On the Building of a Church–The Dream and the Business

Extract

If I were given three words in which to summarize my feelings about church art today, I should choose difficult, dangerous and delicate; and I should add that the nearer we get to practice the more applicable do these words become. It is all too clear that we live today in a non-religious culture. Our current aesthetic ideas and values are secular, even when they are not actually materialistic. Thus the artist who dedicates his talents to the service of religion will inevitably have to work against the current trends and feehngs of the modern world. Then the practical, the technical and economic difficulties are, as will appear, both acute and numerous. It is also a disability that the artist who devotes himself to religion, in this country works in an intellectual vacuum. There is little philosophical or theological literature available to him, and though he is often unconscious of this serious deficiency in his equipment, it is none the less there.

So much for difficulty! But surely also, to jump a point, the practice of church art calls for delicacy and restraint, and in artists or craftsmen who are not of the first order there is a woeful lack of either. This makes the whole business exceedingly dangerous for those who engage in church art. I mean that below a certain level of competence the ‘artist’ is a menace! It is no light matter to seek to give aesthetic expression to Christian truth and mystery, which, I suppose, is what is really meant by church art.