Eric Gill — the modern medievalist
A look at one of Christian art’s most interesting figures
In some ways, Gill’s obscurity is incomprehensible, since his claims to fame are so numerous. He wrote extensively — essays on almost everything, and letters to almost everybody. He excelled as a sculptor and engraver, and the type faces he designed are now used universally. And the sheer power of his religious belief was unshakable. His religious art — such as the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral or the illustrations to the Golden Cockerel Press edition of The Four Gospels (judged by many to be the great twentieth-century books — C.Skelton) — has made a lasting mark on many areas of art and society. And yet, in spite of all this, he almost seemed to embody the ideals of an earlier, simpler, and above all more honest time than ours.
Gill saw art and religion as being inextricably intertwined. Art, the whole business of making and, particularly, man’s making of himself… is the manifestation of religion. The sincerity of his beliefs can be seen in the history of the group of artists and craftsmen that he helped establish — the Ditchling community, also known as the craft Guild of St Joseph and St. Dominic. They lived an austere lifestyle which harked back in many ways to the earliest Christians, or perhaps medieval monastic communities. Members’ families counted on each other for support, and turned to each other in times of need. And, as with those earlier communities, it was founded on Christian ideals. Their art was devotional, and much of their devotion was also artistic. Who can honestly say that it is God who inspires them to get their essays in on time? Or to attend another dreary lecture? Yet there can be no doubt that it was faith that motivated Gill. The account of one woman, a child when the community began, describes how Gill and his fellow workers would leave whatever they were doing — be it work, recreation or conversation — to devote time to prayer. God was an inextricable part of the fabric of their society, real and inspiring, to an almost unbelievable extent. His religion and his temperament urged him to grapple with every problem which his special skills might help to solve, and there was in Gill… an over-riding factor which he derived from his religious beliefs: that we are in the world to work, and to work hard; that, in the end, we may each be called upon by God to account in detail for what we have done (Brewer).
In spite of his deep beliefs, he outraged a great many by being incredibly open-minded. Fundamentalists were critical of his love of Eastern devotional art and his artistic interpretations of Bible passages; moralists condemned his eroticism; and his very human temperament led him into still more conflicts. As he saw it, his life and work were not in any way sacrilegious — on the contrary, through the creative acts of art, he saw himself (and other craftsmen) as a channel for the creative love of God. To him there was nothing wrong or shameful about human sexuality, and his religious interpretations were vital to what he understood as art — a creative, not merely a representative, force. Nor did he see anything wrong in combining these two elements. One of his friends, Count Kessler, described him as medieval in the naive way in which his robust sense of humour effects a balance between religion and eroticism, as well as in the tireless joy and freshness of his creativity. Sometimes provocative, but never disrespectful, he managed to challenge preconceptions and rekindle an interest in Christian art. It is these very qualities that have preserved interest in his work while other religious art, technically good as it may have been, was left behind.
Looking so briefly at his religious art alone cannot do him justice — but hopefully it will whet your appetite enough for you to explore his work for yourselves. His art and writings are well worth dipping into — they are, if anything, even more important today than they were during his lifetime. While he remained firmly practical and very, very human, he also retained a near mystical devoutness, and was unbowed by the relentless advance of science and the materialistic culture that followed it — belief in God is not shown to be foolish simply because we cannot measure Him. Just as his art remains interesting because of its marriage of the secular and the religious, so too does his life, which, for all the disapproval it caused, demonstrated the possibility of combining a deep faith with a very human outlook. The two were not, he argued, by any means incompatible. Those things we call secular which, though not irreligious, do not envisage God as their end immediately. Thus as church we call a religious building, and an inn we call secular. But an inn is not therefore irreligious. He is a figure that not only believed in the connection of art and religion, but embodied it.