Claim. Because God created the universe as His object of joy through love, God is the great artist and the universe is His work of art, making human artistic activity a derivative of God’s creative act.
Elaboration. Lee grounds the entire Unification Theory of Art on a theological premise borrowed from Divine Principle: God created the universe to actualize joy through love, with the universe as His object of joy (I. Divine Principle Foundation for the Theory of Art). From this premise, two analogical identifications follow immediately: God = artist, universe = work of art. Concretely, God created human beings as His object partners of joy, and created all things as object partners of joy for human beings — a nested structure that makes humans both objects (to God) and subjects (to nature).
This analogical foundation does serious theoretical work for the rest of the chapter. It means that (a) artistic activity is not a peripheral cultural luxury but is ontologically rooted in the very act by which the universe exists; (b) the purpose-of-creation applies to art directly — every artwork mirrors, however dimly, God’s original creative motive of love-seeking joy; and (c) human creativity is an inherited divine capacity, not merely a biological or social epiphenomenon. Lee will later use this same identification to argue that artists who consciously align with God’s purpose (‘object consciousness’) produce immortal masterpieces, whereas artists who deviate produce decadent or self-centered work.
The move also subordinates aesthetics to theology in a way that some traditions resist. Kantian aesthetics, for instance, treats beauty as subjective purposiveness without intentional purpose — Lee will later cite Kant approvingly but reframe purposelessness as merely the human-side perception of what is in fact God’s purposive creation. Worth a thread once a counter atomic exists: the analogy invites the question of whether ‘God as artist’ adequately captures divine creativity, or whether it imports human craft-categories into the divine in a way that limits rather than illuminates. Lee’s answer is that artistic activity is precisely ‘derived from God’s creation of the universe’ — derivation, not metaphor — which gives the analogy ontological rather than merely heuristic force.
See also. purpose-of-creation-as-joy-through-love, individuality-of-the-artist-derives-from-individual-image, art-defined-as-emotional-activity-creating-and-appreciating-beauty