beauty and final truth

"What Capa's photograph shows is a truth-a common, terrible, and therefore important truth. But again, does this mean the picture is beautiful? Is Truth Beauty and vice versa? The answer, as Keats knew, depends on the truth about which we are talking. For a truth to be beautiful, it must be complete, the full and final Truth. And that, in turn, leads me to a definition of beauty linked unavoidably to belief."
-Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography

I like what he says here: beauty is final truth. Beauty is eschatological truth, what all of nature groans after, the world as it should be, and as it shall be.

"The subject of this anthology is of the greatest importance, not only for the understanding of the art produced in traditional civilizations, but also for understanding of the real nature of human condition and knowledge of what it means to be human. To be truly human is to reflect the Divine Image here on earth. By virtue of being human, man creates and makes, and by remaining faithful to his primordial nature produces traditional art, in the vastest sense of the term. Such an art reflects her on earth the Divine Artist, thus making possible the creation of the forms that lead to the world of the Spirit and the Formless. This understanding of art has been to a large extent forgotten in the modern world as a consequence of modern man's forgetting who he is, why he is here on earth, and where he is going. This anthology is, therefore, not only an exposition of the significance of traditional art, but also the means for rememberence of what it means to be truly human, to be the pontifical man who is the bridge between Heaven and earth and a channel of grace for the world around him."

-Seyyed Hossein Nasr in the Preface to Every Man An Artist: Readings in the Traditional Philosophy of Art

This looks like a goldmine. I'll probably be quoting it here this summer. I like the connection of art to eschatology, which I've talked about in a few posts too.

thoughts on drawing, glory, beauty and God

"When drawing the model, stay present and in utter awe! When he or she takes the stand, it is as if they are a god or goddess presented to us. They represent you and the rest of humanity. Become amazed and stay open to this fantastic occurrence. Your experience with the model is your drawing... Use the idea of having the richest and most stimulating experience drawing the model's humanity while using your very own as the purpose to drawing. All of the technique throughout the rest of this book is to serve that higher purpose."
-Mike Mattesi in Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators

Drawing is seeing is knowing is loving what you see and know and draw. For we are made to know by loving, and one day seeing, the Holy Trinity, in whose image each of us and all of us are made. An image ultimately that, to quote Lewis, "...one might be tempted to worship". From the above quote : "..as if a god or goddess". As David says: "...crowned with glory and honor." For the One (and Three) we present (and re-present) as we face out into the world is crowned with an infinitely greater glory. And the whole world we face and see is also "full of his glory" as the seraphim proclaim.

Learning to draw is learning how to see the world around you. To know that each face you see is an image of God. To be borne down by the heaviness of the weight of glory. To know that speaking, spoken trees and skies are gloriously declaring glory.

And we too are words made by the Word for speaking.
We are works that work: "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." (Ephesians)

We are made things that make things.
We are images that make images.
We are clay that shapes clay.

And yet... perhaps drawing as I described it is not how it is now, but how it was in the old garden at the beginning of the world, and how it will be at the new garden-city at the beginning to the new heavens and new earth.

For all nature's proclamations of glory, she groans (Romans 8) under another weight, the weight of sin, the weight the King of Glory bore for us under a darkened sky on the broken tree of the cross.

"Beauty is there, abroad in the order of things..." as David Bentley Hart wrote, not in the eye of the beholder. In the eye of the beholder is a splinter or perhaps a 2X6. And so we cannot see creation or our fellow images aright. The woman God made beautifully in his image, we lust after. The brother we are given to look after, we kill instead. The glorious creation which tells of God, we mistake for God and worship.

But that is why we must go to the God who heals the blind, and pray "on earth as it is in heaven." For, as sure as the sun rises after darkness, there will come one eternal day when we will see and live with the God who opens eyes with mud and blinds men with his beauty.

Will beauty save the world? Solzhenitsyn on Dostoevsky

"So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through - then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky's remark, "Beauty will save the world", was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?

It is the small insight which, over the years, I have succeeded in gaining into this matter that I shall attempt to lay before you here today."

-Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his 1970 Nobel Prize Lecture

Why have I not read this short piece before?

Aesthetics and Eschatology

"I came across this passage in Norman Davies' epic history, Europe, in a section analyzing the ultimate collapse of European communism. He said: 'Artists and believers were often the only people who could imagine a world without communism.' To the extent that fantasy books paint a picture of a world that is in some way more heroic, more humane, more beautiful and hopeful than this one ... that is something that people really respond to, and I'm all for it. Perhaps the number of people who are willing to wade through a hopeless and depressing book is dwindling."
-Stephen Lawhead in this interveiw

"True art, I suggest, approximates more and more to the vision of the way things are and the way things shall be. We humans know in our bones that we are children of the present creation, which is simultaneously both glorious and shameful, and that we are designed for a fuller creation, a new order, a world flooded with the creator’s glory, full of justice and joy and, yes, beauty. The point of new creation is that it is the redemption and transformation of this present creation, with its shame and horror overcome; that is the way, if I can put it like this, to the reconciliation of Isaiah’s dilemma. And the true point of biblical apocalyptic, as opposed to the distorted and dualistic versions which have been so powerful and prevalent in our day, is that biblical apocalyptic is all about God’s future breaking in to the present, seen in glimpses, known above all in Jesus, and best expressed not in abstract theology or even in preaching but, yes, in genuine and visionary art. Apocalyptic, both in form and in biblical content, is not about the denial of the present creation, but about the overcoming of its sorrows and the realising of its promise. Apocalyptic is the key to understanding, and re-expressing, the beauty of God."

N.T. Wright in Apocalyptic and the Beauty of God, (mp3 here)

This is a sculpture Wright talks about at the end of that lecture, it's called Tree of Life and is made entirely out of "entirely from decommissioned weapons: bits and pieces of old AK47s, bullets and machetes..."
What a great image of swords beaten into pruning hooks!

Edit: From the quotes above, perhaps it's not surprising that Left Behind is aesthetically poor as well as eschatologically poor.

on earth as it is in heaven

"I'm what is called a "post-millenialist," meaning that when Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like leaven working in a lump until the whole lump is leavened, and that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that grows until all the birds of heaven come and nest in its branches, then we are supposed to expect that the world lump will be leavened with the gospel, and that the world birds will find their home in Jesus' kingdom. Jesus said to go and disciple nations, teaching them to obey everything he commanded, and so we can expect that the nations will learn to obey Jesus.

This hasn't happened yet. But I expect it will happen. And I expect it will take a long time. That means that we may now be in the period that will someday be known as the Early Church."
-The next 10,000 years (a blog post by the Presbyteer)

"... it would seem odd if the Lord gave Adam a commission to rule and subdue the earth, sent His Son to die and rise again as the Last Adam to restore humanity to that task, and then ended the whole process after a couple thousand years, just when we were beginning to make a few meager advances in achieving dominion over creation. Humanity – I say it with reverence – would feel more than a little cheated, like a teenager never given a chance to grow up.

Most editions of the Book of Common Prayer has a table for calculating the dates for feast days, and the table can be used up to about the year 6000 AD. I'm with those guys."
-Coming Soon? (Peter Leithart)

"The next thing looks like it will be China, which probably has more Christians now than the U.S. does. And the Chinese don't know from Calvin or Aquinas. They have been insulated and isolated and have grown up with just Jesus and the Bible. Who knows how that will play out.

And then the next thing will be the Muslim world. The West's Christians have been sentimental, revivalistic, and exhibiting an irrepressible genius for the slide into liberal apostasy. Once the Muslim world converts, then the West will look absolutely anemic."

-The next 10,000 years (a blog post by the Presbyteer)