The first paint...

Yesterday was spent gilding another icon, Our Lady of Perpetual Help for a Catholic church in Wimbledon.

Today I cleaned up the edges where the gold had ended up where the painting is to be done, a meticulous process because you dont want to take off too much, done with a knife blade. Then I transferred the rest of the image to the board, coated this with a very weak egg solution, and then began to map out the basic colour scheme.

 

In this version, the figure of Christ will be in white, which connects with Christ at the Transfiguration when the  Divine energies manifested themselves as Light in the matter of Christ, his face, clothes, everything. Behind we have a six pointed mandorla of fire, set against a blue/green mandorla; the first speaks of the Divine Energy of Love which creates, sustains, redeems, (six is a number often associated with the Passion); the second speaks of the Divne Nature, Unknown but manifested in Christ. This moves to blue and clouds, as the 'fingerprint' of God the Creator is to be found in the order of his Creation of which the heavens are a living symbol. The waters of life are also in blue, reminding us of the Sacramental Order of the Church, flow from out of the mandorla at Christ's feet, rushing forth to make sacred the whole cosmos.The outer edge of the inner shapes is a octagon, representing the eighth day of the New Creation and this is a bright ochre colour. 

The red colour is drawn into a verticle line to the seraphim and to St Mary Magdalene, which the other axis is drawn out to white from the figure of Christ to Adam and to the angel.

This is a complex theological icon, so I am trying to keep the colour palette simple so the composition remains calm and contemplative, with a sense of energy and movement but not at the expense of a real stillness and poise. 

This may all of course change... but so far I am reasonably happy the way it is going. 

Ratio et Fides: The Sacred Heart and the Human Brain!

The last blog ended with these words from Blessed John Paul.

“The man of the year 2000 needs Christ's Heart to know God and to know himself; he needs it to build the civilization of love".

And I added that If we are to 'build the earth' and 'build the civilization of love ' we need to centre our personal lives and our public affairs around Christ's Heart.





Now, that all sounds very nice as a statement of faith, but the rationalist in me was not content. And faith needs reason, as reason needs faith. How, precisely, is the Sacred Heart connected with ‘building the earth’ (as Teilhard calls it) and ‘building the civilization of love’ in the powerful words of Blessed John Paul? I wrestled with this issue overnight and this morning felt none the wiser about how to ‘join-up’ faith and reason in terms of an icon of the Sacred Heart. I think I could do this is 10,000 words, but in a brief blog? I wish I could say that an answer came in a wonderful moment at mass this morning. ( And yet another candle for Ian!) But no: nada! Taking the morning paper and a copy of this month’s Scientific American I settled down with a coffee in my local Café. The paper was full of the usual gloom and doom. By the time I got to reading the latest on all the ‘junk’ debt in Europe I had enough, and picked up my Scientific American. ( I am a compulsive reader of SA and New Scientist!) And there was the answer to my question: how does Teilhard’s and Blessed John Paul’s faith in the Sacred Heart connect up and connect to the ‘real’ world?

In simple terms, Teilhard argued that we should take evolution as a fact and understand our Christian faith accordingly. He argued that human evolution in terms of the physical capacity of our brains had reached its limit quite early on in the evolution of our species. Our brains are pretty much the same as those of our earliest ancestors. The future of human evolution would be cultural, social, and spiritual. The future of mankind was all about how we could harness the energy of God’s love which fills all creation. For Teilhard evolution was not the story of the survival of the fittest, so much as the story of how human beings realize their capacities for love. ‘Love thy neighbour’ for Teilhard was not just a moral injunction it was an evolutionary imperative. The human brain would not get smarter and smarter, but human beings could move to an even higher level of complexity by evolving ways of communicating and integrating their knowledge. Our brains would not become more complex, but the planet would, in a sense, grow a global brain! The planetization of mankind would therefore be a new phase in human evolution: and consequently of the evolution of the cosmos itself. The Sacred Heart is the Omega point : the glowing furnace of divine energy – love - pulling all creation towards the final parousia: when God, who IS LOVE, would be all in all. Human beings were free to participate in this evolutionary process: to create a civilization of love. For it is only by loving one another that we can realize the full potential of our humanity.

With this in mind, the article in this month’s Scientific American gives a little more light on why the Sacred Heart -as the furnace of divine love – is so important for the future of our planet. Douglas Fox, reviewing some of the latest research by neuroscientists into the physical evolution of the brain shows that ‘Human intelligence may be close to its evolutionary limit.’ (SEE HERE : ) Human beings are, it appears, pretty much at the limits of neuro-complexity: in other words, we are not going to get much smarter. What we see - and what Teilhard saw as a paleontologist – is that human beings are just like other life forms. They reach a point at which the brain just does not improve: that is it. Like the crow, honeybee, the octopus and other mammals, human beings have arrived at their optimal neuro-network. Our brains are as complex as they are going to get! We are just stuck with the wiring we have evolved over millions of years: our brains our now ‘evolutionarily entrenched’. All that step-by-step development ( Teilhard called it tâtonnement) of the human brain is coming to and end. We are as smart as we are going to get. We will remain just a bit smarter than our ancestors who emerged from the ice age.

So, where next for mankind? If we are not going to get any smarter in neurological terms, what does the future hold? The future appears In Scientific American to be exactly what Teilhard predicted all those years ago. Fox ‘s article concludes in terms that are wholly consistent with Teilhard:

The human mind, however, may have better ways of expanding without the need for further biological evolution. After all, honeybees and other social insects do it: acting in concert with their hive sisters, they form a collective entity that is smarter than the sum of its parts. Through social interaction we, too, have learned to pool our intelligence with others. And then there is technology. For millennia written language has enabled us to store information outside our body, beyond the capacity of our brain to memorize. One could argue that the internet is the ultimate consequence of this trend towards outward expansion of intelligence beyond our body.

Of course, Teilhard was saying exactly this before the second world war! ( He predicted the internet way back.) But with a big difference. For Teilhard the future of humanity and the future of Christianity were inextricably linked. If human beings are to harness their capacity to ‘act in concert’ they have to learn to trust, respect and above all LOVE one another. The birth of Jesus is an evolutionary event on a cosmic scale. Jesus is the new Adam, marking out the direction which human evolution must take. If civilization is to evolve further it can only be as a ‘civilization of love.’ When Jesus points to his Sacred Heart, burning with love, it is to point the way to the future of mankind. Man has to learn to harness this energy that burns deep at the centre of creation. Then, and only then, can humanity truly take the next step in its evolution. Hence Teilhard’s famous declaration:


Quelque jour, après l’espace, les vents, les marées, la gravitation, nous capterons, pour Dieu, les énergies de l’amour.- Et alors, une deuxième fois dans l’histoire du Monde, l’Homme aura trouvé le Feu. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, L’Évolution de la Chasteté, ( Les Directions de L’Avenir, Éditions du Seul, Paris1973, p92)

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.



Ratio et Fides. Reason and Faith. My reason – informed by the kind of arguments we find in Teilhard and in more recent research – tells me that humanity can only advance if it builds a ‘civilization of love’. It is not about hoping we will get bigger brains. The hope for the future is not that we will solve our problems through getting smarter. My faith and reason tells me that the hope for the future is that human beings will learn to cooperate, be reciprocal and more altruistic. Humanity can only advance as we learn to respect each other, trust each other, and acquire a ‘sense of the earth’. And ultimately, true progress can only take place when we LOVE one another. Jesus in the image of the Sacred Heart is not pointing to his head: he is pointing to his heart. So many of our problems are problems which are of the heart, not the head. It is dangerous when human beings believe that these problems can be solved by analysis and calculation when in truth they are problems which can only be solved by human beings harnessing their capacities for love. As Jesus’s heart calls and is open to our heart, so our hearts must respond and be open to his heart: the divine centre. It is this ‘Milieu Divin’ which has to become the focus ( or as Teilhard called it the‘ foyer’ ) of the next stage of human evolution. Hence as John Paul put it: we need Christ's Heart to know God and to know our own humanity. To know the Heart of Christ is understand the future and ultimate destiny of humanity.

That is what I see when I look at Ian's design for the Sacred Heart!

The Sacred Heart and the Public Square

Seeing the pictures of Ian applying the gold leaf to the board was a really exciting moment. It was as if the board had suddenly become alive! This feeling prompted me to remember why I thought it was important to ‘go public’ with this project. I am no theologian or artist and I have come to this icon as some-one who might be described as a ‘lukewarm’ Catholic who happened to be a professor of public policy. I kept my faith in a nice little private box which was quite separate from my concerns about public problems and policy. I came to realize,however, that in doing this I was actually contributing to the problem: I had seen economic and other problems as essentially about the application of rationality. However, it slowly occurred to me that so many of our problems have their roots deep in our spiritual or religious malaise. The Sacred Heart , I came to believe, was somehow pointing the way forward for a messed-up world that seems to lack a faith in the future. I wrote a piece about this in the the Catholic Herald last year. See HERE.

Looking at Ian’s work I am SO GRATEFUL that he agreed to make what is an intensely private and spiritual process open to the public gaze. The fact that we are now heading towards 6,000 hits on this blog is a sign that it has stimulated an interest and has served as a kind of metaphor for bringing the Sacred Heart into the public square. To use Benedict’s words (which I have put up on the blog) I believe that Ian is showing us why we urgently need sacred images to enable us to ‘learn to see the openness of heaven. We need them to give us the capacity to know the mystery of God in the pierced heart of the Crucified.’ Thus the image of the Sacred Heart becomes increasingly relevant to our age: we have to stop thinking about it as some old image from the past which has little or no relevance for our future. On this point I can refer readers of this blog to Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith’s blog on ‘ The Sacred Heart should be a rallying cry against secular society. HERE ’

Fr. Alexander concludes his piece in terms that I warmly endorse:

There is far too much talk of God in the abstract, I find, these days, especially from unbelievers. But God is never in the abstract. He is a Person. Knowledge of God is best gleaned through the flesh of Jesus. The Solemnity of the Sacred Heart is a good reminder that we should not let the enemies of religion set the agenda. They might want to talk about a God whom they do not believe in, but who we do not recognise either. We need to reply by talking about the God who is love, the Incarnate Son. Interestingly the Catholics who have most resisted de Christianisation – the brave folk of the Vendée and the Cristeros in Mexico – all took the Sacred Heart as their rallying cry. So should we.

And that is also what Teilhard believed: the Sacred Heart (in quo sunt omnes thesauri sapientiae et scientiae) embodies a theology which points the way to ‘Les directions de l’avenir’ – a Christianity of the future. Hopefully, this icon will, in some small way, contribute to clarifying that theology and thereby make it more relevant to the challenges we face in a world in which public problems are increasingly complex, global and inter-connected . Above all Teilhard realized that this globalized ('planetizing') world needs a 'Cosmic Christ': a Sacred Heart to 'build the earth'. As Blessed John Paul said in 1994: 'From the Heart of Christ crucified is born the new humanity redeemed from sin. The man of the year 2000 needs Christ's Heart to know God and to know himself; he needs it to build the civilization of love". If we are to 'build the earth' and 'build the civilization of love ' we need to centre our personal lives and our public affairs around Christ's Heart.

Water Gilding

This morning I finished preparing the bole. That means sanding it down to get every tiny scratch and dent out, then giving a final coat of thin bole which is applied hot, and  which I then polished with a piece of kitchen towel. This took an age, but by mid morning I was ready to start applying the gold leaf.

Gold in an icon speaks of the Being of God, its qualities of 'bright darkness' speaking of God being known and yet unknown. It is the background in all icons (or a heavenly substitute colour such as red, being bright like gold, or blue, a heavenly colour). Here all of Creation is shot through with gold, just as all of Creation is shot through with the glory of God, enveloped in the Divine which creates, sustains and redeems it.

I use triple thickness 23.5ct gold loose leaf, which I have applied with a double layer and burnished to give a deep radiance. In these photos you can see the bole being heated gently before application, and then being applied deftly with a brush so as to create as smooth a surface as possible.

The gold leaf is applied using a gilder's tip, with a solution of alcohol and water being floated on the bole which 'sucks' the leaf onto the board. This is a very tricky process, and it is easy to tear or crease the leaf.




 Once the leaf was  applied and dried, but not too try, I used a burnisher made of agate stone to polish the gold leaf. Applying even pressure the stone pushes the gold and the bole flat, which means the gold gives a reflection like a mirror.

Preparing for the gold...

The unspeakable and prodigious fire hidden in the essence of things, as in the bush, is the fire  of divine love and the dazzling brilliance of God’s beauty inside everything.  St Maximus the Confessor

I just read the above quotation, and thought it aptly captures the essence of the Sacred Heart as ICON, so thought it best to post it here before I forget!

Today saw the board being prepared for the gold leaf: final tweaks to the design, final sanding of the board, and the transfer of the outline of the image where it touches the gold to the board.

Then, to the areas to be gilded, several layers of bole have been applied. This is a fine red clay, mixed with gelatine, which acts as a 'cushion' to which the wafer thin layers of gold will be applied, and then burnished.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary

Today we celebrate and honour the Blessed Virgin Mary, who as Luke puts it ‘treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart’(Lk2:19.) The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary are closely linked. We find this stated most clearly in the writings of St John Eudes. ( see link in list of useful links). And it is rightly very close. God loves us with a human heart. This heart was formed from the DNA of Mary. For many months two hearts beat within her body and this means that we reserve a special place for Mary in our devotion to the Sacred Heart. At one stage when I was thinking about commissioning an icon I thought about an icon showing both Jesus and Mary, but because of the added complexity in the end I decided on just the Sacred Heart of Jesus. When Ian was completing the Rosary paintings it provided an opportunity for me to reflect on Mary ( Hodegetria) ‘pointing the way’**** to the Sacred Heart. For this reason I am delighted that Ian's design has included a picture of Mary showing her Immaculate Heart in the icon.

Our prayer today is taken from the 1st preface of the Blessed Virgin Mary in today's mass:


Father, all-powerful and ever living God,
We do well always and everywhere to give thanks
as we celebrate the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary.



----------------------------

**** Having looked more closely at the drawing, it is clear that the Virgin is standing Interceding for us ! Thus (correct me if I am wrong Ian) this is Mary 'hagiosoritissa' (of the Holy Chest) and not 'hodegetria'. In the context of the Sacred Heart, of course, this makes perfect sense. Mary is interceding for us (rather than 'pointing the way' ) and asking for God to be merciful to the children of Adam.

Feast of the Sacred Heart

It seems such a long time in coming this year , but today (1st July) is the feast of the Sacred Heart. So it gave me a great deal of pleasure to light a candle for Ian today. The prayers, readings and hymns during the mass all illuminated different aspects of the Heart of Jesus – like the many votive candles by the statue of the Sacred Heart itself. Thinking of Ian’s design (SEE 27th June, below) today greatly helped my prayer and enabled me to focus on a few of these dimensions. As this icon is very much on my mind, I was reminded during mass of what the Directory of Popular Piety and Liturgy says about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, because I think it has a good deal of relevance for this project. The Directory ( See HERE ) states that the Sacred Heart of Jesus :

denotes the entire mystery of Christ, the totality of his being, and his person considered in its most intimate essential: Son of God, uncreated wisdom; infinite charity, principal of the salvation and sanctification of mankind. The "Sacred Heart" is Christ, the Word Incarnate, Saviour, intrinsically containing, in the Spirit, an infinite divine-human love for the Father and for his brothers.

In other words, as a 'thesaurus' or 'treasury' it is a lot to take in! It can, as Teilhard observed, rather overwhelm our feeble minds. I reflected on this during mass and it seems to me this is where the role of the artist ( and musician, but that is another issue!) is so important because art can help us to focus our prayer and enter more fully into the mystery. Indeed, the Directory goes on to say:

Popular piety tends to associate a devotion with its iconographic expression. This is a normal and positive phenomenon. Inconveniences can sometimes arise: iconographic expressions that no longer respond to the artistic taste of the people can sometimes lead to a diminished appreciation of the devotion's object, independently of its theological basis and its historico-salvific content.This can sometimes arise with devotion to the Sacred Heart: perhaps certain over sentimental images which are incapable of giving expression to the devotion's robust theological content or which do not encourage the faithful to approach the mystery of the Sacred Heart of our Saviour.

This is the challenge facing Ian in writing this icon. And this is why he needs prayer – and all the candles he can get! I think that the art associated with the Sacred Heart has indeed ‘diminished the appreciation’ of the devotion and has not served to illuminate the theological basis and content of the profound mystery of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. (If anything it can serve to obscure its theological content.) Ian’s design has, I believe, great potential to provide an iconography which can serve to take us beyond the sentimental images and open a window into the deep theological content which the devotion contains. And I continue to pray that the Lord will guide his hands.

And so a simple prayer on this great feast day.

Sacred Heart of Jesus

Place your Heart deep in the centre of our hearts
and enkindle in each heart a flame of love
as strong, as great, as the sum of all the reasons
that I have for loving you.

Saint Claude de la Colombiere.