How the West Betrayed Its Own Sacred Tradition

Part 1: Trent and the Vanishing Gothic Rood Screen

We know we’ve been robbed, but do we know when and by whom?

It was probably not who you think.

A late Gothic rendition of the ancient Byzantine prototype “Christ in Majesty,” by Fernando Gallego, c. 1496. Later in this series we’ll discuss how this painting illustrates the thesis by 19th century architect Augustus Pugin that the Gothic was the last truly native Christian sacred art, abruptly interrupted and supplanted by the Naturalistic Humanism of the Renaissance, foreign and antithetical to Christian ideas, to the great harm of Christendom.

We all feel it, don’t we. That sense of grief that comes when we look back and see what was once central to our faith and worship now regarded as irrelevant relics of a bygone era, well put behind us. It’s not mere “nostalgia” or romanticism; it’s a genuine sense of loss as though we feel something essential has been stolen from us. Many people who return to the practice of the Catholic Faith through a greater acquaintance with those artistic and liturgical traditions report feeling anger as though at a robbery of something authentic, a sense of being wrongfully disinherited and exiled from a homeland.

The liturgical life of the Church, the visual language of sacred art, and the architecture that literally physically shaped the spiritual life of our ancestors; these were not mere accidental cultural expressions of a particular time. They were the fruit of centuries of spiritual development.

And yet, as we know, much of this has been simply tossed aside in the western Church, in favour of a new approach that embraces the material over the mystical, the visible over the hidden.

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Catch up with the conversation

If you’re new to our site - we are getting an amazing number of new subscribers - and to our ongoing discussion of the disastrous misdirection taken in sacred art at the Renaissance, you can do a little background reading. This is… maybe the fourth in our “Lies the Renaissance told you” series? Or fifth? Not sure.

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Last week we talked about the Protestant Iconoclasm that revived the ancient Jewish and Islamic slanders against the Christian iconographic traditions.

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A surviving rood screen at St. Helen's Church, Ranworth, Norfolk, c. 1479–1480. The illusionistic Naturalism of the Renaissance, with its emphasis on the physical, visibility, human achievement and materiality, begins to dismantle the theological worldview that the rood screen represents. In a hundred years, they were nearly all gone.

In today’s post for paid subscribers, we’re going to take a deeper historical look at how that happened, using the narrative “McGuffin” of the medieval and Gothic Church’s rood screens as a touchpoint: what happened to them, and why and when?

Outside the 16th and 17th century frenzy of English and continental Protestant iconoclasm, that destroyed probably thousands of them, it’s worth asking why they were removed even from those churches that were not desecrated by the heretics. What does their continued absence say about the direction Western Christianity had already taken by 1600?

If you grew up in the New World, you might have the impression that the 20th century Iconoclasm - that left our ecclesiastical landscape a dead, gasping, radioactive wasteland of irreligion, and left all of us spiritual refugees staggering through it looking in vain for rare oases - was a product of the disastrous decisions of churchmen of the post-war 20th century. In this you’d be mistaken.

We all know that starting in the late 19th century, and escalating into the present day, the Church faced an unprecedented internal assault. Churchmen, influenced by the intellectual and cultural currents of their time, began undermining Catholic dogma and doctrine. This crisis culminated in what Pope Pius X identified as “Modernism, the synthesis of all heresies.” But by the time Pius X condemned it, the roots had already spread deep, and the crisis, as we now know, was far from contained.

But the Modernist revolt did not spring up out of nowhere; the groundwork for our great contemporary apostasy was laid long ago, as the Church in the West began to abandon its mystical theological heritage and embrace increasingly materialist and rationalist philosophies - and an increasingly bureaucratic, managerialist approach to the Christian life. Starting in the 13th century, the rise of Nominalism¹ in Latin Catholic intellectual and academic circles, with its rejection of universals and metaphysical realities, created an intellectual climate hostile to the sacramental worldview, and dragged the Church inexorably down the stream of materialism.

This was further compounded by the systematic destruction of monasticism, with little institutional resistance, the beating mystical heart of Christianity, that was meant to safeguard and cultivate the Church’s contemplative and mystical traditions. The rupture between heaven and earth in the western Church was not just architectural and artistic.

By the time Modernism took hold, the West had long been ashamed of its mystical artistic roots, more concerned in recent centuries with appearing “rational” - and finally “relevant,” - like a desperate Boomer trying to impress a teenager on Instagram - than with safeguarding the ancient mysteries of the faith or the salvation of souls.

So, who really got rid of the rood screens, and why? It wasn’t who you might think.

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The Sacred Images Project is a reader-supported publication where we talk about Christian life, thought, history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of sacred art. It’s my full time job, but it’s still not bringing a full time income, so I can’t yet provide all the things I want to and am planning for. You can subscribe for free to get one and a half posts a week.

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This is the site where I post photos of my own work as it develops. I have a shop there where some of my drawings and paintings are available for sale as prints, as well as some other items.

Like this little painting I did earlier this year of St. Anthony the Great, father of all monks, inspired by one of the 14th century frescoes in one of our churches here in Narni.

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