The Purpose of Art

   In a post enlightenment world, art seems superfluous. It does not serve any immediately obvious practical purpose. Reading a good work of fiction is not going to help me earn more money. A beautiful painting uses up skills and materials that could have been better spent by the artist helping his neighbour fix his house. Listening to a beautiful symphony is time wasted, time which could have been used to make more money. It seems that art is unnecessary and, in fact, gets in the way of bigger and better things.

This notion, however, is completely bogus. The first obvious indicator of this is that we as humans are captivated by good art and continue to create copious amounts of it. Cultures that have sought to suppress good art (like many of the Marxists regimes) have also always seemed to devolve into places of misery and despair. These two things are related. There is something about the creation and enjoyment of art that is tied up with what it means to be human. I came across a quote a while back from Joel Uili, that I think sums up the situation nicely: “They’ll tell you that the arts and humanities aren’t practical and then read poetry at funerals and weddings, cry over films and search for meaning in ancient philosophy. Surviving is one type of practicality, knowing why we bother is another.”

Why do we bother? What is it that drives our desire for art? Well, as christians, we must think biblically about what it means to be human. Genesis 1:27 tells us, “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Scripture tells us that God created every wonderful thing that exists, and then right before he finishes his creation, Scripture tells us that we were created “in His own image.” Up to this point in the story of Genesis, the one thing we know about God is that he creates things, and the things he created are full of beauty. He made the shining stars, the luscious trees of the forests, the rolling seas, and colourful, singing birds. What was God’s practical need for creating these things? None. God does not need these things. He is infinite, eternal, and all powerful. These things were created because he delighted to create them. We, created in his image, have in us, like our Father, the desire to create things of our own, which delight ourselves and others. J.R.R. Tolkien writes on this idea in his essay On Fairy-stories, and speaks of it also in his poem Mythopoeia, where he refers to man as “sub-creator.” 

"The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact.
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind."

We create because we bear the image of our Creator, and through creating we imitate him.

A good supply of art is necessary. Even people unversed in the arts have a notion of this. It is commonly agreed that reading is good for brain development. It has also been said that giving young children “classical” music, such as Mozart, to listen to is good for neurological development. I believe that these assertions are true, but our temptation is to stop there and move on with our lives. We ought instead to stop and ask ourselves why this is the case. Art shapes us. It gets inside us in ways nothing else can, and through it we are molded and shaped to think, feel, and understand reality in new ways. Good art teaches us to better see, understand, and imitate God’s work. Bad art seeks to pervert the good God has made. Therefore, to grow, we must ensure that we do not consume just any art but good art.

What is good art? Our modern society has a fascination with “art for art’s sake.” In recent generations, we have begun to reject the materialistic enlightenment thinking of the last three hundred years and have embraced creativity to an unhealthy extreme. Much of the art that is praised and paraded in today’s society is worthless garbage. There is little or nothing profound about it. What then makes good art? If our desire to create comes from our Creator, then to create something good means to create something like what he has created. God is a God of order. Therefore, we must have order in our creation. In the first three days of Creation, we see God measuring out and ordering the framework of creation: time (day and night), as well as the boundaries of sky, land, and sea. Then once those boundaries have been set, he moves on to the details: filling the spaces with things. We in turn in our creation must first organize and set the parameters in which we create. If we do not first order our work, then what emerges is chaos. Once we set our parameters, we then move onto filling the space. How do we decide what to put into the space? Today our society is filled with countless voices telling us to “express ourselves” and make our thoughts and voices heard. I hope it is obvious how selfish this idea is. I am not saying that we should never voice our thoughts or opinions, but those thoughts and opinions should not originate with us. To paraphrase a quote I once heard, if someone has an idea or thought that no one has ever thought of before, then it is probably a bad idea. A bad idea is one that does not contain truth. Good art must be true. If to create art is to imitate God, then what we create must in some way align itself with what God has made. I remember my creative writing professor in college, Dr. Jonathan Rogers, telling us in his class, “Don’t worry about being original. Write what is true, and you will find in the end that you have put something of yourself in there too.” Our creations must rightly reflect what God has made: they must accord with the reality he has made. This is what it means for art to be true. Our calling as humans created in the image of God is to glorify him through what we make. But truth does not come from inside us. We must search outside of ourselves to find it.

To create apart from the way God has shown us is to rebel against his order and authority. We learn about him through observing what he has made, and in our study of God’s creation we find our skills grow. Leonardo da Vinci is renowned as a great artist, inventor, and scientist. These three things are not unrelated to one another but are intricately connected. Leonardo himself said, “Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” Drawing and painting require the artist to visually study his subject. How could Leonardo paint the Mona Lisa if he did not know what a human face looked like? His journals are full of studies of various body parts: eyes, noses, hands, arms, etc. He also has scientific sketches of the biological functions of the human body, plants, and many other things found in nature. To gain an understanding of art and science required him learning to observe, “to see,” what existed in the world around him. Then, using what he had seen, he began to invent things: to copy what he had seen in a new and unique way. To make anything worth having for either practicality or beauty, we must begin with observation of God’s creation. 

Art is not superfluous but necessary for any society to grow. It is the process by which we develop the skills to labour in accordance with the order of the world in which we live. It does not exist for its own sake, but is our feeble attempt to imitate what God has already made. To the end that our work does this, it succeeds. When we seek to create apart from God’s instruction, our work fails. Good art teaches us to better understand our Creator and how we ought to live as his image bearers.

Further reading:

Mythopoeia by: J.R.R. Tolkien

On Fairy-stories by: J.R.R. Tolkien

The Ainulindalë by: J.R.R. Tolkien

A House for My Name by: Peter Leithart