“Pistoumetha de pros tous tethaumakotas ek tôn meteilêpsotôn.”
Plotinus, Enneads VI.6.7.
As Iredell Jenkins has pointed out,1 the modern view that “art is expression” has added nothing to the older and once universal (e.g., Greek and Indian) doctrine that “art is imitation,” but only translates the notion of “imitation, born of philosophical realism, into the language and thought of metaphysical nominalism”; and “since nominalism destroys the revelation doctrine, the first tendency of modern theory is to deprive beauty of any cognitive significance.”2 The older view had been that the work of art is the demonstration of the invisible form that remains in the artist, whether human or divine;3 that beauty has to do with cognition;4 and that art is an intellectual virtue.5
While Jenkins’ proposition is very true, so far as expressionism is concerned, it will be our intention to point out that in the catholic (and not only Roman Catholic) view of art, imitation, expression, and participation are three predications of the essential nature of art; not three different or conflicting, but three interpenetrating and coincident definitions of art, which is these three in one.
The notion of “imitation,” (mimêsis, anukrti, pratimâ, etc.) will be so familiar to every student of art as to need only brief documentation. That in our philosophic context imitation does not mean “counterfeiting” is brought out in the dictionary definition: imitation is “the relation of an object of sense to its idea; ... imaginative embodiment of the ideal form”; form being “the essential nature of a thing ... kind or species as distinguished from matter, which distinguishes it as an individual; formative principle; formal cause” (Webster). Imagination is the conception of the idea in an imitable form.6 Without a pattern (paradeigma, exemplar), indeed, nothing could be made except by mere chance. Hence the instruction given to Moses, “Lo, make all things according to the pattern which was shewed to thee on the mount.”7 “Assuming that a beautiful imitation could never be produced unless from a beautiful pattern, and that no sensible object (aisthêton, ‘aesthetic surface’) could be faultless unless it were made in the likeness of an archetype visible only to the intellect, God, when He willed to create the visible world, first fully formed the intelligible world, in order that He might have the use of a pattern wholly divine and incorporeal”;8 “The will of God beheld that beauteous world and imitated it.”9
Now unless we are making “copies of copies,” which is not what we mean by “creative art,”10 the pattern is likewise “within you,”11 and remains there as the standard by which the “imitation” must be finally judged.12 For Plato then, and traditionally, all the arts without exception are “imitative”;13 this “all” includes such arts as those of government and hunting no less than those of painting and sculpture. And true “imitation” is not a matter of illusory resemblance (homoiotês) but of proportion, true analogy, or adequacy (auto to ison, i.e., kat’ analogian), by which we are reminded14 of the intended referent;15 in other words, it is a matter of “adequate symbolism.” The work of art and its archetype are different things; but “likeness in different things is with respect to some quality common to both.”16 Such likeness (sâdrsya) is the foundation of painting;17 the term is defined in logic as the “possession of many common qualities by different things”;18 while in rhetoric, the typical example is “the young man is a lion.”
Likeness (similitudo) may be of three kinds, either (1) absolute, and then amounting to sameness, which cannot be either in nature or works of art, because no two things can be alike in all respects and still be two, i.e., perfect likeness would amount to identity, (2) imitative or analogical likeness, mutatis mutandis, and judged by comparison, e.g., the likeness of a man in stone, and (3) expressive likeness, in which the imitation is neither identical with, nor comparable to the original but is an adequate symbol and reminder of that which it represents, and to be judged only by its truth, or accuracy (orthotês, integritas); the best example is that of the words that are “images” of things.19 But imitative and expressive are not mutually exclusive categories; both are images, and both expressive in that they make known their model.
The preceding analysis is based upon St. Bonaventura’s,20 who makes frequent use of the phrase similitudo expressiva. The inseparability of imitation and expression appears again in his observation that while speech is expressive, or communicative, “it never expresses except by means of a likeness” (nisi mediante specie, De reductione artium ad theologiam 18), i.e., figuratively. In all serious communication, indeed, the figures of speech are figures of thought (cf. Quintilian IX.4.117); and the same applies in the case of visible iconography, in which accuracy is not subordinated to our tastes, but rather is it we ourselves who should have learned to like only what is true. Etymologically, “heresy” is what we “choose” to think; i.e., private (idiôtikos) opinion.
But in saying with St. Bonaventura that art is expressive at the same time that it imitates, an important reservation must be made, a reservation analogous to that implied in Plato’s fundamental question: about what would the sophist make us so eloquent?21 and his repeated condemnation of those who imitate “anything and everything.”22 When St. Bonaventura speaks of the orator as expressing “what he has in him” (per sermonem exprimere quod habet apud se, De reductione artium ad theologian 4), this means giving expression to some idea that he has entertained and made his own, so that it can come forth from within him originally: it does not mean what is involved in our expressionism (viz. “in any form of art ... the theory or practice of expressing one’s inner, or subjective, emotions and sensations [Webster]”), hardly to be distinguished from exhibitionism.
Art is, then, both imitative and expressive of its themes, by which it is informed, or else would be informal, and therefore not art. That there is in the work of art something like a real presence of its theme brings us to our last step. Lévy-Bruhl23 and others have attributed to the “primitive mentality” of savages what he calls the notion of a “mystic participation” of the symbol or representation in its referent, tending towards such an identification as we make when we see our own likeness and say, “that’s me.” On this basis the savage does not like to tell his name or have his portrait taken, because by means of the name or portrait he is accessible, and may therefore be injured by one who can get at him by these means; and it is certainly true that the criminal whose name is known and whose likeness is available can be more easily apprehended than would otherwise be the case. The fact is that “participation” (which need not be called “mystic,” by which I suppose that Levy-Bruhl means “mysterious”) is not in any special sense a savage idea or peculiar to the “primitive mentality,” but much rather a metaphysical and theological proposition.24 We find already in Plato25 the doctrine that if anything is beautiful in its kind, this is not because of its color or shape, but because it participates (metechei) in “that,” viz. the absolute, Beauty, which is a presence (parousia) to it and with which it has something in common (koinônia). So also creatures, while they are alive, “participate” in immortality.26 So that even an imperfect likeness (as all must be) “participates” in that which it resembles.27 These propositions are combined in the words “the being of all things is derived from the Divine Beauty.”28 In the language of exemplarism, that Beauty is “the single form that is the form of very different things.”29 In this sense every “form” is protean, in that it can enter into innumerable natures.
Some notion of the manner in which a form, or idea, can be said to be in a representation of it may be had if we consider a straight line: we cannot say truly that the straight line itself “is” the shortest distance between two points, but only that it is a picture, imitation or expression of that shortest distance; yet it is evident that the line coincides with the shortest distance between its extremities, and that by this presence the line “participates” in its referent.30 Even if we think of space as curved, and the shortest distance therefore actually an arc, the straight line, a reality in the field of plane geometry, is still an adequate symbol of its idea, which it need not resemble, but must express. Symbols are projections of their referents, which are in them in the same sense that our three dimensional face is reflected in the plane mirror.
So also in the painted portrait, my form is there, in the actual shape, but not my nature, which is of flesh and not of pigment. The portrait is also “like” the artist (“Il pittore pinge se stesso,”)31 so that in making an attribution we say that “That looks like, or smacks of, Donatello,” the model having been my form, indeed, but as the artist conceived it.32 For nothing can be known, except in the mode of the knower. Even the straight line bears the imprint of the draughtsman, but this is less apparent, because the actual form is simpler. In any case, the more perfect the artist becomes, the less will his work be recognizable as “his”; only when he is no longer anyone, can he see the shortest distance, or my real form, directly and as it is.
Symbols are projections or shadows of their forms (cf. n. 19), in the same way that the body is an image of the soul, which is called its form, and as words are images (eikonas, Cratylus 439A; eidôla, Sophist 234C) of things. The form is in the work of art as its “content,” but we shall miss it if we consider only the aesthetic surfaces and our own sensitive reactions to them, just as we may miss the soul when we dissect the body and cannot lay our hands upon it. And so, assuming that we are not merely playboys, Dante and Asvaghosa ask us to admire, not their art, but the doctrine of which their “strange” or “poetic” verses are only the vehicle. Our exaggerated valuation of “literature” is as much a symptom of our sentimentality as is our tendency to substitute ethics for religion. “For he who sings what he does not understand is defined as a beast.33 ... Skill does not truly make a singer, but the pattern does.”34
As soon as we begin to operate with the straight line, referred to above, we transubstantiate it; that is, we treat it, and it becomes for us, as if 35 it were nothing actually concrete or tangible, but simply the shortest distance between two points, a form that really exists only in the intellect; we could not use it intellectually in any other way, however handsome it may be;36 the line itself, like any other symbol, is only the support of contemplation, and if we merely see its elegance, we are not using it, but making a fetish of it. That is what the “aesthetic approach” to works of art involves.
We are still familiar with the notion of a transubstantiation only in the case of the Eucharistic meal in its Christian form; here, by ritual acts, i.e., by the sacerdotal art, with the priest as officiating artist, the bread is made to be the body of the God; yet no one maintains that the carbohydrates are turned into proteins, or denies that they are digested like any other carbohydrates, for that would mean that we thought of the mystical body as a thing actually cut up into pieces of flesh; and yet the bread is changed in that it is no longer mere bread, but now bread with a meaning, with which meaning or quality we can therefore communicate by assimilation, the bread now feeding both body and soul at one and the same time. That works of art thus nourish, or should nourish, body and soul at one and the same time has been, as we have often pointed out, the normal position from the Stone Age onwards; the utility, as such, being endowed with meaning either ritually or as well by its ornamentation, i.e., “equipment.”37 Insofar as our environment, both natural and artificial, is still significant to us, we are still “primitive mentalities”; but insofar as life has lost it’s meaning for us, it is pretended that we have “progressed.” From this “advanced” position those whose thinking is done for them by such scholars as Lévy-Bruhl or Sir James Frazer, the behaviorists whose nourishment is “bread alone”—“the husks that the swine did eat”—are able to look down with unbecoming pride on the minority whose world is still a world of meanings.38
We have tried to show above that there is nothing extraordinary, but rather something normal and proper to human nature, in the notion that a symbol participates in its referent or archetype. And this brings us to the words of Aristotle, which seem to have been overlooked by our anthropologists and theorists of art: he maintains, with reference to the Platonic conception of art as imitation, and with particular reference to the view that things exist in their plurality by participation in (methexis) the forms after which they are named,39 that to say that they exist “by imitation,” or exist “by participation,” is no more than a use of different words to say the same thing.40
Hence we say, and in so doing say nothing new, that “art is imitation, expression, and participation.” At the same time we cannot help asking: What, if anything, has been added to our understanding of art in modern times? We rather presume that something has been deducted. Our term “aesthetics” and conviction that art is essentially an affair of the sensibilities and emotions rank us with the ignorant, if we admit Quintilian’s “Docti rationem componendi intelligunt, etiam indocti voluptatem!”41
Phaedo 100D; cf. Republic 476D. The doctrine was later expounded by Dionysius, De div. nom. IV.5, “pulchrum quidem esse dicimus quod participat pulchritudinem.” St. Thomas comments: “Pulchritude enim creaturae nihil est aliud quam similitudo divinae pulchritudinis in rebus participata.” In the same way, of course, the human artist’s product participates in its formal cause, the pattern in the artist’s mind.
The notion of participation appears to be “irrational” and will be resisted only if we suppose that the product participates in its cause materially, and not formally; or, in other words, if we suppose that the form participated in is divided up into parts and distributed in the participants. On the contrary, that which is participated in is always a total presence. Words, for example, are images (Plato, Sophist 234C); and if to use homologous words, or synonyms, is called a “participation” (metalêpsis, Theatetus 173B, Republic 539D), it is because the different words are imitations, expressions, and participations of one and the same idea, apart from which they would not be words, but only sounds.
Participation can be made easier to understand by the analogy of the projection of a lantern slide on screens of various materials. It would be ridiculous to say that the form of the transparency, conveyed by the “image-bearing light,” is not in the picture seen by the audience, or even to deny that “this” picture is “that” picture; for we see “the same picture” in the slide and on the screen; but equally ridiculous to suppose that any of the material of the transparency is in what the audience sees.
When Christ said, “this is my body,” body and bread were manifestly and materially distinct; but it was “not bread alone” of which the disciples partook. Conversely, those who find in Dante’s “strange verses” only “literature,” letting their theory escape them, are actually living by sound alone, and are of the sort that Plato ridicules as “lovers of fine sounds.”
Skr. pasu, an animal or animal man whose behavior is guided, not by reason, but only by “estimative knowledge,” i.e., pleasure-pain motives, likes and dislikes, or, in other words, “aesthetic reactions.”
In connection with our divorce of art from human values, and our insistence upon aesthetic appreciation and denial of the significance of beauty, Emmanuel Chapman has very pertinently asked: “On what philosophical grounds can we oppose Vittorio Mussolini’s ‘exceptionally good fun’ at the sight of torn human and animal flesh exfoliating like roses in the Ethiopian sunlight? Does not this ‘good fun’ follow with an implacable logic, as implacable as a bomb following the law of gravity, if beauty is regarded only as a name for the pleasure we feel, as merely subjective, a quality projected or imputed by the mind, and having no reference to things, no foundation whatsoever in existence? Is it not further the logical consequence of the fatal separation of beauty from reason? ... The bitter failures in the history of aesthetics are there to show that the starting-point can never be any subjective, a priori principle from which a closed system is induced” (“Beauty and the War,” Journal of Philosophy, XXXIX, 1942, 495).
It is true that there are no timeless, but only everlasting, values; but unless and until our contingent life has been reduced to the eternal now (of which we can have no sensible experience), every attempt to isolate knowing from valuation (as in the love of art “for art’s sake”) must have destructive, and even murderous or suicidal consequences; “vile curiosity” and the “love of fine colors and sounds” are the basic motives of the sadist.
That things can be called after the names of the things impressed upon them is rather well illustrated by the reference of J. Gregory to “coins called by the name of their Expresses, as ... saith Pollux kai ekaleito bous hoti bous eikôn enteturomenon, from the figure of an ox imprinted,” Notes and Observations upon Several Passages in Scripture (London, 1684). Any absolute distinction of the symbol from its referent implies that the symbol is not what Plato means by a “true name,” but arbitrarily and conventionally chosen. But symbols are not regarded thus, traditionally; one says that the house is the universe in a likeness, rather than that it is a likeness of the universe. So in the ritual drama, the performer becomes the deity whose actions he imitates, and only returns to himself when the rite is relinquished: “enthusiasm” meaning that the deity is in him, that he is entheos (this is not an etymology).
All that may be nonsense to the rationalist, who lives in a meaningless world; but the end is not yet.
Metaphysics I.6.4. There can be little doubt that Aristotle had in mind Timaeus 51A, where Plato connects aphomoioô with metalambanô. That the one implies the other is also the opinion to which Socrates assents in Parmenides 132E, “That by participation in which (metechonta) ‘like’ things are like (homoia), will be their real ‘form,’ I suppose? Most assuredly.” It is not, however, by their “likeness” that things participate in their form, but (as we learn elsewhere) by their proportion or adequacy (isotês), i.e., truth of the analogy; a visual likeness of anything to its form or archetype being impossible because the model is invisible; so that, for example, in theology, while it can be said that man is “like” God, it cannot be said that God is “like” man.
Aristotle also says that “thought thinks itself through participation (metalêpsis) in its object” (Metaphysics XII.7.8). “For participation is only a special case of the problem of communion, of the symbolizing of one thing with another, of mimicry” (R. C. Taliaferro, foreword to Thomas Taylor, Timaeus and Critias, New York, 1944, p. 14). For the sake of Indian readers it may be added that “imitation” is Skr. anukarana (“making according to”), and “participation” (pratilabha or bhakti); and that like Greek in the time of Plato and Aristotle, Sanskrit has no exact equivalent for “expression”; for Greek and Sanskrit both, an idea is rather “manifested” (dêloô, pra-kâs, vy-añj, vy-â-khyâ) than “expressed”; in both languages words that mean to “speak” and to “shine” have common roots (cf. our “shining wit,” “illustration,” “clarify,” “declare,” and “argument”). Form (eidos as idea) and presentation (phainomenon) are nâma (name, quiddity) and rûpa (shape, appearance, body); or in the special case of verbal expressions, artha (meaning, value), prayojana (use), and sabda (sound); the former being the intellectual (mânasa, noêtos) and the latter the tangible or aesthetic (sprsya, drsya, aisthêtikos, horatos) apprehensions.