Literature, Beauty and Truth: Why "Art for Art's Sake" is an Illusory Principle

Discerning and Enjoying Good Books

Jan van Eyck (c.1390-1441), The Ghent Altarpiece: Virgin Mary (source)

Searching for Beauty

In an interview that I had the honor and joy of conducting almost 20 years ago, in 2005, Joseph Pearce revealed that his vocation is to mediate the encounter of as many readers as possible with Beauty. And not just any kind of beauty, but one revealed by reading the works of literary giants like W. Shakespeare, G.K Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis. What I find significant is that J. Pearce’s explanation invokes the three eminent values of ancient Greek culture: Beauty (Gr. kalós), Goodness (Gr. agathós), and Truth (Gr. alḗtheia). In the case of philosophy, theology, and apologetics, the emphasis is on the exercise of reason that discovers and presents the Truth. Regarding the arts in general, and poetry and literature in particular, this emphasis shifts to the emotions produced at an affective level by the manifestation of Beauty. In other words, the poet and the writer are hunters of hearts.

The fact that Joseph Pearce conceives Beauty as one of the best ways to prepare souls for a fruitful encounter with the Gospel is not something random. Nothing is more evident today, in a context where secularization and desacralization tend to erase even the memory of the notion of ‘beautiful,’ than the pandemic of ugliness. In such a situation, no other response can be more fitting than this revelation of the beauty found in classical works, which through their enduring nature show us that we are dealing with one of the transcendent values of the unseen world.

The high value of beauty comes not only from the universality of its language accessible to all but also from the spontaneous admiration it provokes in those who contemplate a moonrise, a seagull piercing the air, or a lightning gleaming in the turmoil of a storm. The masters of literature are capable, through the charm that crowns like a golden aurora their poems and novels, of creating emotions and arousing curiosity, capturing the attention of those who read. The words of the languages born after Babel have their own musicality, their own vibration, perceptible even when spoken in an unfamiliar tongue.

For example, recite slowly, no matter how hesitantly, Jorge Luis Borges’ favorite Latin verse from:

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram (Aeneid, 6.268).

Although experience shows us that we can never provide a completely faithful translation of a literary or poetic text, I dare to propose a version which, I believe, highlights the unique musicality of the English language.:

Shrouded in obscurity, they walked alone through shadows beneath the pitch-black night.

Reading this verse, we feel ourselves enveloped in the darkness of the night, alone, travelers towards the unknown. The shiver provoked in us by Aeneas’ journey through the world of shadows reminds us of the fear of darkness, never fully conquered, in children. Virgil’s Aeneid is not a poetic work, but Poetry itself. And, like any art, it speaks directly to our hearts.

Novels, stories, and poems, preoccupied as they are, first and foremost, with the revelation of beauty, demand our capacity to love. To great characters like Aeneas, Don Quixote, Hamlet, or Pan Wołodyjowski, we do not relate through the exercise of reason, but through unwavering admiration. We wholeheartedly ‘embrace’ the protagonists of novels and poems that enchant us. United with them, we participate in their joys, sufferings, and experiences. And our allegiance is gained through the luminous aura—expressed by the ancient Greek word κῦδος (kûdos)—that adorns them.

But if the aesthetic realm predominates in the arts, it must never be separated from Truth and Goodness. In our fallen world, there exists a certain ambiguity of Beauty, caused by the chaotic and unruly manifestation of our emotions and passions. Deprived of the light of Truth, emotional and affective excesses can lead us to a depletion of substance in everything that appears beautiful to us. Eating our favorite cake in excess makes us sick, doesn’t it?

The Warning of Romano Guardini

Aware of the self-deceiving artifices of modern writers, Romano Guardini extensively explores the topic of the relationship between Beauty and Truth in The Spirit of the Liturgy,¹ a work highly appreciated by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). In this small writing, he expresses well-founded reservations towards the famous aesthetic program advocated by Oscar Wilde in his collection of essays Intentions (1891). Essentially speaking, however, everything is summarized, devoid of stylistic embellishments, in the concise aestheticist manifesto proposed as a preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in the same year, 1891. The heart of the matter resides in this sentence:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.²

Without claiming that art must necessarily be directly and explicitly subordinated to a moral purpose, Romano Guardini points out that the famous “art for art’s sake” formula promoted by Wilde conceals, beneath its persuasive tones, deadly poisons. With elegance, avoiding direct attacks on certain writers with scandalous lives like Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Ion Creangă, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde himself, Guardini concludes:

Aestheticism is profoundly shameless.

In such a perspective, the dissociation of beauty from moral goodness and, most importantly, from truth, is inconceivable. Taken from the Greco-Latin classical world and ennobled through its interpretation in line with the Gospel, the triad of Goodness/Truth/Beauty has been, is, and will always be the reference point of the Western intellectual tradition. The principle that perfectly illustrates this synthesis is the one that guides Father Guardini’s reflections from the very beginning:

Pulchritudo est splendor veritatis—est species boni.³

The translation proposed by him afterward is not only excellent in terms of its accuracy, but also highly significant for his entire interpretation:

Beauty is the splendid perfection which dwells in the revelation of essential truth and goodness.⁴

This definition of beauty that consistently guides Romano Guardini’s interpretations. The main purpose of the Italian author’s reflections is to firmly establish the axiomatic nature of the inseparability of the values of the classical triad of Goodness/Truth/Beauty. Only in this way, he argues, can the danger of aestheticism be avoided:

Beauty cannot be appreciated unless this fact is borne in mind, and it is apprehended as the splendor of perfectly expressed intrinsic truth.

But there is a grave risk, which many people do not escape, of this order being reversed, and of beauty being placed before truth, or treated as entirely separate from the latter, the perfection of form from the content, and the expression from its substance and meaning. Such is the danger incurred by the aesthetic conception of the world, which ultimately degenerates into nerveless aestheticism.⁵

Emphasizing the precedence of truth over beauty, Guardini offers the only antidote capable of combating the unleashed relativism that insidiously proposes, through an anti-Gospel, evil as admirable and the ugly as worthy of love. However, before addressing the intrinsic content of a poem or a novel, his statement concerns the foremost level of creation, the one unilaterally absolutized by Oscar Wilde when he says:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.⁶

It refers only to the aesthetic form of any work woven with words, aiming to create enchantment in its readers. Wilde’s desire, however, to limit literature only to discerning the quality of writing is certainly mistaken.

The Mission

Indeed, there is an inherent truth in the stylistic (or ‘exterior’) form of any literary text. This was what Joseph Conrad sought to underline when he stated, “a work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”⁷ Therefore, the writer must ensure that no word is excessive, and no word is lacking in an authentic artistic creation. ‘Truth’ here refers to the completeness of the text that reflects the vision developed in the author’s mind. The congruence between the resultant external text and the internal vision represents—as in the case of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theory of truth-correspondence—the first level of truth in a literary creation. However, this level, in contrast to Oscar Wilde’s perspective, is deemed insufficient by Romano Guardini. It must necessarily be complemented by the truth of the content conveyed through the written text.

Fully aware of this, Conrad emphasized that “art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth.” However, the truth spoken of by the Polish author, much like the one considered essential by Romano Guardini, refers this time not to the external form of the beautiful text, but to the content it manifests. Whether we call it ‘vision,’ ‘message,’ or otherwise, this content has its own value of truth stemming from universally accepted principles like Moses’s Decalogue and the mercy and charity heralded by the Christian Gospel. When Bilbo Baggins shows mercy to Gollum, an action that later yields a series of beneficial consequences, we are dealing with a beautiful story whose value of truth is undeniable. If this is conveyed in a fully coherent and sufficiently extensive manner to immerse the reader in the imaginative world proposed by J.R.R. Tolkien, then surely we are also dealing with that formal level which particularly interested Oscar Wilde.

Romano Guardini’s lesson reminds us that beauty is not only in well-crafted words but also in noble characters and their remarkable deeds. And this fundamental fact is emphasized by the extraordinary relevant short description Joseph Conrad gave of the writer’s main mission:

The artist, (…), like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal.

Definitely, Oscar Wilde’s tumultuous novels and poems as well as Joseph Pearce’s exegetical writings prove—from different angles—the accuracy of this statement.

1. The work was first published in Germany in 1930 by the Herder publishing house: Vom Geist der Liturgie. All the quotations from my essay are from the first English edition: Romano Guardini, The Church and the Catholic and The Spirit of the Liturgy, Translated by Ada Lane, London: Sheed & Ward, 1935.

2. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co. Ltd. 1891, p. 5.

3. Romano Guardini, Op. cit., p. 189.

4. Romano Guardini, Op. cit., pp. 189-190.

5. Romano Guardini, Op. cit., p. 191.

6. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, p. 5.

7. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Garden City, New York, 1914, Preface, p. 11.