A brief thought on the use of icons by RCs
All right, I think I'm better now. Sorry for the tantrums earlier.
In (as my late wife, Carolyn would have said) an abrupt and graceless change of subject, through the kindness of The Young Fogey, I happened to read this posting of Tantum Ergo, where Timotheus indicates that renaissance and modern RC devotional art may have departed from its Byzantine and iconological roots. I would like to have commented on Timotheus' weblog, but apparently the weblog moderators there have restricted comment to their members. I thus have no choice save to remain silent, or to make my comments here. Therefore:
Certainly by buying Eastern icons Catholics are breaking from their cultural past, which is part of the problem we face today: loss of identity, in the liturgy and every other aspect of Catholic religious life (except in traditionalist chapels, Deo gratias).
I would rather say that by venerating and maybe even inscribing and otherwise using icons, Catholics are returning to their cultural past.
If I read the article aright, Timotheus asserts that Catholic devotional art went off the tracks when it left its iconological tradition for a more pictoral or representational practice in the Renaissance. I agree there.
I disagree, however, as regards the quotation above. I believe Dorothy L. Sayers put it well when she attacked the saying: "You can't turn back the clock." Her repost is my own in this context: If you mean, you can't go back to the past, then you are correct; but if you mean that you can't correct an error, then you are wrong. Wise men do so every day.
I personally feel that the veneration and correct use of icons at home and in Catholic worship is a corrective to the current efforts at liturgicide in much of modern RC worship. It also may be what His late Holiness, John Paul the Great, authorized when he suggested that the faithful "breath with both lungs of the Church", that is, live devotionally and spiritually in both the East and the West.
Finally, I think it possible for devotional art in RC worship to be both representational and appropriately spiritual. Two examples would be Salvador Dali,

and John Nava:
