Time for some sacred art that IS sacred AND art

Father Uwe Lang, author of Turning Toward the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer (Ignatius, 2005), is also a member of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments and the new scientific director of a masters program at the European University of Rome focused on sacred art and architecture. From ZENIT:

Father Lang, who authored "Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer" (Ignatius Press, 2005), said, "Sacred art is directed to the praise and glory of God and, at the same time, is popular, because it must and can be understood and touch the hearts of the faithful, also of simple faithful."

Referring to the importance that the "Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church" gives to sacred art and to the use of the many works of art as a vehicle of the mysteries of the faith, Father Lang stressed that "today more than ever, in the civilization of image, the sacred image can express much more than the word itself, given that its dynamism of communication and transmission of the Gospel message is exceedingly effective."

Losing beauty

However, Father Lang lamented, sacred art is in crisis: "a crisis of the deepest roots, a crisis that has swept away, even before art, beauty itself, of which it should be the bearer. The very concept of 'fine arts,' of which the Conciliar Constitution on Sacred Liturgy speaks, is debated."

Quoting Hans Urs von Balthasar, Father Lang stressed that "together with the loss of the beautiful, the good and the true have also been lost."

"On one hand," he said, "there is a false kind of beauty that does not raise us to God and his Kingdom, but instead drags us down and awakens disordered desires." And on the other there is a need to oppose what Remo Bodei has called "the apotheosis of the ugly," which affirms that "everything that is beautiful is deceitful and that only the representation of what is raw is the truth."

"This cult to the ugly does no less damage to the Catholic faith than false beauty," Father Lang observed.

Read the entire article.

Read the foreword, written by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, to Turning Toward the Lord.

A nice introduction to von Balthasar's approach to beauty, especially in the context of evangelization and apologetics, is found in Fr. John Cihak's article, "Love Alone is Believable: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Apologetics" (Ignatius Insight, May 2005):

One of Balthasar’s key insights into how God incites man with his divine love is to encourage the non-believer to ponder his encounters with beauty in the world, especially as found in human love. Since most non-believers like to consider themselves open-minded, Balthasar capitalized on that desire by helping them see the mystery of Being as revealed in beauty. His thought in this regard has been developed wonderfully by Fr. Thomas Dubay in The Evidential Power of Beauty (Ignatius, 1999). Non-believers must also consider the limitations of worldly beauty, especially in the brokenness and failures of all human love. Why is love in this world so finite and fractured? Why are all attempts at love stamped as "failed" by the inevitable reality of death? This predicament leads to the vital question: Is there a love beyond this world?

At this point the non-believer can be led to wonder at the Cross and be provoked by this sign of divine revelation. They can be challenged to open their heart to the encounter with the beautiful form of Christ crucified revealing in its depths the Triune God of love. The non-believer with an open heart can be drawn by the grace coming through this form into the dynamic of love, leading to an act of faith. Though this theme is present throughout Balthasar vast writings, I will concentrate on two of his foundational works: Love Alone Is Credible (Ignatius, 2004), and The Glory of the Lord, (tr. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis), vol. 1 (Ignatius, 1982).

Balthasar argues that the encounter with beauty in the world is analogous to the encounter with the Triune God. What happens in the "aesthetic encounter"? He sees that beauty is an indissolvable union of two things: species and lumen. Beauty consists of a specific, tangible form (species) accessible to human senses with a splendor emanating from the form (lumen). Beauty has a particular form, is concretely situated in the coordinates of time and space, and thus has proportion so that it can be perceived. The splendor is the attractive charm of the Beautiful, the gravitational pull, the tractor beam pulling the beholder into it. When confronted with the Beautiful, one encounters "the real presence of the depths, of the whole reality, and . . . a real pointing beyond itself to those depths" (GL).

Also, here an excerpt from chapter 10 ("Artistry and Beauty") of Fr. Dubay's The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet (Ignatius, 1999).