The subject is a vast one. I cannot therefore give more than a few leading ideas on the general theme of art as it was used and understood in the Middle Ages. We could hardly begin from the early Christian artists and follow the history of painting, sculpture, music, stained glass and so on through the Byzantine period right up to the Renaissance. It is an inspiring and vast history, until modern times very much overlooked, but now studied in great detail through a whole library of volumes.

I should like first to deal with the general characteristics, because so often people have supposed that the lack of realism displayed by the artist of the Middle Ages represented a lack of skill. The earlier age of Greek and Roman sculpture reached an extremity of realism to be seen in such popular figures as the Venus of Milo, every detail of the human figure, every fold of the loosely falling clothes described in stone with a finesse of observation which today is called photographic. And later as the Middle Ages passed into the Renaissance we find the same accurate observation and skilful representation, culminating in the pathetic marble of Michel Angelo’s Pieta in St Peter’s at Rome. In between these two triumphant periods the Christian artists seem to have been like children unobservant of details and incapable of any but the crudest representation. The modem man trained in an age of photography and extremes of technique tends to measure all art by the accuracy with which the painting or the statue represents the natural object it depicts.

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.

To start on a personal note, let me say that while I see that the visual art of Mr David Jones is a joy for ever, I cannot read the Anathemata. Mindful however of the magical beauty of those pictures, I am ready to spring to attention as soon as Mr Jones starts discoursing in prose; and so, for the purpose of commenting on this collection of his occasional papers and essays, the trouble I have with his other, ‘creative’ writings does not perhaps matter. It is partly no doubt a question of the sort of poetry one is predisposed to admire; and in my own case a mainly ‘Mediterranean’ training, and in particular the example of Dante, make a certain degree of visible order and outline in large-scale poetry a necessity for me. But our present business is with this rich miscellany of reflective prose, and here I find no difficulty at all in taking Mr Jones as a sort of Virgil-guide, a dolce maestro—in this case a Christian one—through a world he knows so well, the obscure but enchanting regions explored in this book.

I must, however, qualify the above with respect to the Welsh and Early British (if that is the right expression) matter contained here (Sections I and III), for on all this I am too ignorant to be even a good pupil. The strings of Welsh names mean nothing to me.

Both St Teresa and Franz Kafka in The Interior Castle and The Castle explore the geography of the soul. The first is a sixteenth-century spiritual treatise cast in the form of an allegory, the second a modern piece of fiction presented as a novel. In each case, a failure to pursue these terms as definitions has led to a good deal of confused critical comment.

St Teresa begins: ‘While I was beseeching our Lord today that he would speak through me, since I could find nothing to say and had no idea how to begin to carry out the obligation laid upon me by obedience, a thought occurred to me which I will now set down, in order to have some foundation on which to build. I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of a very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions. . . These words say exactly what the writer means them to; she is preparing the way to elaborate her image of the soul as a castle, just as St Augustine referred to Heaven as a city, or Bunyan to some of the landmarks on the way to the Celestial City as Doubting Castle and the Slough of Despond. Each example shows the language to be that of personal comparison—although, whereas the soul is a castle for St Teresa, for Bunyan Doubting Castle is the citadel of the Giant Despair.

A lecturer at a study week-end on the arts recently caused a mild sensation among his hearers by attributing what he regarded as the negligible contemporary impact of English Catholics on the arts to the fact that the parish clergy (he made it clear that he didn’t altogether hold it against them) were largely drawn from the lower middle classes.

This equation—lower-middle class clergy, ‘people’s’ parishes, sentimentality, vulgarity, lack of taste—has come to be largely accepted, whether defiantly or with a resigned shrug. Like many similar commonplaces, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny unshaken. Sentimentality, vulgarity and lack of taste were unfortunately part of the climate in which the Church revived and expanded rapidly after emancipation, and all classes and creeds were affected. In casual conversation of the seminary common-room type, one still hears Anglicanism equated with good taste: yet half our English medieval churches are scarred by the fury of the antiquarian wreckers of the last century. These came in two styles: the strippers, who reduced churches to barns, and the titivators who made them look like repository showrooms. On the whole, considering our limited financial and other resources, Catholics come better out of the architectural history of the past 150 years than most other corporations. Admittedly this is not saying much, but at least we were spared all that dreadful watered-down pre-Raphaelite stuff one finds in children’s corners of Anglican cathedrals.