Spiraling Toward the Irresistible

Personally knowing an artist can provide invaluable insight into the artwork he creates. Art is a response to an artist's surroundings, the effect of the causality of his life, and the artist's interpretation of reality. For this reason, even reading a biography of an artist can help someone distant from the artist in chronology, geography and culture enter into the artist's world and better understand any meaning the artist is attempting to put into his work.

Yet, in order to really know an artist, one must know their artwork. How can one claim to know someone without understanding their most passionate, perhaps personal expressions of self? To many artists, to understand their artwork is to understand the artist.

But if one cannot know the artist without knowing his art, nor the art without knowing the artist, how can there be any understanding between artist and consumer? Is there an impenetrable, closed circle of comprehension that only the artist can enter?

If there is any common understanding, there must be a point of entrance. And if a point of entrance can be achieved, then it is not a closed circle, but a hermenuetical spiral, wherein increasing knowledge of the artist and of the artwork aid the consumer in better understanding both. Once communication has begun, understanding is only limited by revelation.

In Book VII of Confessions, Augustine of Hippo tells the story of the moment of his conversion. He recalls being in a garden and hearing a small boy's voice saying in sing-song tone, "Take it up and read it . Take it up and read it." Curiously persuaded by the voice, he picked up his nearby Bible. Falling open to the Epistle to the Romans, the passage convicted Augustine of his immorality and started him on the path to becoming one of the most accomplished theologians ever to live. 

This was not Augustine's first exposure to Christian Scripture—he had dabbled in all sorts of religions previously, and his mother had taught him Scripture—but previous to this moment of conviction, true knowledge of God and Scripture had been a closed circle to him. Augustine's entry into covenantally knowing the Divine did not come of his own discerning, but rather, through an act of irresistible Divine self-revelation,  an otherwise closed circle became an inward spiral.

Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The poor in spirit are those who realize that they come to God possessing nothing—with no claim to grace or favor, no special understanding. It is from this point of human incapacity that God calls his children to himself, inviting them to the inward spiral, that they might live their lives in order to know Him better and more intimately. And, when all things are made right and the Blessed live forever, we will realize that in God's infinite beauty, there is always more to know, more to treasure, more reason to give to God all the glory.