ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Paul Claudel on sacred art. The poet and dramatist Paul Claudel was saluted by theologians as diverse as Jacques Maritain and Henri de Lubac, Charles Journet and Hans Urs von Balthasar. While Claudel was a contemporary of the Orthodox theoreticians of the icon in the Parisian diaspora, his powerful attachment to the spirit and forms of Latin Catholicism make it unlikely that he will have read their works. Claudel explains this is not a matter of an 'imposed immobility', since it results not from 'incarceration in a frame' but, rather, from the 'concert of interior elements whereby they impede each other from passing'. Claudel found an inner affinity between Christianity and visual art so understood. Claudel divided the chronology of Christian art into three epochs, dubbed in turn 'hieratic', 'symbolic', and 'idealist'. It includes early Christian and Byzantine art as well as the continuation of the latter among the modern Orthodox.
