The Artist After God: A History with a Lesson

At the close of the Second Vatican Council Paul VI observed that the world needs beauty “in order not to sink into despair.”  The artist, in the classical Christian view, is an apostle of hope. This lecture explores this feature of the artist’s vocation, and draws connections between the artistic and the religious life.  Both are ordered toward the transcendent.  Both are called to make invisible goods visible.  Both identities have suffered in the modern era.  Only once the artist conceives his task as ordered toward the divine, only when he is ambitious to bear hope, can his work serve to redeem culture.

The artist, like the religious, is called to be an apostle of hope.  By his gift he is ordained to make invisible goods present by sight, by sound, and by touch.  Whether his subject is sacred or profane, he is called to see things truly as they are, in their totality. The grace of the artist is that he can grasp by swift vision what philosophers and theologians must often labor to behold.  Artists these days rarely see their vocation in apostolic terms.   More often, it seems, and to my mind as a matter of necessity, they have become heralds of despair.  In their search for beauty, they seem to have largely abandoned their post as prophets of hope.  It was a gradual apostasy.  As our culture lost religion, aspirations fell to nature, and finally, to man.  It was a quest bound to be frustrated.  In this talk I would like to sketch something of the history of the artist after God offering a few suggestions as to how he might recover his true call.