Art, Music, and God

My love of the humanities including all types of music and art cannot be expressed.  The depth and breadth of our creativity is overwhelming.  Art and music reflect our most inner soul and our experience of humanity.  In my Synthesis of Humanities class we were asked to answer the question - What is art?  My answer is that art is reflected in all that we do – we are all artists.  However, we can ask what is great art and that can lead to passionate debate.  So I reframed the question in my paper for the class. 

The question I have been asking myself is not “But is it Art?” but rather how does art help me to live the examined life?  How does living an examined life help us to make decisions that affect our daily lives and relationships – the concrete, seemingly measurable acts performed day to day?  Living an examined life can be very painful because it reveals truths about ourselves that require us to act – to change our own behavior.  If we didn’t study humanities or art then we are confined by our limited experiences and   innate ability to process those experiences or to understand other perspectives.  We live in an enclosed world that is safe.  But is living the examined life by studying art, theology, philosophy, literature, history, culture, and music sufficient to solve humanities problems?  My conclusion is that it leads to a “combination of separate elements of sensation or thought into a whole; the combination of the partial truths of a thesis and it antitheses into a higher stage of truth.”  (“Webster’s)  It is my opinion that it is difficult to forgive or love without understanding through perspectives provided in art, literature, philosophy, and music.  To each life a perspective is born.  But only through the grace of God can we understand the whole.