Art, Beauty and God.

Lawrence Feingold on the role of art and beauty in his conversion:

Prof. Smith loved to have us examine works of art from different periods to compare their distinct view of the human person. For example, he compared a Rembrandt portrait with a work of Abstract Expressionism: Woman # 6 by De Kooning, asking us which we would prefer to have in our room to contemplate on our deathbed. His thesis was that much of modern art was marked by a pervasive dehumanization that no longer manifested the truth of the dignity of the human person made in the image of God. Most of us did not simply agree with him at the time, but his teaching worked as a leaven in me for years.

It became more and more apparent to me that the dehumanization of modern art and architecture was absolutely tied to the progressive loss of Christian faith in society, and its resulting secularization. The great works of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque, were obviously based on Catholic faith, from which they drew their inspiration, in whose service they humbly placed themselves, and apart from which they cannot be understood. The interiority of a Rembrandt portrait, for example, was unthinkable without the Christian view of the immortal soul, made in the image of God, lost in Adam’s Fall, and redeemed by the blood of Christ.

I remember being in the Sistine Chapel shortly before our conversion, admiring the Last Judgment of Michelangelo and thinking how incongruous it was that I as an atheist, together with many other tourists, was admiring the Last Judgment without posing the question of the truth it portrayed. As if the truth of the Last Judgment was irrelevant to the work of art!