Four Spaniards and One Saint!

So I was re-reading Kenneth Clark's chapter on the Counter-Reformation in Rome (Chapter/Episode 7 "Grandeur and Obedience") in Civilisation to find his view of the Catholic revival and how it succeeded after the Protestant Reformation. He mentions the day when "Ignatius, Teresa, Filipo Neri, and Francis Xavier" were all canonized as being "like the baptism of a regenerated Rome" (p. 175 in the 1969 paperback edition). But Clark gets the date wrong: he says it was on May 22, 1622, and he leaves out one of the saints canonized that day!

It really happened on March 12 in 1622. Pope Gregory XV capped off the Counter-Reformation era by canonizing four great reformer saints: St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Philip Neri and the patron saint of Madrid, St. Isidore the Farmer. In Rome, they were most proud of St. Philip Neri, the one Roman among the canonized, thus the quip, "Four Spaniards and One Saint." Jesuits around the world celebrate this day as a day of thanksgiving, according to this website:

A little-known day of Jesuit thanksgiving was celebrated on March 12 to mark the canonizations of two of the most famous Jesuits: St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis Xavier. Every year on that date, each Jesuit offers a special prayer or Mass of Thanksgiving for the gift of the saints’ canonizations, which occurred on March 12, 1622 — 66 years after the death of Ignatius and 70 years after the death of Xavier.

The founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius lived most of his priestly life in a small room in Rome, directing the newly founded Society. Francis Xavier, one of the Society’s most well-known missionaries, lived most of his Jesuit life traveling around Asia, preaching and baptizing.

Pope Gregory XV was responsible for canonizing the two Jesuits, and he held religious orders in high esteem. The pope was educated by the Jesuits at the “Collegio Romano,” the university founded by Ignatius in Rome that is now known as the Gregorian University.

On the same day Ignatius and Francis Xavier were canonized, Pope Gregory XV also canonized Teresa of Avila, reformer of the Carmelites; Philip Neri, founder of the Oratorian Fathers; and Isidore of Madrid, a simple but devout farmer, now patron of farmers, peasants, day laborers and rural communities.

The grouping of these five dissimilar saints took some by surprise and illustrated that there is no mold for being holy or even for becoming a canonized saint. Pope Gregory XV was never canonized, but he did keep his connection to the Jesuit saints. The pope was buried in the Church of Saint Ignatius in Rome when he died in 1623.

Blessed John Henry Newman wrote of St. Philip Neri, his patron as an Oratorian:

. . . Nothing was too high for him, nothing too low. He taught poor begging women to use mental prayer; he took out boys to play; he protected orphans; he acted as novice-master to the children of St. Dominic. He was the teacher and director of artisans, mechanics, cashiers in banks, merchants, workers in gold, artists, men of science. He was consulted by monks, canons, lawyers, physicians, courtiers; ladies of the highest rank, convicts going to execution, engaged in their turn his solicitude and prayers. Cardinals hung about his room, and Popes asked for his miraculous aid in disease, and his ministrations in death. It was his mission to save men, not from, but in, the world. To break the haughtiness of rank, and the fastidiousness of fashion, he gave his penitents public mortifications; to draw the young from the theatres, he opened his Oratory of Sacred Music; to rescue the careless from the Carnival and its excesses, he set out in pilgrimage to the Seven Basilicas. For those who loved reading, he substituted, for the works of chivalry or the hurtful novels of the day, the true romance and the celestial poetry of the Lives of the Saints. He set one of his disciples to write history against the heretics of that age; another to treat of the Notes of the Church; a third, to undertake the Martyrs and Christian Antiquities;—for, while in the discourses and devotions of the Oratory, he prescribed the simplicity of the primitive monks, he wished his children, individually and in private, to cultivate all their gifts to the full. He, however, was, after all and in all, their true model,—the humble priest, shrinking from every kind of dignity, or post, or office, and living the greater part of day and night in prayer, in his room or upon the housetop.

And when he died, a continued stream of people, says his biographer, came to see his body, during the two days that it remained in the church, kissing his bier, touching him with their rosaries or their rings, or taking away portions of his hair, or the flowers which were strewed over him; and, among the crowd, persons of every rank and condition were heard lamenting and extolling one who was so lowly, yet so great; who had been so variously endowed, and had been the pupil of so many saintly masters; who had the breadth of view of St. Dominic, the poetry of St. Benedict, the wisdom of St. Ignatius, and all recommended by an unassuming grace and a winning tenderness which were his own. 

Of St. Isidore the Farmer, Loyola Press notes:

Isidore was born in Madrid, Spain, and farming was to be his labor, working for the same landowner his whole life. While he walked the fields, plowing, planting, and harvesting, he also prayed. As a hardworking man, Isidore had three great loves: God, his family, and the soil. He and his wife Maria, who is also honored as a saint, proved to all their neighbors that poverty, hard work, and sorrow (their only child died as little boy) cannot destroy human happiness if we accept them with faith and in union with Christ. Isidore understood clearly that, without soil, the human race cannot exist too long. The insight may explain why he always had such a reverent attitude toward his work as a farmer.

Isidore and Maria were known for their love of the poor. Often they brought food to poor, hungry persons and prayed with them. During his lifetime, Isidore had the gift of miracles. If he was late for work because he went to Mass, and angel was seen plowing for him. More than once he fed hungry people with food that seemed to multiply miraculously. He died after a peaceful life of hard labor and charity.

I'll let you know why I was re-reading that chapter in Civilisation soon, after I finish reading this book: How Catholic Art Saved the Faith: The Triumph of Beauty and Truth in Counter-Reformation Art by Elizabeth Lev from Sophia Institute Press.

The Kenneth Clark Exhibit @ Tate Britain

From Brian Cole in The Wall Street Journal:

London

How daring! Tate Britain has devoted a large exhibition to someone who was not an artist—the first time it's done so. Equally surprising, the subject is a figure now mainly known for a television show.

The director and curators of the Tate Britain are to be congratulated for working to restore the importance of Kenneth Clark through an excellent exhibition and catalog, both titled "Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation." Beautifully installed in six rooms with more than 200 objects from Old Master to modern, most drawn from Clark's own collection, the exhibition traces Clark's life and chronicles his important role in British culture as patron, collector, art historian and broadcaster.

The show carefully and judiciously reminds us who he was, why he was so important to 20th-century England, and why he deserves to be remembered. They are brave to do so because to many of their peers in the museum and academic worlds, there can hardly be anyone more out of fashion. . . .

Why would Kenneth Clark be out of fashion? Cole explains:

Among the postmodern culturati, Clark has been ridiculed as an upper-class snob (although his entire career proves just the opposite) and mocked for espousing highly unfashionable ideas about truth, artistic genius, greatness—above all, for the peculiar idea that beauty is an important attribute of art. And in an era of multiculturalism his concept of Western Europe as a great civilization has been belittled.

More about the Tate Britain exhibit here. 

This exhibit has certainly brought Sir Kenneth Clark much media attention, as reviews and profiles were published when it opened in May. Of course, he has never really gone away, because of the popularity of that Civilisation series, as this profile from The Guardian attests:

Even now, says James Stourton [Clark's authorized biographer], thousands of DVDs of the series are still sold every year: "It has never died. It's like being on a magic carpet. It's an amazing grand tour. Today, the presentation gets in the way a bit. He's wearing funny clothes, and has a funny voice. You have to get beyond the Burberry coats and the manner and listen to the words." Clark was by now beginning to fall out of sympathy with the art world; painting, he thought, had not been in such a bad state since the death of Giotto. But, no matter. Amazingly, it was for these films that he would be remembered, his passion for art and all its possibilities somehow having transmitted itself to a rapt nation. The clipped vowels and the awkward body language didn't bother the public (even in 1969 he would have sounded stiff, for this, after all, was the year Monty Python made their TV debut) because, as Stourton puts it, "he owned his material". At the Tate show, visitors will be able to see this ownership for themselves thanks to several carefully positioned screens – and some will doubtless ponder if any presenter now, relying as he or she inevitably will on a team of researchers, will ever be able to match its undoubted authority.

What Stourton describes as distractions now I find essential to the series. It was "A Personal View" so the person, Sir Kenneth Clark had to be himself--he did not have to look like a television personality; he had to have ideas and views to present. I like the static camera and the slow pans from Clark to the background and the great close ups of the artwork, so steady and patient--the camera is giving me a chance to see what Clark sees, to learn how to look at the art, see the beauty, and appreciate the civilization that created it.

The BBC is going to "remake" the series with another art critic who will have his or her own "Personal View"--I doubt the critic would dare have such a "conservative" view of civilization or even to concentrate on western civilization. It will have to be multi-cultural and the pace will have to be fast, with quick cuts and angles. The presenter will have to be photogenic with perfect teeth (Sir Kenneth's are horrible, one can tell). I can't imagine a remake of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation: A Personal View that could replace it in my library of books, DVDs, or memories. As Clark says at the end of the series, I may be hopeful about the new version, but not joyous.

Also from Cambridge University Press: A New Book on the Counter-Reformation

While searching for Andy Wood's forthcoming book, The Memory of the People on the Cambridge University Press website, I found this intriguing study, The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (Cambridge University Press; Not yet published - available from July 2013), edited by: Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper, both of Temple University, Philadelphia:

This book examines the promotion of the sensuous as part of religious experience in the Roman Catholic Church of the early modern period. During the Counter-Reformation, every aspect of religious and devotional practice was reviewed, including the role of art and architecture, and the invocation of the five senses to incite devotion became a hotly contested topic. The Protestants condemned the material cult of veneration of relics and images, rejecting the importance of emotion and the senses and instead promoting the power of reason in receiving the Word of God. After much debate, the Church concluded that the senses are necessary to appreciate the sublime, and that they derive from the Holy Spirit. As part of its attempt to win back the faithful, the Church embraced the sensuous and promoted the use of images, relics, liturgy, processions, music, and theater as important parts of religious experience.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction; Marcia B. Hall
2. The sensuous: recent research; Tracy E. Cooper
3. Trent, sacred images, and Catholics' senses of the sensuous; John W. O'Malley
4. The world made flesh: spiritual subjects and carnal depictions in Renaissance art; Bette Talvacchia
5. How words control images: the rhetoric of decorum in Counter-Reformation Italy; Robert Gaston
6. Custodia degli occhi: discipline and desire in post-Tridentine Italian art; Maria Loh
7. Raffaelle Borghini and the corpus of Florentine art in an age of reform; Stuart Lingo
8. Censure and censorship in Rome ca.1600: visitation of Clement VIII and the visual arts; Opher Mansour
9. Painting virtuously: the Counter-Reform and the reform of artists' education in Rome between guild and academy; Peter Lukehart
10. Carlo Borromeo and the dangers of lay women in church; Richard Scofield
11. 'To be in heaven': Saint Filippo Neri between aesthetic emotion and mystical ecstasy; Costanza Barbieri
12. Rebuilding faith through art: Christoph Schwarz's altarpiece for the new Jesuit school in Munich Jeffrey Chipps Smith
13. 'Until shadows disperse': Augustine's twilight; Meredith Gill
14. A machine for souls: allegory before and after Trent; Amy Powell.

Some of the titles of the essays reminded me of Sir Kenneth Clark's assessment of Catholic Counter-Reformation efforts, especially in art and architecture, as they asserted Catholic teaching and thought about the Blessed Virgin Mary, the saints, the Sacraments, and other controversies--"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--or at any rate a legacy from the pagan Renaissance: it was not afraid of the human body. . . . [Speaking of Titian, Rubens, and  Bernini] In their work the conflict between flesh and spirit is gloriously resolved." (pages 178 to 182, Chapter 7, Grandeur and Obedience, Civilisation: A Personal View).

Clark uses Peter Paul Ruben's painting, "Sinners Saved by Penitence", as an example--and this site features the illustrated script of the episode--noting, "And in Rubens's picture of that extremely un-Protestant subject "Sinners saved by Penitence", he has achieved in the repentant Magdalene, and even in the figure of Christ himself, a noble sensuality, perfectly at one with an unquestioning faith." (page 182). Father John O'Malley's essay and Bette Talvacchia's particularly seem to address Clark's analysis.

Because of my interest in the Counter-Reformation, I might have to queue this book up on my wish list!