During all the centuries of her life the church has made great use of art, but she has learned nothing from the artists. There was never an artist who did not know that he could not paint his picture or compose his music by thinking out the laws of beauty. If the church had seen the way to her truth as clearly as they did the way to theirs, there would have been no trouble and no defeat. Science never had any quarrel with artistic truth, and the artists never concerned themselves with what the scientists said was true. The painters and the poets and the musicians know that there is an order of reality in which intellectual assurance plays no part and the reason is unimportant.
And further along in Witness to the Truth:
Definitions and analyses and all such contrivances of the classifying mind were never of any importance to the poets. Aesthetic dogmas might come and go. They never touched poetry. If a man of saintly life disagreed with the churchmen’s rules, he suffered, in the so-called Ages of Faith, very painfully indeed. Not so in art. Aristotle’s Poetics was long the critics bible, but when Shakespeare was lined up against its rules and came out badly, it was not Shakespeare that suffered, but the rules.
Edith Hamilton
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