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Sacred, Holy or Religious Art?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Desmond Chute
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There is a very real sense in which everything that is is sacred. We say, or at least said, that life is sacred; motherhood is sacred, and so on. Far be it from me to deprecate this usage. For does not the root evil of our time, the secularization of life, he precisely in atrophy of the religious sense? It was this very tendency of the historical process which caused voices to be raised amid the wilderness of nineteenth-century industrialism, reaffirming the holiness not only of God’s creation but also of the works of man.

Holy: holiness: here we have le mot juste. We say God is holy. The word is inadequate but not erroneous. It would never occur to us to say God is sacred: not only would that be erroneous, it would be absurd. Sacred to what? This question alone is enough to make it clear that whereas the concept of holiness is absolute, that of the sacred is relative. It might be said that holy is predicated of God and of his gifts to us, sacred of our gifts to him.

Whatever is sacred is holy, but not all that is holy is sacred, save in the very diluted sense of meriting our respect. Be it clear from the outset that in these pages the word is not used in this its most generic meaning but in the truest and most positive sense by which sacred signifies set apart by man for the worship of God.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 36 , Issue 418 , January 1955 , pp. 570 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © 1955 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 The reference is to ‘Elements of Sacred Architecture’, by Graham Carey (Catholic Art Quarterly, XI, 3 Google Scholar). It may here be pointed out that sacred is perhaps not the most accurate epithet to apply to the kind of culture in the author's mind, which might more rightly be described as hierarchical or theocentric.

2 This definition, often quoted by Eric Gill together with another—‘a work of art is simply a thing well made’—is derived from the late W. R. Lethaby.

3 Here, as elsewhere, the word Gregorian is used with precise reference to the reform carried out under the auspices of this Pontiff, as distinct from the pre‐Gregorian chants of the fourth and fifth centuries as from the Greek chants followed and from the still later style of the Kyriale and of the Sequences, all of which is indeed Plainsong (or chant), but which it only makes confusion worse confounded to describe as Gregorian.

4 Cf. his Religion and the Modern State (London: Sheed and Ward, 1936).

5 A convenient example, in so far as in his case fame is commensurate with merit. Martin Schongauer and Andrew Rublev, roughly his contemporaries, run him dose in this, if somewhat behind in that. Nor must one ever forget the anonymous masters and pupils in all ages to whom the bulk of sacred and religious art is owing, notably, in the present instance, the many unidentified Flemish, and such German painters as the Meister des Peringsdörfer Altars, whose Vision of St Bernard embraced by the crucified Saviour is one of the most perfect, as it is one of the latest, examples of a medieval art at once devotional and sacred (reproduced in Die Altdeutsche Malerei, Ernst Heidrich, Jena, 1909, bei Eugen Diederichs).

6 Can this inadequacy be altogether extraneous to the difficulty so often met with today of making this devotion acceptable, more especially to catechumens and converts?

7 Cf. Danish Art Treasures throughout the ages; Catalogue illustrated. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1948.