Limits are overcome
In the Bible, human creativity is the most natural response to an encounter with the Creator God. Such creativity—which can be expressed in many ways: as poetry or music, dance, sculpture, or architecture—is always a “religious” response, through which earth is “bound back” to heaven, and man to God.
The stele set up by Jacob at Bethel in fact marked the place where he had seen resting on the earth a ladder whose top reached heaven, and on which God’s angels ascended and descended (Genesis 28:12).
In like manner, the tents that Peter wanted to set up would have marked a point of convergence: the place where Peter, James, and John saw a man, Jesus, change in his appearance and converse with Moses and Elijah. In short, they saw what had been promised to Nathaniel: “the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (John 1:51).
The work of art made to record similar experiences is therefore a work of supreme synthesis: a scala paradisi on which opposing extremes are linked, limits overcome, time and eternity joined.
-Timothy Verdon, The Ecumenism of Beauty
