Introduction to Excerpt from Letter to Artists

THE REPUBLIC, PLATO TELLS US, does not need art. Painters and poets are lower than the low, inferior even to the workers and craftsmen who make up the bottom class of Plato's tri-partite society. The cheap, imitative wares of artists, kaleidoscopes of color and sound, disorient and seduce us, breeding irrational emotionalism and false opinion. Paintings and poetry are, like the ghostly shadows flickering on the wall at the back of the cave, distorted images of the objects they model. And those objects, like the artifacts casting the shadows in Plato's cave, are themselves imitative of a higher reality, imitative of the forms or ideas that stand above the fray, remote, passive, immutable, rendering intelligible the material world. Artists and lovers of art share the fate of the cave dwellers who toil away, distracted and misled by images, never knowing of the sun-filled world outside the cave, never realizing the existence of the higher world of forms.

The Church does need art, John Paul says in his Letter to Artists. But his conception of art is radically different from Plato's. Art images the mystery of divine creation. Painters and poets imitate not a sterile, impersonal form or idea, but a Creator who is pure activity, bringing the world out of nothing, shaping its valleys and hills, filling its oceans with water and its skies with stars, breathing it all to life. The Creator becomes incarnate in the world, making the invisible visible, making the Word flesh. And from the mystery of God incarnate comes "a flowering of beauty." Painters and poets who echo divine creative activity, producing incalculable treasures, little resemble the artists Plato depicts, purveyors of cheap tricks, illusionists, twisting our perceptions of reality. True artists are not merely imitators: because they imitate God, they are also creators, and transcend the realm of the material in a way Plato (imaginatively gifted as he was) seems not to visualize. They tap into the source of transcendence. And by their art they provide for the rest of us an approach to faith.

Just as the Church needs art, so also art needs the Church, John Paul tells us—and we might take Plato's impoverished conception of painting and poetry to be one piece of an argument for that claim. Religion, a "homeland of the soul," provides an orienting base for artists embarking on the search for meaning.

The extract we print from John Paul's Letter to Artists (presented on Easter Sunday, 1999) and the comments thereon of four philosophers focus on the reciprocal needs of art and the Church. As the comments illustrate, philosophy, while quintessentially rational, does not denigrate either the aspirations or the tools of the artist. Perhaps, as Professor Freddoso suggests, "Philosophy, much like art, is in the end a matter of the heart as much as of the intellect." Philosophers share what Professor Haldane describes as "the religious challenge to artists: to be forms of the Word (Logos)."

Each of us faces that challenge. John Paul exhorts us all to make our lives themselves works of art, to produce masterpieces out of the materials we are given. Many of us, as we labor over these masterworks, have—as part of the task—another job. Acting in imitation of our creator's gift of life, we have "scatter'd [our] Maker's image through the land." We are procreators, and thus in the business of producing, and modeling for, young artists. As painters and poets, as philosophers and thinkers of various stripes, as authors of our own and our neighbors' destinies, as mothers and fathers, we help build up the Church, the body of Christ. We build the City of God. It is a nobler undertaking than the building of...