Telos and Techne
Our two weeks in Italy marked the third time Kathy and I have visited the country. All three trips have been memorable, but I thought I’d begin with a bit about our second trip. It included a private tour of Vatican artwork under the guidance of Joseph, a seminarian.
If you’ve been to Italy, you know the artwork everywhere is beautiful. This includes the Vatican, where Joseph helped us pay attention to details in the artwork that we would have likely missed on our own. The result was often stunning, including the number of times he pointed out seemingly “hidden” images in the art depicting the marital gospel. Joseph reminded me of how art can reveal mysteries which for ages past were kept hidden in God.
I share this in light of our recent trip which included a tour of the Uffizi Museum in Florence. I could on occasion overhear tour guides. As they described the artwork, they often focused on the beauty of techne, but rarely on the beauty of telos.
Techne? Telos? Yep, weird terms but important, for they tell us much about the times in which we live.
Telos is Greek for purpose (to what end did the artist create this?). Techne is Greek for technique (what brush strokes, lighting, shading did the artist use?). For centuries, art shaped societies by having a techne, along with an ethos (or culture) bonding individuals in a society that directed viewers’ attention to a purpose (telos) outside and beyond the viewer. Techne was the lower beauty lifting our eyes to the higher beauty of telos.
What I experienced in the Uffizi was the eclipse of ethos, the discarding of a pre-Enlightenment culture that bonded individuals in a society. The result is an individualized society where I, as an individual, pay attention to whatever I want to pay attention to.
This includes art and what we pay attention to.
“Attention changes the world,” writes Iain McGilchrist. “How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future.” McGilchrist says we’re at the end of “a 500-year slide into the territory of the left hemisphere” of the brain. The left brain pays attention to surface stuff, like an artist’s technique. Mind you, there is beauty to be found there.
But the left hemisphere lacks the sustained, contemplative attention span of the right hemisphere that’s necessary for perceiving telos. The result is that most viewers in today’s world pay attention to the beauty of lighting and shading and so on, but the artist’s telos remains hidden from them. They’re like the people Jesus described in his day: Though seeing, they do not see.
They’re like us.
When things are hidden from view, they’re in a “void,” a word taken from the Old French voide, or viude meaning “empty, vast, unoccupied, hollow.” That’s our society writes Paul Kingsnorth: The Void of the West. We appreciate the beauty of technique. We pay little attention to the beauty of telos, leaving us unaware of the void in which we live.
In pre-Enlightenment societies, individuals discovered the beauty of telos through submission to authoritative tradition—which is what Kathy and I experienced under the guidance of Joseph at the Vatican. He revealed what the artwork means; that is, what is its purpose? It made all the difference in the world.
I seek to be a difference maker. If you seek to be one as well, here’s a place to begin. Watch this YouTube tutorial on Fra Angelico’s painting, Annunciation (depicting when the Angel Gabriel announced to Mary, a virgin, that she would conceive and bear a child). You’ll come away appreciating the beauty of Fra Angelico’s telos, as well as his technique.
You might even begin to perceive the Void of the West, which is a topic we’re going to contemplate this month—and offer to all subscribers as a gift. Enjoy.