Art & Monasticism
The Contemplative View of Literature
So, what are a bunch of nuns doing commenting on literature anyway? A valid question, and one that obviously underpins the whole of our enterprise here at The Nuns’ Nook. Shouldn’t we be focused on something a little more spiritual? Also, shouldn’t literature be praised for its artistic merits and not forced through the lens of the spiritual life, or worse, a trite moralism?
In his 1920 collection of essays Art & Scholasticism, the eminent twentieth century Thomist Jacques Maritain confirmed St. Thomas Aquinas’s conclusion that ‘the arts’ – even the fine arts like literature and music - were the purview of the practical intellect, and therefore free from moral judgment per se. What he meant by this, of course, is not that the artist is free of moral boundaries himself, but that his work should be judged on the grounds of its conformity to the rules of art rather than the rules of morality. Flannery O’Connor – the author of a fair number of brilliant but disturbing short stories – found this conclusion rather comforting, especially in light of her tendency to criticize much of what passed for Catholic Literature at the time.
But what does it mean for the contemplative?
As a person consecrated to the contemplation of Eternal Things, can the contemplative rightly turn her attention to something so fundamentally practical as the arts? If the judgment of art is based upon a set of practical rules, is it not beneath the notice of the contemplative, who has sworn to leave such things behind to focus on the One Thing Necessary?
Of course, the question isn’t quite so simple.
Many intuit the natural connection between the arts and Higher Things, and while the quality of a work may be judged by the rules of its execution, the content can hardly be considered irrelevant in the calculation. One of the clearest ways I have found to express this reality appeared during a class discussion on the Theology of the Spiritual Life in which one sister argued that the quality of Jack Kerouac’s books could not be judged by his personal holiness – with which I heartily agreed – but what if Jack Kerouac had been a saint as well as an artist?
Wouldn’t his books have been better?
The fact is that the arts may be practical in their mode, but their essence – especially that of the fine arts – touches very closely on the ultimate realities of the True and the Good. “Beauty and Goodness in a thing,” says St. Thomas Aquinas in the Prima Pars of his Summa Theologiae, “are identical fundamentally…”[1] In contemporary culture, we distinguish beauty from goodness. Something can be good and ugly. Something can also be beautiful and evil. We note that these two things can be separated – and the reason for this is elucidated more clearly in the same Summa article if you read on. But if we look closely, this separation is real only in so far as we hollow out beauty’s definition to the barest meaning of the words “beautiful things are those which please when seen”[2], and judge the ‘goodness’ of a thing according to our own subjective set of rules rather than according to the rules of its Creator. Like Ariel in The Little Mermaid, we may judge a bent fork to be an excellent ‘dinglehopper’, but the original inventor of the fork would still call it a faulty fork.
Here, immediately, the contemplative sneaks in as being peculiarly interested in the discussion. The profoundest beauties are those which are most completely good, and the most complete goods are those that conform most closely to their Maker’s intention. Similarly, those things that are truly beautiful, and therefore truly good, are singularly powerful manifestations of those Divine Intentions. As women consecrated to the pursuit of the Face of this Maker, aren’t sensible manifestations of His Divine Intentions to be cherished, examined, and deeply understood? In The Mind of the Maker, English author Dorothy L. Sayers certainly thought so, using the creative mind and its works as the springboard for some fantastic insights into the Trinity. More than that, though, isn’t the way that beauty strikes us to the heart a particularly powerful manifestation of His Face?
There is something about art that captivates us and touches us in a unified experience of the whole of a thing – something which is seldom achieved by breaking a thing down to understand its constituent parts. This experiential knowledge gives us a truer kind of knowledge than understanding on its own.
Now, don’t get us wrong.
As Dominicans we believe that clarity is the pinnacle of knowledge – we’re hardly advocating a vague feeling of ‘connection’, or some equally spurious idea that to nail something down clearly is to deform it. What we are saying, however, is what St. Thomas Aquinas himself meant when he alluded to his own work as being “so much straw” in comparison with his experience of the Real Thing in His Fullness through prayer. He clearly did not think his life’s work was a waste of time, but he knew full well that the mystery of God expands and expands into His Infinite Being. Like the Pseudo-Dionysius before him, he knew that God, in His Divine Simplicity and Wholeness, thoroughly overwhelms the senses and the mind in their earthly capacity and that the clarity we ultimately seek can only come to us through the work of grace making us capable of it in Eternity.
The clarity of understanding, then, is only one side of a very precious coin.
The same Jaques Maritain who limited the judgment of art to its practical rules in Art & Scholasticism, also hailed its unique capacity for touching the Infinite in his Creative Intuition in Art & Poetry. He notes that through accessing these creative powers and sharing them with others, we reveal aspects of God’s face that cannot be seen by cool syllogistic reasoning alone, and that this experience is highly important for a well-rounded humility in the face of the Mystery that is God.
If we let it, art can teach us about Heaven.
Of course, not all literature touches these lofty heights. A bad idea is a bad idea, and a book that paints a bad idea in a beautiful light is not only not actually beautiful, but actually damaging to us. This is where the contemplative life is uniquely placed to draw beauty and goodness from literature while rejecting the other. Through immersion in Scripture and the Liturgy, living at the heart of the Church, contemplatives – if we’re paying attention – can grow in a deep knowledge of God and increasingly discerning of all that is of Him, and all that is not. That’s not to say we’re the sole interpreters of these things, or even right all of the time, but it does mean that as contemplatives, we have a unique perspective to share in these reflections, and we hope that through our work here at The Nuns’ Nook, we can bring some of that reflection to all of you. We hope to bring you with us as we seek His Face in the beauties of the written arts, and not only that, but we hope this contemplative view can also offer something unique to your own reading.
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[1] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-I, Q. 5, a. 4, Reply to Objection 1.
[2] Ibid.
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