My first advice to anyone who wishes to appreciate or make sacred art is not to treat art like data. The criterion of the modern mind does not need to be met it needs to be dismissed. Art is recalcitrant to numerical description hurrah, I say, for art. This is, to the modern mind, the only way to prove that they are real. The modern mind has acquired the habit of quantifying, sorting and ranking things that are not inherently numerical: beauty, intelligence, friendship, originality, love. To a man with a hammer, the adage goes, everything looks like a nail to a man with a computer, everything looks like a datum.2 And technology imparts its bias to its users. Computers have it built into their every function, for they actually cannot heed anything unless it is reduced to a number. New technology impresses this way of thinking even more deeply. Let it be said at once that this reduction of the world to the categories of physics is not a scientific discovery (as many believe), but a metaphysical assumption that has been built into the theory from the outset.1 Logically speaking, the bifurcation postulate is tantamount to the identification of the so-called physical universe (the world as conceived by the physicist) with the real world per se, through the device of relegating all else (all that does not fit this conception) to an ontological limbo, situated outside the world of objectively existent things. What is being bifurcated or cut asunder are the so-called primary and secondary qualities: the things that can be described in mathematical terms, and those that cannot. We are told that consists of space, time and matter, or of space-time and energy, or perhaps of something else still more abstruse and even less imaginable but in any case we are told in unequivocal terms what it excludes: as all of us have learnt, the physical universe is said to exclude just about everything which from the ordinary human point of view makes up the world. The Catholic philosopher and physicist Wolfgang Smith described it well: At the end of this line of reasoning is a colorless, mechanical view of reality. This is the perhaps the most popular error of modern thinking. I see an error at the start of this line of reasoning: the assumption that in order for a thing to be real (and not just a product of the mind), it must be quantifiable. This idea is not entirely new de gustibus non est disputandum has been uttered for centuries, although I suspect that it has only recently been understood in an absolute sense. They heatedly argue that art is not a thing worth arguing they insist that nothing about art is objectively true except its objective lack of objective truthfulness. Facing such conflict, many hoist a flag of surrender and say that art is just a matter of personal taste.

Opinions about art are diverse, strongly held, and contentious.

Medieval art