You are on page 1of 26

James Matthew Wilson

John Paul IIs Letter to Artists


and the Force of Beauty

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
l o g o s 18 :1 w i n t e r 2015

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


our age can envision artworks as standing outside the search for
empty glory or the craving for cheap popularity in service of some
transcendent end.2 Has not the philosophy of beauty since Kant been
only too successful in convincing us that beauty refers only to a certain kind of superficial pleasure, and that art, to the extent that it
is serious, no longer concerns itself with beauty at all?3 Rightly or
wrongly, the common sense of our day may actually anesthetize most
persons against the experience of art that John Paul views as so important. In answer to such a possibility, I would like to examine the
implications of John Pauls account of the artist and to set forth the
principles that would have to be true if art and the beautiful were
to play a meaningful role in the New Evangelization. I shall then
attempt to vindicate the truth of those principles with specific reference to the ontology of beauty that various writers have extrapolated
from the theology of Aquinas.
John Paul appeals to a venerable but challenging analogy in the
opening paragraphs of his letter, citing the absolute creativity of God
as a sign of the distinctiveness of artistic work. He writes, Through
his artistic creativity man appears more than ever in the image of
God . . . in shaping the wondrous material of his own humanity
and then exercising creative dominion over the universe which surrounds him.4 The fundamental conception of man as image of God
specifically in his identity as an intellectual being endowed with free
will is not simply assumed here but is also further specified, taking
on a new dimension: we see that man, like God, can cause the acts of
his intellect and will to bring forth new things that exist apart from
themselves.5 The act of making an artifact puts an objective seal on
our otherwise private intellectual natures as the image of the Divine
Mind. To make something also brings about a kind of self-disclosure,
a revealing of one being to another that comes through matter but is
fundamentally intellectual or spiritual rather than material in nature.6
This dimension of mans creativity the Pope had already explored in
regard to work in his early poetry and in the social encyclical Laborum
Exercens (1981). But, in the Letter, the Pope emphasizes the special

47

48

logos
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

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


ourselves to another person against something outside our imaginative relation, such as truth, but only to sense the natural congeniality
between person and person that imagining makes possible.8
A number of years ago, I published an essay in which I argued in
support of this social function of art.9 Once, I claimed, metaphysics
had served as a preamble to theology, preparing the reason to understand what faith proposed. In our doubtful age where even being,
the subject of metaphysics, seems impoverished and to provide few
principles to the intellect, the imaginative arts provide, as it were, a
preamble to metaphysics. We imagine what we cannot yet know by
reason or believe by faith, and this act of sympathy and imagination
can prepare the soil of our soul for more substantial realities. In this
formulation, and others like it in the romantic tradition, imagination has an equivocal status: it has a transformative subjective power,
capable of changing our way of living, seeing, and thinking, and yet
remains objectively innocuous or agnostic, making no claim beyond
What if? or Let us pretend. . . .
Those who have read C. S. Lewis or J. R. R.Tolkien will recognize
this principle as generative of their stories. And, indeed, it accounts,
I think, for the real but relative success of the Catholic novel in the
twentieth century. In an age in which the language of personal isolation, doubt, and anxiety already pervaded high and popular culture,
a literary tradition that could persuasively dramatize such feelings
as fundamentally religious questions, that could show their origins
in an inherent religious need in the person, and that could similarly dramatize how well the Cross and Christian belief comported
with these subjective aches and desires would almost inevitably succeed for a time. Great though the fiction of such writers as Graham
Greene, Flannery OConnor, and Walker Percy is, their appeal as
Catholic novelists seems to rely primarily on that closed circuit in
which narrative mediates between human personalities, and their
fame depended largely on the peculiarities of twentieth-century life
that shaped its sensibility with the language of angst and spiritual
tragedy. Accepting the anthropology of popular existentialists such

49

50

logos
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

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


John Pauls vision of the artist makes this possibility readily conceivable, but not by establishing a definite relation of art to truth.
Rather, the artists image in the artwork allows us to inhabit his
way of seeing; it allows us even to assent to such a way of seeing as
good without resolving whether what is seen is real. Taken in itself,
this conception of the artist may have more in common with the
thought of Friedrich Nietzsche than with the evangelical aspirations
of the Church. Art becomes a model by means of which we may
emulate another; it allows us to craft our being into an aesthetic
form (Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art).15
But its capacity to show us how we must be formed if we are to
conform to the truth of God is limited, insofar as it remains primarily a matter of imaginative communication between one mind to
another, indifferent to truth per se.
Hardly nave to this potential limitation, the Pope proceeds to
insist that the theme of beauty is decisive for a discourse on art.16
Drawing on Pseudo-Dionysius and the larger Christian-Platonic tradition, he observes that the goodness of creation stands in a certain
relation to beauty. God looks upon creationthat is, he knows it
and sees it as good; this knowledge of what is true as good is the
vision of beauty, says the Pope. While it is in living and acting that
man establishes his relationship with being, with the truth, and with
the good. The artist has a special relationship to beauty.17 The Pope
hardly exaggerates in calling this decisive. For, unless we can take
such a claim seriously, the nature of art and its possible role in the
New Evangelization will be limited to the those of self-disclosure
and imaginative empathy that I have already described.
Contrary to the Popes exposition, I would propose that we must
first understand beauty as having a distinct and primary reality apart
from art and the artist and that we have to understand it as real per
se, as a transcendental property of being standing alongside truth
and goodness. Unless we first believe in beauty as a reality in the
world, we cannot rightly hope for much to come of the beauty that
might be found in the fine arts. Our subjective understanding of the

51

52

logos
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

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


sunset, in this wide receivers one-handed catch, or that violinists
sustained note are only particular manifestations of a higher reality,
that of Beauty Itself, or Kalon.20 In the terms of that tradition, all individuals are beautiful only insofar as they participate in Beauty itself,
which subsists independently, over and above them.21 The human intellect, with its power of abstraction, may perceive a multitude of individual instances of beauty, ordering them from least to greatest. In
the process, it will come to discern that quality they all have in common, the beautiful, and will thus ascend rung by rung up a ladder
from physical beauty to moral beauty to intellectual beauty and on
to eternal and unqualified beauty.22 Since ancient times, Christians
have specifically identified this assent to beauty as one with the assent to God, declaring Beauty Itself to be one of the divine names.23
John Paul summons this tradition in his letter, understanding beauty
as one pathway to God.
But this vision of a hierarchy ordered by degrees of participation
in the divine Beauty itself may pose even more difficulties for the
modern mind than does the relatively simple acknowledgment of
beauty as an objective quality rather than a subjective projection of
taste. As Fr. Richard Viladesau has observed, The approach to God
from the beautiful, despite its attractiveness, when formulated as it is
by Augustine, Bonaventure, or Aquinas, becomes intellectually alien
to the contemporary mind. As Paul Ricoeur has written, for the generation that has passed through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and
Blanchot, what is forever excluded . . . is a pure and simple repetition of the philosophers of participation and presence.24
As I have framed it, John Pauls summons of artists to evangelize
culture through the manifestation of art that is beautiful can only be
fruitful if we can establish three things. First, that beauty refers to a
real property of being rather than a description of a subjective judgment of taste. Second, that the encounter with something beautiful
is indeed an encounter with a particular participation in Beauty Itself
and, therefore, opens up a path for the perceiving intellect to approach God. And, third, that more than simply allowing sympathy or

53

54

logos
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-

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


stance, that not just any measurements could be beautiful but only
those that somehow stand in relation to each other, those relations
themselves being somehow measuring and being measured by one
another. Shapes and sounds can both be measured, but, at least on the
surface, the resultant numbers would have nothing to do with each
other. And so, we may say only that is beautiful whose intrinsic proportions stand in some extrinsic proportion to one another. Those
numbers or measures between which there is no evident relation are
without proportion.
If some proportions seem more naturally to belong together,
then we can say that there must be some sort of unity among a finite
number of proportions for them to constitute a set.This set in turn is
identifiable as constitutive of a beautiful thing. The proportions that
constitute that unity we may call integral proportions because they
are integrated into one thing. In such a measurement, we would have
to detect a unity that can be described as organic, intrinsic, whole, or
complete. The thing possesses these attributes specifically in respect
to itself and so may be said to be measured against itself.
But anything can be, in some way, measured against anything
elseeven, perhaps, shapes and sounds. And so, in addition to an
interior wholeness, we must acknowledge the vast array of secondary,
extrinsic proportions that may present themselves when we examine
a particular thing: the measurement of a thing now to its past and
possible future, in relation to its use, or its circumstance, its contrast,
similarity, or compatibility, with what exists outside of it. All this can
be subjected in some way to number and, therefore, is undeniable
even in the eyes of the most skeptical modern rationalism. We can
speak of fitting relations among otherwise diverse things. We can do
so with greater confidence, if we consider that many proportions between things are only analogously mathematical, just as a syllogism or
logical demonstration, or the relation of cause and effect, is only analogously so; but this does not pose any complication to our claim. For
our starting premise indicates that quantity is foundational to reality
and so governs logic as it does all things. This wider net of extrinsic

55

56

logos
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

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


measurement of arithmetic concludes primarily in a true answer; but
it and other measures may also be such that, when we see the way in
which they fit together, we are pleased. Beautys root in the form is
no understatement: we encounter beauty precisely when we see the
form of a thing and how it fits within a larger harmony and order
comprising other things. Beauty therefore designates an aspect of reality. It is ontological, and no less so because part of its reality may be
its relation to the perception of a knowing subject.
A short space later in the Summa, again almost incidentally, Aquinas defines what it is we are pleased with when we encounter a beautiful thing. He writes, Beauty includes three conditions, integrity
or perfection, since those things which are impaired are by the very
fact ugly; due proportion or harmony; and lastly, brightness, or clarity,
whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color.30 These
terms recur in his work, but they never receive further explanation.
What I have argued above about proportion in fact explains them:
there is the internal proportion of integrity, the more wide-ranging,
inter-entitative, set of proportions called harmony or consonance,
and there is clarity, the proportion of a thing to the light of the mind
that creates it and to the light of the mind that perceives its form. A
thing is beautiful insofar as it meets these three conditions.
But, one may object, such a formula seems to suggest that beauty is more uniform and narrow an essence than our experience of
it. All that is required is the presence of these three conditions. To
the contrary, as I have described it, these three conditions merely
describe the major categories into which a mathematically infinite
variety of proportions may fall. One may again object, this time to
claim that this merely allows beauty to slide back into relativism and
ambiguity, and therefore does not leave us in much different a position from that into which Kant had led us. The decisive difference
between Kant and Aquinas would seem to be that Kants account of
universal beauty refers to a universal taste or aesthetic judgment,
whereas Aquinass refers to a real property in beings, but one that
will be so analogically various as to escape serious analysis. This last

57

58

logos
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

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


or words grasped in themselves and as things . . . but it grasps
them also as making known something other than themselves,
that is to say, as signs. And the thing signified can be a sign in its
turn, and the more the object of art is laden with signification
. . . the greater and richer and higher will be the possibility of
delight and beauty.35

Maritain would seem to overlook proportions as proportions,


which would involve some specification of measurement or fittingness, in order to account for their presence in a work of art as one
akin to words or other signs: they present themselves in such a way
as also to represent and reveal something beyond themselves. In consequence, his emphasis falls decisively on claritas, which is the principle of intelligibility in a thing.36 We have already seen that Aquinas
viewed beauty as causal of the pleasure we experience when we see
a well-proportioned form. Maritain sees this as an encounter of the
human intellect with another intellect that is signified in the beautiful
thing. When the light of your mind falls upon something beautiful, it
brings into act the light of another mind, not of the artist but of the
Creator who is Beauty. Beauty is a transcendental, and, the moment
one touches a transcendental, one touches being itself, a likeness of
God, an absolute, that which ennobles and delights our life.37 I shall
return to this in a moment.
The most satisfactory modern account of Aquinass conditions of
beauty comes from the hands of a scholar who doubts its value. The
Italian semiotician and novelist, Umberto Eco, interprets Aquinas
much as I implicitly did above, by giving central place to proportion.
Our encounter with form, our ability to discern the proportions of
wholeness or perfection, give rise to integrity, but integrity is just
one kind of proportion.38 Proportion in the ever-multiplying, wideranging sense governs the formal conditions of beauty throughout,
he contends, noting, Proportion, because it is constitutive of beauty
and thus coextensive with it, has its own transcendental character.
Proportion therefore has an infinity of analogues.39 In reading Eco,

59

60

logos
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

In this respect the semiotician renders overly subjective the power


of forms and proportions to signify. He privileges our immediate
experience of clarity as seeing a form that signifies for us, over that
other dimension of clarity, the intelligible manifestation of the creative intellect that makes the thing to be in the first place. Something is not beautifuldoes not have claritasprimarily because I
perceive it as such, but because its existence manifests the intention
of its creator and therefore expressesshows forththe creative
intellect itself.
A work of arts integrity is its internal wholeness, and its proportion is its fitting relation to a potentially vast order of things part of
and beyond itself. Clarity marks the proportion of a thing to our
intellect, as Eco appreciates, but it also draws our intellect into luminous relation with the whole intelligible order of reality that pro-

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


ceeds from Beauty Itself.41 The work of art, in its beauty, therefore
stands between the perceiving and the creative intellects, drawing
the former toward the latter.42 We are oriented by beauty into the
whole harmony of the cosmos; the individual artwork draws us toward a vision of the truth, goodness, and order of things. These are
obviously bold claims, but they would seem to follow logically from
the idea of claritas as a condition of beauty. The medieval thinkers
who so frequently spoke of light in regard to beauty, but also in regard to things in general, were searching for a language to capture
the way in which everything we encounter strikes us with its intelligibility. As Viladesau argues, light or luminocity for medieval
thought symbolizes the nature of being an intelligible andat its
higher levelsself-conscious.43 A thing may be mysterious, but it
is never wholly alien to our thought: we can understand it to the
extent that we may understand it, as it were, and we can also be
conscious, we can know the degree of our understanding. When we
encounter the proportions of a form, we sense that this intelligibility
is no fluke or ubiquitous type of chance, but a revelation of light and
order. Because he understood so well the metaphysical foundation of
clarityits revelatory characterMaritain remains one of the great
interpreters of Aquinas on beauty, despite, as Eco suggests, his having
failed to give proportion its due.44
I have shown that, in consequence of the ubiquity of number,
all things possess proportions, and where there are proportions the
conditions of beauty are verifiably present, although it will of course
be our subjective act of abstraction that can recognize and enumerate them. But have I demonstrated the most challenging aspect of
that claim, that, in virtue of the proportion of claritas, the beauty in
an object proceeds from and therefore participates in God as Beauty
Itself? I believe that we have the basic elements for such a demonstration already in place.
First, let us consider what the Letter suggests. In the claritas of a
beautiful thing we mark its intelligibility and thus its signifying position between two minds. As John Paul indicates, in a work of art, we

61

62

logos
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

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


I would elaborate this claim as follows. As soon as we acknowledge the bare presence of proportion in things, and proceed to discern them as beautiful, we will be led by our own intellects, from
proportion to proportion, form to form, and on to the source of
their intelligible light. This experience of an ascent from the finite
to the infinite, from a beautiful thing to Beauty itself, absolutely
speaking, merely retraces a path from the appearance of things to the
substance, the reality beneath, that makes them possible in the first
place. Again, that beautiful things participate in Beauty Itself is not
a theory that needs to be separately demonstrated, for it is a reality
that we all already experience through the natural proceedings of
the sense and intellect from the effects of beauty they already know
toward the causes that make them to signify with such irreducible
power. While the theory of participation is distinct from the ontological theory of beauty, it follows from it. The experience of beauty
taken as real will lead us upward of its own accord from beautiful
things to Beauty Itself.
But here arises our third query. If this understanding of beauty as
ontological and participatory is correct, I am not sure that it does not
militate against the works of artists as especially privileged expressions of the beautiful that may help the modern mind to approach
God as Beauty Itself, in an age when so many minds are resistant to
the God of Truth and Goodness. The prototypical examples of beautiful things perceived as participating in a beauty beyond themselves
would seem to be our encounter with the order of creation itself,
particularly the natural and immediate intelligibility of the colors of
the natural world, or the orderliness of the cosmos as we come to
understand it by way of mediation of numbers and equations. In such
experiences, we perceive as an intended reality that an intelligence,
but one far different from our own, has put them into being. Such
encounters seem to bind our thinking precisely in a way that the
imaginative encounter with the work of an artist seems not to do.We
tend to mistakeas I think I did in my Dante essaythe summons
of beauty, natural or artistic, for a quiet and tender one. It stands

63

64

logos
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

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


so only at the cost of dismissing beautys ontological status. This has
been the great consolation Kant offers the modern age: he allows us
to devalue our experience of the real by treating it as being of as little
worth as we consider ourselves to be. Beauty is just my taste, and
what am I? we ask. The imagination can unveil sublime and stirring
plains, in the romantic view, but they are just as quickly swept aside
as a higher kind of dreaming.50 My argument has shown that there
is indeed a subjective element in the conditions of beauty insofar as
proportions are always relational, and one proportion of claritas is to
a perceiving subject. But, the other proportion is to that intelligence
whose knowledge is constitutive of reality as such.
At this point, a last objection raises itself: we do not quibble
about the reality of truth in the same way we do about beauty. Roger Scruton has insisted, for instance, that the status of beauty as an
ultimate value is questionable, in the way that the status of truth
and goodness are not.51 As I suggested earlier, most of us sense a
truths claim on us, its binding of our intellect, in a way we do not
sense when encountering something putatively beautiful. It is precisely those hard facts of the truth that we contrast with the squishy
subjectivity of taste and beauty. But, as Alasdair MacIntyre has recently intimated in his discussions of arguments between theists and
atheists, this is actually a case of modern persons misunderstanding
their own arguments. Reviving Lonergans discussion of God as the
condition of possibility for knowledge, MacIntyre contends that the
binding nature of truth is indeed hotly contested, for arguments
about God are at bottom arguments about the very nature of intelligibility.52 Is truth a merely posterior projection onto a material
reality itself impervious to reason? Or does our discovery of the
truth in the world really constitute a discovery, where the minds
power of abstraction unearths a rich treasure trove of truths from
the concrete things of the universe? We are as capable of pretending
that truth is merely a projection of (the subjects or some historically conditioned powers) will as we are that beauty is. Testing the
limits of this capacity for pretending has been the chief interest of

65

66

logos
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-

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


lishing, 2007), 19496. As Kerr suggests, this further specification is not without
consequences, such as risking the misconception that it is in mans capacity for
exercising dominion rather than reason that the imago dei appears. Jacques Maritain,
to whom John Paul II is evidently indebted for his discussions of human work here
and in other writings, was alive to this risk and exercised a caution less obvious in
the Popes statements; see Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers
of Poetry, trans. Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1974), 154, n. 4.
6. See, Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1995), 121, and also Ransoming the Time, trans. Harry Lorin Binsse,
(New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1941), 253.
7. John Paul II, Letter, 2.
8. In the wake of Kant, the imagination came to the forefront as a primary faculty of
human freedom, especially the freedom of the fine arts. This seems to have been the
case specifically because the imagination constituted an entirely subjective power,
purely expressive of our subjectivitys transcendence of matter, rather than as a
faculty of being, as the intellect had been understood to be in classical and scholastic
philosophy. On the rise of the imagination as pure expressive subjectivity, see M.H.
Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); for a
subtle neo-Thomist refutation of the modern position, see Pierre Rousselot, Intelligence: Sense of Being, Faculty of God, trans. Andrew Tallon (Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 1999).
9. James Matthew Wilson, What Dante Means to Us, First Principles, June 17, 2009.
10. See Blaise Pascal, Penses, trans. W. F. Trotter. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,
Inc., 2003), 433. Here, Pascal monumentally reconfigures Christian apologetics as
an anthropology of the interior life. The vocabulary of Christianityto wit, the Fall
and the redemption in Christis validated according to the criterion of whether it
accounts for an inward angst one already feels, but cannot otherwise explain.
11. John Paul II, The Jewelers Shop, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1992).
12. See, for instance, the dramatically powerful but justly criticized conclusion to Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).
13. Thrse Couture, Sawtelle House, Sidney; St. Marys Church, Prague, Dappled
Things 6.2 (Easter 2011), 26.
14. Couture, 27.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, eds. Raymond Geuss and
Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 121.
16. John Paul II, Letter, 3.
17. Ibid.
18. Tracey Rowland, Ratzingers Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 141.
19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 1987), 1.6.

67

68

logos
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

john paul iis letter to artists and the force of beauty


God is the cause by His knowledge (I.14.8). The actualization of this relation is
claritas.
43. Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 114.
44. Maritains account of beauty was written as an Aristotelian and Thomist one, but his
emphasis on claritas derives more obviously from Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius
(and Aquinass commentary on the latter) than it does from his acknowledged
guides. But, I would suggest, Maritain, who was often quick to dismiss the Platonist
tradition in favor of a supposedly distinct Aristotelian one, captures, on the point of
claritas, a central, if subtle, foundation for Aquinass theology in general. It would
seem that the idea of clarity, of intelligibility, provides the justification for Aquinass
many appeals in his work to proportion by way of the fitting. Because we can know
something about the intelligible ordering of things by truth and beauty, we can draw
certain conclusions about the proper proportions of reality that a more circumscribed use of logic would not permit. Pierre Rousselot, who brilliantly explored
what he called the poetic science of Aquinass arguments from what is fitting, dismissed their argumentative significance for science or opinion as nil (Rousselot,
134). He is on firmer ground in writing that it was quite natural for Thomas to
evince an extreme desire [in arguments about what is fitting] to bring order to the
world, since it flowed directly from his conviction of its intelligibility. A system is an
attempt to reconstruct the divine artists plan (135). If claritas is a real proportion
of created things to the intelligence that created them, then a poetic science cannot be fully distinguished from any other science, for Aquinas; Beauty and Truth are
distinct in reason but one in being (Cf. Aquinas, Summa theologica, I.5.4 and I.16.3).
45. Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 122.
46. Ibid., 138.
47. On this point, see Jacques Maritain, Concerning Poetic Knowledge in Jacques
and Rassa Maritain, The Situation of Poetry, trans. Marshall Suther (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 3770.
48. On sensibility as the condition of possibility for the experience of what is true or
good, see T. S. Eliot, The Social Function of Poetry in On Poetry and Poets (London:
Faber and Faber, 1957), 1525. For Platos reflections on poetry in relation to the
appetite and the life of reason, see Plato, Republic 401cd, and James Matthew Wilson, Retelling the Story of Reason, Anamnesis 1.1, 540.
49. That beauty deepens rather than dissipates after our reason (our whole self) engages
it is a reality too often neglected or denied in philosophies of art. Maritains just
commitment to poetry as a nondiscursive knowledge leads himbut unnecessarily, in my opinionto render intellectual reflection secondary to the experience
of beauty (Art and Scholasticism, 164, n. 56). Eco accepts that aesthetic experience
is intuitiveimmediate and nondiscursivebut he then proceeds to claim that,
contra Maritain, Aquinass account of beauty has no place for such an experience,
and is therefore inadequate (Eco, 623, 241 n. 27). Eco then condemns Aquinass
entire aesthetics because, contra Maritain, it is rigorously intellectual rather than

69

70

logos

50.
51.
52.
53.

54.

intuitiveThere is a striving, a laboring to become adequate to the truth of things,


an intellectual toil (Eco, 199, Cf. 200201)but the human intellect could never
actualize claritas, because it cannot arrive as a complete knowledge of the form of
things, as can the divine mind (204). A more measured critique of Maritain in favor
of Aquinas may be found in Harold L. Weatherby, The Keen Delight:The Christian Poet
in the ModernWorld (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 12349.
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays 19171932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1932),
204.
Roger Scruton, Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.
Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, Inc., 2009), 7677.
I am thinking above all of Michel Foucaults practice of Nietzschean genealogy in
such works as The Order of Things (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1994) and The History of
Sexuality, 3 Vols., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 198890).
John McNerney, John Paul II: Poet and Philosopher (London: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2004).

Copyright of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought & Culture is the property of Logos: A
Journal of Catholic Thought & Culture and its content may not be copied or emailed to
multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.
However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

You might also like