Studying the Sublime

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Is artwork a portal to the divine or an expression of humankind’s innermost creativity? Catholic artist and teacher Hamilton Reed Armstrong explored these questions at an April 15 lecture on “Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder.”

“We have two schools in ancient Greece, starting with Plato, and Plato looks at beauty as existing as a triad with the good and the true, [as the] essence of God himself—transcendental,” he explained. In Platonic philosophy “God is beautiful, God is true…God is good and it is totally apart from the existing order.” This later became known as idealism.

“For Aristotle, on the other hand, beauty exists in the here and now and points to the elements of symmetry, harmony, and definiteness—things are what they are,” he said. Thomas Aquinas was later inspired by these Greek philosophers.

“St. Thomas Aquinas, indebted to Plato and Aristotle, placed beauty in both the supernatural and natural orders,” Armstrong wrote for an essay distributed at the event. “Accordingly, Aquinas acknowledges that ‘God is beautiful in himself…and the source of all beauty’…but also lists the attributes of beauty to be found in nature. These are: proportion, clarity, and integrity.”

According to Armstrong, these ideals provided the foundation of the “old world order” prior to the 19th and 20th centuries. He argues that modern art has gotten it “wrong,” abandoning the pursuit of real beauty in order to emphasize the individual, internal perspective of modern artists routinely attempting to break and redefine aesthetic boundaries.

Thus schools host galleries with artwork by Felipe Baeza, who depicts Catholics with crucifixes and rosaries stuck in their rectum and Angels sporting rosaries with male genitalia attached. Or, as happened last April, Yale University became embroiled in a scandal where student Aliza Shvarts claimed that she had regularly artificially inseminated herself and induced miscarriages for a year for her senior art project. (Yale News later reported that an “unnamed official” had tested her artwork and found no real blood in the project, which Shvarts denied).

“Now where does this come from? I would trace it philosophically to Descartes and his… ‘I think therefore I am.’ He’s reversed the tomistic Aristotelian view of ‘I am therefore I can think,’” Armstrong argued. He continued, “If you can put the idea in the mind of the thinker, how about beauty in the mind of the thinker? Descartes didn’t go there—he was not interested in beauty—but Immanuel Kant certainly did.” Kant’s philosophical work was then completed by Georg W. F. Hegel, who defined beauty as “neither an eternal given nor present in nature” but “the procession of the spirit through time as made manifest by individual men of genius in every age,” wrote Armstrong.

“It’s revolutionary! I mean, Picasso is right up there with Marx, Freud, and Darwin in tearing down the old order,” Armstrong asserted.

The connection of Picasso, an abstractionist, to these thinkers may seem questionable to those unfamiliar with early 20th century history. An English professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada provides a clue as to the connection:

“The modernist manifesto remains one of the most predominant but perhaps under-studied genres of 20th century literature. Yet almost every major movement – Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, Imagist, Vorticist, Constructivist, Secessionist, Objectivist and Projectionist—issued a manifesto,” states a Winter 2009 course description by Professor Ira Nadel. The description continues,

“This seminar will examine the rise of the manifesto, its role in shaping modernist literary culture and the impact of its ideologically inflected language on the forms of modernist expression. In other words, how did the manifesto weave together social theory, political acts and literary expression?”

The course reading list blends Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto with works by Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, F.T.Marinetti, Valentine De Saint-Point, G. Apollinair, Tristan Tzara, and Andre Breton.

Richard R. Brettell writes in his book Modern Art, 1951-1929 that “It was in 1924 that the writer Andre Breton (1896-1966) issued the first Surrealist manifesto, not for visual artists, but for writers.”

“He called for a poetics of the unconscious, of the mental world outside the control of reason and social organization,” Brettell wrote, later adding, “That their thinking stems logically from Freud is worth knowing, as is the pre-eminence in Surrealist practice given to the word and literature.”

Armstrong maintains that modern art schools “corrupt” art students. He said he has a hard time figuring out where to send promising artists, “…because if you go to the art schools you’re going to get corrupted. You’re gonna do your base course in figurative drawing and then you’re going to get all sorts of courses on Zen, you’re going to get [Carl] Jung, you’re gonna get feminist ideology, you’re gonna get a whole package of things that are attacking the western Christian tradition if you go out there to an art school.”

“I wouldn’t even send a student to Dallas,” he later said. “I don’t think their art department is correct. Notre Dame? Uh, uh. Catholic University? Uh, uh.”

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.