Arthur Aghajanian: Hey, Mark. Thanks so much for joining me today. It's great to have you on the show. I've really been looking forward to hearing your ideas on a variety of topics having to do with theological aesthetics. So I'm excited for our conversation.

Mark McInroy (00:17.166)
Thank you, Arthur. Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation as well.

Arthur Aghajanian (00:22.254)
Great. Well, theological aesthetics. So we're going to be digging into this topic, but for me, it really is about connecting art and beauty with the nature of God and divine revelation. And I'm going to be really interested to hear how you think about it and how you come to it. I'm reminded of St. Augustine and how he emphasized the beauty of creation as a reflection of God's nature.

And when I think about theological aesthetics as a discipline, I recall how it was formalized in the 20th century through thinkers like Hans Urs von Balthasar, who argued that beauty is central to understanding truth and goodness. And that in today's context, theological aesthetics addresses how beauty can reveal spiritual truths and act as a form of divine encounter in the world. So to kick things off,

How would you define theological aesthetics, and why do you think it's such an important field of study? I'd love to hear your own take on how you think your own work fits into this area as well.

Mark McInroy (01:33.582)
Thank you for the question. The central idea for theological aesthetics as I see it is that beauty is a divine attribute or property of God and that the beauty of the world bears witness to its beautiful source. And you gave some expression to this moments ago. Even though the beauty we find in the world is going to be far surpassed by the absolute beauty of God. And that's important for a number of reasons I think most fundamentally.

Arthur Aghajanian (01:50.084)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (02:02.08)
it recasts relationship with God such that it has this aesthetic dimension to it, which is to say that one's encounter with the God who is beautiful is going to involve being enraptured, entranced, deeply moved by that beauty. And so what this emphasis on God's beauty does is it re-enlivens a relationship that might have become dry or stale or perhaps overly dominated.

Arthur Aghajanian (02:27.224)
Hmm.

Mark McInroy (02:29.634)
by a sense of what one should do to the detriment of emphasizing what one wants to do. Typically, we're drawn to beauty intrinsically. We don't need to be told to gravitate toward or to pay attention to what's beautiful. So take that idea and apply it to God. And we have, for many, a real revolution in how they relate to God. God is a source of unending fascination who feeds us with what we most deeply desire.

Arthur Aghajanian (02:43.3)
Right.

Mark McInroy (02:59.16)
So the language of beauty and aesthetics powerfully captures this aspect of the divine. And so if thinking differently about God is the first reason that theological aesthetics is important, the second is that it prompts one to think differently about the world too. And so the claim in theological aesthetics is that the beauty of the world is a reflection of its beautiful source. And if that's right, then what it means is that the beauty we find in the world is theologically significant.

Arthur Aghajanian (03:04.409)
Yeah.

Mark McInroy (03:29.294)
That's to say that the transport out of ourselves that we experience in music, the fascination that a captivating painting might elicit, the jaw-dropping grandeur that we encounter in the natural world, they all give us some hint of what relationship with God is like. And as utterly overwhelming as our encounters with worldly beauty can be, they actually pale in comparison to our encounter with God's beauty.

Arthur Aghajanian (03:32.058)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (03:42.49)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (03:57.058)
could think of it as know capital B beauty just as a shorthand. It's the absolute standard, the absolute source for all beauty.

Arthur Aghajanian (04:00.847)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (04:04.996)
Do you think these ideas, I'm just curious, the idea of God as judge comes to mind as you're talking. I'm flipping this and thinking about an opposite idea. Where would, if somebody were to come to this with this mentality of God as a divine judge, how does this fit into the matrix you're describing? I'm curious.

Mark McInroy (04:33.006)
It's a good question. They take up, to my mind, very different trajectories, different emphases that one finds in theological traditions. With that said, it's not that there's no place for one in the other, but one hopes recast what that relationship consists of or how something like God as Judge would unfold. And maybe one...

Arthur Aghajanian (04:40.399)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (04:58.146)
Yeah, because I'm specifically thinking about the Panticrata image. You know, I mean, there's an image there and it's often a beautiful image in the way that Christ is rendered and yet it's God as judge.

Mark McInroy (05:14.254)
Right, right, yeah. And there's a severity to that image, to the public record, right? Yeah, so maybe one way to bring these worlds of sorts or these trajectories together is to think about what kind of work judgment is doing in the first place, right? So why issue judgment? And this might be a bit of a tough sell for some, but I think it's fair to talk about

Arthur Aghajanian (05:19.224)
Yes, exactly.

Arthur Aghajanian (05:35.876)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (05:42.976)
judgment when you've got the theological aesthetics lens through which you're evaluating it is ultimately not for the sake of judgment alone, right, but instead to lead to a world, lead to a relationship with God, devotion to God. That one could say has beauty to it, know, goodness might be more clearly in view with judgment. It's kind of the other side of seeking goodness when judgment comes when it's lacking.

Arthur Aghajanian (06:06.393)
Hmm.

Mark McInroy (06:13.122)
But to put beauty forward as the telos along with goodness, I think can perhaps to some at least with all kinds of complications, perhaps not withstanding, but it can make the notion of judgment perhaps just a bit more palatable because it's really, it's a difficult thing for many in our contemporary setting. This image of God is a feature of the tradition. There's no way around that, but how we grapple with it in the contemporary setting, it goes a lot of different directions.

Arthur Aghajanian (06:32.652)
Yeah.

Arthur Aghajanian (06:41.732)
So one could possibly, then one observation that might come out of that might be that God as judge without the beauty is a God, is an idea of God that's lacking in something essential.

Mark McInroy (07:02.35)
That's right. That's right. I think that's way to put it. That if we don't have beauty in the picture, then we're really missing something crucial. And one of the arenas in which we feel that deficit is in notions of judgment along with any number of others. Yeah.

Arthur Aghajanian (07:17.762)
which are usually, and those ideas of God are very dry and sort of lifeless. Right? It's like the, it's a form of legalism really, isn't it? I mean, it's a small God.

Mark McInroy (07:38.86)
It can deteriorate in that direction to be sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it also might be worth noting. We're perhaps more sympathetic to the notion of divine judgment when we see real injustice in the world and we feel utterly powerless to do anything about it ourselves and wonder what could possibly be done about it ourselves. And the idea that there's some kind of accountability for

Arthur Aghajanian (07:41.135)
Yeah.

Mark McInroy (08:07.118)
some really, really horrific things that are going on. You we might warm up to the notion of divine judgment in those instances, making sure we don't, you know, veer into, you know, schadenfreude or delighting in another's suffering or anything along those lines. But there are some situations that we find, unfortunately, in our world far too frequently that really need to be addressed.

We just, we might feel that judgment of them is in order, right? That gets into really tricky terrain, of course, but it's just to try to make it a more palatable idea, I suppose.

Arthur Aghajanian (08:43.406)
Well, how would... Yeah.

Arthur Aghajanian (08:51.918)
I'm wondering how theological aesthetics would then deal with the question of, say, genocide, man's inhumanity to man, the question of the death of God, or where is God in human suffering? How would theological aesthetics from the standpoint of goodness and beauty counteract any kind of nihilistic?

Mark McInroy (08:59.617)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (09:21.058)
view of creation.

Mark McInroy (09:23.468)
Right, right, good. It's right out of the gates here. We're with some really tough questions. this is... No, it's great. It's great.

Arthur Aghajanian (09:28.28)
Yeah, I'm throwing a spin on it, I guess, but I just, I just can't help but think about these things. Cause when you talk about goodness and beauty and so forth, I want to take into account the fact that, well, sort of to honor the fact that this is, I think a very healthy and right-headed way of thinking about the nature of spiritual life. But also we can't forget that those who

who are not thinking in these terms or those who lack any kind of spiritual life or have a problem with any kind of belief would argue that there is so much suffering and there's such a lack of beauty. There's so much that, you know, what about the other side of the picture? And so,

Mark McInroy (10:23.256)
Yes.

Arthur Aghajanian (10:25.207)
Knowing that theological aesthetics would have some kind of response to this and coming to you as the expert on that, I'm just really interested to hear kind of the larger kind of framework in which all of this could be held.

Mark McInroy (10:38.938)
And I appreciate the question because it's an opportunity to make clear that theological aesthetics and emphasis on beauty, goodness, and truth, it's not a warm and fuzzy kind of feel good exercise, right? And to have the chance to address that is important, I think. It's not an easy thing to do, of course. Whenever we're in this arena, one has to just begin with the challenge of...

Arthur Aghajanian (10:51.129)
Hmm.

Mark McInroy (11:04.876)
theodicy, the challenge that's before us when we try to account theologically for these horrific, horrific things, the problem of evil and whatnot. I do think that there are some resources that are well explored concerning goodness and one can make a parallel set of claims concerning beauty. So that is to say, if one asks, as any number of theologians have, how is it the case that we have

Arthur Aghajanian (11:13.273)
Right.

Mark McInroy (11:34.264)
this absolutely good God who creates a good world, right? You read the creation narrative in Genesis and again and again and again, the world is described as good. And so it might not seem to many theologians that has not seen that evil has a place in that world. And there are some, there's some grappling with this in the early days of the church, early centuries of the church. But with a figure like Augustine of Hippo, we get a really powerful articulation of

goodness as it relates to evil and how one can still maintain the absolute goodness of God. And so what Augustine does is he says, precisely because a good God creates a good world and there's no place for evil within the world, evil isn't something positive itself, but simply a lack of goodness. say evil is a privation, as he puts it, of goodness. Well, a lack of being.

Arthur Aghajanian (12:15.93)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (12:25.156)
Hmm.

or a lack of God.

Mark McInroy (12:32.822)
Right. So for something to be, for something to exist is for it to be good. That's one implication of saying the world as a whole is good. It's not that there's part of the world that's good and a part that's evil, a that's about all of the world is good. It's a non-dualistic approach to creation. Right. And so what Augustine will say is that evil isn't something in its own right. It's rather a lack of something else. It's akin to a hole in a piece of paper. What is a hole? Well, it's a lack of paper.

Arthur Aghajanian (12:38.202)
Hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (12:47.706)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (13:02.51)
It's not its own positive reality.

Arthur Aghajanian (13:04.802)
I think about the whole Garden of Eden scenario and the disconnection from God that happened there as this sort of fundamental split that occurred, the subject-object split, feeds ego, disconnects one from God, and allows for evil to come into the world. Is that kind of along the lines of what you're describing?

Mark McInroy (13:31.31)
It's how that idea relates to that particular narrative, I think, would have to be done really carefully. Certainly, it's at that moment in the Genesis narrative that one wonders, where did this come from? I think things were going great in chapters one and two, and then chapter three of Genesis, things shift, and one wonders why. Yeah, was good. was great. Right,

Arthur Aghajanian (13:54.38)
It was all beautiful. Yeah, was the Garden of Eden is the thing of beauty. Yeah.

Mark McInroy (14:00.748)
So Augustine puts forward this idea of evil as a privation of goodness. And sometimes it's regarded as not quite taking evil seriously enough. It's just a lack of good. To my mind, that's not quite a fair reading of Augustine. If you read through Augustine's writings, he grappled mightily with his own desires, among any number of other things. He was face to face with evil, I think. And when we understand the way in which for him, although evil is a lot

Arthur Aghajanian (14:18.554)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (14:29.504)
a lack of goodness, it's simply a privation. What it does is corrodes goodness, right? So it's like an acid except for an acid is something, right? So it just pulls goodness down as it were. And so all that is a little bit of a preamble to say, I think one can make a parallel set of moves when it comes to beauty, right? So that is to say, if one claims with theological aesthetics that beauty also

permeates everything that exists. That for something to be, to exist, is not only for it to be good, but also for it to be beautiful. The next question is, and you gestured toward this moments ago, what does one do with ugliness? How does one account for ugliness? And it seems to me that one can say ugliness, like evil, is simply a lack. It's a privation. It's corroding beauty, but it doesn't have a reality in its own.

Arthur Aghajanian (15:21.849)
Hmm.

Mark McInroy (15:23.032)
So you can take those two ideas and use them as one tool in a really difficult effort at meeting up with the problem of evil, the problem of suffering, and these kinds of things. Maybe one more element to add, and one does this with great caution, of course, one is always treading very carefully in these waters, or swimming carefully, I suppose, in these waters. It can be the case that, under certain conditions at least,

There is a beauty that happens in the midst of that grappling. And thinking of it as beautiful can actually assist the movement through it. It can make what would otherwise perhaps be a really insufferable situation somewhat more manageable. Of course, not in... Yeah, and of course not in every instance and one...

Arthur Aghajanian (16:07.086)
Hmm. Right.

Arthur Aghajanian (16:17.786)
So hope comes in, in other words.

Mark McInroy (16:22.638)
one should, I think from a pastoral perspective, be very reticent to say that somebody else should think that way. But when it can happen, I think it can be an enormous balm in some instances.

Arthur Aghajanian (16:37.284)
Yeah, interesting. I'm really curious about the role of images when it comes to the idea of the logos and the incarnation. So I was wondering if you could talk about how these concepts have been connected to imagery historically and maybe even today.

Mark McInroy (16:55.32)
So I think there's a very specific rationale for why images play a crucial role in relation to the incarnation, to the Logos become flesh, and therefore to Christianity as a whole. And this rationale doesn't receive the attention it deserves, in my view, but it gets articulated quite powerfully during the Byzantine iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries.

And during that time, in the midst of this intense debate about whether images of God are permissible or not, there's a figure named Theodore the Studite who presents what he sees as a crucial consideration for the use of images. He notes that when God revealed God's self to humankind, God did not do so in, as Theodore puts it, a merely mental way. But instead, God disclosed God's self to the senses.

So God's revelation does not consist merely of fodder for intellectual reflection. It's not about concepts. God's revelation instead deployed the sensory medium in order to disclose God's self. And if we look at scripture, right, we encounter the idea certainly that Christ is the logos, that's familiar, but he's also the icon, right? He's the image of God.

Arthur Aghajanian (17:58.682)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (18:06.677)
Right.

Arthur Aghajanian (18:17.197)
Right.

Mark McInroy (18:17.964)
And so what Theodore does with that is he goes so far as to suggest that those who refuse images actually deny the reality of the incarnation. So they simply don't take seriously enough the fact that God has presented God's self not just to our minds, but to our senses. And so the implications of this are very far reaching to my mind. And I actually don't think they've been adequately or fully developed, even though they were advanced over 1,000 years ago. Because what it means

Arthur Aghajanian (18:26.51)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (18:45.976)
Yeah, well, early, yeah.

Mark McInroy (18:47.116)
What it means is that Christian theology and Christian life more broadly requires a focus on images such that one remains perpetually engaged with the senses. And so in this understanding, the sensory register is this enduring medium for divine revelation. And as such, it's not left behind. One doesn't depart from the senses and images in order to get onto what is supposedly the more serious business, namely thinking.

Arthur Aghajanian (18:56.823)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (19:15.362)
So this is actually the core idea behind the image as theology volume that I was fortunate to co-edit. We asked in that book what sort of theological work images can do that simply can't be done through linguistic efforts. So we noted that there's a certain logocentrism that pervades the Christian tradition. And we began to explore doing theology in a very different way. So we investigated the question of what images can do for theology that's different from

Arthur Aghajanian (19:31.258)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (19:45.65)
And in some cases, not even possible for words alone.

Arthur Aghajanian (19:51.194)
Yeah, I think about how the logos, the word of God, the idea that the logos became flesh in the person of Christ, right? I mean, when we look at John 1, 14, for example, and that bridges the gap between the divine and the material worlds, that's kind of the most fundamental Christian idea.

isn't it? And early Christian iconography often represented Christ as the ultimate manifestation of the word made visible. And the Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that the incarnation justifies the veneration of icons as matter is redeemed and capable of conveying the divine. So the Eastern

Mark McInroy (20:17.784)
That's right.

Arthur Aghajanian (20:43.002)
Christian tradition has not had a problem with this idea of materiality. So is there something in that divide between East and West that occurred historically that would be important to consider here in terms of this redemption that we're seeing today of the material and the image in the context of Christianity?

Mark McInroy (21:13.31)
It's certainly within Eastern Orthodoxy, as you're suggesting, there is this enormous emphasis on not only images, but materiality itself. I see it as being picked up in the West in certain portions, perhaps not as comprehensively or exhaustively. The West is quite varied in this regard. But even in, I mean, it's worth noting that even in the East,

Arthur Aghajanian (21:22.98)
Yeah.

Mark McInroy (21:39.138)
You've got this period of time when materiality is this highly fraught category. And this is why images are so controversial during the Byzantine iconoclastic controversies. And what many will say is that the reasons that materiality is so fraught come from outside of the Christian tradition itself. So a great deal of the antipathy toward the material is regarded by a number of scholars as is derived not so much from scripture, but instead

Arthur Aghajanian (21:44.153)
Hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (21:49.924)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (22:08.056)
from philosophical ways of thinking that originate outside of the Jewish and Christian traditions.

Arthur Aghajanian (22:13.866)
Do you mean the Greek Hellenistic?

Mark McInroy (22:17.026)
Correct, yeah. So to be more specific, it's philosophies associated with Plato, it's Middle Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and Plato himself that tend to view matter negatively. And so it's when those ways of thinking influence Christianity, which they do rather mightily in the first few centuries of the Christian tradition, that's when you start to get this tremendous resistance to the notion that divine disclosure could possibly take place through the material.

Arthur Aghajanian (22:23.554)
Neoplatonism.

Arthur Aghajanian (22:27.524)
Mm-hmm, right.

Arthur Aghajanian (22:34.2)
Yeah, right.

Arthur Aghajanian (22:42.522)
Right. Because there's this idea that you're over, the spirit is overcoming the body or passing beyond into some, into higher realms that are non-physical.

Mark McInroy (22:52.6)
That's exactly it. So the material gets in the way, you could say. It's an impediment to the purely intellectual. And it's precisely in the attitude toward the body that you see this most vividly. What we are to do in these philosophical ways of thinking is actually to be liberated from the body. The body is just an encumbrance. That's the view of many scholars. And you certainly encounter it in Plato.

Arthur Aghajanian (22:56.771)
Yeah.

Arthur Aghajanian (23:08.664)
Right, right. So I suppose that began with Plato.

Mark McInroy (23:17.718)
It's quite vivid in Plotinus, who is a neo-Platonist who's several centuries after Plato. We'll talk about the body as not being proper to us. He's basically trying to counsel his reader who might be afraid of dying. He says, don't worry about dying because you'll simply essentially just slough off this husk and your soul will finally be free. So there's a really powerful antipathy toward the body that one finds.

Arthur Aghajanian (23:21.678)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Arthur Aghajanian (23:40.664)
Yeah.

Mark McInroy (23:46.892)
But as you suggest, the crucial idea in Christianity, that runs directly against this privileging of the immaterial over the material, and then that's the incarnation. So the notion that Jesus's body was made capable of bearing the divine presence is just incredibly important, incredibly powerful. And so for that way of thinking, the body is not some encumbrance. It's the very vehicle through which God is present with us.

Arthur Aghajanian (23:56.943)
Yeah.

Arthur Aghajanian (24:16.088)
That's a radical shift from given Christianity's roots in neo-Platonism and its influence of Near Eastern and ancient philosophies on early Christianity. I'm excited to get to the part of our conversation where we're going to be going into mysticism and this early development of

Mark McInroy (24:16.28)
Okay, it's a radical shift.

Arthur Aghajanian (24:44.643)
Christianity, but to stay on materiality for a little bit longer, how do you think art can serve as a form of divine disclosure? How do you see engaging with images or physical objects as pulling us deeper into a spiritual experience for us today?

Mark McInroy (25:03.98)
Yeah, it's a great question and there's a lot that one could say about it. We benefit, I think, here from some analyses of art that are put forward in modern philosophy, specifically French phenomenology. And there's a philosophical treatment, but then you can carry it into a theological treatment. It's Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who I think is one of the most insightful on this. And he writes quite a bit on modern painting.

Arthur Aghajanian (25:31.29)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (25:33.51)
which he sees as moving beyond a representational understanding of art. So to him, artworks are not discrete objects, but instead they're lenses. So one doesn't look at images, one actually looks through images. So we use them as guides for seeing. And through them, we see not just the image itself, but everything else too.

Arthur Aghajanian (25:44.57)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (25:57.924)
But we can go back to medieval art, like illuminated manuscripts and reliquaries and this idea that luxurious materials were used to signify divine presence.

Mark McInroy (26:08.878)
That's right. That's right. That's absolutely right. And I think you arguably find traces of that way of thinking in Merleau-Ponty, even though he's doing it in a very different way. One way to put it, which I think we're in the general vicinity of, is to say that art's not presenting something other to the world. It's not that there's nature on the one hand and the art on the other, or the divine reality.

Arthur Aghajanian (26:20.88)
Yeah.

Mark McInroy (26:39.606)
the art on the other just to move theologically for a moment. There's a commentator on Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Aloa is his name, he says that for Merleau-Ponty, art's not an alternative to the natural world, but an intensification of its operations. Right, right, so art doesn't, art's not aspiring to replicate things in the world. It's that it's this arena in which natural operations are condensed, they're vivified.

Arthur Aghajanian (26:55.244)
Yeah, that's good. I like that.

Arthur Aghajanian (27:08.132)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (27:08.524)
So an image then, art, it's not an imitation of reality. It's not a less real version of the thing that's depicted. And instead we find in images a more real instance of the reality. Images amplify, they amplify the real. They're not these like pale, sad imitations.

Arthur Aghajanian (27:21.698)
Yeah, intensification. Yeah. Intensification, amplification. I think about, for example, the use of natural light in Gothic cathedrals using stained glass windows, which

Mark McInroy (27:36.494)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (27:41.71)
was a way of manifesting God's divine light in the physical world. It's this intensification. It's this cooperation with the material of nature to bring the divine dimension, to bring the divine dimension into human experience. also that it's important to remember that for many theologians, matter is

discussed as a conduit through which the divine is revealed in a variety of different ways, which, I mean, this whole idea mirrors the sacramental worldview, doesn't it? Where ordinary elements, bread, wine, water, are vehicles of grace.

Mark McInroy (28:25.486)
That's That's exactly right.

Arthur Aghajanian (28:27.182)
So it's a very large subject that's all pervasive throughout Christianity, isn't it?

Mark McInroy (28:32.524)
Yes, yes, it absolutely is. It's the idea that it's not only Jesus's body that is the bearer of the divine presence, but the sacraments as well, the materiality as such can do that kind of work. You get these views of matter that are kind of reductive or simplistic, or simply don't do justice to what we find in the Christian tradition. And one of them comes from that Greek philosophical

Arthur Aghajanian (28:40.932)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McInroy (29:00.93)
trajectory that we just described. there's another that has to do with the very idea that there's such a thing as the secular, the very idea that we have this God-free, purely natural zone in the Creator. Yeah, yeah. And so in this understanding, matter couldn't possibly be filled with divine grace because it's part of nature, which, according to this way of thinking, is separated sharply from supernature.

Arthur Aghajanian (29:09.978)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (29:15.63)
This dualistic concept, yeah.

Arthur Aghajanian (29:25.103)
Yeah.

Arthur Aghajanian (29:30.424)
Right.

Mark McInroy (29:30.998)
And by this idea, I mean, it's important to recognize it only begins in the modern period. So it's a relatively recent construction. And there's been a lot of work actually by a number of contemporary theologians who argue against the idea that anything in the world could be marked off as free from God. And so where they will go with this, this is a bit of a refrain, especially in early 20th century, early to mid 20th century Catholic theology, not that it's confined to that register by any means, it's just kind

endemic to orthodoxy to be sure, the idea that nature itself is always already graced. So it's already shot through with the divine presence down to its very core.

Arthur Aghajanian (30:07.48)
Mm-hmm.

Arthur Aghajanian (30:11.384)
Yeah. Now, if we think about matter, though, being filled with divine grace, how do you think that changes how we see representation in religious art? Does it shift how we perceive or even experience these images when we come to images, whether contemporary or historical, and we're thinking about these images, we're thinking about the material that makes these images as being

Arthur Aghajanian (30:42.279)
part of what God is, that really changes our whole outlook, right? When we're coming to an image with the sacramental understanding of creation, that matter participates in God's grace and can reflect divine truths, I'm thinking about how Thomas Aquinas stressed that beauty and form and matter can lead the mind to contemplate higher divine realities.

and that religious art often represents the divine with things like the use of gold, halos, and light, which symbolize holiness and the presence of grace. So in religious art specifically, there are all these clues to the divine nature of matter, not in contemporary art, not in modern art. so for me, it's really interesting to look at how one can trace

God's grace in a variety of creative work, whether we're talking about visual art or the literary arts or what have you, when the work is not overtly religious. I'm really interested to hear how, in contemporary terms, you see a reverence for the material world or a heightened awareness of how

representation in art can bring viewers closer to spiritual contemplation.