Chesterton’s Daisies: The Ordo Amoris and the Discipline of Drawing

...so that we love those things by which we are carried along for the sake of that toward which we are carried.
—Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.35 [1]

The practice of drawing is as old as humanity, and as universal as it is old. Evidence of our innate instinct to draw ranges from the caves of Altamira to the refrigerator art of families with young children. But somewhere along the way, most of us quit drawing; as we become adults, awareness of the gap between visual experience and our own representational skill translates into self-deprecation (“I can’t draw a stick figure”) and loss of desire to try (“I’m just not creative”).

Even for artists, there is a temptation to view representational drawing as a tedious, albeit indispensable element of technical training, or simply as a tool, mere preparation for the “real” creative work. In this piece, I would like to propose an alternative vision of drawing, one that reflects both my own experience and the principle of the ordo amoris, in which a proper love of lesser goods leads to love of the highest Good.

Like all engagement with physical reality, the activity of drawing has the potential to guide our hearts and minds along the path of the visible toward the transcendent, toward that which, according to St. Augustine, is to be loved for its own sake: the triune God (On Christian Doctrine I.3–5). It is the love of that highest Good that is our ultimate end; but at the same time, we cannot fully love the highest things unless we also learn to love lesser things in proper measure. We cannot simply “skip to the end”: as embodied beings, our path to the love of God must necessarily pass through material, time-bound realities and processes. The practice of drawing, I believe, is a uniquely effective vehicle for cultivating an ordered love of lesser things.

Drawing is not just a technical skill, but a discipline of both body and spirit. Like any discipline, it involves the repetition of small acts over long periods of time, resulting in incremental but nonetheless genuine transformation. In a variation on G. K. Chesterton, I would like to suggest that the repetitive nature of the practice of drawing, along with its capacity to alter our perception of reality, is also singularly well-suited to help us apprehend and even imitate the work of God in creation.

Seeing, Knowing, Loving

One of the most surprising discoveries a student of observational drawing makes, if he or she is willing to submit to the process, is that “drawing is not really very difficult. Seeing is the problem.”[2] The ability to draw accurately and naturalistically hinges above all on learning to truly see the thing one is trying to draw. 

In her classic instructional book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards asks: “What prevents a person from seeing things clearly enough to draw them?”[3] Her answer revolves around what she calls a “symbol system.” As children, we naturally develop a repertoire of pictorial symbols to represent the world: a circle with radiating lines for the sun, a square with a triangle atop it for a house, an oval for a body with two sticks for legs and two for arms, a circle for a head, and so on. These visual symbols are fundamentally linguistic in nature. Like words, they are simplified abstractions, ciphers that point to an entire class of objects. As Edwards explains:

From childhood onward, we have learned to see things in terms of words: We name things, and we know facts about them. The dominant … verbal system doesn’t want too much information about things it perceives—just enough to recognize and to categorize. . . . The . . . brain in this sense, learns to take a quick look and says ‘Right, that’s a chair (or an umbrella, bird, tree, dog, etc.).’[4]

The visual symbols we develop as children operate like words: they serve as shorthand emblems for objects in the world. As Edwards observes, most adults who try to draw 

generally do not really see what is in front of their eyes . . . They take note of what’s there, and quickly translate the perception into words and symbols based mainly on the symbol system developed throughout childhood and on what they know about the perceived object.[5]

This approach works perfectly well for most areas of adult life. But when it comes to making a drawing of a specific person or object, we find ourselves flummoxed. We discover that no two things look exactly alike: even when they belong to the same class—bird, dog, tree, human face—each one is singular in appearance. In that moment, we instinctively recognize that the lines and shapes of our symbol system are poor equivalents for optical experience. A circle with two dots and a curved line may serve well enough as an emoji signifying happiness or sadness, but is it of any use whatsoever in capturing the likeness of an individual?

 By inviting us to discover and linger over the inexhaustible particularities of even the most mundane subject matter—and anyone who has ever drawn something as ordinary as a dandelion can attest to the bottomless vortex of detail into which one is pulled with prolonged looking—the act of drawing, like a fairy tale, reveals the profundity of God’s creation.

The frustration we adults typically feel when called upon to draw reveals the inherent limits of this symbol system. Edwards’s advice to us, if we wish to go beyond these limits and learn how to draw naturalistically, is to “set aside your usual verbal categorizing and turn your full visual attention to what you are perceiving—to all of its details and how each detail fits into the whole configuration.”[6] Drawing, she says, “requires that you look at something for a long time, . . . registering as much information as possible—ideally, everything.”[7] This principle is exemplified in one of the many exercises she recommends, in which the student turns a picture of a person upside down before trying to draw it. Inverting the image prevents the brain from reflexively labeling particular forms as “eyes,” “nose,” or “mouth” and defaulting to entrenched visual symbols to represent these things. Instead, looking at the picture upside down encourages us to see the true visual relationships that constitute the figure and helps us reproduce on paper not what our brain assumes an “eye” should look like, but the shapes we actually see.

In sum, the ability to draw hinges on the ability to see things as they are. Instead of filtering optical experience through conceptual abstractions or habitual categories, we learn to open ourselves to—ideally—near-exhaustive perception of what is actually there.[8]

Skill in drawing is a fine thing and is worth developing for its own sake. But I think these observations also point to a deeper truth, one whose implications go beyond mere sketchbook practice or the desire to pursue artistic activity. While learning to see is essential to learning to draw, I would suggest that the converse is also true: learning to draw is, if not essential, at least highly conducive to learning to see. The sustained, focused looking and fundamental cognitive shift required to draw naturalistically enhances our ability to apprehend the world in general—not simply to optically perceive it, but to grasp it, lay hold of it, internalize it with the senses, mind, and heart. To truly apprehend something is to establish a fundamental congruence between ourselves and the objective world, between our subjective perception and the way things truly are: in other words, to gain knowledge.

 Drawing thus gives birth to knowing; in fact, we might even say that drawing is a kind of knowing. And knowing is important because it is inextricably connected to love: as St. Augustine observes, “no one can love at all a thing of which he is wholly ignorant” (On the Trinity X.1.1).[9] But loves must be ordered; the love of finite things solely for themselves and not for the sake of the One who is worthy of all love violates the ordo amoris and will separate us from God. But does the fact that a thing can become an idol mean that it should not be used at all? While fallen humanity may often err on the side of inordinate love for finite things, isn’t it also possible to fall into the ditch on the other side, into a Gnostic minimization of the incarnational, sacramental significance of physical experience?[10] As St. Augustine himself states:

the whole temporal dispensation was made by divine Providence for our salvation. We should use it, not with an abiding but with a transitory love and delight like that in a road or in vehicles or in other instruments, or, if it may be expressed more accurately, so that we love those things by which we are carried along for the sake of that toward which we are carried. (On Christian Doctrine I.35)

My contention is that because of the kind of seeing that drawing requires, its practice is uniquely suited to “carry us along” toward the contemplation of higher things.

Time and Specificity 

A key aspect of drawing is its temporal dimension. Learning to draw is a protracted process, requiring hours, weeks, and years of practice. The discipline of drawing forces us to internalize the experience of time needed to attain knowledge and cultivate love. But even more important than the sheer quantity of time spent drawing is the quality of our attention while doing so. The French philosopher Simone Weil argues that the “right use of school studies” lies not in mere cognitive assimilation of the subject matter, but in a kind of attentiveness that trains the soul for prayer, “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.”[11] What she says of geometry, for example, could be asserted in equal measure for drawing: 

It does not even matter much whether we succeed in finding the solution or understanding the proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so. Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted. . . . It is certain that this effort will bear its fruit in prayer.[12]

And indeed, as Betty Edwards observes, “drawing induces a focused, alert state of consciousness that can last for hours, bringing significant satisfaction.”[13]

This focused, alert consciousness forms the precondition for an equally important aspect of the apprehension cultivated by drawing: particularity and specificity. The whole point of trying to draw something naturalistically is to capture its unique character and specific relatedness to its visual environment. Rather than merely noting its general identity and assigning it to a preestablished category in our symbol system, the goal is to become aware of it as an unrepeatable instance. To see something in this way is to know it in in all of its singularity—and knowing with specificity leads to loving with particularity (a principle whose inverse was famously articulated by a character in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular”).[14]

In drawing, the reward for submitting to this protracted temporality and intense specificity is a slow revealing of layers upon layers of observed reality. Sustained looking gives rise to an astonishing transformation of visual experience in which previously unnoticed features and interrelationships materialize before one’s eyes in a way that seems almost magical. The reference to magic is intentional: as G. K. Chesterton suggests in Orthodoxy, the truth of fairy tales lies in the fact that they “touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment” and exhume our buried awareness of the marvelousness of ordinary existence.[15] Drawing operates in much the same way. By inviting us to discover and linger over the inexhaustible particularities of even the most mundane subject matter—and anyone who has ever drawn something as ordinary as a dandelion can attest to the bottomless vortex of detail into which one is pulled with prolonged looking—the act of drawing, like a fairy tale, reveals the profundity of God’s creation. As Chesterton puts it, we are confronted with the fact that “this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different.”[16]

Repetition and Eternity

Chesterton’s most unexpected insight into the truth of fairy tales, however, comes in his meditation on repetition. Learning to draw, like learning anything, requires repetition over time—which is also the aspect of any discipline that feels most tedious and can easily slip into mindless automatism. Chesterton asks us to consider whether far from being mechanical, soulless, or deterministic, the repetition we observe in nature in fact speaks the loudest of life, intention, and free agency:

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.[17]

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells us to consider the lilies of the field. If I set out with my sketchbook to draw the daisies of the field, I will soon discover that though they all belong to the same species, they are all different. My ability to apprehend their sheer number and complexity soon exhausts itself; despite my best efforts to depict each one individually, I will be forced sooner or later to reduce, to simplify, to abstract. God, however, is not bound by any such limitation. As Chesterton observes: 

It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.[18]

The practice of drawing thus confronts us with our inability, even in a thousand lifetimes, to fathom the intricacy of creation and the enormity of God’s providential care; it brings home to us the need for—and the beauty of—repetition as a means of growing in that understanding. And as we train our ability to see with our physical eyes in this life, do we not also experience a foretaste of what we will one day enjoy in our resurrected bodies? As St. Augustine exults at the conclusion of his City of God:

When God will be “all in all,” how much greater will be this gift of vision in the hearts of all! The eyes of the body will still retain their function and will be found where they now are, and the spirit, through its spiritual body, will make use of the eyes. . . . We shall be able to see the material bodies of the new heaven and the new earth in such a way that . . . wherever our eyes are turned, we shall see God, and we shall see Him with the utmost clarity (XXII.29).[19]