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One of the many remarkable documents of Pope St. John Paul IIs
pontificate was his 1999 Letter to Artists. It exemplified the Popes
practice of engaging the world and of encouraging the pursuit of
various avenues to the Divine as part of the New Evangelization.
Further, it recalled the ancient understanding of beauty as integral
to the spiritual life of man and as a name of God while confirming the distinctly modern self-image of the Church as the unique
preserve of the Wests intellectual and cultural achievements. In the
process of answering many questions about how the Church might
engage artists and how artists might serve the Church, it raised
deeper ones that are touched on but not systematically treated.
One of those questions is decisive for the meaning of the Letter
and of serious consequence for us today. Namely, if the artist has a
special spiritual vocation in the Church, John Paul says it is to make
beautiful things, and the beauty of those things must be capable of
enthusing its audience and raising it up in the service of the common
good.1 But, it is far from clear that contemporary artists understand
their work to have such an aim as beauty, much less a beauty in service of a shared good, as is it questionable whether most persons in
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attributes of the fine artist, writing, In shaping a masterpiece, the
artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals
his own personality by means of it. . . . [Thus, through] his works, the
artist speaks to others and communicates with them.7
Such language purposefully gives us an immanent conception of
what an artist may do. The hypothetical masterpiece would seem to
gain its significance, first, through being distinctly itself, and, second,
in revealing its maker, and thereby drawing its audience into a closed
circuit of communication with artwork and artist. I think it likely
that this adequately accounts for our most common experiences of
artworks. We are often impressed by their mere beingthat there
should be something well made at all rather than not. We are similarly engrossed by their expressivity, the way in which works signify
the spirit of a being similar in nature to ourselves whom we sense
standing opposite the artwork from ourselves. As such, the artwork
speaks to us as one human voice to another and may sway us to adopt
as our own the sensibility or perspective, not to say the beliefs, of the
artist. In such a communication, the artwork reveals the sensibility
it manifests as good and so draws our appetites toward it, even if we
are uncertain that it is also true. We are invited to make believe,
to suspend disbelief, and so entertain what the artist portrays and
seems to intend. As such, imagination appears as the primary faculty
in the life of art.
The most obvious instances of art operating on us in this way
in our time are to be found in film and the novel. Both of these are
character-rich, expressly narrative arts where we enter into sympathy with either a protagonist in or narrator of the work by way
of the imagination. But I would note how agnostic this conception
of art is. It does not ask us to grapple with what is true but only to
hear the testimony or witness of a mind already sufficiently similar
to our own that its voice may move us to sympathy, to an instinctive sense of its goodness. This may be an awesome power in its own
right, but there is also a kind of modesty, quietude, even resignation,
about it. We are not asked to test the similarities and differences of
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as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, their novels imaginatively appealed to the earlier existential anthropology of Blaise Pascal, Sren
Kierkegaard, Maurice Blondel, and Romano Guardini. Their success as Christian novelists dependedas Pascal might have said
entirely on whether the depiction of the anxious interior lives of
their characters seemed to echo, or provide an image of and vocabulary for, the felt interior state of their readers.10 Their books need
communicate only from one person, one psyche, to another. John
Pauls interesting play, The Jewelers Shop, works in a similar fashion,
appealing to our moral desire for encounter and communion with
others (rather than our shared sense of anxiety about meaning) apart
from other questions.11
If the significance of the artwork is strictly that of the made thing
expressive of its maker, it requires few if any a priori beliefs to be
in place: only our natural capacity for sympathy and an openness to
pretending. And yet, in the case of such novelists, we leave off with
a question that the works by their nature cannot answer. We may be
moved in sympathy to think of the world through the mind of the
Christian character, but the exciting question left suspended is Are
we right to think thus? or Is it true?12
A talented young poet named Thrse Couture explores the lead
up to, and lingering in, such questions in a recent poem published
in the Catholic literary journal Dappled Things. Describing historic
Catholic churches, their architecture and art all in place but largely
neglected of the purpose for which they were built, namely, worship,
Couture inquires whether they might still signify for a secular viewer
what they did for those who once prayed in them. She describes an
artist sketching in a book the arches and the stained glass trill /
of light across the trodden, ancient floor.13 She speculates that the
blessing of this artist may lie in some firm intuition that
awakes the urge to reinhabit, make anew
or otherwise inquire into suspicion
of loveliness and that it might be true14
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objectivity of beauty in some sense conditions how we can respond
to it. And so, despite everything, it may have been counterproductive
of the Pope to introduce a discussion of beauty only in the specialized context of the mission of artists. Tracey Rowland has observed
that, for John Paul, beauty was probably not a primary transcendental property of being.18 But for the Letters most profound passages
to ring true and provide guidance for artists and laypersons alike,
beauty would have to attain to just this status.
There are considerable obstacles to our accepting any such understanding of beauty. First of all, many of us, to the extent that we
think about beauty at all, think of it in the terms of Immanuel Kant,
who concluded that all talk of beauty is in fact a discussion of taste, a
faculty inside us, a subjective judgment. There may be a temptation
to presume our taste-judgments hold for others besides ourselves,
and yet we do not do this because they describe the object under
discussion but because we believe that the taste faculty of others may
interpret that object in much the same way we do. Kant writes that,
while a person will talk about the beautiful as if beauty were a characteristic of the object and the judgment were logical . . . in fact
the judgment refers only to the objects presentation . . . to the
subject.19 Despite our habit of saying That is a beautiful waterfall,
while pointing at the waterfall, we are in fact making a statement
only about how our taste judges its perception, and taste is not logical in the sense that it has nothing intrinsically to do with our faculty
of reason that knows truths. That there is no arguing about taste is
ancient news, but the reduction of the beautiful to taste is a modern
innovation. The persuasiveness of Kants position therefore makes it
less likely for us to feel obliged by a fact of beauty in the way we may
suppose ourselves to feel obliged by facts of truth.
A second difficulty concerns the Christian-Platonist conception
of Goodness and Beauty to which the Pope pointedly but briefly refers in his letter. That tradition, most powerfully expressed in Platos
Symposium, the Enneads of Plotinus, and the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius, tells us that the beauty we perceive in this face, that
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communication between one human mind and another, artworks by
their nature do in fact participate in the Beautiful. In brief, it must be
the case that beauty is real, is a divine name, and can be manifest in
artworks. The first may seem counterintuitive to the modern mind.
The second will seem familiar insofar as most persons do believe that
encounters with beauty in some way draw us out of ourselves in a
vaguely edifying manner; but we are unused to conceiving that as a
spiritual journey with a real and definite destination rather than as a
momentary elevation. The third will chiefly raise objections among
modern artists, who often do not think of their making as a manifestation of the beautiful, but in terms of the expressivity I have already
described.
The first of these, it turns out, is easy to establish in a minimal
sense. Our age more than any other since that of the ancient Pythagoreans tends to identify number with the foundation of things. All
reality is reducible to the quantitative, we are inclined to think, and
the understanding of the numerical formula of things unlocks them
for our exploitation.25 The atheist materialist philosopher George
Santayana was keen to this modern quantitative sensibility when he
observed more than a century ago that number and measure are the
most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps
for truth.26 The proper ordering or measuring of quantities, the
putting of our numbers in their place, is, of course, called proportion. It is just such numeric proportion that Santayana insisted was
the condition of perfection for any particular thing. As soon as one
has acknowledged the existence of mathematical proportion and our
capacity to perceive it, one has established beauty as a property of
any beings in which we may perceive such proportions. This gives
us leave to speak of beauty at least as an equivalent of quantifiable
proportion.
Establishing beauty as a mere synonym may not seem to take us
very far. But already within this statement of equivalence lies an implicit complex of terms that, once defined, allows the concept of
beauty to take on more robust dimensions. We understand, for in-
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and analogous proportions we may call consonant, that is those proportions through which we can find any degree of consonance, of relation that is not internal to a thing but rather subsists between things.
There is a particular set of proportions that is consonant but in
such a distinct way that it merits separate classification, namely the
consonance or proportion between a thing (including all of its other
possible relations) and the intellect that knows it. There is, most obviously for us, the proportion between a thing and its relations to
the eye or the mind that sees it, but also to the mind and hand that
made it, or to the mind that created it. In these latter two cases, the
thing and its proportion actually derive being and measure from the
mind: they are kindled into being in virtue of having been thought.
In the former case, it is the receptive light of the mind that knows, in
the sense of perceiving or understanding, that determines whether
it will be able to stand in proportion to the thing. In brief, a thing
stands in distinct proportion to the creative and perceiving intellect.
These we may call the proportions of illumination, for an intellectual
light serves either to make a thing to exist or to make it to be known.
It was Aquinas who harvested these three rich implications from
the ostensibly spare conception of beauty as measure or proportion.
In discussing the nature of goodness early in the Summa theologica,
he almost incidentally mentions that beauty, like being, is rooted in
the form of a thing, and that in particular it consists in due proportion.27 In the next article he follows Aristotle in proposing that the
definitions of the species of forms are like numbers.28 Because of
the quantitative methods of the modern physical sciences (indeed,
because of the Table of Elements), this is a claim we have at least as
much reason to assent to as did Aquinas.
But, Santayana claimed that measure applied to beauty, goodness, and perhaps to truth, while John Pauls Letter suggests their near
identity even as he recognized marked distinctions between them.
Aquinas appropriately emphasizes that beauty is distinct from goodness precisely because, where goodness leads us to the pleasure of
possession, beautiful things are those which please when seen.29 The
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objection also misses the mark, although it is correct to bear in mind
the purely analogous nature of beauty.31 There are better and inferior
interpretations of Aquinass account of beauty that suggest, for all its
flexibility, that there are greater and lesser instances of beauty and,
further, that there are better and worse accounts of how the conditions of beauty stand in relation to one another.
I would offer three brief instances. James Joyce in his novel A Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man has his protagonists alter ego, Stephen
Dedalus, provide a complete aesthetic philosophy that bases itself
on Aquinass categories of integritas, proportion or consonantia, and
claritas.32 For Dedalus the most important of the three conditions
is integrity, which he defines as the self-bounding individuality of a
thing. Proportion he interprets exclusively as comprising the internal
complexity of that thing, and the moment of clarity occurs when the
mind discovers in an absolute sense the things quiddity, its unique
whatness. Such an interpretation accounts for much of modern art
(including Joyces last two novels), which tends to isolate objects for
representation, stripping them of content and significance until the
form shines out in expressive solitude. But, as Dedalus himself confesses, with integrity understood as pure individuation, a single angel, a bright light, a louse, and a piece of dung could all be considered
beautiful. We cannot account for beauty chiefly in terms of integrity.
In a more adept account, the French philosopher Jacques Mari
tain corrected Joyce to note that integrity is based upon wholeness,
or perfection, rather than mere individuation.33 And, he understood
proportion as a variety of fitnesses or harmonies. But he had little
to say about this condition, merely asserting the infinite varieties of
proportion that are possible.34 Perhaps he is uninformative on this
point because he saw in works of art chiefly their capacity to signify,
that is, the proportion of a work of arts interior features to meanings
beyond itself. He writes,
This is why art as ordered to beauty refusesat least when
its object permits itto stop at forms or colors, or sounds
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one quickly comes to believe that Joyce and Maritain have stinted the
concrete reality of proportion in favor of a more provocative game.
For, not only are clarity and integrity mere subsets of proportion in
general, it is in the myriad proportions of form alone that we can
locate the beautiful as a real property of being.
Ecos analysis cannot entirely satisfy us, however, and for one reason. He does not so much treat clarity as yet one more ontological
proportion proper to the artwork, as he does frame it as the experience of such proportions: that a form and its proportions can communicate itself to us pleases, and this pleasure is experienced as an
internal illumination. He concludes,
Proportion presents itself as clarity. Proportion is its own
clarity. It is fullness of form, therefore fullness of rationality,
therefore the fullness of knowability; but it is a knowability
which becomes actual only in relation to the knowing eye. . .
Clarity is the fundamental communicability of form, which is made
actual in relation to someones looking at or seeing of the object.
The rationality that belongs to every form is the light which
manifests itself to aesthetic seeing.40
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often encounter a revelation of the being of the maker along with
the revelation of the being of the artwork itself. In natural objects
we experience a similar revelation, most often experienced as the
illumination of a thing in light of its position within a larger order
of beings: not just the waterfall gushing across the rocky slope and
framed with a staggered appointment of fir trees but also those things
perceived as part of the whole working order of the universe. We do
not feel that we need to learn a different mental language other than
that with which we read the signification of a desert plain or a fishs
anatomy in order to read the waterfall. The clarity of the beautiful
reveals this order to us, not in the formulae of truth, or in the moving language of desire that teaches us about goods, but in the mute
but intensely signifying manifestation of form.
We do not need to argue in quite the same way as we have for
the ontological reality of beauty that the illumination of the order of
things, of their formal intelligibility, is a sign of their participation in
the God of Being and Beauty. Philosophers since Kant have returned
again and again to the question What are the conditions of possibility for knowledge? What has to be in place, as it were, in a knowing
subject for that subject to know in the first place? Bernard Lonergan
provides a provocative argument that is apposite to the account of
claritas I have given. We know we know things, but it would seem
that we can only know things if they are intelligible, in other words,
capable of being known.That knowability is not something that things
give to themselves or that we could give to them, since the potency
to be known must be prior to our actual knowing. Intelligibility must
therefore be given to things with their being. Viladesau summarizes
this argument thus: If the real is completely intelligible, then God
exists. But the real is completely intelligible.Therefore, God exists.45
Viladesau extends this argument to the reality of b eauty: The condition of possibility for the experience of beauty [which we all can
have]in the sense of the joyous affirmation of the form or desirable intelligibility of existence, even in its finite limitationis the
implicit and unavoidable coaffirmation of ultimate Beauty.46
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apart from the binding certitudes of logical truth or the absolute
moral distinctions of good and evil.
But, beautys silence is not so gentle; we think it so only when
we follow Kant and mistake beauty for a subjective judgment or understand the arts only as a communication of merely the sensibilities
of their makers and not the creative intellect of the divine. Rather,
beautys silence is that of the form of beings in their unmediated,
nondiscursive reality.47 It thus may enter our minds before we have
become aware of it, it may dominate us, brooking no resistance. It
may even shape our appetite and reason, determining in advance
what we can recognize as good or acknowledge as true, as modern
doctrines of sensibility and Platos ancient quibbles about poetry
testify.48 We can, after all, make an error in a math problem, but
the judgment of the beautiful and the ugly can be instantaneous and
irrevocableeven if it also develops and deepens gradually as the
proportions of a thing unfold before our intellects.49 One can soften
truth claims with qualifications and ethical judgments by couching
them as kind reminders and positive enticements. But when a work
of art is set before us to declare the lordship of God, as do, for instance, the churches of the high Middle Ages, there can be no such
hesitation: as soon as we perceive a proportion as beautiful, it takes
hold of us as much as we do of it.
Of course, the millions of tourists who visit Notre Dame or
Chartres may beg to differ. They would tell us that they come for
the beauty of the architecture, not for the Gospel in stone it claims
to preach. But I can only reply, It is the force of that Gospel already working within you. You cannot deny the presence of beauty;
you sense its orderliness calling you to an order beyond itself but of
which it is a part. The only moment that allows one to resist that
call comes not in denying that beautiful things participate in Beauty,
but in the Kantian denial of the reality of beauty as a property of
the object itself. The great irony of Kants aesthetic theory, and the
romantic theory of imagination, is that it was intended to open up a
place for spiritual freedom, where the beautiful can appear, but it did
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the radical historicism of much postmodern thought.53 Conversely,
to the extent we confess it, the very stubbornness of facts, the firm
grasp a truth has on the mind once it is known, testifies also to the
binding reality of beauty. Both truth and beauty are properties of
being.
The artist in our age, if he is to serve any purpose at all, must
make such modern evasions impossible. He must strike the intellect
with the full ontological force of the beautiful and, then, let that
beauty do the rest. This may require the cultivation of modes of art
that appeal to beauty, even in opposition to the merely immanent
expressivity of the artist or imagination of the audience. The poetry
of Gerard Manley Hopkins provides one instance of such a mode,
as does the music of Mozart. But we may turn to a more recent
model. John Paul, whose entire papacy consisted in a series of vivid
confrontations with power, and whose poems take for their subjects
the almost violent encounter of man with the intelligibility of his
brotherthe way the humanity, the strength and weakness, of the
other acts upon us and claims us for loveclearly pioneered such a
mode.54 The only question that remains, to my thinking, is whether
any modern artist could make a thing that signifies as forcefully, as
violently and persuasively, as did the heroically proportioned, splendorous form realized in St. John Pauls life.
Notes
1. John Paul II, To Artists: A Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II reprinted in The Roman
Catholic Arts Review 1 (2010), 4.
2. Ibid.
3. Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1999),
6, 10. As Viladesau observes, the classical ontological theories of beauty that understood beauty as fundamental to reality as such (a point addressed below) gave
way after Kant to beauty as part of the special province of aesthetics, or rather, of
philosophies of fine art. So, also, he observes, some of the more ambitious theories
of art in the last century have left beauty out of the critical vocabulary entirely.
4. John Paul II, Letter, 1.
5. See Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub-
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20. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin Books, 1991),
I.6.4.
21. Plato, Symposium 211ab, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1997).
22. Plato, Symposium, 210ab.
23. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works (NewYork: Paulist Press, 1987), 701C708B.
Cf. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 31.
24. Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 117.
25. For an elaboration on this claim as it applies to Aristotle, see James Matthew Wilson, The Splendor of Form, Dappled Things 8.1 (Candlemas 2013), 4355. For a
critique of this Pythagorean temptation to identify number with reality, see Benedict XVI, In the Beginning . . .: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the
Fall, trans. Boniface Ramsy, OP (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 8486.
26. George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, eds. William G. Holzberger,
et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 151.
27. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, vol. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican
Province (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1948), I.5.4.
28. Ibid., I.5.5. The number is said to give the species, for definitions signifying species
are like numbers according to the Philosopher (Metaph. x); for as a unit added to, or
taken from, a number, changes its species, so a difference added to, or taken from,
a definition, changes its species.
29. Aquinas, Summa theologica, I.5.4.
30. Ibid., I.39.8.
31. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 30, 172.
32. James Joyce, The Portable Joyce (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 47980.
33. John W. Hanke, Maritains Ontology of the Work of Art (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1973), 21.
34. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 27.
35. Ibid., 55.
36. Ibid., 28.
37. Ibid., 32.
38. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1988), 99.
39. Eco, 97.
40. Ibid., 119. Cf. Eco, 37.
41. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 79.
42. Aquinas defines God as creative intelligence in the following manner: The
knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artifice is to things made by his art (I.14.8). He
then concludes, as I have, Natural things are midway between the knowledge of
God and our knowledge: for we receive knowledge from natural things, of which
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50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
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