Listening to another medieval podcaster who I shall leave anonymous, she was describing quite breathlessly the ornate vestments from Westminster Abbey, two in another collection and among the few that survive. "My heart stops a beat just to look at them," she said. She also referenced the lovely paintings of lords and ladies that adorned the walls of the hallway leading to the exhibit, and the beauty of them brought a sort of rapture to her voice. Almost...worshipful.
She expressed regret at all that was destroyed in the Reformation, especially under the Puritans. Most people would agree with her, especially those who have no god to worship and so substitute in things like beauty for their transcendent experiences. Those certainly would see no point in regarding such things as an obstacle to god because to them it would not be an obstacle. Beauty is fine as a final destination for them.
Most believers would approve of beautiful music, beautiful architecture, beautiful decoration in worship and places of worship as well. I tend to side with them on the matter. There was the joke about the Episcopal Church so exclusive that it had a wine list for communion, well-capturing the ridiculousness of the extremity we can bring to what is supposed to be simple worship. But if you are the local winemaker asked to supply for the Mass every week a thousand years ago, do you not bring your best? If you are a poor trumpeter but pressed into service for Easter, do you not practice to make it the best you can?
So the Puritans and other iconoclasts must be wrong, surely, in their destruction of the beautiful things that separate us from God? Yet the worship in her voice reminds me that they were very much onto something real. For some, at least, and likely more of us than admit it, beauty and nostalgia are idols.
3 comments:
This is part of the theme of the video I just posted at the Orthosphere. I understand the Puritan's iconoclasm, but at the same time regret its legacy to American architecture. The Puritan plain style isn't solely to blame, of course, but when mixed with capitalist accounting gives rise to the brutal functionalism that blights so much of our landscape. Beauty naturally invite idolatry; worship naturally calls forth beauty. The dilemma is inescapable. The only solution is to understand idolatry and recognize the creeping presence of idolatry.
Truth and Beauty is the first division of the Good. You wouldn’t distrust Truth, because it is true. Beauty isn’t, always. But it is still very close to the Platonic ideal of goodness.
Best book I ever read on the subject of what idolatry is (and isn't) was Herbert Schlossberg's "Idols For Destruction". Any time we place something other than God at the pinnacle of our value system, and start imagining it as the source of all blessing and judgment, we are engaged in idolatry. As well as courting our own destruction.
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