Bibliography:FCR Bibliography 0040
Carola, Joseph A.. The Academics, the Artist, and the Architect: Retrieving the Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Catholicism. (2020).
| Name(s) | Carola, Joseph A. |
|---|---|
| Title | The Academics, the Artist, and the Architect: Retrieving the Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Catholicism |
| Year | 2020 |
| Language(s) | eng |
| Contained in | Logos vol. 23/1 |
| Bibliographic level | Paper in journal |
In the early 1800s, amid the still smoldering, revolutionary ash, the Catholic Church in Europe rose like a phoenix remarkably revived despite the immense challenges that continued to confront her. Catholic academics, artists, and architects among both the clergy and the laity engaged in a massive project geared toward resurrecting the Catholic ethos in theology, philosophy, literature, art, and architecture—an ethos that revolution, war, and antithetical philosophical currents had greatly enfeebled. To that end, a broadly defined Catholic intelligentsia retrieved the Church's tradition in order to lay a sure foundation on which to rebuild. Theologians delved deeply into Scripture and the Church Fathers. By century's end, they also turned to Thomas Aquinas who, in having masterfully synthesized the Church's patristic heritage, offered a thoroughly Catholic and solidly intellectual response to the culture wars then raging. Catholic artists, along with their Protestant confreres, imbibed the spirit of Fra Angelico and Giotto in order to overcome the pagan neoclassicism dominant in their guild's academies. Neo-Gothic architects, especially in Great Britain, looked to the decidedly Christian architecture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in order to construct buildings, both civil and ecclesiastical, that ennobled the human spirit rather than edifices that enslaved it. In order to illustrate this multifaceted project of retrieval, I shall consider the theological enterprises of Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838), John Henry Newman (1801–1890), and Giovanni Perrone (1794–1876). I shall also examine the artistic work of Johann Fried-rich Overbeck (1789–1869) and the architectural insights of Augustus W. N. Pugin (1812–1852). As we shall see, the twentieth-century Ressourcement, well known to many, followed directly upon an equally significant, although perhaps less well known, nineteenth-century return to the sources undertaken in order to meet the pressing challenges of that day for the sake of the future. But before I descend into the particulars, it is important to recall the political and intellectual climate that contextualized that momentous and indeed often heroic nineteenth-century retrieval of the tradition.
