Theological Notebook: A Few Pieces on Faith and the Arts

[novak]

One of the clear and sensible assessments reported in the book review of Theodore Ziolkowski's Modes of Belief: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief that I read in the latest issue of Commonweal (as I reported doing on my journey to Montreal) was from a comparison the reviewer made to Charles Taylor's recent masterpiece A Secular Age. (The

Comments

[verdanthe]

Another perspective:
"Because nothing in our world can do better than hint at the beauty of the kingdom of God, natural objects are rendered in a vivid but symbolic, even abstract, manner. It is only in modern times that artists like Chagall have begun to rediscover the value of icons in ignoring rules of perspective and figures that defy gravity. Thus Chagall is able to show in this painting something about the nature of marital love that could not be revealed with such immediacy in a realistic painting of a husband and wife together in their kitchen. But then Chagall, though Jewish, grew up in a world of icons - a Ukranian town."

Jim Forest is not a great writer, and not a scholar, but I thought this idea was interesting and relevant to your train of thought.

[novak]

That is an interesting continuance from what I had written. The idea of "icon" as broadening out from the formal notion of icon would seem to be in line with what Ziolkowski was arguing about a broadening out of the notion of the "religious" in art. And I think Forest (I knew of him through his association with Thomas Merton) is right on target for pointing to Chagall as emblematic of such a 20th century sensitivity.