There is a deep dichotomy in our culture, a [dichotomy] as deep as if there are two different sets of reality. A few years ago there was a cartoon in the New Yorker showing a modern box-like building with an abstract wall-painting on it. The caption said: “The more rational the building, the more irrational the painting.” This sums up the problem and the inherent disharmony of our time.
We must realize that we Christians are responsible… To look at modern art is to look at the fruit of the spirit of the avant-garde: it is they who are ahead in building a view of the world with no God, no norms. Yet is this so because Christians long since left the field to the world, and, in a kind of mystical retreat from the world, condemned the arts as worldly, almost sinful? Indeed, nowhere is culture more ‘unsalted’ than precisely in the field of the arts – and that in a time when the arts (in the widest sense) are gaining a stronger influence than ever through the mass communications.