ABSTRACT
When art (or skill) is combined with the Liberal Arts, Fine Art results. The skillful combination of matter with mere concepts is ideological, and with sheer experience, barbaric. When matter and the ideal are analogically grounded in Perfection, then a glimpse of the numinous occurs. It is analogia that provides a freedom-granting space between subject and object, relationalism and Perfection. Culture as the means by which we rise from barbarism to civilized behavior occurs via an immanent realism and transcendent Idealism. In the West the realization of numinous Perfection is historically central to the classical Platonic notion of Metaxy and the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinitarianism. As a universal cultural position, it consists of a qualitative and nonviolent phenomenology.
