Canterbury’s graffiti and the lost sense of holiness, goodness, and beauty

News of the “decorating” of the Anglican cathedral in Canterbury with graffiti has been met with mixed explanations and reactions. The cathedral’s dean, David Monteith, explained that festooning it with graffiti gave voice to “marginalized communities” and “younger people who have much to say.” To those who criticize the result as ugly, Monteith concedes that “there is a rawness … which is disruptive” about it, but it “intentionally builds bridges.” Presumably, if you were welcoming, you’d appreciate the travesty.

One should not be surprised at the further desecration of Canterbury for two reasons. In modern times, it’s hardly the first Anglican cathedral to suffer such indignities. Within the past decade, others have already been turned into temporary discos and miniature golf courses to make them “relevant,” so it was probably Canterbury’s turn. In earlier times, multiple versions of English Protestantism pillaged the country’s Catholic churches, abbeys, and monasteries in the name of various “Reform(ed)” aesthetics, before finally settling on an ersatz Catholic smells and bells.

The same week that Canterbury was turned into an American inner-city ghetto “artwork,” another man attacked and desecrated the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. And just last May, the Catholic cathedral in Paderborn, Germany, was the site of some half-naked actors doing a chicken juggling act before the high altar—apparently sold (without the details) to the diocese as another example of “culture.” Catholic churches have been under attack, even destroyed, in various countries.

How should we account for these happenings? Let me suggest two reasons: a loss of the sense of holiness and a loss of sacred aesthetics.

Lost holiness

The loss of the sense of holiness today takes various forms. Borrowing from modern jargon, “holiness” is a “binary” category: something either is or isn’t.

But moderns rarely think in such stark terms. That’s likely a diabolical ruse, because confronting such dichotomies likely would stir up most people’s vestigial sense of what is proper to the holy and thus mobilize them to reject such compromises. Instead, holiness gets nibbled around the edges.

Today’s problem seems to be the idea of “transitory holiness.” It’s built into ideas of churches as “multifunctional” places, a notion in vogue immediately after Vatican II that lingers in various mutations today. “Transitory holiness” seems something like a bad reverse transubstantiation. The church is “holy” from 7:30 am to 1:00 pm for Sunday morning Masses. By 3:00 pm, it transforms into a concert hall with good acoustics for the local choir, especially when choir stalls or other “churchy” architecture provide a good photo backdrop for a Christmas concert. By 6:00 pm, it might mutate into avant-garde “culture,” like the Paderborn chicken dance or the Canterbury indoors street art and tagging festival. By 9:00 pm, it is just a locked space until it becomes “sacred” again for Monday morning early Mass. And no doubt, a few “enlightened” clerics will lecture scandalized Christians to be “accompanying” of the “marginalized” whose “voices” are now being “heard” in these sacred spaces, “perhaps for the first time” through these spray can and poultry antics.

The idea of “transitory holiness” came from an Italian source that took umbrage at a cathedral in that country turning itself into a restaurant for a Caritas dinner: “the scent of spaghetti Bolognese Saturday night, incense Sunday morning.” I find the idea compelling in light of an August 2023 New York Times story about a neo-Gothic St. Louis church that had been “deconsecrated” and turned into a roller skating rink. “St. Liborius” became “Sk8 Liborius,” a play on the name. And, regardless of the duly ribboned episcopal decree, the “deconsecrated” building, by its very shape, style, structure, and history, continued to scream “church!”

All this raises questions, both about priests leasing out churches for extracurricular activities after Mass and bishops closing down churches which they think they can magically “deconsecrate” after having been once consecrated to God. Human experience tells us that holiness is a property with a peculiar “sticking” ability, one not readily shed. It cannot be turned “on” and “off,” like too expensive interior church lighting.

“Off-and-on” holiness inures people from the resistance that outright “holiness/unholiness” might elicit. But if there’s no middle ground: just as nobody’s “a little pregnant,” so there’s no “a little holiness.” The opposite of holiness is unholiness or (to put it bluntly) sinfulness. That is tied up with beauty.

Loss of the Catholic aesthetic

Alexandre Cingria (1879-1945) is a forgotten figure in Catholic aesthetics, overshadowed by his brother, the writer Charles-Albert Cingria. Alexandre Cingria was a Swiss artist renowned for his skills in the visual arts, painting, and especially stained glass. The latter works are found across Switzerland.

Cingria also engaged in theoretical aesthetics and, in 1917, delivered a series of talks that eventually became La décadence de l’art sacré [The Decadence of Sacred Art], a leading book on Catholic aesthetics in the early 20th century. It was later translated into German [Der Verfall der kirchlichen Kunst] but not English (a gap this writer hopes soon to remedy). In La décadence, Cingria asks what has gone wrong with religious art, identifying three global causes: moral, socio-political, and aesthetic.

Cingria starts with the moral, which, for our purposes, is worth focusing on, Yes, socio-political factors (Protestantism, which in its extreme Swiss variants disdained religious art, and the French Revolution, which excommunicated religion from “art”) and aesthetic factors (Cingria, like Dawson, is an unabashed admirer of the medieval, though he deplored the separation of religion from modern life) are important, but the moral is critical.

Cingria does not hold back: modern religious “art” is ugly, and ugliness is the devil’s aesthetic. The devil deplores beauty. But he doesn’t necessarily “go all the way” by usually foisting upon Christians rank ugliness. More often, he feeds them the boring and the lazy. A religious aesthetic, be it in art, music, texts, or preaching, that manages to take the earth-shattering mysteries of Christianity and put people to sleep is diabolical. And clergy who are indifferent to beauty in church play into that game, perhaps even more so than the clergy who ally themselves with what Monteith called “rawness” and “disruptive.”

Cingria has another term for the latter: “disorder.” The devil does not like order. Disorder was what he introduced into the cosmos, and he often pairs it with boredom— as with cheap “art” in churches, and mass-produced “art” that elicits no creativity, only copying. To adapt Einstein, the definition of boredom is repeating the same temptations over and over again and not wanting a different outcome.

Better known than Cingria, the Swiss theologian Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar made his mark in modern theology in part through his emphasis on “beauty.” Beauty is, alongside truth and goodness, one of the “transcendentals,” those aspects of reality that are interchangeable (because what is is true and good and beautiful). Because the transcendentals are grounded in God, they draw men to Him. By engaging people with beauty, one brings them to God.

It is not accidental that people feel a sense of elevation and closeness to God when they visit the great churches of Christendom. Cingria’s early contemporary, the French poet Charles Péguy (who liked writing his poems as if God were the narrator) even has the Father say, “in heaven … there will not only be souls; there will be things. … Cathedrals, for example. Notre-Dame, Chartres—I will put them there”). It’s this sense of beauty, for example, that Bishop Robert Barron has sought to incorporate into his evangelization efforts. The beautiful brings people to God. But if that’s true, then the corollaries are: the ugly does not bring them to God, and the indifferent leaves them indifferent to Him. Sloth is a capital sin.

We should not overlook the connection between beauty/ugliness and grace/sin. The modern world, allergic to real morality, in fact tries to reduce morality to debatable questions of taste: saying “X is bad” means simply “I don’t like X.” Saying “Y is good” just means “I like Y!”

Cingria and von Balthasar upset the modern abolition of morality that turns it into mere matters of taste by insisting that the opposite is, in fact, true. As Von Balthasar notes, what is truly beautiful draws people towards God. All normal people instinctively feel what St. Augustine put into words when he spoke of “Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved You” (Confessions, 10.27). At least the Doctor of Hippo appreciated beauty, acknowledging he was often taken by beautiful things while ignoring the Source of their beauty: “I, unlovely, rushed heedlessly among the things of beauty You made.”

And Cingria points out the opposite side of that coin, the side that so many modern clerics seem unwilling to speak aloud about: the embrace of what is not beautiful, of what is ugly, is the embrace of evil, of sin, of the devil. Every artist who aspires to paint “what eye has not seen nor ear heard”–that is, heaven–strains to produce the most beautiful vision contained in his heart. After all,  nobody paints a beautiful hell.