Art as an Expression of the Divine

Michelangelo is famously attributed the following quote when speaking about the artist’s relationship with the Divine, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” While certainly a beautiful view on his own work, what Michelangelo is saying is even deeper than you think. Religious themes in art are certainly not new; the earliest forms of creative expression from the crudest cave paintings to splendor of Versailles have all sought to convey the intrinsic need for beauty that we all naturally desire. Man perceives the beauty inherent in all things in the universe, and then hopes to establish himself in it, he hopes to participate in this great work of art, and this desire is what ultimately motivates our lives. It is not merely enough to have beauty, we must join ourselves to it, work with it, live in it, and love it; we must have a vision of our lives that goes beyond our lives, we must have a vision of beauty itself, a Beatific Vision, if our desires are not to be in vain.

In the words of Camus, “Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to ignore.” While we all intuitively adore and praise what we understand as beautiful, when we sit down to define what exactly we are talking about, the question becomes more complicated, as Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.” Our inability grasp what seems to be so intuitive yet so escapable to human understanding does indeed seem terrible in its power to expose our own limitations, our own fallenness. Perhaps this is because by our senses we can only grasp what is finite, but what beauty offers us is something infinite, the fulfillment of all desire, we can merely dip our toes in, so to speak. As C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Which brings me to my personal journey with coming to understand creativity as something more than a mere hobby. I have always loved making stories, from the time I was a little boy I was thinking of grand quests where my friends and I would be off on some adventure, fighting a dragon with King Arthur, or making up countries that we would each rule. However, as I grew up, I lost touch with this side of myself, as most do. That is, until I read St. Thomas Aquinas in Medieval Philosophy with Dr. Peter Kreeft. Aquinas described what are called the transcendentals; these can perhaps best be understood as properties of being and exist in all things. Before learning more on the topic, I really struggled to understand what it meant when I heard we were made in the “image of God”, and I failed to see how artistic pursuits were anything more than a pastime. But Aquinas taught me that art is a participation in God’s essence, akin to how we pursue virtue because it is good, we create beauty for the same end. This newfound understanding, though primitive at the time, motivated me to pick up a pen and begin writing stories again. This does not mean that every story or work of art has to be overtly religious to participate in God’s creation, but rather that by the fact that you seek truth, beauty, and goodness it is already glorifying God, because it glorifies what God is.

If you hold to a Christian worldview in which man is made in the image of God, that is, that we have immortal rational faculties that seek to contemplate higher goods, then this creative spark which energizes man’s quest in life is sensible, without this understanding it is null and void, or at least, a waste of time. God created all that dwells within existence because it is good, and He did so, not for his own sake, but out of love. This desire we have for beauty is a reflection of God’s presence in our souls, artistic endeavors are an imitation of the Divine act of creation.

The only difference being that we need to make use of a medium—-that is to say, God’s creation—whereas God, as the Creator, simply loves things into existence.