God Making: An Essay in Theopoetic Imagination

Abstract

This paper looks at the phenomenon of theopoetic art. The word theopoetic dates back to the Patristic authors—referring to the making divine of the human and the making human of the divine—and has been radically revived as part of the recent religious turn in continental phenomenology and hermeneutics (Keller, Caputo, Nancy, Kearney). Looking at an example of religious art, Andrei Rublev’s Trinity, the author traces the development of the idea of “God making” from Jewish and Christian literature to contemporary debates on the relationship between the secular and the sacred.