What is being argued here is simply that the Incarnation is the only possible charter, guide, and animation for the work of the architect as he seeks to give form to faith. If grace can become nature, then nature can ever after that embody, celebrate, and refract grace. Now that grace has made nature the theatre of its gift, all of nature is free and able to offer its redeemed self as a kind of transparency to the reality of grace. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.
Art is a historical, natural activity.
There is a sense in which all art is radically unphilosophical, and this fact is revealed by the impatience all artists feel when they fall into the interpretive hands of fashioners of general statements-philosophers or theologians. And all art, on the other hand, aims at a universality which shall transcend the occasion of its work. Bach wrote for a world beyond Leipzig because he was concerned to do a particular job for Leipzig, in Leipzig between 1734 and 1750. And if Mr. Saarinen's Christ Church in Minneapolis is called a fine church, that is because Mr. Saarinen was primarily concerned to build a place of worship and work for a particular congregation. One has a feeling, let us say for humanity-its scope, possibility, variety, contrariness, pathos, and delight.