Art, Virgil says in Dante’s Divine Comedy , is the grandchild of God: God forms man in his own image, and we imitate this creative act. To put it differently, art reflects creation and creation reflects God. But literary critic Terry Eagleton isn’t so sure. Did God create the artist, or did the artist create God? Reviewing Peter Conrad’s new book, Eagleton begins his intriguing ramble :
Most aesthetic concepts are theological ones in disguise. The Romantics saw works of art as mysteriously autonomous, conjuring themselves up from their own unfathomable depths. They were self-originating, self-determining, carrying their ends and raisons d’être within themselves. As such, art was a secular version of the Almighty. Both God and art belonged to that rare category of objects which existed entirely for their own sake, free of the vulgar taint of utility. The third member of this category was the human being. In their freedom, independence and glorious pointlessness, works of art were images of men and women - or at least of what they could become under transformed political conditions. In this sense, art was a politics all of its own, pointing to a future society in which human beings would be treated as ends in themselves. It was a foretaste of utopia in its very uselessness.
He does the Marxist thing for a while, exploring how art, like a quasi-Incarnation of time and eternity, takes the place of God as a powerful ideological force. Read Shelley’s “To a Skylark” or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and you’ll know what he’s getting at. The question, though, is whether this is desirable or even possible:
The aesthetic was the last refuge of mystery in a drably rationalist world. Perhaps the artwork was the one thing left that had a value rather than a price, and didn’t exist for the sake of something else. Like God, poems and symphonies existed just for the hell of it. As the idea of God was gradually ousted, art was on hand to fill his shoes.
I’d rather like to think that art exists just for the heaven of it, and heaven exists for God, but I won’t quibble with the words. (And imagining God’s shoes, much less anyone filling them, is beyond me.) What is striking, though, is Eagleton’s reaction to the recognition that the mystery of divine creation is, indeed, a mystery: “Existence is gift, not fate . . . . God is not a celestial engineer but an artist, for whom fashioning the world is an end in itself.” For him, this is “dismal truth”; after all, how can one who is dependent upon God’s love really exhibit the “transcendent artistic spirit,” fashioning the world and fashioning himself? Does God need to be dethroned for us to be supreme? Or, is the creative spirit an awe-inspiring gift—a sharing in God’s own nature?
“To reign is worth ambition though in Hell,” said Milton’s Satan ; “Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.” I wish he were alone.
