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The Catholic commentator Catherine Pepinster good morning
Good Morning Michelle. On thursday night, I was riveted by the opening programme in the new series 'Civilisations', billed by many as the 21st century response to Kenneth Clarke's 1969 TV series 'Civilisation', which i recall watching as a child and being similarly enchanted. While Clarke focused on western art, and began his story outside Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, thursday night's presenter Simon Schama took us on a global tour to see evidence of man's earliest attempts of art in Europe and beyond. Just as Clarke had shown, Schama described the way in which art emerged as a means of human beings depicting the world around them, but also making sense of their lives, searching for deeper meaning. He spotted a religious impulse in this very ancient art. The connections between art and religion have remained intertwined ever since. While art's origins owe so much to the religious impulse, religion would probably not have survived if humanity had not used the arts to develop religious ritual. Religions from primitive times onwards have needed words and music, dance and the visual arts, to shape and structure worship. This is apparent in the Christian tradition, where the liturgy of church services depends on so many forms of art. But there's a lingering tension in Christianity, whose creed includes the belief that God became man, and therefore has not remained distant from us. Should worship reflect God being of the here and now, or should it express God's otherness, his difference. In other words, do we go for rock guitars and plain English, this is little different from the rest of life, and so suggests God is integral to the everyday. Or do we opt in Church, say, for incense and Latin, something not so ordinary, that suggests the great mystery, the Magnum Mysterium, which composers from Palestrina to Judith Bingham have tried to express in their music. This dilemma in Christianity between greeting God in the ordinary, and God as extraordinary, shows no sign of ending. Nor does humanity's need to express its search for meaning, Simon Scharma's opening episode of 'Civilisations' was called 'The second moment of creation', the first presumably being the creation of the world. It made me reconsider Michelangelo's Fresco in the Sistine Chapel of the creation of Adam, where God's hand is outstretched, touching Adam's as if God is in the midst of the act of creation, but now it seems to me as if Michelangelo is showing God as passing on the baton, giving humanity his creative touch, the genius celebrated in 'Civilisations'.
And that was thought for the day with Catherine Pepinster
Thank you very much, Harry!