III But the Work of Christian Art here does not refer to either any work made by a professing Christian or to every piece of stuff associated with the religious assembly of Christians. Christians can make many things, and certainly even things of high aesthetic quality, things of great art, without those things being Works of Christian Art. Such things can be merely honestly crafted items for daily use. They can be items of high aesthetic quality and invention. Yet even items set apart from daily use, aesthetic things used in worship, need not be items of Christian Art. They can be merely items of liturgical apparatus. A paten—the plate that holds the communion bread—although intimately associated with the business of the Eucharist, is not always, or even usually, to be considered as a Work of Christian Art. When use by the ministers and the communicants in the business of communion it is an apparatus of liturgy, indeed a sacred object (meaning an object set apart), but not in itself sacred, like a totem, but rather sanctified by the communicants’ faithful reception of Christ’s body. Apart from the liturgy, it is just a plate. Apart from the faithful assembly of believers, it is crockery, or silverware. There is nothing in the particular roundness of the paten that immediately separates it from all other plates. Now the paten can be decorated with symbols and sayings which seek, by their presence, to separate that paten from the great body of plates, but those things are decorations, superficial things ground into the basic roundness of the plate. They can be rubbed-off without altering the paten’s fundamental structure. And though perhaps costly, and make of precious metals, the paten can be fairly easily bought. It can be manufactured and produced in mass. Its manufacturer can design different styles to respond to different market demands and various tastes. These designs can be pictured in a catalogue of church wares, and one kind or another can be ordered on demand. Because of its use in the Eucharist, the paten might be treated with particular respect, perhaps stored apart from other objects out of a caretaker’s devotion, but at the very best this respect, this devotion, is due not to the object itself but vicariously to the faith testified to by the communicants who take Christ’s body from off its surface. None of these things would characterize the Work of Christian Art. And there are those who would say that art, of any kind, and of any quality, would be an example of Christian Art simply because it was made by a professing Christian. And there is a certain reasonableness to this argument. But would we say that any act done by a Christian is a “Christian” act because it is done by a Christian? Are the rapes of children by priests Christian rapes? Are the murders of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian Christians, Christian murders? Or wouldn’t we agree that there must be a certain quality or nature to an act for it to be considered “Christian”? And if there are indeed qualities or characteristics appropriate to a “Christian” act, what might those characteristics or qualities be? For instance, would a “Christian act” be more likely described as cruel or kind? And if we agree in the nonsense of describing any act done by a Christian as a “Christian act,” surely too we can agree in the nonsense of calling any aesthetic artifact, even a work of art produced for religious purposes, made by a Christian a Work of
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