[katoliko] Memorable Kenneth Clark Quotes on Catholicism and Protestantism
Carlos Antonio Palad
(Once more, upon a friend's request...)
Dear All,
Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark of Saltwood (1903-1983) was a renowned art historian and expert, a major media personality in his day, and a member of distinguished councils and of the Spanish Academy. He authored several books that, far from being mere histories of works of art and artists, also vividly portrayed the historical epochs that provided the backdrop and environment for these. He is perhaps best know today for his 1969 BBC TV Series "Civilisation: A Personal View." He later reworked and expanded the script of that series to produce "Civilisation" (1969), a history of the West from the medieval ages to the 19th century, as told through the art of those centuries.
Clark was sympathetic although not uncritical of the Catholic Church, and "Civilisation" is replete with references to the civilizing work of Catholicism -- and the destructiveness of Protestantism. Born Anglican and a lifelong "liberal" and humanist, Kenneth Clark was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed.
His son, the prominent British politician Alan Clark (1928-1999) was also received from Anglicanism and into the Catholic Church on his deathbed (although some have disputed this).
Here are some of Kenneth Clark's "quotable quotes" on Catholicism and Protestantism. I am quoting from my copy of "Civilisation" (Civilisation, Harper and Row Publishers Inc., NY, 1969, Book Club Edition)
CATHOLICISM:
"... at the end of the tenth century, there was a new power in Europe, greater than any king or emperor: the Church. If you had asked the average man of the time to what country he belonged, he would not have understood you; he would have known only to what bishopric. And the Church was not only an organiser; it was a humaniser..." (p. 29)
"It could be argued that western civilisation was basically the creation of the Church" (p. 35)
"[The Cathedral of] Chartres is the epitome of the first great awakening in European civilisation. It is also the bridge between Romanesque and Gothic, between the world of Abelard and the world of St. Thomas Aquinas, the world of restless curiosity and the world of system and order. Great things were to be done in the next centuries of high Gothic, great feats of construction, both in architecture and in thought. But they all rested on the foundations of the twelfth century. This was the age which gave European civilisation its impetus. Our intellectual energy, our contact with the great minds of Greece, our ability to move and change, our belief that God may be approached through beauty, our feeling of compassion, our sense of the unity of Christendom -- all this, and much more, appeared in those hundred marvelous years between the consecration of Cluny and the rebuiding of Chartres" (p. 60)
"...Rome had been (as it seemed) completely humiliated -- almost wiped off the map. The city had been sacked and burnt, the people of Northern Europe were heretics, the Turks were threatening Vienna. It could have seemed to a far-sighted intellectual... that the Papacy's only course was to face the facts, and accept its dependence on the gold of America, doled out through Spain"
"Well, this didn't happen. Rome and the Church regained many of the territories it had lost, and what is more important to us, became once more a great spiritual force. But was it a civilising force? In England we tend to answer no. We have been conditioned by generations of liberal, Protestant historians who tell us that no society based on obedience, repression and superstition can be really civilised. But no one with an ounce of historical feeling or philosophic detachment can be blind to the great ideals, to the passionate belief in sanctity, to the expenditure of human genius in the service of God, which are made triumphantly visible to us with every step we take in Baroque Rome. Whatever it is, it isn't barbarian or provincial... I think one must agree to put off defining the word civilisation till we have looked at the Rome of the Popes." (pp. 167-168)
"...the victory of the Catholic Church... How had that victory been achieved? In England most of us were brought up to believe that it depended on the Inquisition, the Index and the Society of Jesus. I don't believe that a great outburst of creative energy such as took place in Rome between 1620 and 1660 can be the result of negative factors, but I admit that the civilisation of these years depended on certain assumptions that are out of favour in England and America today. The first of these, of course, was belief in authority, the absolute authority of the Catholic Church. This belief extended to sections of society which we now assume to be naturally rebellious. It comes as something of a shock to find that, with a single exception, the great artists of the time were all sincere, conforming Christians. Guercino spent much of his mornings in prayer; Bernini frequently went into retreats and practised the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius; Rubens
attended Mass every morning before beginning work. The exception was Caravaggio, who was like the hero of a modern play, except that he happened to paint very well."
"This conformism was not based on fear of the Inquisition, but on the perfectly simple belief that the faith which had inspired the saints of the preceding generation was something by which a man should regulate his life" (pp. 174-175)
"The great achievements of the Catholic Church lay in harmonising, humanising, civilising the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people" (p. 175)
"The leaders of the Catholic Restoration had made the inspired decision not to go half-way to meet Protestantism in any of its objections, but rather to glory in those very doctrines that the Protestants had most forcibly... repudiated. Luther had repudiated the authority of the Pope: very well, no pains must be spared in making a giant assertion that St. Peter, the first Bishop of Rome, had been divinely appointed as Christ's Vicar on Earth. Ever since Erasmus, intelligent men in the north had spoken scornfully of relics: very well, their importance must be magnified... The veneration of relics was connected with the cult of the saints, and this had equally been condemned by the reformers. Very well, the saints should be made more insistently real to the imagination and in particular their sufferings and their ecstasies should be vividly recorded." (pp. 177-178)
"...the Church gave imaginative expression to deep-seated human impulses. And it had another great strength which one may say was part of Mediterranean civilisation... it was not afraid of the human body"
(p. 178, 181)
PROTESTANTISM:
In one of (Erasmus') letters written soon after Durer had done his portrait, he says of the Protestants: "I have seen them return from hearing a sermon as if inspired by an evil spirit. The faces of all showed a curious wrath and ferocity." (p. 156)
"No doubt (Luther) was extremely impressive, the leader for which the earnest German people is always waiting. Unfortunately for civilisation he not only settled their doubts and gave them the courage of their convictions: he also released that latent violence and hysteria... beyond this was another northern characteristic that was fundamentally opposed to civilisation: an earthly, animal hostility to reason and decorum that Nordic man seems to have retained for his days in the primeval forest." (p. 158)
"Luther didn't approve of destruction, not even the destruction of images. But most of his followers were men who owed nothing to the past -- to whom it meant no more than an intolerable servitude. And so Protestantism became destructive, and from the point of view of those who love what they see, was an unmitigated disaster."
"We all know about the destruction of images -- what we nowadays call works of art; how commissioners went round to even the humblest parish church and smashed everything of beauty it contained, not only images, but carved font covers, reredoses -- anything within reach, because it didn't pay them to stay too long on a single job. You can see the results in almost every old church and cathedral in England, and a good many in France. For example, in the Lady Chapel of Ely, all the glass was smashed, and as the beautiful series of carvings of the life of the Virgin was in reach they knocked off every head -- made a thorough job of it. I suppose the motive wasn't so much religious as an instinct to destroy anything comely, anything that reflected a state of mind that an unevolved man couldn't share." (p. 159)
"...whatever the long-term effects of Protestantism, the immediate results were very bad: not only bad for art, but bad for life. The North was full of bully boys who rampaged about the country and took any excuse to beat people up." (pp. 160-161)
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