DAVID: A BEAUTIFUL OBJECT?

The question behind my questions belongs neither to art history nor to art criticism, but to theology. Put as baldly as possible the question is this: is there a spiritual aspect to the art experience? The question presumes another, more fundamental: what is spirit, and what do we mean when we talk about spiritual experience, or about the spiritual content of art or, for that matter, of our experience in general? To what precisely are we referring? To an element purely within ourselves, say, to a feeling? Or, perhaps, to something that is essentially negative, for example, to something nonmaterial, non-worldly, non-corporeal, the essence of which is simply to be other than everything else, and for this reason unable to be easily counted or named among the finite things that make up our world? Yet, if we are unable either to define the word intelligibly, or to locate it within a specific realm of discourse, how do we know that “spirit” is not just a fiction we want very much to believe in, but which does not actually refer to anything real in itself, rather is simply a kind of ideal extension of our inner being, or self-presence? Let these questions, unanswerable in themselves, serve for the moment as the framework for my reflections on the David to follow.