Claim. The artist who functions properly as object to God-as-subject must adopt five concrete attitudes: comforting God’s historical sorrow, comforting the sages and Jesus who walked the restoration path, expressing the deeds of good and righteous people, heralding the coming ideal world, and praising God by expressing the beauty and mystery of nature.
Elaboration. Since creation is the activity by which an artist (as object) gives joy to God (as highest subject) and to the whole, ‘the artist must first establish a sense of object consciousness’ (Object Consciousness). Lee then enumerates five contents of this consciousness — a remarkably specific programmatic list.
(1) Comforting God’s sorrow: God created humans for joy and endowed them with creativity, but humans separated from God and lost the consciousness of giving Him joy. This left God in ‘historical sorrow’ (han). The artist should seek to comfort God for this. (2) Comforting sages and Jesus: the righteous who walked the path of restoration with God shared His pain; comforting them indirectly comforts God. (3) Expressing the deeds of good and righteous people: the artist cooperates with providence by portraying those persecuted by the sinful world. (4) Heralding the ideal world: artworks should express hope and confidence about the future, manifesting God’s glory (eschatology). (5) Praising God through nature: approaching nature with awe as the manifestation of God’s attributes, the artist discovers nature’s profound and mysterious beauty.
The payoff claim is strong: ‘Artists who have such an object consciousness and invest all their energy into their creative work, can receive blessings from God and assistance from the spirit world. This is the way in which truly great works of art can be produced. Such works may be considered to be the fruit of a co-creative effort between God and the artist.’ Co-creation, not just inspiration — the spirit-world actively assists.
Lee names exemplars: Renaissance painters Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo are said to have created with such object consciousness, as did Beethoven in composing music. This is why their works became ‘immortal masterpieces.’ Critics will note that this is a fairly Romantic-Catholic theory of genius dressed in UT vocabulary — the assumption that great art correlates with theistic devotion runs into counter-examples (atheist composers and painters who produced enduring work). Worth a thread: how the framework handles cases like Picasso (cited later as a Cubist representative) whose object consciousness was clearly not God-directed yet whose work has endured.
See also. object-consciousness-before-subject-consciousness, unificationism-as-unity-of-realism-and-idealism, subjective-action-as-empathy-creative-appreciation