Art Is The Bridge Between The Secular And The Religious

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Thesis

I have a thesis which I hope to live by: “Art Is The Bridge Between The Secular and The Religious.”

I will explain what this means in this post, but hope to produce many works over my lifetime that will instantiate the thesis. The point of a life thesis is not simply to be right, but also, and more importantly, to be devoted. Before making my argument, however, it is important to know a bit about my story, and why I care about being a bridge in the first place.

I. Origin Story

I was raised in two worlds and have always lived in two worlds: the world of religion, faith, spirituality, tradition, and the world of secularism, rationality, skepticism, materialism. I grew up attending public schools in Montclair, New Jersey, a progressive-liberal town, but had the privilege of studying Talmud with Orthodox tutors from nearby Passaic, a Jewish community that skews more politically and psychologically “conservative.” At Jewish summer camp, I elected for an extra load of yehadut, Jewish Studies, while my peers—many of whom attended Jewish day school—were off playing frisbee or trading Magic the Gathering cards. When I was a pre-teen, I elected to grow out my side-locks or peyot, Hasidic-style—an act of mimetic desire for the enchanted world I imagined in the cloisters of Old Jerusalem. But I eventually cut them after getting taunted and ridiculed by my peers. As a very young kid, I attended a Conservative synagogue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where there was a Chabad minyan in the basement. My earliest memories of Jewish life are of the Chabad rabbi’s song-filled and cluttered home, filled with children and ruckus.

My dual loyalty or conflicted identity, or insider-outsider position, or whatever you want to call it, animates what I have come to see as an existential calling: to be a bridge or a translator between two worlds, often seen at loggerheads.

II. The Search

I wrote my dissertation at Oxford on Heidegger. Ironically, I did not choose Heidegger because he was controversial or polarizing, though he is, but because I thought (and still think) that his work provides a strong conceptual basis for bridging the world of religion and the world of secularity. Heidegger himself writes about the meaning of bridges. Bridges don’t simply conjoin opposite sides of a river, as if those opposite sides pre-existed. Rather, bridges gather the opposite sides, allowing them to be opposite sides. The bridge has a creative function. It allows the river and the riverbanks to be in relationship.

Heidegger grew up a traditional Catholic in a small town, but became an academic philosopher who left the Church. Still, he requested a Christian burial, and wrote compellingly about the life of the spirit and the possibility of transcendence throughout his life. Heidegger may not have been Orthodox, but neither was he an apostate. His early lectures on Paul provided him with the basis for the core insights of Being and Time. Heidegger writes favorably of Augustine, Luther, Pascal, Eckhart, as well as Lao Tzu. Heidegger is best read, I contend, as a post-secular thinker—someone unhappy with both bourgeois religion and bourgeois secularism. His hopes align with those mystical and poetic thinkers who seek to restore enchantment to life, with legal observance or creedal doctrine being of secondary (but not negligible) import.

I have many “take-aways” from Heidegger, but these are my top two:

1. How we express ourselves matters as much as what we say. A statement can be correct and also trivial; a statement can be literally incorrect, yet profound and meaningful. Correctness, rightness, validity, pick your term, is a floor, not a ceiling.

2. It is not enough to have good or true ideas, one must also live them and embody them. Science may tell us something about ourselves, conceived as objects to be studied, but song, dance, poetry, architecture, religious life, and certain modes of philosophical thought can bring us closer to living out our understanding.

III. The Fall

There is a world of difference between reading for love and reading for instrumental reasons, such as producing a dissertation, an assessment designed to prove one’s fitness for membership in an academic guild, but not necessarily for displaying humanistic virtues like creativity, generosity, and self-awareness. A PhD is a certain kind of credential, but I realized in the process of pursuing it that it is not the credential I ultimately aspire to. I could not imagine myself happy or fulfilled (or answerable before God) as a professor whose life had been devoted to writing academic books and articles. To write a dissertation on Heidegger was for me a kind of self-contradiction. Here was a thinker writing about the perils of disenchantment and here I was producing a work that participated in a style of writing—in an institutional apparatus—predicated on maintaining that very disenchantment. In my experience of writing and then defending a dissertation, the writing was on the wall, that the enchanted life was to be found elsewhere.

Still, I might have deluded myself for a while longer had academic politics—or to put it more neutrally, academic preferences—not gone my way.

In the run-up to my dissertation defense, I had to defend a shortened version of my dissertation, a pre-defense defense. I found myself blindsided when my core, guiding hypothesis was contested off the bat.

The argument, as I remember it, went something like this: “You say Heidegger is a bridge between the religious and the secular, but that is impossible, because there can be no bridge. One must choose. We choose the Christian way. Heidegger may be helpful to Christians, but he is probably a heretic who, at the end of the day, must be rejected.”

I remember thinking to myself that my contrarian view might have something to do with my being a Jew rather than a Christian, but I was not about to play the anti-Semitic card.

Another objection my examiners had—one of whom is a distinguished, eminent, and oft-cited Christian theologian—was about my method. It went something like this: “You claim to be writing from a position of broad human experience—what you call “natural theology”—but there is no such thing. Without tradition, nothing gets off the ground. Thus, you must write from a specific tradition. Write from a Jewish tradition or write from a secular position or write from a Christian or Islamic position, but don’t tell me that you are writing from a human one.”

A third objection was stylistic: “Your work is not citational enough. It’s too poetic. We can’t tell when you are writing as you and when you are writing as an expositor of Heidegger. Each sentence needs a footnote explaining who agrees with you and who disagrees and why.”

All three objections are about why it’s wrong to try to be a bridge. I respect my critics, but the reason I am writing this on Substack, and the reason I have turned to podcasting is that I will not sacrifice my voice and my integrity on the altar of peer-review. I would venture to say that my experience is one small sample of why the academic humanities may be in for a serious collapse. Many at the top have actively invested in opposing the construction of bridges, preferring to live in a castle protected by the moat of self-justification. The tightly regulated, yet Byzantine discursive norms—to use a favored phrase of academic jargon—are not just a practical barrier to entry, but also a psychological one. The 19th century German research institution is a house (it has functionality), but not a home (it lacks warmth), for poets, artists, and seekers.

IV. The Gift

The objections of my pre-dissertation-defense examiners stayed with me for a long time, and nearly led me to abort my endeavor altogether, leading me into an existential crisis. But I was too distracted by and indignant about the content-objections to take in the third objection, the objection to my style. It turns out that the feedback I received was a gift in disguise. It is feedback I have received and continue to receive, no matter the context. “Why don’t you speak or write more directly? Why do you speak in parables and allusions? Why do you blur the distinction between yourself as interpreter and the text? Why are you all Midrash and no bottom line, no policy? We need to know your politics to know if we can listen to you. Are you on our team?”

These objections all come down to the same thing: art is something fearful, because it is not easily categorized, understood. Art is not explicit. Poetry is that which cannot be paraphrased. If it were it would be kitsch or propaganda or mere decoration. But art is a way of being in the world. Heidegger says art contains the struggle between the push towards revelation and the push towards concealment. Art is ambiguous, tense. And ambiguity and tension are not for everyone. But to be an artist is to be bestowed with the gift of this struggle. And the struggle of the artist, above all, to be understood, is a reflection of this primal struggle.

V. The Common View: Polarization

At the political level, religious people and secular people disagree about many things. They represent different “interest groups.” Religious and secular people disagree not just about values, but also about how to see the world. Is there an afterlife or not? Does life begin at conception or not? Are customs normative even when they clash with individual self-expression or utility-maximization or not? The interface between the sociological worlds of religious traditionalists and secular materialists feels polarized. This is so, even as many so-called secular people still pursue substitutes for traditional religion, be it in the form of yoga, “mindfulness,” astrology, cross-fit, rooting for a favorite sports team or attending a Taylor Swift concert. This is so, even as many so-called religious people benefit from and use modern technology and medicine, which are indebted to the scientific method. This is so, even as some thinkers, starting with Max Weber, find in modern capitalism itself all the trappings of old world religion.

And yet…the image of a bridge suggests that religious and secular ways of thinking are interrelated, that polarization is the wrong lens, because neither so-called religious people nor so called secular people can be reduced to their political interests or defined by their sociological choices.

VI. From Notre Dame to Kafka

Notre Dame is a place of worship, constructed by “believers,” but it is also a magisterial building, evoking awe, for non-Christians.

Homer’s Iliad is a masterpiece of literature even to those of us who do not believe in “the gods.”

Meanwhile, many modern artists and writers whose authors lack religious conviction produce work that speak meaningfully to people of faith, from Kafka to Joseph Cornell to Peter Zumthor to Rae Armantrout.

Then, we have a great many artists who seem at once both religious and somehow modern: Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Donne, Montaigne. Michelangelo.

Nietzsche is an anti-religious thinker who writes with a prophetic zeal, often evoking the Gospels. Aquinas, meanwhile, is a religious thinker who writes with the logical acuity of rationalist blogger Scott Alexander.

The line between secular and religious does not cut neatly in the aesthetic realm.

VII. Art Leads Towards Religion and Away From It

Art leads to religion because both share in common the pursuit of transcendence, but art also leads away from, or can lead away from, religion, because it has its own imperatives. It concerns the ineffable, while religion concerns the concrete, the applicable.

Art sits on the threshold where Dostoevsky’s Jesus exchanges words with the Grand Inquisitor. Art is both devotional and critical, orthodox and unorthodox. It can’t but be both a form that shores up the teaching of the time and an unruly, unpredictable creature that has a life of its own.

The most authoritarian societies have always known the dangers of art. Plato’s Socrates famously bans art—or some forms of it—from the Republic, despite the fact that Socrates is himself a masterful conversation artist, and Plato’s dialogues amongst the greatest works of literature.

But the most authoritarian societies could never dispense with art, either, so powerful was its pull, and so they sought to regulate it, instead.

The ambivalent relationship that religion has with art, beginning in the Bible with the golden calf, then continuing with the construction of the Tabernacle and Temple, and perhaps culminating in historic debates about iconoclasm, tells us that we can’t live with or without art.

Are statues of Buddhas religious or secular? Clearly, they are both. One need not be a devotee to enjoy the form; and yet enjoying the form might just be enough to move one to a state of devotion. Conversely, the observance of formal delight might become so compelling that one ends up serving that end, or the sheer endeavor to create or reveal, and abandoning the rest (the practice, the doctrine, the identity, etc.)

VIII. Imitation of God

The best religious argument for art is that it is the way that we imitate God, the ultimate artist, or channel divinity in the world.

The best secular argument for art is that it is about the world, composed of earth, and that it tells us not about anything metaphysical, but about ourselves.

But both arguments crowd out the experience of art, which comes before this distinction between religious and secular. Inchoate meaning and worldly referent are not opposites. Art is the bridge, taking us back and forth between the ineffable and the sayable. It shows us that secularity cannot do without mystery any more than religiosity can do without worldliness.

At the political level, we live in a time, relatively young in the scheme of world history, where religion and state aspire to be separate. We live in the era of “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s…” But in the realm of art, there can be no such division.

Art tempts the non-believer to Orthodoxy and the ascetic to worldliness.

We pursue art not because we know where it will lead, but because we do not know. If we are lucky, it will make converts of us all.

IX. To Be Continued

It’s easy to hold a poem or look at a painting and call it art. But the greater task is to behold things which do not seem like works of art and realize that they are just as magnificent as the obvious things.

It is my conviction that the Jewish legal tradition—especially the Mishna and Talmud—is a work of art, although both believers and non-believers, insiders and outsiders, do not often view it this way.

To be an artist is not just to make art, but also to redeem the art in existing things, to uncover art in the found world.

We are accustomed to reading legal texts for practical instruction, but less accustomed to reading them for their aesthetic composition and literary merit. To read them artistically and poetically is to be a bridge between those for whom these documents are defunct curiosities and those for whom these documents are the austere preserve of a Divine Will. Sure, the Talmud contains some great stories, but I am talking about the law itself.

Abraham Joshua Heschel says that while the great nations of the world built cathedrals in space, the Jews built a cathedral in time—the Sabbath.

This is a gorgeous idea, but should be extended. The Sabbath exists because it is a legal category. The Jewish cathedral is the law.

In any case, my point here is not about Judaism, but about the importance of finding art in unexpected places, not just in museums or poetry anthologies.

Art can’t make us agree on the hard questions that divide us, and on the basis of which we self-ghettoize, but the experience of art can help us communicate across the chasm that separates the riverbank of skepticism from that of appreciative wonder.