'that exquisite finish'

The grass blades of a meadow a mile off, are so far discernible that there will be a marked difference between its appearance and that of a piece of wood painted green. And thus nature is never distinct and never vacant, she is always mysterious, but always abundant; you always see something, but you never see all.

And thus arise that exquisite finish and fulness which God has appointed to be the perpetual source of fresh pleasure to the cultivated and observant eye; a finish which no distance can render invisible, and no nearness comprehensible; which in every stone, every bough, every cloud, every wave is multiplied around us, for ever presented, and for ever exhaustless. And hence in art, every space or touch in which we can see everything, or in which we can see nothing, is false. Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing. . . .

—John Ruskin, “Of Truth of Space,” Modern Painters, I (1843)

The Pictures We Create

"Well, there are many saints I'm particularly fond of-Stephen, St. Francis and others. I often see pictures of them and of the Savior and the Virgin-such utterly lying and false and silly pictures-and I can put up with them just as little as you could with that picture of Goethe. When I see one of those sweet and silly Saviors of St. Fancises and see how other people find them beautiful and edifying, I feel it is an insult to the real Savior and it makes me think: Why did He live and suffer so terribly if people find a picture as silly as that satisfactory to them! But in spite of this I know that my own picture of the Savior or St. Francis is only a human picture and falls short of the original, and that the Savior Himself would find the picture I have of Him within me just as stupid as I do those sickly reproductions."

—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)

No created mind...

No created mind can by any means possess the capacity to understand all, but as soon as it has discovered a small fragment of what it is seeking, it again sees other things that must be sought for; and if in turn it comes to know these, it will again see arising out of them many more things that demand investigation.

—Origen, On First Principles (214)

The Spirit and Wonder World

We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medicine and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament. And if we suppose that we can do so ourselves, we must be clear that we can represent this as the attitude of Christian faith only by making the Christian proclamation unintelligible and impossible for our contemporaries.

—Rudolf Bultmann, "The New Testament and Mythology" (1941)

Rationality and the Fabulous Beings

Finally, though, and perhaps a mite perversely, I want to urge the essential sanity of Kirk’s approach to reality. One need not believe in fairies to grasp that there is no good reason why one ought not to do so. To see the world as inhabited by these vital intelligences, or to believe that behind the outward forms of nature there might be an unperceived realm of intelligent order, is simply to respond rationally to one of the ways in which the world seems to address us, when we intuit simultaneously its rational frame and the depth of mystery it seems to hide from us. It may be that the apprehension of such an unseen order, when it comes in the form of folklore about fabulous beings, has been overlaid by numerous strata of illusion—but so what? Everything we know about reality comes to us with a certain alloy of illusion, not accidentally, but as an indispensable condition.

—David Bentley Hart, "The Secret Commonwealth" (2009)

Utopia, Reality, and Truth

Idea and fact, utopia and reality are relative terms which constantly shift from one to the other, and if certain utopias can and must be ignored, it is not because they are utopias, that is, because they have no place in the given external reality or appear in it merely as ideas, but because they are bad ideas; and in this respect not only are they inapplicable within the existing reality, but they also have no legitimate place in the world of ideas.

—Vladimir Soloviev, Critique of Abstract Principles (1877)