Daniel McInerny’s “Beauty & Imitation” is a mere companion piece; it is, rather, a superb reactivation not only of Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis but also with an Aquinas enhancement. From the first page forward, in fine prose, McInerny surveys with sincerity and depth the Catholic understanding of the arts, beauty, and sublimity.
Despite, or perhaps in part because of its importance and influence within the history of aesthetics, the current status of mimesis as a concept (or family of concepts), in the theory of art is contentious and unstable —from Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems
Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts (448 pages, Word on Fire Academic, 2024)
I was scolded once by an audience member when I made a remark about modern painting having become anti-mimetic and that modernism itself fomented an anti-mimetic revolution. I had in mind the characteristics of Jackson Pollock and action painting.
I was told, somewhat huffily, that Pollock with his drip painting was exploring his own unconscious mind and that the paintings were replete with Jungian symbolism and that he was translating his whole personality into his paintings.
And they are, indeed, energetic and indeed he owned some problems with drinking.
I suspect the “aesthetic” is neither classical nor Aristotelean where art imitates life. It is likely more congenial to an “anti-mimetic” position which holds the direct opposite and in which life imitates art more than art imitates life.
A paradox, I think.
One might thus imagine Walter Pater or Oscar Wilde standing side-by-side in close observation of Pollock’s 1947 “Lucifer” and concluding that although not representational, it does indeed convey the “aesthetics of suffering” and “the dark dungeons of a troubled conscience.”
Others might call it “sheer impertinence, decadence.”
Having said that, Stephen Halliwell published in 2002 The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. The book is a masterly survey of mimesis and the history of aesthetics which he calls an inheritance at least until modernity when that inheritance is contested.
Not to suggest, then, that Daniel McInerny’s Beauty & Imitation is a mere companion piece; it is, rather, a superb reactivation not only of Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis but also with an Aquinas enhancement. From the first page forward, in fine prose, McInerny surveys with sincerity and depth the Catholic understanding of the arts, beauty, and sublimity.
*****
Professor McInerny’s well-made book is a shade over 400 pages. When I unwrapped the packaging my sense was that this might be an overwhelming read.
I took my time and it was not and became engrossing.
The book also owns a subtitle: “A Philosophical Reflection On The Arts,” which brings to mind Edmund Burke’s “A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And The Beautiful.”
With such a subtitle it’s often possible that “philosophical” reflections or inquiries will for the average reader vector into matters elusive and thus can easily founder.
Professor McInerny’s reflection is much less so; he keeps in mind his interest in the Catholic Imagination while narrowing his thesis: “The arts,” he wishes to suggest, “are forms of inquiry, of investigation, as the beauty that we find in them illuminates the truth about ourselves.” His “philosophical inquiry… affirms ‘the way of beauty’ insofar as it affirms how beautiful works of art help us realize our agency as truth-seekers.”
That brings ups the question as to what does it mean to think philosophically?
It’s an interrogation of a sort and involves whether art is imitative or expressive and asks questions, for example, about watching movies which is different than watching things in real life.
Here McInerny asks his reader to consider an ordinary experience: sitting with family or friends and watching a movie. When we watch the movie we are not calling the movie into question but are simply taking it in. When we philosophize, however, we step back from the ordinary experience and begin to reflect and ask questions, and those questions are philosophical.
Both are concerned with our understanding the intelligibility of the “real “world but for sure a movie transcends what we know about that “real” world.
If it’s a good movie, as in the case of Dunkirk, which he praises effusively and with good cause. It’s a masterpiece of cinematic art. From that fine film we learn spiritual lessons as we do in Forrest Gump, in which the spiritual lesson is that self-importance is a thing that must be dropped and that the better way is to the best of one’s ability extend unconditional love.
That being the likely case, does Professor McInerny strike out on his own or does he pay homage to his mentors? Here he adds in his introduction that in pursuing his inquiry, he will be developing a philosophy of art inspired by the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.
And of course with Aristotle first Professor McInerny confronts that slim little fragmented treatise, the Poetics, and Aristotle’s argument that mimesis, or imitation, is natural to human beings by nature.
But here the argument broadens when our good professor argues that the mimetic arts are all story-telling arts, and that human life itself is formed around narrative structures, which means imitating human beings in action. This he notes is true in the single case of Hamlet, where we find story upon story in the words of the characters and where we are also privy as to what it means to mourn and what it means to doubt.
But to consider a story as a narrative sequence that pictures a human in pursuit of some goal or good also means that the story is not a hodgepodge of events but an ordered sequence with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Or perhaps less a middle and more a muddle that needs resolution.
Here he writes that the authorial intelligence is at work by bringing order and intelligence to the story which is a picturing of wholeness, complete and unified which we find not only in Aristotle but also St. Thomas who refers to intelligence as the cognitive sense which connects the universal considerations of reason to sensible particulars and an action which Maritain will later reference as poetic knowledge, illuminating intellect, and the deepest longings of the artist’s soul.
With such language in hand, Professor McInerny considers the way in which mimetic art pictures the quest for human happiness, albeit happiness understood in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition is incomplete in this life.
“[H]uman destiny ultimately lies in a transcendent realm, where we hope to lovingly contemplate the beautiful vision, [H]e who is beatitude for all eternity.”
McInerny is not at this moment in his “text” making a simple argument for the power of the human imagination, a power which every human has.
What is needed, he argues, is not just an argument for a revival of the aesthetics of mimesis but a discussion of the aesthetics of mimesis and specifically Story as Moral Argument and defining the Catholic Imagination.
With that in mind, two articles from Part I, The Nature of the Mimetic Arts, are worth considering.
Story as Moral Argument
His example here is Flannery O’Connor.
Almost every day, she would write at a small desk with a typewriter set up in her bedroom on the ground floor of the house near Milledgeville, Georgia that she shared with her mother; Flannery O’Connor would sit down to write fiction. The writing stint would last about two hours. The time was limited by her lupus.
“She doggedly refused to let [lupus] undermine her vocation as a writer.”
Professor McInerny’s interest here has to do with the way in which stories “work as arguments wielding experiential ethical knowledge.” He quotes O’Connor as saying that she prefers to talk about the meaning of a story rather than the theme. Noting for the moment that she lived on a working farm, O’Connor goes on to say that theme is a bit like the string on a sack of chicken feed and if you pick out the string you can rip out the sack and feed the chickens. Theme is more like an isolated statement memorized for a test in which the beleaguered student writes that “O’Connor is trying to say….”
“A story is a a way of saying something that can’t be said in any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”
And to whom should we turn for aid?
Well, one might turn to the literary critic for whom story telling is best understood as a division of logic. Here, however, the critic must accept the story as yielding experiential, not theoretical, knowledge. Criticism should aid to help us reflect which again brings us back to philosophical reflection which supplements our enjoyment of stories.
Following Story as Moral Argument, “Professor McInerny enlarges on an issue deeply important to him.
The Catholic Imagination
With that in mind, then, Chapter four, “The Catholic Imagination” occupies a central part to McInerny’s argument about the mimetic arts and moral transformation.
The chapter starts with what Henry James would call the “germ” of a story and a high concept one at that:
A live man enters the realm of the dead.
If we have read and studied the book we know the man has been wandering in a dark wood and midway in his life’s journey.
But we’re curious and wonder why and how did he get there?
We are not told.
We read that he has been attempting to find a way out of that dark wood and makes for a mountain in the distance.
The story goes on and again if we have read and studied the book we will recall when our “pilgrim” meets someone, not a living someone but a denizen of a place called “The Inferno” and also a very famous poet.
What is at work in the poem we come to know is congenial to the Catholic Imagination. The man, we know, must go on an unexpected journey the first part of which is a descent into the pit of the inferno to discover the true horror of sin which will allow him to ascend the mountain of purgatory to cleanse himself of the effects of sin.
Here Professor McInerny makes the argument that Dante’s Divine Comedy is not only one of the great works of literature but quite arguably “the most glorious monument of Catholic artistic culture.”
But why?
The mimetic arts as pursued according to the Catholic imagination are imitations of the arena God makes in creating his “theo-drama” which likely will not sell on Netflix. The term, “theo-drama” is from von Balthazar and as McInerny explains means God’s drama, the story of human life as seen from God’s perspective as He mercifully endeavors to help us attain unity with Him.
The poem is, therefore, the story of human life as seen from God’s perspective and a way of seeing reality through images which then reinforces Catholic belief, practice and culture which is, of course, to return love for love.
It’s a fine chapter this which reaches a high point in which McInerny recites what he understands to be the task of the Catholic imagination which is to depict (1) how the supernatural end of human beings through the gift of grace delivered through Catholic sacramental life and Catholic culture which more generally helps to distinguish ends (supernatural and natural) from secular purposes; and (2) to show (likely enough in the same mimetic move) how the natural end is insufficient without the supernatural end—that is, how grace perfects nature.
Is there a painted argument?
He suggests that Michelangelo’s painted imitation of our heavenly Father’s creative act on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is an example of how we make sense of our world and to “believe” such is more purposeful than to argue that to burn always with a hard gem-like flame is ecstasy in life.
Likewise Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew is an iconic presentation on how to make the first step of following Christ attractive, or better yet, “look like love at first sight.”
McInerny also writes then that he agrees with Stephen Halliwell’s thesis in his The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems that mimesis even with all is variations has proved to be the most long-lasting widely held and intellectually accommodating of all theories of art in the West.
Art is in that respect a matter of insight and moral transformation and is further a political matter which has traditionally been understood as having a role to play in the political community as a common good, its well being. Here he enlarges upon his idea by suggesting that without this purpose the political community can not know or understand itself.
To that end, as McInerny nears his conclusion, he writes with lucid prescience that proponents of the Catholic imagination might very well feel they no longer have a voice or power to persuade especially when so much contemporary art proliferates in narcissism and nihilism.
That Catholic mimetic tradition, however, which is in thrall to Being, is also a Source inexhaustible and shows us that all the world is really a stage where men and women, merely players, dream thoughts of heaven.
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