Day 54 Creedal Painting

"The Triumph of Thomas Aquinas" Andrea Bonaiuto (Andrea da Firenze)

                                                            (see also Bread)

“…It has been said that 'man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God'; and the augustness of the occasion on which the words were spoken has caused us to confine their meaning to what we call the life of the soul; when, indeed, they include a great educational principle which was better understood by the mediæval Church than by ourselves. May I be allowed once again to describe a painting in which the educational creed of many of us (ie. of the P.N.E.U.) is visibly expressed? …

A Creed which unifies Life. ––Our nature craves after unity. The travail of thought, which is going on to-day and has gone on as long as we have any record of men's thoughts, has been with a view to establishing some principle for the unification of life. Here (in the Spanish Chapel of the church of S. Maria Novella fresco) we have the scheme of a magnificent unity. We are apt to think that piety is one thing, that our intellectual and artistic yearnings are quite another matter, and that our moral virtues are pretty much matters of inheritance and environment, and have not much to do with our conscious religion. Hence, there come discords into our lives, discords especially trying to young and ardent souls who want to be good and religious, but who cannot escape from the overpowering drawings of art and intellect and mere physical enjoyment; they have been taught to consider that these things are, for the most part, alien to the religious life, and that they must choose one or the other; they do choose, and the choice does not always fall upon those things which, in our unscriptural and unphilosophical narrowness, we call the things of God. Let us bless Taddeo Gaddi and Simone Memmi for placing before our eyes a creed which shows that our piety, our virtue, our intellectual activities, and, let us add, our physical perfections, are all fed from the same source, God Himself; are all inspired by the same Spirit, the Spirit of God….”

                                                     *

“The scholastic mediaeval mind, probably working on the scattered hints which the Scriptures offer, worked out a sublime Filosofica della Religione Cattolica, pictured, for example, in the great fresco painted by Simone Memmi and Gaddi (which Ruskin has taught us to know), and implied in "The Adoration of the Lamb" painted by the two Van Eycks. In the first picture we get a Pentecostal Descent, first, upon the cardinal virtues and the Christian graces, then, upon prophets and apostles, and below these upon the seven Liberal Arts represented each by its captain figure, Cicero, Aristotle, Zoroaster, etc., none of them Christian, not one of them a Hebrew. Here we get the magnificent idea that all knowledge (undebased) comes from above and is conveyed to minds which are, as Coleridge says, previously prepared to receive it; and, further, that it comes to a mind so prepared, without question as to whether it be the mind of pagan or Christian; a truly liberal catholic idea, it seems to me, corresponding marvelously with the facts of life… Because the notion that we (of the P.N.E.U) entertain of knowledge as being heterogeneous lies at the root of our heterogeneous theories of education, it may be as well to quote a passage from Ruskin's description of that picture in the chapel of the Church of Santa Maria Novella to which I have referred:… That is, the Florentines of the Middle Ages believed in ‘the teaching power of the Spirit of God,’ believed not only that the seven Liberal Arts were fully under the direct outpouring of the Holy Ghost, but that every fruitful idea, every original conception, be it in geometry, or grammar, or music, was directly derived from a Divine source…Whether we receive it or not, and the Scriptures abundantly support such a theory regarding the occurrence of knowledge, we cannot fail to perceive that here we have a harmonious and ennobling scheme of education and philosophy.”
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Examen: Am I aware of “unscriptural and unphilosophical narrowness” in myself?  Where does it originate?  What are my "discords?" This is the rubber hitting the road of Mason’s work; have I spent enough time with the creedal painting?

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...It has been said: Charlotte M. Mason, School Eduation, 3:153–55.
The scholastic mediaeval: Charlotte M. Mason, Towards aPhilosophy of Education, 6:322–23.

Day 5 Creedal Painting meditation/100 Days copyright Laurie Bestvater

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