Art and Scholasticism #3

Check out parts 1 and 2

Oooh!

First of all, before I forget, I bought Art & Scholasticism from Cluny Media— definitely support those guys if you get a chance. I think they’re relatively new, family-owned nerdy lil operation. Beautiful, good Catholic books. With a ton of Sigrid Undset titles I had never heard of.

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, so, we’re on Chapter III. I wasn’t actually planning on going through every chapter, I really just want to talk about Chapter IV, BUT when I try to jump ahead, something from the chapter I’m trying to skip distracts me.

SO, CHAPTER III Making and Action

Okay, see? Already the first line is something I want to note.

“The Mind as a faculty is a complete self-subsisting whole, but it goes to work very differently according as it has knowledge for the sake of knowing or for the sake of doing.”

Basically, the mind is it’s own thing, but it works differently depending on if it’s trying to know something or do something.

The Mind-as-Knowing is fulfilled ultimately in the Beatific Vision- the knowing and loving of God face-to-face. It’s tied over for now by things like philosophy and theology and knowing stuff just because it is good to know stuff.

USUALLY, though, the mind is in Mind-as-Doing mode- it works to reason practically, figure out how to get from A to B, how to most rationally use the means I have to get to the end I want.

So we have Mind-Knowing and Mind-Doing – same thing, in different modes or orientations. [I use the word “mode” in my 90s kid context of video games… turbo mode, DK mode, etc. Haven’t thought much how that relates to the traditional academic philosophical use of the word…]

Mind-Doing is then further divided into Action Mode and Making Mode.

The Mind in Action Mode is focused on how to use Free Will to get to the good it desires. My Will is naturally oriented to some thing that is good-for-me, that fulfills some appetite or desire or love. Ideally, it’s all ultimately ordered to The Good (God). As Maritain explains, a freely willed action “is good if it conforms to the law governing all human acts and the true end of human life.” And if a man freely acts in conformity with the law, he is “himself good, purely and simply.” [‘the law’ is, of course, God’s law, revealed in Christ, Who emphasized the necessity of the interior actions of the heart to be in conformity with the law. Just to clarify that obviously a guy who does good stuff on the surface isn’t necessarily “good, purely and simply”].

SO, the Will is oriented to man’s good, and the mind turns that Will to actions that fulfill some desire/love for the good of man. THUS my favorite Augustine quote of all time:

Love God and do what you will.

We have a weird, mechanical kind of view of the will as some kind of tool we pick up and point at something, but really, according to Augustine anyway, it’s more of a disposition, determined by the sorts of things that you love. So when you will something, it’s an overflow or consequence of your love. That’s vaguely what I remember from my Auggie class at CUA anyway, based on a book by one of my early Ave days professor, Sarah Byers. If you have an extra $80 lying around, Byers is brilliant and it’s a very good book.

Anyway. The Mind in Action Mode is going to be operating in the world of Morality– the right and wrong use of the will. This is where everyone’s favorite virtue, Prudence, comes in. Maritain calls it “a virtue of practical intellect which keeps Action straight.”

Prudence keeps Action straight. I love that definition. Simple and handy.

Okay, so NOW we can get to Mind in Making Mode, which, you might guess, has more to do with Art, the supposed subject of these posts and this book.

While Action deals with what we do with our freedom, Making is judged by the thing or work itself. 

Action was good or bad based on if it conformed to the rules of human conduct, whether it led to or away from the Good. Making, on the other hand, is good or bad based on the good or perfection of the thing made.

Art, therefore, keeping Making straight and not Action, remains outside the line of human conduct, with an end, rules, values, which are not those of man, but of the work to be produced. That work is everything for art– one law only governs it– the exigencies and the good of the work.

Does this mean a 3D printer is as good an artist as Michelangelo? Ew, gross, no. Don’t even say that. Maritain also says

“if art is not human in the end which it pursues, it is human, essentially human, in its method of working. It involves the making of a man’s work, stamped with the character of man: animal rationale.

The work of art has been pondered before being made, has been kneaded and prepared, formed, brooded over, and matured in mind before emerging into matter. And there it will always retain the colour and the savour of the spirit.

Think about that in relation to God as Creator Artist…

Final note, which is the whole point of the chapter and one of his main things of the book, Maritain goes on to say that the work to be done is the matter, and undeviating reason is the form of art. If reason is off, the art will be off. The whole thing, while outside of human action and morality, is still directed by the mind, (which, of course, has to be in conformity with Truth to be worth anything).

So the modern BS of random self-expression on one hand, and gross political statement on the other, is stupid and dumb. Art is practical but outside the action/political realm, and is oriented to the objective thing made, not the maker, while still guided by that maker’s rational mind.

This reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s “there’s no such thing as an immoral book” line – this was the point he was getting at. If a book is well-written it is “good” even if the subject matter is toxic and evil; a book is “bad” if poorly written, even if the subject matter is saintly. It’s an entirely unrelated (to art) question of whether or not this book is good-to-read or not. The Picture of Dorian Gray is very good to read, in my opinion, while the book within that book that corrupts the main character is, at least in the main character’s case, not good to read. That is a matter of prudence and Action Mode, though, not art itself.

That’s how Kendrick Lamar can have “good” music that you probably shouldn’t listen to, or at least shouldn’t blast at full volume going through a quiet neighborhood of impressionable youth.

Welp, I’ll end it there for today. Next time will finally be Chapter IV: Art: An Intellectual Virtue

p.s. Seriously, just look at these books

p.p.s. side note: philosophy and grammarly/spell check don’t get along. Yes, AI robot, that’s what I meant to write, leave me alone, you don’t really understand anything. Oh, and thanks for catching that I wrote butt instead of but, that was actually pretty helpful]

 

 

Art & Scholasticism, Scholasticism & Art Part One

As mentioned in the last post, this early work of Maritain is a rejection of the silly Romantic views of Art and the Artist which have come to the modern world via the Renaissance and Enlightenment, namely that art is “self-expression” and the artist is a wild demi-god among men, and art is completely subjective and merely a vehicle for some contrived political message. The truth is much more humble, as Jacques will explain.

[Sidenote: kind of funny to hear a refutation of Romanticism from a guy who literally had a suicide pact with his wife (Raissa) — if they didn’t find the meaning of life within a year, there would be nothing left but to end it all. Luckily, they found the Church, entered it, and determined a better direction for their intensity.]

So, Chapter I.

Herein, Maritain basically explains his 20th century Thomist mission: go back to Thomas and the Schoolmen [ha, band name] and, from the questions they did directly address, and from all the implications, logical consequences, definitions, exceptions, etc., piece together what their answer to other questions would have been. For the Scholastics, Maritain says, were primarily absorbed by the demands of teaching, they didn’t have time or good reasons to wonder about stuff outside of their syllabi and lesson plans.

So it happens that the Scholastics argued a lot about Art in general, which included things like shipbuilding, and they of course talked about Beauty, but the Fine Arts as a distinct, beauty-oriented thing to work out and debate wasn’t really on their radar. But they talked about a lot of stuff that’s relevant to the discussion; the Scholastics were so good, they answered questions they hadn’t even thought of yet.

Here, one could say, “well dammit, if it’s not in the Summa, I don’t need to know about it!” 

Wellll, Thomas Aquinas thinks that’s dumb, so we’re not going to do that.

PRUDENCE, that virtue that judges how best to realize the ideal in particular circumstances, here and now, is kind of the key thing here, I think (which Maritain talks a lot about a couple chapters later).  I imagine if you told Thomas that you were going to mostly dismiss questions of your time because he didn’t happen to think of them first and give you an outline of how to address them, or they just don’t quite fit into the Scholastic framework, he would be pretty annoyed.

Or, more likely, he’d laugh a jolly Lewis-Chestertonian heavenly laugh and remind you that it’s all straw anyway- Love God and do what you will, says Augustine!

True, you could do much, much worse than only reading St. Thomas. But still.

Anyway, getting off track; I really just wanted to point out that in Chapter I Jacques talks about the “neo”-Thomist [he would prefer plain ol’ Thomist] way of running scholastics’ genius insights through the circumstances and difficulties of the situation today, [again, sounds like prudence…] and getting even more of their genius insights.

JM ends the chapter saying:

 [he hopes] that, despite their inadequacy, these observations apropos of and concerning the maxims of the Schools will draw attention to the utility of having recourse to the wisdom of Antiquity, as also to the possible interest of an exchange of views between philosophers and artists, at a time when the necessity of escaping from the vast intellectual confusion bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century and finding once more the spiritual conditions of work which shall be honest is everywhere felt.

Friggin 19th century.

That confusion, like a lot of confusions, comes down to a lack of proper context. “Art” in a world where nothing is transcendent and Beauty is subjective and meaningless, is going to be pretty messed up. A return to scholastic ideas brings back the proper context and orientation [i.e., God], enabling us to make some sense of things. So says Maritain.

I have some notes ready to go on the also very short chapter 2, but it shifts into totally different thought and this seems like enough for a late Saturday night and a dying laptop.

This post brought to you by:
~a lot of time in the sun- shine                                                                                    ~Winehaven Stinger Mead

p.s. I am hoping to fix up the layout and stuff around here soon. I just went with what I had while I was inspired before I got distracted away again.