Art = Inquiry into Truth
Art = Delight and even Entertainment, too. But above all it is a Quest.
We should think about art as a way of approaching, of inquiring into, TRUTH.
Art provides us with a contemplative experience into specifically MORAL GOODNESS.
It is a “VIRTUAL REALITY EXPERIENCE,” where we encounter the truth about ourselves as human beings.
An experience that CLEANSES OUR VISION.
Listen to my entire conversation with Dr. George Harne, president of Christendom College, on the new podcast, CHRISTENDOM CONVERSATIONS. I was honored to be the inaugural guest on this great new show.
Just click the link below:
https://www.christendom.edu/2025/02/07/christendom-college-president-george-a-harne-ph-d-launches-new-podcast/
Our conversation was based upon my book, Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts (Word on Fire Academic, 2024), available here:
https://bookstore.wordonfire.org/products/beauty-and-imitation
To find out more about my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair (Chrism Press, 2023), click here:
Superb conversation. The connection between leisure and liturgical time mentioned towards the end is profoundly right. The receptivity of the artist is both contemplative and a form of play – and the prayerful life of the Church is archetypal in approaching the fount of creativity. The joyful, intense play of the child rapt in wonder before the gift of existence is the same spirit of humility that enables insight and gratitude.
The kind of ultimately trivial formalism one must reject comes from an unserious failure to engage reality. One suspects at least a susceptibility to nihilist inattention, either a refusal of beauty which cannot be commanded or ignorance of its true power and possibility.
Modernity has shaped a technologically sophisticated ethos that nonetheless can coexist with barbarism. There’s hardly anything as crude and stupefying as a purely utilitarian calculus. There are lines from Péguy I like that place the bank book at the antipodes of the gospel. The black magic of disenchantment is its own dulling spell that makes porosity to the infinite depths of being opaque to the jejune or jaded intellect. I tend to think of the early Enlightenment as foolishly proud adolescents, while the post-modern dregs are their cynical epigone.