The limits of our language are not, pace Wittgenstein, those of our world (and as a man immersed in music, he knew that). The arts are most wonderfully rooted in substance, in the human body, in stone, in pigment, in the twanging of gut or the weight of wind on reeds. All good art and literature begin in immanence. But they do not stop there. Which is to say, very plainly, that it is the enterprise and privilege of the aesthetic to quicken into lit presence the continuum between temporality and eternity, between matter and spirit, between man and “the other.” It is in this common and exact sense that poiesis opens on to, is underwritten by, the religious and the metaphysical. The questions: “What is poetry, music, art?” “How can they not be?” “How do they act upon us and how do we interpret their action?” are, ultimately, theological questions.

George Steiner