The creative act

I had dinner with GC (a friend and co-worker) the other night. After talking about work stuff for awhile, I asked him where he stands on spiritual matters. GC and I have very different backgrounds so we complement each other very well (and have developed some great thinking at work as a result). So I thought getting his perspective on spirituality would be helpful as part of the process I'm going through right now. Our discussion covered a lot of ground. One of the things GC mentioned was the creative act. He and I had talked about the creative act a number of times before - but never in the context of spirituality.

After I got home from that dinner, I did some Google searches and came across this 1957 speech by Marcel Duchamp. One of the concepts that I found interesting in Duchamp's speech is the interplay between an artist and the spectator of his/her art. As Duchamp puts it, "the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." The concept of an "art coefficient" is also introduced - specifically, "the personal 'art coefficient' is like a arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed."

I had never thought about art in this way. Perhaps there is a similar interplay at work between God and human beings in which we all have a role to play in completing the creative act that God began. And perhaps there is a personal "spiritual coefficient" that relates what is unexpressed but intended by God to what He (or books like the Bible) unintentionally express to each of us.