It is often said that the earth and its creatures are God’s gifts to humankind. Animals and plants are understood to have been ‘sent’ for us, so that we may, by and large, do with them as we will. What we must do in return is express our thanks to the Creator for His generosity. We must say Grace over our meals. So John Locke wrote:

In the Christian tradition, discussions on the rights of ownership typically propose definite limitations on the private use of the earth: we may not supply ourselves with luxuries while other persons still lack basic necessities. But no limits are explicitly set on the common human use of the earth. The gazelle, then, would seem to have no right to the land on which she grazes; the lion no right to her prey. Only humans have rights of ownership, even over their own bodies. That anything non-human enjoys food, habitat or life itself is only by the mercy of homo sapiens.

A popular belief drawn from this is that certain animals are simply ‘made to be eaten’. A sheep is walking mutton. Within the Christian tradition this belief tends to be justified by an appeal to revelation.

I owe my sub-title to Winefride Wilson, one of the last members of that remarkable English Catholic experiment in the uniting of art, worship and life, the Ditchling Community, That was how she rendered the German name of an important manifesto for the revival of Christian art Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Herzensgiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), ‘Heartfelt Outpourings of an Art-loving Cloister-brother’. Wackenroder’s impassioned appeal for a renaissance of Christian art, so moribund in his period as in our own, has lost nothing of its relevance today. In this article, I propose to indicate, first of all, the significance of this subject; secondly, to place this discussion in its contemporary secular context; and thirdly, to make some proposals for retrieving, and enhancing, the lost riches of the Church’s iconography.

The Second Vatican Council instructs all Catholics that ‘those decrees of earlier times [the reference is to the Second Council of Nicaea, 787, and the Council of Trent, 1545-1564] regarding the veneration of images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the saints be religiously observed’. And this bare statement of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, is filled out in its sister text on the Holy Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. In the latter, we find a distinction (to which I shall return) between ‘religious art’, ars religiosa, and ‘sacred art’, ars sacra, seen as the high-point of religious art at large.

We have been invited to discuss the justice of war because of the Kuwait case and its aftermath. But, I believe this is not the best place to begin. Let me start by saying why.

Whether the Kuwait War was a ‘just war’ is still controversial. The ad bellum case for using force against Saddam was strong. The cause—a plain case of invasion by one sovereign state of another—was surely just by the traditional standards. Furthermore it is unlikely that sanctions alone could have got Saddam out of Kuwait (though I accept that they were not given enough time and that this meant that the ‘last resort’ criterion was not fully met). The force to be used was assembled under the authority of UN resolutions (although some have argued that these were themselves unconstitutional). The intention was at least partly to restore peace (even though putting the Sabah family back into Kuwait hardly amounted to justice and peace for the Kuwaitis). On the other hand, the in bello criterion of proportionality was always in danger of being breached. The Pope’s warning that such a war was likely to do more harm than good was timely and valid.

In 1990 George Steiner was invited to give the Gifford lectures at Glasgow University. They were well received. In fact, in Donald MacKinnon’s words, they were ‘an outstanding series’. They are as yet unpublished. While we still await their publication, the paperback version of Real Presences, his most outstanding explication so far of a theology of culture, has appeared. Furthermore, in 1993 John Hopkins University Press are publishing, under the editorship of Nathan Scott, a collection of essays on various aspects of George Steiner’s work. This article attempts to assess the preoccupation with theological issues evident in Steiner’s work from the beginning.

That culture and its meaning are underwritten by God is a thesis with a long history in literary studies. From the Greeks to Proust, from the Torah to Thomas Mann, the argument that the great artist is ‘inspired’ and communicates that which transcends both himself/herself and his/her public is an ancient one. When George Steiner began defending this argument (in opposition to the formalism of New Criticism in the States) in the late Fifties and early Sixties, he might appear therefore as a late believer in the traditions of liberal humanism. He could be seen as a man ascending a path into the mountains well- trodden before him by the likes of Coleridge, Ruskin, Arnold and T.S.Eliot. Aware, from his examination of the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky of ‘genius [who] had fallen into the hands of the living God’ (T.D. p.44), he began by exploring the frontiers of language. In 1961 we find him writing about ‘the retreat of the word’ in contemporary culture in an essay with that title. Silence threatens, he prophesies. But it is the silence of the meaningless, the illiterate; the silence of ossified cliche. In the early Sixties we find him preoccupied with this silence and countering it with another form of silence—the silence of the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus of Dante’s Paradiso—where language arches back towards its origin, ‘where the word of the poet ceases, [and] a great light begins’ (L.S. p.59). In 1966, in the remarkable essay ‘Silence and the Poet’ Steiner goes on to make the claim that here at the frontiers of language is ‘proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. . . [W]e experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours. What lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God’ (L.S.p.58).