John Paul II’s Letter to Artists and the Force of Beauty

Abstract

ONE OF THE MANY remarkable documents of Pope St. John Paul II's pontificate was his 1999 Letter to Artists. It exemplified Pope's practice of engaging world and of encouraging pursuit of various avenues to Divine as part of New Evangelization. Further, it recalled ancient understanding of beauty as integral to spiritual life of man and as a name of God while confirming distinctly modern self-image of Church as unique preserve of West's intellectual and cultural achievements. process of answering many questions about how Church might engage artists and how artists might serve Church, it raised deeper ones that are touched on but not systematically treated. One of those questions is decisive for meaning of Letter and of serious consequence for us today. Namely, if artist has a special spiritual vocation in Church, John Paul says it is to make beautiful things, and beauty of those things must be capable of enthusing its audience and raising it up in service of common good. (1) But, it is far from clear that contemporary artists understand their work to have such an aim as beauty, much less a beauty in service of a shared good, as is it questionable whether most persons in our age can envision artworks as standing outside the search for empty glory or craving for cheap popularity in service of some transcendent end. (2) Has not philosophy of beauty since Kant been only too successful in convincing us that beauty refers only to a certain kind of superficial pleasure, and that art, to extent that it is serious, no longer concerns itself with beauty at all? (3) Rightly or wrongly, common sense of our day may actually anesthetize most persons against experience of art that John Paul views as so important. answer to such a possibility, I would like to examine implications of John Paul's account of artist and to set forth principles that would have to be true if art and beautiful were to play a meaningful role in New Evangelization. I shall then attempt to vindicate truth of those principles with specific reference to ontology of beauty that various writers have extrapolated from theology of Aquinas. John Paul appeals to a venerable but challenging analogy in opening paragraphs of his letter, citing absolute creativity of God as a sign of distinctiveness of artistic work. He writes, Through his 'artistic creativity' man appears more than ever 'in image of God' ... in shaping wondrous 'material' of his own humanity and then exercising creative dominion over universe which surrounds him. (4) The fundamental conception of man as image of God specifically in his identity as an intellectual being endowed with free will is not simply assumed here but is also further specified, taking on a new dimension: we see that man, like God, can cause acts of his intellect and will to bring forth new things that exist apart from themselves. (5) The act of making an artifact puts an objective seal on our otherwise private intellectual natures as image of Divine Mind. To make something also brings about a kind of self-disclosure, a revealing of one being to another that comes through matter but is fundamentally intellectual or spiritual rather than material in nature. (6) This dimension of man's creativity Pope had already explored in regard to work in his early poetry and in social encyclical Laborum Exercens (1981). But, in Letter, Pope emphasizes special attributes of fine artist, writing, In shaping a masterpiece, artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. ... [Thus, through] his works, artist speaks to others and communicates with them. (1) Such language purposefully gives us an immanent conception of what an artist may do. The hypothetical masterpiece would seem to gain its significance, first, through being distinctly itself, and, second, in revealing its maker, and thereby drawing its audience into a closed circuit of communication with artwork and artist. …