Popes St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, in everything from addresses to encyclicals, have demonstrated a notable concern for beauty, art, and artists. Recent Church preaching and teaching has emphasized the “way of beauty,” which speaks not only to the intellect and will but also to the emotions–indeed, to all these dynamics at once. Through its integral language of the heart, the way of beauty is a powerful and joyful path for the renewal of culture. For both evangelical and properly theoretical reasons, Catholic thought is summoned to examine what it means to produce and appreciate beautiful art, especially in our age.

Daniel McInerny’s work, Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts addresses this need with charm and insight, weaving learned philosophical precision with wide-ranging cultural and artistic examples, writing with the straightforward yet winsome prose of a successful, veteran teacher in the humanities, who is also a published novelist. Beauty and Imitation analyzes fundamental and contemporary issues that probe the question, what is going on in artistic experience and why does it matter? His argument is that authentic art is imitative of reality or “mimetic” in kind; and the delight it effects can help order the passions of individuals and societies toward the good.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I, “The Nature of the Mimetic Arts,” comprises five chapters and begins by explaining why “art” is best understood as mimetic. Part II, “The Mimetic Arts and Moral Transformation,” focuses in two chapters upon the way both knowing and delight are at play in artistic experience, giving it unique power. These two parts provide the heft of the book’s conceptual apparatus. In an “Interlude,” McInerny offers a summary of his argument through an imagined dialogue between characters drawn from a story by JRR Tolkien. The dialogue explores the nature of artistic experience: Is it in fact as mystical and non-conceptual as some have it? The author thinks not (220). Finally, Part III’s seven chapters provide “A Guided Tour of Some Mimetic Arts,” applying the book’s analytical equipment in close examinations of music, painting, literature, and film, also addressing the question of whether and how art and entertainment are related.

McInerny’s realist account contests ideas about art that, roughly speaking, proceed from the Romantic movement. For him, art is not primarily about the expression of self, and it is not reducible to questions of aesthetics nor limited to the “fine art” of museums and concert halls; rather, it is intrinsically tied to conceptual and moral content. His Aristotelian-Thomist paradigm holds that integral human experience bridges sense particulars and intelligible wholes, according to which art’s representation of reality is likewise “hybrid” (31). Further, because the human is a truth-seeking moral agent, and because the human understanding of experience is narrative-based, all mimetic arts all in some way “picture” the dramatic, human story—“showing” the truth “experientially” rather than explaining it (68). This is even the case with purely instrumental music, which “pictures… an experience moving, being enacted, in intellectual-emotional space” (246).

The delight one experiences in contemplating various forms of art proceeds from cognition of the artwork precisely as a kind of picturing. One delights not only in the imagination or skill of the artist but, more importantly, in what the artist’s work properly shows—the very object of the picturing. McInerny follows Aquinas in teaching that there are three characteristic features by which something beautiful pleases the beholder: wholeness, proportion, and radiance. By design, McInerny has arrived upon the theoretical notion of beauty after beginning with the actual structures of being human and making art (172–73). Following this method, the delight in contemplating art is straightforwardly understood as objective. Art objectively compels the mind to articulate its intelligibility; which is why, for McInerny, the meaningfulness of art is always tied to thinking about it, even if conflicting judgments are not subject to conclusive resolution. Even so, the cognitive delight the appetite enjoys is connected to the intellect’s attainment of intelligibility and truth. Thus, art can train the emotions “in line with reason,” effecting—at least over some period of time—substantial moral transformation (196, 202). Art pictures the drama of reality in an emotionally powerful way, equipping us with a knowledge of the good and motivation for change richer than we might otherwise have.

Not surprisingly, Beauty and Imitation is also an encouragement about the Catholic imagination, which meaningfully features elements of mystery, responsibility, and symbolism (102–19). The picturing of real human transcendence is often lacking in our contemporary age. Society has increasingly turned away from worship of God to worship of self. McInerny recognizes that popular entertainment tends to constitute an “anti-culture” (377). At the same time, he judges that pop music and other forms of entertainment invite us to see that good Catholic art of mimetic imagination must not only be intelligent and elevating but accessible and entertaining (388).

The present review has focused upon basic elements of the author’s argument and exposition, steering away from his engagement with important sources, technicalities, and disputes. Many readers likely to take up such a work will find well-known, debated ideas like catharsis, poetry’s defectus veritatis (or “defect of truth”), and even the fourfold sense of scripture treated afresh. McInerny’s approach is traditional, while taking significant direction from modern approaches, such as those as found in Stephen Halliwell’s studies of Aristotle, Robert Sokolowski’s phenomenology, and the theories of Jacques Maritain, whose recasting of Aristotelian-Thomist positions he finds both instructive and problematic.

Naturally, the work sparks questions for further study and analysis. One range of questions concerns the implications of the metaphor of “theo-drama.” For McInerny, the term indicates that art’s picturing of reality draws its power from the real but tensional relationship man has with the providential and revealing God. For him, the mimetic arts are theo-dramatic. The idea is drawn from the modern theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar (96). In his massive trilogy, which strategically reverses the traditional order of truth, goodness, and beauty, Balthasar grounds his theory of action in the perception of beauty (which for the Christian, he holds, ultimately surrenders to the manifestation of divine glory). For Balthasar, the central theo-dramatic question is less “What ought I to do?” than “Who am I (to be)?” The answer to this latter question follows lines of aesthetical insight rather than moral specification, interpretation rather than science. But how does one integrate what is existentially meaningful with what is objectively truthful when the former leads the way? Balthasar’s reason for speaking in the paired terms of “theo” and “drama” frames his conviction that we do not fundamentally pre-determine ethical judgments but rather discover them through the living action of obedient responsibility to God. Does the metaphor of theo-drama necessarily suggest that authenticity can (even should) outstrip normativity?

For McInerny, the answer, evidently, is “no.” And in any event, such questions from the foregoing paragraph are not the task of a “philosophical reflection upon the arts” to answer. To be sure, taken on its own well-defined terms, Beauty and Imitation is a tremendous accomplishment that anyone interested in the subject-matter must read and re-read. Word on Fire Academic has hit its mark with this publication, giving readers a work that is both evangelical and scholarly. The book answers a deep need during a difficult age. It lacks nothing requisite and all its parts fit seamlessly together. In Beauty and Imitation, Daniel McInerny shines a bright light that will give lay and scholarly readers an abundance of knowledge and delight to be savored and shared for time to come.

Reviewed by: Rev. Bruno Shah, O.P.