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Faith and Twentieth Century Forms
By John W. Dixon, Jr.

The critical event of the twentieth century is not the death of God but the death of the vertical.

Or are they the same thing?

The vertical divides the paper into the skeleton of the grid. Each number or each person assumes a place within the grid. The grid is the structure of death.

On a flat earth, all perpendiculars are parallel: the grid. On a round earth, all perpendiculars radiate from a common center. Trees are radiant from the earth like light from the sun.

The earth can be round literally and known to be round, without being round, mythically. We live in the myth.

Buckminster Fuller notes that for pilots, airplanes do not come down and go up. They come in and go out. How could it be otherwise for a man who can think where Calcutta is when he is in New York?

The primitive village is one among many like itself, scattered evenly over the land, connected by a web of real but slight tensions. Along the lines of this web, man travels or fights with those nearest to him.

This article was prepared as an experiment in communication and was presented as a lecture at the conference on "The Church and the Visual Arts," held at Valparaiso University, Indiana, May 4, 1968. The poem "Grace Note," repeated several times in the article, is by Abner Dean (Wake Me When It's Over, copyright by the author, 1955). Mr. Richard Lippold, the sculptor, who is referred to in the article, was also a participant on the same program. Mr. Lippold's work has been exhibited in many museums, including the Whitney, Modern Art in New York, the Tate in London, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan in New York. The quotation beginning "Ultimately, however . . ." (p. 33), is from the author's book, Nature and Grace in Art (1964), p. 201. The poem by James Worley, "Heterodoxology," is from an unpublished manuscript. John W. Dixon, Jr., is Professor of Art and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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The Egyptians who made the pyramids gave the world an axis. They also made Pharaoh and the slaves of Pharaoh. The Sumerian who made the ziggurat made a stairway to heaven so man could reach to the gods. He also made Sargon.

The Sumerian also made possible Gudea, just as the Egyptian made possible Queen Hatshepsut.

Primitive painting consists of animals in composition of indefinite extension without the grid of the vertical and horizontal. Primitive sculpture is woman with no face, great breasts, belly, and buttocks, an embodied function, a primal force.

If God is at the top of the great stairs, or at the top of the world axis, what happens when there is no longer any axis?

Around 2800 B.C. the first pyramid was built. The axis was established. The grid took shape. By 1904, for Frank Lloyd Wright, a house radiates out from a central core; the vertical core only supports it. In the intervening four and one half millennia, western religion and philosophy were created, assuming that human experience was organized in a hierarchical pattern.

"Thus says the Lord:
Heaven is my throne
and the earth is my footstool"
(Isaiah 66: 1).

Why is a superior religion or civilization called higher? What is the meaning, in church or university, of saying "the church 'from top to bottom' "; "the university 'from top to bottom"'? Hierarchy is dead.

Men can choose to speak of God as he, she, or it. Thus they can choose to be related to God homosexual, heterosexual, or neutral. But homosexuality and the neuter are unfruitful. Heterosexuality is-sexual. Is there any language for the proper reference to God that is not sexual? The writer of Solomon's Song thought not. Bernini and St. Theresa thought not. The writers of the gospel

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hymns thought not. The women who linger too long after church to talk to the preacher think not. What is the emotion felt by the demure and innocent nun as she contemplates the crucifix? St. Theresa said she was penetrated by the arrow of the Divine Love. John Donne said it ravished him.

But we have no language to talk about sex. The word itself in all its expletive ugliness does not refer to an act or a relation; it simply refers to the difference between men and women. Then for the act, and the parts the act joins, we have only Latin terms, evasive, bloodless. What should we put in their place? There are only short expletives, harsh, blunt, spasmodic. Adequate perhaps to what goes on in the back seats of automobiles, but not to the rhythmic flow, the responsive rhythm, the passion and power of what happens between a man and a woman.

If we cannot talk of God without the language of sex; if we cannot talk of sex because our language hides it from us; how then do we talk of God? Can a language that denies life speak of God?

And what happens to God when the axis of the world is broken?

"Remember the word-?
The one from the manger-?
It means only this . . .
You can dance
With a stranger."

If God is not he, she, or it, is God then androgynous? The priest wears the garments of women, as did the shaman before him. In our culture, a man in the garments of women is either ridiculous, perverse, or sacred. In the primitive tribe, the androgyny was holy.

Several years ago there was a characteristic book-burning scandal over Katzansakis' novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, which presents Jesus as small, weak, and neurotic. Yet a dominant image of Jesus since the sixteenth century has been androgynous. This has been almost the exclusive image since the nineteenth century, including the debased Byzantinism of most modem, "sacred" art. What does it do to the psychic health of a culture. If its God is an androgyne?

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Among those who have rejected our culture it is difficult to tell the boys from the girls.

Contemplate the destruction of Marilyn Monroe, the pouting child face, the marvelous, meaningless body, all eroticism and unfruitfulness, given to a series of men and masturbating boys, willingly going to destruction at the hands of a violent and brutal culture which condemns in horror the smashing of a store window by a frantic Negro but quivers lasciviously at the destruction of such lovely sensuality! So Andy Warhol gives us the face. And again, and again and again and again and again. Like a judgment. Or a soup can. Or is a soup can a judgment? Is soup sensual?

What is the difference between men and women? How can they know what that difference is if God is not a man or a woman? Do I find my meaning in a neuter God? Or the androgyny? How does a man know a woman or a woman know a man? Are we forever shut off from each other?

Or what did destroy Marilyn Monroe?

What did you think or feel when you thought I might use the one syllable words? It is fashionable now to do so; they are supposed to be a sign of freedom. How many of you could use or hear them casually? Or do you get sensual satisfaction from hearing them, or from contemplating the virtue of your indignation at hearing them? But these words are not tokens of honor or honesty. They are night words. The pleasures of them are not in openness but in hidden ness. The pleasures of pornography are in its forbidden ness. Does the legalizing of pornography extend or restrict the psychic freedom of man?

The Playboy philosophy is a philosophy of play, not adult seriousness. Love is inseparable from lust. It is a rare person who does not find evil stimulating. Every orgasm is a little death.

A psychologist has conducted experiments on a species of Norway rats. These creatures have a clearly defined and attractive life style. They are hunters but do not attack their own kind. They are

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monogamous with a clear mating ritual: the male pursues the female who escapes into her burrow, and then she puts her head out to watch him dancing before her. She then emerges for the coupling. The experiment consisted of significantly reducing the available space. Some of the rats become apathetic, abandoning the hunt. Some became cruel, torturing their prey or attacking their own kind. Some became homosexual. The mating ritual was destroyed, and the male now pursued the female into her burrow. Several males often used one female till she was exhausted or dead.

Is homosexuality a problem in medicine, ethics, or city planning? Why are undergraduates so frantic to gain access to the private quarters of the other sex?

Contemporary houses have no basements, or if they do, the basements have large windows and no mystery. Where does a modern child go to enter the earth, the buried, the hidden, the mysterious? In my grandfather's house there were always rooms beyond the room I was in. Underneath there was a vast space, full of closed boxes and coal and old tires and abandoned tools and darkness. The back stairs went past the maid's room. In twenty-five years I saw that room only two or three times and never entered it. It was small and dark and clean and had the odor of a room occupied by a hardworking woman who used cheap powder.

Erik Erickson says the psychic life of a woman is defined by the sense of a hollow space inside her body.

I was always a little in awe of the backstairs. The maid was a woman who had cared for me when I was a baby.

Contemporary houses have no attics either and often no stairs. In my grandfather's attic, there were rooms of trunks, boxes with things like old doorknobs, the official records of the civil war, a dressmaker's dummy from the 1890's. In one dark corner an electric connection box looked like a spider. Such courage as I have was in part formed in the act of walking past that corner to get to the next room, which had a wonderful box full of keys. I slept once in the room that had been my grandmother's. I could hear my fiancée

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moving around in the next room. Later the house was sold to a physician who turned the back study into a consulting room. Once I spent an afternoon in that room reading in the Message and Papers of the Presidents. At a family reunion, a table was set up there for the children. I do not know the physician and he does not know me. I don't know what the room looks like as a doctor's consulting room.

The violent destruction of property is condemned, sometimes to the point of death if performed by individuals. The men who destroyed Lake Michigan as a viable ecological system are honored and respected members of society. The Mayor of Chicago would kill a child for the burning of a store. We destroy great works of architecture for private profit. Our housing developments, our shopping centers, are so ugly, not from economic necessity, but because the destruction of nature and the creation of ugliness give sensual gratification to many in our society.

The sexual relation of man and woman is entirely legal, but it cannot be represented publicly. Murder is illegal but can be represented in all its detail. The tortured figure of the victim of judicial murder, writhing in death agony on the instrument of his execution appears in homes, hospitals, churches, and as personal ornament. Sexual union, which has brought enormous pleasure and comparably little harm to the human race, is represented publicly nowhere in the world except for the temples of Konarak and Khajuraho. The Christian missionaries, dangling their crucifixes, called those sculptures unspeakably and inhumanly obscene.

"Remember the word-?
The one from the manger-?
It means only this . . .
You can dance
With a stranger."

I

Shall we change the mode of treatment? This was a rather "donnish" experiment in a fashionable mode of presentation. It is supposed to be allusive, indirect, discontinuous. It speaks directly of sex, which is fashionable, and does so in slightly vulgar language,

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which is also fashionable. It mixes subjects because, of course, human experience is discontinuous. And even though the genre is fashionable, all this is perfectly true. Experience does interlock in ways inaccessible to our formal intelligence. But formal intelligence is a mode of living as well, and all I have said is reducible to propositions, to formal statements of the contemporary condition. I have alluded to the problem of achieving and maintaining sexual identity, the symbolism of religious language, the psychological consequences of urban planning, the symbolic and psychological importance of domestic architecture, the directionality of spatial thinking. It all sounds bloodless and impersonal when put this way, but it is true that we can think in abstract, impersonal terms as well as in the allusive, personal, but undisciplined mode of the first attempt.

I tried deliberately to suggest a range of modern problems, not all of which appear to be germane to my intent. It might, for example, be judged that I have referred to fundamental problems of modern culture when I identify and suggest the sexual problem, but that is not my concern now, as the spatial problem is. But also contained in my experiment is the implication that the two are not separable. If I were asked to state what in my judgment are the chief problems of contemporary culture, I would answer immediately: the problem of sexual identity and the problem of the organization of space. The first can be specified more exactly as the problem of the nature of women. We know more about the nature of men than we know what to do with, for all thought for several millennia has been based on masculine or neuter images of order and relation. What we don't know is what women are. It is not the only major cultural problem, but there are others that cannot be resolved until this one is and, conversely, this one is the key to many other locks. Yet I have tried to make clear that this question is inseparable from the way in which we live in and organize our space. It is not only the pathological manifestations in the experiences related to those of the Norway rats. It is the normal experience. Who we are as man or woman is inseparable from our experience of space. This space is the space of our own bodies, the space of our houses, the space of our cities, the space of nature. The artist is human, and he generates his art work out of his experiences of the common life in the common space, but, to a degree matched only by the scientist, his responsibility in the common life is the genera-

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tion of the image and the structure of space which sustains us as we live within it.

Thus the major conclusion to draw from my preliminary explorations is that our culture is built on an image of order in space which has dominated all our thought and all our institutions for nearly five thousand years, and that, in our own day, that order, that image of space, has died. It is not entirely the spatial image alone that concerns me, as vital as that is. It is rather the image of order built on the images of space, for the image of order determines the structure of faith, or our conviction about who we are and what our responsibilities are. The problem of the church today is not a problem in its formal theology or its institutional structures; it is a problem in its organization of space.

II

Does this suggest that Christianity is built on an image of order that is transitory, that it is organized around a principle that is less than eternal and immutable? It does not so much suggest as assert exactly that. Does this suggest further that we must now extract the living core of Christianity from the manifestations of it in a passing spatial image? Again I assert rather than suggest. This is not our duty because it cannot be done. Christianity was born not only into a particular culture but into the particularities of that culture. We know enough about culture and personality to know that we cannot think of a self inhabiting a culture and be independent of it. The self is, in part, its culture although not co-terminus with it. What the Christians did exploded the Roman empire, but the Christians themselves were late classical people and therefore could not see Christianity except by means of and in terms of the peculiar imaginative vision that characterized the eastern Mediterranean.

There was a vast range in this imaginative vision, shaped as it was by Jew, Greek, and Roman, and more than touched by the submerged but powerful imaginative forces of North Africa and the Middle East. But there were common assumptions that provided the skeleton of the varied imaginative acts, and these assumptions coalesced to provide the structure of the western imagination within which we have lived. The sense of a dominant verticality went back to the Egyptian pyramids, the Near Eastern sky-gods, and the Greek acropolis. Linear time was biblical. Fused with Greek causality,

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this linearity rapidly became the dominant mode of thought in the western world. Matter was de-sacralized by the Jews, made intelligible by the Greeks, made subservient by the Romans. This is, of course, vastly oversimplified, but I am convinced it describes basically the imagination of man that shaped and was shaped by Christianity. It is this imaginative structure that has been eroded away by the creativity of the modern world. The warfare between science and religion has ended, for science and art have demolished the imaginative structure on which Christianity was built.

We now must look at the imaginative structure that has replaced the one destroyed. Obviously I have to be selective, else I would be speaking in such general terms as to be very nearly meaningless. In being selective I will be most dangerously particular and choose for my examination the work of the contemporary sculptor, Mr. Richard Lippold.

Please note that in examining this work I am not sitting in judgment on it. It happens that it gives me a great deal of pleasure to look at it, which I suppose is what we mean when we say a work is good, but at the moment that is beside the point. Neither will I assume the right to tell Mr. Lippold what he should have done or even what he did do. What I want to do is describe what happens to us because of Mr. Lippold's work.

I should like to underline that way of putting it. Of course, what has happened to us has been because of a great many people and not Mr. Lippold only, but his is a distinguished part of it.

The first thing that happens is the transformation of our relation to space. This comes about in a variety of ways. Unlike Jackson Pollock's paintings, which have abandoned axiality altogether, Mr. Lippold's works are still axial but multi-axial; the axes stream off in all directions. Sometimes one axis-particularly the vertical -will be stronger but amiably so. It does not dominate or control the work.

Next, it is necessary to see that it is organized according to its own structural tensions and not according to my view of it. It is serenely indifferent to me. Thus, instead of standing securely in my own place contemplating the subservient work, I participate in the radiant space of the work.

A corollary to this is the transformation of my sense of material. What is the material of Mr. Lippold's work? If I look at it out of

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Plate I. "Variation within a Sphere #7: Full Moon," by Richard Lippold. 1944-1950; 10' X 2'; brass, nichronie wire. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Plate II. "Variation within a Sphere #10: The Sun," by Richard Lippold. 1953-1956; 20' X 20' X 20'; gold-filled and stainless steel wire. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Plate III. "Homage to Fabergé," by Richard Lippold. 1963; gold, silver, copper, nickel. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

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Plate IV. "Flight," by Richard Lippold. 1963; bronze, gold-filled, and stainless steel wire. Pan-Am Building, New York.

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the corner of my eye, it appears almost solid, but if I look at it directly, it dissolves into light. Or is it space? Or tension?

The clarity of inside and outside is a requirement for an orderly sense of time. The terms hardly have any meaning any more. Who can talk intelligibly of inside and outside with this work? Is the space on the other side still "my" space? Or is it the space of Alice's mirror?

Do I meet Mr. Lippold as a person when I look at the work? Yes, of course, for he made it. But what kind of personality made it? I don't know, for the dramatic imprint of the person is not there and the drama has been the soul of art for five hundred years. The connection with the artist has been cut. The work is singularly there. It is serenely elegant and endlessly fascinating, for it seems so carefully to exist in a new space and time detached from me, and from Mr. Lippold.

The philosophically minded among you may recognize the ordering of the notions I have used here. I have affirmed that Mr. Lippold's work requires us to reorder our sense of space, of time, of material and cause. These happen to be ancient and honorable philosophical categories; but more to our purpose is the fact that the phenomological psychologists assert-and I think rightly that these categories are the basic modes of our ordering in the earth. They are, in short, the definition of the self.

There is a further conclusion to be reached. What I have outlined as the effect of the work of Mr. Lippold, and his colleagues for a long time past, is very nearly an exact contradiction of the statements about these categories that have prevailed for about three thousand years. We are, it is clear, in one of the fundamental revolutions in human history.

Still another conclusion. This is less apparent in the work of Mr. Lippold than in some of his colleagues, but if his style is described in sufficiently general terms, as I tried to do a moment ago, it becomes apparent that this is not the first time we have had such an ordering of things. Nearly the same descriptive terms can apply -again, very generally-to primitive cave painting. The basic differences are great and of the first importance, but the likenesses are of even greater psychological significance. It may be even more illuminating psychologically if the same fundamental ideas appear in the work of Mr. Lippold, who brings a cool and sophisticated

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rationality to his work, than it would be with some of his colleagues, who are more concerned with fecundity and primitivism in general.

What this suggests is that, at a new level of self-consciousness we are reliving what is basic to the history of man. There are those among us who want to go back to the archaic- I think of Robert Graves, Norman O. Brown and Richard Rubenstein-but at this point the cool intelligence of some of our artists is as important as the erotic passion of others, for it makes possible not simply the mind-suppressing return to the primitive past but a taking up of what was basic to the primitive intelligence into the vital life of our own day.

III

Now I hope the shape of my argument becomes clearer. I do not want to offer a theological interpretation of modern art. Nor do I want to extract theological implications from the work of the modern artist. Both of these efforts would, it seems to me, be quite false to the best work of the modern mind. Rather I want to define as accurately as possible what they have done both for us and to us. What they have done is to diagram for us the redefinition of the self, showing us with remorseless clarity who we are. This kind of vocabulary used to be applied to those artists who reveal to us our moral life, the grandeur and the misery of man. When the modern artist abandoned the narrative, finally when he abandoned representation, this part of his responsibility was partly surrendered. Rather he is concerned with the primary disposition of the soul, the skeletal structure of cosmic order by which men live, which in fact they are. There is nothing mysterious or mystical about this, despite the inflated sound of the language. I am speaking as precisely as I can-and I think it is possible to be quite precise-of our structuring of space, of time, of material, of cause, of order, of force, of tension and rhythm, those modes of our relating ourselves to each other and to the world.

Have I then provided a rationale for the use of avant-garde forms in the public life of the church? Even though this is more fun, and ultimately more profitable, than the attempt to make modern art theologically relevant, it seems to me ultimately as futile. It is true that we now have to admit that-as Christians-our sensibility is woefully impoverished. Our sensibility may be well nourished else-

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where by our participation in the work of modern culture, but it is not nourished in the public life of the church. The conclusion of this line of reasoning would appear to be to bring those nourishing forms and experiences into the church. This is a worthy thing to do. I, with many other people, find church services extraordinarily dull, and the vitality of contemporary art could liven things up considerably. But I am not at all sure that dullness is a necessary symptom of falsity. Liveliness is not an inevitable criterion of truth. To use modern art is a good thing, but T. S. Eliot's comment is still valid: the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. But what is the wrong reason and, conversely, what is the right reason?

The wrong reason is beginning the Christian life with the creations of man and expecting to move from there to God, like Jack climbing the bean stalk. Current dogma has it that God is in the "secular" order, but since this assertion exists without the possibility of demonstration or proof it is no more than a postulate convenient to the circumstances. The theologians of the secular don't know any more about where God is than I do. As one who lives in the secular order, I can properly ask: if I can have these experiences without theological baggage or Christian responsibility, why assume extra burdens? We are led inevitably to the dissolution of a distinctive Christian affirmation or experience, for creativity is defined elsewhere. The kind of Christian life we attempt to maintain is parasitic on cultural forms.

IV

I have therefore reached certain conclusions that make life rather difficult for us:

(1)Christianity as we have known it is inescapably tied to certain modes of apprehending and ordering the world.

(2)These structures, these modes of the imagination, have irretrievably died and are now in the process of being replaced by new structures.

(3)We cannot revive the church by manipulating its common life in the modes of contemporary sensibility.

For the committed Christian, this is a depressing and discouraging prospect if it is, indeed, true. I am not quite so pessimistic. We

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have learned these things from the enterprise of modern art, of modern science, of the modern mind, but we have learned other things as well, one of which is to redefine the questions involved in the summary I have just made. Let me examine this great enterprise then, again in very general terms, to see what it looks like.

I have tried to show that we have accomplished a new and unprecedented self consciousness. One great consequence of this self consciousness seems to me the discovery of true ecurnenicity. When we discover that our primitive ancestors are still meaningfully alive in us, when we discover that Christ really wasn't shut up in our little box, shutting out other men's structures, then we began to live in those structures as well as grasp with some sense of wholeness what they were trying to do. Tolerance of social customs, sympathy for cultural forms, does not really give access to the essentials of another people. To grasp, even to live within, the spatial order of another people's images is to communicate with them at the basic human level.

If I am right, much of the movement of the modern mind, the modern sensibility, has been a yearning toward this community of man. Some of this is bizarre, particularly in its sexual manifestation, some very dangerous, particularly in the use of drugs, but some is both humane and noble. Very often, particularly in the theological community with its growing awareness of the imperialism of the church's ancient claims and the collapse of the church's inherited language, there has been a turning away from the Christ, an abandonment even of the name. Sometimes this is simple apostasy. Sometimes it is a truly Christian yearning to transcend the barriers that finite languages have set up between men. Always this abandonment will dissolve the faith.

And yet there is little reason to think the abandonment is required of us. We may have learned the partiality and limitations of our language but we have also learned the common humanity of man and the possibility of our participation in it. The temptation of the intellectual in our day is to make the artist what he never should be -the high priest of a religion of form. The appeal for relevance, the appeal for the use of the new art in the church, is dangerously close to the repetition of the ancient error-trying to shut up Christ in a box. It is a box, even if it is the newest and most fashionable box. Yet Christ does not come to man like that. He can speak

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only in the language of the incarnation; it is not possible to conceive of Jesus apart from the structure of space and time which he sanctified by his presence. To demythologize the gospel is to drain it of its life blood, even when we know that we nourish ourselves and experience the world by means of a wholly different mythic structure. If Christ could not live fully within those mythic structures, he cannot live fully in ours.

Thus we do not give the contemporary artist authority over Christ, but neither do we give a Jesus, shaped by a first-century imagination, authority over our culture. We must know, rather, that Christ is he who comes in the immediacy of things, and the conviction that Christ is in this or that aspect of the contemporary world is no more reliable than the equal certainty of the ancient Jew. Christ cannot be boxed in a first century box or a twentieth century box. Rather he is incarnated in the living processes of the true life of men.

Our duty, then, is not to worship idols, old or new, or demand of the artist that he be either priest or shaman to fill the voids of our own making. Rather we must become most fully the new men that our new ordering requires of us. Being new men in this way goes far beyond a gracious appreciation of new art forms. It involves a reordering of our psychic life; a restructuring of our social and economic order in the image of our new spatial ordering; a reshaping of our major form-the cities of our dreams and habitation; a new relation between men and women-in short, a revolution. It is not for us to deny the Christ because he does not come in the modes he once used, or to try to dictate the modes he must use among us now. Rather we seek obedience in the new ordering of things, openness to the new vision, and, in his will, all these things will be added to us.

"Remember the word-?
The one from the manger-?
It means only this . . .
You can dance
With a stranger."

For it is written, "Seek you first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you." It does not say that the Kingdom of God will be achieved by seeking first the form of worship. Language is a function of meaning, not meaning a function of language.

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Of course it is equally true to say that meaning is a function of language, not language a function of meaning. Christ bowed himself to the humility of matter, and matter was thereby elevated to the glory of God.

Christian art is not the product of Christian ideas, even ideas about form. Christian art emerges from the struggle of the faithful to find Christ in the matter of the earth.

I have spoken of twentieth century forms but not so much of faith. But ours is the post-Christian world, a religion less age.

Several years ago there was a murderous riot in Lahore; someone had stolen the hair from the beard of the prophet. Last summer in Thessalonica a devout and kindly Greek woman took me to a cave with a sacred spring. She lit a candle and touched the water to her head and neck. The water cures headaches and women's troubles. What god lived in that spring in 650 B.C., and what devout and kindly women came to it then? A sign in Indiana says, "Support your American Legion, America's bulwark against communism." The peasants go to the Virgin of Guadalupe. A tomb in Atlanta says, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last."

A student of mine said of Bonhoeffer, "He picked a helluva time to come up with that idea."

The faith lives where it has always lived, in the hearts and lives of faithful people. Apostasy and paganism we have as all ages have had, only no longer so much in the language and costume of faith.

Our age is blessed among most ages for we have had, not one saint, which is as many as most ages can claim, but two: an Italian peasant who became Pope John the Good and a Georgia Negro who became the Blessed Martin the Martyr.

Is it necessary to add that sainthood does not lie in either moral or intellectual perfection, which neither man had or claimed, but in being a channel of grace, transforming the lives of men. In an age when smaller men cry their impotence, these men shaped the

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moral conscience of their time. They were transparent to love and because of them we live again in hope.

I never saw either man. They are a living part of my moral life because of-television.

The artist is not the conscience but the cartographer of our inner life. In the dialogue of the common life, he gives form to the inchoate yearnings of our sensibility and gives back to us the sensible tools for our experience of the world. He does not so much give us faith as the tools of faith, for faith is an act of the sensibility, not of belief. It is a commitment, of the acting, feeling, intelligent, and passionate body, not of ideas that pass with the passing of each age.

"Ultimately, however, the numinous is received by those who would receive it and thus goes beyond the reach of rational categories. It is part of the humanness of man that he should maintain his rationality and the rational control of his understanding as long as he can. Yet humility lies beyond the control of the conscious mind, and the transfigured earth is a world to live in, not to chart from the outside. The Christian artist is the artist who has gone into that world and has created in it, not just a thing, but a pointing to the Way."

The glory of the artist is the revelation of the structure and the material of the common life. The good artist of our day performs the ancient task assigned him by the great poet Auden, to teach the free man how to praise.

Listen to the poet James Worley, who gives us a measure of this ennoblement of the reality of things:

"Life is poorly measured by its monuments and monsters; the myriad meek inherit what the rest merely adorn. Praise all, from whom God, blessing, flows."

"Remember the word-?
The one from the manger-?
It means only this . . .
You can dance
With a stranger."