VIIART AND THE DIVINE
The fact that religion and art are connected is abundantly established by history. The naturalness of that connection is made clear by the many traits art and religion possess in common. As philosophers have argued to the existence of God from the fact that the universal belief in His existence can be accounted for satisfactorily on no other supposition; as philosophers also argue to the immortality of the soul from man’s universal and inevitable tendency to unending existence, so in like manner, it may be argued that since always and everywhere the art impulse is connected in its origin and growth with religion, that impulse too, like belief in God and desire of immortality and conscience for law and tendency to truth, is a projection of the divine upon humanity, not the anthropomorphism of God but the theomorphism of man. The structure of our eye, made to respond to light, justifies us in concluding there is light. The nature of the soul, which can respond to infinite beauty, justifies us in concluding there is infinite beauty. He whosaid, “Let there be light,” said also, “Let us make man after our own image and likeness.”
An explanation of the nature of these two human acts of art and religion will disclose more analogies while revealing essential differences. Religion is a virtue of the will, a habit developed by the free act of man, a virtue which culminates in worship of God as the supreme being. The impulse of art has not been analyzed as fully and as satisfactorily as the virtue of religion, but from Aristotle’s analysis in thePoetics, through the Neo-Platonists and the Scholastics down to Kant and his followers, there is common agreement that the tendency to beauty does not belong to the inclination towards good, actuating appetite and will, but that the enjoyment of beauty is a function of the perceptions, the imagination, and the mind. The admitted disinterestedness of the art impulse is the paramount and irresistible evidence that it differs essentially from the self-seeking tendency of will and appetite which cannot be indifferent to good, since good is the very cause and condition of the appetite’s existence. The enjoyment of a painted fruit is akin to the enjoyment of verified theory or of a triumphant conclusion, and not like the satisfaction felt in the ownership of the painting of fruit or in the actual craving or eating of the fruit.
It is evident, therefore, why a man may be artistic without being religious. There is no more difficulty in understanding why an artist is not a saint than in knowing that conscience is one thing and acting upto it another thing. Improvement in art does not always mean improvement in morals or in religion, any more than to know is to will. Nor, on the other hand, will the evil of an artist or of his work be evidence against the divinity of art. The divine origin of conscience and the natural law is evident in the vice of the sinner as in the virtues of the saint. The essential difference between art and religion shows also that the school in which the prophet is Ruskin, the school which finds a religion in the beauty of world or of art, is incorrect in its teaching. Love and fear are the mainsprings of action, the incentives to virtue. Beauty may grace the attraction of good; it cannot take the place of good in virtue and religion. Estheticism is not asceticism. Francis of Assisi was a poet and a saint, Francesca da Rimini enjoyed poetry, might have been a poet, but was not always a saint, and many a Francisco and Francesca may be found neither artistic nor religious, as many are talented without being virtuous and virtuous without being talented.
Despite the sad lack of harmony between the beauty of their art and the virtue of their lives, artists have nevertheless always been revered. The honor of their art has won them in their lapses a gentleness of treatment not accorded to less favored mortals. They are fallen angels if they fall.
Does the union of religion and art mean then that the artist must be a moralist? To moralize is not a function of art as such. I enjoy the beautyof a tree without any feeling that it conveys a truth or inculcates a virtue. The artist may transfer the tree to canvas, where I enjoy it as I did in nature without any accessory implication, informing or ethical. Joyce Kilmer may put the tree in a poem and with it add beauty to the truth that, “only God can make a tree.” The psalmist may put a tree in his sacred hymn and with it add beauty to his praise of the life of a good man, who shall be “like a tree planted near the running waters.” Logical truth and moral good are not excluded from art, although the artist by profession is not a teacher. Modern critics are often inconsistent and hypocritical in welcoming every dramatist or poet or novelist who undisguisedly advocates various theories, but will be withering in their scorn for any one who advocates the ten commandments. To moralize, to dogmatize, to theorize is not the function of art, and though these actions are not incompatible with the functions of art, very rarely in the history of art has it been successful when it undertook to teach or to preach. Didactic poetry, satire poetry and propaganda drama, have great difficulty in becoming poetry and remaining poetry.
Religion then is a virtue of the will, resulting in acts of worship; art, a power of the mind, resulting in various artistic creations. Religion may remain wholly spiritual, even in its expression, but, though the mind’s appreciation of beauty may rest on purely spiritual and intellectual objects, such as theories orvirtues or God and heaven, art must express itself in sensible objects. Even in literature, the most intellectual of arts, words and pictures of the imagination are essential. Angels might be conceived as having an art whose sole medium was spiritual ideas, not so man, whose mind works through imagination. Aquinas, stressing the intellectual nature of beauty, calls attention to the fact that while men speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds, they will rarely and only figuratively consider the acts of other senses, as taste, touch and scent, beautiful. The actions of these senses are immersed in the material, whereas sight and hearing are closer to the intellectual and spiritual. Man has not yet succeeded in making a fine art whose medium would be tastes and touches and fragrances. The unselfish enjoyment of art cannot be released in objects so material and so near to the appetites. The sensualist is not an artist in yielding to sense enjoyment, although he may wish to give his unhallowed ways an artistic gloss. The one who sees only an apple pie in rosy apples or senses slumbrous ease in soft velvets and in iridescent silks or perceives only the perfume in flower and fruit, is not experiencing esthetic emotions, but rather stirrings of the bodily appetites. If estheticism is not asceticism, neither is it, on the other hand, concupiscence or mere sensualism.
Does the connection between art and religion exclude the presentation of evil in art? Art would be much handicapped if it were restricted entirely togood objects. Art is a manifestation of man’s intellect and must act in accord with the nature of that faculty. If evil is artistically presented, it must be depicted as evil. To present moral evil as a good is a falsification as repugnant to the mind as would be the painting of a blue sunrise, of a green moon or of a black-and-tan sea, and as absurd as the sculpture of a five-legged lion. The enlightened mind rejects such physical monstrosities, and the enlightened mind, despite the lower appetites, rejects moral disorders with equal, if not greater, repugnance.
Again, art requires that the evil, the moral ugliness or physical ugliness, be a necessary and rational part of the presentation. A fact of nature becomes at once the material of science, because science concerns itself with unadorned truth. But for a fact of nature to be material of art, it must be idealized, that is, it must be made an integral part of the art product. The pleasure of art does not arise from deception but from illusion which does not deceive. Painted grapes might deceive birds; but did they deceive men, then the effect would not be that of art but of reality. The evil or ugly can never be pleasant as long as it is present and actual. The transfer of evil to the world of art if it becomes an integral, justified and rationalized part of the illusion, is usually enough to rob evil of its actuality and unpleasantness.
Sometimes in contemporary realism, with every justification of ugliness from the art product, thereis depression and not true art pleasure, because we cannot forget the actual world when contemplating the imaginary world of art. Suppose “Macbeth” or “Œdipus” were really historical and were acted in the presence of their contemporaries or of the next generation. Would there be satisfaction and the emotional relief arising from illusion? Hardly. Memories would be too much lacerated with the actual to surrender to the illusion of art and to enjoy its contemplation. Actuality would put back the salt into the tears that else might have been sweetened by transfer of evil to remote and imaginary realms. The Greeks and Shakespeare were right in making their tragedies historical, whereas modern realists are somber with pessimism because they never forsake the actual.
Art and religion are both concerned with life and so they both must touch evil and ugliness, unhappily a large part of life. Religion as a virtue must overcome evil and not permit it to master the will. Art depicts evil in such a way as not to offend the enlightened mind, by approval of evil or by the artistically unjustified introduction of evil or by actual experience of evil. In all these cases the mind would not experience the true and lasting pleasure of art. The taste of fruit passes; the contemplation of painted fruit is a joy forever. Art pleasure is not the playing with toys, as Plato would seem to make it, but the fine occupation of rational minds, which Aristotle made it, an occupation worthy ofman because art interprets nature and man to himself, because art exercises man’s rational faculties, because art releases man’s emotions under conditions where the evil of actual life is removed. Macbeth and Œdipus in life were saddening spectacles; the echo of that sadness felt through dramatic representation has high pleasure for the mind.
The cathartic function of art brings it close to the virtuous and the divine. What virtue does really, art does ideally, transforming evil into good. The vicarious sacrifice of Calvary was the catharsis of mankind, an infinite cleansing, compared with which the vicarious feeling of dramatically enacted evil is but as a drop to the ocean. Close to the divine, too, although at the same time infinitely remote, is the creation of art. Wisdom and love inspired God in His creation, but so also did the quest of beauty. Aquinas called the universe God’s sermon, and the universe is a divine picturing and sculpturing and harmonizing. The artist follows far after, rethinking through finite images the ideals which filled the thoughts of the Divine Artist.
In idealizing, in creating, is art akin to the divine, and, lastly, in its disinterestedness is art divine. All appreciation of beauty is divine. Contemplation will be the occupation of eternity, and contemplation is the proper and the congenial attitude of the soul towards beauty. Good inspires love and attracts to union, but when union has been effected in eternity, the enraptured ecstasy of the beautiful will be thesoul’s unending activity. Beauty is the supreme excellence of truth, the polish on the granite of fact, the uncloying fascination arrested upon perfection. In eternity infinite good and infinite truth, obscured in time, will stream into the soul unclouded and refulgent, and beauty will grace love and crown wisdom.
The millions of mankind who admire the red of every morning, and the forests breaking green through the silver mists and the birds in awakened song rising from the flowers to the brightening sky, these millions do not begrudge one another such beautiful spectacles, nor are they mutually jealous as they listen to beautiful sounds. That unselfish, that unenvious contemplation of beauty marks off man from animals by an impassable chasm and makes him an image of the self-sufficing Creator, the source of all beauty, the exemplar of all beauty, whom the Blessed forever contemplate and forever enjoy, unenvying and unenviously.