ART AND SCHOLASTICISM
JACQUES MARITAIN
table of contents
The Schoolmen and the Theory of Art
The Speculative Order and the Practical Order
Making and Doing
Art an Intellectual Virtue
Art and Beauty
The Rules of Art
The Purity of Art
Christian Art
Art and Morality
Chapter I
The Schoolmen and the Theory of Art
The Schoolmen did not write a special treatise entitled Philosophy of Art. This was no doubt due to the strict pedagogical discipline to which the philosophers of the Middle Ages were subjected; occupied in sifting and probing the problems of the School in all directions, they cared little that they left unworked regions between the quarries they excavated. Yet we find in them a very profound theory of Art; but we must look for it in austere treatises on some problem of logic -- "is Logic a liberal art?" -- or of moral theology -- "how is the virtue of Prudence, a virtue at once intellectual and moral, to be distinguished from Art, which is an intellectual virtue?"
2 In these treatises, in which the nature of art is studied only incidentally, art in general is the subject of debate, from the art of the shipbuilder to the art of the grammarian and the logician, not the fine arts in particular, the consideration of which has no "formal" bearing on the matter under discussion. We must go to the Metaphysics of the ancients to discover what their views were concerning the Beautiful, and then proceed to meet Art and see what comes of the junction of these two terms. If such a procedure disconcerts us, it at least affords us a useful lesson, by making clear to us the error of the "Aesthetics" of modern philosophers, which, considering in art only the fine arts, and treating the beautiful only with regard to art, runs the risk of vitiating both the notion of Art and the notion of the Beautiful.
3 Thus one could, by gathering together and reworking the materials prepared by the Schoolmen, compose from them a rich and complete theory of Art. I should like only to indicate here some of the features of such a theory. I apologize for the peremptory tone thus imposed on my essay, and I hope that despite their insufficiency these reflections on maxims of the Schoolmen will draw attention to the usefulness of having recourse to the wisdom of the ancients, as also to the possible interest of a conversation between philosophers and artists, at a time when all feel the necessity of escaping from the immense intellectual disorder inhe&rited from the nineteenth century, and of finding once more the spiritual conditions of honest work.
Chapter II
The Speculative Order and the Practical Order
There are in the intellect virtues whose sole end is to know. They belong to the speculative order.
Such are: the Understanding of first principles, which, once we have drawn from our sense-experience the ideas of Being, of Cause, of End, etc., enables us to see immediately -- through the power of the active light which is in us by nature -- the self-evident truths on which all our knowledge depends; Science, which enables us to know by demonstration, assigning causes; Wisdom, which enables us to contemplate the first causes, and in which the mind holds all things in the superior unity of a simple glance. These speculative virtues perfect the intellect in its most proper function, in the activity in which it is purely itself; for the intellect as such aims only to know. The intellect acts, indeed its act is, absolutely speaking, life par excellence; but its act is an immanent act which remains wholly within the intellect to perfect it, and through which the intellect, with a limitless voracity, seizes being and draws it into itself -- it eats being and drinks being -- so as "itself to become, in a certain fashion, all things." Thus the speculative order is its proper order; it is at home there. The good or the evil of the subject, the needs and conveniences of the subject, matter little to it; it enjoys being and has eyes only for being.
3 The practical order is opposed to the speculative order because there man tends to something other than knowledge only. If he knows, it is no longer to rest in the truth, and to enjoy it (frui); it is to use (uti) his knowledge, with a view to some work or some action.
4 Art belongs to the practical order. It is turned towards action, not towards the pure interiority of knowledge.
5 There are, it is true, speculative arts, which are at the same time sciences, as, for instance, logic. These scientific arts perfect the speculative intellect, not the practical intellect; but such sciences retain in their mode something of the practical, and are arts only because they imply the making of a work --- this time a work wholly within the mind, and whose sole object is the achievement of knowledge, a work which consists for instance in settina our concepts in order, in framing a proposition or in constructing a reasoning. The fact remains, therefore, that wherever we find art we find some productive operation to be contrived, some work to be made.
Chapter III
Making and Doing
The intelligence is a faculty perfectly one in its being, but it works in entirely different ways according as it knows for the sake of knowledge or knows for the sake of action.
2 The speculative intellect will have its perfect and infinitely superabundant joy only in the intuitive vision of the Divine Essence; it is through it that man will then possess beatitude: gaudium de Veritate. It is very rarely exercised in absolute liberty on this earth, save in the Man of Wisdom, theologian or metaphysician, or in the pure scientist. In the great majority of cases reason works in the practical order, and for the diverse ends of human actions.
3 But the practical order itself is divided into two entirely distinct spheres, which the ancients called the sphere of Doing (agibile, prakton) and the sphere of Making (factibile, poiêton).
4 Doing, in the restricted sense in which the Schoolmen understood this word, consists in the free use, precisely as free, of our faculties, or in the exercise of our free will considered not with regard to the things themselves or to the works which we produce, but merely with regard to the use which we make of our freedom.
5 This use depends on our specifically human appetite, on our Will, which of itself does not tend to the true, but solely and jealously to the good of man -- for that alone exists for appetite which fulfills desire or love and which increases the being of the subject, or which is to the subject as the subject is to itself. This use is good if it is in conformity with the law of human acts, and with the true end of the whole of human life; and if it is good, the man acting is himself good -- purely and simply good.
6 Thus Doing is ordered to the common end of the whole of human life, and it concerns the proper perfection of the human being. The sphere of Doing is the sphere of Morality, or of the human good as such. Prudence, the virtue of the practical intellect which rules Doing, stands entirely in the human sphere. Queen of the moral virtues, noble and born to command, because it measures our acts with regard to an ultimate end which is God Himself sovereignly loved, Prudence nevertheless retains a taste of misery, because it has for its matter the multitude of needs and circumstances and traffickings in which human anxiety flounders about, and because it imbues with humanity all that it touches.
7 In contradistinction to Doing, the Schoolmen defined Making as productive action, considered not with regard to the use which we therein make of our freedom, but merely with regard to the thing produced or with regard to the work taken in itself.
8 This action is what it ought to be, it is good in its own sphere, if it is in conformity with the rules and with the proper end of the work to be produced; and the result to which it tends if it is good, is that this work be good in itself. Thus Making is ordered to this or that particular end, taken in itself and self-sufficing, not to the common end of human life; and it relates to the good or to the proper perfection, not of the man making, but of the work produced.
9 The sphere of Making is the sphere of Art, in the most universal sense of this word.
10 Art, which rules Making and not Doing, stands therefore outside the human sphere; it has an end, rules, values, which are not those of man, but those of the work to be produced. This work is everything for Art; there is for Art but one law -- the exigencies and the good of the work.
11 Hence the tyrannical and absorbing power of Art, and also its astonishing power of soothing; it delivers one from the human; it establishes the artifex --- artist or artisan --- in a world apart, closed, limited, absolute, in which he puts the energy and intelligence of his manhood at the service of a thing which he makes. This is true of all art; the ennui of living and willing, ceases at the door of every workshop.
12 But if art is not human in the end that it pursues, it is human, essentially human, in its mode of operating. It's a work of man that has to be made; it must have on it the mark of man: animal rationale.
13 The work of art has been thought before being made, it has been kneaded and prepared, formed, brooded over, ripened in a mind before passing into matter. And in matter it will always retain the color and savor of the spirit. Its formal element, what constitutes it in its species and makes it what it is, is its being ruled by the intellect. If this formal element diminishes ever so little, to the same extent the reality of art vanishes. The work to be made is only the matter of art, its form is undeviating reason. Recta ratio factibilium: let us say, in order to try to translate this Aristotelian and Scholastic definition, that art is the undeviating determination of works to be made.
Chapter IV
Art an Intellectual Virtue
Let us sum up now what the Schoolmen taught about art in general, considered in the artist or artisan and as something of himself.
Art, first of all, is of the intellectual order, its action consists in imprinting an idea in some matter: it is therefore in the intelligence of the artifex that it resides, or, as is said, this intelligence is the subject in which it inheres. It is a certain quality of this intelligence.
2 The ancients termed habitus (hexis) qualities of a class apart, qualities which are essentially stable dispositions perfecting in the line of its own nature the subject in which they exist. Health, beauty are habitus of the body; sanctifying grace is a habitus (supernatural) of the soul. Other habitus have for their subject the faculties or powers of the soul, and as the nature of these faculties or powers is to tend to action, the habitus which inhere in them perfect them in their very dynamism, are operative habitus: such are the intellectual virtues and the moral virtues.
3 We acquire this last kind of habitus through exercise and use; but we must not for this reason confuse habitus with habit in the modern sense of this word, that is to say, with mere mechanical bent and routine; habitus is exactly the contrary of habit in this sense. Habit, which attests the weight of matter, resides in the nerve centers. Operative habitus, which attests the activity of the spirit, resides principally in an immaterial faculty, in the intelligence or the will. When, for example, the intellect, at first indifferent to knowing this rather than that, demonstrates a truth to itself, it disposes its own activity in a certain manner, thus giving birth within itself to a quality which proportions it to, and makes it commensurate with, such or such an object of speculation, a quality which elevates it and fixes it as regards this object; it acquires the habitus of a science. Habitus are intrinsic superelevations of living spontaneity, vital developments which render the soul better in a given order and which fill it with an active sap: turgentia ubera animae, as John of Saint Thomas calls them. And only the living (that is to say, intellectual beings, who alone are perfectly alive) can acquire them, because only they are capable of elevating the level of their being by their very activity: they have thus, in their enriched faculties, secondary principles of action which they use when they wish and which make easy and delightful for them what of itself is difficult.
4 Habitus are, as it were, metaphysical titles of nobility, and as much as innate gifts they make for inequality among men. The man who possesses a habitus has within him a quality which nothing can pay for or replace; others are naked, he is armed with steel: but it is a case of a living and spiritual armor.
5 Finally, habitus, properly speaking, is stable and permanent (difficile mobilis) by very reason of the object which specifies it; it is thus to be distinguished from simple disposition, as for example opinion. The object with regard to which it perfects the subject is itself immutable -- such as the infallible truth of demonstration for the habitus of Science -- and it is upon this object that the quality developed in the subject takes hold. Hence the force and the rigidity of habitus; of their object galls them; hence their intransigence -- what concession could they admit of? They are fixed in an absolute; hence their inconvencience in the social order. Men of the world, polished on all sides, do not like the man of habitus, with his asperities.
6 Art is a habitus of the practical intellect.
7 This habitus is a virtue, that is to say, a quality which, triumphing over the original indetermination of the intellectual faculty, at once sharpening and tempering the point of its activity, draws it, with reference to a definite object, to a certain maximum of perfection and thus of operative efficiency. Every virtue being thus determined to the ultimate of which the power is capable, and every evil being a lack and an infirmity, virtue can tend only to the good: impossible to use a virtue to do evil; it is essentially a habitus operative of good.
8 The existence of such a virtue in the workman is necessary for the good of the work, for the manner of action follows the disposition of the agent, and, as a man is, so are his works. To the work-to-be-made, if it is to turn out well, there must correspond in the soul of the workman a disposition which creates between the one and the other that kind of conformity and intimate proportion which the Schoolmen called "connaturality"; Logic, Music and Architecture respectively graft the syllogism in the logician, harmony in the musician, equilibrium of masses in the architect. Through the virtue of Art present in them, they in some way are their work before making it; they are conformed to it, so as to be able to form it.
9 But if art is a virtue of the practical intellect, and if every virtue tends exclusively to the good (that is, to the true in the case of a virtue of the intellect), we must conclude from this that Art as such (I say Art and not the artist, who often acts contrary to his art) is never mistaken, and that it implies an invallible rectitude. Otherwise it would not be a habitus properly speaking, stable of its very nature.
10 The Schoolmen discussed at length this infallible rectitude of art, and more generally of the virtues of the practical intellect (Prudence in the order of Doing, Art in the order of Making). How can the intellect be rendered infallibly true in the domain of the individual and the contingent? They replied with the fundamental distinction between the truth of the speculative intellect, which consists in knowing, in conformity with what is, and the truth of the practical intellect, which consists in directing, in conformity with what ought to be according to the rule and the measure of the thing to be effected. If there is a science only of the necessary, if there is no infallible truth in knowing in regard to what can be otherwise than it is, there can be infallible truth in directing, there can be art, as there is prudence, in regard to the contingent.
11 But this infallibility of art concerns only the formal element of the operation, that is to say, the regulation of the work by the mind. Let the hand of the artist falter, let his instrument betray him, let the matter give way, the defect thus introduced into the result, into the eventus, in no way affects the art itself and does not prove that the artist is wanting in his art. From the moment that the artist, in the act of judgment brought by his intellect, imposed the rule and the measure which suited the given case, there was no error in him, that is to say, no false direction. The artist who has the habitus of art and a trembling hand,
C'ha l'habito de l'arte e man che trema,
12 produces an imperfect work, but retains a faultless virtue. Likewise in the moral order, though the event can fail, the act posited according to the rules of prudence will nonetheless have been infallibly correct. Although extrinsically and on the part of the matter art implies contigency and fallibility, nevertheless art in itself, that is to say, on the part of the form, and of the regulation which comes from the mind, is not fluctuating like opinion, but it is planted in certitude.
13 It follows from this that manual skill is no part of art; it is but a material and extrinsic condition of it. The labor through which the zither player acquires nimbleness of finger does not increase his art as such nor does it engender any special art; it simply removes a physical impediment to the exercise of the art: non generat novam artem, sed tollit impedimentum exercitii ejus:art stands entirely on the side of the mind.
14 In order to determine more precisely the nature of Art, the ancients compared it with Prudence, which is also a virtue of the practical intellect. In thus distinguishing and contrasting Art and Prudence, they put their finger on a vital point in the psychology of human acts.
15 Art, we have already said, is in the sphere of Making, Prudence in the sphere of Doing. Prudence discerns and applies the means of arriving at our moral ends, which are themselves subordinate to the ultimate end of the whole of human life, that is to say, to God. Metaphysically, Prudence is, if you will, an art, but it is the art of the totum bene vivere,of the good life absolutely, an art which the Saints alone possess fully, together with supernatural Prudence, and above all with the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, which move them to divine things according to a divine manner, and cause them to act under the very guidance of the Spirit of God and of His loving Art, by giving them eagle wings to help them walk on earth: they shall take wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. Art is not concerned with our life, but only with such or such particular and extra-human ends which are an ultimate end in relation to it.
16 Prudence works for the good of the one acting, ad bonum operantis; Art works for the good of the work made, ad bonum operis, and all that turns it from this end perverts it and diminishes it. From the moment that the artist works well -- as from the moment that the geometrician demonstrates -- "it matters little whether he be in good humor or angry." If he is angry or jealous, he sins as a man, he does not sin as an artist. Art in no way tends to the artist's being good in his own action as a man; it would tend rather to the work produced -- if that were possible -- itself making in its own line a perfect use of its activity. But human art does not produce works which move to action of themselves: God alone makes works of this kind, and thus the Saints are truly and literally His masterpiece as master-artisan.
17 Consequently, since the artist is a man before being an artist, it is easy to see the conflicts which will set at loggerheads within him Art and Prudence, his virtue as Maker and his virtue as man. No doubt Prudence itself, which judges in everything according to the particular cases, will not apply to him the same rules as it will to the farmer or the merchant, and will not ask of a Rembrandt or a Léon Bloy that they make works that pay, so as to ensure the material comforts of their family. But the artist will need a certain heroism in order to keep himself always on the straight path of Doing, and in order not to sacrifice his immortal substance to the devouring idol that he has in his soul. In truth, such conflicts can be abolished only if a profound humility renders the artist, so to speak, unconscious of his art, or if the all-powerful unction of wisdom gives to all that is in him the sleep and the peace of love. Doubtless Fra Angelico did not experience these interior conflicts.
18 The fact remains that the pure artist abstractly taken as such, reduplicative ut sic, is something entirely amoral.
19 Prudence perfects the intellect only presupposing that the will is straight in its own line as human appetite, that is to say, with regard to its own proper good, which is the good of the whole man: in reality it concerns itself only with determining the means in relation to such or such concrete human ends already willed, and therefore it presupposes that the appetite is rightly disposed with reference to these ends.
20 Art, on the contrary, perfects the intellect without presupposing the rectitude of the will in its own line as human appetite, for the ends at which it aims are outside the sphere of the human good. Hence "the movement of the appetite which corrupts the judgment of prudence, does not corrupt the judgment of art, any more than it does that of geometry." Since the act of using our faculties (usus) depends on the will in its proper dynamism as human appetite,one can understand that art gives only the power of making well (facultas boni operis), and not the use itself of making well. The artist may choose not to use his art, or he may use it badly, just as the grammarian, if he wishes, may commit a barbarism, and yet the virtue of art in him is not for all that any the less perfect. According to the celebrated saying of Aristotle, who no doubt would have liked the fantasies willing it; whereas the man who sins against prudence or against justice is blamed more if he sins willing it than if he sins without willing it. In this connection the ancients observed that both Art and Prudence have first to judge and then to command, but that the principal act of art is merely to judge, whereas the principal act of prudence is to command. Perfectio artis consistit in judicando.
21 Finally, since Prudence has for its matter, not a thing-to-be-made, an object determined in being, but the pure use that the subject makes of his freedom, it has no certain and determined ways or fixed rules. Its fixed point is the true end to which the moral virtues tend, and in relation to which it has to determine ways or fixed rules. its fixed point is the true end to which the moral virtues tend, and in relation to which it has to determine the just means. But for attaining this end, and for applying the universal principles of oral science, precepts and counsels, to the particular action to be produced, there are no ready-made rules; for this action to be produced, there are no ready-made rules; for this action is clothed in a tissue of circumstances which individualize it and make of it each time a truly new case. In each of these cases there will be a particular manner of conforming to the end. It is for Prudence to find this manner, using ways or rules subordinated to the will which chooses according to the occurrence of circumstances and occasion -- ways or rules that in themselves are contingent and not pre-determined, that will be fixed with certitude and rendered absolutely determined only by the judgment or the decision of the Prudent man, and which the schoolmen called for this reason regulae arbitrariae. Particular for each particular case, the ruling of Prudence is nonetheless certain and infallible, as I have said before, because the truth of the prudential judgment depends on the right intention (per conformitatem ad appetitum rectum), not on the event. And supposing the return of a second case, or of an infinity of cases, in all points identical with a given case, the very same ruling as as imposed on that one would have to be imposed on all: but there will never be a single moral case which would be entirely identical with another.
22 It is clear then that no science can replace prudence, for science, no matter how detailed in casuistry it may be, never has anything but general and determined rules.
23 It is clear also why Prudence, in order to establish its judgment, must absolutely have recourse to that groping and multiple exploration which the ancients called consilium (deliberation, counsel).
24 Art, on the contrary, which has for its matter a thing-to-be-made, proceeds by certain and determined ways: "Art seems to be nothing other than a certain ordination or reason, by which human acts reach a determined end through determined means." The Schoolmen, following Aristotle, affirm this constantly, and they make of this possession of fixed rules an essential property of art as such. I shall present later some remarks concerning these fixed rules in the case of the fine arts. Let us recall here that the ancients treat of the virtue of Art considered in itself and in all its generality, not in any one of its particular species; so that the simplest example of art thus considered, the one in which the generic concept of art is first realized, must be sought in the mechanical arts. The art of the shipbuilder or of the clockmaker has for its proper end something invariable and universal, determined by reason: to permit man to travel on water or to tell the time -- the thing-to-be-made, ship or clock, being itself but a matter to be formed according to that end. And for that there are fixed rules, likewise determined by reason, in keeping with the end and with a certain set of conditions.
25 Thus the effect produced is doubtless individual, and in those cases where the matter of the art is particularly contingent and imperfect, as in Medicine, for example, or in Agriculture or in Strategy, Art will find it necessary in order to apply its fixed rules to use contingent rules (regulae arbitrariae) and a kind of prudence, will find it necessary also to have recourse to deliberation, to consilium. It is nonetheless true that of itself Art derives its stability from its rational and universal rules, not from consilium, and that the correctness of its judgment is not derived, as with Prudence, from the circumstances and occurrences, but rather from the certain and determined ways which are proper to it. That is why the arts are at the same time practical sciences, such as Medicine or Surgery (ars chirurgico-barbifica, it was still called in the seventeenth century), and some can even be speculative sciences, like Logic.
26 In summary, Art is thus more exclusively intellectual than Prudence. Whereas Prudence has for subject the practical intellect as presupposing right will and depending on it, Art does not concern itself with the proper good of the will, and with the ends that the will pursues in its own line as human appetite; and if it supposes a certain rectitude of the appetite, this is still with regard to some properly intellectual end. Like Science, it is to an object that Art is riveted (an object to be made, it is true, not an object to be contemplated). It uses the roundabout way of deliberation and counsel only by accident. Although it produces individual acts and effects, it does not, except secondarily, judge according to the contingencies of circumstance; thus it considers less than does Prudence the individuation of actions and the hic et nunc. In short, if by reason of its matter, which is contingent, Art accords more with Prudence than with Science, yet according to its formal reason and as virtue it accords more with Science and the habitus of the speculative intellect than with Prudence: ars magis convenit cum habitibus speculativis in ratione virtutis, quam cum prudentia. The Scientist is an Intellectual who demonstrates, the Artist is an Intellectual who makes, the Prudent Man is an intelligent Man of Will who acts well.
27 Such, in its principal features, is the conception that the Schoolmen had of art. Not in Phidias and Praxiteles only, but in the village carpenter and blacksmith as well, they acknowledged an intrinsic development of reason, a nobility of the intellect. The virtue of the craftsman was not, in their eyes, strength of muscle and nimbleness of fingers, or the rapidity of the chronometered and tailored gesture; nor was it that mere empirical activity (experimentum) which takes place in the memory and in the animal (cogitative) reason, which imitates art and which art absolutely needs, but which remains of itself extrinsic to art. It was a virtue of the intellect, and endowed the humblest artisan with a certain perfection of the spirit.
28 The artisan, in the normal type of human development and of truly human civilizations, represents the general run of men. If Christ willed to be an artisan in a little village, it is because He wanted to assume the common condition of humanity.
29 The Doctors of the Middle Ages did not, like many of our introspecting psychologists, study only city people, library dwellers, or academicians; they were interested in the whole mass of mankind. But even so they still studied their Master. In considering the art or the proper activity of the artifex, they considered the activity that our Lord chose to exercise during all of His hidden life; they considered also, in a way, the very activity of the Father; for they knew that the virtue of Art is predicated pre-eminently of God, as are Goodness and Justice, and that the Son, in plying His poor man's trade, was still the image of the Father and of his never-ceasing action: Philip, he who sees me, sees the Father also.
30 It is curious to note that in their classifications the ancients did not give a separate place to what we call the fine arts. They divided the arts into servile arts and liberal arts, according as they required or did not require the labor of the body, or rather -- for this division, which goes deeper than one thinks, was taken from the very concept of art, recta ratio factibilium--according as the work to be made was in one case an effect produced in matter (factibile properly speaking), in the other a purely spiritual construction remaining in the soul In that case, sculpture and painting belonged to the servile arts, and music to the liberal arts, where it was next to arithmetic and logic. For the musician arranges intellectually sounds in his soul, just as the arithmetician arranges numbers there, and the logician, concepts -- the oral or instrumental expression, which causes to pass into the fluid successions of sonorous matter the constructions thus achieved in the spirit, being but an extrinsic consequence and a simple means for these arts.
31 In the powerfully social structure of mediaeval civilization, the artist had only the rank of artisan, and every kind of anarchical development was forbidden his individualism, because a natural social discipline imposed on him from the outside certain limiting conditions. He did not work for the rich and fashionable and for the merchants, but for the faithful; it was his mission to house their prayers, to instruct their intelligences, to delight their souls and their eyes. Matchless epoch, in which an ingenuous people was formed in beauty without even realizing it, just as the perfect religious ought to pray without knowing that he is praying; in which Doctors and image- makers lovingly taught the poor, and the poor delighted in their teaching, because they were all of the same royal race, born of water and the Spirit!
32 Man created more beautiful things in those days, and he adored himself less. The blessed humility in which the artist was placed exalted his strength and his freedom. The Renaissance was to drive the artist mad, and to make of him the most miserable of men -- at the very moment when the world was to become less habitable for him -- by revealing to him his own peculiar grandeur, and by letting loose on him the wild beast Beauty which Faith had kept enchanted and led after it, docile.
Chapter V
Art and Beauty
Saint Thomas, who was as simple as he was wise, defined the beautiful as that which, being seen, pleases: id quod visum placet. These four words say all that is necessary: a vision, that is to say, an intuitive knowledge, and a delight. The beautiful is what gives delight -- not just any delight, but delight in knowing; not the delight peculiar to the act of knowing, but a delight which superabounds and overflows from this act because of the object known. If a thing exalts and delights the soul by the very fact that it is given to the soul's intuition, it is good to apprehend, it is beautiful.
2 Beauty is essentially an object of intelligence, for that which knows in the full sense of the word is intelligence, which alone is open to the infinity of being. The natural place of beauty is the intelligible world, it is from there that it descends. But it also, in a way, falls under the grasp of the senses, in so far as in man they serve the intellect and can themselves take delight in knowing: "Among all the senses, it is to the sense of sight and the sense of hearing only that the beautiful relates, because these two senses are maxime cognoscitivi." The part played by the senses in the perception of beauty is even rendered enormous in us, and well-nigh indispensable, by the very fact that our intelligence is not intuitive, as is the intelligence of the angel; it sees, to be sure, but on condition of abstracting and discoursing; only sense knowledge possesses perfectly in man the intuitiveness required for the perception of the beautiful. Thus man can doubtless enjoy purely intelligible beauty, but the beautiful that is connatural to man is the beautiful that delights the intellect through the senses and through their intuition. Such is also the beautiful that is proper to our art, which shapes a sensible matter in order to delight the spirit. It would thus like to believe that paradise is not lost. It has the savor of the terrestrial paradise, because it restores, for a moment, the peace and the simultaneous delight of the intellect and the senses.
3 If beauty delights the intellect, it is because it is essentially a certain excellence or perfection in the proportion of things to the intellect. Hence the three conditions Saint Thomas assigned to beauty: integrity, because the intellect is pleased in fullness of Being; proportion, because the intellect is pleased in order and unity; finally, and above all, radiance or clarity, because the intellect is pleased in light and intelligibility. A certain splendor is, in fact, according to all the ancients, the essential characteristic of beauty -- claritas est de ratione pulchritudinis, lux pulchrificat, quia sine luce omnia sunt turpia-- but it is a splendor of intelligibility: splendor veri, said the Platonists; splendor ordinis, said Saint Augustine, adding that "unity is the form of all beauty"; splendor formae, said Saint Thomas in his precise metaphysician's language: for the form, that is to say, the principle which constitutes the proper perfection of all that is, which constitutes and achieves things in their essences and qualities, which is, finally, if one may so put it, the ontological secret that they bear within them, their spiritual being, their operating mystery -- the form, indeed, is above all the proper principle of intelligibility, the proper clarity of every thing. Besides, every form is a vestige or a ray of the creative Intelligence imprinted at the heart of created being. On the other hand, every order and every proportion is the work of intelligence. And so, to say with the Schoolmen that beauty is the splendor of the form on the proportioned parts of matter, is to say that it is a flashing of intelligence on a matter intelligibly arranged. The intelligence delights in the beautiful because in the beautiful it finds itself again and recognizes itself, and makes contact with its own light. This is so true that those -- such as Saint Francis of Assisi -- perceive and savor more the beauty of things, who know that things come forth from an intelligence, and who relate them to their author.
4 Every sensible beauty implies, it is true, a certain delight of the eye itself or of the ear or the imagination: but there is beauty only if the intelligence also takes delight in some way. A beautiful color "washes the eye," just as a strong scent dilates the nostril; but of these two "forms" or qualities color only is said to be beautiful, because, being received, unlike the perfume, in a sense power capable of disinterested knowledge, it can be, even through its purely sensible brilliance, an object of delight for the intellect. Moreover, the higher the level of man's culture, the more spiritual becomes the brilliance of the form that delights him.
5 It is important, however, to note that in the beautiful that we have called connatural to man, and which is proper to human art, this brilliance of the form, no matter how purely intelligible it may be in itself, is seized in the sensible and through the sensible, and not separately from it. The intuition of artistic beauty thus stands at the opposite extreme from the abstraction of scientific truth. For with the former it is through the very apprehension of the sense that the light of being penetrates the intelligence.
6 The intelligence in this case, diverted from all effort of abstraction, rejoices without work and without discourse. It is dispensed from its usual labor; it does not have to disengage an intelligible from the matter in which it is buried, in order to go over its different attributes step by step; like a stag at the gushing spring, intelligence has nothing to do but drink; it drinks the clarity of being. Caught up in the intuition of sense, it is irradiated by an intelligible fight that is suddenly given to it, in the very sensible in which it glitters, and which it does not seize sub ratione veri, but rather sub ratione delectabilis, through the happy release procured for the intelligence and through the delight ensuing in the appetite, which leaps at every good of the soul as at its proper object. Only afterwards will it be able to reflect more or less successfully upon the causes of this delight.
7 Thus, although the beautiful borders on the metaphysical true, in the sense that every splendor of intelligibility in things implies some conformity with the Intelligence that is the cause of things, nevertheless the beautiful is not a kind of truth, but a kind of good; the perception of the beautiful relates to knowledge, but by way of addition, comme à la jeunesse s'ajoute sa fleur; it is not so much a kind of knowledge as a kind of delight.
8 The beautiful is essentially delightful. This is why, of its very nature and precisely as beautiful, it stirs desire and produces love, whereas the true as such only illumines. "Omnibus igitur est pulchrum et bonum desiderabile et amabile et diligibile." It is for its beauty that Wisdom is loved. And it is for itself that every beauty is first loved, even if afterwards the too weak flesh is caught in the trap. Love in its turn produces ecstasy, that is to say, it puts the lover outside of himself; ecstasy, of which the soul experiences a diminished form when it is seized by the beauty of the work of art, and the fullness when it is absorbed, like the dew, by the beauty of God.
9 And of God Himself, according to Denis the Areopagite, we must be so bold as to say that He suffers in some way ecstasy of love, because of the abundance of His goodness which leads Him to diffuse in all things a participation of His splendor. But God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, whereas our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.
10 integrity or perfection or completion can be realized. The lack of a head or an arm is quite a considerable lack of integrity in a woman but of very little account in a statue -- whatever disappointment M. Ravaisson may have felt at not being able to complete the Venus de Milo. The least sketch of da Vinci's or even of Rodin's is more complete than the most perfect Bouguereau. And if it pleases a futurist to give the lady he is painting only one eye, or a quarter of an eye, no one denies him the right to do this: one asks only -- here is the whole problem -- that this quarter of an eye be precisely all the eye this lady needs in the given case.
11 It is the same with proportion, fitness and harmony. They are diversified according to the objects and according to the ends. The good proportion of a man is not the good proportion of a child. Figures constructed according to the Greek or the Egyptian canons are perfectly proportioned in their genre; but Rouault's clowns are also perfectly proportioned, in their genre. Integrity and proportion have no absolute signification, and must be understood solely in relation to the end of the work, which is to make a form shine on matter.
12 Finally, and above all, this radiance itself of the form, which is the main thing in beauty, has an infinity of diverse ways of shining on matter. There is the sensible radiance of color or tone; there is the intelligible clarity of an arabesque, of a rhythm or an harmonious balance, of an activity or a movement; there is the reflection upon things of a human or divine thought; there is, above all, the deep-seated splendor one glimpses of the soul, of the soul principle of life and animal energy, or principle of spiritual life, of pain and passion. And there is a still more exalted splendor, the splendor of Grace, which the Greeks did not know.
13 Beauty, therefore, is not conformity to a certain ideal and immutable type, in the sense in which they understand it who, confusing the true and the beautiful, knowledge and delight, would have it that in order to perceive beauty man discover "by the vision of ideas," "through the material envelope," "the invisible essence of things" and their "necessary type." Saint Thomas was as far removed from this pseudo-Platonism as he was from the idealist bazaar of Winckelmann and David. There is beauty for him the moment the shining of any form on a suitably proportioned matter succeeds in pleasing the intellect, and he takes care to warn us that beauty is in some way relative-relative not to the dispositions of the subject, in the sense in which the moderns understand the word relative, but to the proper nature and end of the thing, and to the formal conditions under which it is taken. "Pulchritudo quodammodo dicitur per respectum ad aliquid. . . ." "Alia enim est pulchritude spiritus et alia corporis, atque alia huius et illius corporis."And however beautiful a created thing may be, it can appear beautiful to some and not to others, because it is beautiful only under certain aspects, which some discern and others do not: it is thus "beautiful in one place and not beautiful in another."
14 If this is so, it is because the beautiful belongs to the order of the transcendentals, that is to say, objects of thought which transcend every limit of genus or category, and which do not allow themselves to be enclosed in any class, because they imbue everything and are to be found everywhere. Like the one, the true and the good, the beautiful is being itself considered from a certain aspect; it is a property of being. It is not an accident superadded to being, it adds to being only a relation of reason: it is being considered as delighting, by the mere intuition of it, an intellectual nature. Thus everything is beautiful, just as everything is good, at least in a certain relation. And as being is everywhere present and everywhere varied the beautiful likewise is diffused everywhere and is everywhere varied. Like being and the other transcendentals, it is essentially analogous, that is to say, it is predicated for diverse reasons, sub diversa ratione, of the diverse subjects of which it is predicated: each kind of being is in its own way, is good in its own way, is beautiful in its own way.
15 Analogous concepts are predicated of God pre-eminently; in Him the perfection they designate exists in a "formal-eminent" manner, in the pure and infinite state. God is their "sovereign analogue," and they are to be met with again in things only as a dispersed and prismatized reflection of the countenance of God. Thus Beauty is one of the divine names.
16 God is beautiful. He is the most beautiful of beings, because, as Denis the Areopagite and Saint Thomas explain, His beauty is without alteration or vicissitude, without increase or diminution; and because it is not as the beauty of things, all of which have a particularized beauty, particulatam pulchritudinem, sicut et particulatam naturam. He is beautiful through Himself and in Himself, beautiful absolutely.
17 He is beautiful to the extreme (superpulcher), because in the perfectly simple unity of His nature there pre-exists in a super- excellent manner the fountain of all beauty.
18 He is beauty itself, because He gives beauty to all created beings, according to the particular nature of each, and because He is the cause of all consonance and all brightness. Every form indeed, that is to say, every light, is "a certain irradiation proceeding from the first brightness," "a participation in the divine brightness." And every consonance or every harmony, every concord, every friendship and every union whatsoever among beings proceeds from the divine beauty, the primordial and super-eminent type of all consonance, which gathers all things together and which calls them all to itself, meriting well in this "the name chalos, which derives from 'to call.'" Thus "the beauty of anything created is nothing else than a similitude of divine beauty participated in by things," and, on the other hand, as every form is a principle of being and as every consonance or every harmony is preservative of being, it must be said that divine beauty is the cause of the being of all that is. Ex divina pulchritudine esse omnium derivatur.
19 In the Trinity, Saint Thomas adds, the name Beauty is attributed most fittingly to the Son. As for integrity or perfection, He has truly and perfectly in Himself, without the least diminution, the nature of the Father. As for due proportion or consonance, He is the express and perfect image of the Father: and it is proportion which befits the image as such. As for radiance, finally, He is the Word, the light and the splendor of the intellect, "perfect Word to Whom nothing is lacking, and, so to speak, art of Almighty God."
20 Beauty, therefore, belongs to the transcendental and metaphysical order. This is why it tends of itself to draw the soul beyond the created. Speaking of the instinct for beauty, Baudelaire, the poète maudit to whom modern art owes its renewed awareness of the theological quality and tyrannical spirituality of beauty, writes: ". . . it is this immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its various spectacles as a sketch of, as a correspondence with, Heaven. . . . It is at once through poetry and across poetry, through and across music, that the soul glimpses the splendors situated beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the eyes, these tears are not proof of an excess of joy, they are rather the testimony of an irritated melancholy, a demand of the nerves, of a nature exiled in the imperfect and desiring to take possession immediately, even on this earth, of a revealed paradise."
21 The moment one touches a transcendental, one touches being itself, a likeness of God, an absolute, that which ennobles and delights our life; one enters into the domain of the spirit. It is remarkable that men really communicate with one another only by passing through being or one of its properties. Only in this way do they escape from the individuality in which matter encloses them. If they remain in the world of their sense needs and of their sentimental egos, in vain do they tell their stories to one another, they do not understand each other. They observe each other without seeing each other, each one of them infinitely alone, even though work or sense pleasures bind them together. But let one touch the good and Love, like the saints, the true, like an Aristotle, the beautiful, like a Dante or a Bach or a Giotto, then contact is made, souls communicate. Men are really united only by the spirit; light alone brings them together, intellectualia et rationalia omnia congregans, et indestructibilia faciens.
22 Art in general tends to make a work. But certain arts tend to make a beautiful work, and in this they differ essentially from all the others. The work to which all the other arts tend is itself ordered to the service of man, and is therefore a simple means; and it is entirely enclosed in a determined material genus. The work to which the fine arts tend is ordered to beauty; as beautiful, it is an end, an absolute, it suffices of itself; and if, as work-to-be-made, it is material and enclosed in a genus, as beautiful it belongs to the kingdom of the spirit and plunges deep into the transcendence and the infinity of being.
23 The fine arts thus stand out in the genus art as man stands out in the genus animal. And like man himself they are like a horizon where matter and spirit meet. They have a spiritual soul. Hence they possess many distinctive properties. Their contact with the beautiful modifies in them certain characteristics of art in general, notably, as I shall try to show, with respect to the rules of art; on the other hand, this contact discloses and carries to a sort of excess other generic characteristics of the virtue of art, above all its intellectual character and its resemblance to the speculative virtues.
24 There is a curious analogy between the fine arts and wisdom. Like wisdom, they are ordered to an object which transcends man and which is of value in itself, and whose amplitude is limitless, for beauty, like being, is infinite. They are disinterested, desired for themselves, truly noble because their work taken in itself is not made in order that one may use it as a means, but in order that one may enjoy it as an end, being a true fruit, aliquid ultimum et delectabile. Their whole value is spiritual, and their mode of being is contemplative. For if contemplation is not their act, as it is the act of wisdom, nevertheless they aim at producing an intellectual delight, that is to say, a kind of contemplation; and they also presuppose in the artist a kind of contemplation, from which the beauty of the work must overflow. That is why we may apply to them, with due allowance, what Saint Thomas says of wisdom when he compares it to play "The contemplation of wisdom is rightly compared to play, because of two things that one finds in play. The first is that play is delightful, and the contemplation of wisdom has the greatest delight, according to what Wisdom says of itself in Ecclesiasticus: my spirit is sweet above honey. The second is that the movements of play are not ordered to anything else, but are sought for themselves. And it is the same with the delights of wisdom. . . . That is why divine Wisdom compares its delight to play: I was delighted every day, playing before him in the world."
25 But Art remains, nevertheless, in the order of Making, and it is by drudgery upon some matter that it aims at delighting the spirit. Hence for the artist a strange and saddening condition, image itself of man's condition in the world, where he must wear himself out among bodies and live with the spirits. Though reproaching the old poets for holding Divinity to be jealous, Aristotle acknowledges that they were right in saying that the possession of wisdom is in the strict sense reserved to Divinity alone: "It is not a human possession, for human nature is a slave in so many ways." To produce beauty likewise belongs to God alone in the strict sense. And if the condition of the artist is more human and less exalted than that of the wise man, it is also more discordant and more painful, because his activity does not remain wholly within the pure immanence of spiritual operations, and does not in itself consist in contemplating, but in making. Without enjoying the substance and the peace of wisdom, he is caught up in the hard exigencies of the intellect and the speculative life, and he is condemned to all the servile miseries of practice and of temporal production.
26 "Dear Brother Leo, God's little beast, even if a Friar Minor spoke the language of the angels and raised to life a man dead for four days, note it well that it is not therein that perfect joy is found. . . ."
27 Even if the artist were to encompass in his work all the light of heaven and all the grace of the first garden, he would not have perfect joy, because he is following wisdom's footsteps and running by the scent of its perfumes, but does not possess it. Even if the philosopher were to know all the intelligible reasons and all the properties of being, he would not have perfect joy, because his wisdom is human. Even if the theologian were to know all the analogies of the divine processions and all the whys and the wherefores of Christ's actions, he would not have perfect joy, because his wisdom has a divine origin but a human mode, and a human voice.
Ah! les voix, mourez donc, mourantes que vous êtes!
28 The Poor and the Peaceful alone have perfect joy because they possess wisdom and contemplation par excellence, in the silence of creatures and in the voice of Love; united without intermediary to subsisting Truth, they know "the sweetness that God gives and the delicious taste of the Holy Spirit." This is what prompted Saint Thomas, a short time before his death, to say of his unfinished Summa: "It seems to me as so much straw" - - mihi videtur ut palea. Human straw: the Parthenon and Notre- Dame de Chartres, the Sistine Chapel and the Mass in D -- and which will be burned on the last day! "Creatures have no savor."
29 The Middle Ages knew this order. The Renaissance shattered it. After three centuries of infidelity, prodigal Art aspired to become the ultimate end of man, his Bread and his Wine, the consubstantial mirror of beatific Beauty. And the poet hungry for beatitude who asked of art the mystical fullness that God alone can give, has been able to open out only onto Sigê l'abîme. Rimbaud's silence marks perhaps the end of a secular apostasy. In any case it clearly signifies that it is folly to seek in art the words of eternal life and the repose of the human heart; and that the artist, if he is not to shatter his art or his soul, must simply be, as artist, what art wants him to be -- a good workman.
30 And now the modern world, which had promised the artist everything, soon will scarcely leave him even the bare means of subsistence. Founded on the two unnatural principles of the fecundity of money and the finality of the useful, multiplying needs and servitude without the possibility of there ever being a limit, destroying the leisure of the soul, withdrawing the material factibile from the control which proportioned it to the ends of the human being, and imposing on man the panting of the machine and the accelerated movement of matter, the system of nothing but the earth is imprinting on human activity a truly inhuman mode and a diabolical direction, for the final end of all this frenzy is to prevent man from resembling God,
dum nit perenne cogitat, seseque culpis illigat.
31 Consequently he must, if he is to be logical, treat as useless, and therefore as rejected, all that by any grounds bears the mark of the spirit.
32 Or it will even be necessary that heroism, truth, virtue, beauty become useful values -- the best, the most loyal instruments of propaganda and of control of temporal powers.
33 Persecuted like the wise man and almost like the saint, the artist will perhaps recognize his brothers at last and discover his true vocation again: for in a way he is not of this world, being, from the moment that he works for beauty, on the path which leads upright souls to God and manifests to them the invisible things by the visible. However rare may be at such a time those who will not want to please the Beast and to turn with the wind, it is in them, by the very fact that they will exercise a disinterested activity, that the human race will live.
Chapter VI
The Rules of Art
The whole formal element of art consists in the regulation which it imprints on matter. Moreover it is of the essence of art, according to the ancients, to have fixed rules, viae certae et determinatae.
2 This expression "fixed rules" conjures up some bad memories: we think of the three unities, and of "Aristotle's rules." But it is from the Renaissance with its superstitious reverence for antiquity and its stuffed Aristotle, not from the Christian Aristotle of our Doctors, that the starched rules of the grammarians of the grand siècle derive. The fixed rules of which the Schoolmen spoke are not conventional imperatives imposed on art from without, but the ways of Operation peculiar to art itself, the ways of working reason, ways high and hidden. And every artist knows well that without this intellectual form ruling the matter, his art would be but sensual slush. Some explanations however seem to be necessary at this point.
3 First, with regard to art in general, the mechanical or servile arts as well as the fine arts and the liberal arts, it is important to understand that the rules in question are nothing, in actual fact, if they are not in a vital and spiritual state, in a habitus or a virtue of the intellect, which is precisely the virtue of art.
4 Through the habitus or virtue of art superelevating his mind from within, the artist is a ruler who uses rules according to his ends; it is as senseless to conceive of him as the slave of the rules as to consider the worker the slave of his tools. Properly speaking, he possesses them and is not possessed by them: he is not held by them, it is he who holds -- through them -- matter and the real; and sometimes, in those superior moments where the working of genius resembles in art the miracles of God in nature, he will act, not against the rules, but outside of and above them, in conformity with a higher rule and a more hidden order. Let us understand in this manner the words of Pascal: "True eloquence makes fun of eloquence, true morality makes fun of morality, to make fun of philosophy is to philosophize truly," to which the most tyrannical and the most radical of academy heads adds this savory gloss: "Unless you don't care a rap about painting, painting won't care a rap about you."
5 There is, as I noted earlier, a fundamental incompatibility between habitus and egalitarianism. The modern world has a horror of habitus, whatever ones they may be, and one could write a very strange History of the Progressive Expulsion of Habitus by Modern Civilization. This history would go back quite far into the past. We would see -- "a fish always rots by the head first" -- theologians like Scotus, then Occam, and even Suarez, ill-treat, to begin with, the most aristocratic of these strange beings, namely the gifts of the Holy Spirit -- not to mention the infused moral virtues. Soon the theological virtues and sanctifying grace will be filed and planed away by Luther, then by the Cartesian theologians. Meanwhile, natural habitus have their turn; Descartes, with his passion for levelling, attacks even the genus generalissimum to which the wretches belong, and denies the real existence of qualities and accidents. The whole world at the time is agog with excitement over calculating machines; everybody dreams only of method. And Descartes conceives method as an infallible and easy means of bringing to the truth "those who have not studied" and society people. Leibniz finally invents a logic and a language whose most wonderful characteristic is that it dispenses from thinking And then comes the taste, the charming curiosity, the spiritual acephaly of the Enlightenment.
6 Thus method or rules, regarded as an ensemble of formulas and processes that work of themselves and serve the mind as orthopedic and mechanical armature, tend everywhere in the modern world to replace habitus, because method is for all whereas habitus are only for some. Now it cannot be admitted that access to the highest activities depend on a virtue that some possess and others do not; consequently beautiful things must be made easy.
7 Chalepa ta kala. The ancients thought that truth is difficult, that beauty is difficult, and that the way is narrow; and that to conquer the difficulty and the loftiness of the object, it is absolutely necessary that an intrinsic force and elevation -- that is to say, a habitus -- be developed in the subject. The modern conception of method and rules would therefore have seemed to them a gross absurdity. According to their principles, rules are of the essence of art, but on condition that the habitus, a living rule, be formed; without it, rules are nothing. Plaster the perfect theoretical knowledge of all the rules of an art onto an energetic laureate who works fifteen hours a day but in whom the habitus is not sprouting, and you will never make an artist of him; he will always remain infinitely farther removed from the art than the child or the savage equipped with a simple natural gift: this said by way of excusing the too naive or too subtle adorers of Negro art.
8 The problem is posed for the modern artist in an insane manner, as a choice between the senility of academic rules and the primitiveness of natural gift: with the latter, art does not yet exist, except in potentiality; with the former, it has ceased to exist at all. Art exists only in the living intellectuality of the habitus.
9 In our day natural gift is lightly taken for art itself, especially if it is covered over with facile faking and a voluptuous medley of colors. However, natural gift is only a prerequisite condition for art, or again a rough outline (inchoatio naturalis) of the artistic habitus. This inborn disposition is clearly indispensable; but without cultivation and a discipline which the ancients held should be long and patient and honest, it will never develop into art properly speaking. Thus art, like love, proceeds from a spontaneous instinct, and it must be cultivated like friendship; for it is a virtue like friendship.
10 Saint Thomas points out that the natural dispositions through which one individual differs from another have their root in the physical disposition of the body; they concern our sense faculties, in particular the imagination, the chief purveyor of art -- which thus appears as the gift par excellence by which the artist is born -- and which the poets gladly make their main faculty, because it is so intimately bound up with the activity of the creative intellect that it is difficult in the concrete to distinguish the one from the other. But the virtue of art involves an improvement of the mind; moreover, it imprints on the human being an incomparably deeper quality than do the natural dispositions.
11 Besides, the manner in which education cultivates the natural dispositions may atrophy the spontaneous gift instead of developing the habitus, especially if this manner is material and rotten with recipes and clever devices -- or again if it is theoretical and speculative instead of being operative, for the practical intellect, on which the rules of the arts depend, proceeds by positing an effect in being, not by proving or demonstrating; and often those who best possess the rules of an art are the least capable of formulating them. From this point of view one must deplore the substitution (begun by Colbert, completed by the Revolution) of the academic teaching of the schools for corporate apprenticeship. By the very fact that art is a virtue of the practical intellect, the mode of teaching that by nature belongs to it is apprenticeship-education, the working-novitiate under a master and in the presence of the real, not lessons distributed by professors; and, to tell the truth, the very notion of a School of Fine Arts, especially in the sense in which the modern body politic understands this phrase, conceals as deep a misunderstanding of things as the notion, for instance, of an Advanced Course in Virtue. Hence the revolts of a Cézanne against the Academy and against the professors, revolts directed, in reality, chiefly against a barbarous conception of artistic education.
12 The fact remains that art, being an intellectual habitus, presupposes necessarily and always a formation of the mind, which puts the artist in possession of fixed rules of operation. No doubt, in certain exceptional cases, the individual effort of the artist, of a Giotto, for example, or a Moussorgsky, can suffice by itself alone to procure this formation of the mind. And indeed, since what is most spiritual in art -- the synthetic intuition, the conception of the work-to-be-made -- depends on the via inventionis or the effort of discovery, which requires solitude and is not learned from others, it may even be said that the artist, as far as the fine point and the highest life of his art are concerned, forms and elevates himself single-handed. The closer one approaches this spiritual point of the art, the more the viae determinatae with which one will have to deal will be adapted and personal to the artist, and designed to disclose themselves to one man only. In this respect it may be that in our time, when we are experiencing so grievously all the evils of anarchy, we run the risk of deceiving ourselves as to the nature and extent of the results that can be expected from a return to the craft traditions.
13 Still, for the immense amount of rational and discursive work that art involves, the tradition of a discipline and an education by masters and the continuity in time of human collaboration, in short, the via disciplinae, is absolutely necessary, whether it is a question of technique properly speaking and of material means, or of all the conceptual and rational replenishing which certain arts (above all in classical times) require and carry along -- or, finally, of the indispensable maintenance of a sufficiently high level of culture in the average run of artists and artisans, each one of whom it is absurd to ask to be an "original genius."
14 Let us add, in order to have the thought of Saint Thomas in its entirety, that in every discipline and in all teaching the master only assists from the outside the principle of immanent activity which is within the pupil. From this point of view, teaching relates to the great notion of ars cooperativa naturae. Whereas certain arts apply themselves to their matter in order to dominate it, and to impose on it a form which it has only to receive -- such as the art of a Michelangelo torturing marble like a tyrant -- others, because they have for matter nature itself, apply themselves to their matter in order to serve it, and to help it to attain a form or a perfection which can be acquired only through the activity of an interior principle; such are the arts which "cooperate with nature," as, for instance, medicine, with corporeal nature, or teaching (as also the art of directing souls), with spiritual nature. These arts operate only by furnishing the interior principle within the subject with the means and the assistance it avails itself of in order to produce its effect. It is the interior principle, the intellectual light present in the pupil, which is, in the acquisition of science and art, the principal cause or principal agent.
15 If it be a question now of the fine arts in particular, their contact with being and the transcendentals creates for them, as regards the rules of art, an altogether special condition.
16 And straightway they are subject to a law of renewal, and therefore of change, which the other arts do not acknowledge or at least do not acknowledge for the same reason.
17 Beauty, like being, has an infinite amplitude. But the work as such, realized in matter, exists in a certain genus, in aliquo genere. And it is impossible for a genus to exhaust a transcendental. Outside the artistic genre to which this work belongs, there is always an infinity of ways of being a beautiful work.
18 A sort of conflict may therefore be observed between the transcendence of beauty and the material narrowness of the work to be made, between, on the one hand, the formal ratio of beauty, the splendor of being and of all the transcendentals combined, and, on the other hand, the formal ratio of art, undeviating ingenuity in the realm of works-to-be-made. No form of art, however perfect, can encompass beauty within its limits, as the Virgin contained her Creator. The artist is faced with an immense and lonely sea,
. . . sans mâts, sans mâts, ni fertiles îlots,
and the mirror he holds up to it is no bigger than his own heart.
19 The creator in art is he who discovers a new analogate of the beautiful, a new way in which the radiance of form can shine on matter. The work that he makes, and which as such exists in a certain genus, is from then onwards in a new genus and requires new rules -- I mean a new adaptation of the fundamental and perennial rules and even the use of viae certae et determinatae not hitherto employed and which at first disconcert people.
20 At that moment the contemplative activity in contact with the transcendental, which constitutes the proper life of the fine arts and of their rules, is clearly predominant. But almost inevitably talent, cleverness, pure technique, the merely operative activity that pertains to the genus art, will little by little get the upper hand, at the moment when one no longer exerts oneself except to exploit what was once discovered; then the rules formerly living and spiritual become materialized, and this form of art finally exhausts itself. A renewal will be necessary. Please God that a genius be found to bring it about! Even so the change will perhaps lower the general level of art; and yet change is the very condition of art's life and of the flowering of great works. We may believe that from Bach to Beethoven and from Beethoven to Wagner art declined in quality, in spirituality, and in purity. But who would bold enough to say that one of these three men was less necessary than the other? If they load their art with exotic riches too heavy for any but themselves to bear, it happens that the most powerful ones are the most dangerous. Rembrandt is a bad master; but who would refuse him one's affection? Even though painting was to be wounded for it, it is better that he should have played and won, made his miraculous breach in the invisible world. It is indeed true that there is no necessary progress in art, that tradition and discipline are the true nurses of originality; and it is likewise true that the feverish acceleration which modern individualism, with its mania for revolution in mediocrity, imposes on the succession of art forms, abortive schools, and puerile fashions, is the symptom of wide-spread intellectual and social poverty. And yet the fact remains that art has a fundamental need of novelty: like nature, it goes in seasons.
21 Unlike Prudence, Art does not presuppose straightness of the appetite, that is to say, of the power of willing and loving, in relation to the end of man or in the line of morality. It nevertheless presupposes, as Cajetan explains that the appetite tend straightly to the proper end of the art, so that the principle: "the truth of the practical intellect does not consist in conformity with the thing, but in conformity with the straight appetite," rules the sphere of Making as well as that of Doing.
22 In the fine arts the general end of art is beauty. But in their case the work-to-be-made is not a simple matter to be ordered to this end, like a clock one makes for the purpose of telling time or a boat one builds for the purpose of traveling on water. As an individual and original realization of beauty, the work which the artist is about to make is for him an end in itself: not the general end of his art, but the particular end which rules his present activity and in relation to which all the means must be ruled. Now, in order to judge suitably concerning this individual end, that is to say, in order to conceive the work-to-be-mad reason alone is not enough, a good disposition of the appetite is necessary, for everyone judges of his own ends in accordance with what he himself actually is: "As everyone is, so does the end appear to him." Let us conclude therefore that in the painter, poet, and musician, the virtue of art, which resides in the intellect, must not only overflow into the sense faculties and the imagination, but it requires also that the whole appetitive power of the artist, his passions and will, tend straightly to the end of his art. If all of the artist's powers of desire and emotion are not fundamentally straight and exalted in the line of beauty, whose transcendence and immateriality are superhuman, then human life and the humdrum of the senses, and the routine of art itself, will degrade his conception. The artist has to love, he has to love what he is making, so that his virtue may truly be, in Saint Augustine's words, ordo amoris, so that beauty may become connatural to him and inviscerate itself in him through affection, and so that his work may come forth from his heart and his bowels as well as from his lucid spirit. This undeviating love is the supreme rule.
23 But love presupposes intellect; without it love can do nothing, and, in tending to the beautiful, love tends to what can delight the intellect.
24 Finally, because in the fine arts the work-to-be-made is -- precisely as beautiful -- an end in itself, and because this end is something absolutely individual, something entirely unique, each occasion presents to the artist a new and unique way of striving after the end, and therefore of ruling the matter. Hence there is a remarkable analogy between the fine arts and Prudence.
25 No doubt art always keeps its viae certae et determinatae, and the proof of this is that the works of the same artist or of the same school are all stamped with the same fixed and determined characteristics. But it is with prudence, eubulia, good sense and perspicacity, circumspection, precaution, deliberation, industry, memory, foresight, intelligence and divination, it is by using prudential rules not fixed beforehand but determined according to the contingency of singular cases, it is in an always new and unforeseeable manner that the artist applies the rules of his art: only on this condition is its ruling infallible. "A painting," said Degas, "is a thing which requires as much cunning, rascality and viciousness as the perpetration of a crime." For different reasons, and because of the transcendence of their object, the fine arts thus partake, like hunting or the military art, in the virtues of government.
26 In the end, all the rules having become connatural to him, the artist seemingly has no other rule than to espouse at each moment the living contour of a unique and dominating intuitive emotion that will never recur.
27 This artistic prudence, this kind of spiritual sensibility in contact with matter, corresponds in the operative order to the contemplative activity and the proper life of art in contact with the beautiful. To the extent that the rules of the Academy prevail, the fine arts revert to the generic type of art and to its lower species, the mechanical arts.
Chapter VII
The Purity of Art
"What we now seek in art," Emile Clermont observed "the Greeks sought in something quite different, sometimes in wine, most often in the celebration of their mysteries: a frenzy, an intoxication. The great Bacchic madness of these mysteries corresponds to our highest point of emotion in art, which is something derived from Asia. But for the Greeks art was altogether different . . . . It did not have for its purpose to convulse the soul, but to purify it, which is the exact opposite: 'art purifies the passions,' according to Aristotle's celebrated and generally misunderstood observation. And what would doubtless be a prime necessity for us, is to purify the idea of beauty. . . ."
2 Both with regard to art in general and with regard to beauty, the Scholastic Doctors insistently teach that the intellect has primacy in the work of art. They never stop reminding us that the first principle of all human works is reason. Let us add that in making Logic the liberal art par excellence, and in a sense the prime analogate of art, they are telling us that in every art there is a sort of lived participation in Logic.
There all is ORDER and beauty, Richness, tranquility and pleasure.
3 If in architecture all unnecessary veneer is ugly, it is because it is illogical; if sham and illusion, always irritating, become detestable in sacred art, it is because it is profoundly illogical that deceit should serve to decorate God's house: Deus non eget nostro mendacio. "Everything in art," said Rodin, "is ugly which is false, which smiles without motive, everything that is senseless affectation, everything that struts and prances, everything that is but parade of beauty and grace, everything that lies." "I want you," Maurice Denis adds, "to paint your figures in such a way that they have the look of being painted, subject to the laws of painting -- I don't want them to try to deceive my eye or my mind; the truth of art consists in the conformity of the work with its means and its end." Which is to say with the ancients that the truth of art is taken per ordinem et conformitatem ad regulas artis, and that every work of art must be logical. Therein lies its truth. It must be steeped in logic: not in the pseudo-logic of clear ideas, and not in the logic of knowledge and demonstration, but in working logic, always mysterious and disconcerting, the logic of the structure of the living and of the intimate geometry of nature. Notre-Dame de Chartres is as much a marvel of logic as Saint Thomas' Summa; flamboyant Gothic itself remains averse to veneer, and the extravagance in which it exhausts itself is that of the elaborate and tortuous syllogisms of the logicians of the period. Virgil, Racine, Poussin, are logical. Chateaubriand is not. -- The architects of the Middle Ages did not restore "in the style," like Viollet-le-Duc. If the choir of a Romanesque church was destroyed by fire, they rebuilt it in Gothic, without further thought. But observe in Le Mans Cathedral the joints and the transitions, the sudden and self-assured arcing in splendor: there you have living logic, like the logic of the orogeny of the Alps or of the anatomy of man.
4 The perfection of the virtue of art consists according to Saint Thomas in the act of judging. As for manual dexterity, that is a requisite condition, but extrinsic to art. It even represents -- at the same time that it is a necessity -- a perpetual menace to art, inasmuch as it runs the risk of substituting the guidance of muscular habit for the guidance of the intellectual habitus, and of having the work escape the influx of art. For there is an influx of art which, per physicam et realem impressionem usque ad ipsam facultatem motivam membrorum, proceeds, from the intellect where art resides, to move the hand and to cause an artistic "formality" to "shine" in the work. A spiritual virtue may thus pass into a clumsy stroke.
5 Hence the charm one finds in the clumsiness of the primitives. In itself clumsiness has nothing charming about it; it has no attraction where poetry is lacking, and it even becomes downright obnoxious whenever it is -- however so little -- willed for itself or imitated. But in the primitives it was a sacred weakness through which the subtle intellectuality of art revealed itself.
6 Man lives so much in sensibus, he has so much trouble maintaining himself at the level of the intellect, that one may well wonder whether -- in art as well as in social life -- progress in material means and in scientific technique, good as it is in itself, is not an evil in actual fact, so far as the average state of art and civilization is concerned. In this category, and beyond a certain limit, whatever removes a constraint removes a source of strength, and whatever removes a difficulty removes a source of grandeur.
7 When on visiting an art gallery one passes from the rooms of the primitives to those in which the glories of oil painting and of a much more considerable material science are displayed, the foot takes a step on the floor but the soul takes a steep fall. It had been taking the air on the everlasting hills: it now finds itself on the floor of a theatre -- a magnificent theatre. With the sixteenth century the lie installed itself in painting, which began to love science for its own sake, endeavoring to give the illusion of nature and to make us believe that in the presence of a painting we are in the presence of the scene or the subject painted, not in the presence of a painting.
8 The great classicists from Raphael to Greco, to Zurbaran, Lorrain, and Watteau, succeeded in purifying art of this lie; realism, and, in a sense, impressionism, delighted in it. Does Cubism in our day, despite its enormous deficiencies, represent the still groping and noisy childhood of an art once again pure? The barbarous dogmatism of its theorists compels one to doubt this very much, and to fear that the new school may be endeavoring to free itself radically from naturalist imitation only to immobilize itself in stultae quaestiones, by denying the primary conditions which essentially distinguish Painting from the other arts, from Poetry, for instance, or from Logic.
9 We observe, however, in a few of the artists -- painters, poets, and musicians -- whom Criticism only recently lodged at the Sign of the Cube (an astonishingly expandable cube), the most noteworthy effort towards the logical coherence and the simplicity and purity of means that properly constitute the veracity of art. These days, all the best people want the classical. I know nothing in contemporary production more sincerely classical than the music of Satie. "Never any sorcery, repetitions, suspicious caresses, fevers, or miasmas. Never does Satie 'stir the pool.' It is the poetry of childhood relived by a master technician."
10 Cubism has rather violently posed the question of imitation in art. Art, as such, does not consist in imitating, but in making, in composing or constructing, in accordance with the laws of the very object to be posited in being (ship, house, carpet, colored canvas or hewn block). This exigency of its generic concept takes precedence over everything else; and to make the representation of the real its essential end is to destroy it. Plato, with his theory of imitation in its several degrees and of poetry as a conjurer, misconceives, like all exaggerated intellectualists, the proper nature of art; whence his contempt for poetry. It is obvious that if art were a means of science, it would be tremendously inferior to geometry.
11 But if art, as art, is a stranger to imitation, the fine arts, insofar as they are ordered to Beauty, have a certain relation to imitation, and one that is quite difficult to define.
12 When Aristotle wrote, apropos the first causes of poetry: "To imitate is natural to men from childhood. . . . man is the most imitative of the animals: he acquires his first knowledge through imitation, and everybody delights in imitations. We find a sign of this latter in works of art: for of the very things that we look at with uneasiness we rejoice to behold the most exact images, such as the forms of the vilest beasts and of corpses. The explanation is that to learn is the greatest of pleasures not only for philosophers but also for other men . . ."-- when Aristotle wrote these words, he enunciated a specific condition imposed on the fine arts, a condition grasped from their earliest origin. But Aristotle is to be understood here in the most formal sense. If, following his usual method, the Philosopher goes straight to the primitive case, it would be an utter mistake for us to stop there and always to limit the word "imitation" to its everyday meaning of exact reproduction or representation of a given reality. When the man of the reindeer age traced the forms of animals on the walls of caves, he was no doubt prompted above all by the pleasure of reproducing an object with exactness. But since that time the joy of imitation has been remarkably purified. Let us try to make this idea of imitation in art more precise.
13 The fine arts seek to produce, by the object they make, the joy or delight of the intellect through the intuition of the sense: the aim of painting, said Poussin, is delight. This delight is not the delight of the very act of knowing, the delight of the possession of knowledge, the delight of the true. It is a delight that overflows from this act, when the object upon which it bears is well proportioned for the intellect.
14 Thus this delight presupposes knowledge, and the more knowledge there is, or the more things given to the intellect, the greater is the possibility of delight. This is why art as ordered to beauty refuses -- at least when its object permits it -- to stop at forms or colors, or sounds or words grasped in themselves and as things (they must first be grasped in this manner -- that is the first condition), but it grasps them also as making known something other than themselves, that is to say, as signs. And the thing signified can be a sign in its turn, and the more the object of art is laden with signification (but with spontaneous and intuitively grasped signification, tion, not with hieroglyphic signification), the greater and richer and higher will be the possibility of delight and beauty. The beauty of a painting or a statue is thus incomparably richer than the beauty of a carpet, a Venetian glass, or an amphora.
15 It is in this sense that Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, Music, and even the Dance, are imitative arts, that is, arts which effect the beauty of the work and procure the delight of the soul by making use of imitation, or by rendering, through certain sensible signs, something other than these signs spontaneously present to the spirit. Painting imitates with colors and plane forms things given outside of us, Music imitates with sounds and rhythms -- and the Dance with rhythm only -- the "characters," as Aristotle says, and the movements of the soul, the invisible world which stirs within us. Allowing for this difference as regards the object signified, Painting is no more imitative than Music and Music is no less imitative than Painting, if "imitation" is understood precisely in the sense just defined.
16 But since the delight procured by the beautiful does not consist formally in the act itself of knowing the real, or in the act of conformity with what is, it does not at all depend on the perfection of imitation as reproduction of the real, or on the exactness of the representation. Imitation as reproduction or representation of the real -- in other words, imitation materially taken -- is but a means, not an end; along with manual dexterity, it relates to artistic activity, but no more than manual dexterity does it constitute it. And the things rendered present to the soul by the sensible signs of art -- by the rhythms, sounds, lines, colors, forms, masses, words, metres, rhymes, images, the proximate matter of art -- are themselves but a material element of the beauty of the work, just like the signs in question; they are a remote matter, so to speak, which the artist arranges and on which he must make shine the radiance of a form, the light of being. To propose to oneself as an end the perfection of imitation understood materially, would therefore be to direct oneself to what is purely material in the work of art, and to imitate slavishly; this servile imitation is absolutely foreign to art.
17 What is required is not that the representation exactly conform to a given reality, but that through the material elements of the beauty of the work there truly pass, sovereign and whole, the radiance of a form -- of a form, and therefore of a truth: in this sense the great phrase of the Platonists, splendor veri, always remains. But if the delight in the beautiful work comes from a truth, it does not come from the truth of imitation as reproduction of things, it comes from the perfection with which the work expresses or manifests the form, in the metaphysical sense of this word, it comes from the truth of imitation as manifestation of a form. Here we have the formal element of imitation in art: the expression or manifestation, in a work suitably proportioned, of some secret principle of intelligibility which shines forth. It is upon this that the joy of imitation bears in art. It is also what gives art its value of universality.
18 What constitutes the rigor of the true classical, is such a subordination of the matter to the light of the form thus manifested, that no material element issuing from things or from the subject is admitted into the work which is not strictly required as support for or vehicle of this light, and which would dull or "debauch" the eye, ear, or spirit. Compare, from this point of view, Gregorian melody or the music of Bach with the music of Wagner or Stravinsky.
19 In the presence of a beautiful work, as I have already pointed out, the intellect rejoices without discourse. If therefore art manifests or expresses in matter a certain radiance of being, a certain form, a certain soul, a certain truth -- "Oh! you'll confess in the end," Carrière once said to one whose portrait he was painting -- it does not give a conceptual and discursive expression of it in the soul. It is thus that it suggests without properly making known, and that it expresses that which our ideas cannot signify. A, a, a, exclaims Jeremias, Domine Deus, ecce nescio loqui. But where speech leaves off, song begins -- exsultatio mentis prorumpens in vocem.
20 Let us add that in the case of the arts which address themselves to sight (painting, sculpture), or to the intellect (poetry), a stricter necessity of imitation or signification imposes itself extrinsically on art, because of the faculty involved. For this faculty must rejoice -- above all, if it is the intellect, secondarily and instrumentally if it is sight. Now sight and intellect, being the most cognitive of the powers of knowing and the ones most drawn to the object, cannot experience complete joy if they do not know, in a sufficiently lively manner, some object -- doubtless a sign itself in its turn -- which is signified to them by mass, color, or words. The eye therefore and the intellect need to perceive or to recognize in the work some element that is legible. And no doubt it is a question here only of a condition extrinsic to art itself formally considered-- an obscure poem can be better than a clear poem; nevertheless, the poetic value being equal, the soul will derive more enjoyment from the clear poem, and if the obscurity becomes too great, if the signs are no longer but enigmas, the nature of our faculties protests. In some degree the artist always does violence to nature, and yet if he did not take account of this exigency, he would sin, by a kind of idealist vertigo, against the material or subjective conditions which art is humanly obliged to satisfy. Therein lies the danger of the foolhardy voyages, however noble in other respects, to the Cap de Bonne Esperance, and of a poetry which "teases eternity" by voluntarily obscuring the idea under films of images arranged with an exquisite sense. When a Cubist, in his horror of impressionism or naturalism, declares that a picture, like a cushion, should remain just as beautiful when turned upside down, he affirms a very curious return -- and a very useful one, if properly understood -- to the laws of absolute constructive coherence of art in general; but he forgets both the subjective conditions and the particular exigencies of the beautiful which is proper to painting.
21 Nevertheless the fact remains that if "imitation" were understood in the sense of exact reproduction or copy of the real, it would have to be said that except for the art of the cartographer or of the draftsman of anatomical plates there is no imitative art. In this sense, and however deplorable his writings may be in other respects, Gauguin, in affirming that it was necessary to renounce making what one sees, formulated a primary truth which the masters have practiced from the very beginning. Cézanne's well-known remark expressed the same truth: "What is required is that we re-create Poussin by painting from nature. Everything is there." The imitative arts aim neither at copying the appearances of nature, nor at depicting the "ideal," but at making an object beautiful by manifesting a form with the help of sensible signs.
22 The human artist or poet, whose intellect is not the cause of things, as is the Divine Intellect, cannot draw this form entirely from his creative spirit: he goes and imbibes it first and above all in the immense treasure-house of created things, of sensible nature as also of the world of souls, and of the interior world of his own soul. From this point of view he is first and foremost a man who sees more deeply than other men, and who discloses in the real spiritual radiances which others cannot discern. But to make these radiances shine in his work, and therefore to be truly docile and faithful to the invisible spirit that plays in things, he can, and he even must, distort in some measure, reconstruct, transfigure the material appearances of nature. Even in a portrait that is "a perfect likeness" -- in Holbein's drawings, for instance -- the work always expresses a form engendered in the spirit of the artist and truly born in that spirit, true portraits being nothing other than "the ideal reconstruction of individuals."
23 Art, then, remains fundamentally inventive and creative. It is the faculty of producing, not of course ex nihilo, but from a pre- existing matter, a new creature, an original being, capable of stirring in turn a human soul. This new creature is the fruit of a spiritual marriage which joins the activity of the artist to the passivity of a given matter.
24Hence in the artist the feeling of his peculiar dignity. He is as it were an associate of God in the making of beautiful works; by developing the powers placed in him by the Creator -- for "every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights" -- and by making use of created matter, he creates, so to speak, at second remove. Operatio artis fundatur super operationem naturae, et haec super creationem.
25 Artistic creation does not copy God's creation, it continues it. And just as the trace and the image of God appear in His creatures, so the human stamp is imprinted on the work of art -- the full stamp, sensitive and spiritual, not only that of the hands, but of the whole soul. Before the work of art passes from art into the matter, by a transitive action, the very conception of the art has had to emerge from within the soul, by an immanent and vital action, like the emergence of the mental word. Processus artis est duplex, scilicet artis a corde artificis, et artificiatorum ab arte.
26 If the artist studies and cherishes nature as much as and a great deal more than the works of the masters, it is not in order to copy it, but in order to base himself on it; and it is because it is not enough for him to be the pupil of the masters: he must be the pupil of God, for God knows the rules governing the making of beautiful works. Nature is essentially of concern to the artist only because it is a derivation of the divine art in things, ratio artis divinae indita rebus. The artist, whether he knows it or not, consults God in looking at things.
They exist but for a moment, but all the same it was fine! He were ignorant of his art who found a flaw in Thine.
27 Nature is thus the first exciter and the first guide of the artist, and not an example to be copied slavishly. Ask the true painters what their need of nature is. They fear her and revere her, but with a chaste fear, not with a slavish one. They imitate her, but with an imitation that is truly filial, and according to the creative agility of the spirit, not with a literal and servile imitation. One day, after a walk in the wintertime, Rouault told me he had just discovered, by looking at snow-clad fields in the sunshine, how to paint the white trees of spring. "The model," said Renoir for his part, "is there only to set me on fire, to enable me to dare things that I could not invent without it. . . . And it makes me come a cropper if I throw myself too much into it." Such is the liberty of the sons of the Creator.
28 Art has not to defend itself only against the allurements of manual dexterity (or of that other cleverness which is taste) and against slavish imitation. Other foreign elements also threaten its purity. For example, the beauty to which it tends produces a delight, but it is the high delight of the spirit, which is the exact contrary of what is called pleasure, or the pleasant tickling of the sensibility; and if art seeks to please, it betrays, and becomes deceitful. Similarly, its effect is to produce emotion, but if it aims at emotion, at affecting the appetites or arousing the passions, it falsifies itself, and thus another element of lie enters into it.
29 This is as true of music as it is of the other arts. Music no doubt has this peculiarity that, signifying with its rhythms and its sounds the very movements of the soul -- cantare amantis est -- it produces, in producing emotion, precisely what it signifies. But this production is not what it aims at, any more than a representation or a description of the emotions is. The emotions which it makes present to the soul by sounds and by rhythms, are the matter through which it must give us the felt joy of a spiritual form, of a transcendent order, of the radiance of being. Thus music, like tragedy, purifies the passions, by developing them within the limits and in the order of beauty, by harmonizing them with the intellect, in a harmony that fallen nature experiences nowhere else.
30 Let us designate as thesis every intention extrinsic to the work itself, when the thought animated by this intention does not act on the work through the artistic habitus moved instrumentally, but juxtaposes itself to this habitus in order itself to act directly on the work; in that case, the work is not produced wholly by the artistic habitus and wholly by the thought thus animated, but partly by the one and partly by the other, like a boat pulled by two men. In this sense every thesis, whether it claims to demonstrate some truth or to touch the heart, is for art a foreign importation, hence an impurity. It imposes on art, in art's own sphere, that is to say in the very production of the work, a rule and an end which is not the end or rule of the production; it prevents the work of art from springing from the heart of the artist spontaneously like a ripened fruit; it betrays a calculation, a duality between the intellect of the artist and his sensibility, which two, art, as it happens, wants to see united.
31 I willingly accept the ascendancy of the object which the artist has conceived and which he lays before my eyes; I then abandon myself unreservedly to the emotion which in him and in me springs from a same beauty, from a same transcendental in which we communicate. But I refuse to accept the ascendancy of an art which contrives suggestive means by which to seduce my subconscious, I resist an emotion which the will of a man seeks to impose upon me. The artist must be as objective as the man of science, in the sense that he must think of the spectator only in order to present him with the beautiful, or the well-made, just as the man of science thinks of his listener only in order to present him with the true. The cathedral builders did not harbor any sort of thesis. They were, in Dulac's fine phrase, "men unaware of themselves." They neither wished to demonstrate the propriety of Christian dogma nor to suggest by some artifice a Christian emotion. They even thought a great deal less of making a beautiful work than of doing good work. They were men of Faith, and as they were, so they worked. Their work revealed the truth of God, but without doing it intentionally, and because of not doing it intentionally.
Chapter VIII
Christian Art
By the words "Christian art" I do not mean Church art, art specified by an object, an end, and determined rules, and which is but a particular -- and eminent -- point of application of art. I mean Christian art in the sense of art which bears within it the character of Christianity. In this sense Christian art is not a species of the genus art: one does not say "Christian art" as one says "pictorial" or "poetic" art, "Gothic" or "Byzantine" art. A young man does not say to himself "I am going in for Christian art," as he might say "I am going in for agriculture." There is no school where one learns Christian art. Christian art is defined by the one in whom it exists and by the spirit from which it issues: one says "Christian art" or the "art of a Christian," as one says the "art of the bee" or the "art of man." It is the art of redeemed humanity. It is planted in the Christian soul, by the side of the running waters, under the sky of the theological virtues, amidst the breezes of the seven gifts of the Spirit. It is natural that it should bear Christian fruit.
2 Everything belongs to it, the sacred as well as the profane. It is at home wherever the ingenuity and the joy of man extend. Symphony or ballet, film or novel, landscape or still-life, puppet-show libretto or opera, it can just as well appear in any of these as in the stained- glass windows and statues of churches.
3 But, it may be objected, is not this Christian art a myth? Can one even conceive of it? Is not art pagan by birth and tied to sin -- just as man is a sinner by birth? But grace heals wounded nature. Do not say that a Christian art is impossible. Say rather that it is difficult, doubly difficult -- fourfold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another: for it is a question of harmonizing two absolutes. Say that the difficulty becomes tremendous when the entire age lives far from Christ, for the artist is greatly dependent upon the spirit of his time. But has courage ever been lacking on earth?
4 Besides, wherever art -- Egyptian, Greek or Chinese -- has known a certain degree of grandeur and purity, it is already Christian, Christian in hope, because every spiritual radiance is a promise and a symbol of the divine harmonies of the Gospel.
5 Inspiration is not a mere mythological accessory. There exists a real inspiration, coming not from the Muses, but from the living God, a special movement of the natural order, by which the first Intelligence, when It pleases, gives the artist a creative movement superior to the yardstick of reason, and which uses, in superelevating them, all the rational energies of art; and whose impulse, moreover, man is free to follow or to vitiate. This inspiration descending from God the author of nature is, as it were, a symbol of supernatural inspiration. In order for an art to arise that is Christian not only in hope but in fact, and truly liberated by grace, both forms of inspiration must be joined at its most secret source.
6 If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian, and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to "make Christian."
7 Do not make the absurd attempt to dissociate in yourself the artist and the Christian. They are one, if you are truly Christian, and if your art is not isolated from your soul by some system of aesthetics. But apply only the artist to the work; precisely because the artist and the Christian are one, the work will derive wholly from each of them.
8 Do not separate your art from your faith. But leave distinct what is distinct. Do not try to blend by force what life unites so well. If you were to make of your aesthetic an article of faith, you would spoil your faith. If you were to make of your devotion a rule of artistic activity, or if you were to turn desire to edify into a method of your art, you would spoil your art.
9 The entire soul of the artist reaches and rules his work, but it must reach it and rule it only through the artistic habitus. Art tolerates no division here. It will not allow any foreign element, juxtaposing itself to it, to mingle, in the production of the work, its regulation with art's own. Tame it, and it will do all that you want it to do. Use violence, and it will accomplish nothing good. Christian work would have the artist, as artist, free.
10 Nevertheless art will be Christian, and will reveal in its beauty the interior reflection of the radiance of grace, only if it overflows from a heart suffused by grace. For the virtue of art which reaches it and rules it directly, presupposes that the appetite is rightly disposed with regard to the beauty of the work. And if the beauty of the work is Christian, it is because the appetite of the artist is rightly disposed with regard to such a beauty, and because in the soul of the artist Christ is present through love. The quality of the work is here the reflection of the love from which it issues, and which moves the virtue of art instrumentally. Thus it is by reason of an intrinsic superelevation that art is Christian, and it is through love that this superelevation takes place.
11 It follows from this that the work will be Christian in the exact degree in which love is vibrant. Let's make no mistake about it: what is required is the very actuality of love, contemplation in charity. Christian work would have the artist, as man, a saint.
12 It would have him possessed by love. Let him then make what he wishes. If the work conveys a note less purely Christian, it is because something was lacking in the purity of the love. Art requires much calm, said Fra Angelico, and to paint the things of Christ one must live with Christ; it is the only saying that we have of his, and how little systematic . . .
13 It would therefore be futile to try to find a technique, a style, a system of rules or a way of working which would be those of Christian art. The art which germinates and grows in Christian man can admit of an infinity of them. But these forms of art will all have a family likeness, and all of them will differ substantially from non-Christian forms of art; as the flora of the mountains differs from the flora of the plains. Consider the liturgy: it is the transcendent and supereminent type of the forms of Christian art; the Spirit of God in Person fashioned it, so as to be able to delight in it.
14 But the liturgy is not entirely immutable, it suffers the passage of time; eternity rejuvenates itself in it. And the Maronite or Pravoslav liturgy is not the Roman liturgy: there are many mansions in Heaven. Nothing is more beautiful than a High Mass -- a dance before the Ark in slow motion, more majestic than the advance of the heavenly hosts. And yet in it the Church is not seeking for beauty, nor for decorative motifs, nor to touch the heart. Her sole aim is to adore, and to unite herself with the Savior; and from this loving adoration beauty, too, overflows.
15 Beautiful things are rare. What exceptional conditions must be presupposed for a civilization to unite, and in the same men, art and contemplation! Under the burden of a nature always resisting and ceaselessly falling, Christianity has spread its sap everywhere, in art and in the world; but except for the Middle Ages, and then only amid formidable difficulties and deficiencies, it has not succeeded in shaping an art and a world all its own -- and this is not surprising. Classical art produced many Christian works, and admirable ones at that. But can it be said that taken in itself this form of art has the original savor of the Christian climate? It is a form born in another land, and then transplanted.
16 If in the midst of the unspeakable catastrophes which the modern world invites, a moment is to come, however brief, of pure Christian springtime -- a Palm Sunday for the Church, a brief Hosanna from poor earth to the Son of David -- one may expect for these years, together with a lively intellectual and spiritual vigor, the regermination of a truly Christian art, to the delight of men and the angels. Even now this art seems to herald itself in the individual effort of certain artists and poets over the past fifty years, some of whom are to be reckoned among the greatest. We must above all be careful not to disengage and isolate it prematurely, and by an academic effort, from the great movement of contemporary art. It will emerge and assert itself only if it springs spontaneously from a common renewal of art and sanctity in the world.
17 Christianity does not make art easy. It deprives it of many facile means, it bars its course at many places, but in order to raise its level. At the same time that Christianity creates these salutary difficulties, it superelevates art from within, reveals to it a hidden beauty which is more delicious than light, and gives it what the artist has need of most -- simplicity, the peace of awe and of love, the innocence which renders matter docile to men and fraternal.
Chapter IX
Art and Morality
The artistic habitus is intent only on the work to be made. No doubt it permits the consideration of the objective conditions (practical use, intended purpose, etc.) which the work must satisfy -- a statue made to be prayed before, is different from a statue for a garden. But this is because such a consideration has to do with the very beauty of the work: a work which would not be adapted to these conditions would thereby be lacking in proportion, and therefore in beauty. Art has for sole end the work itself and its beauty.
2 But for the man working, the work-to-be-made enters -- itself -- into the line of morality, and on this ground it is only a means. If the artist took the end of his art or the beauty of the work for the ultimate end of his operation and therefore for beatitude, he would be but an idolater. It is absolutely necessary therefore that the artist, qua man, work for something other than his work, for something better loved. God is infinitely more lovable than art.
3 God is jealous. "The rule of divine love is without mercy," said Mélanie de la Salette. "Love is a true sacrificer: it desires the death of all that is not it." Unhappy the artist with a divided heart! The blessed Angelico was willing to put down his painting without a murmur and go and tend geese if obedience had required this of him. Consequently a creative stream gushed from his tranquil heart. God left him that, because he had renounced it.
4 Art has no right against God. There is no good opposed to God or the ultimate Good of human life. Art in its own domain is sovereign like wisdom; through its object it is subordinate neither to wisdom nor to prudence nor to any other virtue. But by the subject in which it exists, by man and in man it is subordinate -- extrinsically subordinate--to the good of the subject; insofar as it finds itself in man and insofar as the liberty of man makes use of it, it is subordinate to the end of man and to the human virtues. Therefore "if an art produces objects which men cannot use without sinning, the artist who makes such works himself commits sin, because he directly offers to others the occasion of sin; as if someone were to make idols for idolatry. As to the arts of works which men can put to a good or bad use, they are permissible; and yet if there are some of them whose works are employed in the greatest number of cases for a bad use, they must, although permissible in themselves, be banished from the city by the office of the Prince, secundum documenta Platonis. "Fortunately for the rights of man, our fine cities have no Prince, and all that works for idolatry and lechery, in dressmaking or in literature, is not thwarted by Plato.
5 Because it exists in man and because its good is not the good of man, art is subject in its exercise to an extrinsic control, imposed in the name of a higher end which is the very beatitude of the living being in whom it resides. But in the Christian this control proceeds without constraint, because the immanent order of charity renders it connatural to him, and because the law has become his own interior inclination: spiritualis homo non est sub lege. It is to him that one can say: ama, et fac quod vis; if you love, you can do what you wish, you will never offend love. A work of art which offends God offends the Christian too, and, no longer having anything with which to delight, it immediately loses for him any claim to beauty.
6 There is according to Aristotle a twofold good of the multitude, for example, of an army: one which is in the multitude, itself, and such is the order of the army; the other separate from the multitude, and such is the good of the Commander. And this latter good is the nobler of the two, because it is to it that the other one is ordered -- the order of the army being for the realization of the good of the Commander, that is to say, the will of the Commander in the obtaining of victory. We can conclude from this that the contemplative, being ordered directly to the "separate common good" of the whole universe, that is to say, to God, serves better than any other the common good of the human multitude; for the "intrinsic common good" of this multitude, the social common good, depends on the "separate common good," which is superior to it. It is the same, analogically and all allowances being made, with all those, metaphysicians or artists, whose activity touches the transcendental order of truth or beauty, and who have some part in wisdom if only natural wisdom. Leave, then, the artist to his art: he serves the community better than the engineer or the tradesman.
7 This does not mean that he must ignore the city, either as a man -- this is obvious -- or even as an artist. The question for him is not whether he ought to open his work to all the human currents flowing into his heart, and to pursue, in making it, this or that particular human aim: the individual case is sole master here, and all prejudgment would be improper. The sole question for the artist is not to be a weakling; it is to have an art which is robust enough and undeviating enough to dominate at all events his matter without losing anything of its loftiness and purity, and to aim, in the very act of making, at the sole good of the work, without being turned aside or distracted by the human ends pursued.
8 To tell the truth, art took to enclosing itself in its famous ivory tower, in the XIX century, only because of the disheartening degradation of its environment. But the normal condition of art is altogether different. Aeschylus, Dante, or Cervantes did not write in a vacuum bell. Moreover, there cannot in fact be any purely "gratuitous" work of art -- the universe excepted. Not only is our act of artistic creation ordered to an ultimate end, true God or false God, but it is impossible that it not regard, because of the environment in which it steeps, certain proximate ends that concern the human order. The workman works for his wages, and the most disincarnate artist has some concern to act on souls and to serve an idea, be it only an aesthetic idea. What is required is the perfect practical discrimination between the aim of the workman (finis operantis, as the Schoolmen put it) and the aim of the work (finis operis): so that the workman should work for his wages, but the work should be ruled and shaped and brought into being only with regard to its own good and in nowise with regard to the wages. Thus the artist may work for any and every human intention he likes, but the work taken in itself must be made and constructed only for its own beauty.
9 It is the idlest fancy to think that the ingenuousness or the purity of the work of art depends on a break with the animating and motive principles of the human being, on a line drawn between art and desire or love. It depends rather on the force of the principle that generates the work, or on the force of the virtue of art.
10 There was a tree that said: "I want to be tree only and nothing else, and to bear fruit which will be pure fruit. That is why I do not want to grow in earth which is not tree, nor in a climate which is climate of Provence or of Vendée, and not tree-climate. Shelter me from the air."
11 It would simplify many questions to make a distinction between art itself and its material or subjective conditions. Art being of man, how could it not depend on the pre-existing structures and inclinations of the subject in which it dwells? They remain extrinsic to art, but they influence it.
12 Art as such, for instance, transcends, like the spirit, every frontier of space or time, every historical or national boundary; it has its bounds only in the infinite amplitude of beauty. Like science, philosophy and civilization, by its very nature and object it is universal.
13 But art does not reside in an angelic mind; it resides in a soul which animates a living body, and which, by the natural necessity in which it finds itself of learning, and progressing little by little and with the assistance of others, makes the rational animal a naturally social animal. Art is therefore basically dependent upon everything which the human community, spiritual tradition and history transmit to the body and mind of man. By its human subject and its human roots, art belongs to a time and a country.
14 That is why the most universal and the most human works are those which bear most openly the mark of their country. The century of Pascal and Bossuet was a century of vigorous nationalism. At the time of the great tranquil victories of Cluny, and at the time of Saint Louis, a French -- but, above all, Catholic -- intellectual radiation was exerted on Christendom, and it was then that the world experienced the purest and the freest "international" of the spirit, and the most universal culture.
15 It thus appears that attachment to the natural environment, political and territorial, of a nation is one of the conditions of the proper life and therefore of the very universality of the intellect and of art; whereas a metaphysical and religious cult of the nation, which would seek to enslave the intellect to the physiology of a race or to the interests of a State, exposes art and every virtue of the spirit to mortal danger.
All our values depend on the nature of our God.
16 Now God is Spirit. To progress -- which means for any nature, to tend toward its Principle -- is therefore to pass from the sensible to the rational and from the rational to the spiritual and from the less spiritual to the more spiritual; to civilize is to spiritualize.
17 Material progress may contribute, to the extent that it allows man leisure of soul. But if such progress is employed only to serve the will to power and to gratify a cupidity which opens infinite jaws -- concupiscentia est infinita -- it leads the world back to chaos at an accelerated speed; that is its way of tending toward the principle.
18 There is a fundamental need of art in the human community: "Nobody," says Saint Thomas following Aristotle, "can do without delectation for long. That is why he who is deprived of spiritual delectations goes over to the carnal."
19 Art teaches men the delectations of the spirit, and because it is itself sensible and adapted to their nature, it can best lead them to what is nobler than itself. It thus plays in natural life the same role, so to speak, as the "sensible graces" in the spiritual life; and from very far, and unconsciously, it prepares the human race for contemplation (the contemplation of the saints), whose spiritual delectation exceeds all delectation," and which seems to be the end of all the operations of men. For why the servile works and trade, if not in order that the body, being provided with the necessaries of life, may be in the state required for contemplation? Why the moral virtues and prudence, if not to procure the tranquility of the passions and the interior peace that contemplation needs? Why the whole government of civil life, if not to assure the exterior peace necessary to contemplation? "So that, properly considered, all the functions of human life seem to be for the service of those who contemplate truth."[157] But contemplation itself -- and all the rest -- is for the sake of love.
20 If one tried, not, certainly, to make an impossible classification of artists and works, but to understand the normal hierarchy of the different types of art, one could do so only from this human point of view of their properly civilizing value, or of their degree of spirituality.
21 One would thus descend from the beauty of Holy Scripture and of the Liturgy, to that of the writings of the mystics, then to art properly so-called: the spiritual fullness of mediaeval art, the rational harmony of Greek and classical art, the pathos-laden harmony of Shakespearean art. . . . The imaginative and verbal richness of romanticism, the instinct of the heart, maintains in it, in spite of its deep-seated lack of balance and its intellectual indigence, the concept of art. With naturalism this concept disappears almost completely -- only to reappear, as one might expect, cleansed and sharpened, with new values.
22 The magnificence of Julius II and of Leo X had a great deal more to it than a noble love of glory and beauty; with whatever vanity it may have been accompanied, a ray passed through it of the Spirit which has never failed the Church.
23 That great Contemplative, instructed by the gift of Science, profoundly discerns all the needs of the human heart; she knows the unique value of art. That is why she has so protected it in the world. Even more, she has summoned it to the opus Dei, and she asks it to make precious ointments which she spreads over the head and feet of her Master. Ut quid perditio ista? murmur the philanthropists. She continues to embalm the body of her Beloved, whose death she proclaims every day, donec veniat.
24 Do you think that God, Who "is called Zealot," says Denis the Areopagite, "because He has love and zeal for all that is," is scornful of artists and of the fragile beauty which issues from their hands? Remember what He says of the men whom He Himself assigned to sacred art: "Behold, the Lord hath called by name Beseleel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Juda, and hath filled him with the spirit of God, with wisdom and understanding and knowledge and all learning to devise and to work in gold and silver and brass, and in engraving stones, and in carpenter's work. Whatsoever can be devised artificially He hath given in his heart: Ooliab also, the son of Achisameck of the tribe of Dan: both of them hath he instructed with wisdom, to do carpenter's work, and tapestry, and embroidery in blue and purple, and scarlet twice-dyed, and fine linen, and to weave all things, and to invent all new things."
25 We have already noted the general opposition between Art and Prudence. This opposition is further aggravated in the fine arts, by reason of the very transcendence of their object.
26 The Artist is subject, in the sphere of his art, to a kind of asceticism, which may require heroic sacrifices. He must be thoroughly undeviating as regards the end of his art, perpetually on guard not only against the banal attraction of easy execution and success, but against a multitude of more subtle temptations, and against the slightest relaxation of his interior effort, for habitus diminish with the mere cessation of their acts, even more, with every relaxed act, every act which is not proportionate to their intensity. He must pass through spiritual nights, purify himself without ceasing, voluntarily abandon fertile regions for regions that are barren and full of insecurity. In a certain sphere and from a particular point of view, in the sphere of the making and from the point of view of the good of the work, he must possess humility and magnanimity, prudence, integrity, fortitude, temperance, simplicity, ingenuousness. All these virtues which the saints possess purely and simply, and in the line of the supreme good, the artist must have in a certain relation, and in a line apart, extra-human if not inhuman. So he easily takes on the tone of the moralist when he speaks or writes about art, and he knows well that he has a virtue to protect. "We shelter in ourselves an Angel whom we constantly shock. We must be the guardians of this angel. Shelter well your virtue. . . ."
27 But if this analogy invests the artist with a unique nobility, and explains the admiration he enjoys among men, it runs the risk of leading him pitiably astray and of having him place his treasure and his heart in a phantom, ubi aerugo et tinea demolitur.
28 The Prudent Man as such, on the other hand, judging as he does all things under the angle of morality and in relation to the good of man, is absolutely ignorant of all that pertains to art. He can, no doubt, and he must, judge the work of art insofar as it concerns morality: he has no right to judge it as a work of art.
29 The work of art is the occasion for a unique conflict of virtues. Prudence, which considers it in its relation to morality, deserves on better grounds than Art the name of virtue, for, like every moral virtue, it causes the man who acts to be good -- purely and simply good.
30 But Art, insofar as it resembles more the speculative virtues, and insofar as it thus possesses more intellectual splendor, is in itself a nobler habitus: simply speaking, that virtue is nobler which has the nobler object. Prudence is superior to Art in relation to man. Understood purely and simply, Art -- at least the art that, aiming at Beauty, has a speculative character -- is superior metaphysically to Prudence.
31 What makes the conflict bitter is the fact that Art is not subordinate to Prudence by virtue of their respective objects, as science, for instance, is subordinate to wisdom. As concerns its own objects, everything comes under the purview of Art, and of Art alone. But as concerns the human subject, nothing comes under Art's purview. Over anything made by the hand of man Art and Prudence each claim dominion. From the point of view of poetic, or, if you will, working values, Prudence is not competent. From the point of view of human values, and of the moral regulation of the free act, to which everything is subordinate on the side of the human subject, Prudence alone is competent, and there is no limitation upon its rights to govern. In order to form a correct judgment about the work both virtues are necessary.
32 When he reproves a work of art, the Prudent Man, standing squarely upon his moral virtue, has the certitude that he is defending against the Artist a sacred good, the good of man, and he looks upon the Artist as a child or a madman. Perched on his intellectual virtue, the Artist has the certitude that he is defending a no less sacred good, the good of Beauty, and he looks as though he were bearing down on the Prudent Man with the weight of Aristotle's maxim: "Life proportioned to the intellect is better than life proportioned to man."
33 The Prudent Man and the Artist have difficulty therefore in understanding one another. But the Contemplative and the Artist, each perfected by an intellectual virtue which rivets him to the transcendental order, are naturally close. They also have the same brand of enemies. The Contemplative, who looks at the highest cause on which every being and activity depend, knows the place and the value of art, and understands the Artist. The Artist as such cannot judge the Contemplative, but he can divine his grandeur. If he truly loves beauty and if a moral vice does not hold his heart in a dazed condition, when his path crosses the Contemplative's he will recognize love and beauty.
34 And besides, in following the very line of his art, he tends without knowing it to pass beyond his art; just as a plant, though lacking knowledge, directs its stem towards the sun, the artist, however sordid his life, is oriented in the direction of subsisting Beauty, whose sweetness the saints enjoy in a light inaccessible to art and reason. "Neither painting nor sculpture," said Michelangelo in his old age, "will any longer charm the soul that is turned towards that divine love which opens out its arms on the Cross to receive us."
35 Consider Saint Catherine of Sienna, that apis argumentosa who was the counsellor of a Pope and of Princes of the Church, surrounded by artists and poets whom she leads into Paradise. Perfectly prudent, but set far above Prudence, judging all things by Wisdom, which is "architectonic in regard to all the intellectual virtues," and in whose service is Prudence as the porter in the service of the king," the Saints are free like the Spirit. Like God, the wise man is interested in the effort of every form of life.
36 Delicate and not exclusive,
He will be of our day;
His heart, contemplative by choice,
Will yet know the work of men . . .
37 Thus Wisdom, placed as it is at the point of view of God, which equally commands the spheres of Doing and of Making, can alone perfectly reconcile Art and Prudence.
Adam sinned because he failed in contemplation. Ever since, the heart of man has been divided.
38 To turn away from Wisdom and Contemplation, and to aim lower than God, is for a Christian civilization the first cause of all disorder. It is in particular the cause of that ungodly divorce between Art and Prudence which one observes in times when Christians no longer have the strength to bear the integrity of their riches. That is doubtless why Prudence was sacrificed to Art at the time of the Italian Renaissance, in a civilization which no longer tended to anything but the humanist Virtù, and why Art was sacrificed to Prudence, in the XIX century, in "right-thinking" circles which no longer tended to anything but Respectability.
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