Two conversations come to mind when I think about the relationship between art and life. The first one occurred some Sunday afternoon during adolescence, after Mass with a friend named Tim. Tim and I were the self-appointed rebels in our Confirmation class, courageously informing our instructor about the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the ubiquitous use of the f-word in contemporary society. Tim and I also shared various musical and literary enthusiasms, notably the Beats. I mostly read Ginsberg, because his stuff was shorter. Kerouac’s books were too long.

But our mutual friend Justin had read On the Road. “He stayed mystified for days, man,” Tim told me. “Mystified?” “Yeah, man. The part in Mexico, with the Virgin Mary. Justin doesn’t really believe in the Church, but this book left him in awe.”

I wondered what would become of Justin.

The second conversation occurred in college. I was discussing with a philosophy professor the relationship between literature and philosophy. “In my Shakespeare seminar,” I told him, “we read a few lines from Titus Andronicus that summed up the entirety of yesterday’s discussion in ethics class.” “Isn’t that the truth?” he said, admiringly. But he turned out to be less enthusiastic about the utility of literature in the search for truth. The best thing that literature can do, he said, is to dramatize the moral dilemmas and philosophical questions that a character is grappling with, and the show the bad consequences of wrong solutions and false answers. I asked him about A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He said something like: “I don’t see how such a novel would help a person trying to rationally consider the arguments concerning God’s existence.”

The first story is literary fideism: literature moves me in a way which lies completely out of the scope of reason and reality, so that it is impossible to articulate the relationship between art and life.

The second is literary rationalism: the value of literature can be reduced to the philosophical problems and ideas that it attempts to dramatize; in the end, only these arguments can really illuminate what life is all about.

Neither approach is sufficient.

Which is why I find it impossible to fully embrace Tobias Wolff’s recent New Yorker essay, “Winter Light.” Though elegantly written, it strikes me as an example of literary fideism.

My fellow “Good Letters” blogger Peggy Rosenthal sums up the article here. Briefly, Wolff recounts an experience he had with a friend named Rob when they both attended as showing of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light at a Lutheran Church. After the film was shown, a minister used it as tool for evangelism, aided by a projected image of Holman Hunt’s painting “The Light of the World.”

The film had left both men attentive and focused on the questions it posed; the projection of Hunt’s painting, however, elicited two different reactions. Rob became born again in his faith; Wolff was turned off (“It seemed to me a typical Pre-Raphaelite production: garish, melodramatic, cloying….”).

Wolff did not become open to the possibility of belief until years later, after reading the poetry of Hopkins, Eliot, and George Herbert. He concludes: “We like to think of our beliefs, and disbeliefs, as founded on reason and close, thoughtful observation. Only in theory do we begin to suspect the power of aesthetics to shape our lives.”

Wolff’s fideism lies in the false dichotomy between beliefs “founded on reason” and those founded on “the power of aesthetics.” If beauty is powerful, it is powerful either because it can delude you and lure you into admiration, or because it is somehow connected to reality, to the way things are, and can awaken and persuade you into the understanding of something true.

The former theory would make aesthetics an arbitrary force that should not be trusted; the latter would mean that it is connected in some way to reason and reality, so that Wolff’s dichotomy becomes untenable.

It’s also untenable because Wolff’s own experience refutes it. Both Wolff (eventually) and his friend Rob are moved to change their lives as a result of encountering beautiful works of art. Implicitly, they both believe that, in the face of the evidence (i.e., the work of art itself), it is more reasonable to believe in God’s existence. So perhaps the most important element in Wolff’s essay is not the Hunt painting, which produced opposite reactions in him and his friend Rob, but the Bergman film, which moved both men in the same way.

Winter Light deals with a Lutheran minister whose faith crumbles precisely because it has not connected to reality. In the film, Tomas Ericsson’s faith was, by his account, a faith in a God who ruled a very narrow and false world; Ericsson, while living in Portugal, chose not to leave his narrow world and face the brutal realities of the Spanish Civil War. Nor did he choose to leave it in order to truly love his mistress, the suffering Marta. But reality seeps in—to paraphrase a beautiful line in Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly—and Ericsson is forced to face it. In facing reality he realizes that his religion does not help him to understand and to act. So he rightly abandons it.

Would a faith founded on aesthetics stand such a trial? Only if those aesthetics are somehow connected to reason, and revelatory of the real. Such a faith—and such an art—would give us a way to deal with reality, would show us how to live. Peggy writes in her post, “I believe that good art has a privileged relation to faith.” I would say that good art has a privileged relation to reality.

The power of Wolff’s essay lies in its precise rendering of a unique experience when art directly influences life. It’s a much richer experience to build upon than the two paltry anecdotes at the top of this post. What we need is a deeper understanding of the connection between art and life, between aesthetics and reason, that accounts of the experience of the beautiful without reducing it to arguments or sentimentalism.