Cultivating the earth is an exercise in being human. And this exercise is more important today than ever before as we suffer an increasing loss of a sense of the human difference. Here I mean all of us, not just confused intellectuals or mislead youth.
Human life is a matter of exercising various ‘arts.’ To be attentive then to the nature of art in the broad and most important sense can reveal much about the human difference and how better to live it out.
But we live in the most art-less age in history. I speak here of much more than the ‘fine arts;’ I mean art in the sense of the many crafts or know-hows that concern how humans go about living on this earth. Aristotle warned long ago of what has largely come to pass. When the main criteria for the crafts come from ‘business’ in the form of the bottom-line or making money, then the crafts are undermined. Thomas Aquinas invokes Scripture as illustrative of Aristotle’s point when it says, “All things yield to money.” (Ecclesiastes 10:19)
The arts are not the highest of human perfections; the virtues are. But there is a deep synergy between arts and virtues. The arts always come to their truest perfection in the context of virtue, and there is much in common between the true crafts-man and the virtuous man. Hand in hand with our cultivation of virtue should be a cultivation of a sense for really making things well—we might call it the ‘craftsman’s approach.’
I will note here just two aspects of any art or craft that parallel and so also aid in a deeper cultivation of human perfection.
1. An art comes from experience and calls for a teacher.
This is always the human way. We must be docile, or teachable, by reality itself and by other people who have interacted more with that reality. Arts are grounded in the truth of the way things are. The carpenter learns from and about wood; the doctor learns from and about the human body. They do not dictate to wood or body what they are; or if they try to, they will never be craftsmen.
This simple disposition of docility stands at the root of all the most important things in life. How different might our world and our lives be if the disposition of the true artist more characterized our approach to life.
2. An artist always has an eye for the beautiful even when being most practical.
It is hard to put a finger on this one, yet it is absolutely apparent in experience. We are most apt to say, “Now there is a craftsman!” precisely when someone has produced whatever he has produced with a certain beauty. The English artist/craftsman David Jones insisted on this point: any truly human work—and the work of a craft or art is the archetype of all human work—strives for the beautiful. Any art, Jones says, is a kind of ‘fitting together’—a notion expressed by Aristotle and Aquinas as a putting of order into things, and this fitting together tends toward beauty. Beauty after all is in the splendor of order.
Here again we see the disposition of the craftsman as being a disposition uniquely expressive of what it is to be human. To cultivate this disposition is to cultivate our humanity.
So why did I open referring to cultivation of the earth? The great Xenophon offers an age-old maxim: “Agriculture is the mother and nurse of all arts.” Much food for thought here. Somehow in the works of agriculture, rightly undertaken, is a kind of first school in craftsmanship—which is a kind of first school in being human.
After all, we were created in a garden.
To be clear, we must be aware that the most important ‘gardening’ for which we were made is not the tending of fruits and vegetables. We are after higher fruits. Yet this does not make bodily fruits unimportant, but quite the contrary. Does not God’s design often surprise us with its, well, homey-ness? Or its richness, while also its littleness. Or its appreciation and inclusion of the whole range of things, arrayed in splendid order. Thus was our world arranged, or sown. So might we learn to arrange, or to sow. Like a farmer. Like a craftsman. ~ ~ ~
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