As far as stimulus from the visual arts specifically, there is today in most of us a visual appetite that is hungry, that is acutely undernourished. One might go so far as to say that Protestants in particular suffer from a form of visual anorexia. It is not that there is a lack of visual stimuli, but rather a lack of wholesomeness of form and content amidst the all-pervasive sensory overload.

Beyond the pervasive disinterest in the visual arts among the Protestant community, the core problem lies in the fact that the art world rejects on several grounds work that is in any way explicitly Christian in content and also shrugs off as naive anything that has the semblance of hope or optimism in outlook.

Beauty, therefore, for the modern and postmodern artist has become a highly dubious metaphor for a discredited belief system.

In the Classical tradition, deriving from ancient Greece and Rome, beauty was perceived as the means by which the artist captured the viewer's eye in order to engage the viewer with truth and so inspire goodness.

Begbie offers an additional valuable contribution by rejecting the traditional emphasis on beauty, in its Platonic sense, and instead suggesting that beauty be reconceived in Christological terms-as disorder redeemed.

In this same tradition, beauty is inextricably bound up with the principles of order and harmony believed to underlie the cosmos. Artists in the Classical tradition, inspired by Platonic idealism, strove to create images that represented not the world of particulars-with all its defects-but an ideal image conceived in the mind, which was taken as representing some absolute, pure, ideal form of which all particular, material forms are but a mere shadow.

Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference.