This saint believed art is necessary. Here’s why

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that, even before humans could read or write, before we lived in cities or invented the wheel, we made art. People would go into caves with pigments of red hematite and black charcoal to draw deer, elk, and bulls. They made hand-prints and traced out the path of the Sun through the sky as a way of remembering their past and preparing for the future.

To me, it’s evidence that from the very beginning God placed a radiant truth into us, a desire to make beauty because beauty is a revelation of the world beyond this one.

Adam and Eve are made in the image of God. We are mirrors of the divine. At least, we are if sin doesn’t smudge the surface too much. Our vocation is to make our souls beautiful and so begin our journey from reflection to reality. This is the Christian pilgrimage, enabled by grace, carried through with moral goodness, understood by the intellect, and shaped by beauty. 

It’s this last virtue – beauty – that isn’t completely appreciated. Sure, we like nice things. We want our homes to look nice, hang art on the walls, decorate, and so on. For special occasions we dress up in our finest outfits. Some parishes invest a lot of resources into beautifying their sacred space with statues and art and architecture, and some liturgies very intentionally seek beauty by using incense, chant, and nice vestments.

We definitely do respond to beauty universally, pretty much all of us love to look at sunsets, listen to music, and take the occasional trip to the art museum, but many people consider beauty a nice extra. Beauty and art are nice to have around but they shouldn’t get in the way of practicality, efficiency, and productivity.

But then, why did those ancient peoples, back when everyday survival was in doubt, put in so much effort to make art? It’s because art is essential.

This is a topic St. Bonaventure explores in his essay On the Tracing Back of the Arts to Theology. He meditates on the nature of art and why we make it. 

“All creatures in this visible world lead the spirit of the contemplative and wise man into the eternal God,” Bonaventure writes.

Everything we can visibly see is God-shaped, and beauty created in time leads us into the timeless. We are “shadows, echoes, and pictures of that first, most powerful, most wise, and most perfect Principle, of that eternal Source, Light, Fullness, of that efficient, exemplary and ordering Art.”

This world is a mirror to Heaven. Beauty is a lingering look at the reflection.

Beauty is all around us - sunsets, mountains, fields in bloom – revealing the hand of God as Artist. It’s only natural that we would try to create beauty of our own by making art.

Bonaventure says there’s even more value in this intentional art-making than in natural beauty because it’s an intentional imitation of God. We create by consulting our memory, dreams, and rational faculties. In doing so, artists bring purpose and meaning to the reflection. They’re trying to create mirrors that reveal the invisible God.

Artists put in the work because they possess motivation, even if they may not always be able to explain why making art is so fulfilling. I, for instance, am often compelled to write. I would write books and essays even if no one else ever read them.

As a priest, after a particularly beautiful and demanding liturgy something important shifts within me, but I can’t explain why or how. It’s the effect of beauty which cannot be explained or defined.

“Every artificer who fashions a work does so that he may derive praise, benefit, or delight therefrom,” writes Bonaventure, “a threefold purpose ... a noble good, a useful good, and an agreeable good.”

In other words, the artist adds value and moral purpose to the universe. Ideally, when finished he can take a step back, see what has been made, and say, “This is good.”

“Enter into yourself, therefore, and observe that your soul ... could not love itself unless it knew itself.”

A consequence of sin is that we don’t really know ourselves. We’re confused about our motivations and have difficulty honestly evaluating our actions. Bonaventure argues that, because of this, we struggle to love ourselves. But God knows us. To obtain a more clear picture of our inner lives, we produce beauty which follows the “footprints” of God through creation to uncover his image. As we come to know God through beauty, we increase our self-knowledge. Art is a kind of knowing. Art is a revelation of love.

In the beginning, God made light. St. John describes this light as the Logos, perfect spiritual knowledge embodied in Christ. We know only what we can see in his light. The divine light assists us to participate in God’s glory as we behold pure goodness and truth.

Seeing the light is not a one time event. We’re always striving to get closer to the source, the radiance of truth moves us. Bonaventure describes the journey of beauty as a ladder on which we climb ever higher.

“To know God through the creature, however, is to be elevated from knowledge of the creature to knowledge of God as by the means of an intermediate ladder. And this is properly the possession of wayfarers.” 

When we make beautiful art or participate in it, we make our own souls beautiful. We see God more clearly, see ourselves more clearly, and are set onto the path of eternal destiny.