The Browser

Yesterday morning, a young woman, a student of art history, joined us to see the Cavallini frescoes at Santa Cecilia. She had never seen them before and began at once to point out inequalities and different hands that must have taken part in the execution. The fault of teaching art history. The student is inclined to analyze and dissect the moment he encounters the object, instead of letting is soak into him as he gazes and looks, and dreams for hours together, the way I used to when young, and still should if I had youth's leisure. I recall writing in the same vein about the contemporary student's approach to literature. He is not encouraged to live and muse and ruminate over his reading but to precipitate himself with scalpel and microscope. I wonder whether the arts gain by being taught in schools.

From Berenson, Sunset and Twilight

This talk of "meeting" [God] is, no doubt, anthropomorphic; as if God and I could be face to face, like two fellow-creatures, when in reality He is above me and within me and below me and all about me. That is why it must be balanced by all manner of metaphysical and theological abstraction. But never, here or anywhere else, let us think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. Unless you sit to it very tightly, continually murmuring "Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou," the abstraction is fatal. It will make the life of lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naif image is mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds unbelievers back from conversions. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. What soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard?

From Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly On Prayer