A triptych, which is a three-paneled painting usually used to adorn an altar, by Robert Campin, ca. 1427-32. In the center is depicted the Annunciation scene from Luke's Gospel. The angel Gabriel has just arrived, catching Mary off guard, since she has hitherto been steeped in the reading of God's word. She holds her Bible in swaddling cloth, anticipating the import of Gabriel's message: If Mary will but say yes to God's proposal, the Word will be made flesh in her, a living Image of the Godhead to live among us on earth. As we will see on our journey, this will have reverberating effects on the making of art in Christian practice, as the Old Covenant "graven images" pass into New Covenant "icons," images of the divine Image.

Blaise Pascal was quite the playful and ironic Christian thinker. He was a rigorous and pioneering scientist, but his eccentric and roguish intellectual style is captured serendipitously in his unfinished work, the Pensées, which is simply French for “Thoughts.” This work, never published during his lifetime and discovered by others only after his death, is exactly what its title describes. It is essentially a sizable collection of brief, disjointed thoughts, some paragraphs-long, others formulated in what are called aphorisms, i.e., short, pithy sayings which require prolonged reflection to dig out the full meaning which hides beneath their succinct surface. It is a fascinating, thought-provoking, accessible, and spiritually edifying read, and one I highly recommend for the intellectually adventurous, even if he or she is not advanced. There is one “thought” of Pascal’s which has always held a particular fascination with me. It is as simple and short as an aphorism can be, and it runs like this, “What vanity painting is, which attracts admiration by resembling things whose originals we do not admire!”^[1] Short and sweet enough, but its list of implications is long and somewhat bitter. Now, I believe Pascal is being, characteristically, ironic here, and that he does not really mean what he is saying. But many other Christians have vociferously and devotionally and with all holy intent meant this very thing, and I believe that this is what Pascal is trying to highlight. It gets at the heart of an essential question in Christian and Western thought that has echoed from the beginning down through the ages: Does beauty matter to the spiritual life? Specifically, does the representation of beauty by man matter to the spiritual life? And I am afraid the question is even more perilous than that, for if the answer is yes, and the representation of beauty does indeed matter to the spiritual life, is it a beneficial or deleterious kind of mattering? And it is a question, much like the oftentimes precipitous experience of erotic love, we simply cannot escape, even if we as good Christians want to. For God is beautiful. Rather, he is Beautiful, the paragon of beauty. Should we then imitate his beauty in our own productions, dare I call them, creations? Or is this a presumptuous, or, at worst, idolatrous, pursuit? Let us begin a journey into beauty and artistry today and how we as Christians should respond to these mysterious and oftentimes baffling phenomena that we cannot escape, no more than life itself. 

In Pascal’s ostensibly Platonic stance toward art (for the pagan philosopher Plato, at least on the surface, was highly skeptical of art’s profound power over the human soul), it is apparent that the problem of painting is inherent and irredeemable. But in what essential aspect of the artform does this problem lie? Pascal, in his ironic way, himself seems to say that it rests in the relationship between the content and the function of a painting, for its only goal seems to be to imitate its subject, itself a poor one. Pascal appears not to care much at all about the prospective form the subject of a painting can take; he seems only to be concerned with the notion that all a painting can do in essence is depict its content mimetically, this content being intrinsically and merely tethered to the tangible world. In short, painting is worthless because it fails to depict an alternative to the worldliness we already see.

The plausibility of Pascal’s ostensible critique is also subject to another fundamental question: Is graphic art the sole medium prone to his posited limitation? Throughout some strands of Christian aesthetics, there seems to be a certain setting apart of image from word or song. Images of virtually all kinds used in worship, as the Puritans read them, are an affront to the singularity of Christ’s manifestation of the image of God in human form, whereas music contains no competing graven images. St. Thomas Aquinas disagrees, however, with the sinfulness of fashioning earthly images and with Pascal’s and, in a sense, Plato’s, denigration of the value of things that possess the capacity to be represented: “Meditation on His works enables us in game measure to admire and reflect upon His wisdom,”^[2] for, according to the wisdom theologian, wisdom “He poured out…upon all His works.”^[3] St. Augustine, likewise, knows to give fervent thanks for what the light of the world allows his eyes to behold: “The eyes delight in beautiful shapes of different sorts and bright attractive colors” and “pictures and various works…are the fruit of…imagination,” so that “O my God, my Glory, for these things too I offer you a hymn of thanksgiving.” Augustine is perceptively quick, however, like his philosophic mentor Plato, to acknowledge the dangers sparked by human creative transgressions, rather than to foist blame upon the artworks in and of themselves. He proceeds with viewing cautiously: “I would not have these things take possession of my soul…”^[4] The great Christian theologians through the ages, in the end, stand athwart Pascal’s implication that the things of this world should be held up as objects of mockery. They believe that God’s creation is full of all things terrible and wonderful, and therefore demands man’s cogency to wrestle with it with all the virtues of the intellect, in which Aquinas places man’s capacity for making Art. 

However, Pascal still draws much inspiration for his aphorism from Plato, and those Christians who would denigrate art, especially visual art, are significantly, though often unconsciously, influenced by this pagan’s thought as well. This is no sin in and of itself, but this influence should be examined if we are to ensure we remain faithful to what Christ has revealed. It is best to understand where Plato is coming from first, and then to see if he can after all be reconciled with a worldview that allows art a place in its pursuit of the good, before we can then see if art has anything beneficial to bear on Christianity’s pursuit of God. In Plato’s work the Timaeus, he constructs a mythical view of the origin of the cosmos. Within this he paints a picture of a being called the Demiurge who loves the Form of the Good (below which he exists) so much that he tries to transmute it fully into matter, producing our world of space-time, but ends up being able only to create shadows of the Good’s beauty. Our poor lover of the Good can never quite capture the fullness of the Form. The Demiurge can be seen to be like the Artist, and the Form is much like what we would call a philosopher-critic, who embodies in her person its nature and statutes. Gazing down at the Artist’s creation, the philosopher-critic can choose to Admire his work or not, depending on whether there are things about it that capture some kind of truthfulness about the Form of the Good she knows and embodies. In this sense, our philosopher-critic is also an Admirer, and she is in another sense the queen of all the rest in the community who experience the Artist’s work, the common or general Admirers who ought to look to her judgment for a gauge on how to receive the Artist’s creation. If you do not identify as either an Artist or a Critic, you can in good faith place yourself in their camp.

Now God, as the ultimate Admirer of our works, inspires artists to fashion art that does him and the reality he forms justice, and he has the sole authority to give the final critique of each creation. God’s appraisal determines which artworks will be transfigured or perish in the fires of his discernment. Because the divine Admirer gifts mortal admirers with the ability to participate in this act of divine judgment, they truly become, in a term J. R. R. Tolkien would no doubt happily affirm, “sub-critics”^[5] in the material, yet metaphysically-aspiring world of Art. Indeed, the “sub-critic” is the obligatory companion of Tolkien’s “sub-creator,” and they fellowship with one another in much the same way as do the Platonic Admirer and Artist. While Tolkien would undoubtedly deepen the intimacy and yoked communion of the sub-critic and sub-creator, both relationships are animated by a respect and even love for one another, as the Platonic philosopher-critic looks upon the power of the artist in transcendent, yet enraptured wonder, and the artist gazes upon the Forms seen through the person of the philosopher-critic in impelled awe. 

However, we find that Tolkien’s profound sense of unaffected camaraderie indeed does radically transfigure Plato’s collegial but imperial relationship between the two, and in the next installment of our journey to the heart of the question of Christian art we will discover how Tolkien’s Christian worldview and approach to art transform the pagan Plato’s relationship between the Artist and the Admirers, and with it our understanding of the individual and communal responses to artistry which Christians should cultivate.