The fine arts are those arts which produce things that are beautiful. Their value lies in that they exhibit beauty — they please when apprehended by the senses. Music, movies, painting, poetry all fall under this category of the fine arts.
In this area there are endless cries of people who want to reclaim the arts for Christ, make them Christian. I think the best version of this is a recognition of a (perceived) dearth of beautiful things in the modern evangelical world and hence a desire to pursue greatness to create things that stand the test of time and that will be enjoyed and contemplated by subsequent generations. The worse version may be a desire for things that shouldn’t even be liked to begin with really. For example, there are plenty of people trying to create the same sorts of brainrot stuff that the secular world makes but “Christian” and one begins to wonder what the endgame even is. If your understanding of the postmillennial kingdom includes christianized Bible themed brainrot soap opera comedy there’s a disconnect. Further than this too we shouldn’t look at the world of secular Hollywood or Nashville, with all of the corporate bureaucracy concerned chiefly and primarily with making money, a system which pumps out things that appeal to the lowest common denominator, and covet it. It seems like a weird thing to say that the marvel cinematic universe or Kendrick Lamar are things to plundered and examples to be imitated for their sheer glory and awe. Again, there’s a disconnect.
It is my contention (which is not a contention original to me) that to reclaim the arts for Christ one needs to have put in the work to both 1) understand and love any individual craft and develop a real skillset such that you’re actually capable of producing true depictions of things you seek to capture with your art, whether ideas or things. You actually need to be skilled at painting, composing, filmmaking, editing, etc. otherwise you won’t be able to bring about your vision. And 2) have a comprehensive and deeply penetrating, dare I say philosophical, understanding of reality, all ordered towards the Triune God of Scripture. These components fall roughly along the lines of form and content — you need to know what to say and how to say it. Lopsided examples abound — people trying to say something true but saying it clumsily and in an ugly manner, failing to communicate what they wanted to, on the one hand, or people having great form (writing style, cinematography, colors and brushstrokes, etc.) but all the content is messed up and wrong. Wickedness is glorified.
As an example, Dante needed to care about all of the intricate and nuanced facets of poetry in order to say the things he wanted to say well. For beauty intuitively elucidates the nature of things more potently than an analytical statement does. So for him to strike his audience with the force of the things he was communicating most effectively, he needed to wield his tools — those tools of grammar, rhyme, meter, etc. — with skill. A deep and mature practical skillset is necessary.
But further, and perhaps more importantly, he needed to have something to say. And in the case of exploring the nature of God, man, forgiveness, sin, heaven, hell, knowledge, revelation, and all of creation, he needed to understand these things himself. If this weren’t the case, he couldn’t have taught his audience any of it, and the work not touching on anything transcendent or real but being content to sit with the mere pleasure of the sounds and rhythms of words, would have fallen into irrelevancy and taught no one.
Plato says in the Laws:
For the true judge should not take his verdicts from the dictation of the audience, nor yield weakly to the uproar of the crowd or his own lack of education; nor again, when he knows the truth, should he give his verdict carelessly through cowardice and lack of spirit, thus swearing falsely out of the same mouth with which he invoked Heaven when he first took his seat as judge. For, rightly speaking, the judge sits not as a pupil, but rather as a teacher of the spectators, being ready to oppose those who offer them pleasure in a way that is unseemly or wrong; and that is what the present law of Sicily and Italy actually does: by entrusting the decision to the spectators, who award the prize by show of hands, not only has it corrupted the poets (since they adapt their works to the poor standard of pleasure of the judges, which means that the spectators are the teachers of the poets), but it has corrupted also the pleasures of the audience ; for whereas they ought to be improving their standard of pleasure by listening to characters superior to their own, what they now do has just the opposite effect.
Plato and Aristotle (and I’d say we see this as a general theme throughout the west) understood the fine arts, and in particular poetry, as primarily didactic — these arts are meant to shape and teach their audiences, not merely please them. The question of pleasure in the arts is an important one because we’re dealing with multiple components, the objective interest and beauty of the things themselves and also the tastes and capacity to feel pleasure in the consumer or recipient. Both of which need to be present and calibrated. The things needs to be beautiful and the person consuming needs to have properly ordered affections and loves, that is, takes delight and pleasure, as well as pain and discomfort, in the proper objects.
Plato also says:
Thus much I myself am willing to concede to the majority of men,—that the criterion of music should be pleasure; not, however, the pleasure of any chance person; rather 1 should regard that music which pleases the best men and the highly educated as about the best, and as quite the best if it pleases the one man who excels all others in virtue and education.
To let your own capacity for pleasure in any given thing be the criterion of that things goodness, your need to be aligned with the good. For the vast majority of us people, especially in our nihilistic and consumerist culture, those affections are all supremely disordered. We love what we ought not to love and take pleasure in shallow or degrading material. Even if the material is a “harmless pleasure,” it still, for many, becomes a dominant and all-consuming attention black hole.
We glut ourselves on the “harmless” pleasure of the UI animations of our phones. A friend recently told me a story of a young boy he saw in the line at a restaurant. The boy was vigorously swiping on Tik Tok, not concerned with the content of any of the short videos but rather driven on by the sheer dopamine he was able to get by the design and animation — 120hz smooth motion, bright flashing colors, loud sounds — of the app. In one sense there’s nothing harmful about good, well designed, pleasing, graphics and animation. I think there’s even something to be said about it tapping into the objective order of reality and touching on something real, for pleasure is real, God made it, God made beauty, the ratios and proportionalities that are pleasing, and so on. But it’s all a matter of “unto what?” Unto what do we create these adornments? Unto what do we make these orderly, interesting, and beautiful things which afford pleasure? In the case of the Tik Tok kid, the answer is unto spending as much time as possible on the platform so that the company can charge advertisers for ad space.
How often are we that Tik Tok kid? If not with social media, which is an obvious thing and easy to condemn, then with other things — our music and movies? How often are we drawn about by shallow pleasures without an underlying understanding, being self aware of what we’re being shaped towards and made to delight in. Pretty nihilism is still nihilism. Gay European weirdness is still gay European weirdness even if it has the most beautiful bokeh you’ve ever seen and the lens gives the image just the right amount of character.
It is in this way that the fine arts are didactic. Not primarily because they put forth propositional statements about what’s good and bad, as in a lecture. But because they necessarily have to be. Pleasures and pains are never in a void, and so an unthoughtful consumption of things because of surface level interest and pleasures gets you to like a whole lot of weird and bad things.
So is the answer to only ever consume the most deep and grand things imaginable. No. But rather to have that be the primary focus of your fine arts diet. Being intentional, using your reason to discern on the front end, not just filtering out the red letter morally bad things, like porn, but more