The Bible in Pictures

Parents are often heard to lament the lack of books capable of explaining the Bible to their children. There is a very obvious lack in this matter among Catholic books, but the deficiency is not restricted to Catholics. There are, of course, a certain number of picture books illustrating the life of Christ or episodes in the Bible, but they are generally prepared on the false assumption that the only sense of Scripture a child can grasp is the literal sense. Herein lies a serious fallacy, for the child's mind is instinctively symbolic and metaphorical; the poet exists in the young mind long-before the philosopher is born in him, long before he can analyse the meaning of his signs and make-believe. But when an artist tries to give only the literal sense to the child he begins by painting Jews and Arab sheiks as they are said to have been at the time of Christ. He then goes on to apply certain aspects of the universal appeal of Christ to every individual with an almost complete univocity in which our Lord appears not only as a baby but also as a sailor boy and fighter pilot. And since Christ in this respect has to appear as the lowest common denominator among all these types of humanity he has to be robbed pictorially of any definite character. The 'baby-Jesus' style of art turns the Word Incarnate into a simpering doll, meant to represent the neighbours' little Sally aged eighteen months without excluding cousin Tom who is two years older. The holy Child must be no more than an outline of round cheeks and chubby limbs in order to fit into it any child character one chooses

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