Jones’s Cultural Theory

Chapter 9 examines Jones’s belief that human beings were fundamentally creative and that what they made was sacramental. Yet, in his mind, the Break between past and present was preventing these signs from being repeated and understood in modernity which was undermining the spiritual and cultural foundation of what it was to be human. The artist’s role in a period of decline was therefore to re-make these past signs anew in the present, a creative act of renewal that Jones conceptualised as anamnesis and founded on a complex vision of the Mass. This chapter explores Jones’s original theories of man-the-artist, anamnesis and the Bridge—which visualises cultural inheritance—and situates them in relation to The Anathemata (1952). For Jones, cultural preservation was a dynamic process of regeneration in which Rome came to have an essential role not only in Western culture, but more specifically, in the heritage of Britain and in the unique inheritance of Wales.