Reclaiming the Arts: An Orthodox Perspective

“There is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting thereto.”

William James

All-Merciful Saviour Monastery - Vashon Island, Washington.

The Arts have been for over a century philosophically and ideologically bankrupt. They are an index of the flow of thoughts of the ages. Western civilization, until the end of the 19^th century has functioned on a Christian world view with a Creation based perception of reality. Prior to the scientific advances of the 19^th century and particularlyDarwin’s theory of evolution, there was a common acceptance that there was a Creator of all things. This included the presuppositions that there exist absolute moral and ethical standards together with right and wrong ways to live and to accomplish both the tasks of life and the works of art, and that there is an underlying order to all things. Man does not invent the absolutes, standards, or order, but discovers them. The well being of civilization depended upon discovering that order and adhering to it. This view was the basis of the creation of all works of art, including architecture, literature, music, and crafts. Similarly, non-Christian cultures of the world both ancient and modern, literate and non-literate, took their cues for form and beauty from the natural or created world. For at least 35 centuries or more, this had resulted in a progressive realization of how to create an order and harmony of form in daily life. With this realization came an astonishing variety of forms and expressions. From the pyramids to the Parthenon, from the Pantheon to the Paris Opera, as well as all other works of art, there existed a recognized underlying order.

All-Merciful Saviour Monastery - Vashon Island, Washington

In the last 20 years there have been springing up private ateliers which offer a classical education in the Arts, but they are referred to by the mainstream schools as mere teachers of “crafts”. One in Minneapolis, Atelier Lack, represents an unbroken line to the classical era handed down from master to apprentice. From this one several others have come into being. In the late 1980’s Thomas Gordon Smith established a traditional and classical curriculum at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. Smith, a product of UC Berkeley, which has been on the loony fringe of the modern movement, rebelled against the modernist and post-modernist movements and established himself as a classicist. The school and its graduates have been categorized by the prevailing architectural community as dangerous radicals who have dared to challenge the modernist architectural establishment. In England the architect Quinlan Terry, who in the 1950’s apprenticed himself to one of the last surviving classicists, presides over a thriving practice of traditional architecture. Terry is also a Christian and has written an interesting treatise on the Temple of Solomon and how it prefigured Greek classical architecture.

All-Merciful Saviour Monastery - Vashon Island, Washington.

The calling of the Orthodox Christian is not to transcend the material or secular world, living in some imagined mystical isolation from the “profane.” We are to transfigure the material through the spiritual by our life and actions. We are to bring to bear in our immediate environs the Kingdom of God, and thereby assist in remaking the world in His image, and not our own. Alan Bloom in his much vilified (by the intellectual establishment) work The Closing of the American Mind gave a quite Orthodox definition of art and civilization. “Civilization or, to say the same thing, education, is the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions – not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy – but forming and informing them as art.”1

1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon and Schuster, Inc,New York,New York, 1987, p. 71

Deacon James serves with Fr. James Bernstein, at St. Paul’s Antiochian Orthodox Church in Brier, Washington. He has been a practicing principal architect for 38 years, and has designed several Orthodox churches, including The All-Merciful Saviour Monastery. Visit Deacon James, and his work, at his own architecture company, The James Bryant Group LLC, or email him directly here: jebryant@frontier.com .

Photographs taken from a Deacon James work on Vashon Island, Washington, USA, at All-Merciful Savior Monastery.

Pemptousia