and Spain have disclosed the earliest evidence of man’s art. The man was
no mean artist, and the coloring and skillful drawing have astonished
every one. Why dark caverns, inaccessible to light, should have been
so decorated has puzzled observers. Reinach calls the pictures early
“magic,” painting of animals to capture them. But there are paintings of
men as well as of bisons and reindeer. Professor Osborne is quoted as
saying that it seems to be art for art’s sake, namely, that the sheer
pleasure of the drawing is its reason. An admission, it would seem, that
the professor has no real explanation to offer. Sir Bertram Windle has
recently asserted the religious origin of these pictures. They would
seem to be the earliest appearance of stained-glass windows. The caves
were temples, and the explanation is confirmed by a comparison with the
beehive tombs of Mycenæ and with the Egyptian tombs. The altar, the
sacrifice, the victims, the food, clothing and other accompaniments
of life, are all evidences of religious feelings and a belief in a
continued existence. The absence of the bodies in these caves may easily
be accounted for. Fleeting time with prowling animals has destroyed
them while it left the pictures on the wall. Art is even longer than
Longfellow imagined.
If the earliest art so far found is religious in origin, these so called
Cro-Magnon or Aurignacian artists exemplify again what is a commonplace
in the history of art. It would be easy to add to the following
statements found under “Art” in Hasting’s _Dictionary of Religion_:
“The religious aspect of art in Egypt includes almost all that is known
of it.” “There is hardly any doubt that the high level of Assyrian and
Babylonian art is due to the deep religious feeling of the two nations.”
“The history of art in Greece is throughout its course intimately
connected with religion.” The fact is beyond all denying. Religion and
art are united, in music and song, from the dances of savages to the
Hebrew psalms and the stateliest liturgies; in painting, from the early
caveman to the modern man; in sculpture, from the crudest icons dug up
at Troy to the idol statues of Greece and Rome, in the lions and bulls
of buried Mycenæ and Crete, of Assyria and Egypt, in the tiny seal
rings, in the ornaments and statuary of our modern churches; in oratory,
from the prayers of the priest in the _Iliad_, to the fulminations of
the prophet and the eloquence of the pulpit; even in civic oratory
we find Demosthenes and Cicero in their sublimest heights touching
upon religious motives; in the poetry of incantation, of oracle, of
revelation, in liturgy and drama; in the little tale of the fable and
in the mighty story of the epic, for the full sweep of which Homer and
Virgil, Dante and Milton must stage their events upon the background of
a Divine Providence; in architecture, from the tombs and temples of the
eastern world, to the temples of the Aztecs and to the Gothic cathedral.
Aquinas gave in his _Summa_ a synthesis of all science; Dante gave in
his _Divina Comedia_ a synthesis of man’s life and destiny; the Gothic
cathedral of the same age gave a synthesis of all the arts in one
structure, exemplifying in fullness and excellence the mutual interaction
of art and religion in the middle ages, where manifestly religion
held sway as never before or since. The Morgan “Collection” in the
Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York exhibits the dusty wreckage
of that wonderful union of religion and art. No poet’s imagination is
needed to rebuild those fragments into that marvelous structure, under
whose myriad statuary of serious saints and grotesque gargoyles, you pass
through carved portals into the spacious aisles over which arches leap
aspiringly. The painter fascinates you with the story of many colors
in the windows. The weaver hangs other pictures on the rich tapestry
curtaining the walls. The wood-carver is everywhere evoking beauty with
cunning fingers. Music and song in the dramatic and antiphonal liturgy,
the sublime eloquence of the pulpit in turn charm and rest the ears.
The minutest detail is as artistic as the rich magnificence. The missal
on the altar will be a “Book of Kells,” a reflection on illuminated
parchment of the religious and monastic life which produced it, by
its patience, learning, devotion, silent application, and scrupulous
exactness; “examined with a microscope for hours,” says an authority,
“without detecting a false line or irregular interlacement.” Near the
missal of the Gothic cathedral would be found a jeweled chalice, like
that of Ardagh, with three hundred and fifty-four distinct pieces,
classic and rich in all kinds of ornament. Baldwin Brown was surely right
in declaring: “It is probable that nothing more artistically beautiful
has ever been seen than the Gothic cathedral,” and the Gothic cathedral
is the crowning glory of a deeply religious age.
VI
ART AND THE DIVINE
2. THE KINSHIP OF ART AND RELIGION
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 Puritanism finally 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
its products, 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 in _Mind in the Making_ says 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
correctly and 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 of religion, 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 hand in 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 creation _motif_ in 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 of God’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 in _L’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).
“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.”
VII
ART AND THE DIVINE
3. ART IN ITS RELATION TO VIRTUE
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 who said, “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 the
_Poetics_, 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 up
to 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 beauty of 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 or virtues 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
to good 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, there is 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.