician even in his own bodega.

'Today we appreciate Bernini for his fantastic technique. However he was not the most virtuoso marble sculptor of his time. Giuliano Finelli was. Bernini employed highly skilled assistants to help realize his ideas. His 'Genius' or 'Divine gift' as it was referred to in his time was his artistic sensibility and vision. The production of art in the 17th century was a collaborative process, not the misunderstood individual against society of today. Students of the of the past were not studying but working. Art education was in fact 'on the job' training. All the assistants received the same technical training. Art evolved from it constant practice. There was always work for a competent artist, so he could risk and push himself.

'Finelli's first biographer was a man called Giambattista Passeri. He may have known personally the sculptor. Finelli was born in Carrara in 1601. The first documentation about him is from 1616 about his relation to a Michelangelo Naccherino, a sculptor based in Naples. Naccherino moved around a lot, working in Rome and even Florence. Eventually, Finelli moved to Rome around 1620 and worked in Bernini's workshop. One of the most shocking revelations is that Finelli completed a lot of the detail work on Bernini's marbles. The virtuoso leaves on Bernini's Apollo and Daphne were most likely done by Finelli. Today, we attach 'Genius' to technique. Recent revelations about 17th century art production show that virtuoso technique was only a component of great art, not the sole determiner of 'Genius.' In fact, if you look at Finelli's independent work it is not very impressive outside of the technical realm.

'Passeri is quoted as saying: "vedendo la diligenza di Giuliano si valse di lui nelle due statue di Dafne, e di Apollo, che sono nella Villa Borghese a Porta Pinciana, nelle quali oltre il buon gusto, e disegno si vede un maneggio di marmo che pare impossible, che sia opera umana, e da essa Gian Lorenzo guadagno un nome immortale."

'It is roughly translated as: "recognizing Giuliano's capability, he(Bernini) utilized him in the production of the statues Apollo and Dafne that are in the Villa Borghese at Porta Pinciana. Apart from the good taste and competent design, one sees a treatment of marble that seems impossible, let alone a work by human hands. And it is from this that Gian Lorenzo(Bernini) name became immortal."After collaborating on many projects with little compensation Finelli left Bernini's workshop in 1629.'

Matt knows more than anyone else I know about the training methods and technique of the baroque and the High Renaissance and he has taught me a great deal over the years. He has just started his own blog which publicises his own work and discusses a lot of these technical aspects in an engaging way. Those interested should look here.

This article first appeared in July 2015.

Above, Bernini's (or perhaps Finelli's!) Daphne and Apollo

Cardinal Montalto by Finelli

Detail of Bernini's Ecstasy of St Theresa of Avila, shown in full below

Vocation and the Common Good

How doing what I want to do helps others to do what they want - a tribute to the outgoing President of the Dominican School of Theology and Philosophy in Berkeley, CA  Several years ago, I attended a short lecture series offered by Fr Michael Sweeney, who was president of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology a member school  of the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley). It was called Re-Visioning Society and was offered as part of their summer session and explored Catholic social teaching and the common good. I am reminded of this now, in 2015, because I have stayed in touch with Fr Sweeney ever since. He has just stepped down from his role as President after 10 years. I am sure he will continue to have a profound affect people's lives in this next phase of his life. I hope also, of course, that the incoming President continues and even builds on the good work that has been going on at the school. I was interested Fr Sweeney's course I because this idea of the common good has been referred to by Pope Benedict in a recent encyclical. What I didn't quite realize beforehand  how important what I learned would be on my thinking subsequently. I was excited to realize, as happens so often when I learn more about one aspect of Catholic teaching, that it would have an impact on my understanding of everything else in the Faith. One of those in particular relates to the idea of personal vocation. I had written an article about discerning personal vocation just before this. Here is the article I wrote after the course, 5 years ago, in which (with the aid of Fr Sweeney's lectures) I hoped to place that idea of personal vocation in the context of God’s vocation for the whole human race, the common good:

The questions I was hoping to resolve ran as follows: how can I act in ‘solidarity’ with the ‘common good’ and fulfill a personal vocation at the same time? Does acting for the common good mean that I have to think about how every action is in part, for example, going to contribute to alleviating famine in the world? Or, put another way, if I do nothing directly to help alleviate famine in Africa, am I ignoring my obligation to act in accordance with the common good? If either is so, it seems an impossibly high standard to achieve. Furthermore, won’t it likely undermine my success at doing anything well because I will have to spread myself too thinly – if I devote the time needed to teaching at Thomas More College, plus the other duties of life, I have none left to use directly to help those starving in the horn of Africa. Is this wrong? Am I being selfish in being and artist because I love doing it?

The course began by establishing from reason (as distinct from revelation) the nature of the human person as a relational being.  We were simply asked to give a short summary of who we were for the other members of the class.

At this point I must admit I was wondering if I’d done the right thing in signing up for the class. Was it was going to degenerate into a touchy feely therapy? I needn’t have worried however. After allowing each of us to speak, Fr Sweeney then remarked on a common thread that ran through our descriptions of ourselves.  Our own sense of ourselves was based upon relationships we have with others.  (For example, ‘I work with this company’ ‘I do this job with these people’ ‘I am a father’) This is, we were told, what describes a person, as distinct from an individual. A human person is always in relation with others, starting from birth. No one, by choice, disengages from society altogether (not even a hermit) and is happy. From this starting point in common experience, he built up rationally, the case he was making, taking us with him…

This understanding of the human person has a profound effect on how we view what society is. A relationship of the sort we are now envisioning is always between two subjects ie two people freely cooperating as moral agents. This is termed covenantal and is based upon mutual self-sacrifice on behalf of the other. This freedom to respond as a person is one of the essential elements of society. Society therefore is the vector sum of the relationships within it. It is not a collective of self-contained individuals.

As with all things that exist in human nature, the essence of personhood exists in perfection in God in whose image and likeness we are made. However, there is only one God and unlike us He is complete unto Himself and does not rely on any external relationships in order to exist. Revelation helps us here: through it we know that there is one God and three persons in the Trinity, in perfectly realized relationship. This Christian concept of God also explains why we are liturgical beings, first and foremost. We are made for the liturgy, by which we approach the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. When we participate in the liturgy we enter the Church, the mystical body of Christ. When we do so, with grace, we can relate first to the Son as man; and second to the Father through the Son as God. The Son is one person, but two natures.

If God were not like this, our relationship with him would be very different. A God who is not personal in the Christian sense would always be above us. We could not be raised to Him. Instead of a relationship of two subjects, it would be one of subject and object that is, master and slave. One can immediately see why Judeo-Christian society is fundamentally different from Islamic understanding of society, for example.

The good is what we seek and what makes us happy. We know from revelation objectively that this is God. This is the ultimate Good that is common to all of us. Society as a whole is called to be with Him in heaven and simultaneously, each person is called be with Him as well. On the way there are secondary goods that every one of us needs in order to be happy: food, shelter, water, air, love and so on. These are common goods.

So what of personal vocation and common good? God has called each of us to be with Him in heaven, as I described in my previous article, when we follow this we feel the joy that is ours. If we consider the vision that God has for society to be represented by a picture, then each personal vocation is a piece in the jigsaw that contributes to that picture. Therefore, we only need focus on our personal vocation and be content that it is contributing to the big picture and if perfectly realized would be in perfect harmony with it. This is not justifying selfishness. Every vocation is one of charity which permeates all that we do, but the precise way in which we are called to direct that charity is unique to each person. Some will be called to raise money for those who are starving. Some will not, but will be asked to. We are connected to society most profoundly through our closest personal relationships. So whatever these happen to be, these are the ones that we should focus on the most.

This of course, does rely on us being able to discern our vocation. We are fallen people and man’s ingenuity to hide bad motives behind good seems at times limitless. Therefore, good counsel is to be recommended during the discernment process.

When faced with a major choice we can ask ourselves a number of questions that help to point us in the right direction. First, is what I am doing consistent with its proper end? If so I am more likely to completing my piece of the jigsaw. Second (as a safeguard) is what I am proposing to do contrary to common good? Is it undermining others’ ability to respond freely in their relationships, for example; is it polluting the air so that it’s likely to harm those who breathe it. If so, I won’t do it.

Applied in business for example, other things being equal, I would act to make the business as profitable as possible, so that the gross profit was available to pay costs and employees, distribute amongst shareholders and reinvest for the continued profitability of the business. I would not feel obliged, for example, to institute charitable donations by the business to people that would be otherwise unconnected to the business model (although it would be perfectly good to take steps to enable shareholders and individuals to choose to contribute cooperatively in some way that they could not do as individuals).     The general principle is that by fulfilling our personal vocation, we will be helping society as a whole to move towards the common good (and by refusing to do so, we tend to frustrate it).

I saying that each person's vocation is unique, what we are referring to is each person's unique way of attaining those goods that are common to all of us. And if in essence our vocation itself is common, and if the essential relationships through which it is expressed our common, then we are necessarily in solidarity with each other as we pursue our own vocation.

And what does this have to do with beauty? Beauty is what we perceive when there is harmonious relationships, sometimes called ‘due proportion’. In the context of human relationships, that is the harmonious alignment of wills on behalf of another and it is called love. An education in beauty is an education in love. It will increase our natural instinct for acting in accordance with the common good for the benefit of all. It starts with God’s love for us, already assured, and the degree to which we respond in kind, through grace.

As St Augustine said: ‘Love God and do what you want.’ And even if it means going to the desert and sitting on a pillar it is helping mankind...

News about the Way of Beauty

Some of you who read the blog regularly may have noticed that my posts have been less meaty recently.  This is because I have been devoting much of my writing time to two books. The first pulls together themes that I have written about in the last 5 years on this blog on the basis of Catholic culture in the liturgy and how we can form people to create a culture of beauty using traditional principles. That is due to be published by Angelico Press any day now. When it comes out I will let you know. It will be entitled...the Way of Beauty.

The second is about to be submitted to publishers consideration (any publishers reading, I'm open to offers!). It is a manual for discerning personal vocation and is detailed explanation of a program of personal prayer and spiritual exercises that I was shown when I first came into the Church and which led me to doing what I do now. These were developed by an insightful layman who helped many, many people in London and are not obviously linked to any other method such as those based upon Ignatian spirituality or those used by the Catherine of Sienna Institute. I thought that the originality and effectiveness of the method I was shown might make it of interest to some people. It is intended as a companion to the Little Oratory, which describes the liturgical piety which must be at the heart of our prayer lives if we are to be open to inspiration and transformation in Christ.

This is still taking up a great deal of my time.

When I started this blog it was a chance to start airing some of my ideas and see what the response was. Now after 5 years of posting twice a week I think I have reached a point where I am ready to pause and reflect. I have noticed that the ideas for articles which just seemed to flow effortlessly when I started, are now beginning to dry up - I feel as though I am forcing it a bit now. I am ready now to devote my writing energies much mor e to pulling the material together and developing it further and then capturing it in books and courses to make it available on a more permanent basis (assuming there are some people who will be interested of course!).

So I will take a sabbatical for the summer and start original material in the Fall.

The postings that do appear will either be news about those products that I am producing - books, talks, online courses, chant etc.: or will be an approximately weekly posting of past material from about 5 years ago. It occurred to me that there is much material that I have created will be of interest to people who were not reading the blog back then, so I will be bringing back articles from that time that are still relevant today with usually just a few modifications. Some long time readers might have noticed that I have already begun to do thi. The series about landscapes are such examples.

I will still be walking the Way of Beauty but for the summer at least it will be a more reflective, less public journey.

Lead kindly light....