Reflections on “America and the Angels of Sacré-Coeur” by David Bentley Hart
In the December 2011 issue of The New Criterion, David Bentley Hart explores his signature theme, the confluence of culture and religion, using as a departure point the interior decoration—in particular, the pendentive angels—of Paris’s famous Montmartre Basilica. Hart’s argument centers on causality, citing the Basilica’s birth as a product of the faltering French Christianity of the late nineteenth century, one composed of politics, history, economics, aesthetics, and, last but presumably not least, spirituality. He reflects on how causality has shaped western civilization, giving rise to an increasingly secular culture—one that is arid, brittle, and bereft of “spiritual labor [and] an openness to revelation.”
Sacré-Coeur sits impudently above the city, its gaudy blend of the Romanesque and Byzantine irresistible to photographers. An obliging blue sky forms the perfect contrast for its improbable whiteness; the façade resists city soot because it is clad in travertine marble, a stone that exudes calcite, thus perpetually renewing the building against the depredations of the environment. (The spiritual metaphor here is clear.) Hart sees it as a “synthetic memorial . . . concocted from equal parts morbid nostalgia and sugary fantasy.” Inside, he passes from the “huge, hideous mosaic” of the apse to concentrate on the four chancel vault angels carved in high relief on the natural stone supporting the center dome. “Were it not for the transcendent longings they embodied, or for the ecstatic creativity those longings once evoked, there would be no church there at all. And one knows this, however fleetingly, in the instant of their apparition.”
He continues with a splendid summation of just how four stone angels signify the divine intimations inherent in western civilization:
“After all—and this is a truth so certain that only the most doctrinaire Marxist or lumpen British atheist could deny—the structure of culture is essentially an idealist one, and a living culture is a spiritual dispensation. A civilization’s values, symbols, ideals, and imaginative capacities flow down from above, from the most exalted objects of its transcendental desires, and a people’s greatest collective achievements are always in some sense attempts to translate eternal into temporal order. This will always be especially obvious in places of worship. To wax vaguely Heideggerean, temples are built to summon the gods, but only because the gods have first called out to mortals. There are invisible powers (whether truly divine powers or only powers of the imagination) that seek to become manifest, to emerge from their invisibility, and they can do this only by inspiring human beings to wrest beautiful forms out of intractable elements. They disclose their unseen world by transforming this world into its concrete image, allegory, or reflection, in a few privileged places where divine and human gazes briefly meet.
Such places, moreover, are only the most concentrated crystallizations of a culture’s highest visions of the good, true, and beautiful; they are not isolated retreats, set apart from the society around them, but are rather the most intense expressions of that society’s rational and poetic capacities. And it is under the shelter of the heavens made visible in such places that all of a people’s laws and institutions, admirable or defective, take shape, as well as all its arts, civic or private, sacred or profane, festal or ordinary. This is a claim not about private beliefs, or about the particular motives that may have led to any particular law or work of art, but about the conceptual and aesthetic resources that any culture can possess or impart, and those are determined by religious traditions—by shared pictures of eternity, shared stories of the absolute. That is why the very concept of a secular civilization is nearly meaningless.”
Hart does not introduce Sacré-Coeur and its angels in order to contrast moribund European Christianity with jingoistic paeans to American spiritualism. American religious life is too “odd and paradoxical” for broad generalizations, Hart writes. Rather, he is warning us about the “final triumph of true cultural secularism.” He sees this as a real possibility given that we are a nation built on a constitution that categorically separated itself from the politically-integrated Christendom of Europe. In addition, we have further rejected the invigorating potential of the supernatural by entrenching material reality in American culture, by fiercely guarding our position of global leadership, and by maintaining a perverse pride in our social enlightenment. How baffling it is, Hart muses, to discover that “American society has [never] really succeeded in erecting a partition between its religious and its civic identities.” How could it be otherwise in a nation that engraves "In God We Trust" on our national currency?
Further, Hart contends, we are especially susceptible to the secular—and, conversely, oblivious to the supernatural—because American religion offers so few imaginative resources. It seldom aspires, Hart notes, to a higher culture. We carry over the separationist principles of our political groundwork, so that “inward conviction and outward form” seldom converge. The result is a religion of pragmatism and austerity, but very little beauty. “It is,” Hart writes in a fine distinction, “a religion of feeling, not of sensibility; it might be able to express itself in great scale, but not as a rule in good taste.”
Which brings us back to Sacré-Coeur. Its grandeur and scale make it almost impervious to criticism and it is easy to forget its real purpose as a house of worship. The Basilica’s official Web site carries this adjuration: “Tout visiteur de Paris aperçevant les coupoles de la Basilique se dit: La haut, en ce moment, quelqu’un prie pour moi!” By looking up to the domes of Sacré-Coeur, we are reminded that someone up there is praying for us. As he looked up to the Basilica’s angels, Hart, too, perceived this in the form of “the advent—and the gaze—of immense and numinous presences.” Prayer is another form of what he calls “transcendent longings,” and he expresses hope for a future if we recognize this as a form of grace given to ease our spiritual labors on behalf of civilization.
© Leann Davis Alspaugh 2012. All rights reserved. Photograph of the pendentive angels of the chancel vault, The Basilica of Sacré-Coeur by Didier B, Wikimedia Commons, accessed 13 January 2012; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sacre_Coeur_-_Coupole.jpg
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