The Way of Beauty: Charles Scribner’s A Preface To Christian Art and Music

God has given me many opportunities to remember him, and two of these channels, art and music, have led me to authentic encounters. This is why I truly believe artistic expression, part of that “via pulchritudinis” — the way of beauty — must be recovered by us today.

It may have happened on some occasion that you, as I have done, paused before a painting, or lingered, listening to a piece of music that you found deeply moving, that gave you a sense of joy, a clear perception. In such a moment, what you beheld was not only a painted canvas, or an accumulation of sounds, but something greater, something that speaks, that can touch the heart with its sense, communicate a message with its reason, uplift the mind, engage the heart.

Early in my life I was graced by the company of my aunt, Agnita Britzman, a painter, who taught me during our many visits to galleries and museums that a work of art is a product of the creative capacity of the human being, who in questioning visible reality, seeks to discover its deep meaning and to communicate it through the language of forms, color, and scale. She reminded me that art is able to manifest and make visible our human need to surpass the visible, expressing the thirst and the quest for the infinite.

Throughout my life, I have learned that art resembles a door open to the infinite, to a beauty and a truth that go beyond the daily routine. It has given me ascension.

I have also learned this from the many concerts and great recordings of music that I have been able to experience all through my life.

Indeed, some artistic expressions are real highways to God, the supreme Beauty. They have helped me to grow in my relationship with him in prayer. These are works that were born from faith and express faith. I’ve seen and heard examples of this when I’ve visited a great cathedral: I’ve been enraptured by the vertical lines that soar skywards and uplift my gaze and my spirit, while at the same time I’ve felt small and yet longed for fullness.

I’ve had this encounter when I entered a chapel and was spontaneously prompted to meditate and to pray. I perceive that these splendid places contain, as it were, the faith of generations. Or when I’ve listened to a piece of serious music that plucks at my heartstrings, my mind, as it were, expanded and turned naturally to God.

I can still remember when I was sixteen years old, hospitalized with double pneumonia, listening repeatedly to an oratorio of Bach on a cassette tape recorder with earphones, deep into the darkness of night. While listening, I felt, not by reasoning but in the depths of my heart, that what I was listening to was communicating truth to me, the truth of the supreme composer, and, there and then, it impelled me to thank God. I still remember saying almost aloud to myself: With this music I understand that faith must be true; and Bach, too, another being of my species, knew such a strong faith must be true. Because another knows this and can transmit it to me, it must be the way beauty expresses the presence of God’s truth.

From the time I was a small child, visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art and seeing the many fruits of an artist’s faith — in their form, in their color, in their light — I have been urged to think of God and have had a desire to draw from the source of all beauty. For me, it’s always seemed as though painters for centuries have dipped their paintbrush in that variant and lush text of the scripture. I believe that is how artistic expression can bring me to remember God, to help me to pray or even to convert my heart.

Exactly that happened to Paul Claudel, the French poet, playwright, and diplomat, while he was listening in the Cathedral of Notre Dame to the singing of the Magnificat during Christmas Mass in 1886. He had a tangible experience of God’s presence. He had not entered the church for reasons of faith but rather in order to seek arguments against Christians and instead God’s grace worked actively in his heart.

We are a species that needs guides for us in navigating a path. We find some of them in the creation of artists — the artists of vision, the artists of sound.  And we have a long history of those who have toiled to express in a thousand forms the sacred, God-given life of the soul to no other purpose than that the soul plays in complete gratitude before God.  If our history teaches anything, it is that the soul [ought] not to see purposes everywhere, not to be too conscious of the end it wishes to attain, not to be desirous of being overly clever and astute, but to understand simplicity in life.  As I will tell those who say they “got nothing out of art of Bernini,” “got nothing out of the music of Bach”: “You’re not supposed to get anything out of it. You’re there to allow it to help you channel your adoration.”

Looking at great art and listening to great music helps amplify an appreciation for signs and symbols, and it also warns, in its quietly profound way, against having a merely “aesthetic” appreciation of life. Indeed, these sacred muses level a harsh critique of “aesthetes” because we belong not solely to beauty but also to truth. Of course, beauty inspires awe – the “Ah” of a child upon entering a Gothic cathedral. My point is that beauty eludes those who pursue it for its own sake; otherwise, all of the world is a dark charnel house. Over centuries, our path of gratitude has developed into a work of art; it was not deliberately formed as such by the Church, but something much, much, more. And that much, much, more has given us beauty and truth, words that have been and should continue to be our first. Beauty and truth are the last things which the thinking intellect dares to approach since only they dance as an uncontained splendor, as a constellation, an inseparable relation to one another.

This permits us to ask: Do we “get anything” out of art and music?

At times, we experience genuine tranquility and awe, but these moments are fleeting, and we must be content to accept them as they come. Closely tied to this awareness is the problem of our will and the desire for autonomy — “the will to power” of Nietzsche, whereby the “superman” fashions his own forms of worship, so as to achieve what he wants to experience. The way to avoid such a process is found in the priority of contemplation, of looking and listening, the wonderful power of composure necessary to the ritual of our everyday life and its deep tranquility – contemplation, reverence, and admiration of truth. In other words, our art and music, as well as our vision and sound, should give us nourishment, recharge our soul, and bring us to repose. It should not agitate us. In the midst of the many occupations that fill our days, it should help us to find time and opportunity for God and for devotion.

A new and slim book, Sacred Muse: A Preface to Christian Art & Music, by Charles Scribner reminds us that the beauty of faith can never be an obstacle to the creation of artistic beauty, because, in a certain way, it is its lifeblood and its ultimate realm. The book (I think of it as a handbook, a field guide) offers what is intended as a brief, (richly illustrated with many color plates), essay to instruct and persuade. It is written for teacher, student, and amateur alike –anyone who wishes to explore the periods and artists, those guardians of beauty in the world, who thanks to their special aesthetic sensitivity and their intuition can grasp and understand more profoundly than others the beauty proper to the faith, and thus express it anew and communicate it in their own language.

Although I found myself taking my time with it, lingering on its meditations, it is a book that could be read in one sitting. It is a book that will amply provide the reader with a generous and widely hued survey of art and music of the ages, from early Christian to the present. Perhaps what is most welcome about Sacred Muse is the way in which it is a deeply personal testament. In fact, it is a kind of summation of Scribner’s life-long journey in study and teaching and appreciation of the Baroque giants Ruebens and Bernini, alongside the towering Caravaggio, and musically Palestrina, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Verdi, and onward.

When Scribner writes of Rubens and Bernini, situating them adjacent to Michelangelo, he is offering us a way of, refreshingly and unapologetically, centering all history in Christ, who is both the transmission of that history and the very expression of a new experience in time, in which past, present, and future make contact, because they’ve been inserted into the presence of the risen Lord. Furthermore, these works confirm anew, each time we come to them, a staggering presence containing within their frames our eschatological hope. Michelangelo, picturing humanity and divinity alike in idealized form, created something quite new. He made something that freed us. It developed the “aesthetic” in a modern sense, a vision of beauty that does not point beyond itself but is content in the end with itself, the beauty of the appearing thing. We experience ourselves in our own autonomy, in all of its grandeur. This is an art that speaks of our grandeur almost as it were surprised by it; it needs to reach for no other beauty. This is the vision of divine beauty. And, surely, we see it, as Scribner does, in the Sistine Chapel’s Creation of Adam. It’s an art that takes in the moment, the present, and brings redemption through beauty itself.

That sense of redemption, of beauty, was not only coming to bright fruition visually: Haydn, later, in his Creation, composed late in life, with its “thunderous chords and evocative harmonies, and soaring lines,” offers an example of the most sublime way how art and faith can be webbed. And, like Michelangelo’s Pieta, in its ability to transmit an absolutely original artistic expression, which, at the same time, is in complete service to a moment of faith. Both Haydn and Michelangelo made art that conceals a universal rule of artistic expression: that of using a physical medium to communicate a beauty that is also good and true. This is the same law that God followed when communicating his love to us: He became incarnate in our human flesh and created the greatest masterpiece of the entire creation: the one mediator between God and us, the man Jesus Christ.

Moving to art made in the Baroque period, which followed the Renaissance, Scribner gives us many different aspects and modes of expression, most of which emphasize the didactic and pedagogical character of art, as a fresh start toward interior renewal, leading once more to a new kind of seeing that comes from and returns within, especially in the work of the second Michelangelo, the great painter of altarpieces, Caravaggio. His altarpieces are like windows through which the world of God comes out to meet us. The curtain of temporality is raised, and we are allowed a glimpse into an inner world of God. We especially see this in his Seven acts of Mercy, depicting the seven acts of corporal mercy, which can still be seen to this day at Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples. This art inserts us directly into the Gospel.

If it can be said that there is a musical equivalent, it is Mozart, with his simple, profound, unique balance. His music goes to the point without rhetoric, tangent, or fluff. Every note is essential; and all of it is filled with purpose. Although Mozart wrote a substantial amount of secular music, his musica sacra is the essence of purity, with its simple message: a joy, an expression of a higher perception of a whole, something that we can only call inspiration out of which his compositions seem to flow naturally.

This is certainly true of Bach’s music as well. It, too, has a power, a rationally organized sound of human voice and instruments, with its dynamics of tension and relaxation, establishing a somewhat mysterious link between emotional experiences of human life and the interplay or “concert” (from Latin “concertare,” meaning “engaging in contest”!) of melodies, harmonies, timbres, volume, and tempo that can move us deeply. When matched to a message or text, this emotive power takes on a specific meaning with this branch of music playing a prominent role in the history of music, and, indeed, the history of civilization.

Scribner, whose focus is clearly, and for the purposes of this essay, European, guides us through the centuries, leaving us with a strong reflection on the sound and vision of the twentieth century and ongoing. While he laments the Expressionism and Cubism of the period’s visual art, and the waning tradition of the century’s music, including Francis Poulenc’s “soul-searching” The Dialogues of the Carmelites, he does see and find hope in the century’s medium of film. “Ours,” he writes, “is an age of technology and electronic recordings; perhaps these will provide new means and media for transmitting (the Christian) tradition.” He cites The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, the great biblical film of Pier Paolo Pasolini, as a transmission of that hope, that possibility.  Beyond all the technicolor blockbusters, this austere black and white film gives us a Jesus, a God who condescended to join us in our frailty, inviting us to redemption.

Images and sounds of beauty, in which the mystery of the invisible God becomes visible, should be an essential part of our lives, and indeed in our gratitude and worship. There will always be ups and downs in the history of our sounds and visions, upsurges and declines, and so periods when images and music are somewhat sparse. Sacred Muse confirms that art and music will always find its subject in the images of salvation history, beginning with creation and continuing all the way from the first to the eighth day, the day of the resurrection and the Second Coming, in which the lines of human history will come full circle. The sights and sounds of our history are rightfully steeped in the sacred arts, and we need not disown the path these arts have followed for over two millennia. I’m especially grateful that Scribner closes his essay with a visit to the Nevelson Chapel, St. Peter’s, in New York. Standing in it, and then kneeling in it, as I have, I have sensed a similar optimism as expressed by Charles Scribner III. I was reminded of how the personal can reach out to reach the universal when we encounter the sacred muse, especially when I remember the imperative stated in the second epistle to the Corinthians. Gazing at the creation of the sacred muse, we are “changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (3:19). Take this book as you stand before great art or listen to great music. It will give you a new or renewed gift or seeing and hearing.

Sacred Muse: A Preface to Christian Art and Music
By Charles Scribner
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023; 128pp

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