The life of Art is a life of pursuit and struggle; a life spent pursuing and encountering Beauty Himself. The movement is Beauty, Goodness, Truth.
The Beauty of the Logos
Bright 50 calls us to Beauty: to encounter Beauty Himself in the Holy Eucharist, in the people we love and serve around us; and it calls us who are artists to enter deeper into Beauty and spread it out to the world in our work; to spread it as light. It is when our understanding of art is contextualized in this Way, in the Way, that art becomes the Way we become saints.
One of the mistakes of our using the truth-first approach is that this approach belongs properly to Christ. He is the Logos, the Truth, who consents to the Goodness of self-emptying, and thus shines out radiantly as Beauty. for Him, the progression is Truth-Goodness-Beauty.
We ought to respond to this in the reverse: when we behold this Beauty, we are born, and then strive to become Good by accepting to live self-sacrificially, and finally, with time, we manage to become True. We mirror His progression, in other words, which is what marks us as ‘good and faithful servants’. We ascend where He has ascended.
However, when you capture a form in art or architecture, both progressions are happening at once. You are going by your aesthetic feeling in response to the Beautiful Form, are adjusting and adjusting until what you make becomes good in the sense that it is faithfully and honestly bearing every force at work in your painting; if you manage this you will have made a work of art that is true–i.e. that will last forever (Ethics of Beauty, ).
Christ is the Way, the Truth, the Being, the One Who Is. He condescends to become man, and reveals Himself to us as Beaty and Goodness. We model that movement as an ascension. We move towards becoming more and more like Him: We encounter Him as Beauty in the sacraments, in the natural world, in works and acts of Love, and pursue Goodness, and become more and more true; truly alive, truly ourselves.
And in the making of the work of art, this same progression takes place: a struggle for Beauty through iteration until you have something that is good, out of which emerges a work that is true art, that is good and beautiful and true.
But I would also add that we become this work of art; that a work of art is a microcosm of the life of the artist–the artist as one who pursues Beauty, Goodness and Truth in his own life–who is a microcosm of the cosmos and of God Himself.
Patitsas continues on this dual progression of ascension and descension in the making of art …
But while you, the artist, ar making these adjustments guided by your aesthetic sense, at the very same time, from the other direction, the Form, the Truth–Christ–is condescending to shoulder more and more of the forces of chaos to present in the particular artwork you are creation. That is, He is doing more and more Good in that work of art or building. Until when the artist has allowed the Form to be completely Good, the true building or painting at last readily appears, and in it, Christ shines out as the Beautiful.
This is synergy: the energy of God fusing with the struggle of the artist–the struggle of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth in his or her own life; the Eucharistic indwelling of the Uncreated Logos as union with God so that He becomes the creative force in and through the artist–that same life force, that same uncreated energy that is alive in all of creation. This synergistic loving union becomes the act of subcreating with God, and, in turn, God transforming our lives into a work of art.
Patitsas …
So even as the artist proceeds in one direction, he or she is mystically met by Christ, rushing to meet him from the other direction, rewarding the prodigal return.
This is the sacramental life of the artist: loving union with God through our own bankruptcy, the realization of our total futility, indeed our non-existence, our non-being outside of Christ. Our artistic work should be an ontological struggle to meet Christ and allow Him to shape us to become the clay in the hands of God, allowing Him to shape us into the artist that we are; not by our will or our merit, or even our talents, but only by His grace.
The other way, the way of the ego, is death …
But if the artist tries to ‘be creative’ in some false egoistical, ex nihilistic, and truth-first way, or if at the other extreme the artist looks firstly to a pre-existing blue print of Beauty which he intends to impose upon the world, then things won’t turn out so well. Rather, he must be ‘stupidly’ guided by his feelings for Beauty, or the building or painting won’t come alive.
I’ve written about this before, this egoistical way of ‘art’ that seeks to take the place of God and create ex nihilo, which is impossible and absurd. The Way, the Logos, and this following and uniting with the Way is more like a chiasm, “for as God descends, we ascend, in a union that is also an exchange of places”(462). And …
The reality of all this is so beautiful and sublime: it is not by seeking to create a beautiful image but by falling wholly in love with Beauty that we ourselves become Beautiful. In this, what we do and make discloses both God’s and our own Beauty to the world. By forgetting the world and ourselves, we help to save the world–and we ourselves (or our art) become immortal (462).
Thus our true work is to seek and fall in love with Beauty Himself–that’s the direction, that’s the struggle. The rest becomes an outflow of that struggle. For the real work of art is ourselves. But we can’t do it on our own, for apart from Him we do not exist. Instead we must forget ourselves and focus on Him by loving others and loving His creation, and by partaking, eucharistically, His ineffable Beauty.
