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COMMENTARY
March 25, 2006
De-Westernization
The Pope will pray tomorrow in a beautiful but bare new church at Tor Tre Treste, a northern suburb of Rome, designed for the millennium by the great American Jewish architect, Richard Meier. In its form, the church itself is symbolic, having the shape of a boat with three white concrete sails. It is considered a masterpiece of postmodern architecture. But there is nothing on the walls, nor above the altar, except a single 17th-century crucifix, placed to catch light at sunset. A couple of articles posted on the interesting Catholic website “Chiesa” focus on this bareness, as I will today, on this Feast of the Annunciation.My reader, knowing that I am Catholic myself, may entertain scepticism when I say that the Catholic Church created “the West”, and not vice versa. He should not doubt this assertion, however, for it is fact. It becomes evident when one looks into history, including the histories of the Protestant denominations which are themselves rooted in a specifically Catholic past -- i.e. were not products of Byzantium, nor Islam. Nor did they originate in Hinduism or Buddhism. There is an East and West to Christendom, but the East was conquered by Islam, and indeed, a formerly Christian world, across North Africa and the Middle East, is now all but extinct. The principal seat of the Eastern church, at Constantinople, has been under Muslim rule since 1453, and its greatest shrine, the Hagia Sophia, was converted into a mosque -- as so many churches in Western Europe are now being converted. It is more than a question of conquest, or demography, for at the heart of the struggle to preserve Western civilization is the question of what it is. In Byzantium, there were two sustained periods of “iconoclasm”, when Christians themselves, adopting Islamic ideas about idolatry, stripped the rich imagery and decorations from their churches. The commandment not to worship graven images was also taken literally by Calvinists and others in the heat of the Reformation. Later, Quakers were among those who adopted this view, eliminating art and music in their sanctuaries. I do not mean to condemn such things out-of-hand. Monasteries are also places of silence, and it is well to recapture the “gift to be simple” in a Lenten season. But the simple is not simplistic. In the main, Eastern and Western Christians have alike understood, that one does not pray to an icon, but through it; and the God to whom one prays is the one triune God, not pagan or animist deities. We address saints as intercessors. We, both Eastern and Western Christians, do not worship calves, or spirits -- religious propagandists to the contrary. More generally, Christendom has been alive to the arts, to poetry, music, architecture, through 20 centuries. Our churches have been, through the centuries, by far the greatest patrons of all the arts. We expressly deny that they are evil in themselves. Art, music, poetry, architecture, plate and robe, are extensions of the liturgy; and outside the Church, each art may broadly serve human needs, by giving witness to the good, the true, and the beautiful. And even caricature and satire have been accepted, for their moral content -- when they point to a truth. The Christian objection cannot be to art, but only to art when it is put in the service of evil. Whereas, in Islam for contrast, figurative art and melodic music have ever been banned in themselves -- from the mosque, and often outside it. They are considered evils in themselves. Like our brother Muslims, we hold against idolatry, but we understand idolatry in a much different way. For us, idolatry is anything put consciously before or above God. It could be art, or extremes of "art for art's sake"; but it could also be money, or a lover, or a theological obsession. We do not hesitate for a moment to depict the Christ in our art. It could even be said that the depiction of Christ, directly in his person or indirectly in the effect of His grace, is for us the highest purpose of art. As in its originating Church, so in the civilization at large: we have exulted in art and music, in the poetic in every form; we have been iconodules, not iconoclasts. To be Western means surrounding ourselves with what we find uplifting, and using the material for spiritual ends. A church with blank walls is not, to this Western way of thinking, a place without distractions. As so many wise Western minds have observed, the blank wall easily becomes a screen upon which to project the phantasms of the human heart; a mirror in which we look not for God, but for our own faces. To put it another way, we have used art as a means to break down our own narcissism; and over time, repeatedly, we have found the enemies of art to be fanatics. Yet recently, from our society at large, we have been stripping the symbolism, the public imagery that recreates what we are and believe -- mostly to achieve the lowest common denominator of “multiculturalism”. And now, even our churches are becoming bare and "unwestern". This is another aspect of the suicide of the West. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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