The Three Pillars of Living Water College of the Arts 

Art, Faith, and Reason are the three principles upon which Living Water College is built, and these are also the three pillars which the students will diligently build up during their three years of studies. To properly construct these three pillars is the entire goal, we could say, of the program at LWCA. To diligently ensure that all three are resting on a solid foundation, to make sure they are upright and beautifully built, to see to it that they are solid and tall enough to hold up the complete building – this is really the immediate aim of the college program: to build up the three pillars of Art, Faith, and Reason in the character of each student. 

Now pillars by themselves do not make a house. They hold up a house. Likewise, three years of training in Art, Faith, and Reason do not make a master artist. However, it is my goal in this essay to provide the architectural drawing, as it were, of the entire house; to outline how each of these three pillars can hold up a crucial part of the entire structure, which will be the life-long vocation of the artist. Art, Faith, and Reason are not all of equal value, and they have purposes that go far beyond what we are speaking about here. However, they each contribute to the particular goal of the college, which is to provide a foundation for the artistic life. 

The first pillar – Art – means that students will actually be practicing the Fine Arts, which is of course the primary goal of the program. In the first year, all students will gain broad practical experience in the fundamentals of Design, Writing, and Performing Art. In the second year they will concentrate on two specific media from the following: Traditional Media (painting, sculpting, etc.), New Media (photography, web design, computer modeling, etc.), Theatre, and Film. During the second year they will also spend a few months in a mentorship off campus. This will be an opportunity for them to carefully observe an experienced artist and start broadening their own technical skills. In the third year they will focus on only one medium, and by the end of the third year they will have completed a major project as a conclusion to their portfolio. 

It is a huge task, a life-long task, to master an art form. Some students will come to the college with more natural ability and prior training than others, but for all of the students, to become a great artist will likely require many years of continual practice after their college years and throughout their life. Combining Sacred Theology and the Liberal Arts together with the Fine Arts might seem to make it too difficult to perfect any art. However, to perfect even one Fine Art is normally impossible in three years.

Now the second pillar – Faith - actually implies two things at the college. First of all, it means that students are encouraged to personally pray and seek God to grow in a spiritual life. The Mass will be offered regularly in the college chapel, and there will be public prayers for the students to take advantage of. The gift of artistic ability comes from God, and God is the ultimate aim of the artist, since He is the source of all beauty and goodness and truth, and everything worth describing through art originates in Him. Of course, a person can have great artistic ability without knowing God, but a spiritual life united to God only leads to a deeper appreciation of artistic gifts. This pillar is especially necessary today, since art is often separated from God in our culture and in the training of artists. Sometimes this separation is very explicit, while other times it is subtle; sometimes artists are led to believe that their faith will restrict their intellectual and artistic freedom. Actually the opposite is true. A sincere faith and spiritual life open the eyes of our mind, rather than close them. 

Secondly, however, the Faith takes a prominent role in the curriculum itself, since the Scriptures, writings of the Church fathers, lives of saints, and sacred art will be studied and discussed as part of the classes. In other words, the Faith not only includes the personal side, but also objective content; what has been revealed by God through Christ and His Church, and from those who directly draw from these sources. Sacred Theology goes together with a spiritual life to make up the first pillar of the program: Faith. Of course, it isn't only religious art or art with a religious theme that is cultivated at LWCA, since much great and beautiful art isn't explicitly religious. However, some of the best art in the world is religious; and it would not be an exaggeration to say that some of the worst art is irreligious, or divorced from God and nature, however well made and seductive it may be. The true artist must draw others to what is truly wonderful, rather than using his ability to deceive and corrupt. By its very name, Living Water College was founded to reclaim the arts for the Lord, and to reconnect the arts to the fountain of all inspiration, which is Christ. 

The third pillar of LWCA – Reason - refers to the life of the mind. Reason isn't simply memorizing information. It is the ability to think clearly, and to think clearly about the deeper reality. In practice, the way the college proposes to do this is through the classical Liberal Arts as we have inherited them mainly from ancient Greece. Seven arts or skills make up the Liberal Arts, three having to do with thinking properly (the Trivium), and four having to do with the things to think about (the Quadrivium). The first three, Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, actually have very broad implications. They are basically the ability to accurately express thoughts, to go beyond this by expressing the truth of your thoughts, and to go beyond this by moving someone or yourself to act on your thoughts. All language has these three purposes, and art has these three aspects as well. There is a meaning to art, a logic to art, and a moving side to it. Not all art is created with an intellectual understanding on the part of the artist, but the ability to think clearly can deepen the artist's technical ability and help to bring order to disorganized inspirations. Now the way these three arts are cultivated at the college is through continual Socratic discussion and dialectic. Students will immerse themselves in the greatest works of literature and art, and come to class to discuss them. Through continually exercising Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, they will strengthen their ability to think, and at the same time try to grasp the very same things which the greatest authors and artists grasped. They will discuss not only the great ideas contained in these works, but also the artistic craft of the works. Through active participation in class, they will try to make this understanding their own, so that they can explain it to anyone else. In other words, they will try to build this pillar on the solid ground of experience. 

The next four skills, however, have an even greater meaning for the life of the artist. Traditionally, they have been named Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy - four subjects which seem at first to have absolutely nothing to do with Art. But in their broad meaning, they have everything to do with the life of the artist. Plato named these arts as the four which tend to make you think beyond the surface appearance of things. That is because they lead you to perceive unchanging realities - in particular mathematical truths - in the things that appear before us. Arithmetic refers to nature without space and time. Geometry refers to nature, but without time. Music refers to nature, but without space, and Astronomy refers to nature in space and time. At LWCA these four arts are studied, but in a way which is suited to the artist. So in Arithmetic and Geometry for example, students will learn to give mathematical demonstrations through the great works of mathematics. They will also learn to recognize and understand the numbers and shapes found in nature and in great works of art: in a snowflake, in a flower petal, in a face, in the Athenian Parthenon. Music, as a Liberal Art, involves not so much creating music, as understanding it. So students will learn to recognize why harmonies and rhythms sound the way they do, or why a string together with another string 2/3 the length, produces two notes which sound good together. They will begin to understand what Vivaldi's music has to do with the seasons, and what the flight of a bumblebee has to do with music. They will recognize how timing is found not only in a good song, but also in a good joke, in a well told story, and in the cycle of the seasons. Finally, in the art of Astronomy, broadly speaking, students will begin to truly understand why the stars move the way they do, or why a stone falls in a parabola. They will ask why a tree begins as a seed, and then becomes a sapling, and why new branches come out at a certain rate and rhythm, and they will compare this with the stages a work of art must go through to be completed. You see, nature has everything to do with art, and through these seven Liberal Arts, students will not only acquire the ability to think more clearly, but also gain a greater wonder and understanding of nature. Mostly, the four Liberal Arts of the Quadrivium will be studied through great books written by authors who have both a profound understanding of these things, and the ability to write well. But these four arts will also be studied through one of the greatest books, nature itself, written by the hand of God. 

Yet what kind of artistic ability can a student realistically expect to acquire by the end of this program? If we look away for a minute from the strong foundation which is built through the three pillars, what kind of art will a student be able to actually produce by the end of the third year? It is difficult to answer this question, but three considerations will help us to imagine what kind of students will be coming from LWCA. These students will arrive from all parts of the world to immerse themselves in a study of the greatest thinkers and artists; in an integrated curriculum, where every part of the program reinforces every other part. These students will be coming with their particular artistic gifts and will be continually collaborating on artistic projects with their peers. Finally, these students’ art will be enriched by their faith and reason, and driven with a powerful momentum. Although it is a Herculean effort to begin with the three pillars of Art, Faith, and Reason, great things can be built upon them – and great things will come from LWCA.