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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926,
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 18
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH
HOW THE CHURCH STUPEFIES FOLK BY CRUDE EMOTIONALISM
by Joseph
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
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CHAPTER
I The Alleged Beautiful Services .......... 1
II There never was a Catholic art .......... 7
III Few Poets and Vapid Hymns .............. 13
IV Masses Composed by Skeptics ............ 19
V Why a dead Language is Used in the Liturgy ... 23
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Chapter I
THE ALLEGED BEAUTIFUL SERVICES
In approaching this subject it will be useful to state again the angle from which I write the present series of booklets. It is to show that the scandalous action of the Vatican and most of its national hierarchies which I traced in the first series of booklets was just what you would expect if you know the Church of Rome. It is not a religious body like any other, and the venerable antiquity of which it is so proud merely recalls, to the informed mind, the violence and unscrupulousness of the methods by means of which it has survived. Its path through the ages is marked, not by the flowering of new cultures or new civilizations, but by the graves of rival religions and of masses of rebels. It consists essentially of a Black International which in every age wages an economic struggle for survival and has, in view of the absurdity of the creed on which it lives, to use violence and deception to hold
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together the body which supports it. However many million devout laymen and however many thousand sincere priests there may be in the world this is its broad structure, and only when you see that can you understand its proved action in modern life.
Some American apologists have pleaded in excuse for their very un-american efforts to suppress criticism that the critics would like to drive a wedge between the Catholic laity and their priests. The man who could succeed in doing this would render an outstanding service to the country. We say that the international army to which their priests belong is Fascist. The name "Fascist" was, it appear's, taken from a bastard Italian word (fascio) which means a bunch or a group, but it goes back ultimately to the emblem of authority, the axe and the rods, in the ancient Roman army. That emblem is so characteristic of the Roman Church that, we saw, even while. it protested in a dozen tongues -- English, French, German, etc. -- that it is now tolerant and humane it still claimed in Latin its possession of the axe and the rods. In an age when the Fascist banner seemed destined to float over three continents it threw off the mask of meekness and openly joined the aggressors.
This involved a larger use than ever of its second weapon, suppression of truth and mendacity, in the lands that were not yet conquered, and I have endeavored to expose this and enable the reader to understand the Church. In the world at large it is, instead of being the impressive institution it represents in America, a tragic-comic spectacle. If you grant it the 250,000,000 subjects it claims today, one-third of these are men and women who curse it in their hearts and go to church only under the shadow of its bloody emblem of the axe and the rods, and more than a third of the remainder are either children or illiterates. The only point of serious interest is how it keeps in its fold in America and Britain so many out of the teeming millions who have come from less educated lands, and I have, I think, explained this. There remain, however, two elements of explanation that are so frequently claimed that we must examine them. The first is the fairly common opinion that the Church of Rome appeals to the heart and, the emotions, far more than any other Church does, and this, it is thought, distracts the mind from the intellectual absurdity or moral repulsiveness of its doctrines. The second is the familiar cry -- the parrot-cry, one might justly call it -- that it "does good," and on a scale that ought to impress even the skeptic.
Postponing the question whether the Church has rendered a service to art itself we may consider first the sensuous appeal which it makes, and against Protestant writers confesses that it makes, to the general body of the faithful. That this is one element of it, success in inducing millions to continue in the profession of beliefs which are as incongruous in our modern world as an iron-clad knight would be, we fully admit. Statistics, it is true, do not show that the sensuous services give the Catholic Church any advantage over the leading Protestant Churches except in a preponderance of female church-goers over males, but in fact a high proportion of Catholics would tell you that the character of the services attract them. It is, part of my work to warn folk against generalizing from one or a few cases, but it may be of interest to give one. I have a neighbor, an elderly woman, a bombee
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of shattered nerves, who was brought up a strict Roman Catholic.
Intelligence and education poor. She is ready at all times to join
her son (a full apostate) in cursing the
What is important here is not the type but the psychological
factor. We must not exaggerate it. About a third of the Catholic
body discharge only the minimum of obligation and attend a "low"
mass (without music) on Sundays. They take no part whatever in it
and do not understand a word of the priest's Latin gabbling; and
instead of having any sensuous or artistic enjoyment they just
kneel uncomfortably and impatiently until it is over. The church
itself which they attend is "artistic" only to a low taste, like
the "best room" in the apartment of workers or small-middle-class
folk with more money than education. A few of these may also attend
the evening service. It is nearly all in Latin and they take no
part in it, but the sanctuary is gay with surplices and silk, the
altar ablaze, the service and choral, and the sermon usually short.
If the alternative is anything like that of the old lady I have
quoted, to be left alone in a drab room, one usually prefers to be
"a Catholic." Remember that it is cheap -- two cents or a nickel.
These folk are not interested in doctrines. The "real presence" of
This one-third of the Catholic body is, numerically, the chief source of leakage. To them the religion is, as I said, a practice or a sentiment, not a belief. Where there is no particular emotional response to the rhetoric of the pulpit and the weekly paper about the Holy Faith and Holy Father and the devouring thirst of the world and the devil to destroy them they are easily drawn off. The men and youths and many of the young women secede as soon as they get a live faith and ideal like Socialism. Others just drift away if the general atmosphere is non-Catholic. In a Catholic country these folk are held by the gaiety of the show. The wine- shop and the church are the two bright spots in their heavy lives.
The nice-minded skeptics who resent this coupling of the wine-
shop and the church, who (with no knowledge of Catholic life) say
that "religion" is the real uplift in these people's hearts and it
is wicked to try to remove it, may be recommended to read some such
book as Prof. J.L.
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conservative and more attentive to their political interferences
than to the moral and spiritual welfare of the mass of the people.
The Indians, the vast majority of the population of Latin America,
are at the lowest level of ignorance and superstition, ready at any
time to serve the political purposes of the hierarchy, though often
barely Christian in religion and permitted by the priests the
wildest license. The Church festivals are orgies. In fact,
Professor
To these 60,000,000 or so Catholic worker's and peasants of
Latin America add those of Cuba and the Philippines, the rural
parts and small-town populations of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the
Portuguese. French, and Belgian colonies. I gave an authentic
picture of life in such regions in Book IV of this series. The
entire body of Catholics coming into this category are considerably
more than half the whole number of the
As I said, the Catholicism of this larger half of the subjects of the Black International no more requires study than does that of children. It is an ingrained attitude or set of practices, protected from interference from the rebel who appears here and there by the power that the priest's have: a power which in all Catholic countries Fascism has made absolute. To an extent their minds are drugged on Sundays and Saints' Days, but it is hardly necessary in their case. It is at the higher levels that the intellectually depressing effect of the Catholic services becomes important, and the more artistic they are the more effective the opiate.
Two illustrations of the truth of this at once occur. I have not the Catholic Who's Who for America but the situation is much the same as in Britain, and I have already pointed out that, confining ourselves as far as possible to the same cultural level converts to the Church from the world of art are three or four times as numerous as from the scientific world. It would be quite
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natural to suggest that artists feel the charm of the beautiful services more than scientists, but it is a poor compliment to pay to any artist of distinction to suggest that he will enter a Church and on his knees make a solemn declaration of literal belief in all its doctrines, repeated one by one, just because its churches and services are artistic. He is free at any time to attend the services and, if he feels inclined, see a pretty symbolism in them, but if he calls himself a Catholic he in the same breath denies that he takes a symbolic view of the services and doctrines. That is a comprehensive and deadly heresy in theology; though, of course, we are aware that a priest will, to secure or retain the name of a distinguished artist for the Church, not press him about his beliefs any more than he will be too inquisitive about a wealthy man's amorous adventures.
The truth is, however, that it is not the higher artistic
sensitiveness but the comparatively lower intellectual vitality or
equipment of the artist that explains why he is willing to make a
profession of the creed I described in an earlier book. Probably in
most cases these artist-converts flatter themselves that they have
one sound reason which may be classed as intellectual. They are
convinced the Roman Church has been, and is, a great inspirer of
high art, and this at least predisposes them to endorse a creed
that, in marked contrast to science, has had, they say, so
beneficent an influence. Catholic literary artists have written
this, and I have heard them say that art and the love of beauty are
in danger of perishing in our drab, cold, materialistic age and
they must rally to the Church as the best guarantee of survival.
G.K.
The second illustration is the preponderance of women over men in the richer and more artistic Catholic churches. Here I rely neither on impressions nor on the common belief that women are more religious than men. In the less artistic Protestant churches there is no material disproportion of the sexes, and it is not notable in the poorer Catholic districts. A Strict census of church-goers, spread over six months, in the city of London (England) in 1903 proved this. In the whole city (6,250,000 people) 372,264 men and 607,257 women attended church. But the disparity of the sexes was far and away the greatest in the artistic churches of the rich West End of London. In two Anglican churches there were 160 and 249 men and 886 and 1,034 women. In three Romanist churches there were 267, 276, and 237 men and 1,105, 807, and 701 women. In Methodist and Baptist churches in a poor quarter there were 3,336 men to 4,127 women. It is clear what conclusion we must draw from such figures. Educated men are far less disposed to let their intellectual life be stupefied by emotional satisfaction. Religion, again, is a practice or an emotion rather than a belief.
The Church professes that it appeals to the emotions only as a preliminary appeal to the intellect. That is clearly false. It appeal's to the senses because if they find an attractiveness in the services less demand need be made upon the intelligence of the
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worshiper. To contrast the Protestant version of Christianity with the Roman as cold and unemotional is absurd. The Protestant service makes a very powerful appeal to the emotions of a believer. The prayers are heavily emotional and are not muttered in a tongue that any of the laity understand. The congregation silently takes part in them, and the emotions stirred are then released in the community-singing of the hymns, of which there is very little In the usual Catholic service. It would not be inaccurate to say that the Protestant service appeals to the emotions through the ideas or doctrines which are embodied in the prayers, hymns, and sermons, while the Catholic service aims at a direct gratification of the senses by florid music, flowers, candles, colored silks and white robes, ornate altars, incense, stained glass, and a general artistic scheme according to the cultural quality of the congregation of each particular church.
In this sense it stupefies the intelligence or dulls its
alertness and critical tendency by ensuing this gratification of
the senses or, in wealthier churches, of the esthetics sense. A
friend of theirs once gave me the broad explanation of the
Catholicism of Belloc and
The field here is so large, the variety of types so great --
from
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Chapter II
THERE NEVER WAS A CATHOLIC ART
That, a Catholic reader would say, is such nonsense that it is impudent to ask people to read it. Better informed folk will say, with a smile, that it is an uncontrolled expression of my anti- Papal complex or at the best a paradox. Not a bit of it. It is a plain statement of fact, and my habitual readers will know that I have very closely studied the history of art, especially during the Middle Ages, and discussed it in earlier works. Let me first make a distinction which is elementary yet is quite commonly overlooked, and not infrequently by writers on art.
When you pass along the streets of a city you notice that, generally speaking, banks and insurance corporations have more artistic buildings than the others. Is there some artistic inspiration in the money-business, something that you would call financial art? You know the answer. They just employ art more than other concerns because it pays them to do this. Never mind for the moment what their conception of art is. It may be block glass and chromium steel or a gothic sky-scraper. The point is that the diverse artistic effort in a collection of buildings expresses the resources of the business and the particular utility it finds in the employment of art. Well, the richest employer of artists is and always's was the Catholic Church, and no other business in the world derives so much profit from the employment of art as it does. It no more inspires the art than a funeral-furnisher does. If there is anything in its doctrines that may in any sense be said to inspire art it is just in those bastard dogmas in which the original Christian ideas are mixed with Greek or Roman mythology or medieval barbarism.
The history of Catholic art, even as it is known to every
educated man, confirms this, and the more closely you study it the
clearer the truth becomes. There was no art in the service during
the first three centuries. Naturally, says the apologist. The
faithful were fugitives from the police, holding services that were
necessarily simple in the catacombs. . . .
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The eastern Churches were still so rooted in the anti-artistic
tradition that they generally preferred to burn the temples and all
their artistic paraphernalia.
At least, the apologist might say, the Roman Church did better
than the Greek. It preserved and Christianized the art. To what
extent we need not inquire. The point here is that it did not
inspire a new art but, in the words of one of the leading art-
historians,
I have often illustrated the way in which the Black International has succeeded in recent years in poisoning the wells of public information by references to the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The boast of British Catholics that they "revised" it is only too true. Amongst other changes notice that "Dark Ages," on which there had previously been no article, now bag a short notice from one of the professors of history of a second- rate British university. I suppose they had to pass over Oxford and Cambridge to find a man who could please Catholics. This man solemnly says, with all the superciliousness of his school that the phrase Dark Ages -- being a continuous period we ought to call the Dark Age -- used to be applied by writers who judged life by the classical standard of art and letters, to the period from the 5th to the 15th Century. He seems to be unaware that it was the Father of Catholic History, Cardinal Baronius, who first used the phrase; that, it does not simply designate the scarcity of art and letters but of all civilization; and that no responsible historian carries it as far as the 15th Century. It is, he says, now "obsolete"; whereas it is fully vindicated in the greatest historical work in the English language, the Cambridge Medieval History. The only sense in which it could now be used, he says, is that the period, has loft us only a very scanty and poor historical literature to inform us about it; and he does not reflect that this is precisely one of the symptoms of its degradation. But it is wrong to apply so opprobrious's a word to "one of the great constructive periods in human activity." This man is President of the British Royal Historical Society!
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I must refer the interested reader to other works in which he
can read about the total collapse of the fine Greek-Roman
civilization and the five or six centuries of moral, social, legal,
political, and economic, as well as cultural, debasement that
followed. It is enough that art was dead, except amongst the anti-
Papal Ostrogoths and Lombards of North Italy, until, in the 11th
Century, Greek art was introduced into Germany by a royal marriage,
and it was not until a century later that Europe generally began to
cultivate art. Professor
But the great art of the Middle Ages! That is what the apologist and the artistic converts to the Church have in mind: the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, the superb paintings and statues, the work in gold, silver, and bronze, the tapestries and stained windows, the lace's and embroideries. Certainly a period of superb artistic creativeness, and because a half or more of the works of art then created are religious the apologists and the religious- minded artists clap their hands and cry: See what our religion inspired, see what the world has lost in discarding it!
I will not be tempted to reply that according to very many
art-authorities of our time we, especially atheistic France, have
created a greater art, because I must confess to an incurable
enthusiasm for medieval cathedrals, paintings, and sculpture. But
this art, is just as inspired in its "profane" as in its "Sacred"
achievements: as great in its civic halls as in its cathedrals, in
its painted
The Catholic artists and men and women of artistic
sensitiveness but very little knowledge of the broad history of art
or the lives and opinions of the great medieval artists feel that
in this field the Church will find its most powerful argument. It
is very little use asking them to study the leading modern
authorities on the subject. They just kneel in rapture in a
medieval cathedral or before a sacred painting, and because we no
longer build such cathedral's or paint such pictures they say: Here
is the glorious flower of the Catholic spirit. They would say just
the same about a fresco by
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to paint his, the
The all-pervading fallacy of all this slush about Catholicism
and Renaissance art is the supposition, which too many American
historians now encourage, that the later Middle Age (say about 1150
to 1550) was a period of general piety and loyalty to the Church's
commands. If that were so, the modern "psychological" historian
would have a nice problem in explaining how that was just the
period of the worst and most protracted degradation of the Papal
Court, and why the one period of great art in Rome itself coincides
with the most openly immoral and skeptical stretch of medieval
Church history. Not only, all the leading authorities on the
Renaissance (Burckhardt,
A second fundamental fallacy, which well illustrates the difference between the artistic and the scientific mind and the greater readiness of the former to accept the claims of the Church, is the lack of testing and verification, in plain English, the failure of the artist to check his impression by testing it from various angles. If it occurs to a scientific man that a certain agency is the cause of a particular phenomenon he holds his tongue until he has convinced himself by a series, of check-studies that it explains the whole phenomenon and no other agency does. Scientific method is in this just the clarification of common- sense. Applied to our present subject it would inquire whether an artist is more inspired in sacred thin in profane subjects and whether and to what extent great religious works of art were produced by men of little or no religious feeling. We saw how ludicrously the protagonist of Catholic art fails to do this. But the common-sense inquiry would go much further. Was the European Renaissance the only great, or the greatest, period of artistic creation? And was there a religious inspiration in the other great periods, Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Arab? The plain conclusion emerges that if a man is a great artist it does not make any
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difference to his inspiration whether he has to paint a branch of
cherry blossoms or a
Of the medieval cathedral in particular I have written much elsewhere and must be content with two points. It is obvious that if we have here a case of religious inspiration it must have been in the architects. But they are unknown. I cannot find that any writer on art has tried to compile even a short list or a biographical study of them, and the only such architect of whom I have found definite information, the architect of Speyer cathedral, was a roistering irreligious German bishop who was just as good at building a military fort or a castle. The second point is that modern experts on the Gothic style never notice religious inspiration, in their studies. The development of the style, on utilitarian as well as aesthetic lines, was spread over two generations and mainly occurred in the most frivolous and licentious region of France. The chief significance of it is that wealth was at this period rapidly expanding in Europe, and the clergy and monks got the most of it and wanted fine churches. It was a sound investment.
Another obvious cheek on this superficial Catholic theory is to inquire why great art so notably decayed after the 16th Century. In that pretentious collection of essays by American apologists, Catholic Action (2 vols., 1935), there is a section on "Catholic Action and Culture." The artistic convert who looks to it for what he believes to be the grandest argument for the Church, its inspiration of art, will be bitterly disappointed. The writer dismisses it in a few colorless lines, and the sterilization of Catholic art after the 16th Century is airily explained by saying that "we have not yet recovered" from the blight which the Reformation brought upon art. If the writer does not know that French painting (Poussin, Lorraine, Watteau, Greuze, Fragmard, etc.) and British painting only became great after the Reformation and was almost entirely humanist or naturalist, while Spanish and Italian art died though the countries were hermetically sealed against Protestant influence, he ought not to 'Mention the word art.
Looking for some serious recent Catholic reply to my question
why, if the Catholic creed inspires art, it so conspicuously failed
to do so in Italy, Spain, and Portugal when the Renaissance was
over, although the Catholicism of those countries became stronger
than ever, I find only two French works. The first, L art religieux
apres le Concile de Trent (1932) by
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The second book, La decandence de I'art sacre (1931), by A. Cingria (a Catholic) grants my whole contention. It is enough to translate the title, "The decadence of 'Sacred art." The kind of question that the author sets out to answer is: "Why do the majority of Christians now like ugliness"? He doesn't know. Let us put him right to some extent. They do not like ugliness except in the sense that a church in a poor uneducated district naturally reflects the poor taste of the worshipers. But Catholics would be only too pleased to have great art once more if they could get it. The Roman Church in America is many times as rich as the Italian Church was during the Renaissance and would pay ten or a hundred times as much as a medieval church or monastery did. They cannot get it. They have to import pictures from Spain, Italy, and Germany; and we should smile at the idea that the non-Catholic atmosphere of America prevents a Catholic artist from being inspired by Catholic ideas. The Church in Germany until a few years ago was as rich as the American. The Church in Spain and Spanish America is rich. But in the debauched monasteries of Germany and South America, where the Renaissance atmosphere of drink and sexual license is richly reproduced, no great art is produced.
Quebec is a medieval area with ideal Catholic conditions. Its
Church is so rich that it is as zealous against Communism as Wall
Street is. Cardinal
This artistic argument for the Church is futile because even
if we could admit that it inspired great art in the later Middle
Ages yet must add that it has no such inspiration today there does
not seem to be much gain to the
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Chapter III
FEW POETS AND VAPID HYMNS
Two of the arts, literature and music, deserve special
consideration. Both arts had their richest efflorescence after the
Reformation; both ought to be of special value in the service of
religion; and, while the plastic arts are scarcely suitable for
illustrating most of the Catholic doctrines, literature and music
are much better suited for the expression of ideas. In regard to
literature, moreover, we have a much broader test of the Catholic
claim. Even most folk with a fair general culture have to look to
the verdict of experts for an appreciation of painting or
sculpture. How many ever saw a picture, or a copy of a picture, by
one of the Spanish or Italian artists whom Male presses upon us as
"great painters" who worthily sustained the tradition of Catholic-
inspired art? How many, when they see a collection of reproductions
of the religious work of, say, Raphael,
In regard to literature as a whole I have repeatedly pointed
out that Christendom did not produce a book that in the general
opinion of cultivated men and women could be called "great" between
We saw the apologist for the Dark Age, Prof.
From about 1100 a very different literature began: troubadour songs, ballads, epics, light stories, and so on. Yes, but it was so pervasively licentious and crude in its moral sentiments that the Church, when it began to use its axe and rods, regarded the whole movement as a revolt against Christianity and gradually exterminated it. A religious profession who resents my
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characterization of the period -- which, by the way, is the same as that of every recognized European authority on it -- told me to read a recent French work, de Rougemont's Passion and Society, for the corrected historical appreciation of the period. The book is one of those freak originalities that the authorities ignore. It takes troubadour literature in its final and feeblest stage, when a few French and Italian poets were trying to save their art from the Church by taking religious themes, and it falsely represents these as typical troubadour literature. It describes as mystic in the religious sense the greater poems of the whole literature, The Romance of the Rose, whereas all experts recognize that "the rose" is sex.
If the apologist wearily grants that Europe in the Dark Age was so low, economically and culturally, that we cannot expect even religion to inspire a literature and insist that no power or agency could have raised Europe afresh more quickly than the Church did, the answer is that just during this period the Arabs and Persians, starting to rebuild civilization long after the Church did, created an amazingly abundant and brilliant literature -- poetic, historical, scientific, and theological -- which Spanish Catholics and Moslem fanatics later destroyed. And if the apologist says that at all events after 1300 Christian Europe produced a great literature he runs into the difficulty I explained in the last chapter: How on earth does the Christian religion inspire a great literature only in the period when, according to all historical authorities, religious feeling and moral idealism were at their lowest ebb?
How many of the most distinguished writers between
It is time the writers who fancy that Gothic cathedrals and religious paintings prove that there is a rich inspiration in the Catholic creed tried to explain to us why it so dismally failed to inspire great or artistic writers, especially poets. They never attempted it. they speak of this period (1100-1500) as the Ages of Faith they are mainly thinking of France and Italy. Isn't it peculiar that of the artistic writers of the two countries, who were numerous enough, three or four were "obscene" for every one
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who wrote stuff a modern nun would read? Quite a number of them
wrote vindications of what the Church called vice, even unnatural
vice, and comedies which would make a patrolman blush were written
and played in the Papal Court itself, while the great works of
religious art were being produced in other parts of the Vatican or
the city. Your Catholic friend who says to you, with an air of
common-sense; that in spite of all this talk Catholic art, and a
very great art, is there for any man to see, is thinking chiefly of
Rome, of St.
It is hardly surprising that the writers of the time did not
look for inspiration to the Catholic creed. The best of them, like
I said that if these Catholic apologists and artistic folk who
blat about medieval art were quite honest they would try to explain
why it was most "Inspired" when Italy, or Rome in particular, was
most immoral (not merely in respect of sex). They would, have a
still more awkward moment if they tried to explain why it
shrivelled up as soon as the morals of Rome and the Papal Court had
to be comparatively reformed because half of Europe was now
Protestant and cynically watching the
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freedom, adventure, emancipation, and enjoyment -- had quickened the blood of Europe during the later Middle Ages and evoked its art as the spring-warmth quickens the circulation of the plants and causes the flowers of summer. The soil of strictly Catholic countries froze again, and there was no great literary art until a new human factor, the vision of a better world, fired the blood again in the second half of the 18th Century.
But the absurdity of the Catholic argument, if you can call it
an argument, is shown by the record between the Reformation and the
Revolution, as it is shown wherever you test it by facts. A new
Dark Age settled on Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and Germany was
reduced almost to barbarism by the religious wars. In England, on
the other hand, art burst into full blossom as soon as the Catholic
creed was fully extinguished. No one who knows the history of
England would expect it earlier, but the point is that once England
got the conditions of an artistic age, which Italy had enjoyed much
earlier, it did not make the slightest difference that there was
now no Catholic faith to inspire it or Church to employ it.
Literary art, in particular, burst into bloom with the robust
Protestantism, richly leavened with skepticism, under the skeptical
France has been a mixed country ever since the rise of
Then came the new spring, the stirring of the blood of the
race which we broadly call the passion for freedom and democracy,
that is still raging. As the Church of Rome was, and is, bitterly
opposed to it we do not look for many Catholics amongst the greater
writers of the last century and a half. The question is not whether
you can name one or two Catholic writers of the first rank -- a
Chateau briand, a
Ours will probably be described in historical manuals of the future as an age of mediocrity. Statesmen, artists, and scientific and literary men reach no peaks. Possibly the highest ability enters the business world, where the reward is greatest, but we have to remember that both in art and letters the man of outstanding ability is sure of recognition and will certainly not starve in an attic.
If any reader is still inclined to wonder if I have not
yielded in part to prejudice in assigning the relative positions of
Catholic and non-Catholic writers let me recall that I have in an
earlier booklet followed a high and most impartial authority in
estimating the writers of the last forty years: the Nobel Prize
Committee. If anything the Committee, though it is supposed to be
guided by national committees of great weight and impartiality, is
prejudiced in favor of religious writers and, while it has had to
award the great prize 27 times out of the 37 to skeptics, it has
excluded skeptics whom the critics would put high above some who
were selected. Yet in this selection of the world's greatest
writers during the last 40 years we have only four who seem to be
in some literal way Catholics, though they were certainly not
inspired in their work by the Papal creed. The
The most deadly reply to the Catholic argument here, the
immediate reply to those who talk about the warmth, colorfulness,
and emotional richness of the Catholic atmosphere, is the relative
fewness of Catholic poets, especially of poets who show any sort of
indebtedness to Catholic belief for their inspiration. In the large
volume of distinguished poetical literature of Great Britain they
can claim only that of Dryden, who was a skeptic until his later
years and would in any case hardly be called inspired. In the
German-speaking area of Europe, which has always been one-third
Catholic, the record is not better. But it is enough to point out
that in what the Church claims as Catholic countries the majority
of the more distinguished poets during the last century and a half
have been anti-Papal and very few since
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Most conspicuously is the failure of the Papal creed to
inspire poetic art shown in the cabe of hymns. The great majority
of the hymns in a Catholic hymn-book are very poor stuff and many
of them are so vapid that one is forced to conclude that even
priest-selectors would never have included them if they had plenty
of good material to select from. In preparing a small popular work
on Rome (The
The earth is but a vale of tears
O
or: O the blood of Christ! it Soothes the Father's ire: Opes the gates of heaven, Quells eternal fire. Oft as it is sprinkled On our guilty beans, Satan in confession Terror-struck departs.
It is a conglomeration of rotten sentiments, wooden verse, and even
bad grammar. The mechanical grind of the verse-maker runs through
the book, and his insincerity is matched by the insincerity of the
singers. A very popular hymn for services for young women (children
of
Holy
Not a girl of the hundreds of thousands who sing that means what she says, or, in fact, does not feel exactly the opposite sentiment. Grown-up men and women lustily sing:
O Paradise, O Paradise,
'Tis weary waiting here;
I long to be where
or:
Arm for deadly fight, earth and bell unite,
And swear in lasting bonds to bind me;
Raise the cross on high,
Large numbers of the hymns chant this glorious fight against the world -- most of the men make for the nearest beer-house when the service is over and the girls hurry to keep their dates -- the flesh, and the devil. It helps to keep up the prestige and importance of the clergy. They not only lead the troops but are the only channels of the supernatural force (grace) without which the fight is hopeless for the ordinary man.
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This theme runs through the whole collection. Catholics are, you may have found, as cheerful and sinful as other folk, yet you would imagine from merely reading their hymns ("hell is raging for my soul," etc.) that they were a portentously serious and puritanical body of men and women. Next time your Catholic neighbor presses you to read his literature, while refusing to read yours, ask him to lend you his prayer-book and hymn-book. But I wager that he won't.
Chapter IV
MASSES COMPOSED BY SKEPTICS
The hymn is not so important in a Catholic as in a Protestant
church. It had no place in the ritual as it was finally evolved in
the Middle Ages; in accordance, of course, with the blue-prints
entrusted to
Into all that, however, we cannot enter here but must confine ourselves to the actual use of the art of music in Catholic services today; and the chief question that interests us about it is whether in the case of this art at least the Catholic creed has not simply employed but inspired the artist.
Music would lend itself to such inspiration more easily than
any other art. No painter or sculptor has ever given us a
Here you get the most decisive -- and the most deadly -- test of the claim that the Roman religion inspires art. Not relying on my memory of church-experience 50 years ago I take from a recent authoritative publication the names of ten of the greatest
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composers of masses, litanies, and shorter pieces that are used in
Catholic churches today:
Yet no less than six of the ten were apostates --
The most flagrant cases of Catholic misrepresentation are
those of
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important works of their age," and
Let me further illustrate this point from the biography of
another great musician. I do not suppose that the German Requiem of
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we get the usual caution that it is better as art than as an
expression of Catholic ideas. In point of fact he was, like
A full inquiry, which naturally cannot be made for the purpose
of writing one chapter of a booklet, into the lives and sentiments
of all the leading composers of Catholic music would clearly be of
considerable interest. I happened to have made some inquiry at an
earlier date as far as these masters are concerned, and the results
are quite enough for my purpose. The Church employed them and did
not clearly inspire a single one of them. Like the painters of the
Renaissance, whose art was equally great in depicting courtesans
and saints, pious scenes and bacchanalian scenes, they were
"neither Christians nor pagans but artists" as
Anyone who has heard one of these florid masses in a Catholic church feels that it is mainly, as in the opera-house, a commercial use of art. I was attached, as a priest and professor, to a middle- class suburban chapel in London for some years. As I have explained, the only obligation of the people was to bear a mass every Sunday morning, and the great majority discharged this, in spite of the general disposition to be longer abed on Sundays, by assisting at a short early mass. There was no music, and the "sublime" service was gabbled through by the priest in 25 minutes. At 11 there was a sung or "high" mass, and this -- it might have been called the Dress Parade -- all the more comfortable parishioners attended. Several times a year an orchestra was employed and one of the classical masses was sung. It doubtless gave many a heightened idea of the solemnity of the feast, but from the clerical angle it had only one aim: money. Very special collections, sometimes taken by the monks themselves, were made, and the extra hiring of singers and musicians was far more than covered.
The singers of these masses and other choral services are, even on ordinary Sundays quite commonly non-Catholics. They are just professional singers, and the question of combining a moderate wage with efficient work is regarded as more important than the question of their religion or irreligion. I never heard of one
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being "converted." Near the church to which I was attached was a popular beer-house of a superior type, and the pietists of our congregation sent in scandalized protests that after the Sunday services they had to see the whole body of singers repair noisily to the Saloon Bar. They never understood a word that they sang; for, as I said, the English hymn has a very small place on a Catholic Sunday evening service and none in the morning service. The whole performance is, in fact, sheerly theatrical. Even the priests at the altar -- there are usually three -- have a bench in the sanctuary and at intervals in their very sacred manipulations they retire to sit on this while the choir sings, with senseless repetitions (to give the composer elbow-room) and long-drawn phrases, certain parts of the mass. It is fine music; and it makes a mockery of the sense of the ritual from a religious viewpoint. Catholic's sometimes feel this.
My father used to tell of an experience of this kind. He once
took a country cousin, a Catholic, to one of our swell morning
services. When the choir finished the piece they were singing (in
the ritual it was a simple recital of the creed) for the second or
third time and went back to the middle once more, the man, who was
moving restlessly in his sent, whispered to my father: "Damn it,
Chapter V
WHY A DEAD LANGUAGE IS USED IN THE LITURGY
The reader must not lose sight of the guiding idea of this booklet. It is an examination of the claim that the Catholic creed inspires great art: that it was the main inspiration of the superb art of the Middle Ages, and that the general mediocrity, or the lower general level, of art since the 16th Century is due to the destruction of the influence of the Church over half the world. This is one of the smooth generalizations which an age that has become, for not very creditable reasons, complaisant to the Church accepts too easily from the apologist. As history it is on a level with the mendacious claim that the Roman Church gave the world schools broke the fetter's of the slave, and inspired mercy and philanthropy.
Specially rich periods of artistic, production have always been limited in point of time. They may last 50 years or several centuries but they end in mediocrity. Such periods are also commonly periods of growing skepticism -- compare the great art- period of China, Athens, Persia, and Arab Spain and Sicily -- and the greater artists share this with the general educated class. But the temples and priesthoods are the richest employers, and the artist is concerned only that his art shall do justice to his subject. He may in a sense find an idea (of a Mother of God, for instance) inspiring though he does, not regard it as a truth or as an idea corresponding to reality. I have given ample evidence of this.
As to the common Catholic sophism that the reduction of the
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have been far greater since the Reformation than they were in the
Middle Ages, and they ought to be particularly useful for
expressing religious ideas. But Catholics have had a miserably
small part in proportion to their numbers, in the finer creations
of those arts. The medieval Church employed but did not inspire
artists -- a rare
There remains the question why the Roman Church employs a dead language, Latin, in its services. It is, of course, not unusual for priests to continue to read the sacred books of a religion in the language, which may otherwise be dead, in which they were written. The Jews still have the Old Testament read in Hebrew: the Moslem even in Turkey and elsewhere read the Koran in Arabic. But in the Church of Rome practically the entire service on Sundays and the morning service on all days is in Latin. The Greek Church and its various national daughters have the services in ancient Greek, but their motive is the same as that of the Roman hierarchy. It is not as is sometimes suggested, in order to affirm and sustain the international or Catholic character of the Church. lt has a double object. Locally it helps to maintain the very emphatic line that is drawn between the clergy and the laity and strengthen the position of the former as a separate and very much higher caste; and, especially, it is one of the most effective means of reminding Catholics everywhere of their connection with and object dependence upon the Vatican and the Papacy.
A Catholic church has the upper (away from the door) end, or
usually about a fourth or fifth of the area, isolated by a
decorative low iron rail beyond which the laity must never go. Most
of this is empty space to add to the impressiveness of the altar at
the extreme end at which, raised by a number of steps above the
body of the church, the priests, in vestments of colored silk --
the color changing according to the saint, or mystery honored on
that day -- over long white linen robes, the priests perform their
ceremonies. Remember the Catholic belief that on that altar
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same as in a theater, and, though the body of the church is not
darkened, at the evening service the light about the altar is
increased by an immense number of candles in shining brass
candelabra, flowers are used lavishly, and the sanctuary is
gradually filled with a slight haze from the fumes of incense. It
is a continuation of the old pagan tradition. So the priests of
The use of Latin has an obvious advantage in spectacles of
this sort, but it has others which are not obvious. The morning
service, the mass, is so rigorously confined to Latin that in my
sacerdotal days we had to chant even the final prayer for the king
in Latin! On Catholic doctrine there is no disadvantage whatever in
this use of Latin. The mass is not a "Service" in the ordinary
sense. What happens in the mass is that the priest offers a real
sacrifice to God.
When this "solemn sacrifice" is in modern times accompanied by
the operatic music of
This concealment of the mutilation or massacre of the liturgy in musical services by keeping the words in Latin is balanced by the advantage in low (or unsung) masses. I explained in an earlier chapter that, although this is a long series of prayers and addresses to the Almighty of a solemnity in accordance with the Catholic theory of the mass, the people are impatient and are apt
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to complain of any priest who does not "get through" in less than half an hour, usually 25 minutes. The young priest has to practice for weeks before he says his first mass. He has to learn to say the prayers, some of which change with the calendar, at -- I have just tested by experience -- about 200 words a minute. It is, perhaps, fortunate for himself that the words are in Latin, for, although he is supposed to understand the very elementary Church Latin, he is less sensible of the meaning, except in the slower and more solemn passages, than he would be if they were in English.
The advantage in helping to link the entire Church with Rome,
the home of the Latin tongue, is just as obvious. I have
occasionally made light comments on the American apologists and
priests -- if not bishops and cardinals -- who are so blatant in
stressing the harmony of their faith with American ideals that they
swear they would cut the connection with Rome or (which is the same
thing) defy the
They could retain it only on one ground, and it is the chief
reason why the Church retains it today in every country. It is part
of the paraphernalia that makes a separate and very superior caste
of the priests. Like the black cassock or black suit, the reversed
collar, the shaven poll which he is supposed to have, the
incongruous title of "Father" for a man who professes to think
paternity a weakness of the flesh, the ancient Roman (or possibly
Persian and Egyptian) garb he wears at the altar, the dividing
sanctuary line, the "blessing" which a good Catholic (on his or her
knee's) is supposed to ask when he enters a house, and so on, it
marks him off as a member of a sacred caste. In a Catholic country
his indulgence in drink does not matter -- little notice is taken
of this even in Eire -- and his amorous adventures are judged very
humanly. As he repeatedly reminds them in sermons, his character as
a man has nothing to do with the mystic and august character which
"Holy Orders" have conferred on him. He can absolve sins or in
certain cases refuse to absolve them and leave a man under sentence
of hell. He can work the stupendous miracle of transubstantiation.
When countries are still solidly Catholic, and equally illiterate
and densely ignorant, he encourages the belief that his magical
powers go far beyond invisible results like absolving sins or
turning a bit of paste into the living body of
We need not, however, go back once more into "the really
Catholic world"; though you will not forget that these are
conditions in which two-thirds of the
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rendering a notable service to the race and to civilization in inspiring art it has in every age used such art as was available for the usual purposes of the Black International: the protection or augmentation of their power and wealth. It has not rendered, a service to the exploited mass of the people by bringing color and warmth into their drab lives by its services but has used art, if you can give that title to the decorations and services of the average Catholic church, to distract their attention from the absurdity of its doctrines and the extortions of the priests. In nine-tenths of its sphere of influence it uses debased forms of art to help to prevent people from reflecting, during their one hour a week in church, that what they are taught to call their faith is an idle and, in proportions to their resources, costly compliance with the traditional customs in which they were reared; and in the Churches of the more comfortable one-tenth it uses art, like any other employer and from almost any source, to help in sustaining that uncritical attitude which enables the apologist to foist amazing untruths and sophistry even upon the educated layman. Religion may or may not be "the opium of the people." Catholic art certainly is.
It is a familiar Protestant charge that religion in the Roman Church is mechanical, materialistic, a matter of physical acts and sensuous titillations. It is an entirely just charge as far as the great majority of the faithful are concerned. The Black International has in its own interest enacted that it is compulsory under the direct penalties that a man shall be in the church, looking on at a ceremony, which he only half understands, for half an hour once a week. The rest is voluntary and has to be made attractive. I have in Eastern Europe seen men standing outside the wide-open doors of a cathedral, some of them smoking cigarette's, listening to the distant mass. They are within the Catholic law. Religion is to them not a set of beliefs but a small number of compulsory movements. For the majority of the others it is a series of ceremonies which they usually -- there are, of course, special festivals at rare intervals which rouse real fervor -- follow in a frame of mind which it would be difficult to analyze and the clergy have no desire to analyze. People are "doing their duty." And if anybody thinks this a superficial statement of the situation let him wait until in the next book we squarely face the claim that the Church at least renders a great social service or "does good."
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