The Mission of Art

The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, 1510

There seems to be a general recognition that something is amiss in modern culture, a dehumanization, a lack of unity or community, a repressed longing for something, anything, that can fill a void that most people cannot name.  The attempts to fill this void take a myriad of forms, from toys to technology, from the incessant need to be entertained to the use of drugs to kill the pain of meaninglessness resulting from lack of a higher purpose.  We shop, we party, we vacation, we increase our speed although the roads we are traveling on are often going nowhere in particular.

Philosopher Jacques Maritain offers this insight on what might lie at the root of our trouble:

          “We do not need a truth to serve us, 

                                            we need a truth that we can serve.”

Many consider that we as a society are poised on the brink of a precipice.  My purpose in this blog is to offer reflections concerning a Truth that we can serve, a Truth that offers a way back from this precipice.  I am not a mover.  I am not a shaker.  I am just an ordinary person who has life experience that seems to validate what I offer in these reflections.  And I am a person who has worked with young people all my life and who has watched time and time again the transformative effect on these young people when they have been introduced to Truth, Beauty, the great moral and spiritual Virtues, and what are generally recognized as the Great Ideas of Western Civilization.  When they have been shown a way to attach their lives to a transcendent purpose, they are then free to soar.  

My first approach in working with young people is to introduce them to forms of Beauty with which they have not yet been acquainted, the golden nuggets of beauty found in great literature, philosophy, art, music, Nature, etc., and then, released from the bonds of their own subjectivity and the tyranny of the culture, they begin to fall in love with Truth, which leads to the desire to attach their lives to Goodness and to some larger, unifying purpose for their lives.

As one student quoted in a good-bye “thank you” note she wrote to me:  “Teaching is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” -W.B. Yeats  

I believe that Beauty lights the fire on the altar of Truth.

However, Beauty as a virtue has been generally dismissed in modern society, especially in the arts, with its antipathy to anything that has standards of measurement, and the requirement to “measure up” to those standards.

Maritain, writing in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, argues that the loss of Beauty as a standard is a contributing factor to this dehumanizing, even if most people are unaware of the effects this loss creates.   The solution he offers for many of the ills that plague us as individuals and as a society is a return to the recognition and acknowledgement of the power of Beauty as a unifying force and an avenue of spiritual healing.

According to Maritain, “The dehumanizing process . . . can be overcome.  Art in this connection has an outstanding mission.  It is the most natural power of healing and agent of spiritualization needed by the human community. . . .  Art, as long as it remains art, cannot help being intent on beauty.” 

Therein lies the rub—”as long as it remains art” . . . All the modern “isms” have separated Art “from beauty, and from any transcendental end.  The final end and center, then, can only be man,”  which leaves us no way to get ourselves off our hands, so to speak.

This Beauty can take a myriad of forms, approaches, and modes of expression, enough diversity to satisfy anyone, yet there are common criteria or principles that must be recognized or else, to use an analogy, the powerful and life-giving river loses its banks and becomes a swamp.  The real “rub” for the modern culture is that these principles derive from the true source of the transcendent nature of Beauty, or its Divine source.   As stated by Thomas Aquinas, the "beauty of anything created is nothing else than a similarity of divine beauty participated in by things," . . . "the existence of all things derives from divine beauty."

Dostoevski said, “Beauty is the battlefield where God and the Devil contend with one another for the heart of man.” (The Brothers Karamazov)

the Lady's Slipper Orchid, a wild Beauty found in Nature
photo © Greg Ferrell
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