Press: Do good people make good art? - In Character

Incharacter.org - In God's Image: Do Good People Make Good Art? by Gregory Wolfe: "So in what sense might we say that creativity is a virtue? Oscar Wilde, a creative individual if there ever was one, and an artist with his own share of problems, framed the question with his usual wit. “The fact of a man’s being a poisoner,” he once said, “is nothing against his prose.”

If Wilde strikes you as suspect in voicing this opinion, given his own notorious troubles, how about those two paragons of reason and rectitude – Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas? They provide a philosophical basis for Wilde’s position by distinguishing between two different types of human action: making and doing. Doing involves human choices, the way we exercise our free will. In the realm of doing – or Prudence, as it has been called – the goal is the perfection of the doer. In other words, in our behavior we are seeking to perfect ourselves as moral agents.

But in making – or Art, if you will – the end is not the good of the artist as a person but the good of the made thing. [...] Art seems to require an inviolable freedom to seek the good of the artifact, without either overt or covert messages being forced into it. And history demonstrates that it is simply a statement of fact (to paraphrase Aquinas) that rectitude of the appetites is not a prerequisite for the ability to make beautiful objects. Thus our poisoner with his exquisite prose style. Or Picasso brutalizing the women in his life. Or the legion of artists and scientists who drank or drugged themselves to death. [...]

Despite the pain and enervation of lupus and the daily domestic frustrations, [Flannery] O’Connor did not collapse into self-pity and paralysis. A self-described “hillbilly Thomist,” she embraced the Aristotelian-Thomist view of art, especially as she found it described by one of her contemporaries, the French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, in his Art and Scholasticism. She was grateful to Maritain for making the distinction between Art and Prudence because she believed that a Christian writer’s “moral sense” and “dramatic sense” ought to coincide. For O’Connor, as for several other important modern Christian writers, including T.S. Eliot and David Jones, Maritain provided a sort of liberation: he helped explain why religious writers ought to resist the temptation to turn their work into didactic or propagandistic art.

But she also noted Maritain’s argument that art did involve what the ancient philosophers called habitus, or the virtue of artistic craft and discipline. Every day she sat down at her typewriter for a minimum of two to three hours, however wretched she may have been feeling, physically or emotionally. She was tart and unsentimental about the creative process, belonging to the school of artists who believe that inspiration can only be found by sitting down at 9:00 a.m. each day and meeting it halfway. At public lectures she was often asked why she wrote. “Because I’m good at it,” she invariably replied. And if some in the audience were offended by this remark, others recognized that she was simply being true to the Thomistic understanding of art."