.... On things, however, lying outside the immediate circle of his interests, he squandered very little reflection indeed. He was not, for instance, especially perceptive or coherent regarding political matters; it is not even worthwhile speaking of left or right in regard to his views, such as they were. He could be beguiled by Spengler’s rather too bloodied-and-soiled defense of Kultur against “civilization” or genuinely moved by the simplest egalitarian pieties; he was as suspicious of modern civil democracy as he was impatiently contemptuous of class privilege. At any given juncture, he could be reactionary, liberal-minded, conventional, seditious, credulous, or canny, and on the whole it is better to regard his political philosophy as a kind of general abstention from ideology.

At the same time, his larger cultural insights were extremely acute, and arose from long and intense contemplation of the place of the arts in society. On the whole, though he had no pronounced tendency toward any specific economic creed, he never departed far from the distributist perspective he adopted during his days in the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic. He was also deeply shaped by the aesthetic and moral thought of William Morris and John Ruskin. Above all, he was convinced that the consumerist ethos of modern capitalism is the most implacable enemy of a truly Christian social life, because it is the force most corrosive of a sacramental understanding of culture: It distorts the very nature of human beings as spiritual “makers,” peculiarly open to creation and to the supernatural, because it alienates them from the work of their own hands and orients their desires toward false and immanent ends. 

The most important of Jones’s essays is “Art and Sacrament,” written in 1955 and included in Epoch and Artist (1959). It is here that he gives his fullest exposition of his beliefs regarding the inherent connection between artistic poiesis and sacramental worship, and between their respective powers of “re-presentation” in signs—of, that is, the “making present again” that which is past or far away “under other forms.” For, in Jones’s words:

Because the Church is committed to ‘Sacraments’ with a capital S, she cannot escape a committal to sacrament with a small s, unless the sacramentalism of the Church is to be regarded as a peculiar and isolated phenomenon. We know that such a view is not to be entertained and that the sacramentalism of the Church is a thing normal to man and that a sacramental quality is evidenced in the past works of man over the whole period of his existence so far known to us.

It is an essay that should be read alongside two others, “Art in Relation to War and Our Present Situation” and “Use and Sign,” both of which appear in The Dying Gaul (1978). Taken together, these pieces provide as complete an account of Jones’s philosophy of the artistic act as he ever produced. His was a singular vision, to say the least, and one that was wholly internally consistent. More than that, it was also wholly consistent with Jones’s art. It makes everything he created intelligible in a way that only adds to the power of his paintings and engravings and poems, and to their capacity to awaken the imagination to those other dimensions of time into which he seemed to be able to peer.

In the end, his is an art fully acquainted both with the tragedies of history and with the peculiar homelessness of modern humanity, but it is also an art that overwhelmingly argues that both can be escaped, and even redeemed, by the cultivation of a special kind of sacral memory. It offers intimations of eternity precisely through its embrace of time’s fullness. It seems to come to us from a deep past that all of us can almost—though not quite—recall, and from a radiant and restored future that all of us can almost—though, again, not quite—imagine; and thus, above all, it “reminds” us of a creation unmarked by the wounds of fallen time.

- from David Bentley Hart on David Jones