Art is the Signature of Man

When studying on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in the south of France back in the 1990s, I was privileged to see the caves of Lascaux. Well, sort of. No one is allowed in the actual caves, but in a very clever move, the French created an exact replica of the caves just next door.

The tour begins on a flat stretch of ground, where the tour guide says, “You are now standing directly above the cave paintings.” And then you are taken a few hundred yards to the south where you begin your descent into the replica caves.

What I remember most was the tour guide. He was part shaman, part acolyte. He carried a torch and walked slowly. When he spoke, he spoke in hushed tones. Everything about his demeanor made you feel that you were on sacred ground. When we reached the paintings, he spoke as one overcome with emotion, as if he were there to evangelize us, to open our eyes to the incredible, almost miraculous piece of human achievement before us.

I remember one moment specifically when he was following a curved chalk line that represented the back of one of the bulls, and he showed, in very dramatic fashion, that if you followed the line down just so, you would see that the creature was bending down to greet its youngster with a kiss. That “big reveal” was done so well it gave me chills.

Now, reverence for high art is not something that would surprise me in a Frenchman. But these were late Stone Age cave paintings. We were all awed by how old they were, but this man was awed by how beautiful they were. 

The experience challenged me to revise my notion of the “cave man.” As interpreted by this Frenchman, there is just no way that a grunting, hunched-over brute made these paintings. This was the work of a serious artist, working in earnest, with an appreciation not only for line and proportion, but with a deep knowledge of human emotions such as love, fear, and passion. 

Fast forward almost 30 years. I’m listening to Chesterton’s Everlasting Man on Audible in my car. In the opening chapter, Chesterton uses the existence of cave paintings to challenge the notion of the caveman as a primitive form of the human species. He points to the art in the cave as proof that man did not “evolve” from brute to intelligent, but rather man had, from the beginning, the capacity for abstract thought, empathy, and compassion.

Chesterton calls this cave art, “The Signature of Man.” Twelve thousand years before written language, and long before anyone would ever sign their name, humans were leaving their signature on the walls of caves, like graffiti on the subway: “A Man was here!”

Those cave artists had more in common with Michelangelo, Matisse, and Yo Yo Ma than they did with the beasts they drew on the wall. Yet, for over a century now, we’ve been hearing Darwin’s take on how humans crawled out of the primordial slime and had apes for ancestors. Of all the “missing links” in Darwin’s theories, perhaps “Man as Artist” is the most glaring. 

Darwin admits as much in his 1871 book, Descent of Man, stating that the human capacity to make music has no use for survival. He called music “among the most mysterious capacities with which Man is endowed.” 

That would make sense if Man was a mere animal, but Man is more than an animal. Man is a supernatural being.

In his book, Miracles, C.S. Lewis makes the point that man’s ability to reason is itself supernatural, because any rational thought about or judgement made on nature must come from outside of (L. supra) nature. 

Art is a great example of this in at least several important ways.

First, humans can appreciate beauty, whereas nature can only be beautiful. The deer in the snow is beautiful, but it does not perceive itself as such. 

I know, at this point, someone will say, “How do we know animals cannot perceive beauty?” Without calling in Aristotle, Aquinas, and Lewis, etc., to explain, and just to appease the contemporary passion for anthropomorphizing animals, let’s say for the moment that the deer quite possibly can perceive itself as beautiful.

Now, to carry on. Here’s where we leave the beauty-perceiving deer in the dust. Human beings can not only appreciate beauty, but they can also create it. The deer in the snow is a creature, but the human being appreciating her is a creature and a creator. The human being can not only enjoy the deer, but the human being can also paint the beautiful scene of the deer in the snow. 

But wait! There’s more. The human being can paint two deer in the snow, when surely there was only one. And the human being can make the snow in the painting a little more fluffy, and a little deeper so that it curls around the deer’s feet and collects on their backs. Maybe we should add a little creek running by and a bright red cardinal in a birch tree just off to one side.

Now we enter the realm where no animal can follow—creature as “sub-creator.” This is most famously and fully fleshed out in Tolkien’s essay, “On Farie Stories.” The human creature has the ability to take existing things and create their own worlds, “secondary worlds,” as Tolkien calls them. This is perhaps the clearest expression of our imago Dei. As we say in the Creed, God is “the maker of heaven and of earth.” And we, in imitation of God, in cooperation with Him, create our own secondary worlds.

Why do we do this? Because we have visions dancing in our heads: music, stories, art. Give the human a few notes, and he’ll make a symphony. He can’t help it. He’s a creator in the image of the Creator of all things.

My first job out of college was as a French teacher at a Catholic High School. I remember the year I took a bunch of students to Europe over the summer. We were coming out of the National Gallery in London, walking through Trafalgar Square, and one kid, Matt was his name, came up to me and said, “Can’t we see some art that isn’t all about religious stuff?”

Oh, so many things to say about that. But in light of what we’ve stated here, the answer is simply, “No, we cannot go see any art that is not religious.” Because art is the signature of man, a creature made in God’s image, and all man’s creations point back to the Creator. Even the most crude and pretentious modern art cries out, full-throated and unsparingly: “A Man was here!” 

Editor’s Note: For those seeking God in the chaos of the twenty-first century, Peter Giersch invites you to accompany him in his latest release, Talking of Michelangelo: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in the Burgundy Region, available from Sophia Institute Press.

Follow along for more in this series on “Chesterton and the Mystery of Man” here.

Photo by Don Pinnock on Unsplash