De Sanctis Recentioribus

Concerning Modern Saints

Fra Angelico, Sts. Catherine of Siena and Cecilia, San Pietro Martire Altarpiece, predella

The Church has, from its inception, honored and sought the intercession of the saints. They are venerated properly by dulia, a manner distinct from the worship fitting to God alone, latria. Creation of sacred art to commemorate them and provide a means of communion with them has been approved as far back as 787 by the Second Council of Nicea.

As the corporate action of a social body, i.e. the Church, ought to be regulated by the head(s) of that society, the recognition of the faithful dead as saints was originally made by the local bishop and after 1159 (Alexander III) potentially or certainly after 1634 (Urban VIII), by the Roman See alone. Thus after due examination of a person’s life for heroic virtue, testimony of sanctity and a life worthy of imitation, the Pope will declare such a person certainly a friend of God, worthy of veneration and currently possessing the beatific vision, i.e. is in heaven.* This decision is held by most theologians to be infallible, as a secondary object of infallibility.**

The Catholic Church canonizes or beatifies only those whose lives have been marked by the exercise of heroic virtue, and only after this has been proved by common repute for sanctity and by conclusive arguments. …

It must be obvious, however, that while private moral certainty of their sanctity and possession of heavenly glory may suffice for private veneration of the saints, it cannot suffice for public and common acts of that kind. No member of a social body may, independently of its authority, perform an act proper to that body. It follows naturally that for the public veneration of the saints the ecclesiastical authority of the pastors and rulers of the Church was constantly required.

~The Catholic Encyclopedia (1917), Beatification and Canonization

However the current and preceding claimant to the papal office, and likely back to John XXIII, have introduced and promoted a new religion within the structure of Church. Through a wholesale introduction of new doctrines, disciplines and worship following the Second Vatican Council, they have ceased to be members of the Church or be her terrestrial head. So the judgements and directives of such presumptive popes, e.g. canonizations, are not made by a proper authority and are utterly void.

This is not to say that individuals canonized or beatified by post-Vatican II ‘popes’ are not just and holy and in heaven interceding for us. Only that the faithful cannot know with certainty. Private veneration of undeclared ‘saints’ has always been permitted. Indeed an established cultus has long been an element in the process of discovery for canonization. Thus we find Fra Angelico painting St. Catherine of Sienna, several times, amongst the saints, years before she was officially raised to the altars.

So while the studio’s practice and commitments have developed over time, images of post-Vatican II ‘saints’ remain possible subjects for private veneration and Lord willing, a future, more certain reevaluation of their sanctity. ***

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* This does not exclude the very real possibility and even hope that many others, known and unknown, are likewise currently in Paradise. The certainty of their status though is, quoad nos viatores (relative to us wayfarers on Earth), unestablished. See the above regarding private veneration.

**cf S.D. Wright, Dogmatic Suicide – Canonizations, Infallibity and the Consequences

***Some discretion and personal judgement is still reserved by the studio though as not all ‘saints’ enjoy the same purity of reputation and non-infallible ecclesial judgements.

St Joseph in a Flemish Style

The congregation of St Paul's Cathedral in Birmingham, AL recently commissioned a painting of St Joseph as a votive for his patronage of the church through particularly turbulent times. Though envisioning a smaller painting, they favored the work of the Flemish Renaissance artists whose rich details would repay closer meditation on the painting.

Traditionally St Joseph occupied a secondary role in the iconography of the Holy Family and existed largely without a proper cultus. However during the Middle Ages, a renewed devotion to him began to produce images of him alone or with the Christ-child.1

Many saints's visual representation became fixed early and have remained stable, eg St Paul's short beard and balding scalp. Historically, Joseph had always been depicted as a older man, perhaps a widower. This grew from a twofold movement to explain his early departure from the Gospel accounts and to help protect the Lady's perpetual virginity and the divinity of Christ. However the growing personal devotion to St Joseph and the impact of the Council of Trent on the sacred arts saw the development of a separate tradition of his iconography.

Giotto di Bondone, The Adoration of the Magi, detail, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Paris Bordon, The Mystical Marriage of St Catherine, detail, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; Matthew Conner, St Joseph, Birmingham, AL.

Johannes Molanus argued in his De Historia SS Imaginibus2 that a younger depiction of St Joseph was more appropriate. It seemed absurd that the only way to account for his ability to control fleshy desires was through the weakening of age. How could such an enfeebled man physically protect and provide for the Holy Family in Egypt and Nazareth? Rather, a younger, more vigorous man, with the character to control his flesh seemed to resonate with the Gospel’s “just man”. Given the multiple strains of representing the saint, the younger tradition seemed more fitting for this painting as he provided a role model to men of the parish.

Scripture describes him as a faber, a carpenter or mason by trade. St Joseph stands in front of a cathedral under construction. Building on his role as foster father to Christ, St Joseph has long been regarded as protector of the Church3. Flemish altarpieces such as Robert Campin’s Espousal of the Virgin, use architecture as a structure for organizing the space as well as provide symbolic content. Here he is labouring to build up the Church Universal. While Church is one and universal, it is also local and so the small wooden church on the worktable models St Paul's Cathedral, links the part to the whole.

While the finished painting centers on St Joseph, he is not alone; he carries the young Christ. Just as the Virgin Hodegetria's gesturing hand redirects attention to Christ so all saints find their intrinsic worth in Him. The fitting devotion to St Joseph would be incomplete without directing the faithful to the ultimate end, Christ.

Patristic commentary on the Scriptures often sees typological relationships. People and events of the Old Testament prefigure the period of Christ's Incarnation which in turn foreshadow things to come in the Eschaton. Rather than cheapening previous generations for a later, more privileged age, God, the author of history, is able to weave multiple layers.4 Thus, St Joseph the Patriarch, favored son of Jacob, slave of Potiphar and later vizier of Egypt is a forebear of our Joseph.

In the tympanum over the church portal there are two scenes of St Joseph the Patriarch. On the left Joseph is taking account of the Egyptian grain prudentially and providentially being stored for the forthcoming famine. While on the right, he is seen fleeing from the amorous advances of Potiphar's wife. The industry, strength of character and chastity are all shared with the titular St Joseph.

Between the two reliefs is the seated figure of our lady with the infant Christ. Our Lady, as the porta cæli was a common sight over church portals in the Middle Ages. St Joseph's relationship with Mary and young Christ inspire the background events so often used for narrative compression in Medieval painting. On the right, we see the fuga Ægyptium, the flight to Egypt, seen here as a 14th century Burgundian town. In the deep left background lies a country farm with an inclosed garden, the hortus conclusus5 which allegorically points to the new creation effected in the Incarnation: the Virgin Mary, the new Eve, the new Garden and the new Adam. Ecce omnia facio nova.

Sprouting up along cathedral footing, as it where from Creation made new, are bulbs of wild lilies and irises. Hiding in back with fitting modesty, are a few blue irises. The color is long associated with our Lady and the iris or sword-lily refer to the prophecy of Simeon and her Seven Sorrows. Lilies are polysemic, pointing simultaneously to the resurrection of Christ and all of the faithful, Joseph's rod which buds in the Protoevangelium of James and the perpetual virginity of Mary. To echo St Thomas, symbolism can point in multiple directions simultaneously.

Thanks to Fr Bryan Jerabek for his direction without which the work would not have been possible.

St Joseph, ora pro nobis.

1 Stracke, Richard. Saint Joseph: The Iconography. 06 Dec 2017, https://www.christianiconography.info/joseph.html. Accessed 12 Oct 2020.

2 Molanus Johannes, De Historia SS. Imaginum, 1711, pg 269-73, https://www.google.com/books/edition/De_historia_SS_imaginum_et_picturarum_pr/gPe1tnQesNgC?hl=en&gbpv=0. Accessed 12 Oct 2020.

3 "ut quem protectorem veneramur in terris, * intercessorerm habere mereamur in cælis", Antiphonale Monasticum, 1934, pg 890.

4 cf St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.1.9. on God's layering the senses in Scripture; "And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the scriptures, the things that were concerning him." Luke 24:27, 44 on Christ Himself as the hermeneutic key for all of Scripture.

5 Canticle of Canticles 4:12

A pdf of the preceding.

Florilegium

And I said: Ah, ah, ah, Lord God: behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child.

Jeremias 1:6

The Renaissance - a caveat

One may wonder about the absence of the Renaissance from the three traditions outlined by Pope Benedict XVI. What is one to make of the work of Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer and Bernini, to name just a few?

An answer might be found in Pope St John Paul II's 1999 Easter address to artist.* In a passage describing the history of Western Art, he makes reference to two related but diverging philosophies motivating the art of this time, Christian Humanism and secular Humanism. In a renewed engagement with Europe's Greco-Roman heritage, both find significant importance in the human experience of the world. The former, grounded in the mystery of the Incarnation, continues the project of examining human life and the world under the aegis of a Biblical cosmology**. The later, equating such cosmology to the same bin as other antique mythologies, finds man as the measure of all things. 

This is a subtle distinction; a choice between a theocentric and anthropocentric viewpoint. In the ensuing centuries, this rift became more pronounced as the balanced relationship of Natural Reason and Divine Revelation is rejected in view of an increasingly Materialist cosmology and Rationalist epistemology. It is not a question of the data gathered but probity of it's interpretation. Sapientis est ordinare.

This dichotomy is potentially the rationale for Pope Benedict's hesitancy of asserting the Renaissance's a unqualified place in the traditions of Sacred Art. The same religious subject may on the one hand be treated reverently, in full service to the Church, the other, in a superficial way, as merely the fitting decoration for the job at hand. The technical and Humanistic appetites growing in the Middle Ages and full flowering in the Baroque, ought be garnered from the Renaissance but the artist must be prudent in the acceptance of Renaissance forms which are divergent from Divine Revelation. For as Aristotle remarks in the Politics, the forms of music are not inert vessels but of their nature, are invested with certain ethoi.***

*Pope St John Paul II, Letter to Artists, S. 10. 

**Pope Benedict, XVI, Faith, Reason and the University Memories and Reflections (Regensburg Address), On the "baptizing" of Greek culture.

*** Aristotle, Politics, viii. "On the other hand, even in mere melodies there is an imitation of character, for the musical modes differ essentially from one another, and those who hear them are differently affected by each. "

On an artist's vocation

Jacques Maritain says in his Art and Scholasticism that artists, as makers of beauty, are forever torn between the the philosopher's speculative realm and the practicality of the tradesman. One follows disinterested truth while the other, the production of good work. However if paradox can be accepted, a painter can potentially stand at the threshold and look both ways. 

Sacred Art - a methodology

Modern art should be given free scope in the due and reverent service of the church and the sacred rites, provided that they preserve a correct balance between styles tending neither to extreme realism nor to excessive 'symbolism,'...*

- Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei

Pope Benedict XVI, in Spirit of the Liturgy, identifies three traditions of art employed in the Sacred Liturgy: the Iconographic, Gothic and Baroque. While premising the same foundation, the regula fidei, and end, Dei glorificatio, their means differ.** This distinction of means might be seen under two aspects, the theological and philosophical.

The rarified vision of the Iconographic presents the events of Sacred History and the communion of saints, sub specie aeterna, from an eschatological view. The saints, no longer vacillating in the passions of life, are seen complete and at rest, interceding from the glory of Heaven for those on Earth. The images are hence windows into heaven or Sacred History where one can come and still and contemplate the mysterium fidei.

The Gothic and especially the Baroque, rather than an abstracted and objective view, present a mode of representation which is grounded in the particulars of the hic et nunc, here and now of life. The flat, ambient lighting of the Iconographic begins to cede to the more familiar light of the world even to the point of fracture, witnessed in the later Baroque Caravaggisti. Giotto's frescos begin to infuse a new wind of action and emotion. There is a move towards greater Naturalism as St Thomas articulates, "since only through sensible things can we come to know intelligible ones"*** Rather than an objective theological view, a subjective stance develops, beginning in the varities of this life and moving to the certainties of the supermundane. 

This tension has characterized much of the theological speculation within the Church. It is the relation of the transcendent to the imminent. Indeed the disparity of these two outlooks is almost insurmountable, if it not for the greatest mystery, magnum mysterium, Verbum Dei incarnatum, the Word of God made flesh. It is in the person of Christ that the transcendence of God is made knowable to man in the particularities of this life. 

A shift is also seen in the philosophical framework. While the essential material of Theology and art did not change, the language and structure used to speak of them did. Thus in this period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Platonism and Neo-Platonism which influenced the Early Church gradually cedes to the Aristotelianism which gave a new significance to the particularities of Nature. Subjects which might have been discussed in terms of imperfect manifestations of pure Forms, began to be discussed in hierarchies of genus and species, possessing essential and accidental attributes and having various levels of perfection qua active and potential qualities. Through the history of the Church, a spectrum of orthodox or better orthoprax, artistic modes has developed. Just as St Thomas posits a simultaneity of meanings in Sacred Scripture,**** so too these various modalities can overlap rather than compete. 

The body of work presented here, tries to continue an organic development of the late Gothic schools. Here the essential narrative and allegorical elements established by the Iconographic traditions meet an increasing Naturalistic appetite. The gilded backgrounds indicative of God's grace and glory sometimes cedes to the expanse of the created world and sometimes the Naturalistic precision of architecture is pushed back into symbolic form. It is in this potent meeting of schools rather than opposition that the work is formed. 

* Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 195. «Recentes imagines ac formae, ad materiam aptiores, ex qua hodie conficiuntur, non sunt generali modo atque ex praeiudicata opinione spernendae ac reiciendae; sed rationibus illis aequabiliter ac recte compositis, quae neque ad nudam contendant rerum imitationem, nec ad nimium « symbolismum », quem vocant, ac necessitatibus potius spectatis christianae communitatis, quam peculiari artificum iudicio atque ingenio cuiusque suo, oportet omnino eam nostrorum temporum artem liberum habere campum, quae sacris aedibus sacrisque ritibus debita reverentia debitoque honore inserviat;,...»

** The scholasticulus would say that they posses the same material cause, regula fidei, and final cause, Dei glorificatio, but have differing formal causes.

*** St Thomas Aquinas, ST I, Q 50, a 3, ad 3. «quia ad cognoscendum intelligibilia non possumus pervenire nisi per sensibilia»

**** St Thomas Aquinas, ST I, Q 1, a 9-10.

Bestiarium Appalachianum

Wonder over the great breadth of Creation has given birth to bestiaries, herbaries, lapidaries and even the fantastic marginalia of Medieval texts. Gilding fills the skies of the miniatures, representative of God's grace and presence, just as the millefluer and diapering symbolically attest to the fecundity of His Creation. The vastness of created things were catalogued for their essential goodness and their natures pondered for natural as well as allegorical knowledge. For as the beginning of Genesis attest, God Himself judges the goodness of His labors.

The great canticle of the Sunday office of Lauds, the litany of all creation, rises like the swelling of the sea in the praise of God:

Benedícite, ómnia ópera Dómini, Dómino: * laudáte et superexaltáte eum in sǽcula.
Benedícite, Ángeli Dómini, Dómino: * benedícite, cæli, Dómino.
Benedícite, aquæ omnes, quæ super cælos sunt, Dómino: * benedícite, omnes virtútes Dómini, Dómino.
Benedícite, sol et luna, Dómino: * benedícite, stellæ cæli, Dómino.
Benedícite, omnis imber et ros, Dómino: * benedícite, omnes spíritus Dei, Dómino.
Benedícite, ignis et æstus, Dómino: * benedícite, frigus et æstus, Dómino.
Benedícite, rores et pruína, Dómino: * benedícite, gelu et frigus, Dómino.
Benedícite, glácies et nives, Dómino: * benedícite, noctes et dies, Dómino.
Benedícite, lux et ténebræ, Dómino: * benedícite, fúlgura et nubes, Dómino.
Benedícat terra Dóminum: * laudet et superexáltet eum in sǽcula.
Benedícite, montes et colles, Dómino: * benedícite, univérsa germinántia in terra, Dómino.
Benedícite, fontes, Dómino: * benedícite, mária et flúmina, Dómino.
Benedícite, cete, et ómnia, quæ movéntur in aquis, Dómino: * benedícite, omnes vólucres cæli, Dómino.
Benedícite, omnes béstiæ et pécora, Dómino: * benedícite, fílii hóminum, Dómino.
Benedícat Israël Dóminum: * laudet et superexáltet eum in sǽcula.
Benedícite, sacerdótes Dómini, Dómino: * benedícite, servi Dómini, Dómino.
Benedícite, spíritus, et ánimæ iustórum, Dómino: * benedícite, sancti, et húmiles corde, Dómino.
Benedícite, Ananía, Azaría, Mísaël, Dómino: * laudáte et superexaltáte eum in sǽcula.
Benedicámus Patrem et Fílium cum Sancto Spíritu: * laudémus et superexaltémus eum in sǽcula.
Benedíctus es, Dómine, in firmaménto cæli: * et laudábilis, et gloriósus, et superexaltátus in sǽcula.

All ye works of the Lord, bless the Lord: * praise and exalt him above all for ever.
O ye angels of the Lord, bless the Lord: * O ye heavens, bless the Lord:
O all ye waters that are above the heavens, bless the Lord: * O all ye powers of the Lord, bless the Lord.
O ye sun and moon, bless the Lord: * O ye stars of heaven, bless the Lord.
O every shower and dew, bless ye the Lord: * O all ye spirits of God, bless the Lord.
O ye fire and heat, bless the Lord: * O ye cold and heat, bless the Lord.
O ye dews and hoar frosts, bless the Lord: * O ye frost and cold, bless the Lord.
O ye ice and snow, bless the Lord: * O ye nights and days, bless the Lord.
O ye light and darkness, bless the Lord: * O ye lightnings and clouds, bless the Lord.
O let the earth bless the Lord: * let it praise and exalt him above all for ever.
O ye mountains and hills, bless the Lord: * O all ye things that spring up in the earth, bless the Lord.
O ye fountains, bless the Lord: * O ye seas and rivers, bless the Lord.
O ye whales, and all that move in the waters, bless the Lord: * O all ye fowls of the air, bless the Lord.
O all ye beasts and cattle, bless the Lord: * O ye sons of men, bless the Lord.
O let Israel bless the Lord: * let them praise and exalt him above all for ever.
O ye priests of the Lord, bless the Lord: * O ye servants of the Lord, bless the Lord.
O ye spirits and souls of the just, bless the Lord: * O ye holy and humble of heart, bless the Lord.
O Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, bless ye the Lord: * praise and exalt him above all for ever.
Let us bless the Father and the Son, with the Holy Ghost; * let us praise and exalt him above all for ever.
Blessed art thou, O Lord, in the firmament of heaven: * and worthy of praise, and glorious for ever.