Art of Living

The phrase "art of living" can have an aestheticist ring to it. Life becomes a "work of art," a self-conscious dramatization. Someone concerned about the "art of living" may well forget to be concerned with living itself. Of course, self-forgetfulness is part of the art, but that's another story. In short, "art of living" can seem Cartesian; the self stands outside his projects and relations to make sure it all works, putting a little fleck of paint here, knocking off a rough piece of marble there, shifting the harmonization here and there.

On the other hand, "art of living" may imply that we live in such a way as to display ourselves, our clothes, our walk, our gestures. This is the way of dandyism and camp; the way of Wilde and Renaissance courtiers. It has little to do with living, and nothing to do with Christian living.

Yet I want to defend the phrase. It has good biblical warrant, when we consider the meaning of "wisdom" in Scripture. Wisdom generally means "skill," and it can be used to describe craftsmanship, as it does in the case of Bezalel and Oholiab, who helped build the tabernacle. When applied to life, the term does not use its aesthetic, artistic, or craft dimension. Wisdom is often about "fittingness" and this is an aesthetic criteria. The right words at the right time are not only ethically good and rationally sound but "like applies of gold in a setting of silver," which is to say, fitting words are beautiful. The same applies across the board. There is a craft to wisdom, and living wisely is an artistic project.

Of course, as Robert Jenson says in an article summarized earlier on this site, we can engage in this enterprise rightly only when we recognize that we are more the product of a Divine Artistic experiment than we are of our own experiments. The aesthetic project of living well is vapor; we spend a lifetime telling a story with our lives and striving to learn "fittingness" and then we die, and the art work that we have been living is nothing more than a well-dressed, rouged-up corpse lying in a casket. But this vapor is a cause for joy and exhilaration when we realize we are "riding on the Painter's brush."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, May 27, 2004 at 09:37 PM

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