Art and Vocation

The Holy Father's 1999Letter to Artists is a characteristic blend of philosophical, aesthetic and theological reminders of the condition and orientation of incarnate human persons. We are made for God but we have to find our way to him, and that involves aiming ourselves toward a goal. The notion of an end occurs twice here: first, as a destination or terminus; but second, as a state or condition to which, with God's grace, we have to bring ourselves. This latter is the business of self-realization: the process of becoming fully and actually what, in part and in potentiality, we already are.

Herein enter both ethics and art. The Pope is right to distinguish but not to sever them. Kant believed that thought and experience divide into three categories: the speculative, the practical, and the aesthetic (hence the three great Critiques of "pure" and of "practical" reason, and of "judgment"). In the Thomistic tradition, however, the category of the practical subsumes both the moral and aesthetic since it views the latter as primarily a matter of activity—as Thomas Aquinas observes: "In art, the mind is directed to some specific aim, while in morality it is directed to an aim shared by all human life" (Summa Theologiae, Ia, IIae, q. 21 a.2 ad 2). To be sure, there is the aesthetic as experienced beauty—disinterested contemplation of form for its own sake. But this most commonly arises from making and from reviewing what one, or others have made. For this reason the aesthetic of nature properly suggests the idea of a maker of nature.

That is not yet a proof, for it could be that the appearance of aesthetic order in the natural world is an illusion. For example, the apparent composition in the forms of living things; and the dramatic opposition between the heights reaching toward the burning light, and the depths plunging into the chilling dark, could just be projections onto an aesthetically blank world. The possibility of a persuasive design argument remains, however, if, as I have claimed, the idea of beauty is internally related to that of aesthetic design; and if, as I would also maintain, the appearances of natural beauty, recorded by people of different cultures, places, and times, are as they indeed appear, namely aspects of the world. One might add, "of the world as experienced," for as St. Thomas also observes "beauty complements good by subordinating it to the cognitive powers... beauty is that, the very perception of which is pleasing" (Summa, Ia, IIae, q. 27, a.1, ad 3).

In distinguishing ethics and art, the Pope may also have had in mind two opposing errors into which one may fall, having correctly recognized the truth that there are important connections between the moral and the aesthetic; namely those of aestheticizing the moral, and of moralizing the aesthetic. We may speak rhetorically of the "beauty" of good character, and of the "artistry" of a well-designed policy; but it is as easy to speak of the "drama" of degeneracy and of the "thrilling anticipation" of moral tragedy. Certainly much aestheticizing has been directed upon these latter. The "decadents" sought to make a point about how art could be severed from morality by showing that it could serve the interests of decline as well as of improvement. Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray is a rather contrived effort in this direction, as are Aubrey Beardsley's flat and lifeless illustrations for Wilde's Salome. The fact that, it seems, both men turned to the Church as they approached death says something about their souls but does nothing to enhance the status of these works. It does, though, encourage the thought that had things been otherwise in their lives, and in the surrounding culture, then they might have developed their talents in artistically and aesthetically more profound...