It may well be that because we live in a culture where the emotions more and more serve as the criteria of moral and political judgment, that the great cultural challenge is to find ways to bring unruly emotions to heel. After all, isn't the effect of so much of mass contemporary art the same dangerous one that Plato long ago ascribed to poetry?--namely, that art "waters [the emotions] when they ought to be dried up, and sets them up as rulers in us when they ought to be ruled so that we may become better and happier instead of worse and more wretched" (Republic X, 606d).

But while Plato advises that we "dry up" the emotions by severely restricting the influence of art, C.S. Lewis, in his assessment of modern ills in The Abolition of Man, advises that one of our principal cultural challenges is to "irrigate" the emotions precisely through the influence of great art. Many modern educators, Lewis writes: "have honestly misunderstood the pressing educational need of the moment. They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda--they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental--and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts." And again, Lewis indicates that one of the chief ways in which the modern educator irrigates the emotions is through the arts.

Are Plato and Lewis at cross-purposes here?

I don't think so. It seems, rather, that they are talking about different aspects of the same phenomenon. Emotions unguided by reason are in one sense unruly jungles, insofar as the emotional pursuit of pleasure and flight from pain is disordered. But relative to the appropriate pursuit of pleasure and the appropriate flight from pain, emotions unguided by reason are like deserts, desperately in need of irrigation by truth.

Plato of course is notorious for his suspicion of the arts. He knows well that works of the imagination often incite the emotions to respond in ways that are contrary to virtue's demands. Thus in the Republic he ushers all but the most moralistic of poets to the gates of his ideal city. While we, too, might feel the urge to show the makers of teen gross-out movies and contemporary sitcoms to the door of decent society, we might also feel that banishing all but the most moralistic artists a poor resolution to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Our disapproval of Plato's resolution, however, should not blind us to the fact that Plato hits upon a truth: works of the imagination must aim to reflect the truth of how things are, so that the pleasure and pain we feel as we appreciate them is not in conflict with the pleasure and pain we should feel as virtuous agents. The value of the arts, in short, must at least in part be ascertained by how well they measure up to the reality of man's moral destiny, and above all his supernatural destiny.

In his essay "Religion and Literature," T. S. Eliot defends the claim that literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. "The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards." The claim applies not just to literature but to all the arts. The greatness of any work of art must in part be judged by its conformity to the moral and theological truth about man, as well as by how well the work measures up to the canons of the kind of art it exemplifies.

Just yesterday, November 16, Pope John Paul II, with special reference to contemporary mass media, sounded the same theme before a meeting of the Italian Association of Television Viewers and Radio Listeners. "In our media society," the Pope said, "more insistence and courage is necessary to cultivate a taste for the beautiful, accompanying it with sensibility for the good and the true." He added, "it is indispensable to help the users, especially families, to make a mature use" of the television "to discern with balance and wisdom the programs that are in harmony with the Christian view of the world and man."

This is not a call for baldly didactic art, an artless art that instructs but does not move. Nor does it mean that the arts must conform to static prototypes. It is, rather, a call for the arts to once again take up the beautiful--the "true-as-delightful"--for their object. Which is not at all the same as a call for "pretty" or for "pleasant" art. Reality often confronts us with rather disturbing truths, the kinds of disturbing truths that we learn in Dante's Hell or among the Southern grotesques of Flannery O'Connor's fiction.

Beginning tomorrow, and running through Saturday night (November 18-20), the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture hosts its annual Fall conference, a conference which this year is devoted to the challenge outlined above: of re-envisioning art as the manifestation of the beautiful, the "true-as-delightful." The title of the conference is "Epiphanies of Beauty: The Arts in a Post-Christian Culture," a title inspired by Pope John Paul II's 1999 Letter to Artists. In some 120 presentations by artists, theologians, philosophers, literary critics, educators, students, business and other professionals, the conference aims to show how the arts can only flourish, and by flourishing make their contribution to the renewal of culture, when they serve to delight us with the truth of man's moral and supernatural destiny.

Information about the conference, including a full program of events and works of art to be displayed, can be found here on the Center's website. If you cannot make it to Notre Dame this weekend, please revisit our website in the coming weeks as papers from the conference will be posted.

Daniel McInerny