The Labor of Perfection

Art, vocation & the obedience of love.

While attending Princeton Theological Seminary from 2016–2018, I enrolled in two courses at the University across the street: a summer intensive in French and Philosophy of Law with Professor Robert P. George. An esteemed legal scholar with thirty degrees and honorary titles to his name—from Oxford, Harvard Law, and beyond—Professor George was a paragon of Ivy League intellectualism. He wore a three-piece suit to class and lectured ad-lib from the head of our long wooden seminar table, occasionally sharing stories of high-profile legal cases and Oxford’s golden era.

I soon realized my classmates were not simply taking the course for philosophy of law; they were taking Philosophy of Law for Professor George. So was I.

When it came time for term papers, I wrote on the subject of natural law and human rights, one of Professor George’s specializations. The trouble was, I had research papers due in three other classes that semester, with some 60 pages to write in a few weeks. Still, I prioritized my paper for Philosophy of Law, determined to impress Professor George with my lucid logic and penetrating seminarian prose.

God alone knows how many hours I burned on that assignment—researching, writing, revising, and revising. So I’ll never forget the satisfaction I felt when, one sunny April afternoon, I turned it in—my work of art—just before noticing a glaring typo on the paper’s title page. I swiftly corrected the error and re-sent my email to Professor George’s assistant, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

Did he notice? I’ll never know, but I got a B+ on the paper.

I. Abandoning Our Work

Paul Valéry once quipped that “a poem is never finished, only abandoned,” capturing a predicament at the heart of creative praxis: namely, determining when a poem, painting, essay, song, sculpture, or any work of art is finally done. For Valéry, though, it’s a false question. We only complete those incomplete works we inevitably leave.

I find Valéry’s sentiment here refreshingly realistic. A poem might owe its final form to chance and circumstance as much as the will of the poet. The poet writes in time, after all, not an ethereal vacuum. And time is always giving him reasons to get on with things—to meet deadlines, hit send, forget. To not write. Even Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who once woke from an opium-induced dream with an entire epic poem in his head (allegedly), only managed to put down fifty lines before getting interrupted by an infamous “person on business from Porlock.” Returning to his desk an hour later, poor Coleridge could no longer recall the vision, which is why he eventually published the poem under the title “Kubla Khan: A Fragment.”

And isn’t life teeming with persons on business from Porlock?

We should note the cynicism in Valéry’s remark, however. For only a cynical view of the creative process would preclude the very possibility of completion, of perfection. “What is not perfected is not,” wrote A.G. Sertillanges, a contemporary of Valéry, observing how the word finished means both ended and perfect. It goes without saying that an abandoned poem cannot be perfected. But what might it mean to perfect one’s art, anyway? And is that asking too much?

II. The Albatross of Perfectionism

Perfectionism is unfashionable these days, in the arts as elsewhere, the enemy of both progress and completion. The idea is that impossible standards prevent us from finishing our work, or from taking much satisfaction in what work we’re obliged to turn in. The pressure to perfect can be so paralyzing that it’s hard to get started in the first place. Perfectionism breeds fear of failure, we’re told, frustrating the creative process. Hence conventional wisdom discourages us from aiming at perfection at all. Better a shoddy first draft than a blank page, right?

Today’s frenetic social media landscape tends to feed this impulse, pressuring creators not to perfect their work so much as post about it—and often. “Publish or perish,” as they say in the academy, only now it also applies to Instagram, Spotify, and Substack. In a recent article, Philip D. Bunn laments how Substack—widely praised for bypassing the gatekeepers of legacy publishing—has diluted public discourse by cutting out the role of professional editors, those perfectionists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric traditionally entrusted with the discriminating work of quality control. Bunn speaks of his own writing career:

I learned valuable things about how to communicate good ideas beautifully and effectively from all of the editors I have had over the years, things that I cannot and do not learn by sending an email out into the ether, with troves of typos and ambiguities abounding.

Pressing send is all too easy, by design.

Nor is it mere coincidence that our digital platforms have arisen alongside an internet culture that glorifies expressive individualism and so-called authenticity. The algorithm needs its pound of flesh, and we need “content.” Granted, Substack is bursting with talented writers these days, and I can think of several accomplished artists who appear to successfully navigate Instagram without lowering their personal standards. But I suspect even they would concede that social media tempts them to compromise quality for the sake of quantity, not vice versa.

So perfection is the enemy of completion, especially online, but genuine art calls for fulfillment. In contrast to the “digital creator” of social media, the artist desires to “free what waits within,” in the words of Rilke, to produce art worthy of the name. Yet resisting post-or-perish culture will require renewed commitment to fulfilling our work—algorithms be damned. The first step is interrogating our assumptions about perfection.

III. Obliged to Perfection

In his 1920 classic, The Intellectual Life, Sertillanges outlines the spirit, conditions, and methods of the intellectual vocation. Sertillanges wrote as a Dominican priest to aspiring Catholic scholars, but much of his instruction pertains to other creative callings, not least the faithful artist. Especially relevant is his insistence on perfecting all work “one has thought well of undertaking.” Sertillanges understood the intellectual life as a sacred vocation, accountable to the God of Truth. The worker thus strives for perfection out of obedience. “To have a vocation is to be obliged to perfection,” he wrote. By the same token, to leave one’s work prematurely is to neglect one’s artistic duty.

“Artistic duty” might sound like a category mistake, but only if we accept the now-prevailing view of art as self-expression, according to which the artist is beholden to nothing save his private whims. If, on the other hand, his vocation originates in a sacred call, the faithful artist answers by fulfilling his obligations before God and neighbor—by finishing his work. Sertillanges again:

Finished means ended, but it also means perfect, and these two senses reinforce each other. I do not really finish that in which I refuse to aim at the best. What is not perfected is not. According to Spinoza, being and perfection correspond to the same idea; being and good are convertible.

A work of art exists only insofar as it has been perfected. The incomplete novel, song, or sculpture suffers cavities of nonbeing. Every typo is an ontological chink letting in a little oblivion.

Reflecting on the convertibility of being and goodness brings to my mind the creation accounts of Genesis 1–2, where God forms the heavens and the earth out of nothingness. To be strictly literal, the text does not state that God created the world good, though that’s implied. Instead, it depicts God pausing at the close of each day to behold the goodness of the world he was creating, as if to remind us that goodness was and is truly there, intrinsic to being itself. Only after crowning creation with man and woman does God declare the whole tov meod, very good. Then he rests: “And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done” (2:2). The seventh day represents the consummation of creation, God’s perfect work.

It follows that artists reflect their Creator when they strive to fulfill their work—taming the chaotic waters of a first draft and bringing order to all that is tohu vavohu. This obtains despite the thorns and thistles of our fallen world. The thorns and thistles do frustrate the work, though, which helps explain our aversion to perfectionism. The thought of imitating God sounds lofty when you’re simply trying to meet the submission deadline of your favorite literary magazine. We might wonder whether Valéry was right after all, that perfection is unattainable, chimerical—especially when we consider the wider context of his aphorism:

In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.

Here we see it is specifically the amoureux de la perfection—lovers of perfection—who feel artistically hamstrung by time and circumstance, since their idealism prevents them from finishing anything. Perfectionists would tinker with their work ad infinitum, were it not for yet another person on business from Porlock, knocking at the door. Valéry was himself a meticulous poet and essayist—a perfectionist by most standards—but he recognized the mania of perfectionism. As we’ve seen, Sertillanges was also a “lover of perfection,” yet more sanguine about the possibility of finishing one’s work. The difference lies in how the two men understood perfection.

IV. Relatively Perfect

The perfection Sertillanges required of his students was neither absolute nor abstract, but relative and concrete. He saw that, though God may call many individuals to the common purposes of the intellectual life, yet each scholar’s work must remain distinct, determined by the singular shape of his or her life. Above all, one’s work must correspond to one’s talents, time, and God-given graces: “All this severity with ourselves presupposes that the work undertaken is suited to us and proportioned to our resources.” Lacking this key assumption, contemporary anxieties over perfectionism in the abstract are understandable, perhaps, but mistaken nonetheless. I am only obliged to perfect my work, and only insofar as I am capable. How could it be otherwise?

Furthermore, perfection here means fully realizing the inherent telos of an individual work, not meeting some universal ideal. A painter needn’t consult the Platonic Realm of Forms to complete a canvas, for instance. That’s because the requirements of perfection emerge organically between artist and artwork. With each brushstroke, the painting makes its own demands; it begins to exist, to insist. The skillful painter respects this fledgling form even as she labors to fulfill it. “Everything must be brought to term before it is born,” wrote Rilke. A perfect work is thus one whose particular demands have been satisfied in proportion to the powers of the artist who conceived it.¹ Refusing to abort the work, she gives birth. Suddenly, the child is. The child is perfect, like every child.

Creative acts have often been likened to gestation or childbirth, highlighting, among other similarities, the artist’s constant need for patience. If I have oversimplified the process for the sake of illustration, Rilke reminds us that art can never really be rushed. Consider this striking passage from his Letters to a Young Poet:

These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them… patience is all!

Perfecting a work of art can feel like waiting for a change of seasons or the arrival of a baby. Unlike a pregnancy, however, works of art do not typically come with due dates. Rilke here suggests that the artist operates according to qualitative time (kairos) rather than chronological time (chronos). Of course, as a mortal she remains subject to clocks and calendars like the rest of us. But as an artist, eternity stretches out before her. She waits and labors and waits until her fruit is perfectly ripe—and no farther—until she can speak over her creation those primordial words of divine blessing: tov meod, very good. Then she rests.

At times we force the process—impatient creatures that we are—and to tragic effect. Consider the example of Kathleen Raine, who introduces her Collected Poems with this sober remark: “A volume of Collected Poems is a poet’s opportunity to discard work that never should have been published.” She notes how young writers especially feel pressure to establish their credibility through publication and so settle for inferior work. Instead, she advises, they should consider “the irrevocability of the printed word.” Reading a poem published too soon is like biting into a green banana, only the bitterness lingers.

For his part, Sertillanges described creative works as the “offspring of your spirit” and compared the process of perfection to that of rearing a child: “When you have brought forth the work, you will treat it like the child that one feeds and educates, but whose heredity is fixed, whose fundamental characteristics are established.” Good parents strive to bring out the best in their children, even through discipline. They do not saddle their children with unreasonable expectations of conduct or achievement. Every individual is irreducibly so. Likewise, every genuine work of art is sui generis, of its own kind, and therefore of its own perfection.²

V. Freedom and the Perfection of Love

These metaphors begin to buckle slightly when we consider, as we must, that works of art may be judged against one another in ways children should not be. You may be proud of that sonnet you crafted back in English 101, but it’s no John Donne. Sorry. If we can conceive of art’s perfection relative to the powers of the artist, what’s to stop us from taking a wider frame of reference—comparing works across artists, genres, or historic periods? Each time he sits at the piano, must the modern composer imagine Bach scowling down from Heaven?

Christian artists can comfortably leave these questions to the critics and aesthetes. Their work—though ideally informed and reformed by artists of every age—originates in God’s call, to repeat, which always addresses us as individuals of finite abilities and peculiar passions. Moreover, God’s call liberates us to draw inspiration from other artists, especially great ones, without succumbing to the “anxiety of influence.” The towering legacy of a figure like Bach seems to transcend human limits, even judge them, when, in reality, Bach’s work represents the fulfillment of one particular vocation: German, Lutheran, Baroque. The universal is always found in the particular—so is perfection.

Give out all that is in you, and if you are faithful to yourself, and faithful up to the end, you may be sure of attaining the perfection of your work—your work, I say, the work that God expects from you and that corresponds to His graces, interior and exterior. At that moment you will have to say to yourself that many works and many lives are finer than yours, but you will be able to add: none is finer for me, and there is no other similar.

Protestant readers, myself among them, might puzzle over Sertillanges’ Thomistic delineation of interior and exterior graces here, though we are perfectly comfortable with grace. Despite all the above talk of obligations, duties, and works, a thoroughly Christian account of vocation finally rests on God’s grace, not human effort. For one’s justification before God does not hinge on one’s vocation; it is the other way around. Reconciled to God in Christ, the artist receives and realizes his or her creative calling out of gratitude, which is to say freely. Yet, as Martin Luther saw, Christian freedom always, paradoxically, binds us to the good of our neighbor. And this insight provides a final reason for perfecting our work.

The reason is love. Christian artists perfect their works the better to love their neighbor—the neighbor who reads their stories, studies their paintings, listens to their music. We do not create for ourselves, nor even for God alone.³ But we glorify God by perfecting our art for the sake of others. “God does not need our good works,” wrote theologian Gustaf Wingren, “but our neighbor does.” A work of art exists only insofar as it has been perfected, and only so far can it serve my neighbor. I must not abandon my work, therefore, because I must not abandon the neighbor whom Christ calls me to love, indeed, whom Christ himself intends to love by means of my vocation.

How might this be accomplished? Sertillanges believed creative work calls for the virtues of constancy and perseverance in addition to patience. Virtue takes practice. Of course we should continue to question how today’s digital media platforms shape our creative habits. And yes, we ought to respect the irrevocability of the printed word, the framed painting, the recorded song. We might elicit feedback on our works-in-progress from trustworthy colleagues and editors, though not at the expense of developing our own powers of critical self-evaluation. If our aim is work proportioned to our resources, within and without, we would do well to reflect on the shifting scope of our abilities as we plan and polish our art. Above all, we must pray for grace to fulfill our vocations, for prayer fosters every virtue.

Perfection as such needs no defense, speaking for itself. But in our reductive age of technological efficiency, utilitarian politics, and artificial intelligence, Christian artists must earnestly embrace the practice of perfection in order to fulfill their vocation, which is their witness. Perhaps Valéry and Sertillanges represent two principles at war within every artist: Realist and Idealist, Pragmatist and Perfectionist. I have sided with Sertillanges, for now, because he summons us to the obedience of love.

In the end, when a work of art is finished cannot be determined abstractly. The artist must perceive and achieve perfection with each new creation. Situating the artistic vocation within Christ’s greater call of love affords us the perspective and endurance needed to see our works through to completion, by grace. We will continue to miss the mark (and typos). Our efforts at artful love will be partial at best. “But when the perfect comes,” wrote Saint Paul, “the partial will pass away.” May our works anticipate that day.

Quod potui feci, veniam da mihi, posteritas.

1. Nowhere does Sertillanges define a perfect work as without fault. It is rather whole on its own terms and proportioned to the artist. Many consider “Kubla Khan” one of Coleridge’s greatest poems.

2. Does this imply that art is unaccountable to external standards of goodness, truth, or beauty? Sertillanges didn’t think so. The point is not to resign art to subjectivity but to recognize the singularity of each artist’s vocation before the living God. Just as Christ’s call to love cannot be reduced to principles, artistic practice cannot be reduced to a list of abstract transcendentals. In scholastic thought, the transcendentals are not so much standards as properties of being. A work of art participates in them to the degree that it exists at all.

3. Of course, some works never reach our neighbor, but all art is created coram Deo, before the face of God.