Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:00:00]:

Somebody who's been in and out of rehab for ten or fifteen years, he's harming himself and he's harming society. And he himself is asking, well, you know, why should I go on? Right? Well, the one reason he goes on is that he's been wounded by beauty. It's because of experiences of beauty that he knows there's something other than him that's capable of poking in, right, that's capable of touching him, but is fundamentally other. Because without grace, his life is absolute chaos.

Jim Spiegel [00:00:32]:

Welcome to the Kalos Center podcast. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Kalos Center podcast. Our guest today is Margarita Mooney Clayton. She is associate professor of congregational studies in the department of practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. She earned her MA and PhD in sociology from Princeton University and her BA in psychology at Yale University. She's also served on the faculty of Yale University, Princeton University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Pepperdine University. Margarita's most recent books include the love of learning, seven dialogues on the liberal arts, the wounds of beauty, seven dialogues on art and education.

Jim Spiegel [00:01:29]:

In addition to her scholarly works, Margarita's essays have appeared in Scientific American, The Chronicle of Higher Education, First Things, Public Discourse, Church Life Journal, and many other popular publications. Margarita is also founder and executive director of the Scala Foundation, whose mission is to infuse meaning and purpose into American education by restoring a classical liberal arts approach. So Margarita, Mooney, Clayton, thank you for your great work, and welcome to the Cato Center podcast.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:02:00]:

It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me.

Jim Spiegel [00:02:03]:

In some recent articles in, public discourse, you explore connections between art and virtue. What do the life of virtue and the life of creativity have in common?

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:02:15]:

Alright. This is great. So I got interested in this question between the connection between art and virtue because when I gave a presentation on beauty to the consortium of Christian study centers, one of the big theological questions I got was, well, what do you mean that we cocreate with God? Only God can create. And I began to study more of this question because I wanted to have a a strong answer to this. And so what I'm doing in this piece, there's, like, two threads. Right? I'm arguing that oftentimes, virtue is thought of in the moral sense of making making right judgments and behaving correctly, and this is obviously correct. That is one understanding of virtue. But what I'm trying to do is put art back into the realm of virtue because in the Thomistic understanding, right, Saint Thomas Aquinas, what makes a work of art good is that it it properly serves the function for which it is intended.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:03:22]:

So the virtue is is in the object doing what it is intended to do. Now this may sound obvious, but what Saint Thomas is doing is saying that human beings have been gifted with intelligence. And knowing how to direct our intellectual faculty to engage with the world in a way that, yes, cocreates, furthers God's creation is part of exercising virtue. So what he's saying there, right, is that humans participate in the reason and in the creativity of God, and that elevates art. And by art here, I mean, the making of objects. Right? That the making of objects in the world is a participation in the divine creativity. And, again, this is this is a big statement. But when I talk about it, I say, well, what what would happen if our intellect was not being directed through the material world to create things that please god? Well, we can use our intellect to create things that take away from god's granular and from god's goodness.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:04:35]:

Not everything we create serve the human person. Not everything we make furthers the kingdom of god. And so we have got to use our intellect and our moral virtue to properly order our capacity to create because if we don't, we're going to distract and to harm.

Jim Spiegel [00:05:00]:

That's that's good stuff. So, it's a big idea as you say, you know, looking at art, as you put it, is participating in God's governance of the world. Have you gotten much pushback on that? And if so, what form has that taken?

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:05:16]:

So the questions there are sort of are you saying one might say, right, are you saying God isn't sovereign over the world? Right? And I'm well, no. God is sovereign over the world, but God has given us freedom and we do have the freedom to further his plans in the world or to detract from it. And so by emphasizing art as contributing to governance of the world, right, I'm trying to say here I'm trying also to push back on a common idea that art is about self expression and the, personal inspiration of the artist. Now there's nothing wrong, and, of course, artists and people who make things have a personal inspiration, but that's not what makes it good. What makes it good is that they can direct that inspiration to correspond to something that we know is furthering God's plans. Right? So bringing new things into being, we cocreate with God, but apart from virtue or that power will be disordered. So this is what I have said, but the pushback around, you know, God's God's governance is that this is not a kind of God's governance understood in a civic or political, although that is important. This is God's governance understood as endowing human beings with the capacity to co create and freedom.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:06:42]:

So it's more of a vision of a unity and diversity that in the end, God is one and the things that we create are brought together by the oneness of god, yet this is getting very metaphysical here. Right? Yet each of those individual things has its own, has its own essence and has its own form. So as human beings, we have this incredible capacity to both see the whole, see the interconnectedness of things, yet bring new things into the world, which this is this is the wild card right here, that god gives us the materials to create things, but he doesn't create the bridge. And so Peter Brown, for example, who I spoke to in the wounds of beauty dialogue. Right? He says that, you know, prior to Christianity, one understanding of beauty was actually marvel in the human skill of making grand buildings or the coliseum, and the beauty was the human capacity to do that. But for Augustine and coming from the incarnation, no. The the power to create is ultimately with God, but it's the human cooperation with God to bring about. So it's both true that that building or that bridge or that coliseum wouldn't wouldn't exist without our work, without our initiative.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:08:16]:

And how incredible is that that all of these artifacts, you know, tunnels and archways and all of these amazing feats really do require human freedom and human intelligence. But they need to be directed, lest they not serve the human good because we've also created machines that destroy or we create, you know, medicines that harm. So we have the capacity to misdirect our gifts. And so, yes, this is really elevating the human, but it's elevating the human unity with the divine to further God's governance. It's not elevating the human apart from the divine or the human as divine, but rather highlighting that there is the movement of grace within the human person that allows us to unite our intellectual faculties with God's purposes and then build and create things that further the human good.

Jim Spiegel [00:09:17]:

Is it really this just the the cultural mandate or it's a, an important part of the cultural mandate that we get in the early chapters of Genesis? I you could use that portal of entry. You could also what comes to my mind, in a New Testament passage is is this, this verse in second Peter one where Peter says that, we may participate in the divine nature, which has always fascinated me. And I think it's it is easy. Maybe it's typical to interpret that in a in a narrowly moral sense, but it it seems that you would invite us to take this in a more expansive way including the whole realm of creativity. Is that is that fair?

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:10:04]:

Yes. Because I think that the vision of God's splendor in the world that this give rise to is a is a vision of abundance and, in fact, a super abundance. Right? Part of what I think the modern mentality has been inundated with is perhaps you might wanna say, like, a Malthusian framework where the resources of the earth are limited and they can't be expanded, they can only be divided. And as more and more people come into the world, the resources of the earth will be depleted and more and more depleted. So this is this kind of apocalyptical sort of mentality that the finite resources of the world will be depleted. And that really contrast with this vision of cocreation with God and super abundance where I'm not saying that I don't know whether or not a particular mineral is finite or infinite or how much or how much water the planet has. But what I am saying is that because the human mind participates in the divine image, partakes of the divine image, that we have the capacity with God's grace to use our intellect to make and make an abundance out of something that appears to be limited. Right? So the limited amount of a resource doesn't mean that humans can't combine, can't enrich, can't enhance, can't generate in a super abundant way resources of the earth.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:11:53]:

And so what's interesting with this sort of Malthusian perspective, right, the opposite has happened through human ingenuity. We have more food on this planet than we've ever had. We have more sources of energy. Now I'm not saying that there aren't environmental issues to be addressed, but if you look at the predictions about the depletion of the Earth's resources that were being made when I came into this world in the nineteen seventies, they haven't come true. They have not come true. In fact, it's been the opposite, and I attribute that to human ingenuity. Right? And this is the point that I'm making that elevating or seeing human participation in the divine creation is elevating human ingenuity, which allows us to look at the world not through a sort of winner takes all or dividing up the spoils mentality, which I don't think is biblical. Mhmm.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:12:50]:

I don't think there's anything biblical about

Jim Spiegel [00:12:52]:

It's it's not a zero sum game.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:12:54]:

No. I don't think there's anything in the bible that says the created world is a zero sum game. Right? Now are we fallen and in need of redemption? Do we have wasteful tendencies? Of course, we do. Do we destroy things? Of course, we do. But it does strike me that as Christians, if we believe in God's grace, we have to believe that our capacity to cocreate with God and to be creative and in and have ingenuity and innovation even around the greatest environmental or food limitation problems we have. Don't we believe that the human capacity to solve those problems is going to be bigger than the problem? And if not, then we've inverted it, and we have a materialist viewpoint where humans are somehow, you know, humans don't have a soul. We're just one set of atoms trapped inside of a cage somehow trying to make the best of this material world. But, no, we have a soul, and we have a mind, and we have an intellect.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:13:56]:

And we can be in the world while also cocreating with God and bringing out new things.

Jim Spiegel [00:14:02]:

I love it. It's such a optimistic or maybe the better word is hopeful perspective. And just seeing this apply to, let's call it, practical arts or or scientific endeavor, environmental issues. You have an article, and I think it's in Scientific American where you talk about beauty and the aesthetics as as it applies to engineering, you know, and when engineers solve problems, when they when they, imaginatively or creatively come up with a very practical design, there is artistry there that is profoundly practical. It's problem solving. It's these two things don't need to be at odds. In fact, Einstein would say, the best science, the most insightful science ultimately, you know, he was a phys a physicist. Ultimately, the those theories that give us the the the most practical scientific applications are those which will be the most beautiful.

Jim Spiegel [00:15:00]:

Isn't that fascinating?

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:15:01]:

Well, see, I'm so glad you brought up the Scientific American article because I love talking about this with scientists. My husband is a scientist. Before he was an artist, he studied metallurgy, so the physics of solids, physics of metals. He actually and that was at and then he got a master's in metallurgical engineering from Michigan Tech in the Upper Peninsula. And my oldest brother is an electrical engineer at Georgia Tech, and he has a master's in philosophy, and he did it on artificial intelligence. And working engineers as well as my brother and my husband, they will all say that a very important capacity, a very important thing that happens in engineering is simply human intuition. Right? And what I wrote about in Scientific American is that engineers don't just sit down with paper and use formulas. They they dream of something in their mind that nobody thinks could ever possibly be built.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:15:58]:

And the example I gave in the Scientific American article, I believe, was the Duomo in Florence. Brunas Shelley, if I'm getting his name right. He was the architect, and the scientist told him this this couldn't be done, that you couldn't build a tower without having the supports being like this and holding it up. But he had this vision. He had these mathematical calculations in his head. He he had this insight in his head that this could be done. But you don't know if it can be done until you actually try to make it in the world, and it worked. So what happens in a scientific laboratory? What happens in an engineering laboratory? Human beings come in, people like Einstein, amazing imaginations and amazing creativity, and then the working outcomes.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:16:43]:

So but the working out doesn't give you the imagination. This is the rub when it comes to something like artificial intelligence, which my brother with the philosopher and engineer says, it's fundamentally imitative. It you can give it a lot of input. It can be really creative with what you've given it, but only from that starting point that you gave it. And so artificial intelligence is artificial because it can do nothing other than imitate based on what you've given it. Whereas the human being has a soul and has an intellect that's inspired by the divine, and it can have intuition. Now the intuition, as I said, has to be worked out, and this is where we come in and it's repetition and it's refining and it's testing. But don't forget that the that intuition, human intuition is the driver of scientific creativity.

Jim Spiegel [00:17:38]:

That is there's so many directions I could go there. Which one shall I choose? Okay. So Einstein and his imagination, interesting story that you may or may not be familiar with. But, you know, the nineteen nineteen solar eclipse was it was really the decisive test as to whether, relativity theory was correct. I believe the eclipse was viewed down in South America, and many scientists who, you know, wanted to either confirm, most wanted to see a reputation of Einstein's crazy theory, scramble down there to to see if in fact, light as it passes by the sun really is affected by, the gravitational pull of this massive object that is our our sun. And, turned out that Einstein's prediction was correct, and that was the turning point. Historian Paul Johnson says that's when the twentieth century really began in nineteen nineteen August because it confirmed Einstein's relativity theory. But guess who didn't even bother to show up at that eclipse to view it was Albert Einstein.

Jim Spiegel [00:18:54]:

He stayed it might have been where you are. I think he was maybe he was teaching at Princeton at the time. But when his graduate assistant came in to notify him that, his theory had been confirmed, all excited and exuberant. You know, professor Eynes, now your theory's been confirmed. He didn't even look up. He was working on some some calculations, and his response was, well, I knew it was true. The mathematics proved it, which is, that's an impressive confidence in one's theory. And it came from his conviction that as we know, as theists, that thought reflects reality, that human thought as we're made, our minds are made in the image of God, are fundamentally rational.

Jim Spiegel [00:19:46]:

Yes. Fallen. But we are deeply rational beings. And as we probe into the mathematical relationships that are there in the physical world, we really are discovering the way God thinks. And it's there's consistency there. There there's there's there's a a brilliant logic to it. And he what he had done is he had discovered through, the math of it all that other things must be true and that when they're tested, they will be confirmed. I think that connects to some of the things you've been saying just about the intuitions that God has given us that are aspects of our Imago Dei.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:20:33]:

Oh, absolutely. That's beautiful. I mean, the this the thought that through the mathematical calculations we make or through, you know, our intellect and our intuitions that we can come to know the mind of god, as you said. I mean, what a what an amazing idea. Now, of course, we don't come to know the mind of god perfectly, but I think the point you're making is so important because the more that we discover things mathematically or scientifically or create things, the more we know about God who is the author of all creation. And God is both one, but he also holds this is a metaphysical thing. He holds within himself all of these diverse things he's created and bestows a unity upon them. That is order.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:21:26]:

Right? So it's astounding when we look into, you know, the stars or the constellation of this that we can discern order. It's not chaos. This is this is my point. And the the world is not meaningless, and it's not chaotic. There's an order to it. That order, right, has an author. It's the divine mind of God that's holding all of these things, which I think is a beautiful way to think about God and to think about the world and to think about the human person. Because as I said, the alternative is we're all totally fallen.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:22:04]:

This is chaos, and we're we're just bent on this path of destruction, or all of this is meaningless. It's kind of an illusion, you know? None of this really means anything, and we're just kind of floating with no beginning and no end and kind of no purpose. We're just kind of floating. And that to me doesn't seem at all to inspire the moral virtues that the that the modern world wants to have, whether they're Christian or not. Everybody wants to be compassionate. Everybody wants to be just. Everyone wants to be fair. Well, if your ultimate world view is that everything's meaningless or everything's chaos, where does this moral normativity around justice and compassion come from? Why not, you know, hedonism? Mhmm.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:22:52]:

Why not conquer through violence? Right? So if your moral virtues, frankly, I think are left over from a Christian worldview. Right? That but if they're disconnected from a Christian worldview, I ask people, you know, why? If you don't believe that the human person is made in the image of God, Why does someone whose behavior has objectively harmed other people deserve to be treated with dignity? Why? Now it's an uncomfortable question. You know, it makes people kinda, oh, you know? But if you don't believe in the image of God and in the possibility of forgiveness and redemption, then there are some people out there who look like they're not very deserving, and they're a drain on these finite resources that we have. You know? I have in mind, for example, in one of the projects I did, and I had a very long series of conversations with a young man who was a recovering addict from heroin. Somebody who's been in and out of rehab for ten or fifteen years. He's harming himself and he's harming society. And he himself is asking, well, you know, why should I go on? Right? Well, the one reason he goes on is that he's been wounded by beauty. It's because of experiences of beauty that he knows there's something other than him that's capable of poking in, right, that's capable of touching him, but is fundamentally other.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:24:20]:

Because without grace, his life is absolute chaos, and he knows it. And if there's going to be meaning and order in his life, it's the it's a gift of a being so different than him that reaches him through mercy, absolute mercy. You know, he was merciless on himself and his self critique. So human beings have this longing. What do I say to somebody who doesn't know what to believe about God, but wants to believe that there's a piece of him that has dignity and is capable of receiving grace. Well, that's this man's hope. That is his one hope. It's not the next treatment center and it's not the next therapist.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:25:04]:

His true hope is that there's a being capable of loving him in spite of his fallenness.

Jim Spiegel [00:25:09]:

Oh, that's good.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:25:10]:

And that idea is so compelling to everybody because we all you know what we all want? We all want mercy on our sins. That's right.

Jim Spiegel [00:25:21]:

Yep. Such a redemptive perspective. I wanna circle back to this connection between beauty and virtue and reference one of the early presidents of of Princeton, which was, Jonathan Edwards, the great Puritan theologian and philosopher. In an essay or a short book he wrote called, the nature of true virtue, which is a profound, little piece, He maintained that that moral virtue is a kind of beauty. He he he understood virtue as moral beauty. So he saw beauty as a really is a more fundamental category and axiological category than moral virtue. Do do you think that's right? I mean, it's a strong claim.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:26:06]:

Okay. Hey. Alright. I must say, I am a fan of Jonathan Edwards because, you know, I'm a Yale student. We have a college named for him and my affiliation with Princeton, but I'm not an expert on Jonathan Edwards theology. But I will tell you that that idea of morality is fundamentally being tied to beauty and not virtue really appeals to me because what I said the other night in a discussion about this was that human beings are meant to approach God through beauty and I think Augustine talks about this by an attraction to the good. And so, ultimately, for me, morality is adhering oneself to the source of that attraction, which is God. Right? And this is the story of Augustine in the confessions.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:26:57]:

Who made you, sunset? Who made you, birds? Right? It's not a story of simply behavior, right, but of the heart looking for the origin of that beauty and that resplendence and that grandeur. And so morality understood as an attraction to the good and an adherence to the good. Now, of course, out of that comes obligations and duties and, you know, care for others and care for self and behaviors. But what I don't wanna do is reduce virtue or morality, frankly, simply to be external because the heart is made for attraction to the good. And I fundamentally believe, and this is actually what I'm working on with my husband now, a program we wanna develop called the Way of Beauty, which is a process of spiritual discernment for God's calling for you. So let's say we follow the 10 commandments and, you know, we go to church on Sunday. Young people are still looking for what's my calling. Right? Where am I being asked to develop my talents and my gifts? And my husband's intuition, and this is what he's been doing as a scientist and later an artist, is that God speaks to us in our hearts about his calling for us through beauty.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:28:16]:

And he firmly believes that if you practice beauty, whether you're joining a choir or gardening or making flower arrangements, something where you're engaging with the material world and creating something beautiful, that you will then have the inspiration to see where God is calling you to. And so we're working through this, and I think it's a fascinating idea. And it's why, as I mentioned earlier, I've started taking singing lessons both because I wanna improve my singing. But in improving my singing, it's going to make me more receptive to God's grace and to God's call. And so for me, this is super important because I'm highly analytical and rational and calculating all the time. But when I'm doing something beautiful for the sake of bringing beauty into the world and conforming my mind to God, it's true that in a way, like, my mind opens up and I see more possibilities and then I can hear God more.

Jim Spiegel [00:29:18]:

That's good. A major debate, I'm sure you're familiar with, in philosophical aesthetics is whether beauty and other aesthetic qualities are objective features of things. Aesthetic relativists maintain that beauty is just a matter of cultural or, subjective preference or personal opinion that sometimes said to to kind of express that view that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Aesthetic objectivist, though, they believe that beauty is objectively real, as real as any scientific fact about the world. What would your take on that be?

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:29:58]:

Well, you're right that this is one of the bigger questions in beauty and on debates about beauty, but the more that I think about this question, the more that I think that the division between objective and subjective beauty isn't even really the right way to frame the question. When people frame that question, I think what they're rightly pointing to is that an experience of beauty has a personal or a subjective component. And when they hear objective, they hear that there's some kind of, hard and fast rule that, there's a single or a universal thing that should be beautiful to anybody, and therefore, it's a judgment on somebody whose personal experience of it doesn't think it's beautiful. So the way that I think about this, the way that I frame the discussion is, again, to try to get people to picture actual concrete experiences in the world or objects in the world. And it does seem to me pretty clear that we have a lot of consensus about beauty in nature. There's not a lot of disagreement about beauty in nature. People generally perceive forests and ocean to be beautiful. And frankly, most people would think it was strange if somebody said the ocean was ugly.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:31:21]:

Right? It's just it doesn't really doesn't make sense. Now when it comes to creative beauty, I do believe that there are principles of harmony and proportion, and there are elements of form that are present in literature, and in poetry and that those elements of form and harmony and proportion, as you said earlier, reveal to us the divine order that is God. And so I think that we are created as human beings to participate in the divine intelligence, and therefore, form matters. Now there can be a practically infinite way of applying harmony and proportion and form and poetry or storyline in literature. And human responses to that form can also be infinite. But what I don't want to say is that cacophony is beautiful. It's an intentional inversion, or contradiction for the sake of contradiction without a resolution. So musical theory, of course, there's tension, but it's a tension that's designed to produce a greater harmony.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:32:34]:

And I think those experiences, what I sometimes ask people is, well, what kind of music or what kind of art would you wanna look at for the rest of your life? Right? In the academy, we're the ones that wanna experiment with the form. Well, let's let's try a new musical combination. Let's try a new artistic and that's fine, but we probably won't know if a new form of beauty is being discovered on the edges for quite a long time. And what I am interested in is bringing these topics back into high schools and colleges where frankly people are starving for beauty, and they're absolutely inundated with entertainment that is superficial forms of sound and images, which are a false kind of attraction. And not to mention the social media algorithms, which, you know, switch the images and the sounds to kind of never let you rest.

Jim Spiegel [00:33:29]:

Mhmm.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:33:29]:

And so we have lost, I think, this traditional understanding that certain forms of beauty have a form that correspond to our nature as contemplative beings where we can both appreciate the beauty of the object yet be drawn to something beyond the object. And artists and musicians that I'm working with now, this is the kind of art and music that they wanna create. And, frankly, this is the kind of art and music that our young people need to be educated in. And classical schools are doing this. I was working with a classical after school program for underprivileged children in Philadelphia. It's part of the, neon saw classical network, and a lot of public school kids aren't getting any art or music anymore. And they did really resonate with Tchaikovsky's Russian ballet because in that, they can perceive the harmonies, and they can talk about their resolution of the harmonies. I mean, it's amazing.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:34:36]:

And so to say that there's no objective beauty is effectively to say that there's no excellence in art or music or architecture. And your common sense just says that that can't be true.

Jim Spiegel [00:34:49]:

Yeah. Good. I think it's a good way to to sum it up. There are just certain clear cases. There are a lot of fuzzy cases, you know, borderline maybe, something's more or less beautiful, but, you know, an experience of, you know, Bach's Brandenburg concertos or, the Sistine Chapel, or, you know, one of Shakespeare's plays, you get you have clear examples of, aesthetic excellence that, would be maybe analogous to clear examples of virtue just as there are clear examples of vice in the aesthetic realm. You've got clear examples of beauty and ugliness. Yes. In some cases, it's hard to tell whether a particular work is beautiful or whether a particular human act is good, but we can't confuse our ability to know in a particular case with, the question whether it's a fact of the matter that we're looking at something beautiful or something virtuous.

Jim Spiegel [00:35:50]:

I think there's a kind of, parallel there. Now you were just talking about teaching the arts to kids, making a concern for beauty, compelling to a to a community, thinking about, say, the conservative Christian community. Talking about the importance of art creativity in that context can be challenging as I'm sure you know, because there's a common and maybe deserved association between the art world and immorality. And so people will sometimes wanna keep their distance from the arts, the fine arts because of their associations, negative associations, with immorality in in that realm based on their own experience. How do we overcome that obstacle?

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:36:39]:

Well, I think it's wise to be discerning about the images and the sounds that come to us from from popular culture. So the common sense concern that there's a lot of entertainment that's kitsch or immoral and potentially damaging to the image of God in somebody, I would agree with. I mean, of course, an extreme example that's very rampant is, of course, something like pornography, which in my lifetime went from being thought of as, you know, clearly morally wrong to sadly accepted by not just many men, but by many women. And this is a degrading way of of putting of seeing a person. But there are other things too. There's, the women being affected by images on social media and kind of portraying, you know, women in this competitive or attractive sense that's not true beauty. Now what I think a lot of Christians are unaware of is that there is a rebirth in the arts coming out of Christianity, and I meet those people, right, through my work. I meet the one Christian in the fashion design house in New York, you know, or the one person who is a Christian doing, you know, plays in New York City or trying to make Hollywood films.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:38:00]:

And the reason that Christians need to care about those Christians who are there in Hollywood and in fashion design and in Broadway is that precisely works of culture influence the masses. And so we need to have a rebirth of Christians who can make not only art for the church, which is extremely important. That's what my husband does. That's what I support. But we need Christians making culture that uplifts the human being. We need movies and clothing and plays, which are elevating the human person, not ignoring sinfulness and our need for redemption. But there are heroic people out there trying to break through. And so if we don't acknowledge the power, we can't deal with the wrong parts about culture just by putting our heads in the sand because we are embodied human beings.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:38:52]:

This is what I tell people. You can't close your ears or your eyes forever. You can't. And, ultimately, I also believe you can't close your ears and your eyes to culture and worship God. You know, we don't worship God by closing our eyes and our ears. So we need culture in the church, and we need a culture of beauty. Now the places I see this happening are in these programs, which are largely in the classical school world, which started with literature, but now they're bringing in art and music. And more and more art teachers are coming forward and music teachers, and I think all children should be doing music, all should be doing music.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:39:32]:

And I do actually think that if we implant an imprint in our children a love for beauty from a young age, I actually think that that's a defense against the negative images and ideas that are going to come later. And I'm grateful for the family I have, the Catholic education I have, the music in my home because when you've experienced true beauty, false beauty is less attractive because you know it's junk food. But if you've only ever had junk food, you don't know that there's something better. And so we've got to, you know, incubate Christian artists who can make our world yes. There's gonna be thorns, but we need to plant the seeds and rebuild the garden. And for the church to be influential in culture, we have to support culture.

Jim Spiegel [00:40:26]:

That's such a good point, and it's such a instructive point for Christian parenting. I think, you know, we should be as Christian parents about the process of of refining, training, nurturing good taste in our kids. My wife and I resolved very early on. We have four kids. They're they're older now. But being strong believers in the arts and the exploration of popular culture, but with it, you know, in a with a certain Christian wisdom and and discernment, we wanted to train our kids in this. So we resolved to to train our kids to be film critics. And very early on, we had them watching classic films.

Jim Spiegel [00:41:12]:

You know, my wife is huge Hitchcock fan. They they've now viewed all the great Hitchcock films at least once. I've I'm a big Buster Keaton fan. I still say he's the greatest talent in the history of film. And then so many other films that we would expose them to, and then we would discuss them as a family or in, you know, just, dialogues one to one because we were convinced that if if you can become a good film critic, that will, ipso facto, make you a good or at least much better cultural critic because there's so much in film that embodies contemporary culture. It's a multi dimensional art form. You got different media there. Right? There's a text.

Jim Spiegel [00:41:59]:

There's, you know, there's it's theater. There's music, and, we can analyze all aspects of that. There's and there's always a point or there should be some sort of point. You can critique that and how is that conveyed. And it's really worked. You know, our kids have all turned out to be pretty good film critics and good, analyzers or critics of of culture. So that's something we like to recommend people that really Mhmm. It it reinforces your point, or it's an application of your point.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:42:29]:

Oh, and I also think what you're doing with your kids, that's great, but I you know, and what you're doing, I think it's gonna help your kids to understand the bible. Because the bible, at the end of the day, is a collection of stories, and it's full of allegories, and it's full of symbols. And so someone who I admire, like John Henry Newman, right, he was responding to a kind of, well, let's take a scientific or a rationalist approach to the bible. And when you get a kinda purely historical, literal only reading of the bible, you lose the symbolism and you lose the allegory. And what I tell my students is that we need the language of creativity and culture because to talk about spiritual things is to talk about a reality that is not of this world. It is not things we see. So when I started to do this work, I said, wait a minute. The Psalms talk about, you know, the slaying of dragons.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:43:25]:

Well, dragons aren't a real animal. But how can we talk about God's power without recourse to these powerful images? And what happens when we can't think of God in those terms? Then God becomes just another creature, which he's not. So I think there's a great book called Tending the Heart of Virtue, by Vigan Gorian who taught at UVA looking at children's fairy tales and the importance of moral imagination to perceive that God approaches us in dialogue and in love and that we're destined for something really great. And so the message of Christianity right now in a culture of nihilism and a culture of hedonism is that we have the imprint of God in our souls and we're destined for to partake in that divine nature, which begins here but will reach its fulfillment in a place that we don't know exactly what it looks like, but we're supposed to carry that vision within us. And if we lose that vision, then what are we being led by? What are we being attracted to? Right? And then I think it makes the life of faith a life of joy and excitement, because our ultimate fulfillment is to partake of the divine.

Jim Spiegel [00:44:47]:

As we start to conclude here, I wanna get you to talk a little bit about your own faith journey. And I'm interested in how your own faith journey has either that's led you into a serious exploration of art and a theology of beauty, or was it the other way around and you you you had these interests in art and creativity and beauty and that led you down the path of faith, or did they grow simultaneously together? How did that work for you?

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:45:19]:

Well, as a young woman, I think it was all integrated between the home and the school and the church, you know, and I was both a very intellectually curious kid, who liked math and school in general. But, of course, I loved music, and my mother is from Cuba, and she sang a lot in the home. And we sang songs in my family, a lot of, music making in the home and, come from a family of really gifted musicians. And so I saw the importance of that. But really, it was what I pursued full time the intellectual life as a college student and then a graduate student. I really lost my love of beauty, because I didn't make time for it. And I thought it didn't matter, to be honest. I thought it was akin to entertainment, but not integral to my happiness or my, capacity to do my intellectual work.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:46:15]:

So it was in my mid thirties where I went down this path because I realized that my students weren't happy and I needed to give them more than a purely intellectual formation. And I realized that for myself, my desire for beauty was a need for God. And that if I turned God into something only that I study and preach about or teach about, then I wasn't nurturing that piece of me that wants to contemplate and simply be in the presence of God. And so I would just go sit in a beautiful church all by myself and just be with God. Right? That's just me trying to not drown out everything, but to come to church to be filled and to be filled with beauty. Not, yes, filled with the gospel and there's preaching too, but I needed more than that, filled with God's presence and to feel and sense that my life had a meaning and purpose because I could connect to this to this unseen being who was yet making himself known. And so I wanted to share that with students. I wanted to share with students that you can be focused on your practical concerns of family and work and also make time to encounter God through beauty because God wants you to rejoice in his goodness and he wants to give you his gifts.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:47:43]:

Your life for me wasn't only measuring one achievement after another. So it's very easy for me to slip into this kinda quasi utilitarian mentality, measuring God's love for me by the gifts he gives me or by my achievements. And neither one of those is true. Now, as I said, we are called to do things and we're called to do them the best that we can. But I really felt like we were in a cultural moment of crisis and frankly, iconoclasm of, you know, civic figures and, celebration of ugliness. And I thought all of this is tearing down the image of God in people. And I just noticed that when I started inviting friends to museums or for walks in nature or to look at beautiful art, that it sparked something in them, whether they're people of faith or not, that by cultivating my own love for beauty to build unity in a fractured society, to foster inspiration amongst people in despair, and not to try to fix every problem, but to present a vision of beauty that expresses the divine unity and the divine order, which people find a charm.

Jim Spiegel [00:49:00]:

Yeah. That's so good. So your book, the the wounds of beauty, the subtitle is seven dialogues on art and education. That takes a unique dialogical approach to exploring the different ways that beauty is essential to the good life. Can you talk about that?

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:49:16]:

Well, this book emerged out of my teaching. I was teaching for several years with the Scholar Foundation and also with Pepperdine, School of Public Policy on debates in higher education. And so I was trying to help students connect this whole theme of beauty to debates about the human person and the ends of education. And I started having some of these guest speakers who are in the book, people like George Martin who spoke about music, and the students were absolutely mesmerized. And so what I realized was that a lot for a lot of college students, but certainly also for, let's say, high school teachers or church leaders who I want to read this text, I wanted to take some of these big questions and big thinkers, people like Joseph Pieper, who's a domestic philosophy from Germany or Theodor Adorno, right, part of the German school, the Frankfurt School. These figures who are often difficult to read in the primary text even for those of us who are specialist in college professors. And I discovered through my teaching and by hosting guest speakers that I could have an incredibly rich conversation about some of these authors and ideas by talking with a professor or a musician or an artist who has engaged with those ideas and can explain the ideas, but explain them in a way that has been relevant to their practice, whether that's teaching or the writing of poetry, or the making of art. And so I discovered that this dialogical method is actually a relatively well, you could say an ancient method of inquiry.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:51:00]:

Right? We have dialogues in the, you know, Greco Roman world between Socrates and his students and Plato, like, going back and forth. But more often in the modern world, what we produce is a single voice. Right? A single narrator. And so I am the narrator through all of these dialogues, weaving them together, but I maintained the voice of my interlocutors. And then I provide, additional readings and, like, cliff notes about the books in a separate place so that those who want to hopefully encounter the primary text that I talk about will have enough information that then this book becomes a guidebook, like a teacher's handbook about how to enter into all these different texts. Because I know myself from teaching, and I'm sure you do too, that when you're new to a topic, you need something of a guidebook. What are the main debates? What are the big concepts? Who are the major figures? And so weaving together this narrative through seven dialogues allowed me to create a resource that I know has been used by by teachers in high school classes and by churches to stimulate a conversation about a topic that, frankly, used to be absolutely central to how all Christians thought about the meaning of revelation and has been really relegated to far behind either Christian intellectual, analytical philosophy or history or biblical exegesis. And so putting out their resource to help people, begin on this journey.

Jim Spiegel [00:52:51]:

That's so good. Father Socrates would be proud, I'm sure. And it occurred to me in a conversation recently with a colleague that, the whole phenomenon of the the podcast, right, the form that we're participating in right now is a kind of a rediscovery of, the that dialogical approach. And it's also easy to forget that much of scripture is presented to us in the form of dialogue. I mean, you've got the whole book of Job, basically, is one extended dialogue and even debate, and so many other aspects of scripture that we find compelling, including, you know, lengthy sections of the gospel, particularly in the middle of the gospel of John. A lot of compelling dialogue there. So I'm it is encouraging, to me as I'm sure it is to you to see the that that whole form rediscovered, and let's hope that continues.

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:53:51]:

Absolutely. And I think you're right.

Jim Spiegel [00:53:53]:

The question I'd like to conclude all our interviews with is, you know, what is your view on the meaning of life? You you basically just addressed that and summed it up so wonderfully so beautifully, I might say. Is there anything you would add to that?

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:54:07]:

You know, the meaning of life is, I think, for me to grow more and more in the knowledge of just how much God loves us. In spite of our fallenness and in spite of the world's brokenness, we're not alone. And with God's grace, he's leading us somewhere, not without difficulty, and that he'll be with us. And that we're called to participate in this divine drama that we don't really know where it's going, but it's better to take the risk and follow God than to build an iron cage of our own making. That's a false sense of security that's going to shatter. And ultimately, the meaning of life is to receive that love so that we can reflect it onto other people in a way that pulls them in to the divine beauty.

Jim Spiegel [00:55:07]:

That's great. Well, thank you so much. This has been wonderful, and, keep up the great work. Okay?

Margarita Mooney Clayton [00:55:14]:

Thank you.

Jim Spiegel [00:55:16]:

Thank you for listening to the Kalos Center podcast. We gave you our thoughts. Now let us know what you think. Email us at podcast@calos.center.