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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
It is a relief to turn from the apocalyptic literature, so prevalent to-day, to a book whose purpose is to indicate the elements which make for reconstruction and order in one of the basic activities of human life. Its author, the retiring President of the Headmasters’ Conference, is the head of a great school in one of the most ancient and traditional cities of this country. We need not, therefore, be on our guard against a fanatic of modernity for its own sake; and, in fact, the most striking quality of his book is the breadth and sanity of its outlook, a deep appreciation of the great things of the past with a live awareness of what is vital and sincere in our own time. ‘The affectation of despising the old masters is not less dangerous than the opposite error of looking back on art as something embedded in a lost culture, like a fly in amber. Art is continuous, and genuine modernity is not a denial, but only a fresh application in new circumstances, of eternal principles bequeathed to us by the art of all ages .... The real lover of art finds no incompatibility between new and old. His exciting consciousness of his own age, as a creative renaissance, only whets his appetite for the best fruits of archaeological research and discovery.’ The book has a further merit. There are plenty of monographs dealing with the modern manifestations of this or that art, such as Mr. Casson’s works on sculpture and Mr. Roger Fry’s on painting. No one would question their value or their legitimacy, but by the very fact that they treat each subject in isolation they continue to uphold the illusion that art is something apart and remote from normal human life. But Mr. Barton succeeds in making us realise that, in the past, art was integrated in the whole social life of the community and that it must be so again if we are to achieve a true civilisation.
1 Purpose and Admiration. A Lay Study of the Visual Arts. By J. E. Barton. (Christophers; 10/6.)
2 There is not one of these effects (of Greek culture) which Christianity does not utilise. Its place is certainly not the desert nor its dream the disincarnate mind.… It believes that the sound equilibrium of the body and the vigorous play of its functions guarantee the health of a soul, firm in its judgments and free in its activity. In a word, it agrees with the ordinary Greek view, represented by Aristotle rather than by Plato and Pythagoras that the soul and the body—i.e., the spiritual and the sensitive functions—are conjoined and compenetrate each other in the unity of a living organism, and that there is a natural connection between them against which nothing can prevail. Our body is fundamentally most certainly not our enemy, and the natural order most certainly not our seducer. The difference between Christianity and the Greeks lies doubt-less in the fact that it insists to a greater extent on the spiritual issues of bodily perfections, that it finds physical ugliness and wretchedness less repugnant, and that it establishes a more definite distinction between goodness and beauty. Above all, it maintains a certain mistrust with regard to the passions of the flesh which was not a t all common among the Greeks, none of whom would have spoken, of them in the terms of St. Paul. But here again we must beware of extremes, and not confuse Jansenist anathemas with the Christian idea of concupiscence. The Greeks themselves recommended asceticism and practised renunciation, but while they did so only in view of the increased perfection of their nature, Christianity added the idea of the Imitation of Christ and the spirit of religion. In a word, it raises the goal of activity from the human to the divine. And in this it denies nothing, but only completes and concludes.—T. Demain, O.P., Professor of Moral Theology at Le Saulchoir. (Vie Intellectuelle, 10 Sept., 1932; pp. 298–299.)
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