How does society change when it refuses to include God in art? Join Cy Kellett and Dr. Marcus Peter as they explore the impact of removing God from global art and culture after the Middle Ages.
Transcript:
Every American Catholic is is highly Protestantized. And so your view of moving from a Protestant view of Christ as redeeming culture to a Catholic view of Christ as transforming culture—could you talk about what that means? Cuz I think more American Catholics need to get on the transforming bandwagon and off of the more Protestant redeeming or rejecting bandwagon.
When I was a Protestant, when I was with the Assemblies of God, it was always us against the world, us against the culture. Christ came to redeem people from the culture. So yes, you know, he came to redeem culture. But because Protestantism, especially low-Church Protestantism, which was what I was a part of—I was with the Assemblies of God—it’s a very iconoclastic version of Christianity. There is no beauty, there is no overflow of the Christian identity into the arts, into conversation, into palons, into literature, none of that. It’s very purist. Not just Puritan, but purist, view of Christianity.
Now, a pure view of Christianity is a good thing. That’s what the Catholic Church has. But when you divorce the influence of Christ and his Church from every facet of human existence, you have divorced one of the most powerful effects of the Gospel—which is that matter and the material world are not inherently evil. Created by God, by virtue of his existence, it is good. That which God calls into being is necessarily good. It is fallen, by virtue of the sin of Adam—and especially the sin of Adam, right?—it is fallen.
And so the Gospel of Jesus Christ, his saving work on the cross, and his Eucharistic banquet—these are things that redeem the culture from that corruption. But it’s not enough to say that the Eucharist and Christ’s sacrifice have saved culture from corruption, saved man from corruption. He now wants to take us from where we are into conformity, as Paul writes, into the image of Christ.
So we’re ever growing. By virtue of our creation in being human creatures, we have this Imago Natur, right? We have this—the image of nature, the image of God within us. This is the light of nature within us. Grace comes into our soul, and the image of God, now by virtue of baptism, is elevated into the Imago Christi. We learn this essentially in the Summa Theologiae. Aquinas illuminates this extremely well, especially in his treatise on baptism.
In the image of Christ, I’m now called to become so much like Christ because I have been endowed with the same sonship that Christ has. And if that’s the case, then the material order that I have dominion over—and every baptized person has dominion over—is now put under the dominion of Christ because it was under the dominion of me. And if that’s the case, then Christ didn’t just come to save me and tear me away from culture. This material order has a purpose. That which comes from God in the metaphysical order must go back to him.
Going back to the fundamental of this question—Protestantism would argue that Christ came to draw us away from the culture. And it’s always contra mundum, right? Christianity contra mundum. And sometimes there’s truth to this. But the greater reality is, with each Eucharistic celebration, matter is being allowed to be subsumed. In fact, in every sacramental celebration, matter is being allowed to be subsumed into becoming instruments of grace.
Literally, in the Eucharist, bread and wine are transformed into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord and Savior, God himself. And that continued transformation of the material world builds culture. And that’s why, throughout the entirety of Western civilization—honestly, the entirety of Christendom, I should say—the greatest heritages have been built around the altar.
Especially when you think about St. Benedict and Western monasticism. Sorry, put a token in me, but this is my life. This is what I do. The Scriptures transform the world, and now they transform me. Please, go.
Oh no, I just love listening to it. But I feel like—I wonder if you agree with this. It seems to me that modern people—part of being modern is, you have to have a negative view of the Age of Faith. You have to take a negative view of Christendom. Because if you don’t, what you will see is that project was better than the project we’re on now.
Like, you have—like, that’s why we get so much “medieval darkness.” Even the word medieval—you can’t look at—well, of course, then Notre Dame starts to burn down and you go, “Oh, was that all evil and dark? Because look at what’s in the middle of the city of Paris.”
But maybe you could say something about that? The modern mind, uh, is—is, um—and it’s strange that the Protestant mind is caught up in this—a rejection of the Age of Faith. Because they were actually doing better than we’re doing.
Yeah, it really starts with that first wave of de-Hellenization that started with Luther and the early Reformers. The divorcing of faith from reason, as if reason had corrupted faith, made it so that inevitably you’re going to wind up with a fideistic, voluntaristic version of the faith. Luther himself said, “I’m nothing if not a nominalist.”
So this nominalistic, voluntaristic version of the faith has so divorced itself from reason that reason was left as a wayward daughter to develop on her own. And what did she do? She rebelled against Mother. And the Scientific Revolution sprouts and explodes. And now this daughter comes into maturity, but she has completely severed ties with her patrimony, right?
And so you look at the sciences and the greatest heritages of scientific discovery. I’ve—I’ve always been a big proponent of the Great Expansion—or as it’s modernly called, the Big Bang, right? Father Georges Lemaître was a Belgian Flemish priest. Yeah, a Catholic priest. In fact, so brilliant was he, but also so nondescript, he provided Albert Einstein with the final equations necessary for his theory of general relativity.
We don’t talk about that enough. But that’s beside the point. The sciences develop so much, and then you get these great post-Christian, post-Catholic revolutions happening, especially in Europe. Then you get the French Revolution that divorces national identity from any form of the faith—to the effect of rejection of it, right?
Individual Protestants realize that without a centrality of reasonable, orthodox doctrine and authority, it becomes wayward. So from the Protestant Reformation—Revolt, I say—to now, what we really see is we’ve developed a truly Protestant mindset of the world. Not just in America—yes, I know, our Founding Fathers were largely Protestant—but globally. Because we’ve divorced ourselves from those things that are true, good, and beautiful in history.
So the lies about the Dark Ages—the branding of it as the Medieval Era—it’s a complete repudiation of the great advances of art, of poetry, of literature, of even the sciences, technology, and thought, philosophy. The complete repudiation of all of that—as if these were backwater hobos.
And then you take a look at the cathedrals in Cologne, or Notre Dame, and you realize—these backwater, dirty peasants made that. Something that our modern architecture can never emulate.
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