C.S. Lewis once wrote,
“It was when I was happiest that I longed most… The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing… to find the place where all the beauty came from.” – Till We Have Faces
In his essay “Christianity and Literature,” he also wrote,
“[An] author should never conceive of himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom that did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. (“Christianity and Literature,” Journal of the Society of Christians in the Arts, Inc. 1, no. 2 (1975): 22)”
And Jerram Barrs writes in his article, “Christianity and the Arts” (PDF):
“Our work in any field of the arts will be imitative. We will be thinking God’s thoughts after Him—painting with His colors; speaking with His gift of language; exploring and expressing His sounds and harmonies; working with His creation in all its glory, diversity, and in-built inventiveness. In addition, we will find ourselves longing to make known the beauty of life as it once was in Paradise, the tragedy of its present marring, and the hope of our final redemption. All great art will contain this element of being an echo of Eden: Eden in its original glory, Eden that is lost to us, and Eden restored.” (pg 7)
The last two of three quotes above were taken from this Desiring God blog post.
I’ve had this blog post in draft mode for quite some time, and I think its timing is ironic. This past Tuesday I had two LDS missionaries over for dinner and we got to talking about the glory of God. One of them, Elder J., described God’s gifts as “hand-me-down” gifts (that is his word), since God has what he has, especially knowledge and power, after having learned it from another God.
Is your God a “hand-me-down” Artist? When you find the God of this earth, are you really finding where all the ultimate beauty comes from? When you consider nature and beauty and happiness and eternal law1 and the plan of salvation (whatever you think all that is), do you think of it all as ultimately coming from our God, or having been passed down a chain of gods?
I want to know where all the beauty really comes from, and then worship (worship, after all, is the consummation of my pleasure and delight). If our God is not the Ultimate Artist then I will go in search of the one who is.
- “The laws and ordinances by which men and women are exalted in the celestial kingdom of our God are eternal and do not change—and because they are eternal, they predate even God.” (Alonzo Gaskill, Odds Are, You’re Going to Be Exalted: Evidence That the Plan of Salvation Works, p. 8, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2008) ↩︎