Even a work of abstraction, such as a painting by Jackson Pollock, or a symphony by Beethoven, can be understood as an attempt to give expression to some aspect of reality as it is experienced, consciously or unconsciously, by the human person.
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For to say that a work of art has ‘verisimilitude’ is not the same as saying it is ‘realistic,’ but rather that the artist’s vision for the work has been integrated with the execution, and that both the vision and the execution are characterized by a certain level of sophistication. All art is ‘realistic’ insofar as all art is concerned with reality.
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Even in architecture, where utility is a primary motivation, and perhaps even a necessary constraint, an artist will invest the design so thoroughly with the shape of their imagination that even the most mundane elements of the structure will be brought into harmony with whatever vision that person has conceived for the work’s symbolic value. Think of that house known as Fallingwater, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, in the woods of Pennsylvania, and you will know what I mean.
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I mention this now, in the context of utility, because the ‘starving artist’ exemplifies the fact that utility does not enter into the calculations of an artist, at least not in relation to the conception and execution of their work. The measure of the success of their work is not currency, or popularity, or any other form of return, but verisimilitude.
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The ‘starving artist,’ as a figure, does not starve merely because their work does not sell, so that they do not have enough to eat, although that might happen to be the case, but because some special ardor for truth, which can only be satisfied through a mode of expression that is at once personal and impersonal, and that we have given the name ‘art,’ has afflicted them so thoroughly that, were it to manifest physically, it would lend to their appearance, wherever they might be encountered, the wideness of eye and hollowness of cheek that we associate with the need for sustenance.
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This is true because art has no utility, or rather needs no utility in order to be art. Certainly most works of art do have utility, of a personal or even a practical nature, but I would describe that effect as incidental. Art depends only on its own internal order — its own sublimity, as a witness or a testimony to reality — for the validity or fitness of its name.
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The Mona Lisa, for example, is no less a painting for the fact that so many people know of it and would be happy to take a selfie beside it. Yet it would still be a masterpiece were it not in a museum, but was hidden away in someone’s attic, unseen.
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Which isn’t to say that any work that is known, and is lauded, never succeeds in expressing the mysterious, or the ineffable, for certainly some do. If this wasn’t the case, I doubt we’d have the term canonical, which can be used to describe a work that is both well-known and sublime.
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I’d rather that my work be ignored and unnoticed, or noticed but not remarked on, or remarked on but misunderstood (willfully or by mistake), and yet contain in its expression some of the mystery and ineffability that is essential to art, and that, when absent from a work that poses as art, will summon itself, like a memory or a ghost, to the mind of an audience that has encountered that work, so that they are conscious, as they come away from it (provided they are attentive or engaged), of some way that the work has failed to speak to them, though they may be unable to say what that way is, and may even be glad for the distraction or amusement the encounter has provided them, than to produce work that is known and is lauded, but has nothing of mystery or the ineffable in it.
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Most people who live long enough to lose whatever charms might have belonged to them in their youth, so that they no longer have the power to effectuate some end by way of attributes that arrived to them through the accident of their birth, and that had a softening influence on their relationships and interactions, winning them the sort of attentions and loyalties that, while false, nevertheless gave them pleasure, and carried them up the social ladder, seem, by middle age, once they’ve recognized that they are just another mortal whose passions and egotisms have led them to overestimate their own allure and worth, and to ignore or undervalue others (or to value others for the wrong reasons), to want to ease themselves into a warm bath, and never be disturbed, rather than to bear reality in all its indifference, and to square themselves with the fact that one’s existence, in the absence of flatteries and consolations, is, despite its impoverishment, where the soul finds the battles for which it has been made, and through which it can achieve, even in this life, a condition resembling peace.
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The psychiatrist Carl Jung understood this too, which is why he described the integrity of the person as depending on one’s willingness to seek out, and incorporate into one’s identity, not only the ‘light’ parts of one’s self, but also the ‘darkness,’ which he called the ‘shadow,’ the tendencies of which, in most people, seem to be suppressed by the conscious mind, which feels such an obligation to the civilizing effects of society that any of its darker, more instinctive, less rational impulses are discouraged from manifesting, and thus are relegated to the subconscious, where, if they have no outlet, and no means of expression, they can develop into neuroses, which are not so uncommon as one might think, though even if they don’t do this (develop into neuroses) the failure to integrate them can still prevent the expansion of personality that individuals must undergo if they want to actualize.
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The significance of which should not be overlooked, for what it means is that good and evil do not inhabit an equal and opposite relationship, wherein they might be seen as involved in an eternal struggle, or a cyclical dynamic that could resemble, outwardly, the Chinese concept of Yin-Yang, but that ‘good,’ in the substantiative sense, is all there is, and that evil, while it can influence us, is empty, vacuous, a negation of any sort of vitality, and that it effectuates itself only through deceit and falsity, and through a perversion of what has been made, or brought into being, by way of the ‘good,’ even though it itself was formerly of the ‘good’ (in its original angelic state). Which isn’t to say that Christian theology contradicts the wisdom of the Yin-Yang, or that they are mutually exclusive, for in fact they are compatible, since the duality of that concept, most often described as ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ (and symbolized by the circle with the intertwining shapes) has never suggested a dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ but has always expressed ‘goodness’ alone, in all its variety, wherein ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ are merely different facets of creation, materialized from the void.
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My point being that sanctity is, first of all, a spiritual constant that does not measure itself against what humankind might say is ‘good,’ even if at times the two might coincide, and, second of all, that, unlike evil, it finds its source not in the order of created things, but in the wellspring of divine love that is, in fact, the Holy Spirit, and thus is part of the uncreated or eternal order.
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But, yes…like Nietzsche, who sought the value of life not in a supernatural view of it, but through a perspective that would not permit any assumptions that were not apparent evidentially, or phenomenologically, a true Christian is one whose faith does not allow them to settle into the sort of automation of conduct and of thought to which many religious persons unintentionally give way, and that many irreligious persons (who believe they understand what religion is and is not) erroneously assume is the natural expression of faith.
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Which I do not mean as a disparagement of churchgoing, for that can be one of the most direct paths to sanctity, by way of a humility that does not reside in an absence of thought, or rationality, nor in a devaluing of one’s gifts, but in an awareness of one’s position in relation to God; so that I mention it only because it is an activity that, due to its repetitiveness, which is essential to its sacramental nature, is susceptible to the corrupting influence of habit.
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This is where a true Christian can find themself in the strange position of feeling as though they share more in common with Nietzsche than with, say, some pious old churchgoer who, while well-intentioned, has become so set in their ways, and so complacent in their perceptions and interpretations, that their faith has more or less atrophied, and become useless, and could be detached from their identity with the ease that a desiccated branch can be broken off a dead tree.
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Sanctity of this kind reaches its fullest expression in the person of Christ, which is to be expected, insofar as the life of every Christian saint, or sanctified person, is lived in imitation of Christ, who was so conformed to the reality of each moment that even when he revealed himself emotionally, or allowed himself to be possessed of a sincere emotional response, he must always have seemed to be in harmony with his circumstances, and proportionate in his reaction to them. But if one looks at Christ through the lens of conventional morality, which is to say a lens that attempts to gauge his ministry in terms of ‘goodness’ or ‘rightness,’ as a human of a particular time and place would define those things, one will find one’s self perplexed as often as not. For even though a reader of the gospels can sense, in those accounts of him, his tenderness and mercy, which tend to align themselves with conceptions of the ‘good’ as it is handed down through the ages, in a continuum of received morality, that same reader will also sense an indifference to, and sometimes even a hostility toward, the manners and customs and other forms of acceptable ‘goodness’ that civilized man, through a habituation that borders on acedia, or spiritual laziness, can, over time, and often without knowing it, substitute for true ‘goodness,’ which is always vital, and which often seems confrontational, and at odds with polite society, for its lack of regard for standards of conduct (with which people grow comfortable) whenever those standards are offered as an end in themselves, or when they become a distraction from actual holiness.
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Which isn’t to say that a sanctified person themself is always ‘at rest,’ but that they can seem to be, because of the way they carry themselves. For the Holy Spirit, when it makes its domicile inside a person, by way of that person’s openness to it, distributes its gifts to that person, so that even when the person finds it necessary to act (which they do in instances where injustice appeals to their conscience, and compels them) they will exhibit a calmness or poise that is a consequence of the fact that they have no personal interest in the outcome of the event that is transpiring, but feel something more like a sense of duty. Which is not as tedious as it might sound, for duty here arises from an abandonment of the self to the behests of divine love.
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For what is really meant by ‘goodness’ here is sanctity, and sanctity, in a person, is measured by the degree to which that person conforms themself, from moment to moment, to reality as it is, rather than as it could be when it is shaped toward their interests or desires. The reason that sanctity works this way, when it appears in the individual, is because it partakes of the same substance as sanctity in the cosmic or supernatural sense, the essence of which, I think, is a sort of happy inaction that I can only describe as arising out of the confidence and security that belong to the conditions of divine love (or the force we know as the Holy Spirit) when it is at rest.
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This conception of the difference between good and evil, and the consequences that follow from it, can be useful, I think, in distinguishing a Christian viewpoint on the matter from that of other religions and philosophies, but also in clarifying what it means to be ‘good,’ insofar as our notion of ‘goodness’ has been diluted, and watered down, not only in popular culture (where the word has become so sentimental and relative that it is almost meaningless) but also among Christians who have lost their grasp of theology, or who have never been taught its complexity.