VIART AND THE DIVINE
The history of art from its lowest manifestations to its highest gives evidence of its union and intimacy with religion. The fact is admitted, and might easily be confirmed by the very way in which religious movements violently reacted against art. Hebraism knew the power of art over its followers, and Hebraic antagonism to sculpture and painting served to give religious impulse freer outlet in Hebrew poetry and oratory and other literature. The Bible is the supreme illustration of the influence of religion upon literary art. Islamism opposed art, but gradually succumbed to its influence at least in architecture. That Islam has not yielded more to art is an evidence of arrested civilization, as well as of baser and more sensual religious feelings. Puritanism, the intensest form of Protestantism, opposed art in all its manifestations, but Puritanism either diverted art energy to poetry and literature or provoked excesses by its attempt to check the natural impulses of art, and Puritanismfinally yielded to art. It is clear then that religious opposition to art serves but to show more strikingly the union of religion and art. The religion that opposes art must direct the art impulse into other channels or the religion degenerates. By their nature religion and art are congenial.
What now is the explanation of this close and continuous union of art and religion, found everywhere and in all ages? Taine and his school, led astray by some details in the artist’s subject matter, have tried to explain art by environment; but environment is an explanation absurd in itself, and cannon be adequate for an ubiquitous fact which transcends all environment. The theorists who ascribe the origin of art to play and the deploying of superfluous energies liken, with Herbert Spencer, the art impulse to the acts of a kitten playing with a ball. Play may be partly an excess of energy, but not all energy is artistic, and animal play is the stirring of appetite, bearing but a slight, superficial resemblance to man’s early strivings for artistic expression. How many games are imitative and made more attractive by art! From the very first, mind enters into early and even child art, and at the last the devotion of the artists to their ideals in the higher manifestations of art, a devotion quite unlike play, shows that the art impulse is essentially different from the instinctive impulse of the kitten, which pounces on a rat as it pounced on a ball of wool.[1]
Another school, striving to explain the connection between art and religion, takes a directly opposite view to the play theory. Fear and magic are, according to these authors, the controlling factors. The difficulty in this theory is the utterly selfish element in the fear and magic impulse, whereas the art impulse is disinterested and unselfish. Besides, religious belief precedes the fear and magic propitiation of offended powers. The voodoo and the hoodoo mark degradations of religious impulses. Impulses in harmony with man’s nature may go down as well as up, and even should we suppose that the unselfish impulse of art, which finally becomes the evidence and glory of man’s highest civilization, could be traced back to the sordid details of selfish superstition, why should such an ugly duckling evolve into a fair swan? Devolution and degradation are easier than evolution. Why did the art impulse take the narrow, upward path and shun the broad way down to perdition?
The perfection of the oak must have been in the potency of the acorn. The oak could not come from a peanut, nor can all the powers of sun, rain and soil or any other factor of the environment evolve the fruit of the peanut vine into the majesty of the oak. We can explain by an extrinsic cause the stunting of an oak or the rotting of an oak, but we cannot account for the existence of the oak—except by an acorn. We may find perhaps a thwarted or corrupted art tendency in superstitious fear and itsproducts, but that element of fear could not write a poem or compose a sonata or rear a Gothic cathedral. The perfection reached by the art product must have been in the potency of the first artistic impulse in germ.
Religion and art were then united potentially in the original art impulse just as the strength and lofty beauty of the oak were latent in the acorn. The art impulse is natural to man; it is intellectual. It requires brains to be artistic, as it requires brains to laugh, and no animal has done either or will ever do either. The bird in building its nest displays an intelligence not its own; its nest building is inherited just as its song is. Jean Fabre’s observations have shown conclusively the wonders of instinct, coupled with the stupidity of the creature possessing the instinct. But the earliest scrawl or daub of the child displays the mind working on matter and the deliberate shaping of means to an end. All intellectual testers from Simon-Binet to the latest have found the making or interpreting of pictures a measure of intellectual power. They are right. Art is rationalized pigments or sounds or words with their images or some other rationalized material. Dr. James Harvey Robinson inMind in the Makingsays that we are wrong in rationalizing the past to make up our minds, and how does he show it? By rationalizing another past for us. The truth is we must rationalize the past, and Dr. Robinson should induce us, not to stop rationalizing, but to rationalize correctlyand should give us something better than universal skepticism with which to rationalize. The art tendency is one with the religious tendency in being rational and intellectual.
Art and religion strive for high ideals; they are disinterested and unselfish. LaFarge says to Saint Gaudens: “That work is not worthy of you,” and Saint Gaudens picks up a hammer and smashes the sculpture. That is an instance paralleling the heroic following of religious ideals with like sacrifices. Was it fear of bogies or love of their dead which filled so many tombs with precious articles? Believing in immortality, Egyptians and Myceneans gave to the dead what was most precious, and what was most precious was the finest art in the costliest material. Love keeps graves green: fear erects a crematory.
Art and religion are personal and emotional. Each has its own proper expression. Of religion the expression is worship and of art it is concrete embodiment of the ideal, and in both cases the expression is intimately personal and permeated with feeling. Art is more sensible and so more emotional because its expression must be presented to the senses or at least to the imagination. Religion whose primary expression is an act of the will, need not of its nature be attended with emotion or external display but it usually is, and feeling and expression commonly help to the fuller expression of religion. The rapture of art and the ecstasy ofreligion, though differing in much, have also much in common.
In their social appeal art and religion are akin. The artist and the saint have their hours of solitary contemplation. St. Peter at Pentecost, describing the religious ecstasy of the inspired apostles, cried out: “These are not drunk as you suppose,” and, continuing, he quoted the prophet Joel: “Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.” In the forming of their visions and dreams saint and artist are alike, though the substance of their visions differ. They are alike also in their impulse to give their visions expression and to influence men with them. Religion is apostolic and art is social, and that is why in history they have gone forth so often hand in hand to subdue the world. Whole nations had to conspire to erect the Egyptian pyramids, the tower of Babel, the temples of Israel, of Rome, of Greece and of the Orient, and the Gothic cathedrals. Only a union of art and religion could produce such stupendous results. Patriotism and the state have at times come near to these great effects, when patriotism or love of country assumed the nature of religion. To produce these national monuments a lasting cause as well as a cause of wide appeal was necessary. Here again art and religion are akin. Art is long, and religion is immortal.
Art reaches its highest and most perfect expression in the sublime. Here religion does not walk handin hand with art, but bears art on high and gives to art some of its own divinity by endowing the artistic expression with sublimity. The literature of the Bible attained to heights which writers of other nations could not dream of nor ambition. Genesis sets poets and all artists upon a lofty eminence. By the revelation of creation, the imagination and the vision of the artist became coterminous almost with that of the Creator. Newton’s theory of gravitation which shepherded the starry hosts of the universe into one obedient flock, gives us a realization of the effect of Genesis upon the world’s imagination. The creationmotifin literature emancipating man’s imagination, enlarging the boundaries of vision, and dowering the artist with sublimity, deserves a treatise by itself and a history worthy of its greatness.
Art and religion are united in fact, so history teaches; art and religion are akin, so the study of their attributes reveals. What then is the only and full explanation of that fact and of that harmony? Philosophers hold that the only and the full explanation of the harmony subsisting between the mind and reality, which is called truth, is found in the fact that both mind and reality are reproductions in creation of God’s truthful knowledge of Himself. Ethicists hold that the only and full explanation of the harmony subsisting between the will and law, which is called moral good, is found in the fact that both will and law are reproductions in the finite ofGod’s love of Himself. So philosophers must hold that the full and only explanation of the harmony subsisting between the soul and art, which is called the expression of the beautiful, is found in the fact that like the innate tendency to truth and good, the tendency to beauty is a reproduction of God’s contemplation of Himself. Creation, as has often been declared, is a manifestation of the art of God, a mimetic presentation in finite matter and spirit of the infinite ideal. All advance in truth and virtue is an approach to divine truth and goodness, and all true progress in art is an approach to divine beauty. “Filled with enthusiasm,” says De Wulf inL’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté, “before the greatness of the artist’s power, Dante Alighieri compares it to that of Omnipotence:
“‘Your art like the grand-child of God’(Inferno, XI, 103).
“‘Your art like the grand-child of God’(Inferno, XI, 103).
“‘Your art like the grand-child of God’
“‘Your art like the grand-child of God’
(Inferno, XI, 103).
(Inferno, XI, 103).
“Art is the grand-child of God because it is the offspring of man’s creative power as man himself has come from the hands of God.”