Some Problems of Catholic Writers

• (1) The focus and locus of our desire lies in the other world. The Christian soul waits in this world like a bride in an antechamber, who has not yet seen her Bridegroom: her wisdom is in her waiting. The fruits of this wisdom tend to be abstract, aphoristic. When she focuses full desire and attention on the visible present world, it is like a breaking of purdah – there is always a sense of betrayal, though what is written may be sharper and more exact.
• (2) The not-yet-Christian has often all his talents and energies strung up in the search for truth, for final knowledge, for God. But in a sense the Christian, having been donated the fullness of revealed truth, can search only for amplification of what he already knows. The existential anguish of genuine doubt, genuine search, does not inform the work. He could be silent and feel it no great privation of mankind.
• (3) The not-yet-Christian is free to give a sacred, all-but-absolute importance to works of art. A Christian must count them a mere coloured dross compared to one phrase of Scripture or one thread of the Holy Shroud.
• (4) A truly Christian art is crucified – thus in part ugly (since suffering makes for ugliness) and also incomplete (since its deepest meaning will be known only in Heaven . . .).
• (5) Art springs from natural contemplation; the life of prayer from supernatural contemplation. Where choice is evident one must choose the latter. How many artists have been lost for God’s glory in the Cistercian orpage 717 Carthusian silence? One who chooses the former must earn the wonder of the saints.
• (6) Pseudo-Christian art is always angelic in character. It persuades that the Fall is wholly reversed in us; whereas in truth our knowledge of the Fall is the deepest on earth, for we know what is lost – and what may be regained.
• (7) Prudence implies the deepest care for one’s own soul and that of one’s neighbour. I do not see how one could be a passionately committed artist without violating prudence – because one desires with an incomprehensible intellectual passion to delineate the world one knows – forgetting that truth is scandalous. One remembers prudence only when one has ceased to create for the meanwhile, and become a critic again. As critic, I often take myself as artist to task; as artist, I scorn or forget myself as critic.
• (8) All art indeed is religious – in the sense that it involves some experience of primitive mysticism. If no religion had been revealed to an artist, he would probably come to rest as a pantheist, on the basis of his experience.
• (9) Our religion deals much with classes, essences, qualities, generalities – a philosopher’s paradise – but art deals wholly with unique particulars.
• (10) Art fights death, since death is the nullifying of feeling – our religion shows us how to embrace death, since we are thus nearest to Our Lord’s Passion.
• (11) Art is an intelligent dream of life in which chaos is given pattern – religion is the science of doing God’s will, in which chaos is accepted as the working out of His will, nearly always incomprehensible in human terms.
• (12) God gave us the aesthetic faculties, like the sexual faculties, so that we would be spurred, torn, pulled this way and that, and be ill content with any harmony other than that He will give us at the end. He is the great Iconoclast – for no image can truly (fully) represent Him – and that which represents Him best is the image of a man being most terribly tortured to death . . .
• (13) By the effort to break accepted limits, art obscurely covets the infinitude of God.
• (14) In this generation the best Christian artists – Dylan Thomas? Picasso? – have been mainly heterodox or non-religious because the Church has hardly understood the void in which modern man is crucified. She has hid her face from the agony of her Divine Master. But these by intuition have seen Him and known Him as the Hidden One.

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