Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Art

JUST SAY IT

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Beauty, according to the Thomists, is rightproportion, brilliance, and integrity. Evolutionary theorists have tried, and in some cases managed, to find biological grounding for our concepts of beauty. For instance, they at least seem to grasp the relationship between human beauty and reproductive viability, but even these relationships are associational rather than necessary.

But it is more ineffable than that. David Bentley Hart is more expansive:

“Beauty is something other than the visible or audible or conceptual agreement of parts, and the experience of beauty can never be wholly reduced to any set of material constituents. It is something mysterious, prodigal, often unanticipated, even capricious. We can find ourselves suddenly amazed by some strange and indefinable glory in a barren field, an urban ruin, the splendid disarray of a storm-wracked forest, and so on.

Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss 279-280

But in this evil age, the concept of beauty is being subject to the standard word games. The concept behind the word, however difficult to define, is essentially being deconstructed on two fronts. Some claim that beauty is an invention of the mind, especially the minds of men, and therefore needs to be rejected. Others seek to force the word beautiful to refer to that which is not beautiful, neither in the eye of the beholder nor by objective assessment. One remembers that there are four lights:

If you do not care to watch, a man is told that if he would simply say what he is told rather than speak the truth of which he is convinced, good things will happen. The truth under question is inconsequential. But this character bases his whole life on the principle that his first duty is to the truth. It concludes with him speaking the truth rather than giving in.

What modern art and other forces are attempting to do is get you to look at that which is ugly and call it beautiful. Seriously, watch this documentary some time:

At one point in the film, a sculptor tells Scruton that the artists and philosophers who want us to reject beauty are ultimately tempting us to reject knowledge itself.

If we call ugly beautiful, we become more comfortable calling false tue and evil good. Once we become so comfortable with self-deception, we find ourselves unable to discern the difference between any of those categories any more.

Isaiah 5:20 (NET): Those who call evil good and good evil are as good as dead, who turn darkness into light and light into darkness, who turn bitter into sweet and sweet into bitter.

Genesis 1-2 and Man as Artist

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One of the ideas that emerges from the first two chapters of Genesis is the distinction between creation and cultivation, nature and art, or even chaos and order.

For instance, when God makes the world it is a chaotic emptiness (Genesis 1:1-2), but through the next several verses, he organizes it into a series of useful categories. Then he makes humanity, explaining that not only would they reproduce and eat, like the other creatures, but that they would be blessed, take dominion, and bear the image of God. So man is to subdue (or cultivate in context) the created world.

In Genesis 2, while the timeline is intentionally obscured (man is made before the plants, Genesis 2:4-5), the same distinction is further articulated. There is the wild world, but man is placed in a garden planted by God. And so there is nature (that which is) and art (that which is skillfully designed), creation/culture. The idea of subduing/having dominion over the created world is more fully defined in Genesis 2: name the animals, don’t eat poison fruit, eat fruit that gives life, protect the garden, tend the garden, control your body (it’s made of earth, you know), and so-on. In other words, man is to be an artist who makes culture out of creation or art out of nature.

Aristotle’s used the word techne to describe know-how. Later Latin writers translated the word ars. We now use the word art. For Aristotle, art was a virtue of the mind. And I think our tendency to reduce art to the fine arts has led us to undervalue the fact that any human skill that can be acquired through practice is art: mathematics, grammar, cooking, gardening, shepherding, the scientific method, communication, and so-on.

Aristotle’s understanding of art is helpful for seeing what Genesis is getting at, even though Genesis doesn’t use his terminology. Part of our quest for meaning in a world that sometimes seems repetitive and meaningless is acquiring the skills necessary to cultivate the world around us into something beyond what it is. Trees can become parts of a garden, rocks can become a wall, gold can become food containers, currency, or circuits.

Of course, Scripture warns against wrong ways to cultivate creation  (Gen 11:1-9). If you try to unite heaven to earth yourself, you’ll end up utterly confused (which is bad from a personal experience perspective, but good from a necessary moral lesson perspective). I suspect that you’ll find the wrong ways to cultivate insofar as they do lead to confusion which forces different modes of cooperation and thought.