Introduction:
Integrating Art, Life, and Faith
God’s love causes the beauty of what He loves
our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.
—Jacques Maritain
As the twentieth century draws to a close, there is little doubt that in the Western world the continued existence of a common culture is in jeopardy: increasingly, our culture is fragmenting into hostile or indifferent factions. The most obvious forms of cultural fragmentation—the persistence of racism and extreme nationalism—are cause for concern and action. But there is an even deeper and more destructive kind of division that threatens to break apart the polity—the struggle known as the “culture wars.”
In the culture wars two ideological camps are fighting a pitched battle to uphold their visions of family, education, the workplace, and the arts. Most of the commentators on the culture wars have described the two sides as the “traditionalists” and the “progressives.” The issues at the heart of these debates—on abortion and education, for example—are critically important, because they will define the nature of the family, and of the definition of life and death.
There is, nevertheless, a widespread sense of unease with the quality of the debate in the culture wars. It can be argued that the most pernicious result of the culture wars is not the outcome of any particular debate, but the politicization and radicalization of public discourse. Increasingly, the culture wars are being fought by ideological zealots who see the issues as nothing more than the conflict between good and evil. There is less and less space for reflection and contemplation, for new visions of order to emerge; frenetic political action is the order of the day.
In the realm of the arts, for example, the gap between the professional arts community and the public is wider than at any time in this century. Most of the debate is taken up with controversial artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, or some of the more bizarre grants made by the National Endowment for the Arts. Despite the fact that these artists constitute only a small minority, the rhetoric coming from both sides exaggerates the influence of the sensationalists. Unfortunately, many people now look at the world of the arts as if it were hostile territory. It should comes as no surprise, then, than in communities where the arts seem distant and distasteful, funding for art education is the first thing to be cut when school budgets get tight. So in the long run the results of the culture wars come home, bringing in their wake the stress of division and an impoverishment of our common life.
There can be no more important issue than the question of how we can mend our tattered social fabric. In the past, art and religion have been the forces that have brought healing by providing visions of hope and purpose. Though religion and art have themselves become intensely politicized in the culture wars, they still retain the ability to appeal to our hearts, enabling us to transcend our isolated experiences and see life whole. Both the work of art and prayer require us to extinguish our self and pause to contemplate a larger vision; their tendency is unitive rather than divisive.
Precisely because the headlines tend to deal with the more superficial controversies of the day, it is necessary to search out the stories that do not get told—for example, the lifetimes that some extraordinary people devote to healing a divided culture. One such story concerns an artist who has been working quietly in the American Midwest.
For nearly half a century William Schickel, of Loveland, Ohio, has combined his deep personal faith and his skills as an artist and designer to bring a healing vision to a number of American communities. Schickel has led an extraordinarily productive life, working as a painter, sculptor, architectural designer, furniture designer, and stained-glass artist—and at the same time remaining a devoted husband and father, as well as an active member of his community.
The name of William Schickel is not frequently heard within the art establishment on either east or west coasts, but that has never disturbed him. Contrary to the modern romantic trend that has led so many artists to create a cult of personality around themselves, Schickel has deliberately followed an older vision—that of the medieval craftsman who effaces his personality in the artistic work set before him.
Educated at the University of Notre Dame in the 1940s, Schickel was profoundly influenced by the leading thinkers of the twentieth-century Catholic intellectual revival, including the Thomist philosophers Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, who were known for their passionate love of the arts. Schickel imbibed from these thinkers the ability to remain faithful to traditional religious teachings while at the same time striving to find contemporary forms and metaphors to incarnate those truths. In the arts, Schickel’s heroes included many of the leading Modernists, who had developed a spare aesthetic language, including elements of abstraction, that he found hospitable to the spiritual life.
When the Catholic Church was shaken by the turmoil that followed in the wake of Vatican II, Schickel became a leading exemplar of the liturgical renewal, making the changes in the spirit and focus of the liturgy concrete in everything from large public sculptures to the design of altars, fonts, and sconces. Though his fidelity to the Magisterium might cause some people to see Schickel as a conservative, he has steadfastly refused to live in the past. To Schickel, there is an important difference between being a conservative and being a reactionary. The conservative, he believes, must find a language in which to make timeless truths understood in the present. The reactionary, on the other hand, clings to an old language from which the spirit has fled. In this way, Schickel has transcended the ideological polarization so characteristic of the contemporary culture wars.
Though Schickel has welcomed the liberating possibilities offered by modern art, he is acutely aware that the twentieth century has been marked by a spiritual crisis that has closed off certain possibilities. In particular, he has often noted that the process of secularization has made it difficult for most of us to preserve a sense of the sacred. But here his response is refreshingly original. In seeking to use his art to reawaken a sense of the sacred, Schickel has not attempted to compensate for secularization by making spiritual symbols and vessels more ethereal and otherworldly. Rather, his designs and artworks have consistently rendered the sacred in terms of the ordinary, everyday realities. For example, his architectural works have related sacred spaces such as churches and oratories to structures like barns and private homes. The result, far from extending the forces of secularism, has acted as a creative reminder that the sacramental life of the Church is a recapitulation of the daily rituals of eating and drinking, working and resting, gathering and dispersing. Several of Schickel’s designs have quietly pioneered new ways of envisioning the holy that others have subsequently adopted and made their own.
Unlike many contemporary artists, who have sought to express the spiritual in terms of pure abstraction, or of a syncretistic appropriation of Eastern religious symbols, Schickel has always believed in the Western idea that in order to touch us the spirit has to be made flesh. He expresses his incarnational vision by maintaining a dialectic between the visible realities of life—sun, moon, water, fish, the human figure—and a partially abstract treatment of these palpable, recognizable things. Schickel has likened the interplay between the recognizable things of this world and his partial abstraction to jazz, where the well-known melody is caught up in a flood of improvisational play.
At a time when many artists have given in to nihilism and despair, Schickel’s art is consistently celebratory, affirming the goodness of the created order. Perhaps the most central metaphor in Schickel’s vision is that of sexuality: the coming together of man and woman, signifying not only physical passion, but a love that is hallowed because it is unconditional. Much contemporary art, Schickel holds, is coldly ironic and essentially inert. He also deplores the persistent strain within religious art that equates spirituality with an ethereal remoteness. The role of art, he believes, is to capture the eros which we ought to bring to spiritual and physical love alike. In this sense, Schickel clearly works within the ancient tradition that saw the erotic metaphors of the Song of Solomon as the “objective correlative” of the relationship between Christ and the Church.
While there is a distinctive Schickel style, the artist has never sought to impose his personality on his works, or to make himself the subject of his art. With his favorite philosopher, Jacques Maritain, Schickel believes that the personality of the artist emerges most clearly when he or she is engaged in a dialogue with the world. He echoes Maritain’s dense but suggestive formulation: “God’s love causes the beauty of what He loves; our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.” In responding with eros to the beauty of God’s creation, the artist in turn presents beautiful objects which have the power to evoke our love.
Schickel believes that an artist must be a craftsman first, a master of the various disciplines that underlie all great art. Those who have met Schickel often note that he never dramatizes his role as an artist—no one is less interested in cultivating the mystique of the artist than Schickel. Rather, he sees the artist as a creative but responsible member of the community.
One of the most valuable effects of Schickel’s down-to-earth conception of the artist is that he has been remarkably responsive to the needs of the constituencies that have commissioned work from him. Instead of setting himself up as a counter-cultural rebel, Schickel has considered it a privilege to serve others through his art. Whether he engages in a conversation with a pastor or a committee about the needs of a parish, or with city officials about a drab urban corridor that calls out for beauty, Schickel listens carefully and seeks a solution. His aesthetic response remains distinctively his own, but it also attempts to speak directly to those who must live with it day after day.
Now, with nearly a half century of work behind him, it is possible to survey and celebrate Schickel’s achievement. The hallmark of his career is a drive toward integration and wholeness—a struggle to unify past and present, spirit and flesh, artist and community. In an era of divisive ideology and cultural fragmentation, William Schickel presents us with a vision that strives for renewal and hope.