A Thomist Theory of Art
Art is a reflection of God’s creative powers, implanted in creatures made in His image and likeness so that we could, in our subsidiary way, be like Him. We cannot create the cosmos from nothing, but we can take the beauty in creation and revise and reflect it, attempting to capture it in images, dance, song, and word, so as to glorify Him.
Art is non-verbal communication: even poetry and fiction is non-literal. We tell of things either in an exaggerated way, as when we tell of ancient wars or have historical characters give speeches in meter, or we invent whole lives and worlds that do not literally exist. Or, to be precise, art is that which has the form of reality and not the substance. We tell of non-literal things because myths are more true than literal things, and speak of spiritual and eternal reality.
Art is formalized in order to aid the reader or viewer overcome the lack of substance, or, as we say, the suspension of disbelief. Everyone knows Achilles did not actually speak the words Homer invents for him in the same was everyone knows a landscape painted on a canvass is paint-strokes on a canvass, not masses of earth and tree and stream and hill. It is an illusion makes realistic by perspective.
How much stiffness and formality the illusion needs is decided by a consensus between the audience and the artist, in keeping with the technical limits of the medium, the expectations of the genre, the traditions established by prior masters of the art.
After the freethinkers of the French Revolution more or less banished God from the public square, a theory of art claiming it was subjective “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” became fashionable. Impressionism, absurdism, dadaism, cubism, and an endless dreary horde of modern and postmodern spew resulted. Some impressionists paintings perhaps retain sufficient likeness to the objects being presented to qualify as art. Most do not qualify even as decoration. They contain neither composition nor structure nor emotion nor meaning. As best I can tell, they are Rorschach blots where, like seeing faces in the clouds, an idle mind can invent images and meanings.
Let me pause to explain a Thomist conception of words and perceptions, as best I understand it. I am not certain: any Schoolmen who is willing to correct me is welcome to do so. An image of a real thing seen, such as the tree I behold through the window in my backyard, has the form but not the substances of a tree. That is, the sense impression carries the color and shape of the tree into my visual imagination as a phantasm. That phantasm shares the same image of the particular tree as the spirit of this particular tree used to form it as it grew. That phantasm is an incarnation of the real archetypal image all trees properly so called share. When I say the word “tree” that word carries that archetype from my mind, through a medium of written or spoken word, to the eye or ear of my audience, and if he things of the same archetype, the act of communication is successful. If he thought I said flee, and he runs, not successful.
Likewise, in art, the muse inspires an image, a mood, a truth, a light in the artist which he, if he is mad with divine madness, perceives in his mind and heart. He gathers material elements or words and shapes to attempt to capture the form and archetype. If the audience sees the beauty he sees, the art is successful. If, as with modern art, the artists is merely conveying a self portrait of his own self important self-image, there is nothing worthwhile to communicate. If, as with postmodern art, he makes propaganda, or he makes a Rorschach blot, he does nothing but waste time and heap scandal on the caste of artists.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
