1. Liturgy as archetype

Jacques Maritain offers unique insights, for seldom in modern times has philosophical obligation, devotion to the Church, and sincere engagement with art and culture been so intimately bound in one individual. Maritain’s depiction of liturgy flows from a life shaped around the prayer of the Church. Reading his slender volume Prayer and Intelligence,Footnote ⁶ or his theological late essays in Untrammeled Approaches,Footnote ⁷ we sense a profound attachment to the Mass and the Divine Office. It is therefore unsurprising to discover a liturgical thread woven through his aesthetics; and it begins with the revolutionary early text, Art and Scholasticism. He writes: ‘Consider the Liturgy: it is the transcendent and supereminent type of the forms of Christian art; the Spirit of God in Person fashioned it, so as to be able to delight in it.’Footnote ⁸ Maritain declares that liturgy is archetypal: a divinely ordered, supreme paradigm for the diverse patterns of human art – all of which aspire to emulate liturgical action in some degree.

The aesthetic quality of the Liturgy underpins this rather startling depiction, and note that delight is integral. The inference is that art and liturgy, whilst remaining distinguishable because of their aims and intentions, are nonetheless unified in an ontological sense because they have an original ‘familial’ likeness. Art is essentially born of liturgy. Maritain continues: ‘But the Liturgy is not entirely immutable, it suffers the passage of time; eternity rejuvenates itself in it’.Footnote ⁹ This primitive unity gives rise to a living tradition, the spirit of which endures and emerges at different times, in different places, and in distinct liturgic or artistic forms.Footnote ¹⁰ It appears in the language, music and art of the Church, as well as in the finest secular art – which Maritain daringly portrays as ‘already Christian in hope’.Footnote ¹¹ Whatever forms, at any stage of development, the highest creative achievements refer us back to an essential liturgic ancestry, either overtly or indirectly as an echo of the divine archetype – the ‘mother art’, so to speak. Already, then, the modern artist is as religiously engaged as his or her forebears. But let us also consider the receiver of a work.

It is often observed that profound or ineffable experiences are mysteriously procured by certain artworks in both the sacred and secular domains. In philosophical terms, one might explain that the prime analogate of the beauty we see or hear, given in diverse creative forms, is transcendental beauty. Indeed, as Maritain writes to Cocteau: ‘art heralds without understanding them the invisible order and glory of which all beauty is but a sign’.Footnote ¹² This is true enough, but Maritain’s comments on the liturgy help us to interpret such experiences more directly. In the apprehension of a work – particularly one that engenders delight in beauty – what is being procured in the heart of the recipient is, at root, a desire for worship (the raison d’être of liturgy), and what is being produced by the creator of that work is a ‘via liturgica’ (the formalised channelling of that desire). Thus, the relationship between artist and audience also assumes a religious dimension somewhat intrinsically.

Maritain’s portrayal of the Liturgy as an artistic archetype is borne out historically too – for instance in chant, whereby liturgy provided the creative impetus for the entire Western musical world. Maritain reveres the Gregorian form, affirming it as a divinely authored yet humanly articulated form of song, to be afforded liturgical pre-eminence. The ancestry of this leads unmistakably back to that proto-liturgy of lyrical poems, the Psalms – which, as Joseph Ratzinger states, ‘becomes the prayer book of the infant Church, which, with equal spontaneity, has become a Church that sings her prayers’.Footnote ¹³ But Maritain goes further, correlating liturgical song with the creation of musical art: specifically, Gregorian melody as providing the archetype for all melody.Footnote ¹⁴ It is axiomatic that the influence of liturgical chant is pervasive in the Western canon; however, Maritain is drawing our attention to a deeper sense in which a melodic line discloses a truth about its creator in ways that other musical elements do not. A melody is, if you will, the transcendent hallmark or signature of its creator: the confession of who he or she is. Hence, the divine liturgy is more than just an analogate for artistic form and creation; it is more than just a creative inspiration; it is an archetype – precisely because it is the self-disclosure of its author, the Holy Ghost. Art and liturgy are drawn ever closer, as we see that works ordered to worship ultimately beget works that are ordered to beauty.

In Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry,Footnote ¹⁵ Maritain builds a rich ontology and epistemology of the creative act itself, and he doesn’t refer directly to liturgy. However, the entire work is premised on the person-as-artist emerging in a new way at the Incarnation and evolving in stages over the centuries, in response to the divine example of Christ Himself.Footnote ¹⁶ With the passage of time and especially in the modern epoch, the creative individual comes progressively into the foreground, but the archetype can never fully be erased. Throughout his aesthetics, Maritain demands that art should be more than just a choice ingredient in the presentation of something else, and he appeals directly to the Christian artist, pleading for ‘art with all its teeth’.Footnote ¹⁷ If a work is created to serve the liturgy, it should inhere to the inner foundations of the liturgical texts: not subordinated to their content, but cooperating on equal terms. Equally, those texts must deeply penetrate the creative intuition of the artist but emerge unscathed: that is to say, liturgy with all its teeth! This is the message of Sacrosanctum Concilium, which states of the music of the Universal Church: ‘as sacred song united to the words, it forms a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy’.Footnote ¹⁸ United, necessary, and integral; not superfluous, subordinate, or merely ornamental. Maritain’s message is clear: a good work of art seeks not to replicate or recall God’s perfect handiwork in a naturalistic sense.Footnote ¹⁹ Instead, the work is a resonance of its liturgical ‘parent’, continuing God’s work, and it exists only to serve the religious end from which it derives its own existence.

2. Liturgy and logos

For Maritain, it is given that the Liturgy is a received reality, and as a philosopher, he largely leaves alone questions about its inner theological foundations. Joseph Ratzinger’s masterwork The Spirit of the Liturgy is therefore an ideal point of contact. It is a familiar text to many, so I will reflect only on the summary points in the section on art and music which seem pertinent here.Footnote ²⁰ Ratzinger is preoccupied with the fundamental character and coherence of the liturgy, and his treatment of music as it relates to the great prayer of the Church is biblical and Christological. He frequently draws our attention to those historical tensions where artistic freedom and individualism began to assert itself – to the potential detriment of right doctrine, and he points to various historic resolutions.

At the centre of the relationship between art and liturgy – especially between music and words – is the divine logos, the Eternal Word, the cosmic Christ. The relationship between words-as-language and The Word-as-Logos provides an outstanding creative dynamic for the music of Christian worship. Because the Word towers over everything that exists, it rightly becomes the primary stimulus to the artistic imagination, even as we rely on the normative biblical and liturgical texts. The sacred song that flows forth will be, in Ratzinger’s words ‘a higher form of proclamation’.Footnote ²¹ If this is the yardstick for the artist, then it really is not just plainchant which submits its art to the ends of divine worship. The inspired creation of diverse new works is mandated – as has been said, to continue God’s work.

The connection between language and Logos also takes advantage of music’s natural proclivity to transfigure and transcend discursive speech. It’s a familiar enough trait. But now this characteristic is elevated in the highest possible way as it becomes enfolded into the Divine Logos and is made present to the artist as a gift of the Holy Spirit. A fine musician himself, Ratzinger states:

Above all other arts, music exhibits a higher, more spiritual freedom from the material world, and from language. But now this very quality – so perplexing to ancients and moderns alike – is given a definitive, transcendental orientation, and outworking. Music created for the liturgy fulfils its natural inclination in a supereminent way when it is ‘a music in harmony with logos … logos-worthy worship’, as Ratzinger says.Footnote ²³ There is an obvious correlation here with Maritain’s belief that all art that exhibits a particular grandeur and purity – religious or otherwise – becomes a symbolic prelude to ‘the divine harmonies of the Gospel’,Footnote ²⁴ as he states. That is, a work may augur the highest radiance, even unawares.

A third point concerns creator and creation itself: and here too we can draw a line back to Maritain’s view of the Liturgy. All the theories of antiquity about the cosmic origins of music are revised in light of the Logos as creator of everything, in whom, as Ratzinger notes, ‘the archetypes of the world’s order are contained’, and who creates following those archetypes.Footnote ²⁵ Human art seeks to conform to the work of the original artist, so it is doubly significant when art is turned to the Liturgy, which as we recall, Maritain terms the archetype of all art. Ratzinger’s message is heartening: true artistic freedom is not curtailed but enlarged in proportion to the degree that our making is cosmic in scope and ambition. The aesthetic virtues aspire and point to a final unity with theological truth, because in the Christian era, that’s where they fully began, and their growth was, and still could be, chaperoned by a creative life lived liturgically.

3. Liturgy and artist

I cannot escape the sense that both Maritain and Ratzinger remain somewhat at arm’s length from the coal face of artistic production. Actually, the trenches would be a better metaphor – given the individual we return to. Soldier, engraver, poet, painter: David Jones occupies a unique place in twentieth-century British art, with the scope and quality of his work only now being more widely known and appreciated some fifty years after his death.

In 1955, Jones dealt with his own perplexity regarding the situation of the modern artist and the Church. His astounding treatise, Art and Sacrament, Footnote ²⁶ is a complex blend of the speculative and the practical, and it goes further than Chesterton in asserting that the human person is uniquely and foremost a sign-making, religious, and sacramental being.Footnote ²⁷ Jones corroborates Maritain’s reflections on art, but without elevating any particular art, or even fine art as typical. More obliquely, he also anticipates the theological obligation to reconcile the person of the artist with the spirit of the liturgy, especially as it points to the Eucharist. Here’s what he says. ‘Art is, at bottom, an inescapably “religious” activity, for it deals with realities and the real is sacred and religious.’Footnote ²⁸ From the beginning, humanity signifies its existence in the realms of making and acting: of putting things together well, and doing right things; a creature of ingenuity, and an ethical being; given to art, and bound to prudence. For Jones, this is what it means to be human, and in the realm of art there are defining qualities that follow from this.

Creation itself, he suggests, was an entirely gratuitous act that the human artist powerfully reflects.Footnote ²⁹ The creative act is inevitable and habitual – in the way of fulfilling a natural need, and it is completely unnecessary: a thing denied to animals and angels, as he puts it. It is gratuitous. It is also intransitive – that is to say, the process of forming, of achieving fittingness and aiming for perfection is entirely non-functional, whatever the aims or ends of that making. As Jones asserts, there is no other solely intransitive activity undertaken by humanity than artmaking.Footnote ³⁰ In every point, he emphasises the reality that the human person is ‘cut out’ to create, as a means of immediately grasping a sense of one’s own being. ‘Since I myself was created, I cannot help having the desire to create’, admits Igor Stravinsky; and Aaron Copland affirms: ‘I must create in order to know myself.’Footnote ³¹

But the greatest trait comes into view as the work goes out of itself to reveal or signify some external aspect. The intransitive becomes transitive as a definite object is recalled, re-presented, and shown forth again under other forms. You can see where Jones is going. Signification is the behaviour of the human person since primitive times; and this points to the truth that sacramentum, at root, is also something unique, profound, and inescapable.Footnote ³² It is ultimately impossible to ignore the institution of sign-as-sacrament in the Christian tradition, and the centrality of those events in human history. Sacrament is neither an optional extra for the liturgically inclined nor a concession to our corporeal state: it is fully inherent to it. Thus, the most powerful observation Jones makes is also the most overwhelmingly logical. The upper room event in which the super-eminent signs were instituted by the Lord looms over us, and it changed art forever. But why? Jones tells us. Signs – forms of words and particular actions – were employed by our Lord:

Maritain, Ratzinger, and Jones all affirm that the Christian faith is deeply committed to artistic creation in a powerful and essential manner. For each, the Incarnation fulfilled the creative aspiration of the preceding ages, and it ‘deified’ the work-making of all that followed. I’ve often pondered at artists of little or no religious commitment, who have nonetheless adorned the liturgy in beautiful works, or for whom religious themes are a dominant source of inspiration. I can only surmise, from what has been outlined above and much more besides, that the truth of what is grasped in the creative intuition of such individuals is too overwhelming to ignore. Certainly art is ordered to beauty and liturgy to worship; but this statement is insufficient. When artistry is turned towards liturgy, it becomes especially oriented to its own source and final end, and it reveals the manner in which the person-as-artist is already connatured to liturgical action.

In respect of liturgy-as-archetype, liturgy and logos, and liturgy as supremely fitted to artistic proclivity, the quandary posed by David Jones vis-à-vis the modern artist can be answered. As if to sound a note of caution, Jacques Maritain ends his chapter on Christian Art by reminding us that artistic endeavour is not made easy by Christianity: there are real difficulties, and perhaps this accounts for Jones’ disquiet at the prospect of a liturgical commission. Therefore Maritain should also have the last, reassuring word: