The Church and Art

Three things—one distinction and two arguments—stand out in this excerpt from Pope John Paul II's Letter to Artists.

The Holy Father first invokes the common philosophical distinction between doing and making, which underlies the further distinction, at the level of habit, between a virtue (habitual doing-well) and a craft or art (habitual making-well). On the one hand, doing-well—that is, acting in accord with our ultimate end—constitutes our goodness as human persons (our moral or spiritual goodness). On the other hand, making-well—that is, producing fitting objects that conform to "ideas conceived in the mind"—constitutes our goodness as human workers (our professional goodness, so to speak). The notion of an object is taken widely here to designate the fruit of any sort of work that involves intelligent design. Even when I clean my office, I have in mind (roughly) an object or end-state that serves to guide my work. But the paradigmatic instances of an art are those that require extensive training and practice.

As the Holy Father points out, making-well does not entail moral goodness, since it is possible to use an art in ways that are morally destructive of ourselves and others. Nonetheless, in the best sort of human lives our ability to make-well both serves and expresses our doing-well. In fact, one theme of Vatican II, emphasized repeatedly by the present pontiff, is that honorable human work, when properly ordered to our ultimate end and joined to Christ's sacrifice on the cross, can serve to sanctify both ourselves and others. In this way our work, done well and with the right intention, becomes a vehicle of growth in moral and spiritual goodness.

So all honorable work is potentially sanctifying. But certain types of work, because of their inner nature, participate more fully in God's own creative activity. Work in the fine arts, the Holy Father asserts, is especially revelatory of the artist's personality, and beautiful objects of the arts, produced with the right intention, open up "a new dimension and an exceptional mode of expression for [the artist's] spiritual growth." We discover later that this "new dimension" consists in the potential of the fine arts to transport us from the mundane to the transcendent, from visible realities to invisible, yet deeper, realities.

It is precisely because of this special nature that work in the fine arts bears a special relationship to the Church. And here we come to the two arguments mentioned above. The first attempts to establish the conclusion that the Church needs the fine arts—in particular, the literary and figurative arts, music, and architecture. The most interesting premise for this conclusion invokes an analogy between objects of art and the Incarnate Word of God, who is himself "the icon of the unseen God." Building on a conclusion established in an earlier section of the letter, the Holy Father reasons that just as the Church needs Jesus Christ to make visible his unseen Father, so too she needs literary and figurative works, music, and architecture to raise our hearts and minds to the Father revealed by Jesus Christ. The Incarnate Word serves as the model of corporeal representations of transcendent realities and thus secures the place of the fine arts within the practice of the Church.

This premise strikes me as both deep and plausible. I will cite just one liturgical example. In a recent Catholic bestseller, The Lamb's Supper, Scott Hahn has powerfully reasserted the ancient claim that in the Mass the faithful quite literally participate in the heavenly worship depicted in the book of Revelation. This, of course, is true even when the liturgy is celebrated without music in the most plain setting—for example, in the crypt of Sacred Heart Basilica on the campus of Notre Dame, where I...