(i) Art is an action of the intelligence and thus makes claims about how things are.
(ii) As such, it invites contemplation; that is, it sets out to create something that can be absorbed by intelligence, rather than a tool for use in a project larger than itself.
(iii) Thus the canons for understanding art must relate to the integrity of what is being produced, not to goals extrinsic to this process of labour.
(iv) When art engages the will by its own integrity and inner coherence, we speak of its beauty; but beauty cannot be sought as something in itself, independent of what this work demands.
(v) By engaging us in an unforeseen pattern of coherence or integrity, art uncovers relations and resonances in the field of perception that ‘ordinary’ seeing and experiencing obscure or even deny.
(vi) Thus art in one sense ‘dispossess’ us of our habitual perception and restores to reality a dimension that necessarily escapes our conceptually and our control. It makes the world strange.
(vii) So, finally, it opens up the dimension in which ‘things are more than they are’, ‘give more than they have’. Maritain is circumspect in spelling out the implications of this, but it is pretty clear that what this means is that art necessarily relates in some way to ‘the sacred’, to energies and activities that are wholly outside the scope of representation and instrumental reason.
These are taken from Grace and Necessity by Rowan Williams. Here he is summarising the aesthetics of Jacques Maritain, but later in the book he looks at how a similar approach could be freed from Martain’s Thomistic vocabulary.
Recent Comments