Icons, images, Church history, and churches

Icon of Our Lady of Czestowa

I just want to share a pretty neat coincidence of Church history and real life.

Over the weekend I went on a pilgrimage with a group from my diocese to a few notable churches in a nearby city.  One of them was a big, gorgeous, French Gothic Cathedral Basilica that looks like it was transplanted from Europe.  Another was a (ethinically) Polish Church with very ornate paintings inside, a beautiful icon of our Lady of Czestowa above the tabernacle (which was behind the altar), and a relic of Blessed Pope John Paul II.  We were lucky enough to have our bishop along with us, and he was our tour guide, being very familiar with both churches (he actually had been baptized at the Polish church, and he served at the Cathedral Basilica before becoming the Bishop of our diocese).

Throughout showing us around the churches, in addition to telling us about the history of the building, he told us a lot about the architecture, statues, stained glass, and paintings.  He kept on stressing how the images serve, in addition to creating a religious ambiance, to instruct viewers without words, especially back in a time when not everyone was literate.  That was the perfect thing for him to point out, since, coincidentally my reading assignment for my Church History class was  On The Divine Images by St. John of Damascus.  This was great!  The bishop was talking about the importance of images in our churches and that same weekend I was reading St. John's defense of using divine images!  (Mind blown by this coincidence.)

Icon of John of Damascus. And he's holding an icon!

 St. John of Damascus lived ca. 650 to ca. 749, and resigned from a post in the Muslim Caliph's court to join a monastery.  He was ordained a priest and wrote about theology, philosophy and liturgy.  During the period of 725 to 774, there was a period of iconoclasm, brought about by the imperial policy of Emperor Leo III, who wanted to forbid "worshiping" statues.  John of Damascus was conveniently located outside of the Byzantine empire, so he could write rather freely in contradiction of the emperor's policies.  This was his reason for writing his treatise, which is seen as "one of the most important reflections on the theological issues at stake in the iconoclastic controversies" (1).  Here is a link to Part I of the Apology against Those who Attack the Divine Images (not the translation I read, but probably close enough). This one may be easier on the eyes.

One of the ways St. John explains that images are not worshiped instead of God is by describing the nature of worship itself.  While worship is the way that we revere or honor something, there are different levels in which it is applied.  He explains that Adoration, or in Latin, latria, is the highest worship, which is due only to God.  This is probably why we use the phrase "Eucharistic Adoration" rather than a more general term.  On the other hand, we can also honor something that is not as high as God, but still deserves some degree of reverence.  This honor is in Latin called dulia.  I think these terms are also used to explain how we don't "worship" Mary as God, and how we pray to her and to saints.  St. John says some other interesting things, so I recommending reading some if this treatise (I only had to read Part I for class, not the whole thing).





1. Coakley and Sterk, Readings in World Christian History, Vol.I, 289.

Modern Man and the Ugliness of Modern Art

I recently made an album of some pictures I took on my recent research trip to several Italian cities. While I would work during the week, I spent the weekends playing the tourist at various historic sites, especially many of the old Churches. When I returned, I made an album of a selection of the photographs that I had taken and was showing them to some relatives at a recent family gathering. They were suitably impressed by the photos, especially many of the Churches, and some remarked that one did not see artwork and architecture like that today. I was forced to agree.

This exchange reminded me of a couple remarks made by the Archbishop Fulton Sheen. In the first, he speculated on why modern art and architecture was so ugly. He suggested that in religious ages, art and architecture was more beautiful because men believed in a spiritual world that they could represent materially. The material was used to represent the spiritual, and the former was dignified by the comparison. In the modern age (or rather, the second pagan age), artwork and architecture is often so ugly because there is nothing to represent materially. All that is left is the weird, and so much modern art has given up on the search for beauty and simply tries for the strange and unfamiliar.

Many of the Churches that I saw and photographs I took inclined me to agree with the late archbishop. The first image here is of the Florence Duomo. The second is of the world trade center in New York City.
If a picture is typically worth a thousand words, then these are worth far more. The former twin towers were little more than large concrete rectangles, The Florence Duomo far more.

It may be protested that this consists of a remarkably small sample size. Very well, the reader is invited to consider on his own whether there might be something to this, and whether myself and my relatives, untrained artists all of us, are right in agreeing that modern art and architecture is far worse than medieval. One wonders then why "medieval" has become almost a synonym for "backward" in the modern world.

If so, then surely this represents an indictment of the modern world. A material world that cannot believe in the spiritual is a far poorer world. And human sense rightly revolts against it.

Some do not. While traveling Italy, I met a young Scandinavian woman on a bus trying to find her way to a hostel. We began talking about our travels and I mentioned my fascination with all of the old Churches. She responded dismissively, "oh, when you've seen one Church, you've seen them all."

First of all, this is hardly true. It is the ugly buildings of the modern city that all look alike. The sheer variety all the all old Churches makes me think of the remark by C.S Lewis, "how monotonously alike all the tyrants of the world, how gloriously different all the saints." Second, it reminded me of a story told by Fulton Sheen. He told of a tourist at the Louvre who, on exiting commented contemptuously to a security guard who was standing by that he (the tourist) saw nothing to admire in those paintings. The security guard responded, "Listen! These pictures are not on trial; you are!"

It was not only that art has become ugly; it is that the modern materialist, like my Scandinavian acquaintance, also gradually loses his ability to appreciate beauty where it may be found. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, that right or wrong, materialism gradually destroyed the modern man's humanity.

What was true of that tourist is true of the modern world-- and of us. The modern world is on trial and the case for the prosecution, the ugly artistic consequences of our materialism alone, is a strong one indeed. The judge is just, the verdict coming. If the modern world does not reject its materialism, it will find, not only will it have lost the ability to produce beauty, but, it will also have lost the ability to appreciate it, with devastating consequences for its ability to enjoy heaven and the new creation that began with Easter.