Feature
Art & Religion
A Few Thoughts on the Literacy Problem
“The trouble with modern education,” says an old Jesuit in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, “is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.” Waugh’s Rex, who was going through the motions of conversion for reasons of his own, was so ignorant that, in a supremely comic moment, he is deceived by the mischievous ten-year-old Cordelia into believing in the sacred monkeys in the Vatican and the pope who made his horse a cardinal. “‘I don’t say there mayn’t be a good reason for all this,’ he tells the priest, ‘but you ought to tell me about it and not let me find out for myself.’” Things have slipped even since Waugh’s time: the current edition of Brideshead now bears on its cover the inscription, “Companion to the PBS television series.” I suspect one might be hard put to find a college student, Catholic or not, who could tell you with precision what a cardinal or the Vatican is.
An example: a student at Barnard was assigned a museum paper for a basic art history course. She dutifully chose a painting at the Met and made a scrupulous analysis of its formal elements, line, color, spatial configuration and so forth. When she came to the final section of the assignment, “Tell how the artist relates stylistic elements to the narrative or iconographic intent of the painting,” she checked the label and duly found her picture to be a Nativity. Had she been a little more ignorant, she might have dipped into the dictionary and found that one Nativity in history stood out from all the rest; as it was, she knew the word meant “birth” and proceeded as follows: “Everyone is happy when a new baby is born. The grandparents come from far away; everyone brings a present . . .” This was my revelation of the darkness at the heart of American education, the same sinking feeling E. A. Hirsch, author of Cultural Literacy, had when he realized that University of Virginia students (Virginia!) did not recognize allusions to Appomattox.
Her teacher at the time was a graduate student, as was I, and together we shook our heads in perplexity. How, we wondered, could we teach art in its historical context to students with no grasp of history? How could we show them how a painting was meant to be read in its own time, how it was meant by its maker to be seen, if its content was a total unknown to its beholder? Some of us choose to beg the question entirely, and treat art as a self-evolving phenomenon that can be dealt with in purely stylistic terms, standing or falling on its own formal aesthetic merits. But to teach art in a vacuum is to rob it of half its value or more, for religious art, especially in the age of Christendom, was meant to be read not only as beautiful object, but also as an integral part of a greater whole, the liturgy itself.
To propound such a theory nowadays, however, guarantees one a curious reaction, from puzzled stares to downright derision. In colleges and universities, any mention of religion as a serious matter is likely to be met with active hostility. I recall one Columbia professor explaining how a Titian painting in which the donors are presented by their patronal name-saints to the child Christ via the Virgin, functions in the same way as intercessory prayer. He was met with a burst of mocking laughter. Startled, he chid the class mildly for its ignorance and boorishness. “Oo,” whispered my seatmate derisively, “I think we’ve just been spanked.”
What is one to do in the face of such obdurance? One attack might be to teach iconography as a thinly veiled briefing in the basic concepts of Christianity. “If you haven’t ever read a Gospel,” proclaimed the Renaissance lecturer of my undergraduate days, “for heaven’s sake read one now, or you won’t have any idea what’s going on.” Only then can one hope to explain how a work of Christian art would have been read in its own time, and how it functioned in real life, whether as a means of instruction, a part of public liturgy, or an aid to private prayer. I have had some success with this approach, but maybe only because it seems to impart secret and esoteric knowledge to the student, cool facts which very few other people know. In any case it is certainly a good opportunity for a subtle apostolate.
The job was a little easier in a museum setting, or maybe only a little less discouraging because I didn’t meet as much resistance. Still, ignorance was rife. One fellow curator, a woman with a doctorate, was working on a project centering on the concept of the divine child. She asked me to explain to her why the infant Jesus looked like a miniature adult in Byzantine art, but like a baby in Flemish painting. I gave her a thumbnail sketch of the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, and explained that the Church at different times and situations had placed different emphasis on his humanity and his divinity. His divinity. That brought her up short. Was he thought to be divine? Yes, I said, he was thought to be God. That was the whole point. New concept, she said; she thought, he was supposed to be the son of God? She had never heard any of this, and frankly she was a little surprised. Was I a Catholic? Did I believe all this? Again I was reminded of the word of Brideshead’s Charles Ryder: “No one had ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent philosophy system and intransigeant historical claims; nor, had they done so, would I have been much interested.” This can be dispiriting. The best one might hope for is that one might pique one’s audience’s interest, to plant a seed that, under the right weather conditions later on, might sprout and actually come to something. Perhaps that is always the way of an apostolate.
At the moment, the art business is booming. In entertainment terms, a blockbuster exhibition is the next best thing to a ticket to Cats. People are dying to Know About Art. Museum cafes have become fashionable watering spots. A recent exhibition of paintings by Titian—Titian, without even a Ninja Turtle named after him—drew such crowds as to entail a 45-minute wait to get in. “If there are this many people in America who want to see Titian on a weekday,” remarked one friend, a musician, “why do we have such collective bad taste?” The answer is, perhaps, we want to know, but we’re awfully ignorant. The time is ripe to reintegrate art and religion, art and life.
One place to do so might be the churches, where those interested in religion might be more receptive to the concept of its expression through artistic means. Here, I discover, is the flip side of the problem: learning has become so compartmentalized that those who have given serious study to religion, who make it their business, are often totally ignorant about art and its historical integration into liturgy and prayer. An example here: in a local church, an Edwardian Tudor beauty, a new pastor rearranged the furniture of the sanctuary into a big semicircle in an effort to integrate it into a seamless whole with the nave and aisles. He was pleased with his efforts, and put a note in the bulletin asking for people’s reactions to it. An art historian trained in ecclesiastical architecture was lurking in the congregation and responded with an explanation of the historical development of the sanctuary space, its liturgical import and meaning, and the ways in which the axial arrangement of the cruciform church’s interior space functioned to reinforce and enhance the symbolic significance of the sanctuary (the church stands for the Mystical Body, the Church, with Christ at its head, etc.) In short, the new arrangement was not necessarily a good idea in the abstract, and it was doomed to fail anyway. The pastor’s reply was, “I appreciate your sensitivity, but it’s just a matter of taste.” The obdurate are not confined to academic circles either.
Here then are the prongs of the dilemma (at least there are only two). Those who know, profess to know, or want to know anything about art have little or no knowledge of or interest in religion, while those who pursue the interests of religion know, profess to know, and apparently want to know nothing about art. So how does one go about the difficult matter of reintegrating art and life into a coherent concept of culture?
One can always begin with oneself. All through school, I was regarded as a sort of local native guide to things Catholic. My fellow students looked on my Catholicism fondly (I like to think) as an innocuous hobby horse, the kind of quick eccentrics and art historians are prone to, and a useful tool for deciphering arcane iconographies. I could be relied upon, for instance, to explain how what went on in an altarpiece might related to what went on at the altar, how the work of art in its architectural context might be meant to enhance or inform worshipful prayer. Yet you would be amazed to learn how late in life I learned to integrate visual imagery into my own prayer life, learned to pray before such icons as one was meant to do. I could (and did) explain the process to you in elaborate detail; I simply never did it myself. The realization that I could—and should—came like a thump between the shoulderblades.
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
Maternal Body: A Theology of Incarnation from the Christian East by Carrie Frederick Frost
Fertile Ground: A Pilgrimage Through Pregnancy by Laura S. Jansson by Agnes R. Howard
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
The Alternate & Alternative Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft & C. S. Lewis by C. R. Wiley
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
