Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum, in vanum laborant qui aedificaverunt eam - "Unless the Lord built the house, they worked in vain who built it" Ps. 127
The beautiful hymn "Lo, How A Rose E'er Blooming" (originally the 16th century German song "Es Ist Ein Ros Entsprungen") is one of my favorite songs of the Advent Season. It draws its inspiration from the following Messianic passage from the Prophet Isaiah:
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. (Isaiah 11:1-2)
In Isaiah’s time the Davidic kingdom had been destroyed, and the people of Israel were living in exile. Nonetheless, it was clear to the Jewish people that the Prophet was speaking not only of their return to their earthly homeland and the rebirth a truncated political entity: he was delivering God’s promise that, when things looked most hopeless in this world, He would send a Savior, his Messiah, to usher in a Kingdom greater that any conceived by mere men. In this song the “shoot” (the Messiah Jesus, descended through his human mother Mary from King David, Jesse’s son) is depicted as a lovely Rose, a small but vibrant manifestation of God’s presence where all seemed dead:
It came, a flow'ret bright,
Amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.
In the Season of Advent the Church reminds us that God has also promised to send his Messiah again in glory at the end of time. This past year has given Catholic Christians plenty of reasons to feel that our world is collapsing, and that we are living in a sort of internal exile (we need not go into specific details here). Our Hope will not be realized in this world, but only in the New Jerusalem in the world to come.
For this reason, we look to the Blessed Mother as our model, who staked her life on trusting in the promise of an angel. And so the song invites us to join her in gazing on the Rose springing from the stump of Jesse:
An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 1 May 2016. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.
Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6: 9 -11)
"St. George Slaying The Dragon" by Carlo Crivelli
Many years ago the public high school I attended was inviting art students to decorate ceiling tiles with their work. My sister, who was no longer an observant Catholic but knew a good image when she saw one wanted to do a painting modeled on a medieval depiction of St. George slaying the dragon by Carlo Crivelli. The school’s principal vetoed her proposed project, however, on the grounds that the not-terribly-bloody depiction of heroic dracocide was “too violent". My sister (along with many of the rest of us) was amazed that the principal would object to what was obviously a symbolic representation of Good defeating Evil.
This old incident came back to mind last Saturday, which was the feast of St. George. I was planning a blog post to commemorate the Saint’s Day, but circumstances prevented me from actually writing it. It seems that no good thought is wasted, however, because every day since I seem to come across something that brings that image back to mind.
For one there's the Washington Post report [HERE] that Indian guru and peace advocate Sri Sri Ravi Shankar recently tried to engage the Islamist terror group ISIS in a dialogue:
"I tried to initiate peace talks with the ISIS recently but they sent me a photograph of a beheaded body of a man . . . Thus, my effort for a peace dialogue with the ISIS ended."
The advocate for meditation and harmony offered this frank conclusion: "I think the ISIS does not want any peace talks. Hence, they should be dealt with militarily."
This man who has dedicated his life to spreading “meditation and harmony” can see (unlike my old high school principal) that not all violence is alike, and that sometimes there are dragons in the world that, for the sake of peace and justice, require slaying. To destroy such a monster actually furthers the cause of peace.
I am also thinking of the case of Michael Voris. Voris is the creator and public face ofChurchMilitant.com, and an ardent (although at times, perhaps, a little, um, strident) defender of Catholic Orthodoxy. Over this past weekend he revealed that earlier in his life, during a period which he has previously described as “horribly sinful”, he was in fact engaged in a promiscuous homosexual lifestyle “over a prolonged period of time”. He chose to reveal these personal details because, he said, somebody with the Archdiocese of New York was preparing to release information about his prior misdeeds in an effort to damage his reputation.
Michael Voris
Now, not everybody is a fan of Michael Voris. Even some who agree that he is indeed engaging Real Dragons Out In The World find his style too abrasive on occasion, and his manner to be sometimes uncharitable. The past week’s revelations may provide a little humanizing context for his modus operandi, and this video, in which he discusses his past sins, but uses them as a prelude to a celebration of Christ’s love and mercy, is very moving. Voris’ story also serves as a reminder that before we can engage any dragons out there, we must first prevail over those inside of us. As the old Latin motto says, vincit qui se vincit (“he conquers who conquers himself”). We may not all contain within us the same dragons, or dragons as tenacious, as the ones that Michael Voris had to overcome, but we all need to do battle with disordered desires and sinful inclinations if we are to become the people whom God wants us to be (that is, saints). We can only find victory in that struggle, of course, with the help of God’s Grace.
This last point, I have long suspected, is the real reason why my old high school principal refused to allow a painting of St. George and the Dragon. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see the symbolism, it was that the symbolism was all too apparent. Even three-and-a-half decades ago the image of a Catholic Saint killing the Embodiment of Evil was too controversial for a public high school in the United States. In the interim saints have only become less fashionable, and dragons rather more so. Fortunately, Christ has given us the Gospel, his Church, and the Sacraments, so that we might be armed as St. George was armed to confront dragons, both outside and in.
Today is Pentecost, one of the great Feasts of the Church, in which we remember how Jesus sent the Holy Spirit upon his Disciples to guide them in their mission of Evangelization and in the governance of his Church. In the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read that the Apostles, Mary and others were gathered in the Upper Room when there was a rush of mighty wind and tongues of flame. Not only that, those gathered began speaking “in other tongues”. The international crowd gathered in Jerusalem, on hearing them, was
. . . amazed and wondered, saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphyia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God." (Acts 2:5-11)
Referring to this event, St. Gregory of Agrigentum said:
Therefore if somebody should say to one of us, “You have received the Holy Spirit, why do you not speak in tongues?” his reply should be, “I do indeed speak in the tongues of all men, because I belong to the body of Christ, that is, the Church, and she speaks all languages. What else did the presence of the Holy Spirit indicate at Pentecost, except that God’s Church was to speak in the language of every people?”
The Church speaks to everyone because Christ is for everyone, and his language is universal. Today we have ways of reaching people all over the globe that St. Gregory Agrigentum could not have imagined back in the 6th century, but it's the same Gospel, the same proclamation that the Apostles made 2,000 years ago.
One of the attractive things about Catholicism is that, traditionally anyway, it has always included a lot of Cool Stuff: gorgeous music and art (a sampling of which I try to showcase on my blog), beautiful churches in which to worship (which are themselves filled with inspiring images), ancient, uplifting prayers with which to praise our creator, and on and on. There's a vast treasury of beauty, and you can see it, hear, touch it, even smell it. It's all wonderful but . . . is it really necessary?
Many non-Catholic Christians and, sadly, even a substantial number of self-identified Catholics, dismiss these tactile and aesthetic riches as pointless frippery. Many others recognize their power, but misunderstand their purpose. John Adams, for instance, one of my favorite figures from American history but a man whose formation was thoroughly protestant, once witnessed a Catholic Vespers service when the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia decided to take turns attending each other's churches. He was impressed by the impact of the vestments, incense, and chanting, but also highly suspicious of its purpose, remarking "How did Luther ever break the spell?" Now, it's no surprise that somebody like Adams, raised in a worldview grounded in Puritanism, should mistrust and misunderstand the aesthetic aspects of Catholic worship, but we should expect better from our fellow Catholics, particularly those who design churches, plan liturgies, and compose or arrange music. In another recent post [here] we saw how beautiful, well-ordered churches help to teach the Faith. Today I'd like to discuss in more depth how aesthetic experiences (both inside and out of the church building) can deepen our faith and even, in some cases, help bring the unbelieving to belief.
It's a Matter of Trust
Before I go any further, I'd like to stress that bringing about conversion is primarily the work of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord still wants us to play a role, however: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you (Matthew 28:19-20). A significant part of that teaching should be directed toward opening minds and hearts so that people are prepared to trust Christ and his message. And "Trust" is the key word. In my post "Star Trek, Secularism, And Christian Faith" [here] we looked at another passage from Matthew, in which Jesus walks on the water and then invites Peter to do the same; we saw that when Peter sinks into the waves, it was not so much from a lack of belief as a lack of trust (Matthew 14:25-32). Trust of this sort doesn’t come easily: how quickly Peter, who was a close friend of Jesus, wavered in his faith. How many of us ordinary believers, even those of us who have had powerful and convincing encounters with the power of God, have found ourselves beginning to doubt, and starting to drift away? This is, I think, one of the ongoing effects of original sin: that we are prey to doubt, and our emotions can overwhelm our understanding.
If believing Christians can be drawn into doubt, what about people with even stronger emotional incentives to disbelieve? There are those who hope to indulge their favored sins without guilt, for instance, or who work in a profession (such as academia) or live in an environment where Christian Faith marks them out for ridicule and abuse; there are an enormous number of people who know little about the history or teaching of the Catholic Church except the misrepresentations of an uninformed and often hostile popular press; there are those who really have been harmed, or are close to somebody who has been harmed, by someone they identify with Christianity or with the Catholic Church.
The Object of Opening the Mind . . .
William-Adolphe Bouguereau's "Song of the Angels"
Sometimes it is possible to overcome emotional barriers with the power of imagination. It's not that God or the matter of our Faith is imaginary, quite the opposite. It is that evidence is not self-interpreting, it needs a mind to interpret, a mind open to sometimes unsettling truths. Things that engage the imagination such as art, music, and stories (including films and television programs) don't simply work on the intellect, they create new emotional experiences that can sometimes shake and loosen habits of mind cemented in place by previous experiences. Jesus took full advantage of this truth about human nature when he taught in parables. Freed from these old barriers, we are able to see reality in a new light. The well- known Catholic blogger Fr. John Zuhlsdorf (a.k.a. Fr. Z), for instance, was a Lutheran who, after hearing a beautiful work of sacred polyphony on the radio, started to view Catholicism in a different way; this was the first step in his conversion, and eventual ordination as a Catholic priest.
G. K. Chesterton once said: "The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." An important purpose of so many of the tangible and beautiful things in Catholic worship, all the chanting, vestments, smells and bells, is to expand the imagination so that our minds are opened large enough to receive the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
There is, of course, a danger in reliance on the imagination: it can expand the mind in other, less wholesome, directions as well. The well-meaning but misguided creators of Star Trek, for instance, are just the tip of the iceberg, and much, perhaps most, of what else is on offer in the popular culture is considerably worse. Like our conscience, then, imagination must be properly formed. We should take seriously the power of works of imagination, both for good and for bad, always bearing in mind St. Paul's advice: "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (Phillipians 4:8). We might wish to remember the Apostle's words, and feel no guilt when we enjoy the beauty of Catholic music, art, or worship. In fact, it's all part of His plan.
I recently re-published a post called “Star Trek, Secularism, and Christian Faith”. It had originally been posted on my first blog, Principium et Finis, where it garnered more page views than anything else on the blog – more than anything else I’ve ever published online, in fact. There seems to be something about imaginative stories like Star Trek (and similar things) that captures our attention, and has done so since our far-distant ancestors gathered around campfires to hear story-tellers recount the communal tales that defined them as a people.
In my earlier post I was somewhat critical of the creators of the television science-fiction franchise on the grounds that they didn’t really understand the nature of Faith, which was supposed to be a major theme in episode I was discussing. They are on much firmer ground, however, in the episode called “Darmok”, from the fourth season of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not only that, I think that this particular story throws an interesting light on some current issues in the Catholic Church.
In “Darmok” the (mostly human) crew of the starship Enterprise encounters an alien race called the Tamarians, with whom humans have previously had several frustratingly unsuccessful attempts at communication. It seems that the Earthling’s Universal Translators (ah, the wonders of science fiction!) are able to discover the meaning of the Tamarians’ words, but can’t figure out how the words combine to express meaning. What is one to make, for instance, of utterances such as “Shaka, when the walls fell”, or “The river Tamarc, in winter”? The aliens seem to be talking in metaphors and allusions drawn from stories known to them and to nobody else.
Data and Troi explain Tamarian Language
Jean-Luc Picard, the Enterprise’s captain (played by British actor Patrick Stuart) experiences the same frustration as his predecessors in his attempts to communicate with the commander of a Tamarian ship, a frustration clearly shared by his alien counterpart. Finally, the Tamarian captain holds up two daggers and declares “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!”, at which both he and Picard are transported (more sci-fi wizardry) down to the surface of a planet below. Picard soon learns that the captain is not challenging him to a duel as he at first supposes, but what he does intend, or what he means by his insistent repetition of “Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra!” remains a mystery.
Finally, after the two captains together encounter a deadly creature (which mortally wounds Picard’s Tamarian counterpart), Picard puts the puzzle together. Darmok and Jalod were two heroes, perhaps rivals or enemies, who together fought a beast on an island called Tanagra, and formed a bond of friendship. The alien captain had hoped that, by putting himself and Picard in a similar situation, they might likewise achieve through shared experience what they couldn't find through mere words. Picard then comforts his dying counterpart by recounting to him the ancient epic of Gil-Gamesh.
We Are Formed by Experience
The Tamarians, as are all the aliens in Star Trek, are humans in disguise. In this particular story the creators of the television show have put their finger on something that goes to the very heart of what it is to be human: we are formed by our experiences, not only as individuals but as peoples. The “aliens” they have created here view the world only through the lens of the stories that have been passed down about the history of their people, and in their everyday experiences they consciously relive the experiences of their forebears. Their only way to communicate abstractions is through the concrete: people, places, and events.
Picard tells Tamarians about death of their captain
Now, we Earth-dwellers may not look very much like them at first. We have a wealth of language that communicates abstractions and ideas. We are however, more Tamarian than we appear at first glance. Notice how easily, for example, the name of the Nazi’s hand-picked Norwegian puppet Vidkun Quisling has become the common noun “quisling”, a synonym for “traitor” . . . or how easily we use a metaphorical term such as “puppet”, as I did just now. Often, we quickly forget that the expressions we are using are metaphors at all. I remember, for instance during the 1992 presidential campaign when former (and present) California governor Jerry Brown was asked about the “anointed front-runner” Bill Clinton. Brown asked whether he was running for president, or running for pope. Some allusions are even more deeply buried: how many people even know when they use the word “mentor” they are alluding to Homer’s Odyssey, where the goddess Athena, in the guise of a wise old man named Mentor, accompanies Odysseus’s son Telemachus to guide him (or, to speak metaphorically, “show him the ropes”).
It's a Mystery to Me
There’s even more going on here than the use of language. The Tamarian captain understands that actions, experiences, can communicate in ways that words cannot (a point I also discuss in a post I republished this week, “Christ, or Anti-Christ? Art & the Power of Imagination”), which is of course true of human beings as much as it is of the fictional “Children of Tamar”. This is a large part of why so many religions rely on ritual and formal rites: the actions communicate to us much more deeply than mere words, because we are actually living out what they want to convey. The true meaning of the term “mystery” (from the Greek μυστήριον) in fact, is not something unknowable, but something that can only be known experientially. Traditional Christianity tells us that God uses these mysteries as a means not only of imparting His Grace, but of revealing himself to us. Once we understand that, we can more easily see why μυστήριον translates into Latin as sacramentum, because sacraments involve not only knowing or thinking, but acting.
The Mystery of the Eucharist
Most religions rely, to some degree or other, on mystery. At the very core of Christianity we find the Profoundest Mystery, the Supreme Sacrament: The Infinite God become Man in order to experience our humanity, and to invite us, in turn, to share in His Divinity. We live out this mystery concretely when we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist which is, as the Second Vatican Council reminds us, the summit and source of the Christian life. While Catholic Christianity includes countless lesser ways of living out spiritual realities as well, including the other Sacraments, sacramentals, devotions, and so on, the Eucharist, and the Sacrifice of the Mass in which we receive it, is the most important thing we do.
Turning Toward The Lord
It can be helpful, I think, to bear these considerations in mind when we look at the suggestion recently made by Cardinal Sarah, currently head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments , that priests start re-introducing the practice of saying the Mass ad orientem, “toward the rising sun”, which is to say facing the altar rather than the congregation. The Cardinal made the suggestion in a talk delivered at a liturgical conference in London this past summer (full text here). Cardinal Sarah asked his fellow shepherds in the episcopy to support him in this matter, saying:
I very humbly and fraternally would like to appeal also to my brother bishops: please lead your priests and people towards the Lord in this way, particularly at large celebrations in your dioceses and in your cathedral. Please form your seminarians in the reality that we are not called to the priesthood to be at the centre of liturgical worship ourselves, but to lead Christ’s faithful to him as fellow worshippers united in the one same act of adoration.
Implicit in the part of the quote I have italicized above is the idea that what we do, and what the priest does, during the Mass is a part of the message.
Ad Orientem: facing The Lord Together
I first came across a similar suggestion in regard to ad orientem worship some years ago in an article by Fr. Joseph Fessio called “The Mass of Vatican II”. In his essay Fr. Fessio explains what the documents of Vatican II actually say about the Mass; for instance, that it should remain mostly in Latin, and that Gregorian Chant “should be given pride of place in liturgical services", and various other directives that appear not to have much influenced the post-conciliar revision of the liturgy. Fr. Fessio points out that one thing that was done does not appear, anywhere, in the Council’s documents, just as it had never been part of the tradition of the Church over the previous 18 centuries: turning the priest at Mass around to face the congregation, rather than having him face the altar, the liturgical East, along with the people he is leading in prayer. In defending the traditional practice Fr. Fessio more explicitly makes some of the same points that Cardinal Sarah does in his London talk:
It's true that when the priest faces the people for the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, there may be a sense of greater unity as a community. But there is also a danger of the priest being the performer and you being the spectator - precisely what the Council did not want: priest performers and congregational spectators. But there is something more problematic. You can see it, perhaps, by contrasting Mass facing the people with Mass facing East or facing the Lord. I don't say Mass "with my back to the people" anymore than Patton went through Germany with his "back to the soldiers." Patton led the Third Army across Germany and they followed him to achieve a goal. The Mass is part of the Pilgrim Church on the way to our goal, our heavenly homeland. This world is not our heavenly homeland. We don't sit around in a circle and look at each other. We want to look with each other and with the priest towards the rising sun, the rays of grace, where the Son will come again in glory on the clouds.
The Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan famously said of television that “the medium is the message”. The same can be said of all media, including sacred media. How we celebrate the Mass sends a message. The symbolic “message” of the ad orientem Mass is clear: that all of us together, priest and people, are making an offering to God; we all face our Lord together. When priest and people face each other, who is offering what to whom? The message seems to be that we are there to see each other, not to turn to Our Lord. The little cartoon to the left (which, I confess, I stole from Fr. Z’s blog) gives a good illustration of the problem. Cardinal Sarah himself recently made the same point in a talk deliveredto the bishops of Sri Lanka,
In recent decades in some countries the Sacred Liturgy has become too anthropocentric; man not Almighty God has often become its focus.
But that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Instead,
In every Catholic liturgy, the Church, made up of both minister and faithful, gives her complete focus – body, heart and mind – to God who is the centre of our lives and the origin of every blessing and grace.
That’s the beauty of the traditional ad orientem celebration of the Mass: we don’t merely read or hear but experience ourselves the Truth that God is the center of our lives, and our in our worship we all turn to Him together.
It's Greek to Me
Which brings me to my one real quibble with “Darmok”. In the final scene of the episode we see Captain Picard reading a book when his first officer, Commander Riker, enters the room. Riker looks at the book curiously, and says, “Greek, sir?” (did I mention that Captain Picard is quite a Renaissance man? Starship captain, student of Latin and Greek, etc.), which leads to this exchange:
PICARD: Oh, the Homeric Hymns. One of the root metaphors of our own culture.
RIKER: For the next time we encounter the Tamarians?
PICARD: More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs. The Tamarian was willing to risk all of us just for the hope of communication, connection. Now the door is open between our peoples. That commitment meant more to him than his own life. Thank you, Number One.
Now, the Homeric Hymns is not a bad place to start, as far as it goes, but if Picard really wants to get at the “root” of what it is to be human, I have a better suggestion for him, one that starts out like this:
This Throwback was first published 1 August 2015 on the blog Principium et Finis.
Who do you see in the picture?
The Incarnation remains among the most astounding of Catholic doctrines. It's not easy to believe that the Second Person of the Trinity, the Eternal Word,
. . . though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.(Phillipians 2:6-8)
The Infinite God, St. Paul tells us, willingly took on finite humanity in the Incarnation. Because we believe this, Catholics have always understood that humble and material things can serve as channels for greater, immaterial things. The chief examples, aside from the God-Man Jesus Christ Himself, are the Sacraments, which are created things that serve as vehicles of God’s Grace. We also find the same principle at work, albeit on a less exalted level, in art, music, and other works of the imagination.
In recent posts aboutStar Trek[here] and about biblical films such asNoah[here] I have discussed the power of images and other works that appeal to the imagination to mislead and confuse. Such things can also enlighten us, of course, if they are done properly, and deepen our understanding (which is why the Catholic faith has always had such a large audio-visual component). I recently came across an interesting example of an imaginative work being used in a more positive manner. Two imaginative works, actually, because it involves a renaissance fresco appearing in a modern work of fiction.
The book is michael O’Brien’s apocalyptic novel Father Elijah. I’m thinking in particular of a scene in which Fr. Elijah himself and a friend are looking at a wall painting in the Cathedral of Orvieto:
Elijah went over to another mural.
His eyes were drawn to the central figure of the image, a figure of Christ. How strange, he thought,to see a representation of the Lord with the figure of Satan whispering in His ear,and his arm penetrating His robes. Is that Christ’s hand or the devil’s that emerges from the folds of cloth?
It was not a literal representation of a scriptural scene, he concluded; although it might be the artist’s imaginative rendering of the temptation in the desert? But there was something out of character in the way Christ leaned into Satan’s embrace and listened with such attention.
He stared at it for a long time. Suddenly, the meaning of the mural became clear, like a scene viewed through lenses revolving into focus. The blurred shapes of reality drew together into a sharp, piercing landscape of moral disaster.
The figure held in the devil’s embrace was not Christ but the Antichrist.
Elijah understood why Don Matteo had wanted him to see it. Now he knew why the old friar would not tell him the reason for his request. Matteo had wanted Elijah to discover the secret of the mural himself, and in the process, to observe the mechanics of perception.
I immediately knew the painting by it's description, because I had used a picture of it to illustrate a blog post last winter (called, appropriately enough, "'Choice' And The Father Of Lies", here). The painting creates a vivid picture of Satan's usual modus operandi: evil working in the guise of good. The striking image gets the message across much more memorably than a simple explanation (hence the old saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words").
But there's more to it than that. Notice that the characters looking at the mural above don't at first realize what they're seeing; neither did I, only it took me a lot longer to figure it out than it does Fr. Elijah. But that's part of what makes the painting so effective: we think we're seeing Jesus, only to realize that we're actually looking at his opposite. We are not merely seeing a depiction of deception, we are in fact deceived by the artist's work: we experience deception itself, "in the flesh" as it were. That's a powerful lesson. That's why, in O'Brien's novel, Don Matteo wanted Fr. Elijah to experience it first-hand.
Very often our faith is hindered by emotional barriers: those of us who are believers sometimes give in to doubt, even though we've experienced God's presence; unbelievers often are incapable of accepting any evidence at all because of such barriers. A well-crafted work of visual or imaginative art can often weaken those barriers by creating a new emotional experience, and so lead to a new or deeper understanding, while bad or disordered art can lead us further into darkness. What we see, hear, or read can make all the difference.
