Logos

New Testament Biblical texts in their original Greek form are most immediately fascinating for formal reasons.  Unfamiliar text calls attention to its visual beauty because there is a formatting barrier between the viewer and the meaning.  Beyond this formal grace, I have found that when learning a new system you are presented with the ballet-like structure of language: every constituent rule and character shifts and bends the others as a thought unfolds in a balanced dance.  The fact that it is a dead language layers another glaze of interest.  It draws a culture from millennia past directly into the present, skipping the inevitable change of a living thing through time.  Biblical texts also gain a particular zest when juxtaposed with modern linguistic theory: one posits an unquestionable absolute while the other seeks to render meaning itself a phantom (though there is no dialectical resolution here).

However fascinating I find these ideas to be, the prime reason I have focused on these texts is that I believe what they say is true, which gives them immense emotional presence that lends weight to their intellectual interest.  Experiencing the world makes me believe in God, and I know that one of the main attributes of God is perfection.  I am not perfect, and imperfection eliminates perfection when they are grouped, so imperfection cannot logically reside with perfection.  The necessary result of my imperfection is final estrangement from God.  Recorded in these texts, however, is Jesus’ last teaching discourse, after the last supper and before his betrayal and arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which he explains the means of reconciliation between the imperfect and the perfect.  This knowledge that I can be reconciled to God replaces existentialist angst with the enjoyment of beauty (whether it is sensuous, moral or intellectual).  The commingling of the sensuously appealing with the intellectually and spiritually beautiful in these paintings can then be seen as a result of the like commingling in my life that these texts inspire.