Creating Art means affirming Truth—who I am and what I am called to do. It’s a process of truly knowing what’s real and what’s fake.
Teach me Your Way O Lord, That I may walk in Your Truth.
Psalm 86:11
What is Art?
People think that art is ‘subjective’; that it’s just about one’s ‘relative’ experiences shot up with some paint on a canvas or rattled off on a computer screen. But I don’t believe that’s what art is.
In the book What is Art?, Leo Tolstoy gives a poignant definition of what art is that I will attempt to paraphrase simply: that art is a dance between the artist and God Himself. And that process of dancing with God—of wrestling, of creating, of iterating—is by that fact an affirmation of Truth, for God is Truth.
Tolkien had a lovely term for this: ‘sub-creating with God’. Art requires this dance with God simply because we are not self-created, and the ‘stuff’ of our art is not self-created. God created us, and everything that makes us up as humans, and the stuff of the natural world we use as material for our art. God is therefore presupposed not only in every work of Art, but in every experience, and every form of matter we use to create.
Art as Logos
But we can go deeper. In a previous post, I wrote about Christ the Eternal Tao—Christ the Logos. Christ is known as the Word of God who created the world. Christ is the Logos of God the Father. As such, Christ is the Principle, the Order, the underlying Logic of all that is. Therefore, everything presupposes Him. He is Being Himself, and therefore the necessary condition for the possibility of life at all.
This is also where we get order and purpose from. The Logos of the Father set the world in order out of chaos—brought light to darkness, separated the firmament from the waters, established the laws of nature. And created humans in His image and likeness. That means that we are beings who bring order to things, who create things, who seek purpose in what we are doing. It’s not an accident. We didn’t evolve into this through a process of ‘natural selection’. We were created this way.
Art is an ordering of materials for a particular purpose or objective that transcends the materials themselves. There is a higher order that the work of art points to. In sacred works of art, there is the power to lift our gaze to what is true and real; to ascertain a reality that lies beyond ourselves, and participate in it.
Unity, wholeness, completion, order—all ways we create and mimic the Creator. And all ways we affirm what is true.
What is Truth?
Truth for us is not a system of thought. Truth is not created. Truth is a person. Truth is not limited to our apprehension of it. Truth transcends us; we can never come to the full comprehension of Truth. The search for Truth is the search for the Person of Christ.
Truth is the Mystery of the Person of Christ; and, because it is a person, the Mystery is inseparably linked with the event: the event of the encounter. Mystery and event are one.
The Mystery for the Orthodox mind is precise and austere reality. It is Christ and it is to meet Christ.
—Mother Maria of Normanby
Thus as artists we ought to become seekers of Truth, and lovers of Truth. But of course this isn’t just for artists. Look again at St Porphyrios’s beautiful suggestion: that Christians ought to live poetically, i.e. acknowledge and affirm what is beautiful.
The dance therefore is encountering Christ Himself.
What is Real and What is Fake
One prayer we can say often is O Lord show me what is real and what is fake; what is true and what is false. Indeed, back to Merton and the false self. Artists are always seeking authenticity. What better form of authenticity than to grow deeper in your understanding of who you are and why you are created? And then to create from that place of belonging, of identity, of love.
Where we go wrong—whether as artists or not—is putting what we do before who we are. We saw this with Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved sermon. That when we make our life about what we do, what we have, and what people say about us, then we are up and down like a yo-yo. But if we live our lives from the place of who we are, what we have been created for (i.e., to love and be in love with God our creator, and to love everyone and all creation), then it doesn’t matter what life brings us (whether we sell a lot of art or not, whether people call us brilliant artists or not, whether we make a lot of money with our art or not) we will be living from a place of belonging and authenticity.
Back to the Basics …
That is, art is created when we understand the truth of who we are and the One who created us.
What are we created as?
Children of God.
What is our objective?
Loving union with God and all creation, and to become more like Christ.
Living in Truth who is Christ is for everyone.
But for those seeking to create, affirming Truth is the only way to go.
This is where someone like Solzhenitsyn can say that to live courageously, and to create courageously, is simply not to give in to the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. When we are growing in our affirmation of the Truth, we cannot affirm lies. We cannot live in chicanery and falsity. And we cannot create shallow nonsense designed to simply appeal to the baser parts of the soul. The love of Truth, the pursuit of Truth, the affirmation of Truth in our works of art will align us to what is beautiful and good, because goodness and beauty simply are.
Sometimes Doing Art is not Producing Art at All
And it may mean not producing art at all.
Sometimes He wants us to publish other books and promote those that people like better than our own. Sometimes He wants us to put writing away for a while and live with a fuller awareness. The point of it is that we are not ‘writers and artists’. Both of these monikers can be seriously damaging. How many people pursue art to be called that one thing: artist.
Some people go far as to say that their ‘calling’ is to be an artist. But what happens then when you’re down on your luck, when you’re blocked, when a work you’ve done totally bombs and no one cares to even look at it? Are you failing at your calling? Where’s your identity now? …
The Artist’s Way talks about how damaging that can be when people hang their identities on what they do or produce.
Back to Identity …
Back to identity:
Son of God.
Back to calling:
To become like Christ, to become like God.
Back to destiny:
Inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven, and reign with our Lord and all the saints and martyrs and heavenly hosts.
All the rest is simply documentation …
Writing, painting, filming, photographing, telling, pointing to all that we see …
