We started with the question: How does the problem of
technical skill, of technology, present itself, and what ethos is expressed
by technique or technology in the field of liturgical art? And we have
tried to seek in church architecture and iconography the particular attitude
of life or ethos which is capable of transforming the application of technology
into a liturgical and eucharistic action, of making our relationship with
matter once again a communion and a personal fulfilment. We cannot go
further than a semantic description of the conditions of this attitude,
this specific ethos, without a danger of producing a formal deontology.
There is no one theory to specify how the application
of technology is to be transfigured into a communal event and a potential
for man's existential fulfilment. There is, however a dynamic starting-point
for this transformation of life Q use of the world. This is the eucharistic
synaxis, the communal realization of life and art in the parish and the
diocese. No political program, however "efficient," no social ethic however
radical, and no method of organizing the populace into "nuclei" for revolutionary
change, would ever be able to bring about that transformation of life
which is dynamically accomplished by the eucharistic community, or to
lead us to a solution of the extreme existential problems which technocracy
today has created.
The danger of nuclear annihilation, the lunacy of armaments,
the international growth of systems and mechanisms for oppressing and
alienating man, the exhaustion of the planet's natural resources, pollution
of the sea and the atmosphere, the attempt to repress or forget the thought
of death in a hysteria of consumer greed and trade in pleasure– all
these, and a host of other nightmarish syndromes, form the world which
today greets every infant who becomes a godchild of the Church through
holy baptism. And in the face of this world, all we Christians seem like
complete infants, feeble and powerless to exert the slightest influence
over the course of human history and the fate of our planet. This is perhaps
because, through the historical vicissitudes of heretical distortions
of our truth– distortions which lie at the root of the present cultural
impasse– we seem to have lost our understanding of the manner in
which our weakness and powerlessness "perfects" the transfiguring power
of the Church. Our power is "hidden" in the grain of wheat and the tiny
mustard seed, in the mysterious dynamism of the leaven lost in the dead
lump of the world– in the eucharistic hypostasis of our communal
body.
The eucharistic community, the resuscitation of our eucharistic
self-awareness and identity, the nucleus of the parish and the diocese–
these are our "revolutionary" organization, our radical "policy," our
ethic of "overthrowing the establishment": these are our hope, the message
of good tidings which we bring. And this hope will "overcome the world":
it will move the mountains of technocracy which stifle us. The fact that
the world is being stifled by technocracy today is the fated outcome of
the great historical adventure of western Christianity, of the divisions,
the heresies and the distortions of the Church's truth. So equally the
way out of the impasse of technocracy is not unconnected with a return
to the dynamic truth of the one and only Church. Men's thirst for life
has its concrete historical answer in the incarnation of Christ, in the
one catholic eucharist. And the one catholic eucharist means giving absolute
priority to the ontological truth of the person, freeing life from the
centralized totalitarianism of objective authority, and spelling out the
truth of the world through the language and art of the icon. Even just
these three triumphs over heresy are enough to move the stifling mountains
of technocracy. The field in which this triumph takes place is the local
eucharistic community, the parish or diocese; only there can we do battle
with the impasse of technocracy. And the more sincere our search for life
while the idols of life collapse around us, the more certain it is that
we shall meet the incarnate answer to man's thirst– the eucharistic
fulfilment of true life.
It has taken about nine centuries to move from the filioque,
"primacy," "infallibility," and loss of the truth of the person to the
present unconcealed and general impasse created by the western way of
life. Time is very relative, and no one can say when and through what
kinds of historical and cultural development people will perhaps realize
that escape from this impasse is a possibility. When the words of these
pages are wiped from human memory and all of us have disappeared under
the earth, the succession of generations, "all the generations" who make
up the Church, will still be continuing to bring about the coming of the
Kingdom of God within the eucharistic "leaven." However far off in time,
the escape from heresy is a contemporary event– not because the historical
scope of western civilization in its impasse is even now limited, but
because such is the present, eschatological truth of the Church, hidden
within the eucharistic "leaven."
In a new age yet to come, the eucharistic realization
of the Kingdom will. be embodied once again in dynamic forms of social
and cultural life, without doing away with the adventure of freedom and
sin, because this communal dynamism is the nature of the Church, the organic
consequence of her life. This new age will spell out once again, in humility,
the truth of the world, the reason in things and the meaning of history:
it will once again fashion in the icon the transfigured face of man.
Additional note:
Given the limited possibilities of conceptual distinctions, it is difficult
to give a clear explanation of the difference between the "transfiguration"
of natural material and its "dematerialization." By the word "transfiguration"
we are attempting to express the result of ascesis, of man's struggle
to reveal the truth of matter, the potentiality in the created world for
participation in true life– the possibility for the human body, and
man's construction material and tools, to form a communion; to serve and
manifest the "common reason" in ascetic experience, the experience of
personal distinctiveness and freedom. On the other hand, by the term "dematerialization"
we mean the impression matter gives us when it is tamed by the power of
the mind and will; when the hypostatic reality of matter goes almost unnoticed,
since the natural matter has been absolutely subjugated to the inspiration
of the craftsman, to the meaning he wants the work to serve, and the impression
it is meant to make on the spectator. Gothic architecture definitely gives
a sense of dematerialized space, an impression of earth raised up to heaven.
It is precisely the overpowering violence of the craftsman's frequently
outstanding genius which takes the natural material and subjects it to
the demands of the given aim and meaning. In a way that parallels this
precisely, the whole of scholastic theology is a brilliant intellectual
"dematerialization" of the truth of the Church; it subjugates the "common
speech" of the experience of salvation to the interests of individual
intellectual certainty and objective support for the truths of the Church.
None of this is meant to belittle either the "scientific" genius of the
scholastics or the artistic genius embodied in Gothic buildings. No one
denies that creations such as Notre Dame in Paris and the Chartres Cathedral
are supreme achievements of human art. But as we recognize the aesthetic
feat, so we ought also to make a distinction between the ethos and attitude
to the natural material expressed by this art on the one hand, and that
expressed by other forms of art, which embody man's struggle for the truth
of matter and the world, a struggle with the natural material in order
to reveal its personal dimension a struggle and an ascetic effort to bring
about the communal event of personal freedom and distinctiveness.