Does Religious Art Have a Future?
Why We Should Be Passionately Ambivalent About Aesthetics
The relationship between art and religion, or aesthetics and faith, is complex.
On the one hand, the golden calf is a work of art, showing that a focus on aesthetics alone can lead to sacrilege. On the other hand, the Temple and Tabernacles were also works of art. Both were made of gold, perhaps even the same gold, repurposed.
Bach wrote music for the Church. But that might just be a coincidence. I think not. Warhol’s paintings seem, on the other hand, to revel in obfuscating the difference between sacred and profane. Rothko’s paintings hang in houses of worship. I have felt, staring at the paintings of Kiefer and Richter, a religious experience. John Cage and Philip Glass have brought me closer to the divine, even as the divinity they seem to disclose is closer to the spirit of Zen than the Bible. I feel similarly about so-called “Language poetry”—it’s adamantly secular, skeptical, critical; and yet it feels almost Kabbalistic in its painstaking attention to the power of words.
In ancient and medieval times, all art was sacred; from Greek tragedies to passion plays. With the rise of vernacular languages and literatures, we witnessed the beginning of a secular or secular-humanistic instinct: a love of expression for its own sake, rather than as a means to channel religious doctrine or serve God. The works of Rabelais, Boccaccio, and Chaucer are often quite critical of the Church, at least in its sociological form. Dante is an edge case—he simultaneously maintains Orthodoxy and uses Catholic metaphysics to create a world that is deeply personal, one in which he puts his beloved in Paradise, his enemies in hell, and his favorite poet—Virgil—in Purgatory. Is the Inferno religious or secular? In being unable to answer, we find that we cannot simply oppose faith and aesthetics.
Kierkegaard was one of the greatest thinkers on the complex relationship between art and religion, as he was both an aesthetic master and a person who sought to live piously. I wrote a long thread about his insights here. For Kierkegaard, art is both the obstacle and the way.
There is a mystical Jewish parable about those who seek to find their king; the king sits inside a palace by himself, surrounded by concentric circles of palace walls. At each gate of each wall is a treasure. As one gets closer to the inner sanctum of the palace, the treasure gets more and more bounteous. Most people find the treasure and forget their original quest. But those who make it in, undistracted by the treasure—say the Hasidic masters—find not only the king, but that the walls they thought had separated them from him were illusions.
So it is with art. On the one hand, art is the treasure that lures us away from the essence of things. Art is the wall—the wall of representation (in Plato’s sense)—that keeps us from the palace interior. But art is also the second skin of the king, the body of God, the illusion we had to believe in so that there could be a journey. Even this parable is a work of art.
Around the time of Hegel and the romantics, we got the idea that art would replace religion. No longer a contractor for the Church, the artist must create new myths and new rituals. Shelley tells us that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Nietzsche thought Wagner might rejuvenate Germany where the Church had grown static. At some point, the museum replaced the temple just as the novel had replaced “The Book.”
But the battle for art was not won decisively. For the same skepticism that felled institutional religion has also felled institutional art. If the 19th century saw the death of God, the 20th century saw the death of the artist. What more can be done when even art itself is saying it is at an end? What comes after Waiting for Godot? One answer to this is that offered by Ross Douthat, namely, that ours is an age of decadence, boredom, and sclerosis. But another possibility is that great works can always emerge so long as we maintain a creative tension between art and faith, without deciding that one is better than the other and without deciding that they are merely polar opposites.
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