Woe to him who calls ugliness beauty
“Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.”
First, a brief apology: not too peppy the last few days.
So, I seem to still be recovering from the big asteroid-strike of exhaustion that hit me after our trip to Florence last weekend. It works like this since chemo; takes me a long time to recover from things that I used to be able to just brush off with a night’s sleep. I’ve only had a couple of days this week where I could function and I spent them painting, because I’ve got a painting that needs shipping next week. So, I didn’t write this week, and only posted a few pics from Florence last Saturday.
BUT! I’ve got a big file of old articles I wrote for the Remnant that I have permission to repost here, as the mood strikes. And today I’m doing a little catch-up. I promised two posts a week, and I’m gonna deliver two posts a week, come hell or high water.
I’ve got another whole post pretty much finished in our series, “Lies the Renaissance told you,” that only needs editing. And I took nearly a hundred photos of the Florence trip which I think everyone will really like, and it’s a fun story. So, stay tuned. I’m bouncing back, slowly but surely. No worries.
Just why do modern churchmen love ugly things? A repost.
The other day the online Catholic traditionalists were all in a flutter over the pope congratulating the winners of the 2022 Pontifical Academy Award for Sacred Architecture.
Here are the winning entries:
Not exactly Chartres cathedral.
It’s not the first time, and it’s not really Pope Francis, per se. John Paul II was famous for his love of hideous modernist and Brutalist boxes1. It’s just the general state of the modern Church and the modern world; we seem to have decided not only that ugliness - drab, featureless, Stalinist undressed concrete slabs - is beautiful church architecture, but more broadly that goodness is evil and vice versa. The papal awards for these works seems to have struck a nerve this week. Insult to injury, I suppose.
My friend Peter did his usual insightful thing at 1Peter5, and that followed the illustrious Anthony Esolen’s thing for Crisis. Under Peter’s post on Facebook, I commented that ages ago I had done an interview over dinner in Rome with our mutual friend Gregory DiPippo - editor of the New Liturgical Movement on the same subject, for the Remnant. Greg chimed in saying that he remembered it too, but the piece seems to have disappeared from the internet. And then I remembered that it probably never got posted to the net at all, having likely been in the Remnant’s print edition, an effective black hole of forgetting where articles disappear and are never seen again. Fortunately, a short while ago I discovered the lost file of every piece I ever wrote for Mike Matt in a subfile on my precious, precious data stick that I now use to stash all my reference photos. And sure enough, there it was.
I’m glad it’s topical again, because it seems like a perfect subject for our explorations here of the differences between pre-modern Christian ideas about sacred art and those of our contemporaries.
It was prompted, if I can recall that far back, by a conversation with a friend about how bad philosophy makes you go mental.
Woe to Him Who Calls Beauty Ugliness and Ugliness Beauty
(First written for The Remnant, September 29, 2010)
Now, of course, we all know the rule, “Bad philosophy makes you stupid,” for which axiom we see ample daily proof in the world’s legislatures. But after years of indulging in (and later renouncing) traditionalist polemics on the liturgy, I have started to form the opinion that bad philosophy also brings about a peculiar type of aesthetic stupidity; a kind of blindness to beauty that produces the same kind of irrationality one sees in our modern secular legislatures.
In a place like the British Parliament, nonsense passes for wisdom every day by men who can no longer tell the difference between good and evil. But it seems that a similar principle applies to aesthetics, and in the seemingly endless wars in the Church it is often on the front of beauty, what it is and what it isn’t, that the fighting is hottest.
I began to notice this rule some years ago when I read an account of Roger Cardinal Mahony taking his first stroll around his new Los Angeles cathedral, Our Lady Queen of Angels. It is related that as he walked through the building that has been universally reviled as a monstrosity – the butt of jokes throughout the dozen time zones of the e-verse – Cardinal Rog was said to be “in awe”. In the hushed and breathy tones normally reserved by the Sane for the Sistine Chapel ceiling or Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks, he walked through the Rog Mahal, muttering, “I knew it was going to be beautiful, but I had no idea…”
When I read this, a verse of Scripture, Isaiah 5:20, spontaneously popped into my head: “Woe to him who calls evil good and good evil”. We know that the refusal to distinguish between good and evil is a handicap of the philosophy we loosely call “liberalism,” one that was decried by the prophet because it is the deal-killer. “Woe to him” because for such a man there can be little hope of a happy conclusion to life’s spiritual struggle.
But is there not a similar warning for those who would call ugliness beauty and beauty ugliness? Indeed, the prophet goes on in that verse to say, “who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter”.
For some time I have been thinking about a series of questions about the relationship between goodness, truth and beauty, and their connection to what we know about God, and the worship of God in His holy Church. Is there such a thing as an objective standard of beauty? And why has the cult of ugliness, the cult of badness in art, been allowed, indeed encouraged to grow?
Want to figure out what’s true? Learn to draw
To try to find answers, I’ve been reading up. One of the great forgotten masters on aesthetics and society is John Ruskin, the great 19th century art critic, social observer and drawing instructor2, who gives many hints about the connection between art and truth, goodness and beauty, the triumvirate of transcendentals that I have sometimes nicknamed “The Real”.
His starting point is that art is the translation of nature, external reality, by the human mind and hand. His focus, therefore, in teaching students to draw, is to have them learn intense and unfiltered observation of the real world. In his Elements of Drawing, a training manual for beginners, he urges students to develop what he calls the “naïve eye.”
One of Ruskin’s aphorisms is one that I have taken as an axiom in my own study of drawing and painting: “Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.” He said it in response, and as a correction, to the fashionable philosophical nonsense verse, “Beauty is truth.”
Ruskin, along with all the old school artists, taught that the work of learning to draw is not training your fingers, but re-training your brain to see things as they really, actually are. We learn from infancy to interpret the data coming in through our eyes. We have to, or the world remains just a jumble of meaningless shapes. But in learning to label and organise the objects, colours, shadows and spatial relationships we see, we tend to become imaginatively lazy. We tend to substitute an idea, a phantasm3, of the thing for the thing itself and we can eventually learn to see only the things we have trained ourselves to expect to see. It is why children learn to draw people, trees and flowers as symbolic icons instead of drawing the thing they are looking at.
Learning to draw then is learning to turn off this interpretive function and observe the world as it actually is. Learning to make art, according to Ruskin and the entire school of what we now call “classical realism,” is a process that involves shedding, or at least suspending the preconceptions. His method, the standard traditional training method of all the great artists from Cimabue to Sargent, is essentially a lesson in humility before what is greater than we are.
He wrote in Elements of Drawing, “Nature will show you nothing if you set yourself up for her master. But forget yourself and try to obey her and you will find obedience easier and happier than you think.” As good a bit of spiritual advice as one would get from St. Francis de Sales.
I think this focus on The Real, and the discarding of our cherished preconceptions is the place of connection between true art and Catholic worship and the key to understanding what has happened.
“We have an ideology lodged in the Church, like a splinter under a fingernail, that is poisoning the Church’s artistic endeavour. But an infection in the Body of Christ will be expelled, and the ideology that has created this one is already dying.”
My dinner with Gregory: “The cult of bad art begins, unsurprisingly, with the reign of Paul VI.”
I had a long conversation about my questions the other night over dinner in Rome with a friend, Gregory DiPippo. Gregory, a transplant from Rhode Island, is a recognised expert in the traditional liturgy of the Western Church. He is the Rome correspondent for the New Liturgical Movement website and served for some years as ceremoniere4 at the FSSP5 Rome parishes. He is also one of the very few American guides accredited by the Vatican museums to give an accurate account of the Catholic nature and history of their treasures.
Gregory gave me a clear starting point: good art, he said, consists of mastery of technique. Great art, therefore, must integrate technical mastery with the ability to tell a story.
Applying to this Ruskin’s axiom, that for a thing to be beautiful it must also be true, it follows that great art is the work of a technical master used to tell a story that is true. A story that is, in other words, in coherent harmony with objective reality.
I asked, where did our current cult of bad art come from?
“The cult of bad art begins, unsurprisingly, with the reign of Paul VI.” In the fields of painting, architecture, music, “there used to be rules which were basically just taken away.” In music, perhaps the most crucial art form for Catholic worship, those rules were quite specific.
It started with music: the “praise and worship band” goes way back
“Going back to Plato, there was a distinction between two types of music, singing or those instruments which imitated singing, strings, woodwinds, organ, that were allowed in church because the human voice was the highest expression of human rationality.”
In Catholic Churches, instruments were permitted that imitate the human voice but anything percussive, including pianos, were excluded. Percussive instruments were already identified by Plato with a sub-rational type of worship which he called “korybanticism”, after a cult who worshipped the Phrygian goddess Cybele with drumming and dancing. In this cult, worshippers would whip themselves up into an emotive frenzy, a kind of altered state of awareness that suppresses the rational faculties, a form of worship now found in nightclubs.
“Probably fairly few deep philosophical or religious thoughts being thought in nightclubs,” Gregory said.
So there were good reasons to exclude these particular kinds of instruments, reasons that had to do with the things we know are true about God and man. And in the 1960s, the rule prohibiting percussive instruments in Catholic worship was abolished by an official decree.
“While bad art and ugly architecture have always existed in the Church, as failures to achieve the perfection of the principles, our times are the first in which there is a universal and deliberate overturning or discarding of these principles.”
Turning to architecture, under the previous dispensation, church buildings “were seen as a kind of microcosm of the cosmos and so in order to express the harmony of the cosmos as ordered by God, they had to be symmetrical. A church was supposed to have a clearly identified upper and lower area, a clerestory or dome; a clearly distinct sanctuary area, which indicates the hierarchical nature of the Church; altars should be elevated to represent the idea of the holy mountain of Mt. Calvary.”
The current trend for asymmetrical churches, lopsided sanctuaries, amphitheatre-style seating, flattened sanctuaries with no partitions between the laity and the clergy, churches in the round where the congregation faces each other, are the product of a deliberate replacement of the classical forms following the theological function.
While bad art and ugly architecture have always existed in the Church, as failures to achieve the perfection of the principles, our times are the first in which there is a universal and deliberate overturning or discarding of these principles.
The content and form of the art in the context of Catholic worship are important because the purpose of Catholic art has always been the reassertion of a certain set of theological ideas. “The Church believes these ideas are a good thing, and the purpose of our art is to reassert its goodness.”
Throughout the history of Christianity, these styles were the universally accepted forms producing innumerable great works in sculpture, painting, architecture and music, in every century, works that helped to define what our civilisation meant. Which is why, even if one were to find Our Lady Queen of Angels in Los Angeles to be a beautiful piece of architecture, it is a failure as a work of Catholic art.
Ruskin, who mercifully died in 1900, could be described as a proto-Traditionalist in the art world, and as such, his ideas were scorned and ignored as that world moved further into the morass of 20th century modernism. The cultural despair generated by the Great War evolved by the 1920s into a nihilist philosophy that still has the art world by the throat. Art is reduced to the purely subjective, to solipsism and ultimately to a black nihilism. Meaninglessness as meaning.
Scruton picks up the torch
But Ruskin’s foundational idea, that art is for beauty and that beauty is a quantifiable, objectively real thing, has been carried like a light through the dark terrors of the 20th century. The light still burns in the ideas of the English philosopher, writer, and composer Roger Scruton, whose 2009 book, On Beauty, proposes that beauty is not only objectively real and quantifiable, but a vital necessity for the survival of our culture.
Scruton asks, “Since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person’s taste be used to cast judgment on another?
“That familiar relativism has led some people to dismiss judgments of beauty as purely ‘subjective’… The studies of art, music, literature and architecture, freed from the disciplines of aesthetic judgment, seem to lack the firm anchor in tradition and technique that enabled our predecessors to regard them as central to the curriculum.”
Scruton6, not a Catholic, has put his finger firmly on the point of convergence between the 20th century’s rejection of the principle that art is for beauty – and that beauty is a characteristic of a greater Reality – and the destruction of the traditional liturgy in the Church. The same impulse, one might suggest the same spirit, was behind them both.
The nihilist refuses to believe what he knows is true and rejects what he knows is good and beautiful because he has the power to do so. Our culture both within and without the Church, has embraced this nihilistic assertion of power. It extols the anti-rational principles (if they can be granted the name) that result in the mass rejection of the good, the true and the beautiful for the very reason that they are beautiful, true and good.
“Ideology means to reason according to an idea. It means to start with the idea instead of experience. An idea, in the Aristotelian sense of something that is less real than the world. So, you’re not looking at the world and drawing your experience from it and reasoning according to that. You start with the idea and you conform reality to what you already believe.”
Why it’s important: how the cult of ugliness became a death-cult
This attempt to reject the Real on its own merits has resulted in our culture’s obsession with death. A nihilist can finally love and desire only negation, anti-life. But an attempt by something real (a human being) to embrace its own negation can result only in self-destruction.
I asked Gregory how all this happened. He quoted C.S. Lewis who pointed out that it is only in the modern world that art is created deliberately ugly. Styles in painting, architecture and music go in and out of fashion, but our time is the only one in which ugly art is deliberately created by a small minority that is detested by the great majority. This is a new thing, an ideology.
“Ideology means to reason according to an idea. It means to start with the idea instead of experience. An idea, in the Aristotelian sense of something that is less real than the world. So, you’re not looking at the world and drawing your experience from it and reasoning according to that. You start with the idea and you conform reality to what you already believe.”
According to this definition, Stalin’s disastrous policy of collective farming destroys the farm economy of Ukraine, but because communism asserts collective farming as one of its axioms, the policy is retained. “Stalin is reasoning from the idea, the communist idea, ‘This will work, therefore we will just continue operating as if it were working’. Once an idea of this sort has been lodged in someone’s head, it is extremely difficult to dislodge it.”
Gregory proposed that “people have ideologically backed themselves into the corner of saying that all of these other traditional styles in media are exhausted. They have nothing to say, modern man doesn’t care about them. So the ‘beauty’ of something like [Los Angeles’] Our Lady Queen of Angels Cathedral, depends on the idea that all these previous forms are exhausted.”
This is an “ideological premise, because it is not grounded the experience of the average person.”
“In the same way that Stalin was actually incapable of realising that collective farming was a failure, the mind reaches a point where it is incapable of perceiving the lack of beauty.”
So, we have an ideology lodged in the Church, like a splinter under a fingernail, that is poisoning the Church’s artistic endeavour. But an infection in the Body of Christ will be expelled, and the ideology that has created this one is already dying.
“I think that this phase is actually drawing to a close, the revolution is in retreat. We are a minority, but we are definitely growing. We are the only part that is growing. The average young man who is entering seminary today is not dissenting on major issues of the Faith.
“Are we going to be able to turn back the clock 600 years? No. The Church never moves backwards. But what it does is imitate the resurrection of its Founder.”
Gregory said that the first task is to eradicate the ideology that holds the beautiful to be ugly and the ugly, beautiful. He cited the emergence of the Gothic style that appeared following a massive movement of reform of discipline in the priesthood in the 1130s, and the Baroque that appeared after the Counter Reformation “was already a spectacular success”.
“Doctrinal and internal moral reform must precede aesthetic reform, because the love of ugliness comes from an anti-Catholic ideology. You have to defeat the ideology before you defeat the ugliness.
“There will be good art again, when the ideology that likes and encourages bad art is dead. Kill the ideology, and you get back the natural human tendency to love beauty.”
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Which probably should have been more of a red flag than it was during his lifetime.
Definitely need to get back into Ruskin, a bunch of whose writing I have. Someone remind me. He deserves a post or two at least.
A visual mental construction.
Master of ceremonies; resident expert.
Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter.
died, January 12, 2020
Thank you, Hilary. Read half so far and will pick up the rest later. Really enjoying your blogging/stacking.
“The cult of bad art begins, unsurprisingly, with the reign of Paul VI.”
It could be that the term "cult" requires a lot of unpacking here. Because there was already a great deal of bad art popping up in the early post-war years (1946-1962), in Europe, the Americas, and beyond, in both sacred architecture and the art that adorned those buildings and our publications: Consider that St. Mary's Cathedral in Tokyo, Paddy's Wigwam in Liverpool, and Rio de Janeiro Cathedral were all designed and commissioned in the late 1950's - before Paul VI came to the throne. Something about the world wars...broke something in the Catholic mind, and more than just the Catholic mind.
But it is true that under Paul VI, this movement for ugliness went into full overdrive. Maybe Greg means to say it had not attained full-cult status until Papa Montini was on the scene to give it a real imprimatur.