The present volume is a collection of essays on sacred aesthetics, the second by this author to be published by Ashgate; the first was Redeeming Beauty in 2007. I had thought that that first volume had concentrated almost exclusively on the visual arts such that, despite being subtitled ‘Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics’, it barely made any sound concerning the non-visual arts, such as music. Hence, I was pleased to see that what I felt was missing in that volume has now been addressed in Lost in Wonder – Essays on Liturgy and the Arts, which encompasses a theology of the liturgy, sacred architecture, iconography, art, music, literature and poetry. Here, the expanse of aesthetics is well represented, and I think it is rare to find a single author attending to such a range of aesthetic disciplines with such impressive insight and accomplishment. What unites these essays and holds them together is the author's faith in the incarnation – God made flesh and visibly manifest among us. All art flows from this fundamental truth. Hence, Fr Aidan cites the poet Charles Williams: ‘the Incarnation, had it not been necessary to man's redemption, would have been necessary to his art’ (p. 175).
This concern for the incarnation as the basis for art – especially the visual arts – is a constant in the author's many writings on the subject beginning with The Art of God Incarnate in 1980. It underlies his plea, sounded repeatedly in this volume, for the Church's return to an iconic art in the service of the liturgy which discloses the Incarnate One among us. For Fr Aidan is right to insist that art is at the service of objective truth and beauty, which is most excellently made known to us in the incarnation of Christ, and who continues to reveal himself incarnationally in the liturgy. As the German liturgist Michael Kunzler says: ‘What happened once for all in the Incarnation and redemptive work of Christ comes to pass daily in the liturgical actions of the Church’ (p. 18).
Artists today often claim still to explore truth and beauty, except that, as in modern philosophy, so too in the arts, there has been an inward turn towards the subject. Art thus becomes an expression of subjective truth. As the British ‘artist’ Damien Hirst once said: ‘Art goes on in your head… Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings’. Claudel, on the other hand, would agree that art is a response, but it is a response to God, who is beauty and truth itself (see p. 112). Hence so-called art that is blind to beauty and the transcendent, closed to the mystery of the Other who is ‘Beauty's self’ (as Hopkins put it), is not genuine art. As Pope Blessed John Paul II said in his Letter to Artists (1999): ‘Even beyond its typically religious expressions, true art has a close affinity with the world of faith, so that, even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience. In so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery’.
Hence, art must remain focussed on objective beauty, and ultimately on the truth of God; art is at the service of divine truth and beauty, above all in the liturgy. For as Fr Aidan says, ‘the beauty of God has made itself known not only in creation, but, above all, in the work of salvation, centred as this is on the Cross and Resurrection of the incarnate Word, and in the consummation of creation to which the work of salvation points the way’ and ‘the Liturgy of the Church is the principal act of celebrating the divine beauty’ (Preface, vii). Therefore, the liturgy needs and indeed, deserves, genuine art which makes manifest to the human senses the incarnate God who dwells among us for our salvation. It is he who is the ‘principal Liturgist’ (p. 17). Thus, the liturgy is not to be subjectivised but rather ‘in the celebration of the sacraments… the level of objectivity of what is taking place is raised to a higher pitch’ (p. 17). It is our privilege as christians to participate in the liturgy, and so, to thereby encounter redeeming beauty, the person of Jesus Christ himself.
Often, talk of beauty and art in the liturgy can degenerate into aestheticism, a phenomenon that Von Hildebrand deplored in his Trojan Horse in the City of God (1967). But Fr Aidan never allows the exploration of sacred aesthetics to become an issue of taste and ‘dilettantism’ (p. 178). Rather, these essays are explorations of the wondrous truth of the incarnation, of the dread beauty of the Passion, and of our being wounded by the arrow of beauty (as Ratzinger has said) so that our graced lives might reflect the loveliness of Christ Crucified and Risen. Hence, these essays have an ascetic quality combined with a true pastoral sensitivity, concerned with the proper end of Liturgy which is the glory of God and the sanctification of his people. So, for example, Fr Aidan praises Gregorian chant for its poverty, chastity and obedience (p. 125ff) – those keynotes of the vowed religious life, but at the same time, much as he loves plainsong, he notes that ‘many people will need music with more obvious warmth and richness… so as to awaken a liturgical sensibility’ (p. 128), and he points a way forward in the writings of Pope Benedict XVI.
Dostoevsky famously said that “beauty will save the world”. How and why this is so, Fr Aidan explicates in this collection of essays.
