The Creator Spirit and the Soul of Art (conference talk)

Thank you so much to all of you.

Thank you to the Father O'Reilly and the Thomistic Artists Guild for having me.

It's a real honor to be here to speak to you on the theme of art and virtue.

The topic of my talk is something I've been reflecting on for many years.

and something I had always intended to write kind of a philosophical essay about.

But I was sort of thinking, oh, maybe I'll put it off for a few more years until I get more sort of metaphysical chops to write about it in a technical way.

But I'm glad that I got this sort of prompting from you and from the Lord to actually go ahead and put my thoughts down.

The title of the talk is The Creator's Spirit and the Soul of Art.

And I just titled it this past week as I was putting the finishing touches on the talk and realized, well, We're in the Octave of Pentecost, finishing up the Octave of Pentecost here, so it's a very fitting theme.

It's nice to be able to actually celebrate the Octave of Pentecost with you all, so thank you again.

In a letter written two years before his death, J.R.R. Tolkien recalled a remark made by a man visiting him in Oxford.

Tolkien wrote of his guest, He had been much struck by the curious way in which many old pictures seemed to him to have been designed to illustrate the Lord of the Rings long before its time.

He brought one or two reproductions.

I think he wanted at first simply to discover whether my imagination had fed on pictures, as it clearly had been by certain kinds of literature and languages.

When it became obvious that, unless I was a liar, I had never seen the pictures before and was not well acquainted with pictorial art, he fell silent.

I became aware that he was looking fixedly at me.

Suddenly he said, of course you don't suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself? Pure Gandalf.

I was too well acquainted with Gee to expose myself rashly or to ask what he meant.

I think I said, no, I don't suppose so any longer.

I have never since been able to suppose so, an alarming conclusion for an old philologist to draw concerning his private amusement, but not one that should puff anyone up who considers the imperfections of chosen instruments and indeed what sometimes seems their lamentable unfitness for the purpose." The intuition that an artist receives something from beyond himself, even from a divine source, is one that has been felt throughout the history of human culture.

Think of the nine muses of Greek mythology, one of whom is invoked by Homer at the outset of his two great poems.

The bard does not merely pray that the muse will help him write his poem.

He asks her to tell the story.

Sing, goddess, Homer begins as he fathers forth Western civilization.

Catholics, of course, don't believe in the muses, but the belief that artists can receive divine inspiration is so widespread in ancient cultures that we might even call it a part of natural religion.