RHE AESTHETICIST CREDO "ART FOR ART'S SAKE" has often been dismissed as a vicious circle. But even if we take these words to mean what they surely must--art for the sake of beauty and nothing more--something "vicious" seems to remain. The world has so many pressing needs, and the aestheticist, it seems, would prefer to ignore them. The many political schools of criticism, however, that have risen to power by challenging the formalist preoccupation with aesthetics give voice to a profound impulse to relate art to social justice and the common good. But in their own preoccupation with politics, these approaches sometimes risk leaving beauty behind altogether. Many artists and theorists, in fact, call quite loudly for its desertion. Others will suffer it to remain, but not without reducing it to the secondary role of a means to some more pragmatic end. But from a Christian theological perspective, the dichotomy between beauty and social justice assumed by aestheticist and utilitarian alike is a false one. For beauty, social justice, and the common good are all related to caritas, or "charity," as in "Dens Caritas Est"--"God is Love" (1 John 4.16). When God communicates his love to human beings and we, in turn, pass it on to one another, we are able to act with extraordinary courage and selflessness for the sake of social justice and the common good. And through the relationship of beauty to caritas, art is able to engage social concerns without abandoning beauty as its proper end. I am speaking both of "art for art's sake" and art for the sake of social justice and the common good: art for the sake of love itself.
