By SHAUN KENNEY
At the University of Virginia, St. Thomas Aquinas Parish stands at the center of the Catholic community. For many years, there was a statue of Aquinas made entirely out of chrome bumpers, in which the Angelic Doctor was portrayed in all of his massive perched glory in front of the parish facing Alderman Road.
Thus the “Bumper Buddha” graced the epicenter of Catholicism at the university until very recently, when Aquinas was unceremoniously removed and given a more appropriate perch — in a Charlottesville art park on top of a building, gazing over other modern art pieces in silent and highly reflective chromium repose.
For those of you not familiar with Pachamama, it is some sort of Peruvian idol representing fertility and birth. Such was the charge laid at the feet of a wooden statue that was presented to Pope Francis and was displayed inside the Vatican as “Our Lady of the Amazon” — or so we think.
Quite honestly, I have no idea whether this wooden statue — which looked more like three successively larger wooden dinner plates stacked layered side by side — represented our Lady or not. I’ve seen far worse representations in places such as Nazareth, where dozens of beautiful depictions of the Blessed Mother line the Basilica of the Annunciation alongside the American contribution which looks more like Our Lady of Recycling than anything else. Truly, a national embarrassment.
So I chose to employ the ultimate test. I showed the wooden statue to my six-year-old daughter and asked her what it looked like.
Her answer? A boomerang.
Personally, she might have a point. The aerodynamics of this particular statuette are small enough to throw and expect some degree of lift, though that test as it was thrown into the Tiber demonstrably failed.
There are a lot of things to disagree with here. St. Thomas Aquinas argues that beauty consists of three qualities: integritas (wholeness), consonantia (proportionality), and claritas (radiance). Part of the problem with modernism and its ugly kid sister postmodernism is that all three of these qualities are to a great degree diminished in the minds of the consumers of beauty — namely ourselves.
This isn’t to argue that those of us in the West have a perfect conception of beauty either. In fact, much of what we consider “beautiful” today are really just plain lewd.
Does It Radiate Beauty?
James Joyce once wrote in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that this concept of claritas as understood by Aquinas was mixed up just a touch, for Aquinas — coming from a rationalist and Aristotelian background — understood this radiance of an object to be in the whatness (or what philosophers would call quiddity) of the object. A basket has claritas when it functions as a basket.
Joyce observed that there was something more to a basket than its function. That there was a this-ness (haeccity) to a basket that was something more mentally intuitive. Consider my six-year-old daughter as she draws a flower with a box of crayons. Her concept — this-ness — of the flower is pretty well intact; her expression of that flower into a whatness on the sheet of paper might look nothing like an actual flower at all…but it is an expression of what she believes it to be through her as-yet undeveloped skills.
This is all a really complicated way of saying that while beauty is objective, art is in the eye of the beholder — and like many tastes, they are either refined or they are unrefined.
Thus we come back to the boomerangs purported to be either a Peruvian idol or an image of Our Lady of the Amazon. Frankly, I don’t believe either to be the case — in order for something to be syncretism, the exchange has to go both ways. In other words, we have to believe that this wooden boomerang has some sort of power it doesn’t have, and the Amazonian tribes have to believe that the boomerang might actually be an image of our Lady.
Our problem here isn’t so much of what this boomerang might be. Maybe it really is the best these folks could do to express what Our Lady of the Amazon might be.
Maybe my daughter’s crayon flower is the best her six-year-old concept could do? Maybe it really is Pachamama and someone is trying to pass it off as Our Lady of the Amazon…and maybe Our Lady of Recycling in Nazareth really is the best Americans can do to honor Our Lady. Blecch….
But back to James Joyce for a moment. Before an artist creates something, there is a concept in his mind. Joyce’s quote on this is worth capturing in full:
“The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.”
When my daughter thinks of a flower? She is captivated by it. Likewise, when we consider the Blessed Mother, we should be utterly captivated by her beauty in all three forms that captivated Aquinas: her integrity, her consonance, and her radiance. If one considers every instance where there has been an apparition of the Blessed Mother, one is instantly struck that she seems to present all three qualities effortlessly — at Akita, at Fatima, at Lourdes.
Of course, there is always the danger of falling in love with the beauty of an object’s forms rather than the essence of the object itself. This is what Joyce means when he says that Aquinas gets the equation mostly right but not entirely right. The form is important; the essence is critical. Yet that essence drives the form.
Back to our boomerang in the Vatican. Perhaps the word “quaint” is the most charitable word to use to describe this wooden statue. Certainly if I had my choice between the boomerang and Our Lady of Recycling, I might be so inclined to choose the boomerang. Yes, it is that bad.
Aquinas gets it right, of course, but it’s hard for someone who wrote 800 years ago to defend himself against those of us here today.
Yet much like the “Bumper Buddha” at the University of Virginia attempting to depict Aquinas, sometimes you have to lean back and consider that this really was the best this community could do in the 1960s. Did they know better? It’s the University of Virginia; they should have. But alas, they got caught up in the “spirit of Vatican II” and the end result inspired not only the arrival of solid, faithful Dominicans — even a small Dominican house next door — but today a complete renovation of the church itself to become something Aquinas would define as truly beautiful.
I wonder how many European Catholics walk by Our Lady of Recycling in Nazareth and think the same thing about us Catholics in America? That we know better, but every time we walk by that refined garbage, we cannot help but feel slightly ashamed and desire to do better.
One suspects the same could be said for the so-called “Our Lady of the Amazon.” I sit in judgment of no one’s soul. Perhaps this really was the best the Catholics of the Amazon could produce? Perhaps it really is Pachamama (though how a Peruvian idol makes it to the Amazon is a tad suspicious). Perhaps “Bumper Buddha” was the best Aquinas we could make? Perhaps my six-year-old’s flower is beautiful in its own stead?
But even a six-year-old knows the difference between our Lady and a boomerang. Or better still, a six-year-old knows certain truths we as adults simply refuse to recognize.
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First Teachers warmly encourages readers to submit their thoughts, views, opinions, and insights to the author directly either via e-mail or by mail. Please send any correspondence to Shaun Kenney c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Road, Kents Store, VA 23084 or by e-mail to kenneys@cua.edu.
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