Faith & Spirit Quote by Malcolm De Chazal

Malcolm de Chazal’s line hits with the snap of a paradox that’s doing double duty: flattering art while quietly demoting it. “Nature speeded up” frames the artist as an accelerator, someone who takes evolution’s glacial improvisations and compresses them into a human timescale. A painting, a novel, a song becomes what nature might have arrived at if it had deadlines and a nervous system. That’s not just praise; it’s a claim about craft. Art isn’t spontaneous genius here, but a forced concentration of processes that already exist: pattern, variation, selection, decay.

Then comes the provocation: “God slowed down.” The phrase risks blasphemy, but its real move is to turn theology into tempo. If God is the ultimate creator, Chazal doesn’t deny divinity so much as reposition it: divine creation is too vast to read at full speed. Art becomes the human-accessible playback rate of the cosmic. That’s a seductive idea for a 20th-century writer living after the cultural authority of religion had started to wobble, but before spirituality stopped being a serious intellectual register. It suggests art as a bridge technology: not faith, not science, but a kind of perceptual instrument.

The subtext is audaciously modern: the sacred is not abolished, it’s edited. Artists don’t replace nature or God; they remix their scale and timing so we can feel creation as experience rather than abstraction. The line works because it reframes the oldest argument (is art imitation or invention?) as a question of speed, making metaphysics sound like a matter of rhythm.