The Catholicity of Beauty

Faith in Form

In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Oscar Wilde offers the reader a manifesto for modern Aestheticism, proclaiming that the artist’s only concern is to create “beautiful things.”¹ The work of beauty is autonomous, standing apart from both truth and goodness, for “beautiful things mean only beauty,” and there “is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”² The aesthete is the one who takes the “point of view of form,” who would protect it in its “surface and symbol,” and does so to the exclusion of all else.³ For “All art is quite useless” precisely because aesthetic form, the dimensions of the beautiful thing, is the final and highest reality: there is nothing more ultimate than beauty and so nothing outside itself that it should serve.⁴

Aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty and, as such, must be understood as essentially a concern for form—for beauty and the manifestations of beauty. According to Wilde, the integrity of the beauty and form of a being—above all, a work of art—can be secured only by excluding the concerns of philosophy and ethics, of truth and goodness, which always threaten to harness what is beautiful for the service of something extrinsic and secondary to it. “Form is absolutely essential,” we are told later, but as importantly: nothing else is.⁵

In the novel that follows, we witness two versions of aestheticism coordinated by beauty’s respective conditions of surface and symbol, as represented by Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward. The noble lord and the diligent painter both vie for the soul of that innocent, “unspotted” beauty, Dorian Gray.⁶ How they initially understand what it means to have a concern for form, and where Wilde allows it to lead them, provides a cautionary tale regarding the whole enterprise of literary study, of any aesthetic activity defined by its concern for form and understood as a secular, that is to say, a separated, self-grounding, and therefore exclusive mode of inquiry. Cautionary, I say, because such an enterprise will by its nature collapse on itself. Wilde’s novel therefore provides us an occasion to offer an alternative aestheticism, and so an alternative account of literary study, that proposes the Christian faith in its anthropological, metaphysical, and Christological aspects as a necessary guardian for preserving a proper understanding of reason in its whole scope, of reason’s openness to the wholeness of being, and finally of its concern for beauty, for form in its irreducible integrity.⁷

Faith guards these things not by an act of exclusion; rather, because it recognizes both the “ceaselessly self-transcendent orientation” of reason to what lies beyond itself as well as the self-giving intelligibility of being, it jams open the gates, as it were, ensuring that reason will not wither into a false modesty or self-contempt and that the mystery of being will not be flattened until its form appears irrelevant to reason in its particularity and no longer bears meaningful depths within.⁸ An aesthetics opened by faith will therefore become capable of exploring the depths of aesthetic form, in the recesses of which will be found the object of metaphysics—being in its fullness—and even be able to press on further into its own interior, where it may discover and contemplate the formal object of faith, the revelation of God.⁹ This, it should be stressed, is not to argue that being and revelation are circumscribed by and reducible to the form of works of art but, rather, that because being is essentially analogous, human reason may proceed from aesthetic to metaphysical and on to theological forms and see them without confusing them or leaving any of them behind in the process, in a dynamic and fruitful communication, almost a perichoresis.¹⁰ Faith does not merely supplement the concern of reason for aesthetic form, it guarantees to reason that aesthetic form is a true beginning for reason and, further, urges it on...