Two difficulties multiplied

In Art and Scholasticism Jacques Maritain writes that Christian art is not impossible but is:

"difficult, doubly difficult - fourfold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another: for it is the difficulty of harmonizing two absolutes."

He says that the "difficulty becomes tremendous when the entire age lives far from Christ, for the artist is greatly dependent upon the spirit of his time" and then asks "whether courage has ever been lacking on earth."

'Two difficulties multiplied' would, I think, make a great title for a survey of modern and contemporary Christian Art. Maritain, and his wife Raïssa, helped generate that courage in many artists, musicians, poets and writers. Jean-Luc Barré writes that:

"They invented "a style of full freedom in the faith," based on friendship, on "person-to-person influence," on chance encounters, "what each one brings, in the depths of his heart, from his coming and going in a house where he was loved, from the peace of God that he felt there, but of which he had no idea ..." What took place there [in Thomistic Study circles at the Maritain's home in Meuden] was derived from no institution and hearkened back to no known model, and became the target of multiple conversions and a prey of just as many qui pro quo's and misunderstandings."

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Erik Satie - Gymnopedia No 1.