THE ARTIST AS HERO by Marion Deckert, Professor of Theology Bethel College In the Greek understanding, the three highest measures of value were the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. In the final analysis all three of these were taken to be objective in character. In the most exalted vision, such as Plato's, it is proposed that all three ultimately have the same foundation. For Plato one arrives at truth by analogy in philosophy and by ratios in mathematics. One arrives at the good by finding the right point between two extremes. Beauty is a matter of grace, harmony, and proportion. The right proportion, the Golden Mean, is equally applicable in arriving at truth, goodness, or beauty. Neither the True, nor the Good, nor the Beautiful depends in any way on the inquirer, all three of these highest categories are built into the nature and being of the universe. Although beauty is given absolute status by Plato, it is well known that he was a sharp critic of the value and status of art and the artist. This is because Plato does not see the artist as one who is dedicated to finding and exhibiting the Beautiful. He rather sees the artist as one who is skilled in making things appear to be real and valuable. In Plato's mind the problem is that the artist can make what is not true and good appear to be true and good. Even more problematic, the artist can make people believe the false and bad to be the true and good. It is this power of the artist that Plato is most concerned with. Plato's ultimate critique is that the measure of the artist's goodness is the ability to bring people to believe things, rather than the ability to find truth or goodness. To be an artist is to possess a skill. This skill can be put to any use. It is not the content of the product that determines the quality of the art, it is its persuasiveness. There is nothing in the skill that requires it to be directed toward the good. Therefore the artist's skill must be controlled by one who knows the good. Carlyle says, "Given your hero, is he to become Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? ... What the world, on this matter, shall permit and bid is ... the most important fact..."1 If Carlyle is correct we can determine the character of a world by its heros. Throughout the classical period Socrates appears most frequently as the quintessential hero. As the classical age gives way to the Christian era one is more likely to be given the saint as hero, whether in the guise of St. Francis or St. Aquinas. As the new world of the renaissance comes into being the scientist makes his appearance as hero. Perhaps it is not too sweeping a generalization to say that these heros all in their own way were seen as discovering or revealing truth and reality. As long as the old Platonic view of art holds it is no surprise that the artist does not appear as a hero. In the renaissance, along side of Galileo and Newton, the tradition of the artist as hero begins to take shape, we have the appearance of Michelangelo and da Vinci. It is instructive to note that in this tradition the artist is seen as the "renaissance man," i.e., the person who is a master of all truth. It is here in this new world that the old Platonic view of the artist as a craftsman is discarded. A new persona takes shape. The artist is viewed as a person who has an alternate route to the truth. In The Ethics of Geometry, David Lachterman sets himself the task of determining the essential nature of modernism. He sets out his thesis as follows: I want to claim that the "idea" giving significant shape to the "constellation" of themes ingredient in modernity ... is the "idea" of construction or, more broadly, the "idea" of the mind as essentially the power of making, fashioning, crafting, producing, in short, the mind as first and last poietic and only secondarily or subsidiarily practical and theoretical.2 This insight is a key to understanding the essence of the world view in our age. For Aristotle, there are three broad areas of intellectual endeavor, the theoretic -- science (including mathematics) and philosophy (including theology), the practical -- ethics and politics, the productive or poetic -- literature and rhetoric. These three areas correspond to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. The practical and the theoretic are routs to knowledge, they discover that which is. The poetic is essentially productive, it constructs or creates rather than discovers. For the ancient world it was assumed without question that the truth is there to be discovered. The sea change that defines modernity is the conviction that the truth is to be constructed. Lachterman quotes Giovanni Vico as having said, "the true and the made are convertible."3 There could be no more profound change in epistemology and ontology than the change from discovering/revealing to constructing/creating. A few examples of the ways in which this change has soaked into the fabric of our culture will serve to underline its importance. ART: Ancient wisdom held that beauty has a universal basis whereas taste is purely individual. The ancients said, de gustibus non est disputandum; one can not dispute about taste, if one likes something, nothing further can be said. Friedrich Schlegel suggested that in art the modern can be marked off from the ancient as a change in principle from the Beautiful to the Interesting. Plato was convinced that being in love with the appearance of beauty was quite different from being in love with Beauty. In Platonic terms we are all inevitably attracted to beauty. To be attracted to the appearance of beauty rather than the Beautiful is precisely to substitute the Interesting for the Beautiful. From Plato's perspective seeking the interesting rather than the beautiful is a disaster. The lovers of sights and sound ... like beautiful sounds and colours and shapes, and all the objects fashioned from them, but their thought is unable to see and welcome the nature of Beauty itself. ... do you not think that his life is a dream rather than a reality?4 The interesting is essentially a category of taste. It does not point to anything universal. The Greeks were awed by Pythagoras' discovery that harmony is ultimately a matter of mathematical proportion. Why should it be that two people with no relation or connection will tune the lyre alike? Why should it be that the sense of harmony is not after all just a matter of taste? The Greeks took this as proof that beauty is not a matter of taste but a characteristic of reality. The interesting, on the other hand, is highly individual. As such it has no bounds. Given the perversity of the human heart most anything can and does become interesting. Modern art is a study of the possible, the new, a study of pure creativity. This exploration of what has not been, has its basis in freedom from prescribed universal categories. Jazz can be said to be the paradigmatic modern art. Every presentation is a happening, a new creation, it is governed only by the interesting. This aspect of unfettered play governed only by the fascination of the moment, the attraction of the sensation, can be seen in dance, painting, architecture, poetry. CRITICISM: Modern literary criticism exhibits the change from discovery to creation. Deconstructionism proclaims that there is no objective meaning in the text, the meaning is to be constructed, to be created. Criticism itself becomes a jazz form. The critic is to create something interesting, something new and surprising out of the text. The critic ceases to be expositor and becomes artist. The critic is the artist of art. This doctrine of constructive meaning is transferred to all texts, all meaning. As such, criticism becomes the new metaphysics. It is the "science" that governs all writing, all pursuit of knowledge. This new "science" is revealed as art. All searchers for truth must become artists -- "the mind as first and last poietic and only secondarily or subsidiarily practical and theoretical." SCIENCE: Science has long been the bastion of objectivity, the locus of truth. In our time this understanding has been changing rapidly. The publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions opened the way for an understanding of science consonant with the modern zeitgeist. Kuhn himself was fairly cautious about seeing science as pure construction of reality. Those who have followed, such as Feyerabend, have discarded any such caution. The popular image of science as discovery of reality is still strong. Nevertheless, the pressure of current theory is beginning to seep downward, and there can be no doubt about the controversy over the objectivity of science among the intellectual class. PHILOSOPHY: It is well known that philosophy in the latter half of the 20th Century has moved toward a kind of philosophical idealism. Classical idealism wanted to say that the only ultimately real things are mental things. Contemporary idealism is more inclined to say that whatever isn't of human creation cannot be known, and in any case is not necessary. Richard Rorty is one of the more articulate spokesmen for this view. Recently he wrote the following: I ... agree with Donald Davidson that it is futile either to reject or accept the idea that the real and the true are "independent of our beliefs."5 I view it as a mark of moral and intellectual progress that we are more and more prepared to judge institutions, traditions, and practices by the good they seem to be doing than by the philosophical and theological beliefs invoked in their defense.6 ... civilization as a whole might outgrow the supposed necessity to believe in absolute truths.7 ... our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else.8 Underlying this general approach is a radical rejection of objective truth and goodness. In place of a method of discovery we have a method of agreement. Ultimately what we agree to must be a pure creation of the human spirit since ex hypothesi it cannot be discovered or revealed. ETHICS: That ethical rules might be relative to the situation is nothing novel. Many who believe in the relativity of morals will appeal either covertly or overtly to a more or less universal principle for deciding what is required in the particular situation. A much more radical relativism claims that morals are specific to individuals. This reduces morality to pure taste. When art is simply a matter of the interesting and morals are a matter of personal choice, aesthetics and ethics are on all fours, both become matters of taste. Goodness like beauty is not to be discovered, it is to be created. Society is concerned that its members have values, which ones are unimportant. Consider this view of ethics: Ethics as Aesthetics ... we do not need behavioral norms that prescribe how to live and act meaningfully -- these would only limit our freedom, understood as 'freedom to' -- as much as we need suggestive examples, inspiring models, witnesses and experiences from others, to show us what is possible without a belittling prescription of what we have to do. ...9 When the ethically good comes to us in beauty, we are more easily attracted to it so that we are more eager to live in accordance with it.10 THEOLOGY: It may seem unlikely that discovery and revelation will give way to construction and creativity in theology. That this is not so, is a measure of the thorough going nature of the revolution of modernity. The Harvard theologian Gordon Kaufman has been moving steadily in this direction over his long and productive career. In his latest book which he calls In the Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology he says, ... the overall task of Christian theology today becomes clear: theologians should attempt to construct conceptions of God, humanity, and the world appropriate for the orientation of contemporary human life. ...these notions are (and always have been) human creations, human imaginative constructions; they are our ideas, not God's.11 These examples bring home the extent to which moderns have discarded the hope of discovering reality for the assurance of being able to create their own reality. In this kind of world it is no surprise that the artist is hero. In order for the artist to function as hero it is essential that the artist be seen as a craftsman, a person who is expert in creating reality. Ironically, this is just what Plato took artists to be, and the very reason he was highly suspicious of them. There is an alternate persona for the artist in Western culture, that of the person who discovers truth through beauty. One suspects that it is this persona that made the artist a hero in the renaissance. As the Interesting is substituted for the Beautiful, the artist reverts to the old Platonic view; with this difference, the artist is no longer the creator of appearances, but is now the creator of reality. Even if we grant the idea of being able to create reality, the old Platonic critique still has bite. Plato's most serious objection to art is that its very nature forbids deliberation. It is not possible as pure creation to apply categories of morality or veracity. It is not possible to determine excellence beyond excellence of skill. If there is no reality to be discovered, then there is no reality to measure the truth or goodness of the product. There can only be technical prowess, and personal attraction. There is nothing in technique that forbids it from being used in the service of anything, no matter how exalted or how degraded. As Lachterman puts it, "... productive virtuosity is the touchstone discriminating genuine from bogus facts."12 How do we as Christians find a way to express our faith in this age of the artist. To follow the proverbial ostrich is surely foolish. I am unable to propose a new rhetoric for the needed dialog with the age of the artist. What is clear to me is that quite a different rhetoric than that of traditional apologetics is required. Perhaps we can find a direction from a reflective artist who is becoming uneasy with the way in which art has taken the place of religion. Listen to the Irish poet Eavan Boland. The line between religion and poetry has given way. And what comes forth, monstrous to my eyes anyway, is neither religion nor poetry, but the religion of poetry.13 [Matthew Arnold's] argument that the imagination is a sacramental force and that the poem can usurp some of the functions of religion has been profoundly influential on poetry in this century. In a time of lost power it makes a claim for increased privileges for the artist. The irony of this, to me anyway, is that it brings us back to something more primitive again. To invest, as Arnold does, the imagination with sacramental force restores to poetry not its religious force, but its magical function.14 ... over the last century ... the rise of the religion of literature, the hubris of the imagination and its sanctity has been an undercurrent of a great deal of the analysis and discussion of art. ... they are constructing an image of the writer which accrues to the imagination the old privileges of magic and control; the old status of arbiter of reality.15 NOTES 1. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1907), p. 109. 2. David R. Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity, (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 4. 3. Ibid., p. 7. 4. Plato's Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1974), p. 136. 5. Richard Rorty, "Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions?", Academe: Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, 6 (1994), p. 54. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 59. 8. Ibid., p. 61. 9. Roger Burggraeve "Prohibition and Taste: the Bipolarity in Christian Ethics," Ethical Perspectives, 3 (1994), p. 137. 10. Ibid. 11. Gordon D. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 31. 12. Lachterman, p. 5. 13. Eavan Bolan, "When the Spirit Moves," The New York Review of Books, 1 (1995), p. 27. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 28.