Art achieves a kind of double reflection. It returns thanks to God, using his creation to fashion something new; at the same time, it reflects the glory and order of creation back to man, providing moments of epiphany. Art when properly made restores a proper awe before creation; although manmade, it directs our gaze back to God and his work.
epiphany, n. 1. an appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity. 2. (cap.) a Christian festival, observed on Jan. 6, commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles in the persons of the Magi. 3. a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into reality or the essential meaning of something, often initiated by some simple, commonplace occurrence. 4. A literary work or section of a work presenting such a moment of revelation and insight.
One of the things I most appreciate about this journal is that it provides a home for the old-fashioned, humane, meditative essay. I never feel the need as a writer to wind my pieces up with a ten-point plan for action or a takeaway for the tired businessman, or even stick to a clearcut thesis. Rather, I am free to let my thoughts expand and even meander a bit over the purely contemplative and wildly impractical things (faith, art, beauty, truth, etc.) upon which we imaginative conservatives like to muse—a true blessing. The spiritual dimensions and purposes of art, the arts, or beauty is a theme that has been well treated here in the past, but please let me add some new reflections from personal experience as someone who considers himself an artist.
Artistic expression is a universal fact, but art’s meaning and purpose are more difficult to define. Many are the concepts by which artists have described or explained what they are doing and why they are doing it, and there is no perfect agreement on the basic purpose for which art exists. I suppose the most common idea in modern times is that the arts are about self-expression, an idea that can be traced to a certain side of Romanticism and, especially, to the expressionist aesthetic at the turn of the 20th century. Far be it from me to disparage this conception of art, just so long as we understand “self” in a full and deep sense as an individual’s unique perceptions of universal truth and beauty and not merely in the sense of transient, random, or self-centered feelings. I would not deny that one of the legitimate purposes of art is to make evident the artist’s point of view toward reality and life.
What I will try to describe here, though, is a somewhat different view of art. It’s a conception that sees art as essentially a response to Creation—an imitation or mimesis, to use the old Greek term. My view takes its starting point from John Ruskin’s saying (referring to architecture) that “all noble ornamentation is the expression of man’s delight in God’s work.” Born from his experience of the created order around him—often summed up in the word “nature”—art represents man’s own mini-creation or sub-creation, a response of gratitude and awe at what he has experienced and an attempt to emulate or recreate it. Creation is an epiphany, manifestation, or revelation of divine power and goodness and beauty; art is a reaction of wonder in the face of God’s handiwork that can in turn communicate various epiphanies about created reality to human beings in a new, human key.
Art, Nature, and Religion
I can speak from personal experience here, because as a child I not only readily absorbed experiences of nature but had a desire early on to recreate it in works of art. I was blessed to grow up in a family in which culture and learning were honored and the appreciation of all forms of art was encouraged. This included visible art (painting, drawing, photography) as well as music, literature, theater, the movies. To this day I am quite surprised when I encounter a professional in one of the arts, say a musician, who displays no interest in any other artforms, such as painting or literature. In my childhood mind, all the arts were one in some sense and it never occurred to me to be uninterested in any of them (with the exception of ballet, which for some reason never lit a spark in me).
I also sensed early on that the arts had a spiritual and, indeed, religious dimension that raised them above being merely entertainment or a pastime. In retrospect, I think this must have been because I saw all the arts coming together in my parish church. Although the church in question was located in the suburbs, it wasn’t “suburban” in the pejorative sense. On the contrary, this parish was one in which the idea of artistic excellence for the glory of God was taken for granted, from the furnishings of the altar to the classical choral music that always accompanied High Mass on Sundays. The parish’s garden, with its wooden Stations of the Cross and fountain and varied flowers, for me was like the Garden of Gethsemane, rich with spiritual atmosphere, especially in the evening. Those of the Oxford Movement and some of the Pre-Raphaelite artists found spiritual inspiration and often genuine faith in the artistic side of the Church, its vessels and vestments and sacraments. But for me, such inspiration was just as possible in suburban Virginia as it was in Victorian England.
As I look back now, I’m sure that my parish church formed my sensibility and tastes in many ways. Art for me became an outlet for spiritual thoughts—about the Creation, about suffering, about Resurrection. The ideas found a release in an artistic expression, whether it was a story or a picture or a strain of music, and this release had a curative effect on my mind and soul. Art embellishes spiritual ideas, making them attractive but also giving them concrete, intelligible, and sensible form. I learned that the church fostered a special structuring of time through the liturgical seasons, which intersected with the natural seasons I experienced through my senses. Body and spirit, word and sacrament, were joined together in a mysterious way. The things I discovered in life were always giving rise to artistic impulses, and I was constantly envisioning possible artworks. Seeing an evocative landscape—say, on summer vacations at the New Jersey shore—would inspire the idea of some painting or theatrical or cinematic scene.
Those in love with nature and Creation have long felt an impulsion to reflect their beauty. St. Francis of Assisi gave voice to just such feelings when he wrote “The Canticle of the Creatures,” considered the first Italian poem, and Gerard Manley Hopkins was similarly enraptured by “Pied Beauty.” For me the arts, nature, and faith were a deep solace, a balm for depression, and the things that gave life its meaning.
As a child with a developing “artistic temperament,” I wasn’t sure which artform would be my main interest, although early on I was leaning heavily toward painting and drawing. I fed this interest through the various art books my mother passed along to me, books she had collected during her own formative years. Just to flip through those books was to enter another world, and when I started to go to art museums in Washington, DC and saw the originals of those glossy copies, I became even more enthralled. Seeing an exciting painting would invariably lead me to try some imitation in charcoal pencil or oil paint at home. This concentration on visual art changed at the age of eight when I took my first violin lessons, inspired by my mother who taught piano. From then on music was the main thing. Nonetheless, other arts continued to be important to me.
Within the church these expressions of art were united with the life of the spirit and soul, as well as with the life of the mind, the latter coming about through the proclamation of the Word and the homily. I understood the effect that these ideas in turn had on daily living with its ethical dimensions. Everything, however, came through the medium of the senses, and everything was tied symphonically together. The church was a little cosmos in which all of reality was encapsulated and communicated to human beings, who could enter at any time and partake of this mystery free of charge.
Many religious thinkers have applied aesthetics to theology by means of the trope of the Divine Artist. According to this concept—which I value highly—God is the Divine Artist, Creation his artwork; he transmits his grace in part through sacraments, which are also works of art, rituals that communicated divine grace by combining matter and spirit. Sacraments also have the crucial distinction that, unlike artworks that merely imitate or represent reality, they affect and change reality itself.
With my experiences growing up with various forms of art, I can identify to some degree with Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian painter, who similarly had a multi-artistic background. Kandinsky allied himself with a movement of protest against scientific materialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He attempted to steer art toward what he considered a more “spiritual” orientation, one less concerned with depicting the material and visible world and more concerned with depicting inner feelings, ideas, and states.
Going further back, the idea that art possesses qualities of spiritual transcendence, and the idea that the individual arts were ultimately one, were key elements in the aesthetics of 19th-century Romanticism. These ideas were well embodied in the giant “music dramas” of Richard Wagner, which were intended to combine all the arts in an exalted synthesis. Romanticism aspired to the infinite and limitless, as expressed in works of art seemingly without fixed limits or borders and that seemed to recapitulate all of creation and experience. (Catholic believers could well argue that such a “total artwork” is already found in the Holy Mass.)
While aware of the danger of making art or the artist into an idol, I too share this high and exalted notion of art’s potential. But we must keep a theological focus on art as an imitation of the sublimity of creation, realizing that we are not the first creators. Art achieves a kind of double reflection. It returns thanks to God, using his creation to fashion something new; at the same time, it reflects the glory and order of creation back to man, providing moments of epiphany. Art when properly made restores a proper awe before creation; although manmade, it directs our gaze back to God and his work.
Art and the Ideal
In modern society so many concepts have become stereotyped through popular imagery and thought-clichés. “The arts” as we see them represented in glossy brochures have taken on a bohemian and anti-establishment image, quite far from any theological or classically philosophical conception of what art means. It’s clear that our conceptualizations are influenced by our social and cultural environment and we often have to clear our minds of these images to attain to a purer idea of things. Thus, in a broader sense, let us understand art simply as human making, and in that sense a humble participation in the creative activity of God. As such, it has great ethical and moral responsibility attached to it. The artist shouldn’t create trivially, crassly, or nihilistically, out of a personal malaise, or to express his anger at the world or the universe. On the contrary, art at its best affirms that Creation is good and that human beings are created for goodness. It provides a vision of a better world and a better life than the one we are currently living and to that extent is ideal in nature.
Art can thus be an escape from the workaday world and a refuge from suffering. This is not, however, what is commonly called escapism. Recall what ancient Greek dramatists ascribed to the art of tragedy, that it expresses (i.e., presses out, and thus purges) feelings of pity and fear. Art allows us to contemplate life, including its painful aspects, from a safe distance, thus arriving at a state of serenity. In view of this, it’s important to understand that art is not “reality,” but rather a stylized reflection upon reality. Art is a parallel to, a comment upon, life—yet at the same time it is its own reality with its own rules and parameters.
Ars longa, vita brevis
Life is short, art is long. This Latin adage has been interpreted in a variety of ways. Let me suggest taking it as a symbol of the eternity of art or creation next to the finitude and limitations of earthly human life. I would like therefore to try to compare art and life and reflect on how the two might interact.
As the world moves in an ever more unconservative direction, those of us with traditional beliefs, values, and sensibilities feel increasingly estranged from society and modern life. Some of us find in art an escape, a parallel order and reality to the banal and mundane world that surrounds us. Again, this is not escapism—the avoidance of reality by an absorption in entertainment or imagination. Because art, true and healthy art, is so intimately connected with nature and Creation, it can only raise us up from the corrupt reality we presently inhabit and bring us back into union with the true state of things. Art constitutes a sort of double reflection: it reflects the glory, beauty, and order of Creation—including our human nature and abilities—back to God in a spirit of thanks; and it gives to one’s fellow human beings moments of epiphany.
This epiphany communicates surprise and wonder at reality and the discovery of truth. Such a discovery, through art, can delight, dazzle, and even overwhelm the beholder, filling him with warmth and energy and renewing his zest for life, so that art has in a sense redeemed life. The artwork transports the beholder—carries him out of himself, allows him to transcend himself. Speaking again from experience, I have countless times felt demoralized by the dreariness of everyday life, then had my spirits suddenly lifted by a piece of music, a painting, or a brilliant piece of writing. My whole inner being is revived, and I am seized by a wonderful elation, an intoxicating euphoria. The best way I can describe this state is that in it I feel truly myself again.
Beauty and Truth
This epiphanic aspect of art serves to emphasize that beauty does not conflict in any way with truth. I find it remarkable that discussions are occasionally raised in which beauty and truth are pitted against each other. An evocation of the popular phrase “beauty will save the world” will encounter some opposition from the truth brigade. What is being ignored here, it seems to me, is that beauty and truth are both transcendental properties of Being. They are two sides of a coin.
Let us please note that the phrase is not “Art will save the world” but “Beauty will save the world.” And beauty is, if I may so put it, the property that Being has of pleasing upon being beheld. While one can certainly distinguish between truth and beauty, they interpenetrate and are deeply involved with each other. And that is why life, ethics, and religion are not an “eat your vegetables” proposition. Life is not finally a grim and indifferent matter. We are made for joy. Beauty is true (it really exists, it is not an illusion) and truth is beautiful. Acts of goodness, likewise, are beautiful; they exist for their own sake and with their own integrity and are not solely for “practical use.” They, too, reveal or manifest a higher spiritual reality. When Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus’s feet before his Passion, Jesus declared that she had done “a beautiful thing to me” (kalós in Greek).
Beauty provides a shortcut to truth, bypassing deductive reasoning to go straight to the heart of things in an intuitive (from the Latin intuērī, to look at) way. Beauty is not “icing on the cake,” it is an essential aspect of being itself. And thus, beauty and art are nothing less than vehicles for truth. One of the things the religious tradition has taught me is that truth is many-sided and can be viewed from many angles. And one way to truth is through Creation and nature, beauty and art.
Just as beauty and truth are inseparable, I cannot accept the claim, sometimes made, that the Gospel does not address itself to questions of beauty or aesthetics. Can we ignore the fact that Christ’s teachings, his parables, his speech, his very life were artistically shaped? And that the scriptures itself are a specimen of art? The more I live more I wonder whether some have even the dimmest idea of what beauty is. The whole plan of redemption has its aesthetic aspect. We don’t “get” anything “practical” out of it; it is there for our contemplation and response of thanksgiving; it simply is.
Art and Reality
Similarly, works of art, like beautiful things more broadly, exist in part to remind us that there are things that exist for their own sake and not for any further end. We seek many things in life for the sake of other things; but eventually one gets to a bedrock of permanent values beyond which nothing further is sought. Art images this by existing for no other end than our enjoyment. Art could even be said to give life its point; it can redeem and relieve the human misery described so well by Pascal, in which mankind is always frenetically chasing after activity, unable to be at rest. Art relieves us for a time of the burden of having to seek practical goods—something it shares in common with prayer. And art rescues the world from insignificance, for without it our lives tend to disintegrate into scattered and chaotic experiences, sense impressions, and routines.
The more I live, the more I ask myself whether art can in fact be preferable to what is commonly called reality, and I am increasingly answering yes. When I was a child, I thought that art was the best possible human thing and would be my personal contribution to life. As I matured into adulthood, it occurred to me that public affairs were important too and that I should take an interest in them. I have now come full circle to my childhood intuition that art, precisely because it reveals the eternal and the very essence of things, is the only thing that is really real.
But is a life based solely on art and spirituality possible—i.e., a life that gives only the bare necessary attention to practical affairs and devotes the rest to the creative side of things? Let me stress that there are those of us for whom art, broadly conceived, is more or less the entirety of our lives. Art has in a sense become the only reality.
The American thinker William James, for one, allowed that a predilection for the ideal is legitimate. In his Pragmatism he asks (in regard to philosophy rather than art): “Are not all our theories just remedies and places of escape? And, if philosophy is to be religious, how can she be anything else than a place of escape from the crassness of reality’s surface? What better thing can she do than raise us out of our animal senses and show us another and nobler home for our minds in that great framework of ideal principles subtending all reality…?”
And the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote, contrasting the practical and the aesthetic: “No doubt we must pay tribute to this world, a tribute of money and sin. But to pay a tribute is not the same thing as to sell one’s soul. It’s just to do an unpleasant and honorable work in order to contemplate and to create, as the monks understood.”
Life is prelude and rehearsal
While in a sense art is not “real”—and the “realists” among us will warn us against getting too absorbed something so purely “imaginative”—it’s important to observe that this present life of ours is not the realest of the real, either. Plato and Christianity remind us that we are “strangers and exiles on the earth” and that our true citizenship is in another and better world. Life is a testing ground for whether we are ready and worthy to enter that other world which was prepared for us from the beginning of time. Art is a sort of “good dream” that can help us prepare mentally and spiritually for our goal, helping us to rise above everything base here on earth. The fact is that human beings need this beautiful dream in order to survive and to be fully human.
Yes, the artist has nothing real, only dreams and shadows, to share with others. Whether artists or not, we are “strangers and exiles on the earth.” But art gives us a view, a glimpse, a preview, of the better world for which we were made. Art preserves the sense of longing for the infinite and eternal, of dissatisfaction with the here-and-now, that is necessary for the soul to grow and without which the search for truth cannot take place. The well-crafted work of art stands as a reminder that there is an intelligent design to things, that life is not just “one damned thing after another” but that everything is working together toward a goal and an apotheosis. Further, art functions a symbol of mystery, of that which cannot be completely grasped or explained.
Thus, in the end, art is no more “unreal” than Creation itself.
Lest all this talk about art seem too ethereal and rarefied, let me suggest that beauty and art understood in their broadest sense permeate all of life and are not limited to what are called the fine arts. We can be makers on a small and humble scale without creating frescoes or symphonies. A well-composed and well-delivered sermon or speech is a species of art, and art takes in such areas of activity as decoration, carpentry, gardening, cuisine, and craftsmanship of all kinds. And so, art understood as human making is all around us and something in which every one of us participates in some form or another. As making, art is inherently tied in with the belief in the potential of the human being as an eternal soul bearing the divine image, what we might call humanism.
And any form of art can be a portal to the wonder and truth that is first awakened in us by Creation. As a writer, I go through any number of dry periods when ideas simply will not come. Then, with time, the Idea comes, the floodgates open, the passion is rekindled, and one starts to write. This is the result of an indefinable and imperceptible buildup of experience, reading, feeling, and thought. It is inspiration, one of the most mysterious forces. To the writer this feels very much like being struck with an epiphany, a sudden insight. Everything clicks together. Truths about human nature, about good and evil, about beauty, about the moral structure of reality, are illumined, and the artist is well placed to communicate these insights to others. Not only in art but in life itself, periods of dryness and boredom must be endured in the expectation of such illumination from above.
I don’t know the answer to the art/reality dilemma—what is truly real to the person who by vocation lives only through art—or where art will find its final consummation. All we can do is continue making, in the hope and faith that an answer to our deepest questions—an epiphany—will finally appear, either through art or through other higher means. In which spirit I offer a modest piece of art.
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The featured image, uploaded by , is Darpaw, is “The Evening” (1902–1903) by Wassily Kandinsky. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.