Art and Religion

by Richard Shusterman

I

Art emerged in ancient times from myth, magic, and religion, and it has long sustained its compelling power through its sacred aura. Like cultic objects of worship, artworks weave an entrancing spell over us. Though contrasted to ordinary real things, their vivid experiential power provides a heightened sense of the real and suggests deeper realities than those conveyed by common sense and science. While Hegel saw religion as superseding art in the evolution of Spirit toward higher forms that culminate in philosophical knowledge, subsequent artists of the nineteenth century instead saw art as superseding religion and even philosophy as the culmination of contemporary man's spiritual quest. Artistic minds as different as Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, and Stephan Mallarmé predicted that art would supplant traditional religion as the locus of the holy, of uplifting mystery and consoling meaning in our increasingly secular society dominated by what Wilde condemned as a dreary "worship of facts." By expressing "the mysterious sense …of existence, [art] endows our sojourn with authenticity and constitutes the sole spiritual task," claims Mallarmé."More and more," writes Arnold, "mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry."