The Break

Notes on David Jones' 'Art and Sacrament'

David Jones, The Artist (1927), Woodcut

There is a great unwritten book about the influence of catholic thought on the art of the European avant-garde in the period around the two world wars. To give even a first approximation of that influence would require careful study of Joyce’s residual catholicism and the effect it had on Samuel Beckett, the Anglo-Catholic spirituality of T S Eliot and his role, along with Ezra Pound, in the modern Dante revival, the religious music of Poulenc, Nadia Boulanger's salon, Jean Cocteau, Allen Tate and others in the circle of that great fisher of men Jacques Maritain, as well as the plays and poems of Paul Claudel, and the novels of Bernanos, Mauriac, Greene and Waugh. And there would have to be at least a chapter given to David Jones, the Anglo-Welsh painter and poet, best known today for his two masterpieces, In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952), the latter having been described by W H Auden as ‘very probably the finest long poem written in English this century’.

Less well known is Jones’ theory of art, which he developed over a series of essays that were later brought together in Epoch and Artist, a book that suffered from almost immediate neglect when it was first published in 1959. This was a cause of acute depression for Jones, who later told his one sympathetic reviewer, Harold Rosenberg, the presiding art critic at The New Yorker, that it contained ‘unambiguously the main matter which has occupied my mind for many years’. That ‘matter’ amounted to a comprehensive account of ‘the arts of man’ in their relation to his highest religious aspirations, which also promised to explain how ‘man-the-artist’, as Jones liked to call him, had become ‘unintegrated’ in the modern ‘civilisational phase’. The irony that a periodical like The New Yorker, whose readership in many ways represented the spirit of that new civilisation, had been the only one to give him a fair hearing, was not lost on Jones, who was nonetheless consoled to learn that more than ‘three chaps’ had read and understood his ideas.

The most complete statement of these ideas is given in the essay ‘Art and Sacrament’, originally commissioned by Elizabeth Pakenham, the Countess of Longford, who at the time was editing a book on the ‘dilemmas’ of catholic belief in the modern world. Jones was selected to write the section on the prospects of the catholic artist in an age that was increasingly inimical to both his faith and his art. Published under the title Catholic Approaches, the book also includes essays by the convert mathematician George Temple, then the Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Oxford, and Fr Martin D’Arcy SJ, who would also inevitably appear somewhere in my imagined book on catholic modernism in the arts. The whole volume was given the Nihil Obstat by the relevant diocesan censor in case there were any doubts about the orthodoxy of its contents.

Jones consciously chose his title to mirror that of Jacques Maritain’s Art et Scolastique (1920) which had been translated by his friend Fr John O’Connor in 1923 for the St Dominic Press and came to be regarded by Jones as a sort of ‘bible’. It is certainly a remarkable book, the first serious effort to construct a theory of the arts from the terms and concepts of medieval scholasticism, something which the schoolmen themselves never attempted. Maritain’s intention was to do for aesthetics what he had done for the rest of philosophy, delivering it from ‘the immense intellectual disorder inherited from the nineteenth century’. This disorder, he argued, arose from a confusion of first principles, specifically the failure to properly separate the speculative and the practical orders of man’s activity.

In the scholastic framework, as Maritain presents it and it is subsequently taken up by Jones, the speculative order refers to the activity of the intellect in its effort to know the nature of reality. This is contrasted with the practical order, in which man himself acts as a cause and so shapes that reality or, rather, the small portion of reality that is in his power to shape. Within the practical sphere two classes of act can be distinguished - that of ‘doing’, which includes all the ways that man shapes himself in his moral life, and that of ‘making’, the activity through which he shapes the stuff of nature into works of art. ‘Art’ should here be construed in the broadest possible way, including everything from a butcher’s basket like the one which caught Stephen Daedalus’ eye in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to the carvings that decorate the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, valued by Jones as one of the great achievements of western civilisation.

The cardinal error of contemporary aesthetics lies in what another modern interpreter of scholasticism, Etienne Gilson, once called the ‘sophism of misplaced cognition’. We are ensnared by this error when we suppose art to be like a speculative activity that ends in a proposition, rather than the purely ‘factive’ activity that it is, terminating always in a ‘work’, a concrete thing which exists independently from its maker and from all other made things. A separate but equally fatal mistake is to confuse man’s ‘making’ with his ‘doing’, where he is responsible to the moral law and the dictates of prudence. Gilson does not have an equivalent phrase for this particular error, though by way of symmetry we may want to call it the ‘sophism of misplaced moralism’, where we suppose making should embody certain moral dispositions, when in fact the only dispositions that matter are those which, as Jones puts it, ‘comprise the artefact’.

For a mind like that of Jones, which was equally at home in painting and poetry as it was in the craft-like arts, Maritain’s declaration that ‘the sphere of making is the sphere of Art’ must have leapt off the page like an arc of electricity. He followed Maritain closely in these scholastic discriminations, and would put particular emphasis on making as the defining act of the artist qua artist. This can be felt everywhere in his writing and leads to one of the characteristic idiosyncrasies - some would say infelicities - in Jones’s style. To illustrate what I mean, consider the following passage from the short autobiographical note in Epoch and Artist:

‘However, a day came at (Portslade in Sussex) when I found myself trying my hand at the making of a writing. These last dozen words may sound self-conscious and precious, but I shall stick to them as they do faithfully describe my feelings about, and my intentions and attitude toward, the work in question.’

And in the preface to The Anathemata, in a section on the biographical accidents that shaped his poem, Jones explains that:

‘Seeing that, as one is so one does, and that, making follows being, it follows that these mixed terms and themes have become part of the making of this writing.’

It is worth noting that he already used that exact same locution - ‘the making of this writing’ - almost two decades earlier in the preface to In Parenthesis. And in his poetry Jones’ is constantly experimenting with ways of making the written word feel like a sculpted thing, an effect he achieves both through the way his lines are set on the page as well as in the rhetoric of his verse. This is exemplified in the dedication to In Parenthesis, which Geoffrey Hill considered one of the great poetic achievements of the war:

Returning to ‘Art and Sacrament’, Jones’ biographer Thomas Dilworth has said of his prose that it can approach an almost ‘Dominican pedanticism’ in places. This is perhaps unfair but one understands what he is getting at. Jones, incidentally, had a long association with the order of preachers and writes fondly of those ‘comic’ friars who are always saying ‘let us distinguish & sub-distinguish’. Such was his own way of thinking and having separated the practical and the speculative order along the same lines as Maritain, he makes a further distinction between two types of making - the ‘utile’ and the ‘extra-utile’.

Jones was fond of repeating a line from Fr Thomas Gilby, himself a Dominican friar, to the effect that man is venator formarum, ‘a hunter of forms’. With respect to art, he selects his forms with one of two ends in view - either to create an artefact that serves some practical purpose (the utile) or one made and enjoyed for its own sake (the extra-utile). Jones was too much a craftsman to fall in with any crude opposition of the utile and the beautiful. A thing that is made well for its intended purpose can be profoundly beautiful, just as a thing made to be beautiful can be shockingly ugly. All art has a utilitarian strain in it; mastery of different techniques and traditions of making involves learning how to find the right means to effect the desired ends. Or as Jones would put it art ‘compels you to do an infantryman’s job’. And while there is nothing new under the sun the ‘arts do at certain moments uncover relationships hidden since the foundation of the world’, which can happen just as easily in the making of utile as in extra-utile objects. But it is in things made for no other purpose than the ‘splendor formae’ which they embody that man finds his proper function, the activity for which he was himself created. Art, as Jones repeatedly insists, ‘is the sole intransitive activity of man’, and he would just as happily declare that art is for art’s sake, were it not for the aestheticist heresies lingering in that phrase.

This brings us finally to the question of ‘sacraments’ and ‘signs’. Frustratingly, in his effort to clarify this central concept Jones keeps up the same Dominican pedanticism but without the characteristic Dominican precision. By my count there are at least three different meanings of the word ‘sign’ in the essay, and these are all broadly interchangeable with the word ‘sacrament’ (with a small ‘s’) as Jones uses it. So in the same page we will find man described as ‘sign-maker’ and as a ‘sacramental animal’ with little to go on when we try to differentiate their respective meanings.

In the first sense, all extra-utile art is a sign for the simple reason that it has been given a form which, if not separable from matter, still transcends it. In the second sense, signs are objects that point to something other than themselves, so that in order to grasp a sign we also have to grasp the thing it represents. And in the third sense, a sign is something that ‘recalls’ a reality that has disappeared through what Jones calls an act of ‘anamnesis’. He can be forgiven for struggling to pin down this most elusive of concepts, one which led no less a philosopher than Charles Sanders Peirce to propose, and latter scrap, a ten-fold classification of different sign-types. But what is common to Jones’ three meanings is a conception of ‘sign-making’ as a gratuitous expression of spirit which in turn informs and spiritualises the matter it takes up and shapes. Signs are matter and spirit, just as man is matter and spirit:

‘[some deeply religious minds] speak as though this sign-making were adjuvant only and a kind of concession because we have bodies. But this would appear to imply that the body was itself an infirmity or a kind of deprivation. Whereas the body is not an infirmity but a unique benefit and splendour; a thing denied to angels and unconscious in animals. We are committed to body by the same token we are committed to Ars, so to sign and sacrament.’

Signs also furnish the stuff out of which ritual is made, which is the form of worship appropriate to a rational animal, and are themselves munera, the gifts of our hands raised up to God in thanksgiving. For this reason it is fitting - Jones would say necessary - that all the canonical Sacraments of the church involve artefacts. As with any good catholic, Jones’ mind was profoundly shaped by his experience of the eucharist, and this was the sacrament he most often held up as an example:

‘If the very means or channel of redemption is intricated in Ars we conclude that Ars and Man are inseparable… It would appear, to me, impossible that at the Redemption of the World anything should have been done which committed man to any activity not utterly inalienable from his nature.’

This is a statement which should hold just as well for ‘Swanscombe Man’ as it does for ‘Atomic Man’. And yet, there is in Jones an anxiety that goes back to In Parenthesis, and his own experience of the mechanised terror of trench warfare, that man could somehow become alienated from the sign-world and left in a spiritual ‘no-man’s-land’. In the preface to The Anathemata he relates that his friends in the Catholic intellectual circle that used to gather around the publisher Thomas Burns would refer to this as “The Break”:

‘In the late nineteenth twenties and early ‘thirties among my most immediate friends there used to be discussed something that we christened ‘The Break’... in the nineteenth century, Western Man moved across a rubicon which, if as unseen as the 38th Parallel, seems to have been as definitive as the Styx. That much is I think generally appreciated. But it was not the memory-effacing lethe that was crossed; and consequently, although man has found much to his liking, advantage, and considerable wonderment, he has still retained ineradicable longings for, as it were, the farther shore.’

The causes of this ‘break’ are never completely enumerated by Jones but they all have something to do with the rise of technology and the subsequent ‘infiltration of the utile’ into every aspect of life. He sometimes uses the word ‘contrivance’ for a type of art where form has been wholly subordinated to ‘power’. Contrivances are like signs insofar as they point beyond themselves. But what they point at is some other thing to which man’s control has been extended, and not to a transcendental reality which is finally beyond his grasp. There is also money, that ‘other power’, which forces us to think about objects not in terms of their intrinsic form, but of the rate at which they can be exchanged. And the joint effect of money and technology has been an accelerated destruction of the settled forms of life where the extra-utile still had some purchase. The ‘sign-world’ is replaced with the melting phantasmagoria of modernity, leaving man-the-artist with the same transcendental longings that are proper to his nature, but without the means to give them shape and expression.

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In his vast biography of Jones, which runs to some 1400 pages in its unabridged form, Dilworth says of Art et Scolastique that it had a relationship to Jones’ mind like ‘that of a map to a place’. This is true with respect to a large portion of what Jones wrote, though the connections he made between the ideas he found in Maritain were novel and often went far beyond the boundaries of his reconstructed Thomism. And there is one other aspect of ‘Art and Sacrament’ that has no clear correspondence in that ‘map’, at least none that I have been able to find.

I have already mentioned Etienne Gilson’s ‘sophism of misplaced cognition’. Jones never read Introduction aux arts du Beau, where this term was taken from, but I imagine he would have found much to profit from in that brilliant little polemic. That is, if he got past the first page or, indeed, the first paragraph. For it is here that Gilson argues that art, being wholly concerned with the making of artefacts, does not express or communicate any knowledge in itself. Jones obviously agreed with Gilson that the principle act of the artist is making, and when Gilson says that in man’s art we see an ‘outer manifestation of his act of existing’, he may as well be quoting from Epoch and Artist. However, Jones also thought that in the true act of creative making, where a form that was previously not there is set up in its own radiant actuality, there was an access of knowledge that could not be arrived at by any other means. The key passage is from the middle section of ‘Art and Sacrament’, which I will quote at length, as apart from anything it provides a useful recapitulation of the main themes of Jones’ sacramental aesthetics:

‘In so far as form is brought into being there is reality. ‘Something’ not ‘nothing’, moreover a new ‘something’ has come into existence. And if, as we aver, man’s form-making has in itself the nature of a sign, then these formal realities, which the art of strategy creates, must, in some sense or other, be signa. But of what can they possibly be significant? What do they show forth, re-represent, recall or in any sense reflect? It would seem that the forms which strategy shows forth can be typic only of that archetypal form-making and ordering implicit in the credal cause per quem omnia facta sunt. That is to say they partake in some sense, however difficult to posit, of that juxtaposing by which what was inanis et vacua became radiant with form and abhorrent of vacua by the action of the Artifex, the Logos, who is known to our tradition as the Pontifex who formed a bridge ‘from nothing’ and who then, like Bran in the Mabinogion, himself became the bridge by the Incarnation and Passion and subsequent Apotheosis.’

The argument is slightly marred by the clumsy analogy between the art of ‘strategy’ and other types of making. Putting that aside, this extraordinary passage, where any remaining pedanticism gives way to a highly impacted prose-poetry, can be partially clarified by a concept in Aquinas’ philosophy which, strangely, is barely mentioned by Maritain in Art et Scolastique, the idea of knowing per connaturalitatem. In the Secunda Secundae, Aquinas tells us that rectitude of judgment is derived from two sources ‘first, on account of perfect use of reason, secondly, on account of a certain connaturality with the matter about which one has to judge’. He gives the example of chastity where right judgment can be learned either from moral science or through the exercise of the virtue of chastity, which causes us to know ‘by a kind of connaturality’. It is knowledge established in the intellect by way of similarity or likeness with the object under judgment.

Thanks to Dilworth we know that Jones owned a copy of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologica, gifted to him in 1923 by his friend Reggie Lawson, roughly around the time he first encountered O’Connor’s translation of Maritain. While he was a keen reader of modern Thomistic philosophy, his copy of Aquinas was left unmarked. He was not the first intellectually fulfilled Thomist who had little appetite for the works of the master. But had Jones spent more time with the Prima Pars he would have found, in Aquinas’ own words, much of the substance of what he is trying to convey in ‘Art and Sacrament’. In question 14, article 8, where Aquinas demonstrates how God’s knowledge is the cause of created things, we find the following analogy between scientia dei and scienta artificis:

‘The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his art. Now the knowledge of the artificer is the cause of the things made by his art from the fact that the artificer works by his intellect.’

Contemplating this analogy in the light of the passage from Jones, we could say that it is in artistic creation that man is granted his most intimate knowledge of God’s own creative act through a sort of connaturality. Paradoxically, this knowledge is also infinitely remote, the terms of the analogy being held apart by the distance that separates a creature from its creator. But there is as much wisdom and consolation in the remoteness as in the intimacy, something like what I imagine Aquinas felt after his mystical rapture, when he said of his own purely speculative work: mihi videtur ut palea.

David Jones, from The Chester Play of the Deluge: Five plates (1926-7), Wood Engraving