Art and Incarnation

Here’s a good arti­cle about art and incar­na­tion, basi­cally argu­ing that art works because it’s not gnos­tic: it doesn’t reject the world, but rather reveals what’s really true about the world through con­crete, expe­ri­ence­able things.

The arti­cle concludes:

The artist does not show us the world as it ought to be; she shows us the world as it is, here and now, and enables us to see that our redemp­tion is always present, always avail­able. It is not a mes­sage to be com­mu­ni­cated but a pres­ence and a mys­tery to be experienced—in the flesh. Art, as a fleshly medium, is one place where pres­ence and mys­tery can be encoun­tered and received.

This is what I’ve always argued, that art is pow­er­ful because it uses the parts of the world we under­stand to com­mu­ni­cate the parts that we don’t (or can’t).

Which is the mes­sage of the Incar­na­tion as well: that some­thing (some­one?) incom­pre­hen­si­ble is explained (revealed?) by some­thing we CAN understand.