There is an old conversation about art that took place in early twentieth century France. The important question that I derived from that conversation is What does theology have to do with life? In contrast to such questions, I find our current conversation rather depressing.
Theology and Art
French cubist Albert Gleizes ventured into Christian theology to the dismay of his Catholic friends. Gleizes, a convert to the Catholic Church, unwittingly brought up an old debate pitting St. Augustine against Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Gleizes argued that the ascendence of Aristotle and Aquinas in the 12th century had been detrimental to Christian art. In this he was influenced by René Guénon. 1 We will see that it may not have been entirely unwitting on Gleizes’s part.
I don’t have a position on this debate but I’m more sympathetic to Gleize’s Catholic friends. I have my doubts about the influence of Rene Guénon, as they did. But how did the Catholic Church get involved in this debate?
The Worker Priest Movement
After the Second World War, many in the Catholic Church wanted to change the way the Church was presented to the world. They also desired greater openness and relevance to the conditions of modern life. The ‘worker priest’ movement in France was the most radical expression of this desire. The priests in this movement often engaged in the political struggles of the class led by the Communist Party.
In art, they were willing to use well-known sometimes controversial artists, and these artists were given considerable freedom, regardless of their religious beliefs. Fathers Marie-Alain Courtier and Pie Raymond Régamey were the two most prominent names associated with this movement. They were both Dominicans.
Jacques Maritain
Jacques Maritain had already worked out a theory of modern art based on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. In his Art et Scolastique, he argued that in the Middle Ages the artist and the theologian worked together. The artist had represented beauty and the theologian had represented truth. However, the Renaissance set the artist free from the theologian. This sent him out on his own to search after beauty in its own right, independent of theological truth.
According to Maritain, there is a clear distinction between beauty and truth. Beauty is still a ‘transcendental’ and belongs to the divine order. However, under the utilitarian mindset, the artist longs for beauty as an absolute end in itself. In this way, he has become as superfluous and ridiculous as the theologian or saint.
Baudelaire
In the nineteenth century Baudelaire tried to reassert the transcendental nature of his art. In Maritain’s telling, Baudelaire shared common ground with a wide range of artists, especially those interested in religious art. A painted figure should look like a painted figure and not like a real figure. It is deceitful for a painting to give the illusion of nature.
This view was shared by many schools of art in Europe and Britain in Baudelaire’s time. It could even have been written by Albert Gleizes, especially before 1920. However, Maritain continued with what was probably a criticism of Gleizes’s and Metzinger’s du ‘Cubisme’.
Does Cubism in our day, despite its tremendous deficiencies, represent the still stumbling, screaming childhood of an art once more pure? The barbarous dogmatism of its theorists compels the strongest doubts and an apprehension that the new school may be endeavouring to set itself absolutely free from naturalist imitation only to become immoveably fixed in stultae quaestiones…(as quoted by Brooke p, 246)
Thomas took ‘Stultae quaestiones’ from Paul’s Epistle to Titus 3:9. They are questions that ‘if raised in any science or discipline, would run contrary to the first conditions implied by that very same discipline.’
The Dominicans would raise the same objection against Gleizes in the late 1940s. They would say he was bothering his head with questions that did not concern him and should be left to professional philosophers and theologians.
For Gleizes’s part the mistrust was mutual. In his view, the Dominicans would take the easy road of the urban university, ‘where Aristotle’s philosophy rules supreme’. The ‘real door’ will open on the order of St Benedict, exclusively theological.
Gleizes believed that Thomas was of the thirteenth century, the period when the theological view of the world associated with the Benedictines was giving way to a more intellectual and philosophical view of the world, associated with the Dominicans.
What Does Theology Have to do With Life?
How are we to understand the relationship between theology and the physical world? Traditionalists such as Guenon believe the physical world should be organized according to the theology of a past historical era. Guenon, his disciple Albert Gleizes, and their followers, believed the modern age had caused a deviation that can be seen in art and architecture, and that the world must return to that past way of thinking. However, there were disagreements even among the Traditionalists.
Rene Guenon dated the modern deviation from the beginning of the fourteenth century while Albert Gleizes traced it back a century earlier. According to Peter Brooke this indicates a ‘profound difference in approach’.
Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a play of lines and colours that put the eye in movement had given way to a play of lines and colours that evoke the appearances of the natural world. The folds of the garments in the paintings and sculptures which had been organised in such a way as to contribute to the unifying rythm of the whole painted or sculpted area became an imitation of the folds of the garments agitated by the wind or evoking the shape of the body underneath. For Geizes this change was much more fundamental than any change in intellectual ideas. (But) For Guenon, the intellectual idea, the metaphysical structure, was the foundation stone of all the rest. Thus it is sufficient that a correct understanding of his traditional doctrine is conveyed in the symbols and numerical proportions used by the artists. For Gleizes by contrast, it is the ‘cast of mind’ that counts, and this is expressed at a much more fundamental level in the act of the artist than in anything – symbolism, metaphysical argument or whatever – that can be expressed in words. (Brooke p. 254)
There had previously been a rupture between Gleize and his friends Dom Angelico Surchamp and Robert Pouyaud over the question of the similarities or lack thereof between Gleizes and Guenon. There had also been a post-war disagreement between Gleizes and Père Raymond Régamey. These arguments are quite complex, but a brief mention is necessary in order to have some idea of the schools of thought.
The Art Journal, Art Sacré
Régamey and Couturier ran the art journal, Art Sacré. (It had been founded in 1935 as Cahiers de l’ art sacré.) In June 1945, Gleizes submitted an article to the journal, L’arc en ciel,cle de l’art Chretien Medieval.
Régamey answered politely but declined to publish it. He specifically objected to one of Gleizes’s ideas. He said he agreed with Gleizes’s statement that experience is an intimate participation with the living object, and observation is a distant, subjective appreciation. However, he disagreed that everything produced with the combination proposed by observation is damned.
In a lecture in Brussels in 1947, Régamey was more critical, and he included Gleizes, Bazaine, and Manessier in his critique.
A Doctrine of Two Kingdoms
Subsequently Gleizes wrote what seemed to be a challenge to Régamey’s program. He spoke of a ‘doctrine of two kingdoms–the kingdom of this world and the kingdom that is not of this world.
Brooke interprets this to mean that Gleizes has abandoned all hope in the establishment of a spiritual authority on earth.
For Gleizes, the kingdom of this world is the kingdom of space and time. The kingdom that is not of this world is the kingdom of eternity. The ambition of the Christian is supposedly to bring the two into harmony. But Gleizes believes the disharmony between them is total. Harmony can only be achieved with the reestablishment of a religious state of mind.
Furthermore, Gleizes’s piece in Art Sacré implied that the Church is implicated in the general deviation. The Church’s own idea of itself is wrong according to Gleizes, and it must die to be reborn.
This comment reminded Brooke of the annoyance of Père Jérôme when Gleizes told him ‘the whole of theology has to be taken up again’.
Régamey Started to Question Whether Gleizes Was a Christian
One reason for Régamey’s hostility to Gleizes was his suspicion that Gleizes was not a Christian (Brooke p. 253). He had begun to think the ‘tradition’ which Gleizes hoped to renew was the ‘tradition’ of Rene Guenon.
Guenon’s tradition was a metaphysical system of thought which was the real foundation behind all the major religions. In this view, the system is transmitted from one generation to the next through a secret process of initiation. The question of Gleizes’s allegiance to Guenon led to a ‘serious rupture’ among Gleizes’s followers.
Gleizes’s Ideas of Society and Culture Were Typically Right-Wing
Gleizes appreciated Guenon’s critique of modern civilization in his Crise du monde moderne, and Orient et occident. They both believed society was at the end of a short period of religious chaos and heading for destruction. The task of those who were aware of the situation was to rediscover and reaffirm the principles on which a new religious culture could evolve.
Gleizes Knew What He Was Doing
Gleizes knew he was renewing the old case made by the Augustinians against Aquinas. Over time, his friends and Church allies were shut out. Some of the themes that came up repeatedly in the debates with Père Jérôme and others were Gleizes’s distrust of Thomism, his insistence on a cyclical view of history, his sympathy for Guenon, and a tendency to emphasize the universal reality of Christ rather than the historical individual (p. 223).