The World's Debt to the Catholic Church

According to a very old tradition, St. Luke, who wrote the third Gospel, was a painter and a physician. In the last generation the authenticity of the tradition of St. Luke's having been a physician was very seriously doubted and indeed it was thought for a time that the Higher Criticism had completely contradicted the idea. Harnack, however, following Ramsay, has written very positively with regard to Luke during the present century, emphasizing the fact that he was beyond all doubt a physician, and now the idea that he was also a painter seems to be confirmed by historical researches. Certainly his Gospel is full of scenes and events that are word pictures of the most complete and beautiful description. His second chapter has furnished artists almost innumerable with ideas for pictures of the Annunciation that have made a wonderful chapter in art history. Such stories as the raising to life of the son of the widow of Nain or of the raising of Lazarus from the dead could only have been done by a man of artistic eye and spirit, and one can scarcely think of their emanating from one who had not done some painting. It is Luke above all who has given us striking detailed pictures of the miracles of the Lord and it must not be forgotten that, as Harnack and Ramsay point out, he has taken the stories told by the other evangelists and has put them in medical terms so as to give exactly the diagnosis and therefore makes the miraculous cures all the more certain. These miracles particularly have supplied subjects for Christian artists ever since. Every story in Luke's Gospel is a picture in simple beautiful words inviting its reproduction with the brush.

Under the circumstances it is not surprising that from the very beginning painting has been used by the Church for the decoration of ecclesiastical buildings of all kinds in order to attract and hold the attention and arouse the religious emotions. Excavation of the catacombs has revealed, during the past generation particularly, a whole series of paintings which indicate very clearly that the symbolism of the Church in art dates from the first and second century. Pictures of the Lord Himself, of the Lamb, of the Crucifixion, and of the Apostles, come from the very earliest Christian time. The fact that in the ruins of the palace of the emperors on the Palatine Hill there was found, sketched rudely on the wall with a stylus or nail, a caricature of the Crucifixion in the shape of an ass nailed to a cross, is of itself a definite indication that the Christians must have been using very commonly a figure of the Crucified One as the most striking symbol of their religion. This early art is primitive, and yet it has a spirit and a vigor and vividness that give it a place in the history of art and that set it above ever so much of modern art that represents merely a copy of what someone else has done, with but very little, if any, meaning for the artist himself.