It’s been quite a while since our last installment on our journey to the nature of Christian art and its right, sanctified role in our spiritual lives, but wait no longer, because the next phase of our adventure is here! Last time, I talked about a few thinkers that have been influential throughout Church history in addressing this issue, namely that of Beauty, or represented Beauty. They were: Blaise Pascal, Plato, St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, and good ol’ J. R. R. Tolkien. Moving forward, I want to pay special attention to how Pascal, Plato, and Tolkien in particular can illuminate and enrich our understanding and spiritual experience of art. Our last chapter ended with my juxtaposition of Plato on the one hand—insofar as we find the concepts of the Artist and the Admirer implicit in his view—and Tolkien on the other—insofar as we find the concepts of the sub-creator and what I dubbed the “sub-critic” implicit in his view. These pairs of concepts can be connected in special and helpful ways to bridge the gap between pagan and Christian experiences of art, baptizing, as it were, Plato’s pagan thought into Tolkien’s Christian worldview. Now that we’ve seen how these conceptual pairs relate, I want us to take it a step further. I was serious when I said this inaugurates a new chapter on our journey! So let’s talk about not only how Plato and Tolkien can be companioned, but how they how their thoughts can actually be wed to create an all-encompassing framework for a truly sacred Christian interaction with the world of art, one that changes it from the inside out. Are you ready? Well, here we go!

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[1] “sub-critics” 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, for in fact the critic “deserves the title of the poet’s best friend.[2]  And in a single, simple affirmation, the arguably repressive spell of Plato’s ideal community, called in the original Greek the kallipolis, is broken. What is rewoven in its place preserves the élan vital of that same well-ordered community in which everyone performs their proper role, but the city now sings with an intimacy between all members only fraternal charity can abide. The aesthetic, proportional structure of the kallipolis is now equaled in and exalted by the lived relations between its parts, as the philosopher-critic, now properly called sub-critic—a title which at the same time humbles and glorifies her—cannot help but extend the same love she offers the artist to the rest of her citizens, whom she now sees completely as friends and admirers of equal dignity.[3] Her leadership is not overbearing, but inspiring, and everyone is invited to learn the ways of the Good through its revelations alongside her. Every admirer now not only indirectly contributes to, but also directly shares in, the sub-critic’s pursuit and enjoyment of the Form of the Beautiful, and in this joint aesthetic striving the artist is thus even further blessed by the multiplication of his companions, who begin to reflect unique aspects of the Beautiful in themselves. Surrounded by this fraternal splendor, and through the Eros saturating the whole community, its desire now further extending to the heights of Agape to open up onto vistas of wholly unprecedented modes of engagement with the Good, the artist is inexhaustibly inspired to create in the full endorsement of his humanity.

In another dialogue, the Symposium, wherein characters each attempt to give a speech capturing the nature of Eros in the raucous aftermath of a citywide dramatic festival, Plato himself even introduces an unprecedented conciliatory relationship, a theme which is otherwise left untouched in the dialogue’s overt treatments of Eros (perhaps the character of Aristophanes’s comes closest, but his speech hardly emphasizes the differences between the sexes that are whimsically combined into his roly-poly creatures; they very easily and obviously fit together). Plato does so by ending the dialogue with Socrates’s return to the original civic and artistic occasion of their gathering, as he attempts to reconcile the two primordial and apparently antithetical genres of Athenian drama: tragedy and comedy—for, according to Socrates, the consummate tragedian must also be the consummate comedian. In so doing, he hints at a more dignified space for comedy, which was almost always totally subordinated to tragedy in ancient Athenian culture. All the more definitively, Tolkien rescues the artist from total servitude to, and indeed, even exile from, the philosopher-critic. Furthermore, Socrates tries to convince two of his friends, Aristophanes and Agathon, of his counterintuitive claim well into the night to the point of daybreak, and Aristophanes, the illustrious comedic playwright and who thus represents comedy, falls asleep first, leaving Agathon, who is a recently victorious tragic playwright and thus represents tragedy, to fall asleep second. Socrates the reconciler, however, does not succumb to sleep, but instead takes care to make the slumbering playwrights comfortable, then heads back into the city, washes up in the public baths, and goes refreshed about his day, which typically consists of inquiring into the nature of reality with the aid of his fellow townsfolk (frequently at the expense of their own presumptions). Plato thus may be hinting at a truth which Christianity would later brilliantly reveal, namely, that though comedy seems the first to fade, leaving tragedy to draw the curtain on life’s dark night, it is the one who can reconcile the two fundamental arcs of life who presses on into the dayspring to live uninhibited by the otherwise wearisome nature of his trials. Comedy may yet find resurrection in him.

In The Four Loves C. S. Lewis foregrounds what the Symposium seems subtly to imply when ending its tour of disparate visions of Eros at the indeterminate junction of tragedy and comedy: “Lovers,” Lewis observes, “unless their love is very short-lived, again and again feel an element not only of comedy, not only of play, but even of buffoonery, in the body’s expression of Eros.”[4] By championing comedy, Socrates thus seems to be gesturing toward a way of viewing embodied life—precisely due to the nature of Eros—as not just overpoweringly tragic, but also indefatigably comic, for Socrates’s progression to Eros’s end must begin with the intimate knowledge of a particular physical body[5], and moreover, as Lewis remarks, “The fact that we have bodies is the oldest joke there is.[6] Plato never presses this gesture to the point where it significantly raises within his dualism the estimate of the body, which again—he seems to imply here—is the stage upon which the foundational rhythms of human experience converge; it takes Tolkien’s distinctively sacramental insight to give both comedy and the artist their rightly dignified and spiritually efficacious roles in a community and material world now due to join the Platonic immortal soul in eternity.[7]

Later, Lewis intimates how such reconciliations are metaphysically possible, for “the alternative to tragedy,” he asserts, “or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”[8] Not comedy, as we first thought. Thus the divine order in Lewis reconstitutes the natural order, revealing the true antithesis of each aspect of Creation, which turns out to be “damnation,” its nature consisting in an eternal tumble toward nothingness. In point of fact, no reconciliation within God’s order of Creation is impossible, because the ultimate contrary of his work is Nothing itself. So it is that Lewis’s spiritual mentor Tolkien, as we have already discerned, in his very being and, by extension, in his own sub-work is able to unite seamlessly the historically antagonistic artist and critic, for he markedly sub-creates (and sub-critiques) within the Arch-Creator’s order. He is thus the exemplary prophet to summon the Platonic philosopher-critic and her republic to harness the river of reconciliation surging between herself and her citizens and cutting the basic pattern of the incarnational economy. In this divinely new beginning the impossible becomes possible, or paradoxical, just as in the first beginning something springs from nothing. Indeed, “[p]aradox is not obfuscation, not an insoluble puzzle, but a striking breakthrough toward synthesis: at the heart of the mystery of the incarnation we are to see the glorious reconciliation of apparent contraries, even of opposites.”[9] Marcus Aurelius, believing all things are interconnected by a providential order, also prefigures a paradoxical union of this kind—a joining of the separate—though nothing like the interdimensional event Jeffrey describes. As Marcus muses, “And among beings which are higher still, there existed a sort of union in separation, as is the case with the stars. Thus ascent towards the higher was able to create a sympathetic connection even between bodies which remain apart.[10] In Jeffrey’s and Tolkien’s radical world, however, this consolidation, through a subversive descent towards the lower, is substantially actualized across ontological planes and roles, allowing for “sympathetic connections” simply unintelligible in pagan antiquity or elsewhere. And so it comes to pass that the realization of Plato’s unitive hope through Tolkien’s incarnational friendship between contraries de facto (as well as de jure) invites the artist back into the kallipolis and forges the matrix in which Platonic Eros can transcend itself to fulfill the noble communal promises of the first escaped prisoner’s inchoate taste of the sun in the Republic and the Demiurge’s impossible desire for the embodied Form in the Timaeus.

So we’re starting to get a bit more Christianized of a view of art here. We can at least now see how our experience of art could theoretically fit into a fully sacred Christian worldview, rather than merely a non-Christian secular worldview. Well, in our next installment, we’ll be bringing it all home by seeing how the Christian experience of art actually works and can work in our individual and communal lives! Because in the next chapter of our journey, this theory of the Christian aesthetic experience—that is, the Word—(or, if you will, perhaps even what Plato could only hint at with his “Form”), will at last become flesh. That’s right: it’s finally time for all our manmade images to meet the Image.

Artwork entitled, “The Shores of Faery” by J.R.R. Tolkien, 10 May 1915. This is the earliest illustration of his secondary world, painted when he was a student at Oxford. It shows the city of the Elves in Valinor, framed by the Two Trees bearing the light of the sun and the moon.