The Image and the Idea
Every generation paints the sacred anew. Sometimes the pigment is stone or glass, sometimes language or melody, sometimes the shimmer of oil catching light. What we call religion is, at heart, humanity’s longest and most ambitious artwork: a vast canvas to which each age adds its layer. Some paint over what came before, others restore what was fading, and some apply colors so vivid that they change how the entire picture is seen. Nothing is lost entirely. Beneath the centuries of overpainting, older shapes still glimmer through, traces of the hands that once believed their version complete.
The story of Salome and John the Baptist is one such canvas. Few scenes from scripture have been re-imagined so many times. The Gospels give us little more than a sketch: a girl dances, a king swears an oath, a prophet’s head is brought forth on a platter. Sparse, impersonal, the episode reads less like memory than design. Yet over centuries, artists have covered that outline with layers of interpretation — moral, erotic, psychological, symbolic — until the original story disappears beneath its own retellings.
At Chartres Cathedral, carved into twelfth-century stone, Salome appears as a geometric warning: the body disciplined into shape, the gesture frozen mid-sin. The sculptor’s chisel spoke the language of doctrine; faith was architecture, built to outlast the flesh. Three hundred years later, in Titian’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, the scene softens. Her downcast gaze, her luminous skin, the tremor of compassion: these are not lessons but questions. Renaissance painters were theologians of the body. In their hands, divinity became something human beings could render in flesh tones and light.
Caravaggio took that idea and made it dangerous. In his version, painted in 1607, the figures emerge from shadow, their faces half-lit, half-ashamed. The sacred no longer rests in serenity but in tension, revelation trembling on the edge of violence. What earlier artists offered as moral certainty becomes, in his chiaroscuro, the drama of consciousness itself.
By the nineteenth century, Gustave Moreau’s The Apparition turns the story into pure vision. Salome faces the floating head of John, radiant and impossible, a halo of jewels blazing around it. The scene is less gospel than dream: a meditation on fascination, guilt, and beauty. Moreau paints belief as imagination: an image created to make feeling visible. A generation later, Aubrey Beardsley’s black-and-white Salome strips the story of ornament and sanctity alike. Line replaces creed; desire replaces warning. The myth, by then, belongs to art.
Looking across these centuries, it becomes clear that what changes is not the story’s truth but its tone. Each age repaints the sacred with its own palette of fear and hope, sensuality and restraint. The images contradict one another, yet together they reveal the real subject of religion: the human need to keep making meaning visible.
I have come to think of religion not as revelation from beyond but as restoration from within. I think of it as an ongoing creative process through which cultures preserve what matters most to them. Every civilization mixes its pigments from the same raw materials: mortality, desire, memory, wonder. The resulting pictures are never final, but they endure because they give form to feeling. What people once called divine inspiration may simply have been that: the moment when a new layer caught the light.
The restorers of old paintings understand this paradox. Their work is both devotion and interference. Clean too much and the original vanishes; clean too little and the surface dulls. Religion, in every age, performs the same delicate labor. Some adherents guard tradition as if the first stroke were sacred; others repaint so boldly that the old image disappears beneath fresh color. Both are acts of care. Both keep the canvas alive.
This is the kind of reverence I understand: not belief in the supernatural, but respect for human persistence. The psalms, the cathedrals, the icons, the rituals: I see in them not proof of God, but proof of us. As proof of our capacity to translate awe into form. When I stand before a painting or a hymn, I feel what I imagine its maker felt: the urgency to transform emotion into something that can be shared. That impulse, whether it produces an altar or a poem, is holy enough.
Salome, in all her incarnations, becomes the dancer who moves through this gallery of belief. She embodies change itself. She is a figure endlessly reinterpreted because she speaks to whatever each age most needs to confront: beauty, power, judgment, desire. Religion survives for the same reason art does: it can take new color without losing the memory of old pigment.
To trace Salome’s image from stone to oil to ink to digital light is to watch belief evolve before your eyes. It is history rendered as composition: layer upon layer, time becoming texture. I no longer look for revelation in these paintings; I look for reflection. They remind me that the sacred is not what descends from above but what emerges when people work together to shape meaning from chaos.
Faith, as I use the word, is not assent to a doctrine. It is the patience to keep painting. Faith is the willingness to add one’s own layer to a canvas that will never be finished. Religion, understood this way, is not something to believe in or escape from. It is an art form we inherit, revise, and continue. And like any great work of art, its power lies not in its perfection, but in the fact that, after all this time, the paint is still wet.
The Underpainting of Faith
Every painting begins with an underdrawing. They begin with those faint graphite or charcoal lines that guide the hand before color takes hold. You can sometimes glimpse them beneath thin layers of paint: a changed outline, a hand repositioned, the trace of an earlier idea. Religion has its own underdrawings. Beneath centuries of pigment and varnish lies the rough sketch of history, a moment that was once immediate and human before it hardened into symbolism.
In the case of Salome, the sketch could hardly be simpler. The Gospel of Mark gives us only a few lines: Herod holds a banquet, a young woman dances, a prophet is executed. Her name is not given; her motives are never described. She appears, moves, and vanishes. The writer is not painting a portrait but diagramming a moral geometry: power, pride, consequence. The dancer’s anonymity is part of the design.
Matthew, copying Mark, changes almost nothing. Luke omits the story altogether. It is history reduced to gesture: the turn of a wrist, the consequence of a promise. Whatever actually happened, if anything did, remains an underdrawing, faint and unfinished.
Then, decades later, the historian Josephus picks up a new pencil. In Antiquities of the Jews he mentions John the Baptist, describing him not as a visionary but as a reformer whose following unsettled the political order. Herod, fearing unrest, has him executed. There is no dance, no banquet, no mother’s scheme. Only when Josephus later lists the royal family does a name appear: Salome. That small addition, likely incidental, becomes the stroke that future generations could not resist tracing over.
Naming is history’s first pigment. Once the girl had a name, artists and theologians could fill in her color. The early Church, eager for moral contrast, made her the foil to the prophet’s virtue. John was the straight line of divine conviction; Salome, the curve of temptation. It was not evidence but architecture: a composition built to teach.
In those early centuries, imagination began to thicken over fact. Preachers and poets layered commentary onto the meager scriptural sketch until the girl acquired texture, costume, intention. She became the embodiment of the perils that religion had to define itself against: desire, spectacle, feminine power. The outlines of the real person disappeared beneath moral paint.
This, I think, is how religion works: not as deceit, but as accumulation. The raw materials of experience are too bare to endure, so we color them with meaning until they hold our attention. Over time, those colors harden into canon. The line between art and instruction blurs, and the story becomes indispensable precisely because it tells us less about what happened and more about how we wish the world would make sense.
To see that process clearly is not to scorn it. It is to appreciate its craftsmanship. The Gospel writers were not chroniclers of events; they were early artists of interpretation. They shaped the formless—rumor, memory, longing—into narrative form. Their successors copied and illuminated those texts the way later painters would copy and illuminate sacred scenes. Each addition both preserved and transformed what came before.
Modern historians sometimes try to strip these layers away, hoping to reveal the “real” Salome or the “historical” John the Baptist beneath. But the restoration always leaves ghosts of paint behind. The canvas remembers every hand. That, to me, is what makes religious history so human. Even its distortions are evidence of devotion. A devotion not to gods but to meaning itself.
When I read those ancient texts, I no longer search for revelation. I look for the first signs of composition: the rhythm of phrases, the balance of image and idea, the creative act of shaping life into story. These writers were doing what all artists do: taking something small and uncertain and giving it pattern enough to be remembered.
It is tempting to call their embellishments “errors,” but I see them as closer to brushstrokes. The dance, the banquet, the mother’s demand are all inventions that make the scene vivid enough to survive. Without them, the sketch might have faded, lost like so many unrecorded gestures in time. Because of them, generations of artists had something to paint, musicians something to set to music, and preachers something to preach against. Meaning required adornment, and adornment required imagination.
I find a kind of reverence in that. The sanctity lies not in the story’s truth but in the care with which people have kept retelling it. Each scribe, sculptor, and painter added pigment in the belief that they were preserving something worth seeing again. Whether or not the event occurred is almost beside the point; what matters is that it became a canvas large enough for our questions about power, purity, and human will.
The biblical Salome, then, is an outline we keep redrawing. Beneath the ornament of every century you can still glimpse the faint underdrawing of an ancient anxiety: that beauty might undo righteousness, that freedom might threaten order, that art might outlast doctrine. Those are not theological problems; they are human ones.
When I look at the early layers of this story, I see less revelation than rehearsal. I see an attempt to perform meaning through narrative. The later centuries only expanded the production, adding color, music, and motion. But it all began with a few lines on parchment: the gesture of a storyteller trying to make sense of what power and conviction do to one another.
Faith, in this sense, is not belief in those events but participation in their retelling. To trace the underdrawing without needing to call it divine. It is how I honor the art of religion while remaining free from its claims. The miracle, if there is one, lies not in what happened, but in the fact that, after two thousand years, the paint still holds.
The Palettes of Belief
If the earliest texts gave us a line drawing, the next two millennia supplied the pigment. Every culture took up the brush and, using its own materials and anxieties, repainted Salome. Each version contradicts the one before, yet all of them together show the movement of belief itself, not divine revelation descending on humanity, but humanity learning, over and over, how to visualize its longing.
The Medieval Palette
In the cathedrals of France—at Autun, Amiens, Chartres—Salome’s body is carved into moral geometry. She lifts her platter with both hands, stiff as a column, while John’s severed head stares outward with serene indifference. The stone is cold, but the lesson is clear: the flesh is a danger, obedience a virtue.
These artisans worked with a palette of permanence: lime, pigment, lead, light filtered through glass. Their task was not to imagine but to instruct. In that world, art existed to maintain order. To carve Salome was to remind a community that transgression could be given form, displayed, and contained. The dance was replaced by discipline; the story was stabilized in mortar.
And yet, even within that rigidity, a quiet empathy survives. Her drapery bends with motion, her hand trembles slightly under the weight of what she carries. The sculptor, perhaps unknowingly, left behind a trace of compassion and the first crack through which ambiguity could shine.
The Renaissance Palette
When oil paint replaced tempera, religion gained flexibility. Titian’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist glows with an entirely different energy. Her expression is neither cruel nor penitent; it is contemplative. Light softens everything it touches. The body, once condemned, becomes capable of radiance.
The Renaissance rediscovered the body as a language for the divine, or rather, for what the divine had always represented: human feeling rendered visible. Titian’s palette, warm flesh tones against cool shadows, suggests that salvation and desire share the same spectrum. Cranach, following northward, paints her as a courtly woman, poised and private. The didactic becomes psychological. The moral turns inward.
What changed was not theology but perspective. Artists no longer carved truths given from above; they composed them from observation. The sacred moved from heaven to skin.
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The Baroque Palette
By the time of Caravaggio, light itself had become confession. His Salome with the Head of John the Baptist pulls its figures out of shadow as if guilt were the only illumination left. Salome recoils slightly, the executioner looks down, an old woman leans in. No one meets anyone’s eyes.
This is faith after certainty. Faith in the moment when belief discovers its own darkness. The Baroque imagination sought not perfection but intensity. To believe meant to feel, and to feel meant to risk despair. Religion became a theater of contrasts, and painters like Caravaggio supplied the lighting.
In his chiaroscuro, morality and mercy blur. The sacred resides not in purity but in the tension between seeing and not seeing. The story that once taught obedience now becomes a meditation on complicity.
The Symbolist Palette
By the nineteenth century, revelation had migrated from church to gallery. The sacred, losing its altar, found new life in aesthetics. Gustave Moreau’s The Apparition (1876) turns Salome into a priestess of perception, transfixed before the radiant head of John. Jewels, metals, and impossible colors replace moral narrative. The painting is not about judgment but fascination. It presents the awe of vision itself.
For Moreau, beauty becomes theology’s successor. The divine is what the imagination can almost but never fully grasp. A few decades later, Aubrey Beardsley, illustrating Oscar Wilde’s Salome, reduces that excess to line and pattern: black ink curling into white space. His Salome is neither saint nor sinner but symbol: the distilled essence of modern desire.
These artists were not believers in the traditional sense. Their devotion was to form. In Moreau’s gold and Beardsley’s ink, the religious impulse reemerges as art’s own longing for transcendence.
The Modern Palette
The twentieth century inherits both the glow and the fracture. Lovis Corinth paints her with the detached sensuality of dream. Later, feminist artists reclaim her image entirely, presenting her not as an instrument of sin but as an agent of power.
Here the palette expands again: photography, performance, film. In Rita Hayworth’s 1945 film Salome, the dance is pure spectacle, its theology replaced by choreography. In the 1960s, avant-garde theater retells her story as a protest. In the 2000s, her name titles electronic music and fashion lines. She survives not as a warning or idol but as vocabulary, a shorthand for desire and transformation.
If the medieval sculptor carved doctrine, the modern artist paints curiosity. The myth now functions as open source; anyone may remix it. The old fear of her power becomes fascination with her endurance.
The Viewer’s Palette
Walking through this gallery of centuries, I see religion itself behaving like paint: ground mineral and oil, constantly remixed. The moral absolutes of one period dry and crack; new layers are laid on top. What survives is not the correctness of any single image but the continuity of the process.
This, for me, is the meaning of faith. It is not the conviction that one version is true, but the recognition that we keep painting anyway. Each artist, each believer or skeptic, adds another shade to the long composition of culture. The sacred, if the word still applies, is nothing mystical; it is the collective act of caring enough to revise.
To trace Salome from stone to pixel is to watch humanity think aloud in color. The evolution of her image tells the same story as the evolution of belief: that certainty fades, but expression endures. The art changes because we change, and in that change, something worth calling reverence survives.
When I look at her now—fragmented, reimagined, still in motion—I no longer see the seductress who doomed a prophet. I see us: the species that cannot stop turning its questions into beauty. The fresco, the film, the livestream: each a layer in the same unfinished portrait.
Religion remains what it has always been: the world’s longest conversation about meaning, conducted in pigment, light, and form. Salome is simply one of its most eloquent sentences.
The Studio of the Sacred
When I think about all the artists who have painted Salome, from anonymous medieval stonemasons to digital cinematographers, I picture them not as isolated geniuses but as members of a vast workshop. They belong to what Émile Durkheim might have called the world’s oldest collective project: the human attempt to make meaning visible.
Durkheim believed that religion was not revelation from above but reflection from within. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life he wrote that when a community gathers to celebrate what it calls sacred, it is actually celebrating itself. The rituals, myths, and images that seem to point toward gods are ways of giving shape to shared emotion. They give shape to what he called “collective effervescence.” In that moment, society sees its own face transfigured.
Artists do something similar. A cathedral sculptor turning a story into stone, a filmmaker lighting a scene for awe: they all participate in this communal act of reflection. The work of art becomes the mirror where a culture recognizes itself. When we look at Salome across centuries, we are really looking at humanity rehearsing its values: obedience, freedom, beauty, guilt, desire. The sacred is the frame we built so that this rehearsal could continue.
Durkheim’s insight rescues religion from the false choice between truth and illusion. If the sacred is something we make, its reality lies in its usefulness, not its literalness. What matters is that these collective creations give us language for wonder and for fear. They allow chaos to take form. In that sense, a myth is not false; it is functional. Faith, and by extension religion, become aesthetic systems for organizing emotion.
Half a century later, sociologist Peter Berger gave this idea another name: the sacred canopy. Societies, he said, weave stories, symbols, and institutions into a vast shelter against meaninglessness. We live beneath that canopy as naturally as air. When modernity tears it, we do not abandon the instinct to mend; we simply choose new materials. The Gothic arch becomes the printed page, the sermon becomes the stage, the psalm becomes the playlist. The canopy endures because human beings cannot live entirely unsheltered from meaning.
Walking through a museum, I see Berger’s theory in color. People move quietly between paintings the way pilgrims once moved between chapels. Each work offers a temporary refuge from incoherence: a momentary sense that the world is patterned, that emotion and form can align. The religious experience survives in the act of looking. The difference is vocabulary: where earlier centuries called it devotion, we call it attention or mindfulness.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz, writing in the 1970s, described religion as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful moods and motivations … by clothing conceptions of order with an aura of factuality.” In other words, belief feels true because it is performed with conviction and beauty. The same could be said of art. A painting persuades not by argument but by coherence; the image feels inevitable, and that feeling is fulfilling. Standing before Moreau’s Apparition or Caravaggio’s shadowed figures, we experience precisely what Geertz meant. That emotional certainty, that order is possible, at least within the frame.
Durkheim, Berger, and Geertz were describing, each in their own way, a phenomenon older than doctrine: the human urge to build studios for meaning. Sometimes those studios take the form of temples or churches, sometimes classrooms, theaters, or museums. What happens inside them is always the same: people gather, perform, imagine, and leave changed. The sacred is not the content of these acts but their coordination: the shared motion of attention and creation.
Seen this way, religion and art are inseparable. Both are languages for translating experience into pattern. Both rely on repetition and variation. Both depend on trust: the faith that the next brushstroke, the next note, the next gesture might reveal coherence. What believers call revelation is, from this vantage, an aesthetic event: a sudden alignment between what we feel and what we can express.
I no longer think of faith as assent to supernatural claims. I think of it as participation: the willingness to keep working on the collective canvas. In that sense, atheists, believers, and everyone in between are collaborators. Each brings new pigments to the studio: ethics, ritual, skepticism, empathy. Together we repaint the canopy so that it continues to hold. The beauty is not that the image is permanent, but that we care enough to restore it again and again.
When I study Durkheim or Berger, I often imagine society not as a machine but as a mural. A machine can break; a mural only changes through addition. The cracks and discolorations are part of its life. Religion functions the same way: the wear of time reveals new colors underneath, and each generation adds its own repairs. The canvas of culture is self-renewing precisely because no one ever finishes it.
In that sense, even secular art is devotional. When a filmmaker lights a scene with care, when a poet measures a line, when an audience holds its breath together, they perform the same gestures once enacted in sanctuaries. The materials have changed, but the impulse is identical: to honor existence through form. The church became the theater, then the gallery, then the screen. The community remained.
If I have any faith, it is in that continuity: the stubbornness of creativity, the persistence of meaning-making. The gods may have vanished from the deus ex machina, but the light still moves across it. The studio of the sacred has no door and no doctrine; it exists wherever people gather to make beauty out of bewilderment.
Religion, in this understanding, is not something we inherit fully formed. It is something we practice together—sometimes knowingly, sometimes not—whenever we reach for coherence through expression. That, to me, is its enduring truth: not that it tells us what to believe, but that it keeps teaching us how to make belief possible at all.
The Dance
The dance has not stopped; it has simply found new floors. The same choreography that once unfolded in candlelight now plays out under LEDs and camera rigs. Religion still performs itself. It just moves differently. Where choirs once lifted their voices in echoing naves, microphones now capture the same emotion for digital broadcast. The dancer has learned to keep time with technology.
When I scroll through YouTube on a Sunday morning, I find what earlier centuries found in churches: performance, rhythm, collective emotion. A worship band plays to an empty sanctuary while the chat fills with “Amens” and emojis. The frame pans across the preacher’s face, the focus tightens, and behind the lens hundreds of unseen viewers lean forward. The architecture of the cathedral has been replaced by the architecture of the studio, but the instinct is unchanged: to turn attention into participation, to make the invisible visible again.
At first I found this strange, even hollow: sermons as video essays, prayers compressed to comment threads. Yet the more I watched, the more I recognized something deeply human underneath. I found the same impulse that built mosaics and carved tympanums. The medium may have changed, but the creative urge remains the same: to bind people together through rhythm and image. Light still pours through glass; it simply happens to be pixelated now.
That desire for embodiment extends far beyond the screen. In Branson, Missouri, the Sight & Sound Theatre stages full-scale biblical spectacles: Moses, Jesus, Noah and David. The seas part through projection mapping; animals cross the stage; audiences sit enveloped in surround sound and fog. The shows are not ironic. They are sincere attempts to reanimate the sacred as experience. Their producers speak in the language of stagecraft, but their mission is centuries old: to transform story into presence. It is faith rendered as performance art.
Even on screen, the instinct to retell continues. The streaming series The Chosen imagines the gospels in the idiom of prestige television: tight cinematography, serial arcs, moral ambiguity. It is not an adaptation so much as a translation, using the grammar of modern storytelling to make ancient characters modern again. Viewers quote it, debate it, donate to it. For millions, it functions as a new kind of scripture: serialized, crowd-funded, algorithmically recommended. The gospel has learned to stream.
I don’t see these reinventions as distortions. They are restorations. The theater, the film, the livestream, they each add another layer of color to humanity’s longest painting. What religion loses in metaphysical certainty, it regains in creative flexibility. The holy text becomes the script, the sermon becomes the soundtrack, the congregation becomes a network. None of this requires belief in divine authorship; it only requires participation. To gather around a story and keep retelling it is, in itself, an act of reverence for meaning.
Some critics call this “spectacle faith,” as if performance cheapened sincerity. But religion has always been a rehearsal of wonder. The medieval mystery plays were no less theatrical, their angels lowered on ropes, their demons belching fire from papier-mâché mouths. The Renaissance altarpiece, gilded and dramatic, was an early form of visual effects. Even the printed Bible—mass-produced, illustrated, distributed across continents—was once a startling technological miracle. Each new medium drew suspicion, and each became tradition in time.
What strikes me is not how religion changes, but how consistent the desire remains. We continue to choreograph awe. A pastor rehearsing a sermon under stage lights is not so different from a monk copying a psalter or an actor rehearsing an oratorio. All are expressions of the same human practice: to make meaning public. The sacred is not a revelation that descends; it is the feeling that arises when we move together with shared intent.
To call these modern performances religious is not to confuse art for worship. It is to acknowledge that art is how worship survives when belief falters. When I watch The Chosen or a livestreamed service, I do not feel faith in the theological sense. I feel recognition. I feel a sense that people are still painting, still dancing, still refusing to let the canvas go blank. The light moves differently now, but it still moves.
In this way, the digital age has not erased religion; it has democratized its studio. The tools of creation—camera, code, soundboard—are open to anyone. Belief itself has become participatory art. One can remix a hymn, animate a psalm, build a cathedral in pixels. The sacred is crowd-sourced, endlessly revised. If the medieval church once commissioned the artists of faith, the internet now is their cathedral: sprawling, chaotic, but full of shared longing.
When I look at this proliferation, I don’t see the death of religion. I see its dispersion, the way paint spreads thin across a wide surface but still glows when the light hits it right. The energy that once filled cathedrals now flickers in living rooms and headphones. The holy sound has been compressed into an MP3, but its function is the same: to organize emotion into pattern.
Faith, as I use the word, has nothing to do with accepting metaphysical claims. It is the quiet trust that human beings will keep finding ways to make beauty together. I see that faith every time I watch someone lift their voice on a livestream, or light a stage for a play about ancient miracles, or design a title sequence for a modern gospel. The performance is the persistence. The choreography goes on.
Perhaps that is the real miracle of our time, not that belief has survived, but that the creative gesture has. The dancer still moves, even in a world that no longer believes the music was written in heaven. She moves because the rhythm is ours now, composed collectively, remixed infinitely, shared by all who continue to seek meaning in motion.
The dance of meaning endures because we need it. It gives shape to our unanswerable questions, rhythm to our restlessness. It is how we remember that the sacred was never elsewhere; it was always the art of what people can make together when they refuse to stop moving.
The Dancer, The Artist
At the end of every performance, the dancer stops, but the air keeps moving. The audience exhales, the light fades, and what remains is the trace of motion, still shimmering in memory. I think about that shimmer often when I consider the long history of religion. For all its cathedrals and creeds, its scriptures and livestreams, what we have really been preserving is that lingering movement, the human gesture of reaching toward meaning, again and again.
Salome has come to embody that gesture for me. She is the dancer who refuses to disappear, the figure through whom belief keeps reinventing itself. I no longer see her as a sinner or saint. I see her as the emblem of continuity: the movement of art, the persistence of imagination, the embodiment of humanity’s will to make meaning visible even after certainty fades.
Across the centuries she performs the same story but never the same dance. The medieval Salome, carved in stone, warned the faithful about temptation. Titian’s Salome glowed with Renaissance ambiguity, her beauty reconciled with remorse. Caravaggio’s Salome stood in darkness, a study in hesitation and doubt. Moreau’s shimmered in gilded reverence for beauty itself; Beardsley’s twisted her into modern irony. And now she moves again—through LED light, camera lens, digital stream—her steps filmed, edited, replayed in infinite variations. Each reappearance proves that religion, like art, is not a creed but a motion, not an argument but a performance of attention.
I think this is what faith means, at least to me, not belief in what is beyond us, but trust in what we keep making together. My religion is not spiritual; it is artistic, communal, and embodied. It lives in the gestures of people who continue to create even after belief has been stripped of its gods. Faith is not the substance of what is painted; it is the act of painting.