To Sing the Body: Art and the Personalistic Norm
“The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,” Walt Whitman writes in his typically exuberant “I Sing the Body Electric.” From the beginning, art has concerned itself with this sacredness of the human body along with the shame that has encircled it like the serpent who brought it on Adam and his Eve. Scripture itself, the art in which God and man work as one, presents us from its first pages with the mystery of the body. Naked at first without shame (Gen. 2:25), Adam and Eve are revealed to themselves in gazing upon each other. But at the entrance of sin, this gaze becomes instead the occasion for shame, and the body becomes a thing to be hidden. This nakedness followed man from Eden to Golgotha: the nakedness of Noah that led to Ham being cursed, the nakedness of Susanna that made the elders burn with lust, and the nakedness of Christ—the one who had no occasion for shame but took on mankind’s shame upon the cross.
Lucas Cranach der Ältere, The Garden of Eden (sixteenth century)
Scripture serves as a paradigm for treating the body in art and the history of art—particularly in its modern and contemporary eras. It is replete with examples of works that seek not so much to honor the body as to use it, not so much to venerate as to titillate, and not so much to train the heart as to sharpen lust.
Our times call for a renewed appreciation of the sacredness of the human form, and this renewal calls for the cooperation of both artists and their audiences. As a guide toward such a renewal, we could do far worse than to look to Pope St. John Paul II. Turning to writings such as Mulieris Dignitatem, Love and Responsibility, and Man and Woman He Created Them, we can see how his anthropology, particularly his personalistic norm, can offer guidelines for the creation of good art—works that present the viewer with a vision of his own beauty, restoring man’s gaze to that innocence granted him in the beginning.
The Condition of Seeing
It is man’s task to see. Created in the image and likeness of God, man is called to image forth God’s presence in the world by seeing what had been created as good and indeed very good. Further, man is made to see God, not only in the world around him but ultimately face-to-face in the world to come; seeing as he is seen and knowing as he is known. In the beginning, Adam and Eve were able to “see each other, as it were, through the mystery of creation.”
But this seeing is not easy. It requires that purity of heart that Christ spoke of in the beatitudes. In the fallen world, such seeing requires putting on a second nature. For under the sway of concupiscence handed down from Adam, that “power of…perennial attraction” that attends the “constitution of woman’s body” can become the occasion of overmastering passion in man, confounding the natural drive for procreation that is part of God’s plan for man to be fruitful and multiply with the lust that turns the soul in upon itself. The gaze that once unified lover and beloved becomes instead the ground of relations dedicated to use. Contemplation turns to consumption.
Nonetheless, man’s many faculties are meant to proceed in harmony with each other so that sight, passion, will, and love may operate within the virtuous soul for the authentic disposition of oneself toward the other in a unified whole. And art is among the means left to man’s disposal for the training of his faculties, particularly that of sight.
The Beautiful as Harmonizing Principle
The treatments of beauty in philosophy and literature are themselves suggestive of the great array of beautiful things as well as the responses beauty is capable of eliciting. Prince Myshkin, of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, tells us that beauty will save the world. Binx Bolling muses in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer that “beauty is a whore.” Plato frequently treats of the erotic madness aroused by beauty, that passionate desire to beget something, whether a child or a piece of art, through an intimate encounter with the beautiful. And St. Thomas tells us quite simply that “the beautiful is that which, having been seen, pleases.” Pope St. John Paul II, following both St. Thomas and Plato, tells us that “beauty is the visible form of the good.”
All of these notions of beauty hint at the vast gulf between beauty itself, the divine principle, and those beautiful things whereby we encounter or seek to embody beauty. All artists experience, as St. John Paul II says, “the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment.” This gap between Beauty and the beautiful can, when understood for what it is, draw us nearer to God, helping us to appreciate the unity of being that is a mark of God’s creative work in the world. It inspires us to take those aesthetic wings that Plato saw as so critical to the soul’s transcendent flight.
On the other hand, when a false humanism seeks to divorce the human artist from the source of all beauty, then we can all too easily arrive at a form of artistic practice that no longer receives its manner of seeing from that observation of goodness characterized by God’s gaze upon the world he created. Rather, the world becomes a means for expressing the subjectivity of the artist. This presents particular dangers where the representation of the human body is concerned. When the other is no longer seen as another self, as one who is likewise created in the image and likeness of God, it becomes easy to treat the other as an object for use—whether for pleasure, profit, or simple assertion of one’s dominance over the other. Such treatment of the person, which extends through the painting to affect also the viewer, violates that principle of human dignity that John Paul II called the personalistic norm.
Art and the Personalistic Norm
The human body is the form whereby man and woman communicate themselves to each other: “the body…allows man and woman, from the beginning, to ‘communicate’ with each other according to that communio personarum willed for them…by the Creator.” This is ineluctably the case. For whether I see another person, hear her voice, read a letter from her, or feel her touch, it is always by means of the body that her being is communicated to me. This truth is intimately linked with the mystery of the Incarnation. In Christ, God fully reveals man to himself. In gazing on Christ, man experiences the fullness of that sentiment that Adam expressed when, looking at Eve, he said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23).
The mysterious dignity of the human being thus revolves about his status as a person, a status founded on the creative action of God in the beginning and brought to fruition by the fruition of that creative act in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. Man thus demands to be treated in all things as a person, a demand that issued in the ethical standard John Paul II calls the personalistic norm. Put negatively, this norm “states that the person is the kind of good which does not admit of use.” Man can never be used as a means to an end if he is to be treated as a human. Put positively, the norm fulfills the commandment to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.
Too often, artistic media seek instead to use the human form as a means to pleasure, money, and power. And the arts constitute one of those situations in which “woman remains disadvantaged or discriminated against.” The burden of sin falls heavily upon the relationship between man and woman in the fallen world, and, where the arts are concerned, it is woman who especially bears this weight. Whether in painting, sculpture, and even literature, or perhaps especially in the more recent media of photography and film, woman often becomes the object not of artistic portrayal but of pornographic obsession.
We need not adduce plentiful illustrations—to watch a few popular movie trailers, listen to the lyrics of many hit songs, or browse the covers of novels in a bookstore, is to be confronted with examples of art’s debasement of itself in degradation of the human person through violation of the personalistic norm. Nonetheless, art retains the capacity—indeed, all authentic art exercises this capacity—to treat the human form with proper dignity and to train both artist and audience in this way of man that is the way of the Church.
Exemplars and Aspirations
Even the most cursory survey of art history demonstrates that humanistic delight in man need not in itself present a danger to faith “centered on the mystery of the Incarnation.” We need only look to “the way in which Michelangelo represents the beauty of the human body in his painting and sculpture” to be reassured that art has the capacity to demonstrate the beauty of man without necessitating that lecherous gaze that is so often the hallmark of modern seeing.
While the reception of a work of art depends always on the disposition of the receiver—and while thus in a soul habituated to vice even those works conceived according to the personalistic norm might inspire a response based on use—nonetheless art that follows that norm can help to train the eye and the heart to respond more generously and humanely to the work of art itself and to other persons.
Here, I propose two ways by which art can portray the human body in accordance with this norm. The first is that followed by the iconographic tradition, which seeks to portray the person in the light of eternity. It is impossible to look upon a Byzantine icon with lust, not only for how the subjects are disposed but also for the iconographic gaze whereby the one praying with the icon meets, as it were, the eye of Heaven. Seeing the transfigured human form in the icon, the viewer is presented with a vision of his own possible self. The second way is for art to portray man realistically, but illuminated by the twin realities of suffering and redemption.
Nikolaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, 1512–1516
Consider, for example, Matthias Grunewald’s Crucifixion in the Isenheim Altarpiece. The almost naked body of Christ is not an object of use but rather a vision of God’s justice and mercy. It depicts a man who, in perfectly fulfilling the way of the Father, points the way to human happiness for us, through suffering and death into the freedom of the Resurrection. Or consider Leopold Burthe’s Angelique. In this composition, the form of woman is powerfully displayed—yet, with her back turned to the viewer, her hands chained behind her as the sea surges about the rock of her imprisonment, she avoids the lustful gaze and instead evokes that beauty in which we intuit our own suffering. We are moved to the sort of courage that seeks to alleviate that suffering where it lies within our power to do so.
That is, the personalistic norm in art may be preserved either through the lens of the ideal, as in Byzantine iconography, Greek sculpture, and at times even certain forms of abstraction; or through that of the real, which, giving scope to the suffering so foundational to fallen human experience, elicits a desire for justice and mercy so as, whether intentionally or not, to lead the viewer to an experience of himself and his desire for Christ.
This is a tall order. Yet the human person, standing at the crux of reality, calls the artist to the limit of his creative powers. The representation of the body in art invites the plumbing of that depth between the beautiful things we see and the beauty that is one with goodness toward which the human heart is unremittingly drawn. St. John Paul II’s writings, calling man to renewed consideration of his own dignity and spurring artists to proper treatment of that dignity, remain to us potent readings of the signs of the times.
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of two novels, a poetry collection, and a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. His book Restoring the Lord’s Day is out now from Sophia Institute Press. He is the editor of Joie de Vivre: A Journal of Art, Culture, and Letters for South Louisiana, a member of the Creative Assembly at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and a teacher at Jesuit High School in New Orleans, where he lives with his wife and four children.