Thomas Merton thus evaluates the work of his friend, Victor Hammer. This is an apt description of all of Victor Hammer's art - his printing, type design and painting - concrete, spiritual and genuine.

His primary metier was painting, but he was also a master artisan, crafting furniture, including a prototype of a clavichord for Albert Schweitzer, and working in gold and other metals. He was a master of the book arts as well: printing, bookbinding, calligraphy and typography, creating five uncial typefaces in his lifetime. As an architect, he built and appointed a small chapel for his friends and patrons at Kolbsheim in Alsace.

For Victor Hammer, it was difficult to separate art from craft, probably because of each work's genuineness and depth of spirituality. Everything he did, whether paint a portrait or build a chair, was ad maiorem Dei gloriam, to the greater glory of God, words he borrowed from the portico of a Jesuit church in Vienna which overshadowed the games of his childhood and which inspired his artistic vision.

Like other great artists, Hammer tells the truth with his form. His layouts and designs open our eyes to see reality anew, to see as an act of contemplation. Particularly is this contemplative use of form visible in his hand-printed books.

The books themselves give silent testimony to his greater spiritual vision, a vision forged through a lifetime. Even the uncial typography itself slows downs the reader and forces the eye to linger on the visual beauty of the text as well as contemplate its meaning.

He had a number of faithful patrons, first in his native Vienna and elsewhere in Austria, then in Florence, where he established a press, and in London and Paris. When no longer allowed artistic freedom and human dignity by German invasions of Austria, he left Europe for the United States in 1939. He taught at Wells College in New York and later at Transylvania College in Lexington, Ky.

As a teacher Hammer records that he could begin to paint pictures that need not be sold: "I began to choose the subject matter for my paintings from pagan mythology and from the Bible. I was not compelled to 'express myself,' for I was my own collector." During these years, his personal credo was to "build with the thought of a future life of the Spirit on this earth."

In several places he articulated his philosophy of art and the spiritual unifying gesture fundamental to the creative process. Again uniting craft and art in his thinking, he uses architecture to make his point: "This distinction between building and architecture points to the split between the sacred and the secular."

This unified vision is precisely what allows Victor Hammer's work to become a vehicle for the Spirit and to elicit growth in awareness. His triptych, "Hagia Sophia," for example, the center panel of which is gilded and bears Hammer's uncial lettering, signifies the artist's contemplative practice. The viewer is attracted by both visual image and gilded lettering and enfolded into a world of mystery transformation.

Of his own vocation as an artist and printer, he once said, "I cannot spiritually cooperate with or acknowledge the validity of visual chaos." And in all his work there is a pressing concern for kosmos, for order, both in structure and symbolism. It is this search for order which Hammer sees as justifying his art, literary and graphic, and which gives his art its healing force.

To lift us to an apprehension of beauty and the sublime, to transform us, through a vision of who we are and what we might become, this is the work of the artist. Through art we are released from the quotidian and lifted into a realm of compassion and awe. The art permeates us and permanently changes us.

Victor Hammer's passion was for us to behold. To behold reality anew and to see it undivided and whole. His contemplative vision teaches us to see genuinely with our own eyes the spiritual order of things. And perhaps momentarily to perceive as he did, ad maiorem Dei gloriam. q