Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 48:192 (Oct 1891)
Article: The Influence Of The Apocalypse On Christian Art
Author: George Rue L. Bates

BSac 48:192 (Oct 1891) p. 670

The Influence Of The Apocalypse On Christian Art

Rev. George Rue L. Bates

THERE was a long period in the history of Christendom during which the aesthetic and the religious elements in the minds of men were intimately united. The artistic product of this time can with peculiar propriety be called Christian. Hence to this period, known as the Middle Ages, we shall confine our view.

Following close upon the complete permeation of the Roman work! by Christianity, came the ages of ignorance. No sooner had a Christian learning and culture begun to grow, than there fell upon all learning and culture a killing frost. The sack of Rome by Alaric came in the lifetime of Augustine. But in the winter of barbarism by which all culture was blasted, Christianity survived. And while this winter was passing away, and the movement of intellectual life was beginning to show itself again, Christianity stood at a great advantage over all rival influences. The only plant surviving from the ancient world, it soon spread and filled all the fields of human thought and imagination. So it came about that the church furnished not only the religion of the new Europe, but also the law and the science, the art and the poetry. While the imagination had only the legends of the church to feed upon, the religious and imaginative faculties seem to have become so blended that men must believe all they fancied. They had not yet learned how to enjoy poetry without believing it. The lore of the celestial hier-

BSac 48:192 (Oct 1891) p. 671

archy, the virgin mother, and the multitude of saints furnished at once objects of worship and a field for the imagination to work in.

Thus arose the sacred art of the Middle Ages. Primarily it was the expression of pious feeling. Symbolic pictures, like those in the catacombs, were intended purely as means of edification. So, at first, were those of Bible scenes, of Jesus and his apostles and his mother, of famous martyrs and holy men and women, worked in mosaic or painted in fresco in the churches. But the creative faculty and the sense of the beautiful grew and demanded expression, and the demand was granted in the field of religious art. There was no objection to making angels and Marys beautiful. The love of beauty gradually grew beyond religious feeling. At the same time, men began to be educated beyond the simplicity of a faith which built upon imagination. The study of pre-Christian antiquity and a general intellectual awakening brought in a flood of ideas from outside the church, and the aesthetic sense broke away entirely from religion. This was the Renaissance. A Christian art, in the full sense, was after this impossible.

In an age when artists had only the Bible and the legends o...