News of the “decorating” of the Anglican cathedral in Canterbury with graffiti has been met with mixed explanations and reactions. The cathedral’s dean, David Monteith, explained that festooning it with graffiti gave voice to “marginalized communities” and “younger people who have much to say.” To those who criticize the result as ugly, Monteith concedes that “there is a rawness … which is disruptive” about it, but it “intentionally builds bridges.” Presumably, if you were welcoming, you’d appreciate the travesty.
One should not be surprised at the further desecration of Canterbury for two reasons. In modern times, it’s hardly the first Anglican cathedral to suffer such indignities. Within the past decade, others have already been turned into temporary discos and miniature golf courses to make them “relevant,” so it was probably Canterbury’s turn. In earlier times, multiple versions of English Protestantism pillaged the country’s Catholic churches, abbeys, and monasteries in the name of various “Reform(ed)” aesthetics, before finally settling on an ersatz Catholic smells and bells.
The same week that Canterbury was turned into an American inner-city ghetto “artwork,” another man attacked and desecrated the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. And just last May, the Catholic cathedral in Paderborn, Germany, was the site of some half-naked actors doing a chicken juggling act before the high altar—apparently sold (without the details) to the diocese as another example of “culture.” Catholic churches have been under attack, even destroyed, in various countries.
How should we account for these happenings? Let me suggest two reasons: a loss of the sense of holiness and a loss of sacred aesthetics.
Lost holiness
The loss of the sense of holiness today takes various forms. Borrowing from modern jargon, “holiness” is a “binary” category: something either is or isn’t.
But moderns rarely think in such stark terms. That’s likely a diabolical ruse, because confronting such dichotomies likely would stir up most people’s vestigial sense of what is proper to the holy and thus mobilize them to reject such compromises. Instead, holiness gets nibbled around the edges.
Today’s problem seems to be the idea of “transitory holiness.” It’s built into ideas of churches as “multifunctional” places, a notion in vogue immediately after Vatican II that lingers in various mutations today. “Transitory holiness” seems something like a bad reverse transubstantiation. The church is “holy” from 7:30 am to 1:00 pm for Sunday morning Masses. By 3:00 pm, it transforms into a concert hall with good acoustics for the local choir, especially when choir stalls or other “churchy” architecture provide a good photo backdrop for a Christmas concert. By 6:00 pm, it might mutate into avant-garde “culture,” like the Paderborn chicken dance or the Canterbury indoors street art and tagging festival. By 9:00 pm, it is just a locked space until it becomes “sacred” again for Monday morning early Mass. And no doubt, a few “enlightened” clerics will lecture scandalized Christians to be “accompanying” of the “marginalized” whose “voices” are now being “heard” in these sacred spaces, “perhaps for the first time” through these spray can and poultry antics.
The idea of “transitory holiness” came from an Italian source that took umbrage at a cathedral in that country turning itself into a restaurant for a Caritas dinner: “the scent of spaghetti Bolognese Saturday night, incense Sunday morning.” I find the idea compelling in light of an August 2023 New York Times story about a neo-Gothic St. Louis church that had been “deconsecrated” and turned into a roller skating rink. “St. Liborius” became “Sk8 Liborius,” a play on the name. And, regardless of the duly ribboned episcopal decree, the “deconsecrated” building, by its very shape, style, structure, and history, continued to scream “church!”
All this raises questions, both about priests leasing out churches for extracurricular activities after Mass and bishops closing down churches which they think they can magically “deconsecrate” after having been once consecrated to God. Human experience tells us that holiness is a property with a peculiar “sticking” ability, one not readily shed. It cannot be turned “on” and “off,” like too expensive interior church lighting.
“Off-and-on” holiness inures people from the resistance that outright “holiness/unholiness” might elicit. But if there’s no middle ground: just as nobody’s “a little pregnant,” so there’s no “a little holiness.” The opposite of holiness is unholiness or (to put it bluntly) sinfulness. That is tied up with beauty.
Loss of the Catholic aesthetic
Alexandre Cingria (1879-1945) is a forgotten figure in Catholic aesthetics, overshadowed by his brother, the writer Charles-Albert Cingria. Alexandre Cingria was a Swiss artist renowned for his skills in the visual arts, painting, and especially stained glass. The latter works are found across Switzerland.
Cingria also engaged in theoretical aesthetics and, in 1917, delivered a series of talks that eventually became La décadence de l’art sacré [The Decadence of Sacred Art], a leading book on Catholic aesthetics in the early 20th century. It was later translated into German [Der Verfall der kirchlichen Kunst] but not English (a gap this writer hopes soon to remedy). In La décadence, Cingria asks what has gone wrong with religious art, identifying three global causes: moral, socio-political, and aesthetic.
Cingria starts with the moral, which, for our purposes, is worth focusing on, Yes, socio-political factors (Protestantism, which in its extreme Swiss variants disdained religious art, and the French Revolution, which excommunicated religion from “art”) and aesthetic factors (Cingria, like Dawson, is an unabashed admirer of the medieval, though he deplored the separation of religion from modern life) are important, but the moral is critical.
Cingria does not hold back: modern religious “art” is ugly, and ugliness is the devil’s aesthetic. The devil deplores beauty. But he doesn’t necessarily “go all the way” by usually foisting upon Christians rank ugliness. More often, he feeds them the boring and the lazy. A religious aesthetic, be it in art, music, texts, or preaching, that manages to take the earth-shattering mysteries of Christianity and put people to sleep is diabolical. And clergy who are indifferent to beauty in church play into that game, perhaps even more so than the clergy who ally themselves with what Monteith called “rawness” and “disruptive.”
Cingria has another term for the latter: “disorder.” The devil does not like order. Disorder was what he introduced into the cosmos, and he often pairs it with boredom— as with cheap “art” in churches, and mass-produced “art” that elicits no creativity, only copying. To adapt Einstein, the definition of boredom is repeating the same temptations over and over again and not wanting a different outcome.
Better known than Cingria, the Swiss theologian Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar made his mark in modern theology in part through his emphasis on “beauty.” Beauty is, alongside truth and goodness, one of the “transcendentals,” those aspects of reality that are interchangeable (because what is is true and good and beautiful). Because the transcendentals are grounded in God, they draw men to Him. By engaging people with beauty, one brings them to God.
It is not accidental that people feel a sense of elevation and closeness to God when they visit the great churches of Christendom. Cingria’s early contemporary, the French poet Charles Péguy (who liked writing his poems as if God were the narrator) even has the Father say, “in heaven … there will not only be souls; there will be things. … Cathedrals, for example. Notre-Dame, Chartres—I will put them there”). It’s this sense of beauty, for example, that Bishop Robert Barron has sought to incorporate into his evangelization efforts. The beautiful brings people to God. But if that’s true, then the corollaries are: the ugly does not bring them to God, and the indifferent leaves them indifferent to Him. Sloth is a capital sin.
We should not overlook the connection between beauty/ugliness and grace/sin. The modern world, allergic to real morality, in fact tries to reduce morality to debatable questions of taste: saying “X is bad” means simply “I don’t like X.” Saying “Y is good” just means “I like Y!”
Cingria and von Balthasar upset the modern abolition of morality that turns it into mere matters of taste by insisting that the opposite is, in fact, true. As Von Balthasar notes, what is truly beautiful draws people towards God. All normal people instinctively feel what St. Augustine put into words when he spoke of “Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved You” (Confessions, 10.27). At least the Doctor of Hippo appreciated beauty, acknowledging he was often taken by beautiful things while ignoring the Source of their beauty: “I, unlovely, rushed heedlessly among the things of beauty You made.”
And Cingria points out the opposite side of that coin, the side that so many modern clerics seem unwilling to speak aloud about: the embrace of what is not beautiful, of what is ugly, is the embrace of evil, of sin, of the devil. Every artist who aspires to paint “what eye has not seen nor ear heard”–that is, heaven–strains to produce the most beautiful vision contained in his heart. After all, nobody paints a beautiful hell.
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You cannot destroy an institution without the help of those who attack it from within. There must be an awful lot of rot and hate in the upper clergy. I mean those who attempt to pass barely literate child scribbles such as these off as edifying “art” , who wish to institutionalize sexual immorality which makes a mockery of real Christian marriage, and those who gladly cooperated with the closing of churches during covid, sometimes for years. Disgusting is the only word. One is reminded of the tale “The Emperors new clothes”. The question is, where will we ever begin to find Christians as honest as the child in the tale? It is incumbent upon all of us to speak the truth and to call out madness when we see it, no matter the personal cost. This graffiti is just meaningless garbage. The clergy who gave this project the OK are serious dim bulbs.
It’s time we recovered the cathedral at Canterbury, which may not be much of a problem as the Church of England spirals into irrelevance. This is news that I would more expect to see at the Babylon Bee. Dr. Grondelski is correct, though, about recovering a sennse of the sacred– but it won’t happen without restoring a sense of decorum in society in general. We could start by dressing like adults instead of terminal adolescents. Then we can work on cleaning up our mouths (and not just the four-letter words, either; lots of harm can be done without them). Then we can work on restoring the distinction between the sacred and the profane.
Yes, restore the difference between sacred and profane, but don’t consign the latter to the ugly.
Thank you for a great article.
That’s correct. The profane need not be ugly. Another way of saying it is, “a rising tide raises all boats.” What we have now is a falling tide that has exposed all the ugly junk at the bottom of the lake.
Excellent suggestion and a very relevant observation Andrew. Thank you!
Of course, this is appalling. but compared to what Henry VIII did to the cathedral, and Becket’s tomb, does it really amount to very much?
It’s in poor taste but it’s only removable stickers. Not destruction.
Another excellent observation based upon the utter destruction of Henry VIII.
I don’t think actual marginalized people (the poor and the troubled) are clamoring for this stuff in churches. They’d much prefer a quiet beautiful place where they could sit for a while at peace. This stuff is pushed by cultural “elites.”
Perhaps the new Anglican aesthetics parallels their new theology and morality .
It makes me wonder what the “holy” pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales wrote on the walls when they got there. 😇
Here you go Mr. James, from the Cathedral’s site with some photos:
“Historic graffiti across the walls of the Cathedral voices the beliefs, work, hopes and fears of those who built, lived, worshipped and visited this special place over the last 900 years.
Since 2018, a team of volunteers have been surveying, recording and sharing this historic graffiti with visitors, as part of a historic graffiti project…”
“Historic graffiti” is done BY pilgrims (as a private discrete act) and not FOR THEM (as public visual screaming) by someone who “wanted to give pilgrims a voice”. Pilgrims expressed what they wanted via scratching the surfaces of the stones.
Hence, the historic graffiti is true while the current pseudo-graffiti = “installation” is fake, fake in all respects. It is also condescending.
The dean’s comments are nonsensical. No wonder the Anglican Church is in such a poor condition to evangelize.
The “marginalized communities” and “younger people who have much to say” could have been provided with a large whiteboard on casters, instead of the interior surfaces of a cathedral.
The poor and/or marginalized need beauty as much as (or more than) anybody.
We read: “In earlier times, multiple versions of English Protestantism pillaged the country’s Catholic churches, abbeys, and monasteries in the name of various ‘Reform(ed)’ aesthetics, before finally settling on an ersatz Catholic smells and bells.”
In this larger sense, Henry VIII’s smearing of his colorful “marriages” atop a virtual “church” (read “ecclesial community”) that later detached itself altogether from valid holy orders (under Queen Elizabeth)…isn’t this theological/ecclesial graffiti the beginning of today’s spray-paint graffiti culture?
As Uppsala, so Canterbury:
https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=11-06-046-r
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15181045/graffiti-exhibition-Canterbury-cathedral-underground-car-park-Peckham.html
I see I’m not the only one here who reads The Daily Mail.
🙂
Isn’t this the place where they do all that kings and queens and royal crown stuff? JMJ
No. At least not in modern times. That would be Westminster Abbey.
Quite apart from the partisan perspective in evidence in some comments here, may I suggest first of all that a large part of the responsibility for the degradation of beauty in both liturgy and church art–painting, sculpture, poetry, song–began quite some time back. (Which is not to lay it all at the doorstep of Vatican II. A specific date is impossible to pinpoint.)
To those who come into the church from elsewhere, some simply cannot escape the presence of bad taste in the Catholic environment generally. Who is responsible for it? Bishops, popes, parish priests? All of whom are necessarily preoccupied with more pressing concerns than beauty and its vital role in liturgy and worship, as well as private devotion.
But if the place of beauty, as integrated into the life of the church and into its worship and into the minds and hearts of its people, is ever going to be advocated, promoted, and restored, who is going to do it but the leadership of the church?
Dr. Grondelski makes here an heroic and eloquent effort toward that end, but it is hardly enough by itself.
Another voice, along with that of von Balthasar whom he cites, is that of Jacque Maritain in his Art and Scholasticism (1962). The chapter on Art and Beauty is well worth rereading and pondering. Art and beauty are never simply a matter of aesthetics; put otherwise, they do not exist for themselves. Maritain quotes Baudelaire: “it is this immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its various spectacles as a sketch of, as a correspondence with Heaven . . . .” The rest of the quotation is well worth citing, but I leave it to those interested enough to
read the whole essay and perhaps the whole book.
Finally, I would suggest that the inflicting of graffiti on the walls of holy places (and other abuses of them) is hardly worse than the abandonment of beauty in worship and sacred art as practiced by those who have every reason to know better.
From my not “partisan” but artisan (an iconographer) perspective you are right, “the degeneration of the sacred art in the West began long ago, approximately in mid-Renaissance. Christian art began as the images in catacombs which expressed the convictions of the believers, first in symbolic, then in symbolic-realistic form. I.e. they were theological first and artistic – second. They were never “just decorations”. Very importantly, they were driven by a desire to say “I believe this” (a theological conviction) and by an affection for the depicted, “I love Him (Christ)” (an attachment). An attachment to the theological truth = the Person of Christ is the source and the meaning of the icon.
There is something else here: while being a personal expression of a faith and affection of an individual, it is also an expression of what the whole Church believes i.e. it is very objective. It is a personal “I love you, My Lord” joined with “the Lord as the Church knows Him, as He is revealed in the Gospels”. (This is why 7th Ecumenical Council called sacred art “the Gospel is colours” and prescribed the veneration of holy images similar to the Book of Gospels and the Holy Cross.) From here follows that an iconographer’s ego and a commissioner’s tastes must be submitted to the objective knowledge = theology of the whole Church. Anything contrary to that knowledge must go, including “beauty” which is contrary to Our Lord.
As I see it, at the time of the Renaissance the West went for a more subjective approach to sacred art; personal tastes of the Popes and geniuses of artists dictated what and how should be depicted. Sacred art then gradually had become “a picture on a religious theme shaped as a commissioner wants/artistic self-expression dictates”, not an aid for a prayer, or even “just a decoration”.
It is my conviction that sacred art can be verified using the following questions:
– Does it help a prayer (i.e. brings mind and heart to God)?
– Does it help to stir an affection for Our Lord?
– Does it depict Our Lord and His relationships with others truthfully to the Gospels?
– Was it made with love and devotion for the prototype?
– Does it fit well with the fine examples of the sacred art the Church produced over centuries?
Or, if one wishes, one can choose a simpler approach: treat the image of Christ as the photo of your beloved.
Thank you for your very helpful and most insightful commentary. I meant to emphasize more than I did that beauty in religious art is never “decoration.” It is utterly integral to the theological import of the subject and hence of the work under consideration. Or as Maritain puts it, “Sacred art is in absolute dependence upon theological wisdom” (Art and Scholasticism, p. 104).
I would add only one point to your five questions in the next-to-last paragraph: Is the work skillfully done as a matter of craft, whatever the particular art form may be? To take Flannery O’Connor as only one example: she held that her responsibility as artist was to her gifts as maker (Thomas Aquinas being her mentor here). She was not responsible, however, in her art for the moral rectitude of her readers. (See Marion Montgomery’s Hillbilly Thomist, Vol. I, p. 5.)
My question to the Dean of Canterbury is: why didn’t you just answer these “questions to God?” Looking at the questions that have appeared in different articles, they largely seem like commonplace thoughts touching on the nature of God, His creation and His revelation that any Anglican clergyman should be able to address. So why didn’t he just do that?
— “Are you there?”
— “Is this all there is?”
— “God, what happens when we die?”
— “Where does love come from?”
— “Why is there so much pain and destruction?”
–“Why did you create hate when love is so much more powerful?”
Treating marginalized people who don’t have a Christian background as a “special” group with an exotic perspective on life is not really that flattering; in fact, as someone remarked above, it is condescending. It assumes that they would not have similar questions about God and the nature of existence as other people.
Thank you.
There is something appropriate about the graffiti stunt. It appropriately displays the ugly death of Protestantism. It’s an Anglican “cri de cœur”: Help, we are dying! Please like us! We will be whatever you want.