If we credit the Bible's description of the relationship between Creator and Creation, then we cannot deny the spiritual importance of our economic life. Then we see how religious issues lead to issues of economy, and how issues of economy lead to issues of art, of how to make things. If we understand that no artist--no maker--can work except by reworking the works of Creation, then we see that by our work, by the way we practice our arts, we reveal what we think of the works of God. How we take our lives from this world, how we work, what work we do, how well we use the materials we use and what we do with them after we have used them--all these are questions of the highest and gravest religious significance. These questions cannot be answered by thinking, but only by doing. In answering them, we practice, or do not practice, our religion.
The significance--and ultimately the quality--of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.
If we think of ourselves as merely biological creatures, whose story is determined by genetics or environment or history or economics or technology, then, however pleasant or painful the part we play, it cannot matter much. Its significance is that of mere self-concem. "It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing"--as Macbeth says it is, when he has "supped full with horrors" and is "aweary of the sun."
If we think of ourselves as lofty souls entrapped temporarily in lowly bodies in a dispirited, desperate, unlovable world that we must despise for Heaven's sake, then what have we done for this question of significance? Not much, I think. For we are still stuck, like Macbeth, in a condemnation of this life and this world, which were not made for our condemnation. If we divide reality into two parts, spiritual and material, and hold (as the Bible does not hold) that only the spiritual is good or desirable, then our relation to the material Creation becomes arbitrary, having only the quantitative or mercenary value that we have, in fact, and for this reason, assigned to it. Thus we become the judges, and thus inevitably the destroyers, of a world we did not make, and that we are bidden to understand as a divine gift. It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.
If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures--then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use.
This, Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote, is "the normal view," which "assumes. . . not that the artist is a special kind of man, but that every man who is not a mere idler or parasite is necessarily some special kind of artist.... " But since even mere idlers and parasites may be said to work inescapably, by proxy or influence, it might be better to say that everybody is an artist--either good or bad, responsible or irresponsible. Any life, by working or not working, by working well or poorly, inescapably changes others' lives, and so changes the world. That is why our division of the so-called "fine arts" from "craftsmanship" and "craftsmanship" from "labor" is so arbitrary, meaningless and destructive. As Walter Shewring rightly said "the plowman and the potter have a cosmic function." Bad art in any trade dishonors and damages Creation.
If we think of ourselves as living souls, immortal creatures, living in the midst of a Creation that is mostly mysterious--that, even when visible, is never fully imaginable--and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves, for others, and for the world, then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer. We see why the old poets invoked the muse. And we know why George Herbert prayed, in his poem "Matters":
Teach me thy love to know;
That this new light, which now I see
May both the work and workman show.
Work connects us both to Creation and to eternity. This is the reason also for Mother Ann Lee's famous instruction: "do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live on earth, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow."
Explaining "the perfection, order, and illumination" of the artistry of Shaker furniture makers, Coomaraswamy wrote: "All tradition has seen in the Master Craftsman of the Universe the exemplar of the human artist or `maker by art,' and we are told to be 'perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.'" And searching out the lesson, for us, of the Shakers' humble, impersonal, perfect artistry, that refused the modern divorce of utility and beauty, he wrote: "Unfortunately, we do not desire to be such as the Shaker was; we do not propose to 'work as though we had a thousand years to live, and as though we were to die tomorrow.' dust as we desire peace but not the things that make for peace, so we desire art but not the things that make for art. . . we have the art that we deserve. If the sight of it puts us to shame, it is with ourselves that the re-formation must begin."
Any genuine effort to re-form our arts, our ways of making, must take thought of "the things that make for art." We must see that no art begins in itself; it begins in other arts, in attitudes and ideas antecedent to any art, and in nature. If we look at the great artistic traditions, as it is necessary to do, we will see that they have never been divorced either from religion or from economy. The possibility of an entirely secular art, and of works of art that are spiritless or ugly or useless, is not a possibility that has been among us for very long. Traditionally, the arts have been ways of making that have placed a just value upon their materials or subjects, upon the uses and the users of the things made by art, and upon the artists themselves. They have, that is, been ways of giving honor to the works of God. The great artistic tradtions have had nothing to do with what we call "self expression." The great artistic traditions have had nothing to do with what we call "self-expression." They have not been destructive of privacy or exploitive of private life. Though they have certainly originated things and employed genius, they have no affinity with the modern cults of originality and genius. Coomaraswamy, a good guide as always, makes an indispensable distinction between genius in the modern sense and craftsmanship: "Genius inhabits a world of its own. The master craftsman lives in a world inhabited by other men: he has neighbors." The arts, traditionally, belong to the neighborhood. They are the means by which the neighborhood lives, works, remembers, worships, and enjoys itself.
But most important of all, now, is to see that the artistic traditions understood every art primarily as a skill or craft and ultimately as a service to fellow creatures and to God. An artist's first duty, according to this view, is technical. It is assumed that one will have talents, materials, subjects--perhaps even genius or inspiration or vision. But these are traditionally understood not as personal properties with which one may do as one chooses but as gifts of God or nature that must be honored in use. One does not dare to use these things without the skill to use them well. As Dante said of his own art, "far worse than in vain does he leave the shore ... who fishes for the truth and has not the art." To use gifts less than well is to dishonor them and their Giver. There is no material or subject in Creation that in using, we are excused from using well; there is no work in which we are excused from being able and responsible artists.
-Excerpt from Wendell Berry's Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, pp.108-113
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