Recently, one of my favourite writers of contemporary fantasy suggested—during the annual Tolkien Lecture, no less—that the reason we, as humans, make art is to console ourselves with meaning in an ultimately meaningless world. The things we make, the stories we tell conjure an illusion of order, an illusion that things can fit together, when actually nothing does.
My initial response to this suggestion was twofold: first, that JRR Tolkien, the grandfather of modern fantasy and a devout and sometimes irascible Catholic, would have severe words in response to this idea; second, that it’s entirely backwards.
Within the Catholic tradition especially, art has always been seen as something that reveals the fundamental coherence and rational ordering of the universe. As the Catechism says, art ‘give[s] form to the truth of reality in a language accessible to sight or hearing’ (§2501). In other words, it doesn’t act as a fig leaf for our vacuous existence; it reveals instead that the world is imbued with meaning and purpose and creative potential.
But aside from the tragic nihilism of the contemporary fantasy writer’s perspective, it does serve a useful purpose: it offers a stark contrast to a Catholic vision of art that might help us understand in a deeper way what it means to be an artist and, more specifically, what it might mean to be a ‘Catholic artist’.
We do find ourselves in a strange place when it comes to faith and art. Many of the cultural giants responsible for the distribution of art—whether we think of Disney, Hollywood, perhaps traditional publishing, and even the Church—have lost their footing in the cultural imagination. New spaces for distribution are opening up, and especially within the Church, creative minds are coming together to rethink what art is and how something like ‘the Catholic imagination’ influences our art. We’re not exactly at a loss for inspiration, either: the Church has commissioned some of the world’s finest artists and artworks, earning the justifiable honour of being ‘patron of the arts’ through the ages. A lot of people are wondering how we might rediscover that aspect of the Church’s vocation. What would a Catholic culture look like today that had a commitment to the arts embedded within it?
It’s an important question, though not without its dangers. Sometimes our definitions of what ‘Catholic art’ is or should be are excessively narrow, with little room to manoeuvre for artforms that are perfectly legitimate but not expressly ‘evangelical’ or ‘Catholic’ in purpose. In fact, tying art and evangelism together at all can be dangerous when not done right.
Even as far back as 1944, the great English playwright and novelist Dorothy L Sayers warned against reducing art to a weapon in our cultural battles. In an essay reflecting on Christianity and the arts, she wrote:
We see the arts degenerating into mere entertainment that corrupts and relaxes our civilisation, and we try in alarm to correct this by demanding a more moralising and bracing kind of art. But this is only setting up one idol in place of the other … Little children, keep yourself from idols.
Even then, she was concerned with the rise of bad ‘Christian art’ that was merely a ‘reaction’ to cultural and artistic degradation. For such art, the most important thing is the message it conveys, the morals it promotes, and not the excellence of the work itself. There is a temptation to think that such art is more virtuous simply because it is made by Christians.
But for Sayers, commitment to her craft always came first—and not because she didn’t care about her faith or thought that it didn’t influence her work. On the contrary: for Sayers, her commitment to excellence was an expression of her belief that excellence in art, at a fundamental level, reveals and glorifies God, and bad art cannot.
In response to criticism from Christians and atheists alike of her 12-part radio play about Christ, The Man Born To Be King, she wrote:
It was assumed that my object in writing was ‘to do good’. But that was in fact not my object at all, though it was quite properly the object of those who commissioned the plays in the first place. My object was to tell that story to the best of my ability, within the medium at my disposal—in short, to make as good a work of art as I could. For a work of art that is not good and true in art is not true and good in any other respect … Let me tell you, good Christian people, an honest writer would be ashamed to treat a nursery tale as you have treated the greatest drama in history: and this in virtue, not of his faith, but of his calling.
In an interesting way, throughout her reflections on the subject, Sayers often harkens back to an older, and more spacious, understanding of art than we have today.
Throughout much of history, the term art was not understood to signify an object. When we think of art, we might think of a specific class or category of thing, something we can point to or look at (or house in a museum). But traditionally—and we hear this in the medieval scholastics—art was something we do. In fact, for St Thomas Aquinas, art was a kind of virtue: ‘right reason about things to be made’. In what might be a scathing rebuke to the kinds of Christian artists Sayers was responding to, Aquinas goes so far as to say that the only criterion by which an artist should be judged is the quality of what they make—not their will (the effort or intentions that go into it).
But the point is that art was about the making of things, or the fitting of things together. So we can rightly talk about art in a more spacious sense: we can talk about the art of storytelling or cinema or painting or sculpting, yes, but we can also talk about the art of politics, justice and negotiation; of teaching or cooking or parenting, or anything else that demands the making of things in this world.
The only thing we need to consider is whether what we are making is worthy of being made: whether it is good, or noble, in itself.
This may also be what the Catechism means when it says that art ‘is not an end in itself’ (§2501), a phrase that I struggled to piece together for some time. Isn’t art valuable in and of itself? But after discovering this older vision of art as a practice and a virtue, I realised that I was thinking about art backwards: of course art is not an end in itself. The end of art, its purpose, is always the thing to be made—the ‘work’ of art that results from the process.
This is wonderfully liberating for a ‘Catholic artist’. It means that instead of cramming our art form or work into a narrow vision of what we believe ‘Catholic art’ should be, we can realise that ‘Catholic art’ does not look like any one type of thing—it’s not a ‘thing’ or object at all. It means that the mother struggling to keep her home in order (despite the toddler-sized bundles of chaos determined to undo every inch of progress made) is no less exercising her call as an artist than the carpenter or the writer or the painter or the accountant.
It means that to be a Catholic artist is simply to be a Catholic who respects the integrity of their craft, who seeks, above all, excellence in their craft, whatever it is, so that when and if they are called upon to treat something religious (which is obviously a great thing to do), they can actually do it justice.
In one of her more bracing treatments of art and faith (an essay called ‘Why work?’ published in 1947), Dorothy Sayers argued that the Church needs to care, and care deeply, about the art—the work—of its people. If we allow art and work to become a separate departments from religion, then the large majority of the world’s workers will become uninterested in religion (something she already noted as happening back then).
To highlight her point, she wrote:
The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.
Church by all means and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very centre of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? … Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade—not outside it.
To be an artist is human. It is baked into our humanity, part of our vocation of being ‘co-creators’ with God, and we exercise this calling in a variety of ways. Whatever our craft, may we pursue excellence first. May truth, goodness and beauty be found in the way we create—the exercise of our art—and not just what we create.
This is an edited version of a talk given at the ‘Evening for Artists’, hosted by the Benedetto Creatives Collective, on Wednesday 7 August.