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<div id="conspiracy">
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<p> 27 page printout</p>
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<p> Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.</p>
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<p> This file, its printout, or copies of either
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are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.</p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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**** ****</p>
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<p>Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius</p>
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<p>THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 18</p>
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<p> THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
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<p> HOW THE CHURCH STUPEFIES FOLK
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BY CRUDE EMOTIONALISM</p>
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<p> by Joseph McCabe</p>
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<p> HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
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GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS</p>
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<p> CHAPTER</p>
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<p> I The Alleged Beautiful Services .......... 1</p>
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<p> II There never was a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> art .......... 7</p>
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<p> III Few Poets and Vapid Hymns .............. 13</p>
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<p> IV Masses Composed by Skeptics ............ 19</p>
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<p> V Why a dead Language is Used in the Liturgy ... 23</p>
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<p> Chapter I</p>
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<p> THE ALLEGED BEAUTIFUL SERVICES</p>
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<p> In approaching this subject it will be useful to state again
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the angle from which I write the present series of booklets. It is
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to show that the scandalous action of the <span class="GPE" title="GPE">Vatican</span> and most of its
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national hierarchies which I traced in the first series of booklets
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was just what you would expect if you know the Church of Rome. It
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is not a religious body like any other, and the venerable antiquity
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of which it is so proud merely recalls, to the informed mind, the
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violence and unscrupulousness of the methods by means of which it
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has survived. Its path through the ages is marked, not by the
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flowering of new cultures or new civilizations, but by the graves
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of rival religions and of masses of rebels. It consists essentially
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of a Black International which in every age wages an economic
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struggle for survival and has, in view of the absurdity of the
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creed on which it lives, to use violence and deception to hold </p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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1
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.
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THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
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<p>together the body which supports it. However many million devout
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laymen and however many thousand sincere priests there may be in
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the world this is its broad structure, and only when you see that
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can you understand its proved action in modern life.</p>
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<p> Some American apologists have pleaded in excuse for their very
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un-american efforts to suppress criticism that the critics would
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like to drive a wedge between the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> laity and their priests.
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The man who could succeed in doing this would render an outstanding
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service to the country. We say that the international army to which
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their priests belong is Fascist. The name "Fascist" was, it
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appear's, taken from a bastard Italian word (fascio) which means a
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bunch or a group, but it goes back ultimately to the emblem of
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authority, the axe and the rods, in the ancient Roman army. That
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emblem is so characteristic of the Roman Church that, we saw, even
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while. it protested in a dozen tongues -- English, French, German,
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etc. -- that it is now tolerant and humane it still claimed in
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Latin its possession of the axe and the rods. In an age when the
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Fascist banner seemed destined to float over three continents it
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threw off the mask of meekness and openly joined the aggressors.</p>
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<p> This involved a larger use than ever of its second weapon,
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suppression of truth and mendacity, in the lands that were not yet
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conquered, and I have endeavored to expose this and enable the
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reader to understand the Church. In the world at large it is,
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instead of being the impressive institution it represents in
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America, a tragic-comic spectacle. If you grant it the 250000000
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subjects it claims today, one-third of these are men and women who
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curse it in their hearts and go to church only under the shadow of
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its bloody emblem of the axe and the rods, and more than a third of
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the remainder are either children or illiterates. The only point of
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serious interest is how it keeps in its fold in America and Britain
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so many out of the teeming millions who have come from less
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educated lands, and I have, I think, explained this. There remain,
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however, two elements of explanation that are so frequently claimed
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that we must examine them. The first is the fairly common opinion
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that the Church of Rome appeals to the heart and, the emotions, far
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more than any other Church does, and this, it is thought, distracts
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the mind from the intellectual absurdity or moral repulsiveness of
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its doctrines. The second is the familiar cry -- the parrot-cry,
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one might justly call it -- that it "does good," and on a scale
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that ought to impress even the skeptic.</p>
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<p> Postponing the question whether the Church has rendered a
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service to art itself we may consider first the sensuous appeal
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which it makes, and against Protestant writers confesses that it
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makes, to the general body of the faithful. That this is one
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element of it, success in inducing millions to continue in the
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profession of beliefs which are as incongruous in our modern world
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as an iron-clad knight would be, we fully admit. Statistics, it is
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true, do not show that the sensuous services give the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
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Church any advantage over the leading Protestant Churches except in
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a preponderance of female church-goers over males, but in fact a
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high proportion of <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s would tell you that the character of
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the services attract them. It is, part of my work to warn folk
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against generalizing from one or a few cases, but it may be of
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interest to give one. I have a neighbor, an elderly woman, a bombee</p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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2
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.
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|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
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<p>of shattered nerves, who was brought up a strict Roman <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>.
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Intelligence and education poor. She is ready at all times to join
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her son (a full apostate) in cursing the Pope and the priests, and
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she incurs eternal damnation cheerfully most Sunday mornings by
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refusing to go to mass. But she often does go, and she explains
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that it is because she "likes the services." I should add that she
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has a dull and lonely life.</p>
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<p> What is important here is not the type but the psychological
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factor. We must not exaggerate it. About a third of the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
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body discharge only the minimum of obligation and attend a "low"
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mass (without music) on Sundays. They take no part whatever in it
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and do not understand a word of the priest's Latin gabbling; and
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instead of having any sensuous or artistic enjoyment they just
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kneel uncomfortably and impatiently until it is over. The church
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itself which they attend is "artistic" only to a low taste, like
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the "best room" in the apartment of workers or small-middle-class
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folk with more money than education. A few of these may also attend
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the evening service. It is nearly all in Latin and they take no
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part in it, but the sanctuary is gay with surplices and silk, the
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altar ablaze, the service and choral, and the sermon usually short.
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If the alternative is anything like that of the old lady I have
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quoted, to be left alone in a drab room, one usually prefers to be
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"a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>." Remember that it is cheap -- two cents or a nickel.
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These folk are not interested in doctrines. The "real presence" of
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Jesus on the altar, which seems almost grotesque when you coldly
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dissect the dogma as a theologian does, is vague in their minds.
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The church is "the house of God," and they do not make the
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theologian's subtle distinction between God and Jesus or between
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the human and divine persons in the "hyostatic union" of the
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theological Jesus.</p>
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<p> This one-third of the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> body is, numerically, the chief
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source of leakage. To them the religion is, as I said, a practice
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or a sentiment, not a belief. Where there is no particular
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emotional response to the rhetoric of the pulpit and the weekly
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paper about the Holy Faith and Holy Father and the devouring thirst
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of the world and the devil to destroy them they are easily drawn
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off. The men and youths and many of the young women secede as soon
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as they get a live faith and ideal like Socialism. Others just
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drift away if the general atmosphere is non-<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>. In a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
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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.</p>
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<p> The nice-minded skeptics who resent this coupling of the wine-shop and the church, who (with no knowledge of <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> life) say
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that "religion" is the real uplift in these people's hearts and it
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is wicked to try to remove it, may be recommended to read some such
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book as Prof. J.L. Mecham's Church and State in Latin America
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(1934). He has the very correct professorial attitude -- you try so
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hard to stand up that you fall backward occasionally -- especially
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as his university (<span class="LOC" title="LOC">North Carolina</span>) publishes the book. It is mostly
|
|
concerned with history but incidentally it tell's Some painful
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truths about the Church in those <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> countries, to which the
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<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> likes to refer you if he thinks that you know no more than
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he does about them. The clergy are admitted to be, as a body,
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sensual, lazy, and grossly ignorant. The bishops are fanatically </p>
|
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
3
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
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|
<p>conservative and more attentive to their political interferences
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than to the moral and spiritual welfare of the mass of the people.
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The <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Indians</span>, the vast majority of the population of Latin America,
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are at the lowest level of ignorance and superstition, ready at any
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time to serve the political purposes of the hierarchy, though often
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barely Christian in religion and permitted by the priests the
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wildest license. The Church festivals are orgies. In fact,
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Professor Mecham approve ugly quotes from another authority,
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|
"Bacchus is the one absolute and essential God. Sex-morals are as
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usual, inadequately and therefore untruthfully discussed in the
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book, but I have elsewhere shown that the general attitude is such
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that priests and monks indulge in the most open and ingenuous
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fashion. A more candid, and worse picture will be found in Braga
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|
and Grubb's work, based on intimate knowledge, The Republic of
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|
Brazil; and for a concrete richly-informed picture of the state of
|
|
the people and the brutal exploitation of them by unscrupulous
|
|
priests see Alan Hillgarth's novel The Black Mountain. And remember
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|
that these books were written and published before the victory of
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clerical Fascism in Latin America. In most republics the situation
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|
is worse today.</p>
|
|
<p> To these 60000000 or so <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> worker's and peasants of
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Latin America add those of Cuba and the Philippines, the rural
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|
parts and small-town populations of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the
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|
Portuguese. French, and Belgian colonies. I gave an authentic
|
|
picture of life in such regions in Book IV of this series. The
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|
entire body of <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s coming into this category are considerably
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more than half the whole number of the Pope's subjects; and you may
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not be disposed to put the majority of the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s of Eire,
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Poland, Hungary, Mexico, Quebec, Slovakia, etc., on a much higher
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level. Then remember that half the remaining <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s, of the
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world are children, and that half the adult <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s of the United
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States come from some such environment and to a great extent
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|
reproduce their old atmosphere in American cities. The conception
|
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of them -- as so many tens of millions of simple folk elevated for
|
|
an hour above their daily level by beautiful services in which they
|
|
absorb themselves every Sunday and Holy Day is as ingenuous as the
|
|
Sunday School idea of George Washington.</p>
|
|
<p> As I said, the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>ism of this larger half of the subjects
|
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of the Black International no more requires study than does that of
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children. It is an ingrained attitude or set of practices,
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|
protected from interference from the rebel who appears here and
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|
there by the power that the priest's have: a power which in all
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<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> countries Fascism has made absolute. To an extent their
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minds are drugged on Sundays and Saints' Days, but it is hardly
|
|
necessary in their case. It is at the higher levels that the
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intellectually depressing effect of the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> services becomes
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|
important, and the more artistic they are the more effective the
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|
opiate.</p>
|
|
<p> Two illustrations of the truth of this at once occur. I have
|
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not the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> Who's Who for America but the situation is much
|
|
the same as in Britain, and I have already pointed out that,
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|
confining ourselves as far as possible to the same cultural level
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|
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 </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
4
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>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
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and on his knees make a solemn declaration of literal belief in all
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|
its doctrines, repeated one by one, just because its churches and
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|
services are artistic. He is free at any time to attend the
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|
services and, if he feels inclined, see a pretty symbolism in them,
|
|
but if he calls himself a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> he in the same breath denies
|
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that he takes a symbolic view of the services and doctrines. That
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|
is a comprehensive and deadly heresy in theology; though, of
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course, we are aware that a priest will, to secure or retain the
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name of a distinguished artist for the Church, not press him about
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his beliefs any more than he will be too inquisitive about a
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wealthy man's amorous adventures.</p>
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<p> The truth is, however, that it is not the higher artistic
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sensitiveness but the comparatively lower intellectual vitality or
|
|
equipment of the artist that explains why he is willing to make a
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profession of the creed I described in an earlier book. Probably in
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most cases these artist-converts flatter themselves that they have
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one sound reason which may be classed as intellectual. They are
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convinced the Roman Church has been, and is, a great inspirer of
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high art, and this at least predisposes them to endorse a creed
|
|
that, in marked contrast to science, has had, they say, so
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beneficent an influence. <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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.
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|
G.K. Chesterton, who when his earlier good nature was dissolved in
|
|
the acid of the Holy Faith wrote of its critics as "mad dogs," was
|
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strong on this point. It is, as I will show presently, a sheer
|
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fallacy. But the artist who enters the Church in such a frame of
|
|
mind loses any inclination to criticize. He has taken an opiate.</p>
|
|
<p> The second illustration is the preponderance of women over men
|
|
in the richer and more artistic <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 (6250000 people) 372264 men and
|
|
607257 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 1034 women. In three Romanist churches there were 267,
|
|
276, and 237 men and 1105, 807, and 701 women. In Methodist and
|
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Baptist churches in a poor quarter there were 3336 men to 4127
|
|
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.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
5
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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.</p>
|
|
<p> 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
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>ism of Belloc and Chesterton that they regard a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
church as a center of light, warmth, and color in an materialistic
|
|
world. One might carry the analysis further. One does not today
|
|
suffer economically and socially by joining the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> Church as
|
|
one does by quitting it, as Chesterton found. Soon after his
|
|
conversion my mail brought me, doubtless because some careless
|
|
person had simply taken a list of names and addresses from Who's
|
|
Who, an appeal by a group of important <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s for a subscription
|
|
to a large fund to provide Chesterton with a basic income for the
|
|
rest of his life. But we have in an earlier book considered the
|
|
Church as a mutual aid society.</p>
|
|
<p> The field here is so large, the variety of types so great --
|
|
from Seymour Hicks or Charles Laughton to the Irish dock-laborers
|
|
or the Italian street-vendors of <span class="GPE" title="GPE">New York</span>, from St. Patrick's
|
|
Cathedral to the dauby, garnishes of a poor Polish chapel -- that
|
|
it is difficult to cover the facts usefully with a formula. The
|
|
title I have given this chapter is the one usually selected by
|
|
critics of the Church. It is valid if by "stupefying" we mean that
|
|
the emphasis of faith is deliberately transferred from the
|
|
intellectual confrontation of doctrines to the enjoyment of
|
|
sensuous experiences as a discharge of religious duty. A writer who
|
|
was intimate, and on the whole sympathetic, to Italian life, Axel
|
|
Menthe, has said that most of the uneducated or poorly educated
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s rarely thought about Jesus or anything but the cult of
|
|
Mary and the saints. For the majority everywhere the doctrinal
|
|
ideas retire behind a vividly colored screen of emblems, symbols,
|
|
statues, pictures, and material rites and ceremonies. It is one of
|
|
the reasons why those doctrinal ideas, which seem so crude and
|
|
outrageous when you consider them apart from the churches services,
|
|
linger in a world to which they are as alien as the ten-gallon hat
|
|
or the crinoline.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
6
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p> Chapter II</p>
|
|
<p> THERE NEVER WAS A CATHOLIC ART</p>
|
|
<p> That, a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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.</p>
|
|
<p> The history of <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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. . . . Rubbish. There were only
|
|
a few years out of the 250 (from Nero to <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Constantine</span>) when they had
|
|
to dip underground, They hated and feared art. It was what the
|
|
devil employed to make paganism attractive to keep the Greeks and
|
|
Romans out of the Church. What happened in the 4th Century, when
|
|
the Roman Church got freedom and wealth, was not that it began to
|
|
inspire an art but that it began to rob the pagans of their art,
|
|
The official Book of the Popes, composed in Rome from the early
|
|
Middle Ages onward, has preserved an extraordinary list of the
|
|
artistic furniture (silver, altars, statues, etc.) that the Emperor
|
|
<span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Constantine</span> lifted from the pagan temples of Rome and donated to
|
|
the new Christian churches. And when, decade after decade, the
|
|
Romans still clung to the old religion, the Christian leaders, who
|
|
were now fully-pledged Fascists since they had taken over the axe
|
|
and the rods, emptied the gods and goddesses, the holy water and
|
|
incense, the vestments and ritual, from the temples into the
|
|
Christian conventicles on the other side of the street and nailed
|
|
up the doors of the temples.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
7
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p> 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. <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Pagan</span> temples were not meeting-houses
|
|
in which folk sat or stood in rows with long faces chanting
|
|
doggerel or listening to some professional teacher of virtue. They
|
|
were art-museums. Those gay old stories of Zeus and Aphrodite, of
|
|
Apollo and Athene, had in four or five centuries "inspired" a
|
|
wonderful art. In a century or two sculpture, painting, and
|
|
architecture had made more progress than the more ancient world had
|
|
made in 3000 years. And it was mostly stored in the temples for
|
|
the people to admire and enjoy. From about 390 to 420 most of these
|
|
went up in smoke. Priests and monks, with the new Fascist powers
|
|
that the bishops had wheedled from the emperors, led mob's to the
|
|
attack, and all over the Greek world there was such a holocaust of
|
|
art as Goths and Vandals never perpetrated.</p>
|
|
<p> 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, Luebke, "put on the corporeal garment of ancient and
|
|
decaying art." If you prefer me to quote a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> historian of
|
|
art, Dr. F. Von Reber says in his History of Medieval Art (p. 73)
|
|
that "the general debasement of art and the conceptions of
|
|
Christianity worked together to destroy that perfection of outward
|
|
appearance which is the vital principle of all art." In any case,
|
|
the zeal for art, in the corrupt Roman Church of the 4th Century
|
|
and Europe passed into the artistic hell of the Dark Age.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">British</span>
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">British</span> university. I suppose they had to pass over Oxford and
|
|
Cambridge to find a man who could please <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s. 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">British</span> Royal
|
|
Historical Society!</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
8
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="LOC" title="LOC">North Italy</span>, 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 Stenton is right that this was "one of the
|
|
great constructive periods in human activity." He merely forgot to
|
|
add that this was wherever the Roman Church did not exercise power.
|
|
Under the Moslem, from Spain to Eastern Persia, the earth shone
|
|
with a brilliant art from the 8th Century onward.</p>
|
|
<p> 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!</p>
|
|
<p> 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 Venuses and sinful princes as in its Madonnas and
|
|
saints. And when you call the sacred part of it <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> art,
|
|
because it represents ideas or personalities of <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> theologY,
|
|
remember the elementary distinction between an art inspired by
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>ism and one merely employed by the Church. Nearly every
|
|
modern historian of art or expert on the Renaissance has pointed
|
|
out those facts. I have quoted a dozen of them in earlier works on
|
|
the subject, of which a summary is given in Little Blue Book No.
|
|
1136, Medieval Art and the Church. Even Lord Leighton, the
|
|
distinguished <span class="NORP" title="NORP">British</span> painter and head of the Pre-Raphaelite
|
|
School, says that during the early development of Italian painting
|
|
the Church was a blight on the art and that it attained greatness
|
|
only when the humanism of the Renaissance began to replace religion
|
|
as its inspiration. (Addresses Delivered to the Students of the
|
|
Royal Academy, 1896).</p>
|
|
<p> The <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> spirit. They would say just
|
|
the same about a fresco by Pinturicchio (a skeptical, dissipated
|
|
artist employed by one of the most flagrantly immoral of the Popes </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
9
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>to paint his, the Pope's, mistress as the Virgin Mary) in the
|
|
<span class="GPE" title="GPE">Vatican</span>, or a painting by Paolo Veronese (who was dragged before
|
|
the Inquisition for the irreverence of his art) or Filippo Lippi (a
|
|
loose friar who seduced a nun and lived for years with her while he
|
|
painted beautiful religious pictures). They would glow with fervor
|
|
and pride before one of the great religious paintings of Rubens and
|
|
then (I hope) blush with a sense of sin before the same artist's
|
|
"Venus and Adonis," which is equally "inspired." They encourage the
|
|
police to prevent the reproduction and sale today of the classical
|
|
studies in which most of these great artists revelled, and then
|
|
they have copies exhibited everywhere of the religious pictures
|
|
which the rich churches and convents of Italy commissioned them to
|
|
paint. The same bishop or cardinal would employ the same artist to
|
|
paint a Leda and the Swan for his dining-room or library and a Holy
|
|
Family for his chapel. The artist did equally fine work in both
|
|
fields -- no expert has ever claimed that there is less
|
|
"inspiration" in the profane than in the sacred work of Renaissance
|
|
artists -- but the religious market was much the larger and richer.</p>
|
|
<p> The all-pervading fallacy of all this slush about <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>ism
|
|
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, Symonds, Hudson, and the Cambridge
|
|
History) but the special <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> authority on the period, Dr.
|
|
Ludwig Pastor, make this quite clear. In respect of cruelty,
|
|
dishonor, injustice to the weaker, and especially sexual freedom
|
|
and sodomy, it was a more vicious age than any period of ancient
|
|
civilization that was ever half as long.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
10
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>difference to his inspiration whether he has to paint a branch of
|
|
cherry blossoms or a Buddha, a courtesan or a Virgin Mary, a
|
|
peasant or a Christ. The Parthenon is the greatest religious
|
|
building that was ever raised, and Pheideas its creator, was a
|
|
skeptic.</p>
|
|
<p> 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.</p>
|
|
<p> Another obvious cheek on this superficial <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> theory is
|
|
to inquire why great art so notably decayed after the 16th Century.
|
|
In that pretentious collection of essays by American apologists,
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> Action (2 vols., 1935), there is a section on "<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
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
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">British</span> 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.</p>
|
|
<p> Looking for some serious recent <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> reply to my question
|
|
why, if the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> creed inspires art, it so conspicuously failed
|
|
to do so in Italy, Spain, and Portugal when the Renaissance was
|
|
over, although the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>ism 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 Emile Male, is a large work on
|
|
religious art after the Council of Trent." It does not admit on my
|
|
contention. For Spain and the Netherlands (steeped in Spanish
|
|
culture) it reminds us of Velasquez, Murillo and Rubens. Yes: but
|
|
they belong essentially to the Renaissance, which was late in
|
|
Spain, and after them, Spanish art was vapid until the skeptical
|
|
days of Goya (a quite blasphemous painter). As great painters of
|
|
Spain and Italy the author gives Montanes, Pedro de Mena, Minana,
|
|
Crespi, Dolci, Giordano, Caroselli. ... I hope you have heard of
|
|
them.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
11
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p> The second book, La decandence de I'art sacre (1931), by A.
|
|
Cingria (a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>) 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s 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-<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
atmosphere of America prevents a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> artist from being
|
|
inspired by <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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.</p>
|
|
<p> Quebec is a medieval area with ideal <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> conditions. Its
|
|
Church is so rich that it is as zealous against Communism as Wall
|
|
Street is. Cardinal Villeneuve, defending illegal acts against
|
|
critics of the Church by the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> mayor of <span class="GPE" title="GPE">Montreal</span>, said that
|
|
above the laws of <span class="GPE" title="GPE">Canada</span> is "the Law of Nature"; in the same sense
|
|
as the Church overrides all modern civil law and claims to put folk
|
|
to death on religious grounds. The taint of Protestantism never
|
|
reached Quebec. Its people are poor and fanatical: its priests are
|
|
rich, ignorant, and intolerant. But did you ever see any work of
|
|
art that was produced in Quebec?</p>
|
|
<p> 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 Pope. The claim is clearly
|
|
rhetorical. Every man with what we may call average information
|
|
knows that the production of great art is not continuous but is
|
|
richest in certain definite periods that last a few centuries and
|
|
then decay. There have been three in the history of China, three in
|
|
that of Persia, two in the long history of ancient Egypt, one in
|
|
Greece, one in the Moslem world, and so on. Europe got the
|
|
conditions for its second golden age of art in the Middle Ages. It
|
|
came to a close like all other such ages, though it began and ended
|
|
later in France, England, and Spain than in Italy. It took so very
|
|
largely a religious form because the Church was the richest
|
|
employer and in so sensual and voluptuous an age it had a more
|
|
extensive use than ever for art. This is what most of the chief
|
|
historians of European art say. And remember always something which
|
|
it is not their business to say but is of vital relevance to the
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> claim of religious inspiration: that there is not in the
|
|
whole history of religion, as far as we have positive knowledge or
|
|
even ground for suspicion, so profound and general a religious
|
|
corruption -- of Popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests,
|
|
monk, and nuns -- as there was during the age (1300-1600) of
|
|
supreme <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> art. That nut wants some cracking.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
12
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p> Chapter III</p>
|
|
<p> FEW POETS AND VAPID HYMNS</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>-inspired art? How many, when they see a collection of reproductions
|
|
of the religious work of, say, Raphael, Pinturicchio, L. da Vinci,
|
|
Lippi, Botticelli, Veronese, and Murillo, have the least idea which
|
|
of these men really had deep religious feeling and which had not?
|
|
On the other hand, most people have a wider knowledge of books and
|
|
authors, and every <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> knows, and ought to have some idea of
|
|
the artistic value of, the kind of literature which above all ought
|
|
to show <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> inspiration, the hymns that are sung in church.</p>
|
|
<p> 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
|
|
Augustine's City of God (written about 412) and Dante's Trilogy
|
|
(about 1300). No one, in fact, now reads Augustine's work as
|
|
literature, and Dante's work, to which Goethe and other critic's of
|
|
the highest rank denied the title of greatness, has rather an
|
|
esoteric circle of readers. Let us, however, pass them as great
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> literature. It is far more notable, when you are
|
|
discussing the question of religious inspiration, that the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
world failed to produce a single work of high rank during the
|
|
intervening 900 years. Of what other civilization since the Greeks
|
|
created a great literature can you say that?</p>
|
|
<p> We saw the apologist for the Dark Age, Prof. Stenton,
|
|
admitting that the stretch of seven centuries after the Fall of
|
|
Rome was "dark" in the sense that it has left us very little
|
|
literature to throw light upon it. Who ever heard of a civilized
|
|
period of seven centuries without a literature? It wrote books, of
|
|
course. The whole output is preserved in the Migne Library, but if
|
|
you cut out the theological works which not even a priest now reads
|
|
-- Gregory, Anselm, Bernard, etc. -- you have a thin collection of
|
|
weird treatises and chronicles, mostly written in a barbaric (often
|
|
grotesquely ungrammatical) Latin, that makes you smile at the
|
|
apologists for the Dark Age.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
13
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>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.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s
|
|
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?</p>
|
|
<p> How many of the most distinguished writers between Dante and
|
|
Rabelais could even plausibly be claimed to show the inspiration of
|
|
the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> creed! Certainly not Chaucer, the greatest poet of
|
|
that period. The highest <span class="NORP" title="NORP">British</span> authority on him, Prof. Lounsbury,
|
|
shows that he did not believe in immortality and, quoting the
|
|
poet's words, asks: "Can modern agnosticism point to a denial more
|
|
emphatic than that made in the 14th Century of the belief that
|
|
there exists for us any assurance of the life that is lived beyond,
|
|
the grave?" (Studies in Chaucer, II, 515). Not the two greatest
|
|
Italian writers, for Petrarch's best work was inspired by illicit
|
|
love and he scourged Papalism as no modern does, while Boceaccio's
|
|
great work is as far removed from religion as is that of Zola. Can
|
|
anyone find the spirit of the Church in Froissart's blood-soaked
|
|
Chronicle or in the defiant ethic of Villon's poetry'! In the anti-ecclesiastical work of Valla, the purely scientific (a real anti-clerical) work of Bacon, the comedies (often very loose) of Ariosto
|
|
or Benvenuto Cellini? The <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> can have Tasso -- who reads him
|
|
anyway? -- and the Samma of Thomas Aquinas, but he will hardly
|
|
claim Erasmus or Rabelais as inspired by religion.</p>
|
|
<p> It is time the writers who fancy that Gothic cathedrals and
|
|
religious paintings prove that there is a rich inspiration in the
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
14
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>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 <span class="GPE" title="GPE">Vatican</span> or
|
|
the city. Your <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> friend who says to you, with an air of
|
|
common-sense; that in spite of all this talk <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> art, and a
|
|
very great art, is there for any man to see, is thinking chiefly of
|
|
Rome, of St. Peters and the <span class="GPE" title="GPE">Vatican</span>. Well, ask him to reflect on
|
|
this singular fact: Practically all this Roman art was created
|
|
under three Popes (Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X) of
|
|
notoriously vicious character and at a time when the Papal Court
|
|
and the clergy of Rome were steeped in what he calls immorality.
|
|
And, except for the fact that two out of the three Popes were
|
|
sodomists, which the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> apologist will swear black is white
|
|
to disprove, he need not read McCabe to learn this but will find it
|
|
in the most learned and authoritative <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> history of the
|
|
period, that of Dr. Ludwig Pastor, which has been translated into
|
|
English.</p>
|
|
<p> It is hardly surprising that the writers of the time did not
|
|
look for inspiration to the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> creed. The best of them, like
|
|
Picodella Mirandola, looked to a blend of Plantonism and primitive
|
|
(decidedly not Papal) Christianity. But most of them concentrated
|
|
on sex or, as they called it, love. They wrote the most brazen
|
|
erotic literature that had yet appeared, and some of the hottest of
|
|
them were patronized and rewarded by the Popes. Your professors of
|
|
European history do not tell you these things. They may mention
|
|
Macchiavelli, who was really more poisonous than the erotic
|
|
writers, but they prefer to enlarge on the pretty religious
|
|
sentimentality of an ignorant friar (the Little Flowers of Francis
|
|
of Assisi) and the work of Dante. They do not care even to point
|
|
out that Dante succeeds only when he is illustrating a concrete and
|
|
repulsive doctrine like hell, and that his poetic inspiration
|
|
evaporates when he tries to glorify the purely spiritual realm of
|
|
paradise. The <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> creed inspires one in the same sense as the
|
|
Greek mythology did or the bastard Buddhist religion of Asia does.
|
|
Tell the artist that Buddha, Christ, Moses, or Mary was above the
|
|
common human level and he will set his imagination to create a
|
|
superman or a superwoman: Zeus or Jehovah, Athene or Mary.</p>
|
|
<p> I said that if these <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 Popes. It was the same with
|
|
literature as with the other arts. Italy, Spain, and Portugal
|
|
became more <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> than ever. Except that the brazen parade of
|
|
sexual freedom had to be suppressed in Rome there was little or no
|
|
change of the moral level but skepticism, which had abounded during
|
|
the Renaissance, was extinguished and Protestantism truculently
|
|
excluded. And art above the level of mediocrity died. It is almost
|
|
a commonplace of the best recent histories of art that a human
|
|
factor -- a great new wealth with its accompanying sense of </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
15
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
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.</p>
|
|
<p> But the absurdity of the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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
|
|
Elizabeth. From Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer, and Bacoi, to
|
|
Swinburne, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Dickens, England -- anti-Papal
|
|
England -- created a great literature.</p>
|
|
<p> France has been a mixed country ever since the rise of Calvin.
|
|
Until the later years of Louis XIV -- say to 1685 -- it had a very
|
|
large and influential Protestant element as well as much
|
|
skepticism, and after the death of Louis and his Jesuits, male and
|
|
female, skepticism spread very widely. But though the Church
|
|
controlled the majority it did not inspire the art. Literary
|
|
historians assign as the greater writers from the Reformation to
|
|
the Revolution Montaigne, Rabelais, Descartes, Pascal, La Fontaine,
|
|
Corieille, Racine, Boileau, Moliere, Montesquieu, Voltaire,
|
|
Rousseau, and Diderot. Eight out of the 13 were skeptics: two
|
|
(Descartes and Pascal) were regarded with more than suspicion by
|
|
Rome: two only, Racine and Corneille were good <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s, but they
|
|
found their inspiration chiefly in Greek tragedy.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s amongst the greater
|
|
writers of the last century and a half. The question is not whether
|
|
you can name one or two <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> writers of the first rank -- a
|
|
Chateau briand, a Newman (though his title is much disputed by
|
|
critics), a Mistral (a sort of <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>) -- but why, when the Pope
|
|
claimed still to rule half the white world, there are only these
|
|
three amongst a hundred writers as distinguished as they in France,
|
|
Britain, America, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Scandinavia. And how
|
|
do even these compare in inspiration with Byron, Shelley,
|
|
Swinburne, Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Dostoievsky,
|
|
Pushkin, Hugo, Carlyle, Shaw, D'Annunzio, Galdos, and a score of
|
|
others? <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> literature as a whole is the flattest, stalest,
|
|
feeblest of all literature that takes itself seriously. They have
|
|
to ask us to accept Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Noyes, and Joyce
|
|
Kilmer as "great writers." And do not forget that the Church has
|
|
far more money to pay for art today than it ever had before. It
|
|
would give a million dollars for a great artist.
|
|
Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
16
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p> 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.</p>
|
|
<p> If any reader is still inclined to wonder if I have not
|
|
yielded in part to prejudice in assigning the relative positions of
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> and non-<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s, though they were certainly not
|
|
inspired in their work by the Papal creed. The Pope claims the
|
|
allegiance of half the population of Europe and America but counts
|
|
-- in some cases dubiously -- only one-ninth of their greater
|
|
writers; and the award would have been more in accord with the
|
|
general view of literary critics if these four <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> writers had
|
|
been replaced by my four selected from Wells, Conrad, Meredith,
|
|
Zola, b'Annunzio, Sudermann, Galoz, Ibanez, Santayana, Gorki, and
|
|
A. Tolstoy: all skeptics and not in favor in pious Sweden.</p>
|
|
<p> The most deadly reply to the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> argument here, the
|
|
immediate reply to those who talk about the warmth, colorfulness,
|
|
and emotional richness of the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> atmosphere, is the relative
|
|
fewness of <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> poets, especially of poets who show any sort of
|
|
indebtedness to <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>, the record is not better. But it is enough to point out
|
|
that in what the Church claims as <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> countries the majority
|
|
of the more distinguished poets during the last century and a half
|
|
have been anti-Papal and very few since Dante and Tasso can be
|
|
claimed to show <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> inspiration in their work. Yet in literary
|
|
art we have one of the most effective tests of the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> claim.
|
|
A church may commission a man to paint a picture or carve a statue
|
|
but you cannot -- except where a Poet Laureate turns out verse to
|
|
order -- pay a poet to sit down and write a poem. You can neither
|
|
open the fount of inspiration with a golden key nor, in the case of
|
|
a true poet, close it by opposition it is arrant nonsense to say
|
|
that poets have "not yet recovered from the blight which the
|
|
Reformation brought upon art." A hostile world inflames the true
|
|
poet. Shelley was greatest in his Prometheus, Swinburn in his Songs
|
|
before <span class="LOC" title="LOC">Sunrise</span>, Goethe in the first part of Faust.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
17
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 Popes and Their Church) some years ago I looked
|
|
through an American <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> hymn-book and selected a few gems. I
|
|
doubt if even the Salvation Army would (apart from the Mariolatry
|
|
of it) tolerate such doggerel as:</p>
|
|
<p> The earth is but a vale of tears
|
|
O Maria!
|
|
When this exile is complete
|
|
O Maria!</p>
|
|
<p> 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.</p>
|
|
<p>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 Mary, etc.) has the refrain:</p>
|
|
<p> Holy Mary, let me come: Holy Mary, let me come
|
|
Soon to be happy with thee in thy home.</p>
|
|
<p>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:</p>
|
|
<p>O Paradise, O Paradise,
|
|
'Tis weary waiting here;
|
|
I long to be where Jesus is,
|
|
To feel, to see him near.</p>
|
|
<p> or:</p>
|
|
<p>Arm for deadly fight, earth and bell unite,
|
|
And swear in lasting bonds to bind me;
|
|
Raise the cross on high, Jesus is our cry,
|
|
With Jesus still the foe shall find me.</p>
|
|
<p>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.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
18
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p> This theme runs through the whole collection. <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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.</p>
|
|
<p> Chapter IV</p>
|
|
<p> MASSES COMPOSED BY SKEPTICS</p>
|
|
<p> The hymn is not so important in a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 Peter by Jesus in ancient Galilee, The faithful were
|
|
to assist AT, not assist IN or take part in the ceremonies, as I
|
|
will consider in the next chapter. We are told in Pliny's letter to
|
|
the Emperor Trajan that the early Christians met to "sing hymns to
|
|
Christ as God." -- probably chanting psalms in the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Jewish</span> tradition
|
|
-- but the "mass" was at that time not developed. When it was, the
|
|
faithful were in much the same position as skeptics in a theater,
|
|
watching a performance in strange costumes at the far end of the
|
|
building.</p>
|
|
<p> Into all that, however, we cannot enter here but must confine
|
|
ourselves to the actual use of the art of music in <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
services today; and the chief question that interests us about it
|
|
is whether in the case of this art at least the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> creed has
|
|
not simply employed but inspired the artist.</p>
|
|
<p> Music would lend itself to such inspiration more easily than
|
|
any other art. No painter or sculptor has ever given us a Jesus or
|
|
Mary that we could plausibly imagine in a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Judaic</span> environment, and
|
|
Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment" and Ruben's "Descent of the Cross"
|
|
are human scenes into which the spectator must read the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
idea. Literary art is more complete to express idea's or dogmas,
|
|
but the expression can be immensely enhanced if it is associated
|
|
with noble music. If <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>ism inspires art, therefore, we should
|
|
look for a body of it in music corresponding in magnificence to the
|
|
great architecture, sculpture, and painting of the Middle Ages;
|
|
especially as, notoriously the chief attraction of the non-<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s whom it is hoped to convert to the wealthier churches is
|
|
"the fine music." Instead of having to listen, as one does in most
|
|
non-<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> churches, to communal singing which, while it is more
|
|
enjoyed by the congregation itself, is rather artless than artistic
|
|
to the outsider, though it may be relieved at one point by a
|
|
professional soloist whom you may have heard in a cabaret the night
|
|
before, you can hear, well rendered if the church is not poor,
|
|
often with orchestral accompaniment, some of the finer compositions
|
|
of masters of music.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
19
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>composers of masses, litanies, and shorter pieces that are used in
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> churches today: <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Beethoven</span>, Berlioz, Cherubini, Dvorak,
|
|
Gounod, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, and Weber. All these are
|
|
included in the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> Encyclopedia and it is claimed, especially
|
|
or by implication that they were <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s.</p>
|
|
<p> Yet no less than six of the ten were apostates -- <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Beethoven</span>,
|
|
Berlioz, Cherubini, Haydn, Mozart, and Verdi -- in some cases
|
|
notoriously apostates, and some of the others were not clearly
|
|
orthodox. Gounod alone can be quoted as a man of real <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
piety -- in spots. You will read in biographies of him how at one
|
|
time he got so religious that he began to study for the Church: how
|
|
one day, when he asked Sarah Bernhardt if 'She ever prayed and she
|
|
said, "Me pray! Never, I'm an atheist," he fell upon his knees
|
|
before her and, to her disgust prayed for her for quarter of an
|
|
hour: and so on. Yes, and in the same biographies you will read
|
|
about his various little mistresses and his superficial changes of
|
|
mood. In all his work, says one authority, he "hovered between
|
|
mysticism and theatricality." Another authority says "between
|
|
mysticism and voluptuousness's," In his sacred work, says the
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> Encyclopedia sadly, he "did not penetrate the spirit of
|
|
the liturgy": which is a flat denial of <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> inspiration. It
|
|
was such music, fine as it is, as Counod's Messe solennelle and Ave
|
|
Maria that moved the distinguished scientist Claude Bernard (also
|
|
claimed as a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>, of course, though a well-known apostate) to
|
|
say that <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> services are just "opera for servant girls."</p>
|
|
<p> The most flagrant cases of <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> misrepresentation are
|
|
those of <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Beethoven</span>, Cherubini, and Mozart. <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Beethoven</span>'s Mass in D is
|
|
coupled by authorities with his famous Ninth Symphony as "the most
|
|
gigantic of all musical designs." It is not, like Brahms's' Mass,
|
|
a Protestant composition but was intended, when he began to compose
|
|
it, to be performed at the installation of the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> Archbishop
|
|
of Olmutz and is today one of the richest treasures of the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
repertory. But almost any biography will tell you that at that time
|
|
<span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Beethoven</span> had already abandoned his <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> faith and adopted
|
|
Goethe's Pantheism, in comparison with which he thought the
|
|
Christian creed tawdry. His friend and chief biographer, A.
|
|
Schindler, and Nohl in his preface to <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Beethoven</span>'s Brevier (1870)
|
|
state this, and sir G. Maeferren, who describes the Mass as
|
|
"perhaps the grandest piece of musical expression which art
|
|
possesses," says (Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography) that
|
|
he was "a free thinker." He was persuaded, as some other
|
|
distinguished freethinkers were to accept the sacraments before
|
|
death, but all admit that he looked upon them as, at the best,
|
|
symbols. Nohl says that when the ceremony was over <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Beethoven</span>
|
|
murmured, in the old Latin theatrical phrase, "Applaud, friends,
|
|
the comedy is over," but the better-informed Schindler says that in
|
|
these words <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Beethoven</span> referred to the approaching close of his
|
|
life. It is at all events agreed that he had very seriously, on
|
|
philosophic grounds, discarded <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>ism 30 years before he wrote
|
|
the Mass and, unlike other artists, he never wavered in his
|
|
Rationalism.</p>
|
|
<p> Cherubini, though his name is not as familiar to our
|
|
generation as those of <span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Beethoven</span> and Wagner, composed five masses,
|
|
two Requiems (or mass for the dead), and a very large number of
|
|
pieces for <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> use. A critic pronounces these "the most </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
20
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>important works of their age," and Gounod who agrees, quotes
|
|
<span class="PERSON" title="PERSON">Beethoven</span> saying chiefly with an eye to his religious work, that
|
|
Cherubini was "the greatest master of his age." But it is
|
|
undisputed that he abandoned the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> religion before he
|
|
composed any of this sacred music. He lived in Paris in the
|
|
revolutionary days and devoted his great talent to the
|
|
revolutionary cause. It was after the Restoration, when he was
|
|
superintendent of the royal chapel, that he wrote masses, etc., but
|
|
he never returned to the faith. His <span class="NORP" title="NORP">British</span>
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> biographer
|
|
Bellasis admits that he did not receive the sacraments before death
|
|
and quotes the reluctant testimony of his <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> daughter that he
|
|
was "not mystical but broad-minded in religion." Another biographer
|
|
observes that his sacred music was "not created by faith in and
|
|
love of what he composed."</p>
|
|
<p> Mozart, who composed 15 masses and a very large amount of
|
|
other <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> pieces, had so decidedly rejected the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> creed
|
|
in early manhood that when he was dying he refused his wife's
|
|
entreaty that he would see a priest, and his apostasy was so
|
|
notorious that when the wife herself asked a priest to come the man
|
|
refused, and the great musician wag buried without ceremony in the
|
|
common grave of the poor. So his chief biographers Wilder and
|
|
Ulibichev, and the facts are undisputed. The latter quotes Mozart
|
|
saying in reference to his early <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> belief: "That is all over
|
|
and will never come back" (I. 243). He had become a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Freemason</span>
|
|
before he was thirty, at a time when the Church regarded
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Freemason</span>ry as a device of the devil, and to the end of his life he
|
|
remained at the most a Deist. As is well known, he composed one of
|
|
the most beautiful and most frequently used masses of the dead, and
|
|
the circumstances throw an ironic light on this question of art and
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>ism. A rich musical amateur, Count Walsegg, secretly paid
|
|
Mozart, who was desperately poor, to compose the mass and let
|
|
Walsegg put his name on it. Shortly afterwards the great artist
|
|
died and was "buried like a dog."</p>
|
|
<p> Let me further illustrate this point from the biography of
|
|
another great musician. I do not suppose that the German Requiem of
|
|
Brahms is used in <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> services, as the music is set to texts
|
|
from the German translation of the bible, which <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s are
|
|
forbidden to read, but it is just as "inspired" as Mozart's mass.
|
|
Yet Brahms was an Agnostic, as he repeatedly tells in his letters
|
|
(Letters of J. Brahms, Eng. trans. 1909). The instructive point is
|
|
that it is obviously the thought of death that inspired the music,
|
|
not the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> doctrine about death. In almost his last year of
|
|
life Brahms wrote and composed his "Four Serious Songs (Ver Emate
|
|
Gesange). The writer on him in the Encyclopedia Britannica calls
|
|
these his "supreme achievement in dignified utterance of noble
|
|
thought." It warns you to read some of these musical critics with
|
|
discretion. The words of the songs plainly reject the idea of
|
|
immortality, and Brahms admitted in a letter to Herzogenberg that
|
|
that was his intention.</p>
|
|
<p> Haydn composed even more masses and other church music than
|
|
Gounod or Cherubini, and he is still a high favorite in the
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> repertory. In the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> Encyclopedia he is, of course,
|
|
a loyal, if very amorous, son of the Church, though Mendelssohn's
|
|
opinion that his sacred music was "scandalously gay" is quoted, and</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
21
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>we get the usual caution that it is better as art than as an
|
|
expression of <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> ideas. In point of fact he was, like Mozart,
|
|
a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Freemason</span>, and a Mason was to Rome in those days what a Bolshevik
|
|
is today.</p>
|
|
<p> Verdi, has given the Church a mass for the dead, a Te Deum, an
|
|
Ave Maria, a Stabat Mater and other sacred compositions, and he is
|
|
feebly claimed in the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> Encyclopedia. It is a particularly
|
|
brazen claim as, while such claims are usually in the case of great
|
|
artists or scientists based upon the fact that the last sacraments
|
|
were daubed on them while they were unconscious or administered to
|
|
gratify <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> relatives, Verdi stipulated in his will that he
|
|
was to be buried without "any part of the formulae" (F.T.
|
|
Garibaldi, Giuseppe Verde., 1903, p. 235). He was a man of more
|
|
solid character than is usual in the operatic world -- he gave
|
|
2000000 lire to build a home for aged and ailing musicians. --
|
|
and wrote his mass for the dead only to honor his dead friend
|
|
Manzoni. He was a moderate anti-Papal in the political struggle and
|
|
was often assailed by the clergy.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 Symonds says. If you
|
|
commission an artist, or if he himself proposes, to express the
|
|
super-human, his own belief in the matter is not concerned.</p>
|
|
<p> Anyone who has heard one of these florid masses in a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
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.</p>
|
|
<p> The singers of these masses and other choral services are,
|
|
even on ordinary Sundays quite commonly non-<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s. 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 </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
22
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>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
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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.
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>'s sometimes feel this.</p>
|
|
<p> My father used to tell of an experience of this kind. He once
|
|
took a country cousin, a <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>, 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,
|
|
Bill, why don't they say Amen and 'a done with it."</p>
|
|
<p> Chapter V</p>
|
|
<p> WHY A DEAD LANGUAGE IS USED IN THE LITURGY</p>
|
|
<p> The reader must not lose sight of the guiding idea of this
|
|
booklet. It is an examination of the claim that the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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.</p>
|
|
<p> 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.</p>
|
|
<p> As to the common <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> sophism that the reduction of the
|
|
Pope's sphere of influence accounts for the cessation of medieval
|
|
art we saw that the answer is easy. Two arts, literature and music,</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
23
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s 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 Fra Angelica does not alter the general truth --
|
|
and it is plausible to think that the immense reduction of its
|
|
wealth after the Reform affected this. But their reduction does not
|
|
explain the death of art in <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>, Spain or the predominance of
|
|
secular art in France. Anyhow, the Church is now richer and more
|
|
powerful than ever, and the non-<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> world has been duped or
|
|
bribed into such an attitude that it would welcome <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>
|
|
artistic production of a high order. You cannot even speak of the
|
|
chill of a hostile environment, even if you think that such a thing
|
|
does prevent a great artist from expressing himself. Yet the
|
|
Church, while it boasts that it has more members than ever and
|
|
certainly has far more wealth than ever, cannot inspire great art
|
|
in its own body. Four-fifths of its best modern art, its music, was
|
|
composed by the type of men it professes's to abhor above all
|
|
others -- apostates'. "The Church and its great art" is part of the
|
|
dupery it practices on the modern mind. But if I had been content
|
|
to say so boldly, or to refer the reader to other writings of mine,
|
|
I should have been unconvincing, so in this booklet I have had to
|
|
give considerable detail. I trust it has interested the reader.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Jews</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s everywhere of their connection with and object dependence
|
|
upon the <span class="GPE" title="GPE">Vatican</span> and the Papacy.</p>
|
|
<p> A <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> belief that on that altar Jesus
|
|
Christ is physically and bodily present under the "accidents" of a
|
|
wafer or very thin cracker, and you will realize the feeling,
|
|
almost of awe, with which the devout <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> follows the
|
|
evolutions in the distant sanctuary. The setting is exactly the </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
24
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>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
|
|
Isis or Mithra once impressed their followers. Indeed it goes back
|
|
to the sacrifices in the <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Jewish</span> temple, the pageants on the great
|
|
festivals of ancient Egypt, even the mysteries performed at the
|
|
summit of lofty pyramid temples in ancient <span class="GPE" title="GPE">Babylon</span> and Assyria
|
|
while the crowd stood in silence in the court-yard. To some extent
|
|
the modern theater, which was not in its beginnings a revival of
|
|
the Greek theater, is developed from this clerical show. Simple
|
|
theatrical features were added to the ceremony in the sanctuary to
|
|
please the totally illiterate congregation and out of these
|
|
developed the early "miracle play." Large numbers of non-<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>s
|
|
attend <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> services, generally standing near the door, just to
|
|
see the quaint free spectacle at the far end of the church.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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. Don't ask me to explain here how Jesus Christ
|
|
(God) is offered to a God who is not Jesus Christ, as in what sense
|
|
it is a real sacrifice. I did enough cold dissection of the amazing
|
|
doctrines of the Roman Church in the 16th book and do not care to
|
|
return to that tedious occupation. It is enough to say that the
|
|
Church theory is that the priest in every mass "repeats, the
|
|
sacrifice of Calvary" an all that the people have to do is to be
|
|
present on their knees with bowed heads and silent lips..</p>
|
|
<p> When this "solemn sacrifice" is in modern times accompanied by
|
|
the operatic music of Gounod or Haydn, when the priests interrupt
|
|
the solemnity in various places and sit while tenors and bass and
|
|
perhaps violins and cellos, distort the language of the prayers
|
|
into musical arabesques, the result is really so fantastic and.
|
|
irreligious that Pius X, the blunt old peasant Pope of 40 years
|
|
ago, issued a ukase that this sort of thing must stop. He wanted to
|
|
bring the Church back to the use of plain chant, the simple musical
|
|
notation used before operatic music was invented, at least as it
|
|
was improved by Palestrina. For once a Pope found that he was not
|
|
really an autocrat. Even in the Church the power of the purse is
|
|
greater than the terrific powers granted in theory to the Pope. The
|
|
financial loss in every country would have been immense. There
|
|
would be no more "opera for servant girls"; no more "beautiful
|
|
services" for artistic converts and neurasthenic ladies.</p>
|
|
<p> 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
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> theory of the mass, the people are impatient and are apt </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
25
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>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.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 Pope if he gave orders inconsistent with the
|
|
American spirit or Constitution. Would they, on that highly
|
|
fantastic hypothesis, abandon the use of Latin in the services? On
|
|
what ground could they retain it? And if they turned the liturgy
|
|
into plain American how would the archaic sentiments sound, and how
|
|
would the mutilation of the words by priests at the altar or by
|
|
non-<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> singers in the choir impress the faithful?</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Egyptian</span>) garb he wears at the altar, the dividing
|
|
sanctuary line, the "blessing" which a good <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> (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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span>, 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 Jesus. His curse may
|
|
be a very real thing. His prayers -- at from a quarter to one or
|
|
two dollars a time -- are more effective than the services of a
|
|
doctor or a veterinary surgeon and must be secured for a vast range
|
|
of purpose's, from blessing a new house or a new churn or fishing
|
|
boat to success in an impending examination, the detection of a
|
|
thief, curing a woman of sterility, or painlessly removing a gall-stone.</p>
|
|
<p> We need not, however, go back once more into "the really
|
|
<span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> world"; though you will not forget that these are
|
|
conditions in which two-thirds of the Pope's subjects live. Our
|
|
broad conclusion must be that instead of the Church of Rome </p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
26
|
|
.
|
|
THE ARTISTIC STERILITY OF THE CHURCH</p>
|
|
<p>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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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." <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> art
|
|
certainly is.</p>
|
|
<p> 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 <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Catholic</span> 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."</p>
|
|
<p> Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.</p>
|
|
<p> The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful,
|
|
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
|
|
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
|
|
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
|
|
nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and
|
|
religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to
|
|
the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so
|
|
that America can again become what its Founders intended --</p>
|
|
<p> The Free Market-Place of Ideas.</p>
|
|
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
|
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
|
27
|
|
</p>
|
|
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