The lifeblood of Otto Mauer's meditation in Art and Christianity is a forceful assertion: creation qua creation is symbolic. Everything, human and otherwise, is a symbol because God is its source, toward which the symbol points and from which it cannot free itself. It is to this original grounding that the artist is attune and which they affirm. Their work is symbolic because it is a "belief in meaning," a movement beyond self toward something other, something higher.1 The artist, the "real" artist, is then always religious, connected to and pointing toward the divine source of all life regardless of the content or theme of their work. For Mauer this is explicitly worked out in the artist's creative action. But, beyond a few brief statements, there is limited consideration of how this action is related to the viewer's experience. This paper highlights that one limitation of Mauer's approach in this regard is an ambiguity resulting from his neglect of the viewer's experience. There are two points of revision that lend toward a more constructive reading. First, if Mauer's portrait of the artist is to hold, it seems necessary to extend a similar mediating role to the viewer. The viewer must become a "mystagogue" alongside the artist. Second, to afford a place of significance for the viewer in the process of artistic beatification would be to deny Mauer's claim that a "true" or "real" work of art invariably effects ontological and epistemological change. The sacramentality of the artist's work would then only be eschatologically efficacious to the degree that a viewer takes up the project of interpretation. The work of art, even "static" visual media, is never complete. The artist, then, is perhaps only a prophet to the degree that the viewer is also. The work of Elijah carries on through Elisha; the latter inherits the double share of the spirit.