I read an article in my Gothic art History class and I thought it was interesting so I thought I'd share some thoughts about it with a response paper I wrote for class. For a response paper, it's short, but i know it'll be long in a blog, so bear with me. If anything seems confusing, let me know ^_^
Here it goes:
In the reading about natural science and naturalistic art in the middle ages, White talks about how aesthetics or art progress and change from being represented as more symbolic and abstract to being more naturalistic and concerned with the actual physical objects, studied with the ‘curiosity of a’ scientist. Before religion had been objective; perception of nature, subjective. Afterwards, nature became objective; religion subjective.
Before, it was thought that everything in the world that God created was a symbol and had a meaning --thus everything was created for the spiritual edification of man. Man was given a Book of Scripture (the Bible?) and the Book of Nature to help him in his edification process. Everything in the world was to point them back to scripture. For example. Something wooden was a momento of the cross. There were thus books like beastiaries where each animal in the world had a story behind it that was an allegory with a Christian/Catholic context. This is because people were most concerned with their salvation. This view of the world produced an art which distorted natural forms to better indicate their supernatural meaning.
However the view of the world changed as the science of technology and economics expanded the commercial class and made material things and object of interest. This thus perverted the idea of God ,having faith in the unseen , to having interest in material things that might represent God. “In centering its devotion upon the actual physical substance of its deity, people had inadvertently deified matter.” This is because people wanted to study the objects themselves with a new kind of interest. They still had symbolic meaning, however, these spiritual insights seemed to take a backstage to material interests and knowledge.
Also, there was a shift of emphasis from the symbolic sacramental to the naturalistic-dramatic in the development of medieval iconongraphy. Biblical themes were represented as more dramatic. These can readily be seen in the 6 Days of Creation, the Last Supper, the Ascension , and the Virgin and Child. Earlier, Christian artists focused on the cosmological labors of God, but in the 12th century , artists focused more on the terrestrial events and creatures because it was more realistic and tangible to them. The Last Supper was originally depicted at the moment when Christ says “this is my body” but later is depicted at the moment he says “One of you shall betray me” . This is much more dramatic.
i think the fact that the middle age people have “inadvertently deified matter” had in fact turned away from their God in a sense and began worshipping the thing that God told them not to worship, which was anything but Him. They had come to make an idol of things that seemed to be of God, but were in fact not. In their desire for knowledge of the things of God, they had once again fallen into Satan’s trap, a temptation so sly that even the people of the middle ages did not recognize it until it was too late. Bestiaries flourished. Indeed, the desire for the knowledge of things that God had created, the minute detail of everything in Creation, seemed to be a pure pursuit, but the way they went about it showed that they in fact had been deceived by something that seemed to be true, and was Lucifer’s devious plan to make idols look like truth. It was intended to be something so close to the truth that it would deceive people. The deification of matter, was the first step away from truth of the Word, that had originally dominated the people’s life and souls. Instead of focusing on the ‘crux’ of the matter (pun unintended, but made(crux is from the word “crucifixion” I’m thinking) that was their salvation in Christ, people sought dramaticism, knowledge and materialism. It could be seen as why the world today is filled with that same .
Instead of focusing upon worshipping God, theaters grew out of a desire for dramaticism and focused upon entertaining people. People desired realism for the senses. In a sense, they were turning away from their God because God was not something that was as tangible as what they could see in front of them--creation, the evidences of his work. Instead of praising him for creation as they had before, they became deceived by the world they lived in.
Perhaps the Fall of Adam was true, perhaps, Satan did deceive Adam and Eve in the garden with knowledge, that they could be like God.
Today we have theaters that are for our own enjoyment.Instead of worshipping God, we have something made for our own enjoyment, focusing the attention upon ourselves. Many movies are secular . In fact movies in themselves have a secular factor because they appeal to the senses . Unless they were documentaries used to spread the word about Christianity, they really were for the entertainment of the masses. This is not to say that science, technology and progress is a bad thing. The article seems to make out that the bad thing about it is that this search for knowledge took a front seat, front stage show (literally) and religion, the knowledge of God and salvation in Christ took backstage. If this is how White thinks, then what then is the real argument between secular and nonsecular things? Should there really be a separation? Should Christianity really be subjective?
