Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 75

THE EMBODIED ACT

have you ever watched, say, golf or bowling on television? If you
have never tried these activities, watching is torturous. However,
if you endeavor to learn the basics of the activity, if you attempt
to hit a long ball off the tee or sink a thirty-foot putt, you will suddenly gain an appreciation for the golf pro whose performance
reveals a level of mastery nearing perfection. So too with art.
Second, engaging in the artistic act will lead one to greater
awareness of and sensitivity to the transcendentals, especially
beauty. As David Bentley Hart puts it, "In the beautiful God's glory
is revealed as something communicable and intrinsically delightful, as including the creature in its ends, as completely worthy
of love; what God's glory necessitates and commands, beauty
shows also to be gracious and inviting; glory calls not only for awe
and penitence, but also for rejoicing."6 In coming to better grasp
the highest things, we come better to grasp a proper order of
our loves, for love moves all action, and art is a product of rightly
ordered loves even as pseudo-art is the product of loves badly
ordered. And so we see an upward spiral: an encounter with art
helps us to order our loves even as well-ordered loves makes art
more purely itself.
Finally, we may come to recognize that art is ultimately rooted
in divine gift, which is to say, in grace. For in the affirmation of
the artistic act, we witness the contingent nature of our own existence and the gratuitous spirit that animates and sustains the very
ground of our being. The proper response to this recognition is
gratitude and humility, two rare dispositions in our confused and
unartistic age, but the necessary route to wisdom. Nevertheless,
despite these dark and prosaic times, we can recognize through
the artistic eyes of properly ordered loves that "All shall be well,
and / All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of
moder nagejour nal .com

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Modern Age - Summer 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Summer 2016

Contents
Modern Age - Summer 2016 - Cover1
Modern Age - Summer 2016 - Cover2
Modern Age - Summer 2016 - Contents
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