All my life, I have been convinced that those paintings of Biblical scenes around the altars of Catholic Churches were put there to teach me a lesson. I was always told that people were illiterate and the pictures are didactic, a hail-mary attempt by the Church to catechize the crowd.
This is incorrect.
Art is not, purely conceived, an intellectual pursuit in the way we think it is. Intelligence is, of course, a necessary condition for the truth of art to break through, but it is not analogous with truth. In other words, dogma is beautiful by virtue of that which shines out from inside, not for the specific, intellectual formulations themselves. A Catholic does not, for instance, adore the Scriptures qua book. We adore the Scriptures because they are an instance of Divine Revelation.
Although the pictures around the altar may be helpful with dispensing factual knowledge, they aren’t a teaching aid akin to a power-point presentation. Those images are true in a much more robust sense of the word. A work of art is true in a very different way than we are used to conceiving of truth, and is not at all related to a photographic representation or a moral truth.
A corollary of this statement is that we might not actually know what an image is.
I have all my life thought that an image is true if the story it tells is historical, the details accurate, and the representation realistic (or at the least, the representation of a non-objective emotion or concept rings true). This means that, all my life, I wasn’t actually seeing the image for what it truly is. It’s a forest-and-trees situation. What I saw was a clever presentation of the exterior of an object (or the subjective presentation of an affective disposition, but in this case the image isn’t so important because theory has overwhelmed it. That’s a whole ‘nother discussion). This is the point – if all we see in a work of art is the exterior reality, then we are not actually seeing the image. The soul is missing.
The concept of truth and image, for Romano Guardini and Josef Cardinal Ratzinger at least, are not limited to the didactic. They are metaphysical. What I am so overcome by in the work of Titian, for example, is that in and through his exquisite modeling of the human form he is painting the soul of his subject. It’s the soul that shapes the body. He isn’t limited to exterior appearances but, through his skill as a craftsman, seeks out interior disposition. He does this through talent, yes, but he also does so by seeking the truth and finding a metaphysical reality that imbues his images with beauty that goes well beyond representational realism. To paint reality is not to take a photograph, it is to see from the inside out.
Guardini writes,
We must now refer what has already been propounded to the liturgy. There is a danger that in the liturgical sphere as well aestheticism may spread; that the liturgy will first be the subject of general eulogy, then gradually its various treasures will be estimated at their aesthetic value, until finally the sacred beauty of the House of God comes to provide a delicate morsel for the connoisseur. Until, that is, the “house of prayer” becomes once more, in a different way, a “den of thieves.” But for the sake of Him who dwells there and for that of our own souls, this must not be tolerated.
In other words, if we lose the ability to perceive the inner meaning, the very essence of each created thing, then the exterior beauty portrayed is not beautiful at all. It is a stolen kiss, a sentimental cultural parasite.
Guardini writes,
No, art does not bother about aims. Does anyone honestly believe that the artist would take upon himself the thousand anxieties and feverish perplexities incident to creation if he intended to do nothing with his work but to teach the spectator a lesson, which he could just as well express in a couple of facile phrases, or one or two historical examples, or a few well-taken photographs? The only answer to this can be an emphatic negative. Being an artist means wrestling with the expression of the hidden life of man, avowedly in order that it may be given existence; nothing more. It is the image of the Divine creation, of which it is said that it has made things “ut sint.”
Why do artists find themselves so deeply and spiritually connected with their creation? Why do some describe it as a process akin to giving birth?
A pure craftsman would never speak this way. To repair a washing machine is a simple task and doesn’t require sleepless, anguished nights in order to achieve the goal. A man who has painted the siding of a house doesn’t destroy it in a fit of rage because it is somehow unsatisfying. This is because a craftsman has aims that are, with enough elbow grease, achieved by applying a certain skill-set. An artist seeks far more. An artist is not creating a step-by-step instruction manual. An artist is not simply a newspaper reporter skilled in various media beyond typing an editorial.
We might refer to this, along with Guardini, as the primacy of logos over ethos. “In life as a whole, precedence does not belong to action, but to existence.” An artist speaks a true word about the nature of life. That true word touches deeply on questions of metaphysical significance, and as such it has a connection not simply to a single event or moral teaching but to the whole of life. So, artists and writers, ask not what lesson you have taught through your work. Ask yourself if you have worked truly.
Why are those images there surrounding the altar and lining the arcades of our churches? Because they reveal the true face of God.
Thank you, Michael, for agreeing with me (finally).
This perfectly articulates Guardini’s view of art in chapter six of The Spirit of the Liturgy. I want to show, though, that Guardini’s view is fundamentally self-contradictory and wrong.
He starts off the chapter with a radical admission, one which I happen to view as right: “Beauty, therefore, is an independent value; it is not truth and not goodness, nor can it be derived from them.” Artistic “Beauty as such is valid of itself, entirely independent of truth and other values.” It is so radical a statement, he unconsciously spends the rest of the article arguing for its opposite.
Beauty is the splendor of truth, he says, and means there is within a subject, take a bowl of apples, the inner essence beneath the exterior. Vermeer (or whatever artist you like) comes to the bowl, sees the inner essence of the apples and expresses it accurately in paint. Guardini judges the painting beautiful because “everything is said which should be said, and no more…the essential form is attained, and no other.” The inner essence has been revealed and he is insistent that there is only one true, objective one: “the inner essence,” “its inner essence.” Van Gogh (or choose your favorite artist if you don’t like Van Gogh) then comes along and paints the same bowl of apples and this masterpiece looks completely different. What has happened? Are there two objective inner essences in the bowl of apples? Or has Vermeer painted Vermeer’s view of the apples and Van Gogh painted Van Gogh’s view so that neither has expressed the one objective essence of the apples but the most divergent subjective views imaginable?
As a child, there was a part of a Eucharistic prayer I found beautiful, Christ proclaiming “to prisoners, freedom, and to those in sorrow, joy.” This was a collection of melodious sounds and a beautiful rhythm. The nine English words did not express the objective inner essence of proclaiming the gospel, as though this same liturgical passage in Spanish or German would have deprived the hearers of its inner essence.
I am reading Etienne Gilson, the Thomistic scholar, and he is radically shaking up my view of art. He is showing how we approach art as thinkers, whereas artists are makers. We are greedy for intellectual content, focusing on subject and meaning. Art works are made objects: acrylic paint on cotton canvas made with particular brush strokes. I wish I could say more of what the consequence of that is, but I am only understanding, by my estimate, about 15% of what I’m reading of him and I haven’t completed any of his whole books yet.
He pointed out a wonderful piece which has shaken up my view of poetry too. For those who haven’t read it, it’s A.E. Housman’s short piece “The Name and Nature of Poetry” : http://www.bu.edu/clarion/guides/The-Name-and-Nature-of-Poetry-by-Housman.pdf This is from the same school of thought that deemphasizes subject and meaning to beauty, which, as Guardini had started off to say, is related to but independent of other values.
I’d love to become more conversant with Gilson on this topic because I always find him interesting.
To be fair, Guardini does qualify the statement about beauty being an independent value, writing “And yet it stands in the closest relation to these other values. As we have already remarked, in order that beauty may be made manifest, something must exist which will reveal itself externally; there must be an essential truth which compels utterance, or an event which will out. Pride of place, therefore, though not of rank or worth, belongs, not to beauty, but to truth.” I do think that he is right about this, because there is always the temptation to conflate the transcendentals as if they are the same when in fact they are not. However, in the divine essence they do somehow find a unity that eludes our ability to understand.
I think your example about the bowl of fruit is thought-provoking. If you gain any insight into how, say, Gilson would answer it I’d love to hear it. I suspect that to some degree each of those paintings can be said to participate analogically in the same essential inner form of the fruit, but because we only see it through that specific analogy, each could be equally true although the paintings seem to be quite different.
If painting reveals the interior truth of a subject, what does this theory have to say about fantastical subjects? What interior truth does a painting of a dragon or a unicorn reveal?
I agree that “Being an artist means wrestling with the expression of the hidden life of man, avowedly in order that it may be given existence.” But I think to say that paintings reveal some kind of “interior truth” about their literal subjects diverges from this point. A painting of an apple does not reveal its appleness, but rather the apple’s relationship to man: as nourishment, as an object of beauty or desire, as a symbol of paradise or the first sin, etc. None of these are necessarily the apple’s own nature; if the apple could talk, it might very well take offense at being viewed only for these traits, which are all contingent upon its relationship to mankind. But it is the apple’s relationship to mankind that interests *us*. And this, to my mind, is why both the Vermeer and the Van Gogh apples can be “true.” Both express some kind of relationship between a man and an apple, and all relationships are as unique as the people who are in them.
Your quote is the contradiction I mean, though. Guardini can’t assert that “Beauty … is not truth … nor can it be derived from [it]” and then state that Truth deserves pride of place as preceding, compelling, and being the “utterance” of Beauty: that“[Truth] must exist which will reveal itself externally.” If Beauty is Truth externalized, then there exists the same relation between Truth and Beauty as between thought and speech. If we plug in those words, he is saying “Speech is not thought, nor can it be derived from it.” Whereas he goes on to say Beauty (speech) *is* expressed Truth (thought).
Now at least he’s arrived at a reasonable proposition: Beauty is externalized Truth (though he should have just started out saying that, instead of wrongly asserting some independence between Beauty and Truth). His proposition of Beauty as externalized Truth is so reasonable it has deluded me my entire life in art appreciation, and most people I know. It’s this proposition that Gilson savages.
Interior essence is a variation on Plato’s Ideal Forms. It means that inside this apple is its truth obscured by its actual form. The artist comes along, sees the invisible within and copies it for us. The problem is that if the interior essence is invisible, by definition it can’t be seen and if it can’t be seen, it can’t be copied. If Cezanne and Van Gogh paint the same apple, whose painting is truer? By what standard of truth will we judge, since you can’t have a more accurate or less accurate rendering of the invisible?
Interior essence, in the artistic realm, hits a further hurdle as Karen points out, in the fantastical or just obscure. Anthony van Dyck paints a portrait of St. Jude that looks like Charlton Heston and El Greco paints one that looks like an alien (because he’s El Greco) and neither is more or less true to the interior essence, except by accident and then we wouldn’t know, of a person about whom all we know for certain is the four letters of his name.
This is where Truth, which has supremacy in other areas, runs into trouble when it tries to assert itself over Beauty in the realm of art. “True” could either mean accurate to the exterior form, in which case a photograph is your truest art, or else to some invisible form, where the painting’s success as Truth can’t be evaluated but only its Beauty.
I’ll be upfront that I’ve never found Guardini to be a strong thinker. His confusion about what relation he holds Beauty and Truth to be in with each other finds its exasperating climax near the end of his chapter:
“[Liturgy] is primarily concerned with reality, with the approach of a real creature to a real God, and with the profoundly real and serious matter of redemption. There is here no question of creating beauty, but of finding salvation for sin-stricken humanity. Here truth is at stake, and the fate of the soul, and real—yes, ultimately the only real—life. All this it is which must be revealed, expressed, sought after, found, and imparted by every possible means and method; and when this is accomplished, lo! it is turned into beauty.”
Once again, he starts off by driving a wedge between beauty and truth: that in the Liturgy there is “no question of creating beauty,” which is not real and not serious, but Truth is. I know a gentleman who credits his conversion to the architectural beauty of Catholic churches, but nevermind.
By placing Truth first, and by exhausting all “means and methods” to express the truth of salvation, viola: “lo! it is turned into beauty.” Really, that easy? I know religious ed teachers who spend long days and sleepless nights trying to exhaust all means and methods to express the truth of salvation to their students but none of them has created a Pieta. Historically, Pietas are created by surly individuals with little interest in expressing salvation and more in securing fame and commissions.
From the point of view of Truth, there is no particular objection one could raise against a crucifix of Superman nailed to the cross. It expresses truths of savior, hero, sacrifice, indestructibility, and so forth; if it connected with teens and led some of them to vocations, what a desirable piece of religious art! It is ahistorical only by degrees from the gorgeous, athletic, brunette European with great abs that features on most of our crucifixes. The objectively “truest” crucifixes (the Spanish ones where Christ is sliced to ribbons) are not the ones most of us like to look at. So if we depart from objective depictions to invisible realities, the one who argues for the Superman crucifix and the one who argues for somewhat erotic naked European Jesus are on exactly equal ground: arguing about taste and appropriateness in a way where neither can be declared a winner on objective grounds.
It’s all exciting and new stuff to think about, and I hope Gilson and Guardini and whoevever else in one way or another keep moving us forward.