Abstract
The chapter explores analogies between aesthetic and spiritual perception to suggest ways in which the perception of God could be developed similar to the perception of beauty. This chapter draws on Gustave Courbet’s insight that the purpose of art is to discover and make manifest beauty in nature and discusses Claude Monet’s approach to such a discovery by means to returning to a ‘naïve impression’. This chapter argues that far from being simply ‘naïve’, the artist’s way of viewing nature opened the eyes of others to the possibility of ‘seeing more’. For Wassily Kandinsky, Monet’s art occasioned a paradigm shift from realism to abstract art. Kandinsky compared an artist to a prophetic seer who led others to discover the spiritual dimension of art. Similarly, perception of God could be developed through entering the world of experienced perceivers by immersing oneself in scripture and in liturgy.