The Oxford Handbook of Religion - FRANK BURCH BROWN

T H E OX F OR D HA N DB O OK OF
R E L IG ION A N D
T H E A RT S
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THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF
RELIGION AND
THE ARTS
Edited by
FRANK BURCH BROWN
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3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Oxford handbook of religion and the arts / edited by Frank Burch Brown.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978–0–19–517667–4 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–972103–0 (ebook)
1. Arts and religion. I. Brown, Frank Burch, 1948– II. Title: Handbook of religion and the arts.
NX180.R4O94 2013
203’.7—dc23
2013017232
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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In Memory of Mary Harter Mitchell (1953–2009)
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Contents
Acknowledgments xi
List of Contributors xiii
1. Introduction: Mapping the Terrain of Religion and the Arts 1

Frank Burch Brown
PA RT I R E L IG IOU S A E ST H E T IC S
2. Aesthetics and Religion 25
Richard Viladesau
3. Beauty and Divinity 44
Patrick Sherry
4. The Religious Sublime 57
Vijay Mishra
5. Artistic Imagination and Religious Faith 77
Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen
6. Creativity at the Intersection of Art and Religion 91
Deborah J. Haynes
PA RT I I A RT I ST IC WAYS OF B E I N G R E L IG IOU S
7. Musical Ways of Being Religious 109
Frank Burch Brown
8. Narrative Ways of Being Religious 130
David Jasper
9. Poetic Ways of Being Religious 146
Peggy Rosenthal
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viii CONTENTS
10. Dramatic Ways of Being Religious 162

Larry D. Bouchard
11. Dance as a Way of Being Religious 182
Anne-Marie Gaston (Anjali), with Tony Gaston
12. Architectural Expression and Ways of Being Religious 203
Richard Kieckhefer
13. Visual Arts as Ways of Being Religious 220
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona
14. Film and Video as Ways of Being Religious 238
Robert K. Johnston
PA RT I I I R E L IG IOU S WAYS
OF B E I N G A RT I ST IC
15. Judaism and Literature 257
Ilan Stavans
16. Judaism and Music 263
Mark Kligman
17. Judaism—Visual Art and Architecture 270
Edward van Voolen
18. Christianity and Literature 279
Ralph C. Wood
19. Christianity and Music 286
Paul Westermeyer
20. Christianity and Visual Art 294
Graham Howes
21. Islam and Literature 302
Tarif Khalidi
22. Islam and Visual Art 310
Margaret S. Graves
23. Islam and Music 321
Amnon Shiloah
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CONTENTS ix
24. Hinduism—Aesthetics, Drama, and Poetics 327

Sunthar Visuvalingam
25. Hinduism—Visual Art and Architecture 350
Jessica Frazier
26. Hinduism and Music 358
Guy L. Beck
27. Buddhism—Image as Icon, Image as Art 367
Charles Lachman
28. Taoism and the Arts 379
Deborah A. Sommer
29. Confucianism and the Arts 388
Deborah A. Sommer
30. Shintō and the Arts 396
Sybil A. Thornton
PA RT I V I S SU E S A N D T H E M E S
31. Artistry and Aesthetics in Modern and Postmodern Worship 403
Don E. Saliers
32. Art, Morality, and Justice 418
John W. de Gruchy
33. Doubt and Belief in Literature 433
Roger Lundin
34. Iconoclasm 450
Mia M. Mochizuki
35. Gender, Imagery, and Religious Imagination 469
Margaret R. Miles
36. Art, Material Culture, and Lived Religion 480
David Morgan
37. Sacred and Secular in African American Music 498
Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan
Index 523
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Acknowledgments
A volume like this is, by its very nature, the product of many hands. As editor, it has
been a privilege for me to have the opportunity to work with an array of highly qualified
contributors in areas relevant to the study of religion and the arts. Many of them made
adjustments of one kind or another to meet the particular needs of this Handbook.
I also want to acknowledge, for my part, the generous support of various institu-
tions and individuals. First, there is Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis. CTS
not only granted me blocks of time to work on this project, but also provided a truly
congenial environment, with its long-time commitment to the study of the arts in the
context of ecumenical and inter-religious theological education. As I was working on
this Handbook, moreover, CTS allowed me to serve a semester as the inaugural Henry
Luce Professor of Theology and the Arts at St. John’s School of Theology · Seminary in
Collegeville, Minnesota and—during several spring terms—as the Alexander Campbell
Visiting Professor of Religion and the Arts at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Those institutions gave me access to contrasting yet complementary environments, and
to scholars and scholarship in different traditions and fields pertinent to religion and the
arts. To the administrators, faculty, staff, and students at all three institutions, I extend
my heartfelt thanks, although I am eager to add the common but important disclaimer
that none of them is to be held responsible for any deficiencies in what has emerged.
The idea for this Handbook was suggested to me many years ago by Theo Calderara of
Oxford University Press. I am grateful to him for much more than that initial suggestion,
however. In addition to making various constructive recommendations, he allowed me
latitude to shape this Handbook in some distinctive ways. Equally important, he also
gave me much-needed encouragement under trying circumstances.
As already implied, work on this project extended longer than expected, partly due to
interruptions impossible to anticipate. Friends and family—and most of all my daughter
Joanna Burch-Brown—helped me in ways my words cannot begin to express when this
project was interrupted most precipitously and lengthily by the sudden and unexpected
death of my spouse, Mary Harter Mitchell. This was an enterprise in which Mary much
believed, and one that she much encouraged. The publisher has kindly granted permis-
sion for this volume to be dedicated to her memory.
—Frank Burch Brown
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List of Contributors
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona is Visiting Professor of Religious Art and Cultural History

at Georgetown University. A contributor to scholarly journals, collected volumes, and
reference publications, she has edited collections dedicated to religion and the arts—for
example, Art, Creativity, and the Sacred. The Consulting Editor for Art and Religion
for multiple international reference collections such as The Encyclopedia of Religion,
2nd edition, she has curated art exhibitions including In Search of Mary Magdalene and
Noguchi at the Dance, and participated in international television documentaries.
Guy L. Beck is Lecturer in Hinduism, Asian Religions, and Religion and Music at Tulane
University in New Orleans. Professor Beck is the author of Sonic Theology: Hinduism
and Sacred Sound (1993) and Sonic Liturgy: Ritual and Music in Hindu Tradition (2012).
He is also the editor of Sacred Sound: Experiencing Music in World Religions (2006),
and Vaishnava Temple Music in Vrindaban: The Radhavallabha Songbook (2011), with
18 CDs. As a trained vocalist in Hindustani classical music, he has been awarded an
AIIS (American Institute of Indian Studies) Performing Arts Fellowship and a US
Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship. In 2001, he delivered the Michaelmas
Lectures on Hinduism and Music at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, and in 2010
participated in the Eranos Conference in Switzerland on “Love and the Musical Arts.”
Larry D. Bouchard is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where
he teaches in the area of Theology, Ethics, and Culture. He is author of Tragic Method
and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought (1989) and
Theater and Integrity: Emptying Selves in Drama, Ethics, and Religion (2011). He has also
published articles and chapters concerning literature and religion, tragedy and theodicy,
and theology and culture.
Frank Burch Brown is the Frederick Doyle Kershner Professor of Religion and the
Arts at Christian Theological Seminary and was for several years Alexander Campbell
Visiting Professor of Religion and the Arts at the University of Chicago Divinity
School. He is author of five books, including Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the
Languages of Religious Belief (1983; reissued 2013), Religious Aesthetics (1989), Good
Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (2000), and Inclusive Yet
Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully (2009). A contributor to the Oxford Handbook of
Religion and Emotion (2008) and the Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (2013), he has
been named Senior Editor for Religion and the Arts for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia
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xiv LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
in Religion, which is being developed as an ongoing, online scholarly resource. He is also

composer of over twenty commissioned musical works.
John W. de Gruchy is Emeritus Professor of Christian Studies at the University of
Cape Town and Extraordinary Professor in the Faculty of Theology at the University
of Stellenbosch. He has doctorates in both theology and the social sciences. Author
of a number of books, including Christianity, Art, and Transformation: Theological
Aesthetics in the Struggle for Justice (2008), Icons as a Means of Grace (2008), and Led
into Mystery: Faith Seeking Answers in Life and Death (2013), he has published widely
on the church in South Africa, on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on Christianity
and the arts, and more recently on Christian humanism. He and his wife are members of
the Volmoed Community near Hermanus, a retreat and conference center that exists to
promote reconciliation and justice.
Jessica Frazier is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent, and a Fellow at
the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. She is the Founding Editor of the Journal of Hindu
Studies, and author of The Continuum Companion to Hindu Studies (2011), and Reality,
Religion and Passion: Indian and Western Approaches in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Rupa
Gosvami (2009).
Anne-Marie Gaston (Anjali) (D.Phil. Oxon) is an internationally recognized performer
of several styles of South Asian classical dance (Bharata Natyam, Odissi, Kuchipudi,
Kathakali, Chhau). All of her training has been in India for over forty-five years,
with some of the greatest hereditary teachers. Her dance repertoire includes both the
traditional repertoire and innovative dances exploring sacred themes. These mixed
media recitals include dance performed and recorded on video, and images taken in
remote places by Anne-Marie and Tony Gaston. She has published three books: Bharata
Natyam from Temple to Theatre (1997), Siva in Dance, Myth, and Iconography (1981), and
Krishna’s Musicians in the Temples of Nathdvara Rajasthan (1997).
Tony Gaston (D.Phil. Oxon) is an ecologist, writer, filmmaker, and photographer, who
has observed sacred dances throughout the world. He initiated the founding of the Great
Himalayan National Park, which is now under review for world Heritage status. www.
culturalhorizons.ca.
Margaret S. Graves is Assistant Professor of Islamic art and architecture at Indiana
University, Bloomington. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in
2010 for her thesis on miniature architectural forms in the art of the medieval Islamic
world, has published articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals, and has edited
volumes and exhibition catalogues on subjects ranging from the plastic arts of medieval
Iran to the disciplinary discomfort with nineteenth-century Islamic art. Most recently
she co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Art Historiography on the historiography
of Islamic art (June 2012) and edited Islamic Art, Architecture and Material Culture: New
Perspectives.
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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xv
Deborah J. Haynes is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado
at Boulder, former Chair of the department from 1998–2002, and founding Director of
a residential academic program in the visual and performing arts from 2003–2011. She
is an artist and the author of six books including Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (1995), The
Vocation of the Artist (1997), Book of This Place: The Land, Art, and Spirituality (2009),
Spirituality and Growth on the Leadership Path: An Abecedary (2012), and Bakhtin
Reframed (2013).
Graham Howes is Fellow Emeritus, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, a trustee of
ACE (Art and Christianity Enquiry) and formerly on the Advisory Board of Material
Religion. His publications include “Theology and the Visual Arts” in David Ford
(ed.), The Modern Theologians (2nd edition, 1994), English Cathedrals and the Visual
Arts: Patronage, Policies and Provision, with Tom Devonshire Jones (2006), The Art of
the Sacred—An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief (2007), and “Christian
Wisdom in the Visual Arts” in Theology 114 (3): 2011.
David Jasper is Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow,
Scotland, and Distinguished Overseas Professor at Renmin University of China, Beijing.
Among his recent publications is the trilogy of books The Sacred Desert (2004), The
Sacred Body (2009), and The Sacred Community (2012). He was a co-editor of The Oxford
Handbook of English Literature and Theology (2007).
Robert K. Johnston is Professor of Theology and Culture and Co-Director of the
Reel Spirituality Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
A past president of the American Theological Society, his recent books include Don’t
Stop Believin’ (co-edited, 2012), Reframing Theology and Film (edited, 2007), Reel
Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue (2006, 2000), Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes
through the Lens of Contemporary Film (2004), and Finding God in the Movies: 33 Films
of Reel Faith (co-written with Catherine Barsotti, 2004). He is a general editor of the
"Understanding the Bible Commentary" series, Old Testament; a co-editor for Baker
Academic of both the “Engaging Culture” series and the “Cultural Exegesis” series; and a
co-editor for Routledge of the "Religion and Film" series. The author or editor of fifteen
books, Johnston has written thirty-five book chapters and numerous articles, and has
been a regular movie reviewer (see reelspirituality.com). His book on general revelation
entitled God’s Wider Revelation will be published in 2014..
Tarif Khalidi was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, in 1938. He was educated at University
College, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. His current position (since 2002) is
Shaykh Zayid Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, American University of Beirut.
Previously (1996–2002) he was Sir Thomas Adams’ Professor of Arabic and Fellow of
King's College, Cambridge. His most recent publications are Images of Muhammad
(2009), The Qur'an, A New Translation (2008), and The Muslim Jesus (2001).
Richard Kieckhefer is the John Evans Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern
University, where he has taught since 1975. He also holds positions in the Departments
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xvi LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
of History and Art History. His research focuses mainly on late medieval religious
culture, but he has written on church architecture in all periods, and he has worked on
several themes in the comparative study of religion. His book Theology in Stone: Church
Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (2004), deals with churches in historical and
theological context from the third to the twenty-first century. He has published other
books focused on various aspects of late medieval religion.
Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan is a Professor of Religion at Shaw University Divinity School,
Raleigh, NC, and an Ordained Elder in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.
Professor Kirk-Duggan is author and editor of over twenty books, including Exorcising
Evil: A Womanist Perspective on the Spirituals (1997); Refiner’s Fire: A Religious
Engagement of Violence (2000); Soul Pearls: Worship Resources for the African American
Congregation (2003); co-editor, The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa
and the African Diaspora (2009); and with Marlon Hall, Wake Up!: Hip Hop, Christianity
and the Black Church (2011). She has also written numerous articles and book chapters.
Mark Kligman is Professor of Jewish Musicology at Hebrew Union College-Jewish
Institute of Religion in New York, where he teaches in the School of Sacred Music. He
specializes in the liturgical traditions of Middle Eastern Jewish communities and various
areas of popular Jewish music. He has published on the liturgical music of Syrian Jews in
Brooklyn in journals as well as his book Maqām and Liturgy: Ritual, Music and Aesthetics
of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (2009), which shows the interconnection between the music
of Syrian Jews and their cultural way of life.
Charles Lachman holds an M.A. in Buddhist Studies (McMaster) and a Ph.D. in East
Asian Studies (Toronto), and taught at York University and Dartmouth College prior
to joining the faculty at the University of Oregon, where he is chair of the History of
Art and Architecture department. In addition to teaching, he has curated numerous
exhibitions, among them “In the Eclipse of Angkor” (2009), “Buddhist Visions” (2008),
and “Elizabeth Keith in Korea” (2006). He is the author of Evaluations of Sung Dynasty
Painters of Renown (1990), The Ten Symbols of Longevity (2006), A Way With Words: The
Calligraphic Art of Jung Do-jun (2006), and articles and essays in a variety of publications.
Roger Lundin is the Arthur F. Holmes Professor of Faith and Learning at Wheaton
College, where he teaches American literature and modern European literature. Twice
named Teacher of the Year at Wheaton, Lundin has written and edited twelve books,
including Beginning with the Word: Modern Literature and the Question of Belief (2013);
Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in A Secular Age (2009); an Emily Dickinson and the
Art of Belief (2004). He has received major research fellowships from the Erasmus
Institute, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Evangelical Scholarship Initiative. Lundin
has an M.A. in Theological Studies from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and an
M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Connecticut.
Margaret R. Miles is Emerita Professor of Historical Theology, The Graduate Theological
Union, Berkeley. She was Bussey Professor of Theology at the Harvard University
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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xvii
Divinity School from 1978–1996, and Dean of the Graduate Theological Union from
1996 until her retirement in 2002. Her recent books include Augustine and the
Fundamentalist’s Daughter (2011), A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast,
1350–1750 (2008), and The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (2005).
Vijay Mishra is Professor of English Literature and Australia Research Council
Professorial Fellow at Murdoch University. He is also a Fellow of the Australian
Humanities Academy. Author of books such as Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime
(1998) and Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (2001), he has published in a wide
range of areas, among them Gothic Literature, Australian and postcolonial literature,
devotional poetics, diaspora studies, and multicultural theory.
Mia M. Mochizuki is the Thomas E. Bertelsen Jr. Associate Professor of Art History
and Religion at the Jesuit School of Theology, Santa Clara University; the Graduate
Theological Union, Berkeley; and the Department of the History of Art, University of
California, Berkeley. She is the author of the award-winning book The Netherlandish
Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age (2008), and
editor of In His Milieu. Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias
(2006). Her interdisciplinary research has addressed problems in early modern religious
art, with special attention to Reformation (Catholic and Protestant), Netherlandish and
global Baroque art.
David Morgan is Professor of Religion at Duke University, and Chair of the Department
of Religion. Morgan is author of several books: Visual Piety (1998), Protestants and
Pictures (1999), The Sacred Gaze (2005), The Lure of Images (2007), and The Embodied Eye
(2012), and editor of several others, including Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture
(2008) and Religion and Material Culture (2010). He is co-founder and co-editor of the
journal Material Religion.
Peggy Rosenthal has a doctorate in literature and is co-founder of the nationwide
ministry Poetry Retreats. She has published widely on poetry and religion, including
The Poets’ Jesus (2000) and Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times (2003). She
co-edited the anthology Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry (1998) and
co-authored the study Reclaiming Beauty for the Good of the World: Muslim & Christian
Creativity as Moral Power (2010). She writes and reviews frequently for the magazines
Image, America, and Christian Century.
Don E. Saliers is the William R. Cannon Distinguished Professor of Theology and
Worship, Emeritus, at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. He taught at
Yale Divinity School before joining the faculty at Emory in 1974, where he was also the
organist/choirmaster at Emory University’s Cannon Chapel. A contributor to the United
Methodist Hymnal, he is the author and co-author of fifteen books and over a hundred
essays and book chapters. Among his publications are Worship as Theology: Foretaste of
Glory Divine (1994),Worship and Spirituality (1996), Worship Come to Its Senses (1996),
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xviii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
and Music and Theology (2007). In 2005 he wrote A Song to Sing, A Life to Live, with his
daughter Emily, who is one-half of the Grammy Award-winning Indigo Girls.
Patrick Sherry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and
Religion, Lancaster University, U.K. His recent work has been in the area of theological
aesthetics, especially the books Spirit and Beauty (1992, 2002) and Images of Redemption
(2003).
Amnon Shiloah is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Musicology, Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. He was awarded a Ph.D. in musicology and Oriental Studies
from the Sorbonne in Paris. Among his books are the two RISM volumes: The Theory
of Music in Arabic Writings: I, 1979 and II, 2003; Jewish Musical Traditions (1992); Music
in the World of Islam (1995), the French translation of which received the Grand Prix of
the Academie Charles Cros (Paris 2003); two volumes of essays published in the series of
Variorum: The Dimension of Music in Islamic and Jewish Culture (1993) and Music and its
Virtues in Islamic and Judaic Writings (2007).
Deborah A. Sommer focuses on the ritual, visual, and somatic aspects of the Confucian
tradition in China. She received her Ph.D. in Religion at Columbia University in 1993.
Currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Gettysburg
College, she has lectured and taught extensively in Europe and Asia. Editor of Chinese
Religion: An Anthology of Sources (1995), she is completing a book project titled The
Afterlife of Confucius, which explores the religious significance of the body of Confucius,
and she is also completing a new topically arranged translation of the Sayings of Confucius.
Recent publications that focus on studies of body and self in China include “The Ji Self
in Early Chinese Texts” (Bautz Verlag, 2012), “Boundaries of the Ti Body” (Asia Major,
2008), and “Concepts of the Body in the Zhuangzi” (in Victor Mair, ed., Experimental
Essays on Zhuangzi, 2nd ed.).
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at
Amherst College. His books include The Hispanic Condition (1995), On Borrowed Words
(2001), Spanglish (2003), Love and Language (2007), and Gabriel García Márquez: The
Early Years (2010). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998), The Poetry
of Pablo Neruda (2003), the 3-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories (2004),
Becoming Americans (2009), The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010), and The
FSG Books of 20th-Century Latin American Poetry (2011). His play The Disappearance,
performed by the theater troupe Double Edge, premiered at the Skirball Cultural Center
in Los Angeles and has been shown around the world. His story “Morirse está en hebreo”
was made into the award-winning movie My Mexican Shivah (2007), produced by John
Sayles. Stavans has received numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship,
the National Jewish Book Award, the Southwest Children Book of the Year Award, an
Emmy nomination, the Latino Book Award, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the Rubén Darío
Distinction, and the Cátedra Roberto Bolaño. He was the host of the syndicated PBS
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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xix
show Conversations with Ilan Stavans (2001–2006). His work has been translated into a
dozen languages.
Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen studied theology in Tübingen and Dublin. She was awarded her
doctorate from Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy on an interdisciplinary
study of theology and visual art. She is Programme Leader at the Priory Institute, Dublin,
and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Confederal School of Religions, Theology, and
Ecumenics, Trinity College, Dublin. An Honorary Fellow of the School of Theology,
Religious Studies and Islamic Studies at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, she
has published Theology and Modern Irish Art (1999), Theological Aesthetics—A Reader
(2004), Theology in the Making—Biography, Methods, Contexts (ed. with D. Marmion,
2005), Trinity and Salvation—Theological, Spiritual and Aesthetic Perspectives (ed.
with D. Marmion, 2009), Ecumenical Ecclesiology—Unity, Diversity and Otherness in a
Fragmented World, ed. (2009), and Apostolic and Prophetic—Ecclesiological Perspectives
(2011).
Sybil A. Thornton holds degrees in Latin, Film, and Oriental Studies (Japanese) from UC
Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and the University of Cambridge. Her research
explores the continuities in Japanese narrative between medieval and modern, religion
and political critique, and epic and film. Her publications include the 1999 Charisma
and Community Formation in Medieval Japan: The Case of the Yugyō-ha (1300–1700)
and the 2007 The Japanese Period Film: A Critical Analysis. She is currently working on a
translation and analysis of a late fourteenth-century epic, the second of five.
Richard Viladesau received his doctorate in Theology in 1972 at the Pontifical Gregorian
University in Rome. He is currently professor of Theology at Fordham University,
New York. His publications include works on homiletics, fundamental theology, and
theological aesthetics. Among them are Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination,
Beauty, and Art (1999); Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art, and
Rhetoric (2000); and a series of volumes on the Passion in theology and art: The Beauty
of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts—from the Catacombs to the
Eve of the Renaissance (2005); The Triumph of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology
and the Arts—From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation (2008). The most recent
volume in this series, The Pathos of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the
Arts—The Baroque Period, is scheduled for publication in 2013.
Sunthar Visuvalingam is an independent scholar, who received his Ph.D. (1984) at the
Banaras Hindu University on “Abhinavagupta’s conception of humor: its resonances in
Sanskrit drama, poetry, mythology, and spiritual praxis.” He has subsequently co-edited
a volume on Abhinavagupta: Reconsiderations (2006), which features his own lead
essay “Towards an Integral Appreciation of Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics of Rasa.” He has
attempted to interrogate and extend Indian aesthetics and its underpinnings by applying
its principles to modern literature (e.g., Rabindranath Tagore’s novella Chaturanga)
and Bollywood movies (e.g., Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades). His publications cover a
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xx LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
wide range of subjects, such as anthropology (acculturation models of Indian religions)

and comparative religion (transgressive sacrality). He hosts the multilingual and
international website for collaborative research, intercultural dialogue, and comparative
aesthetics svAbhinava.org, and its various associated forums, particularly http://groups.
yahoo.com/group/Abhinavagupta/.
Edward van Voolen, art historian and rabbi, is curator at the Jewish Historical Museum
in Amsterdam and teaches practical rabbinics at the Abraham Geiger College in Berlin/
Potsdam. He has curated numerous exhibitions on Jewish art, culture, and religion.
His recent publications include: 50 Jewish Artists You Should Know, 2011; The “Jewish”
Rembrandt, The Myth Unraveled (ed., with M. Alexander and J. Hillegers), 2008; Charlotte
Salomon Leben? Oder Theater? (ed.), 2007; Modern Masterpieces from Moscow, Zwolle,
2007; My Grandparents, My Parents and I: Jewish Art and Culture, 2006; Synagogen van
Nederland (with Paul Meijer), 2006; Jewish Identity in Contemporary Architecture (ed.,
with Angeli Sachs), 2004. He has taught regularly at universities, e.g., in Amsterdam,
Leiden, Berlin and Chicago.
Paul Westermeyer is Emeritus Professor of Church Music at Luther Seminary in St. Paul,
Minnesota, where he also served as Cantor and administered the Master of Sacred Music
program with St. Olaf College. He has taught at Elmhurst College, the Yale University
Institute of Sacred Music, and St. Olaf. His books include The Church Musician (1997),
With Tongues of Fire (1995), Let Justice Sing (1998), Te Deum: The Church and Music
(1998), and the Hymnal Companion to Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2010).
Ralph C. Wood has been University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor
University in Waco, Texas since 1998. From 1971–1997, he taught at Wake Forest University
in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was the John Allen Easley Professor of
Religion. His books include The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic
Vision in Four American Novelists (1988); The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the
Kingdom in Middle-Earth (2004); Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South
(2004); Literature and Theology (2008); and Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God
(2011).
oxfordhb-9780195176674-fm-ch01.indd xx 19-10-2013 09:17:36

C HA P T E R 1
INTRODUCTION: MAPPING
THE TERRAIN OF RELIGION
A N D T H E A RT S
F R A N K BU RC H BROW N
1.1 Overview
One of the significant developments in the modern and postmodern study of religion
has been an increasingly widespread cognizance of the multiple ways in which artistry
and aesthetics shape what one might think of as the geography of religion—which can
look relatively static when surveyed from above but which is subject to considerable
change over time.1 As Lindsay Jones observes in his introduction to the second edition
of the highly regarded 15-volume Encyclopedia of Religion, the academic study of the
arts and religion has been an area of considerable growth and innovation.2 Scholars of
religion and the arts have also noticed that, in many respects, the topography of the map
of religion looks different when the contours of art are made clearly visible there, and on
a scale proportional to their actual importance and religious function. At the same time,
art itself looks different when its complex relation to religion, as well as its significant
areas of independence, are brought more clearly into view.
The progressively wider distribution of religion scholarship having to do with artistic
and aesthetic matters is further indicated by the fact that discussion of these subjects can
be found throughout the American Academy of Religion. It is no longer restricted to
specialized groups and sections on the arts, although those continue to play an impor-
tant role.3 Even though interest has ebbed and flowed, particularly when it comes to
theological studies in the arts, there exist entire degree programs and departments dedi-
cated to studying one or more of the arts in relation to religion, and to studying connec-
tions between religious and theological aesthetics more broadly.4 Academic inquiry into
topics related to religion, arts, and spirituality (broadly defined) is not limited to pro-
grams in religion or theology, moreover. Studies of religious aspects of art, and artistic
oxfordhb-9780195176674-fm-ch01.indd 1 19-10-2013 09:17:36

2 THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF RELIGION AND THE ARTS
aspects of religion—sometimes previously unnoticed—can be found in areas such as art

history, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, musicology (especially ethnomusicol-
ogy), film criticism, and in the sciences as well. In his book The Singing Neanderthals, for
instance, Steven Mithen draws on anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience in the
course of arguing, among other things, that perhaps the only universal context for music
is that of religion, a sphere in which music and other arts serve functions for which they
are not only uniquely suited but also uniquely needed.5
The trend in scholarship to exhibit an expanded sense of the arts and aesthetics in rela-
tion to religion is by no means confined to English-speaking countries or to so-called
Western religions. The fourth and latest edition of the German encyclopedia Religion in
Geschichte und Gegenwart (translated as Religion Past and Present)—in which, admit-
tedly, this editor had a hand—includes far more material on the arts, media, and culture
than any previous edition.6 The extent of such developments across cultural and reli-
gious boundaries is reflected in the following observation from a scholar of Hinduism,
who points to a pronounced shift away from what she terms the previous “textual fixa-
tion” in the study of Hinduism:
There is an increasing interest in the window that the arts, in all their forms, open
onto the more pervasive, popular forms of Indian religious life, as opposed to the
elitist preserves of the written text. From dance to sculpture, song to architecture,
craftwork to poem, myth, or sacred history, the arts present a range of cultural
artifacts in which ever-fresh provinces of the imagination are laid bare before the eye
of the scholar.7
It is clear that those “provinces of the imagination” that are made visible by artistry, and
as artistry, in the territory of religion are by no means restricted to the regions of the
distant past. This is quite different from what the German Idealist philosopher G. W.
F. Hegel (1770–1831) had envisioned some two centuries ago. Hegel had asserted that
the era of religion’s major alliance with art was over and that art itself, although it had
served as the sensuous embodiment of truth, was no longer needed in any essential way
in a new age of philosophical rationality, which would likewise transform religion itself.8
Contrary to Hegel’s expectation, there is research that strongly suggests that, even in
our relatively secular time, many individuals and groups involved in the arts continue
to see their artistic aims as in some way religious or spiritual, albeit often unconven-
tional and non-dogmatic. The Princeton sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow has
marshaled ample evidence, in two book-length studies, of this ongoing religious and
spiritual motivation for artistry, considered both as a spiritual “way” that is personal and
as an active force in revitalizing American religion.9 Because this seems to be contrary to
an assumption widespread in culture (where arts are regularly classified with entertain-
ment), it is worth pointing out that it is entirely consistent with Wuthnow’s research that
a novelist like Marilynne Robinson, whose works have won major awards, can openly
explore issues of religious blessing, judgment, and forgiveness in novels such as Gilead
(2004) and Home (2008). Moral and religious questions and quests, personal as well
as political, are likewise germane to much of what is compelling about the artistry of

INTRODUCTION 3
Tony Kushner’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America and its adaptation
as a television miniseries on HBO (2003). Similarly, the complexities of evil and suf-
fering, and of seemingly gratuitous kindness and gracious beauty—along with the per-
plexities of possible divine providence or judgment—all play a central part in the films
of Terrence Malick: perhaps most powerfully in Days of Heaven (1978), which won the
Academy Award that year for best cinematography, and in Tree of Life (2011), winner of
the Palme d’Or (the highest prize) at the sixty-fourth Cannes Film Festival.
One could go on to give examples from music. In a popular vein, songs of the Irish
Rock Band U2, and its lead singer Bono, have been turned into the musical framework
for “U2Charist” eucharistic liturgies. Meanwhile, the best-known classical composers
of our time, with a considerable “cross-over” following, include a number whose works
make use of prominent religious or spiritual motifs. Among those composers are Philip
Glass, John Adams, Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and James MacMillan, whose composi-
tions reflect varying religious inclinations ranging from spiritually eclectic to Eastern
Orthodox and Catholic. Finally, in this brief charting of artistic activity in the region
of religion, one might note that even in Great Britain, where participation in religious
organizations is far lower than in the United States, one of the most popular exhibits at
the National Gallery, under the directorship of Neil MacGregor, was a major show in
the year 2000 called Seeing Salvation. That exhibit, which consisted in representations
of Jesus in art from over the centuries, and which was accompanied by a scholarly but
accessible book,10 had been preceded by a series of four programs with the same title,
which MacGregor presented for BBC Television.
Given the extent of artistic ways of being religious, and of religious ways of being
artistic (present and past)—and given also the extent of the scholarship studying that—
there is a need for a relatively comprehensive handbook on the topic. Although interest
in the arts in relation to religion has increased, genuine expertise in this whole area is
not yet widespread. Nor can scholars in the various disciplines in which pertinent work
is being carried out be counted on, at this stage, to be familiar with each other’s work.
That is due in no small part to the way academic disciplines have developed and have
become increasingly specialized. Besides that, most scholars attentive to topics germane
to the arts and religion have been trained primarily in one art or another, or in one reli-
gion or another.
The present Handbook is put together in such a way as to draw on and cultivate spe-
cial expertise while also inviting cross-disciplinary and wide-ranging inquiry, some-
times into areas only beginning to be explored in depth. The need to take a wide range
of scholarship and readership into consideration is reflected both in the international
scope of the contributors and in the mix of established senior scholars with exceptional
junior scholars.
Within the extensive series of Oxford Handbooks, this particular Handbook has dis-
tinctive features, and those need to be noted, along with features shared in common
with almost all the others in the series. All the Oxford Handbooks are designed to take
into account the best current scholarship on a given topic and to address representative
issues and debates within the relevant area of study. Certain aspects of the approach of

this Handbook follow from the fact that religion and the arts, considered as a territory,
has not often been given much visibility on the map of religious studies, and has never
been charted in detail. This means that relatively few readers are likely to be expert in a
given area. As a consequence, some of the topics covered in this Handbook have had to
be explored in relatively broad and non-technical ways, although with attention to sig-
nificant particulars. That is true, for instance, of the chapters on music, on dance, and on
architecture. Another consequence is that it has seemed wise to give more attention than
usual in these Handbooks to the work of describing and informing, and somewhat less
attention to scholarly debates. While major scholars and issues are identified, and sig-
nificant controversies engaged—as in the latter part of this very Introduction—some of
the more specialized questions are best pursued by consulting the bibliographies, which
are an important feature of each chapter.
Further, it should be said that the relative newness of the idea of approaching religion
and the arts partly in terms of aesthetics, as is done here, has influenced the decision to
create a whole section on religious aesthetics. That is so as to give sufficient attention to
an area of growing interest. But whereas much work that has been done in specifically
theological aesthetics has relatively little to say about the arts as such, and has more to
do with beauty in particular, aesthetics in this context is concerned primarily with the
arts and culture. The last part of this Introduction functions, in effect, as the editor’s pro-
logue to the section on religious aesthetics as well as to the rest of the Handbook.
The fact that the Handbook crosses cultures and is diverse in its approaches to reli-
gions is reflected in the makeup of the list of contributors as well as in the inclusion of
multiple religious traditions, even though the balance in the mix of religions reflects
the background and training of the most likely readership, both students and scholars.
Some of the chapters are more philosophical or theological whereas others are more his-
torical or descriptive. Contributors were given considerable freedom, within any given
chapter, to focus on issues and subtopics that, while intended to be representative, are
fitted to their training and background. While some chapters have certain survey-like
qualities, the contributors were encouraged to be selective and to make the most of their
own expertise, and (where appropriate) to argue for a particular claim or point of view,
as is common in these Handbooks. Contributors and the editor alike have ventured to
stretch into areas beyond their scholarly comfort zone in the interests of opening up new
perspectives and insights. This lends something of an air of adventure to the enterprise,
but it does introduce hazards in that certain limitations of both the contributors and the
editor may be exposed.
Finally, the sheer breadth of the territory being covered here means that, inevitably,
some things are necessarily emphasized more than others, and there are gaps and omis-
sions in how the Handbook is composed. Regarding a matter of emphasis, the volume’s
title hints at something relatively subtle but important. This is called a handbook of
religion and the arts rather than a handbook of the arts and religion. Accordingly, the
study of religion is the primary territory or field, so to speak, and the study of the arts is
mapped onto that, although the result can still be called a map of both religion and art. It
would have been legitimate to reverse both the wording and the approach, treating the

INTRODUCTION 5
study of religion as a feature of the study of the arts. That reversal of emphasis appears to
some extent in the Handbook in the section termed “artistic ways of being religious.” The
overall emphasis in this Handbook, however, is on religion and on the relation of the arts
to that.
As for omissions, some of those are conscious, even if not what one would wish for,
ideally. In the composition of the section that treats specific themes and issues in reli-
gion and the arts, there were many possible topics. These particular ones were chosen
for being in some sense timely but also likely to have ongoing relevance. While the kinds
of arts discussed in the Handbook in general include the vernacular and local, there are
many more kinds of artistry than could be given due attention here. It will be obvious,
too, that the religions that receive focal treatment are only the ones most commonly
studied as world religions. The main exception is Shinto, the nature of which can gener-
ate arguments among scholars of Japanese religion, but which, many scholars seem to
agree, has had an influence on Japanese Buddhist aesthetics in particular. Yet even when
it comes to Buddhism, it was, unfortunately, not possible at this stage to generate chapters
specifically on Buddhist literature or music, parallel to chapters on the arts of other tradi-
tions. There is another conscious gap that is regrettable. The decision not to treat religious
traditions on a geographical basis meant that the artistic expressions of religions in some
large areas of the world such as Africa are not given the attention they deserve, particu-
larly considering their wide influence on world religions such as Christianity and Islam.
In the case of Africa, that is partly compensated for by attention to South African art and
by a chapter on African American music. The editor hopes such gaps can be addressed in
future editions, in whatever form they may take.
Omissions of a different sort may also be able to be addressed in the future—such as
those that are the unintended result of editorial blind spots or those that involve digital
media only now coming more fully to the attention of scholars. That possibility seems
even more likely when it comes to filling in existing gaps that are simply a function of the
length of time it has taken to see this project through, and with it, the need not to intro-
duce further delays.
1.2 Art on the Map of Religion:

Perspectives from Religious
Aesthetics
In view of how widespread and prominent the arts are in the terrain of religion, it can
be surprising how little attention has been paid in the past to putting the arts on the
map of religion, or to exploring them once they are located there. What can make this
even more surprising is the following realization: the definition and classification of the
arts, using concepts of the fine arts and aesthetics still influential today, was largely a
product of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and was carried out in such

a way as to create for the arts a relatively independent sphere.11 Religion, by contrast,
seems to have employed the arts on a more or less constant basis from time immemorial.
Accordingly, while it is not hard to understand the considerable degree of independence
modern arts have exhibited in relation to religion, it can be harder to understand why
religious thinkers and religion scholars have been so little inclined to view and interpret
religion on a regular basis in terms of art and artistic practices: not seeing religion just
as a patron of the arts, so to speak (which is well-documented) but seeing religion as in
some significant ways artistic, in itself.
If scholars of religion were sufficiently aware of religion’s artistic life as important to
religious identity, experience, and influence, moreover, then studies of religion, one
would think, would seldom go for long without including the study of its artistic expres-
sions and interpretations. Would not the study of the liturgy of the Mass, if not of eccle-
siology overall, almost inevitably include the study of Gothic architecture as, at least
historically, a major aesthetic mediator of the meaning and beauty of the Eucharist?12
Would the study of Hindu worship in the form of the central act of darśan—of seeing,
and being seen by, the deity—not need, almost inevitably, to consider the very look and
form of the image of the deity that is seen, and that sees? And, when darśan takes place
in the temple, would not the very design of the temple itself—its “sacred geometry,” as
some have termed it, along with its entrance-ways and towers, and the form of its dark,
womb-like inner shrine—would that not need all to be considered and contemplated in
a studious way?13
Or one can think of icons and their importance in the worship and identity of
Eastern Orthodoxy. Awareness of the place and importance of icons can help students
of Orthodoxy understand why, as Hans Belting has pointed out, the schism between
Eastern and Western churches that occurred in the eleventh century was not only doc-
trinal and political in what motivated it but was also liturgical and in some sense, at least,
“artistic.”14 One might even wonder (without license to do so) whether, in the many cen-
turies in which the use of icons was controversial, it might have made a difference to
understanding what was at stake (or at risk) if more attention had been given officially
to what today we could call their aesthetic features: that is, if there had been anything
like the attention paid to their look—how they were painted, and envisioned—that was
given to their doctrinal and theological justification, narrowly speaking. When it comes
down to it, is not the power of icons not only their power in being sometimes held, often
kissed, and consistently beheld a certain way? But also a peculiar power, too, in those
looks of saints and of Christ himself, their restrained and contained manner, convey-
ing nonetheless a penetrating awareness that also bestows protection and comfort?
Would the artistry of that rendering not affect one’s sense of whether it would be better
to destroy icons, or to regard them with devotion?
The thought even interjects itself that teachers of religion in general, due to their
expertise with texts and skills in abstract thought, may be unduly biased toward relying
on religious ideas and texts (including scriptures) and exaggerating their importance.
To this one could add the observation that how the arts are regarded in relation to reli-
gion is partly a matter of the self-understanding of religion and of faith itself, on the

INTRODUCTION 7
part of religious thinkers, teachers, and theologians. Many Protestant Christians in par-
ticular have tended, because of an emphasis on scripture and faith, to see various kinds
of aesthetic expression as worrisome, unbiblical, and possibly idolatrous. And though
Protestants have given considerable attention to music and literature as arts of religious
significance, it is only in recent times that Protestant scholars of Christian thought and
of both regional and global Christianity have begun, with any consistency, to accord
visual arts (now including film and digital media) the attention it seems these arts
warrant.15
It is also the case that the teachings to be found in the more philosophical forms of
Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, often hold that the higher reaches of spiritu-
ality and of religious knowledge are ones that must necessarily leave behind the more
material and sensuous world of the arts, with their ephemeral feelings and flights of
imagination, in favor of attaining elevated insights and states of mind free of all images
whatsoever. In Hinduism the more philosophical and aniconic approaches may be offset
or complemented, to be sure, by the way of devotion, bhakti yoga, which has spawned
all sorts of artistry. And the way of devotion is of course expounded powerfully and
commended highly in the Bhagavad Gita, a work that allows for multiple approaches to
liberation or moksha in any case. Even so, it is not hard to find teachings and schools of
thought in Asian as well as Western religions that appear to give only limited approval,
at best, to various kinds of art, although allowance is almost always made for everyday
people and for the special needs of those just starting out on the spiritual journey, who
may need both enticement and elementary education.
Before we try to assess possible implications of such observations, it would be well to
keep in mind, at this point, that there are at least two uses of mapping religion in rela-
tion to the arts. There is a descriptive or historical purpose that mainly wants to show
as adequately as possible the various ways (often complicated) in which art and reli-
gion have been, and continue to be, related, so as better to understand both religion and
art. And even then, the scholar’s map of Hinduism and the arts, for example, may look
different from one provided by a Hindu guru. Alternatively, there is a purpose that is
normative: seeing not only how art and religion have been related, but possibilities for
how they should be related, and the difference that might make for understanding both
religion and art. Both approaches are pertinent to religious aesthetics and to different
chapters of this Handbook.
At present there seems to be a growing consensus among those who study religion
and the arts that the arts have in fact played a far greater role in religion than was for-
merly acknowledged by scholars and religious thinkers alike, some of the Romantics
excepted. A cautionary word is needed, however, lest one be too quick to import a mod-
ern idea of art and impose that unconsciously onto practices and attitudes in eras or in
cultures with different notions of art, and where, for instance, the powers of art, while
less “aesthetic” in nature, might sometimes be talismanic—as when icons were taken
into battle to secure victory.
If one is raised with modern Western ideas of art as something original and cre-
ative and expressive, it may not be easy to remember that one cannot just look at the

prominence of icons and say that this constitutes a religious affirmation of art. Icons
in their religious use do not function mainly as art in the usual modern sense, espe-
cially not if one’s idea of art is still also under the influence of the now-fading mod-
ernist notion that art is an original creation simply to be appreciated for its own sake,
apart from function or context and so forth. In fact, there is no justification for treating
Hindu images as art in that sense, either, or the reclining Buddhas in Thailand, or even
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings.
Traditional cultures, and many religions today, do not see it as an imposition on
art, or a detraction from its true nature, to put art in the service of religion, where
it will be guided in some way by religious norms. Those religious purposes often
include making truths more memorable, teaching more pleasurable, preaching more
audible, and religious practice more enjoyable (especially for someone just entering
the stream or starting the spiritual path). Beyond that, the arts in religious settings
can be part of a process that evokes ecstatic or mystical states or that conveys a sense
of powerful presence. That is true of icons, traditionally. And it is true, in a differ-
ent way, of images in Hindu temples. The primary aims of those arts have to do with
the encounter between human and divine: with darśan, in Hindu terms—in which
divine and human visions meet one another—or, in Christian terms, with something
sacramental, where the invisible reality shines through the visible form. Neither is
mainly about aesthetic enjoyment in a narrow sense. Nor are such works intended
to draw attention to the artist. The artist in many traditional religious contexts is sel-
dom treated as a special kind of human being, let alone a genius (to use the term the
Romantics favored).
1.3 Considering Beauty
But what about beauty? The discussion has said little about that up to now. And it has at
least implied that religious traditions of using the arts, while giving them a significant
place and purpose, tend to be relatively inattentive to what is unique about the arts, even
in relation to attaining the goals of religious practice and devotion or faith. But don’t
many older religious traditions, at least on the more philosophical and theological side,
show an appreciation of beauty? And wouldn’t that be how they appreciate what is spe-
cial about art?
It would be easy, from our standpoint today, to make that assumption. In fact, it is
not unusual for someone to cite the definition of beauty given by Thomas Aquinas
(1225–1274) as though it were also a definition of art: “Beauty is that which gives plea-
sure in the very act of being perceived”—where “perceived” implies cognition, not
simply being noticed.16 But Thomas is not proposing a definition of art, about which
he has very little to say. For most ancient and medieval thinkers, from Plato and
Plotinus through Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, beauty is not necessarily a defin-
ing trait of art, although some art can be prized for being beautiful. If one forgets that

INTRODUCTION 9
ancient and medieval theories of beauty may not have art principally in mind, one
can become frustrated or confused trying to figure out what those theories might
mean for a theology, or religious philosophy of art. Again, even the American Calvinist
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), whose theology is much concerned with beauty, should
not be interpreted, as he sometimes has been, as intensely devoted to the arts. Edwards’s
thought is devoted much more to moral beauty, and divine, while recognizing that there
are beauties in the world of creation.
The word “art” and its equivalents in other languages (techne in Greek, translated
as ars in Latin) has been around since antiquity. Actual art, moreover—cave art with
astonishing animal representations and with indications of ritual use—goes back
35,000 years or more. (Inhabitants of the prehistoric caves in Spain and France also
played bone flutes that generated musical scales still used today.) Yet the word “art”
in the sense of “fine art,” meaning a beautiful aesthetic artifact enjoyable for its own
sake and having appreciable expressive or imaginative qualities, doesn’t come into use
in that sense until the eighteenth century. It is during that same period that the fine
arts are classified collectively as such. Even then, the list of fine arts (poetry, paint-
ing, music, and so forth) might include gardening, for instance, but might exclude
architecture. Furthermore, “art” develops its present-day connotations of being some-
thing creative, original, and expressive of personal emotions mainly with the rise of
Romanticism in the late eighteenth century—though of course even people in ancient
Greece, India, and China recognized that music and poetry have emotional powers
and could be inventive. Prior to Romanticism, what really distinguished art in gen-
eral, at least in the West, was that it exhibited knowledge, skill, and ability. In the
case of various arts, that was often in the interests of representation or pleasurable
imitation, possibly combined with teaching. Art could also be applied in a particu-
lar practice, such as ship-building. To reiterate: In the Occident, at least, only in the
eighteenth century did the most prominent distinguishing feature of art in general
become its beauty, although the idea that art is something made exceptionally well
and knowledgeably never entirely disappeared.
With regard to theological aesthetics, mistakenly interpreting theological love of
beauty for theological love of art could be a matter of harmless confusion were it not that
some very important ideas and ideals are at sake here. They concern what religion and
spirituality are about, at core, and whether the arts have a significant part in that—per-
haps even a unique part—or whether the arts are consigned to a minor role or a lower
plane of the spiritual life.
In ancient and medieval traditions of thought, to regard or understand something as
beautiful is generally to see it as intrinsically desirable. Beauty is something that beckons
by the radiance of its intelligible form, its luminosity, its unity, harmony, and propor-
tion.17 Beauty can draw the mind toward moral goodness or, indeed, spiritual or intel-
lectual truth, or the divine. By the time of the European Enlightenment, however, when
beauty became for the first time the principal defining trait of art, beauty had already
begun to lose some of its close association with goodness and truth. Or at least one could
say that the truth of beauty seemed to be very different from the truth apprehended by

the intellect. That loss is something lamented today by many religious thinkers who have
sought to recover something of the “great tradition” of aesthetics18 (though we should
note that the Western concept of aesthetics itself, as a branch of philosophy concerned
with art and beauty, comes from the eighteenth century).
From the perspective of religion, with its inherent concern for truth and morality, it
is easy to see why the ancient and medieval ideas of beauty can be deeply appealing to
theological and religious aesthetics today, in its constructive mode. Suppose, therefore,
one ponders a little longer the exalted ideas of beauty found in what is often termed the
“great tradition” of ancient and medieval European philosophy and theology. There, it is
generally thought that beauty, truth, and goodness (along with unity) are transcenden-
tals, because to some extent they can be ascribed to everything that so much as exists.
Although each adds something in experience, they are ultimately one, and mutually
convertible. Any human idea of beauty, however, is only an analogy, at best, of the real-
ity of the perfect beauty of the being of God. Furthermore, although beauty, truth, and
goodness are on intimate terms, to many ancient and medieval thinkers, art’s close ties
to the senses and to fiction and deception, as well as to the body and the emotions, all
tend to make its beauty deficient compared with the purer, immaterial beauty and truth
to be attained by the mind and spirit once one has ascended above the lower rungs of the
spiritual ladder, where art can provide a useful lift.
Some medieval works, to be sure, exhibit a potentially high view of art’s beauty
as a means of spiritual uplift. Dante’s Divine Comedy comes to mind, as well as the
writings of Abbot Suger on the renovation and furnishing of the Abbey Church
of St. Denis in what would come to be called the Gothic style. But in that time the
highest estimates of what we today call art tend to appear more in practice than in
theory: in the huge resources committed to the building of Gothic cathedrals, for
instance, instead of in discussions found in the works of scholastic philosophers and
theologians. And in this regard it is worth noting that it takes a reformulation of the
dominant medieval philosophy of beauty by a present-day thinker such as Richard
Viladesau to bring out fuller implications of the theory of transcendentals for inter-
preting aesthetic experience as we encounter it in art (though not only there). In the
human experience of beauty, Viladesau asserts, we feel a sense of fullness combined
with a longing for a total affirmation of the joy of existence. The condition of the pos-
sibility of this experience of beauty, he claims, is implicitly the ultimate Beauty of
infinite, divine bliss.19
Going beyond the medieval line of thought, however reinterpreted, it could also be
argued that the capacity of great art is not only to give a certain kind of joy in the appre-
hension of the radiance of beautiful form but also to express or disclose in unique ways
the abysses and heights of human experience. And when art discloses some more tran-
scendent truth, it may not be experienced as a truth accessible in the same way or to the
same degree through religious doctrine or through the intellect, but truth as poetic or
musical mystery. To make that suggestion, however, is to point toward a different line of
modern aesthetics, influenced by a different side of Kant’s thought.

INTRODUCTION 11
1.4 Artistic Ways of Being Religious
It was in the Enlightenment period, especially under the influence of aspects of the
thought of Immanuel Kant, that the judgment of beauty, whether of art or nature, was
treated as entirely subjective (though inter-subjective and shared). More and more,
beauty could be seen as a quality or property of something appreciated simply for its
own sake. Shortly thereafter, however, the Romantic association of art with imagination,
creativity, and heartfelt knowledge was developed in philosophies of art that saw art as
revelatory of the truths of the heart and of realities regarded as sublime and sacred. In
this form—which the English poet and artist William Blake embraced and embodied,
for example—art took on a prophetic and religious aura and function.
Thus, unlike Hegel, a number of thinkers afterwards—especially when influenced by
the Romantic movement—saw the future of religion not as increasingly separate from
art but as increasingly expressed through art and by art, and as transformed into a kind
of poetry. In the Victorian era, Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) gave bold expression to that
perspective when he argued that, in view of what he regarded as the moribund state of
religious dogma and the growing incapacity of thoughtful people to assent to doctrine
in some literal way, people would more and more need to turn to poetry for sustenance.
The poetry capable of sustaining us, Arnold claimed, would necessarily include the
poetry that is already part of religion: the literature of the Bible, in particular.20
Numerous religious thinkers and cultural critics in the present time have empha-
sized in new and diverse ways the religious importance of poetry, narrative, image,
metaphor, and aesthetic imagination, including the perception of beauty. Much of
that artistry can be thought of as secular, but sometimes for that very reason it is
seen as pressing into regions important to religion but beyond the compass of tradi-
tional religious thought, and without explicit religious allegiance.21 Theologians not
trained in the theory and criticism of the arts have rarely given extensive attention
to the arts as such. But it is relevant that, within their own sphere, Christian theo-
logians, for example, have viewed poetic and aesthetic media and imagination as in
some major respects integral to human liberation, social transformation, religious
proclamation, sacramental presence, and divine disclosure or revelation—although
necessarily open to critique (ideological and theological, and in certain instances
aesthetic). Many of these theologians have been indebted to the German-American
Lutheran Paul Tillich (1886–1965), or to the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth
(1886–1968), or else to the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988),
likewise Swiss.22 Others, including historians of Christianity and culture such as
Margaret Miles, are more aligned with feminist and liberationist theologies, and,
as in the case of Catherine Keller, with process theology and with Alfred North
Whitehead in particular.23 Still others are associated with Radical Orthodoxy, as
represented by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and, to a lesser extent, David
Bentley Hart.24

The classic modern study in the area of religious aesthetics as such, however, is
Gerardus van der Leeuw’s Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art.25 Although van
der Leeuw’s Christian understanding of things comes to the fore at the end of the book,
in his own constructive theological aesthetics, the bulk of the study provides a detailed
phenomenological description of arts in many eras and contexts, cultural and religious.
Van der Leeuw argues that the arts and religion began in a state of primordial unity, after
which each art later achieved its own integrity and autonomy, as did religion. Although
that process resulted in tension and rivalry, we can discern within each art—dance,
drama, literature, pictorial arts, architecture, and music—a trajectory that reaches
through conflict toward mutual dependence and unity with religion. Everything of the
essence of art considered as such relates to the Holy only by analogy, he says. And yet
Van der Leeuw can also say that holiness and beauty are already co-present in a primor-
dial way, even if holiness is never exhausted by beauty. Their unity preexists, awaiting
revelation.
While affirming aesthetic and artistic aspects of religion and revelation, van der
Leeuw and the other thinkers just mentioned would resist giving up on doctrine and on
truth-claims. Such thinkers typically affirm truths that could be regarded as metaphysi-
cal, yet they treat them as mysteries or (in some instances) as existential realities, not as
propositions or as rationally demonstrable absolutes in the manner of Hegel or of some
older kinds of natural theology.26
By comparison, in the Victorian era, Arnold had gone far toward surrendering doc-
trinal and metaphysical claims and toward embracing art as the viable remnant of reli-
gion and its consolations. And his contemporary, the Oxford scholar and essayist Walter
Pater (1839–1894), although not to be regarded as an aesthete in the narrowest sense, was
even more prone to make beauty and the aesthetic the center of life. In bidding adieu to
doctrinal theology and in following the lead of art, Arnold and Pater had something in
common with a postmodern “a/theologian” of our day, Mark C. Taylor. In a study that
seeks to uncover hidden links between modern art, architecture, and religion, Taylor
begins by examining what he terms the theoesthetics of the Romantics, while also tak-
ing into account Hegel’s depiction of the ascent from art through religion to philosophy
(said to retain and transform what was best in both art and religion). Taylor ends his
book, however, by finding in contemporary postmodern architecture and art a decon-
structive subversion of the unity of theology and aesthetics that was sought and ide-
alized in the Romantics. Taylor, at this point, openly advocates giving up not only on
God and salvation, but also on the Romantic hope that art might somehow deliver per-
manent freedom from structures of oppression. The artistry he finds most resistant to
oppression implies, instead, something less exalted, but an aesthetic education nonethe-
less: an “a/theoesthetics,” calling for an unending cycle of beginning and ending, and the
necessity of unthinking all we have thought with the name “God.”27
Postmodernism distances itself from any Romantic and uncritical celebration of art,28
and opposes any “totalizing” system such as those it often identifies with religion. On
the artistic side of things, even so, it sometimes seems that, in postmodernism of a cer-
tain sort, everything we can think or make is to be seen as art, after a fashion: a free

INTRODUCTION 13
play of self-referential images and figures, or a self-reflexive mirroring of metaphor for

its own sake, and without end: the sign without the signified; imagination as invention
without discovery. Here some would see an affinity with certain forms of negative or
apophatic theology where everything that can supposedly be said positively about God
must also, in some way, be unsaid. Others would find parallels in some of the more para-
doxical sides of Zen Buddhism, for instance, with its use of mind-boggling koans and
its arranged rock gardens that subtly, from moment to moment, change in the mind of
the one meditating there. The larger natural stones, which are set at irregular intervals
in the surface of curved but regular rows of raked gravel, can seem now like mountains
amid the desert, now like islands in the ocean, now again like something infinitely small
beneath the open sky.
In some ways that sense of opening and flux is more characteristic of the present
geography of religion and the arts than the fixed areas and boundaries usually called
to mind by the image of a map. Much of the discussion of religious aesthetics, in
contrast to theological aesthetics, situates itself in relation to multiple religious tradi-
tions, as well as having in its purview art and culture that is seen these days as spiritu-
ally evocative or provocative while nominally secular. The sheer variety of the arts,
and of religions as well, is increasingly part of the conversation around religion and
the arts. And though the present discussion has employed conventional terms such
as “religion” and “art” in the singular, it shares the assumption that those concepts
are constructs that are best thought of in pluralistic terms and with an awareness
that even religion, as we commonly understand it, is by no means a fixed concept.
The assumptions behind the somehow fluid “map” of religious aesthetics guiding this
Handbook’s very composition have thus been consciously dialogical and pluralistic
all along. That is true not only in terms of aesthetic theory but in terms of religious
study, art, and reflection.
1.5 Religion and Art as Mutually

Transformative
Religion and art have more internal multiplicity than has often been acknowledged,
and a more developed if complicated relationship than is often imagined in everyday
discourse and even in theory. Discussions of the relation between religion and the arts
regularly range from affirming that in some sense all art is religious to implying that
when religion and art come together it has nothing to do with what each is, at heart, but
constitutes something like a marriage of convenience, sometimes happy but often not.
It seems fitting to conclude by returning again to the question of how things look when
art appears on the map of religion, and noticing how different this can look depend-
ing on two quite different points of view: more-or-less traditional religion and more-or-
less conventional modern understandings of art. In seeking to develop a more adequate

picture of both the actualities and possibilities of art’s relation to religion, religious aes-
thetics can perhaps serve not just to provide a map but also to act as guide.
We start by observing again how, on the one hand, religions have made much use of
what today we call the arts, but almost always selectively in any given religious tradi-
tion, and often with caution, and an eagerness to exercise control. What various reli-
gions have chosen, artistically, often becomes part of their identity, as icons do for the
Eastern Church and as gospel music does within many branches of African American
and South African Christianity. Certain arts thus figure prominently in religious
practices. Nevertheless, religions have rarely expected the arts to take more than a
subordinate role or to help set the religious agenda through their artistic expression
and vision, so to speak, or to explore beyond the boundaries of conventional doctrine
and devotion, though that has not prevented it from happening. Religious authori-
ties have worried about artistic ambiguity, about unchecked aesthetic emotions and
an unregulated imagination, not to mention their perennial fears about idolatry and
sacrilege when arts are involved. Religions in their institutional form, in short, have
generally insisted on dictating the nature and function of their art, insofar as they are
able. That insistence limits the freedom of art to be exploratory or to serve as a form of
protest and critique. It also tends to miss ways in which artistry can be a higher means
of spiritual exercise, or of communal formation and transformation beyond setting a
certain tone or mood.
On the other hand, if one follows ideas about art that have been common in the
modern West—often descending from one side (only) of the theories of Immanuel
Kant (1724–1804)—then it is likely that, with respect to art, one will miss the artistic
relevance of religious aims and ideas, or at most will acknowledge only preconceptual
feelings shared by both art and religion. That is because modernist ideas of art, stress-
ing the relative autonomy of art, make religious concerns and commitments seem tan-
gential or irrelevant to art, almost by definition. That was at the heart of worries that
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) expressed about art and the aesthetic when he asserted
that art tends to aestheticize religion when it gets hold of it. Christ would want commit-
ted followers, Kierkegaard says, and therefore “scarcely desired or desires that anyone
after his death should waste his time, perhaps his eternal happiness, in painting him.”29
Kierkegaard was aware that in his time art had gone beyond creating a room of its own,
aesthetically, and was already starting to show signs of turning into a substitute for
religion.
These alternative and, at their most extreme, diametrically opposed ways of pictur-
ing art and religion are clearly displayed by a major study (though not well known in
English) published in 1909 by the Finnish scholar Yrjö Hirn, called The Sacred Shrine.
There Hirn embraces an evolutionary interpretation that argues that religion and art, or
their early equivalents, exist and blend together seamlessly in the earliest stages of their
development. But religion, when it reaches its peak, spiritually and intellectually, leaves
art behind. (Various religious traditions and teachings would agree, as we have seen.)
Meanwhile art, when it fulfills its highest potential, leaves religion behind, at least with
respect to doctrine, although in Hirn’s view there may be elevated works of religious art

INTRODUCTION 15
that, precisely as art, have no connection with positive doctrines of faith.30 (No theorist
of high modernist aesthetics could have said it better.)
If Hirn is right, and if that is the choice of how to picture what is true of art in
relation to religion—not only what has been but what essentially must be because
of the character and powers of each—which picture are we to accept? Is the better
option to affirm religion’s frequently pre-modern or anti-modern uses of art, which
give art a place but tend to screen out aesthetic qualities and to curb art’s capacity to
play a transformative role in religion at its highest or truest? Or should one approve
modern ideas of art, which make a special sphere for artistic creativity and aesthetic
experience essentially beyond the reach of religion, and at times becoming an alter-
native religion itself?
Of course it is not as though someone can use religious aesthetics to change
either art or religion. But a different understanding of the powers and purposes of
each in relation to the other can change thought and practice, and invite new pos-
sibilities. And so the first thing to be said is to point out that these are not the only
options. There is no reason internal to either art or religion that forces a choice
between the aesthetically oblivious approach and the religiously oblivious alternative
described above.
Furthermore, while both have pitfalls, both have important things to offer. One
great gift of modern aesthetics and of modern approaches to art is to help us see what
is special about art, and not reducible to “content” per se, or utility, or even to externally
determined standards of morality and religious truth. In art the medium conditions the
message and becomes part of it. The insights and disclosures of art are not isolated, but
neither are they amenable to full translation into abstract ideas and systems. Moreover,
what is most “religious” about a work of art, as expressive or beautiful, or sublime or gro-
tesque, will not necessarily be its nominal subject, as though a mere concept or repre-
sentation were determinative of its inner religious meaning.31 But neither does art alone
bring perceptions and ideas into full intelligibility and critical awareness. The dialectic,
therefore, between artistic expression and religious concepts is ongoing, with correction
and transformation on both sides.
At the same time, one great gift of long and rich traditions of religious uses of artistry
is to help us see that art does not thrive long as its own god. Contrary to what modernist
theories of art have often suggested, art breathes most freely and flourishes most abun-
dantly in an atmosphere of exchange with the rest of life and culture, including religion.
Without simply playing a subservient role, art can nevertheless be changed and moti-
vated by religion. Sometimes religion calls art into a new sense of art’s own vocation; and
sometimes art calls religion into new possibilities, and calls into question settled beliefs
and unimaginative ways of thinking and being.
Van der Leeuw thought that the opposition between art and religion was something
that could only be overcome in the eschaton, although he granted the possibility that, by
the grace of God, there are moments of such transcendence even now. That now seems
an overly rigid way of conceptualizing both art and religion, and a misrepresentation of
the character of both. In fact, we can see that art is at times very much a part of religion,

and religion very much a part of art. And if sometimes they are fused indistinguishably,
that need not result in the kind of Romantic understanding of the matter, in which reli-
gion often gets lost in art and defined only in aesthetic terms.
And so a different kind of religious aesthetics may be needed, transformative of
both “high modernist” and traditional ideas of art, and of ideas about religion too.32
According to this revision of aesthetic thought, there can indeed be almost purely
aesthetic perceptions and enjoyments, such as delighting in the form and texture
of a Mark Rothko (1903–1970) painting that is considered as pure abstraction. And
there can be religious perceptions and convictions without a discernible aesthetic
component, such as the sense of divine and human forgiveness, after repentance and
confession. But art (even modern art such as that of Mark Rothko) is rarely purely
aesthetic in that narrow sense. Certainly Rothko never saw what others termed his
color fields as merely sensuous and formal designs. And religion (such as in confes-
sion and the experience of forgiveness) is rarely devoid of a certain aesthetic feel of
what lies beyond mere thought, or—in the case of doctrine—the shaping influence
of story, symbol, and imagination. Consequently, art and religion often occupy the
same space, which they shape differently: sometimes in tension, but often together. If
art is sometimes dangerous and trivial, so is religion. And sometimes religion can be
trivial artistically, no doubt. Together, however, religion and art can be both mutually
corrective and mutually transformative, partly through the art that is within religion,
and the religion that is within art.
The late Catholic spiritual writer Henri Nouwen confirms the possibility of the mutual
interaction of art and religion in a book that has become something of a modern classic.
The famous Rembrandt painting in the Hermitage entitled The Return of the Prodigal,
which was found in Rembrandt’s studio at the time of his death in 1669, called forth
from Nouwen a series of reflections on the art as well as on the parable in the Gospel of
Luke. These reflections, imaginatively positioning the author in the place of the vari-
ous characters depicted in the painting, show subtly and poignantly, if not necessarily
intentionally, how a work of art can be both religious and aesthetic at the same time: how
Rembrandt in his painting of a particular yet paradigmatic moment of forgiveness is
making something new in terms of both faith and art.33
One does not need to turn to a painting with a conventional religious subject to see
a variation on the same thing, allowing a certain freedom to the interpreter to see with
eyes informed by ways peculiar to modern art when it opens in a veiled way to the invisi-
ble—to what one might call the “spiritual.” The well-known historian of culture, politics,
and art, Simon Schama, closes his eight-part series of presentations on The Power of Art
with a probing analysis of the art of Mark Rothko, especially a set of paintings originally
commissioned by Seagram’s for a New York restaurant—a commission Rothko eventu-
ally declined. Schama frames his discussion with a recollection of his first encounter
with these paintings at the Tate Modern museum in London in his youth and then, in
the end, with his observations of those same, seemingly “abstract” color-field paintings
in the present. He muses, but with considerable conviction: “So you see I got it all wrong
that morning in 1970. I’d thought seeing the Seagram paintings would be like a trip to

INTRODUCTION 17
the cemetery of abstraction—all dutiful reverence, a dead end.” On the video, Schama
continues:
Look at this one. What do you see? A hanging veil suspended between two columns?
An opening that beckons or denies entrance? A blind window? For me it’s a gateway.
If some of those portals are blocked, others open into the unknown space
that Rothko talked about, the place that only art can take us—far away from the
buzzing static of the moment and towards the music of the spheres. Everything
that Rothko did to these paintings—the column-like forms suggested rather than
drawn, the loose stainings, were all meant to make the surface ambiguous, porous,
perhaps softly penetrable: a space that might be where we came from or where we
will end up. They’re meant not to keep us out, but to embrace—from an artist whose
highest compliment was to call you a human being. Can anything be less cool than
this room in the heart of the Tate Modern? Further away from the razzle-dazzle of
contemporary art, the frantic hustle of now?
This isn’t about now. This is about forever. This is a place where you come to sit in
the low light and feel the eons rolling by, to be taken towards the gates that open onto
the thresholds of eternity, to feel the poignancy of our comings and our goings, our
entrances and our exists, our births and our deaths: womb, tomb, and everything
between.
Can art ever be more complete, more powerful? I don’t think so.34
Could anything be “less cool” than these rather audacious ruminations on the power of
art—on works by an artist who, although he disliked having his work identified as mysti-
cal, described painting in terms of both the tragic and the miraculous? Schama goes out
of his way to emphasize that Rothko, far from making art a subject to itself and simply a
visual affair in a narrow sense, repeatedly protested that he was not an abstract painter.
As for what the eye sees, much of what Schama describes here is visible only when the
invisible is also allowed to emerge. Earlier in the video, in approaching Rothko, a Jewish
artist, Schama lets us see his own Jewish roots—though he is an art historian famously
capable of insight when interpreting Christian art such as that of Rembrandt. He does
not hide Rothko’s struggle with the tragic in life, and his eventual suicide. Schama also
lets us see, near the end, the paintings Rothko did for the chapel in Houston dedicated to
his work. But for Schama those works sink too far into sheer darkness and feel trapped,
as though in a tomb.
And so the ending of Schama’s treatment of Rothko, guiding us to see “thresholds of
eternity” and to hear music of the spheres, discloses an element of transcendence we
might otherwise miss. These paintings, it is safe to say, could not be seen in the way both
Rothko and Schama would wish them to be seen without more than a hint of “religion”
in the aesthetic milieu, which hovers in the background of the act of seeing and helps
give art the power that Schama says takes us to a place only art can take us. It is not a
place foreign to the spirit of religion, surely, but a place outside the sphere of religion—a
place where religion can meet art on art’s terms.
In a pluralistic manner consistent with one aspect of postmodernism, it could
be argued that one need not decide once and for all among these various options

in approaching religion and art. The Handbook as a whole offers multiple perspec-
tives. Whatever may be one’s preferences at the level of theory, however, one can
discern signs that religion and art both seem to be surviving beyond what many
European Enlightenment and modern thinkers had expected, and in some cases
seem to be surviving together in ways that contemporary scholars, too, may have yet
to figure out.
Notes
1. For helping alert me to ongoing developments in the interaction between religion,
contemporary modes of spirituality, and new artistic media—including Internet resources
such as YouTube—I am indebted to Yohana A. Junker, who has assisted me in research.
2. Lindsay Jones, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004).
3. In the American Academy of Religion, the Arts, Literature, and Religion Section is the
most prominent in this field; but other sections within and adjacent to the AAR have
served important functions, including SARTS: the Society for the Arts in Religious and
Theological Studies, where Wilson Yates in particular, and more recently Robin Jensen,
have provided significant leadership. Many other societies could be named that are less
academic in nature or that are related to specific guilds within the arts—such as ARC: the
Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture; CIVA: Christians in the
Visual Arts; or ACE: Arts and Christianity Enquiry; and ACS: Architecture, Culture, and
Spirituality. One could mention periodicals, both academic and general, such as Literature
and Theology; ARTS: The Arts in Theological and Religious Studies; Religion and the Arts;
and Image. Other periodicals are tied to specific arts and guilds, such as The American
Organist and Faith and Form. Many more are connected with particular religious groups
and denominations. Scholarship on music and dance is documented in E. Gardner Rust,
The Music and Dance of the World’s Religions: A Comprehensive, Annotated Bibliography of
Materials in the English Language (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
4. For a review of the study of the arts in connection with religion, concentrating on Christian
theology and the United States, see Wilson Yates, “The Theology and Arts Legacy,” in
Arts, Theology, and the Church: New Intersections, ed. Kimberly Vrudny and Wilson Yates
(Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press), 1–28. For a detailed account of scholarship in literature and
theology, especially related to English literature, see David Jasper’s introductory chapter
(the second of two) in Andrew Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay, eds., The Oxford
Handbook of English Literature and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Other extensive discussions of various arts and religion, with bibliographies, are found
in Jones, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. See, for example, s.v. “Architecture,” “Art
and Religion,” various articles s.v. “Literature,” including “Critical Theory and Religious
Studies,” “Literature and Religion,” “Religious Dimensions of Modern Western Literature,”
as well as articles such as those s.v. “Poetry,” “Music,” and “Law, Religion, and Literature.”
5. Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 3, 273. Exactly how universal music
is even within religion is debatable, to be sure. As the chapter on music in this Handbook
discusses, many religious traditions and practices either prohibit music or carefully restrict
its use.

INTRODUCTION 19
6. Religion Past and Present: Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion, 4th ed., 13 vols., ed. Hans
Dieter Betz, Don S. Browning, Bernd Janowski, and Eberhard Jüngel (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Frank Burch Brown served as co-editor with Rainer Volp in the area of Arts, Culture, and
Media, with the assistance of Graham Howes. That was during the formative stages in
which the articles for the entire encyclopedia were planned for the German edition (JCB
Mohr), anticipating the forthcoming English publication as well.
7. Jessica Frazier, “Arts and Aesthetics in Hindu Studies,” The Journal of Hindu Studies 3
(2010): 1–11.
8. G.W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press–Clarendon, 1975), 9–14.
9. Robert Wuthnow, Creative Spirituality: The Way of the Artist (Berkeley : University of
California Press, 2001); and All in Sync: How Music and Art are Revitalizing American
Religion (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2003).
10. Neil MacGregor and Erika Langmuir, Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art (London: BBC
Worldwide; and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 2000.
11. See Paul Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” in his book Renaissance Thought
II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York: Harper and Row–Torchbook, 1965),
163–227; and Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980).
12. Early groundwork for such an approach to understanding the Mass in relation to its artistic
and architectural milieu was provided, indirectly, by studies such Émile Mle, The Gothic
Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1972);
and Yrjö Hirn, The Sacred Shrine: A Study of the Poetry and Art of the Catholic Church, 1909;
reprint edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). Fortunately, the latter’s overall usefulness as a
source of information is not seriously compromised by some of its dubious speculation on
the evolution of the relationship between religion and art.
13. For just such a study, see Diana L. Eck, Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, 3rd ed.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). See also Heather Elgood, Hinduism and the
Religious Arts, Religion and the Arts Series, ed. John Hinnells (London: Cassell, 1999), and
other volumes in the same series.
14. For an erudite treatment of icons and their multiple functions, see Hans Belting, Likeness
and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
15. A representative (but far from exhaustive) list of scholars and teachers with Protestant
ties or interests who have given prominent attention to the visual arts in particular might
include, in the United States, pastor Von Ogden Vogt and the theologians Paul Tillich
and Roger Hazelton, in earlier generations, and more recently historians and theologians
John Dillenberger and Jane Dillenberger, John W. Dixon Jr., Margaret Miles, Wilson Yates,
Robin Jensen, Doug Adams, Colleen McDannell, William Dyrness, Richard Kieckhefer,
Paul Corby Finney, Mia Mochizuki, David Morgan, and Sally Promey; and, in Great
Britain, George Pattison, Richard Harries, Tim Gorringe, David Brown, Keith Walker,
John Drury, Graham Howes, and Owen Chadwick. One example of a Protestant global
history of Christianity that takes visual expression as well as other arts into account is
Douglas Jacobsen, The World’s Christians: Who They Are, Where They Are, and How They
Got There (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2011). On the Catholic side, the names of
those with Catholic roots or ties who are attentive to the visual arts in Christian history
and theology are too numerous even to sample here, but surely could include Wendy

Beckett, Eamun Duffy, Mary Charles Murray, Thomas Mathews (Eastern Catholicism),
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (ecumenical and inter-religious), Kevin Seasoltz (liturgical
studies), and Richard Viladesau, Alejandro García-Rivera, and Aidan Nichols in theology.
See also bibliographies in other chapters in this Handbook.
16. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II–27.
17. For a lucid discussion of the history of ideas of beauty and other aesthetic concepts, see
Wladyslaw Tatarkiewcz, A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1980). For ancient and medieval aesthetics relevant to theology, see Oleg Bychkov,
Aesthetic Revelation: Reading Ancient and Medieval Texts after Hans Urs von Balthasar
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010).
18. This is a major theme in Hans Urs von Balthasar, various translators, The Glory of the
Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982–1989).
19. Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 138.
20. Matthew Arnold, Preface to God and the Bible (1875), in Complete Prose Works of Matthew
Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 7:378.
21. Much of the scholarship in religion and the arts has focused on arts in modernity and
postmodernity that are not explicitly religious. See bibliographies in other chapters in this
Handbook. Here it must suffice to note the pioneering work of scholars such as Nathan
A. Scott Jr., Amos Niven Wilder, and Stanley Romaine Hopper in religion and literature, of
Tom Driver in theatre, and of Jane Dillenberger, and John Dillenberger in religion and the
visual arts. For more, see Yates, “The Theology and Arts Legacy”; Hass, Jasper, and Jay, eds.,
The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, and the multi-chapter section on
Perspectives on Natural Theology from the Arts, in Russell Re Manning, ed., The Oxford
Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
22. See Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen, ed., Theological Aesthetics: A Reader (London: SCM Press,
2004), which contains numerous excerpts and which guides the reader to more extensive
primary sources.
23. For one religious aesthetic approach blending Martin Heidegger’s philosophy with
Alfred North Whitehead’s process thought, see F. David Martin, Art and the Religious
Experience: The “Language” of the Sacred (Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell University Press,
1972). Margaret Miles offers a feminist perspective as a historian of Christian thought
and interpreter of art and culture in her many books, including Image as Insight: Visual
Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985);
and The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (New York: Wiley-Blackwell,
2004). For process, liberationist, and feminist imagination in a pluralist mode that is
attentive to creativity and artistry, see Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider, eds.,
Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation (New York: Routledge, 2011).
24. As a beginning point, see John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds.,
Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999); and David Bentley Hart,
The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2003), which says little about art but engages in artistically relevant theory and theology.
25. Gerardus Van der Leeuw, trans. David Greene, 1963; reprint ed., Sacred and Profane
Beauty: The Holy in Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
26. For a very different kind of natural theology not dependent on older notions of rationality
and religion, and often more welcoming of the arts and aesthetics, see Manning, ed., The
Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology.

INTRODUCTION 21
27. Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), 318.
28. For ways in which critical judgment in aesthetics can be important to religion of whatever
period, see Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in
Religious Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
29. Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 255. See discussion of this and a
contrast with William Blake, in Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian
Taste, 26–61.
30. Hirn, 6. Hirn goes on to study Roman Catholic art in depth, declaring—controversially—
that he sees Catholicism as uniting within itself the lowest and highest elements of belief.
31. Of all modern theologians, Paul Tillich is the most insistent that there is a religious
dimension to art, even when secular—religion being for Tillich, a matter of ultimate
concern. See, for example, Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1959) and Paul Tillich on Art and Architecture, ed. John Dillenberger and Jane
Dillenberger (New York: Crossroad, 1987).
32. Movement in this direction is part of the purpose in Brown, Religious Aesthetics: A Theological
Study of Making and Meaning (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), on which
the present discussion builds.
33. Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son (New York: Doubleday-Image, 1994).
34. Simon Schama, The Power of Art. Disc 3 of a set of three DVDs (British Broadcasting
Company, 2006), from BBC2 broadcasts in 2006. Transcript by Frank Burch Brown. See
also Simon Schama, The Power of Art (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 398–439. The oral
text is quoted here because, in the book based on the video, Schama seems concerned that
his oral rhetoric may seem inflated when reduced to the print medium. In his book, he
slightly but perceptibly curtails the more metaphysical and religious overtones by omitting
his reference to the “music of the spheres,” for example, and to the “thresholds of eternity,”
although retaining other traces of the language of the infinite and the mysterious.

PA R T I
R E L IG IO U S A E ST H E T IC S
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C HA P T E R 2
AESTHETICS AND RELIGION
R IC HA R D V I L A DE S AU
2.1 Religious and Theological

Aesthetics: The Issues
The history and phenomenology of religions in general and of Christianity in particular

manifest a many-sided relationship between the realm of the aesthetic and religion in
its practice and theory. It will be the purpose of this chapter to sort out the major issues
and figures in religious and theological aesthetics, place them in historical perspective,
and suggest basic resources for their study. Many of the topics mentioned here will be
subjects of the following chapters.
Before attempting to uncover the issues and the varied contexts involved in the fields
of religious and theological aesthetics, it will be helpful to glance at the linguistic history
of the idea of “aesthetics” itself.
2.2 The Theoretical Concept of

Aesthetics
The term “aesthetics” (from the Greek aisthesis, meaning “perception by the senses”)
was coined by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten as the title
of his tract Aesthetica (1750). Earlier in the eighteenth century, English and Scottish
Enlightenment thinkers like Francis Hutcheson, Anthony Cooper, and David Hume
had already undertaken systematic reflections on beauty, taste, and sense knowl-
edge in general, and had inquired into the relationship of these to intellect and vir-
tue. Baumgarten’s work gave a new name to such reflections and established them as

a separate discipline. Aesthetics for him is the science of both sense knowledge and its
products, art and poetry. But the scope of aesthetics is practical as well as theoretical: not
merely the description of sensible knowledge, but its perfection. It aims at the attain-
ment of “beauty” in perception. In this sense, aesthetics is an art as well as a science: the
“art of thinking beautifully” and the “art of forming taste.”1
The term “aesthetics” quickly became established in German philosophy, but its
meaning varied. Kant at first restricted its application to the etymological sense: the
science of sense perception and its conditions. Later, however, he allowed a wider use.
Hegel, while acknowledging the etymological sense of the word, used it to mean study
of the beautiful, and especially the philosophy of the “fine arts.”2 The poet Schiller, in
his influential “Aesthetic Letters,” identified the object of aesthetics as “the beautiful
and art.”3 But these, in turn, represent the integration of all our human faculties. The
aesthetic therefore designates the condition of spirit (das Gemüt) in which sensation
and reason are active at the same time. Hence Schiller’s goal of an “aesthetic” education
toward “taste and beauty” is aimed at “the development of the whole complex of our sen-
sual and spiritual powers in the greatest possible harmony.”4
By mid-nineteenth century, the word “aesthetics” was established in English. The
meaning of the term, however, could vary. It could refer to the philosophy of beauty,
the laws of sensible perception, the study of art, the phenomenon of taste, or the active
appreciation of beauty. From early on, English usage gave prominence to the last two,
following the established interests of Anglo-Scottish philosophy. This modified the
extension of the term: in addition to being the name of a philosophical discipline, it
designates the exercise of a personal faculty or judgment, without necessarily implying
academic study. In this way “aesthetics” could be synonymous with “taste” in matters of
art or beauty.
2.3 Religious and Theological

Aesthetics
On the basis of this brief linguistic survey we may distinguish several interconnected
centers of interest within the field of aesthetics. For our purposes of examining specifi-
cally religious aesthetics, it will be helpful to make a primary division between aesthetics
as a practice or an art, and aesthetics as theory. Within each of these, there are different
aspects:
I. Aesthetics as practice or as art:

A. the standards (implicit or explicit) for making judgments and decisions about
beauty and feeling, about the symbolic level of thought, and about means of
communication through the arts: a person’s or community’s norms of “good
taste” or of feeling

AESTHETICS AND RELIGION 27
B. practice in accord with such standards, including:

1. the creation or performance of art
2. the use of art by individuals or communities
3. the appreciation of art or beauty: the exercise of taste or feeling
II. Aesthetics as theory
A. the study of the laws of perception
B. the general study of sensation and imagination
C. the study of “feeling” in the wide sense of non-conceptual or non-discursive
knowledge, combined with emotional response
D. the study of beauty
E. the study of art in general or of the fine arts in particular
F. the study of “taste,” or of psychological and intellectual responses to beauty or
to the arts, including possible standards for these responses
In the areas that concern the arts, emphasis may be placed more on the creative or
on the receptive side of aesthetic experience: the experience of the artist, or of the
audience.
In its widest extension, then, the term “religious aesthetics” can include both the prac-
tice and the study of aesthetics, in any or all of these senses, insofar as they relate to the
sacred or are practiced by communities of belief.
2.3.1 Religious Aesthetics as Practice

Virtually all religions contain some degree of practice of religious aesthetics—that is,
the making of judgments about perception, beauty, feeling, the arts, and the sensible
elements in knowledge and communication, insofar as they relate to God, revelation,
morality, community, or sacred values. Such topics will occupy most of the remainder of
this volume.
Religious aesthetics as practice generally centers on a community’s use of the arts
to mediate the sacred. This includes not only the explicit rules governing such use, but
also the standards and tastes implied in the creation of specifically religious genres
and forms of art, and in the feelings inspired (or intended) by them. The genres of use
may be more or less universal (chanting of religious texts or illumination of religious
books, for example), or may be specific to particular traditions, forms of thought, and
religious goals.
Thus we find in Hinduism a wide religious use of many artistic forms: as means of
meditation, as objects of devotion, as media of communication of religious teach-
ing, and as representations or evocations of the sacred. For example, statues of Shiva
Nataraja (Shiva the Lord of the Dance) not only serve as representations of the divin-
ity, through which offerings may be made to the personal God, but also represent
symbolically a whole theology of God’s creation, revelation and veiling, and salvation

of the worlds through Shiva’s cosmic dance. In the Hindu tradition both dance and
music are used as disciplines of the mind as well as the senses, leading the spirit to
meditation (classical ragas) or to ecstatic worship (bhajans or devotional hymns).
Tantric Buddhism encourages an imaginative form of meditation in which the mind
“creates” divine beings and participates in their attributes, as a means of finally over-
coming the realm of illusion of which they are part. Zen Buddhism, influenced both
by the Mahayana doctrine of “emptiness” (shunyata) and by Taoist principles of
economy, simplicity, and spontaneity, has created unique forms of calligraphy and
painting which, combined with poetry, are intended to express and lead to enlighten-
ment. Confucianism developed a practice and theory of ritual and of music that were
considered crucial to integrating both individual life and that of the Empire into the
cosmic order. Examples could be multiplied from these and many other forms of
religion.
The practice of religious aesthetics—in the sense of use of the arts for sacred pur-
poses, and the development of norms and standards for such use—has also charac-
terized Christianity nearly from its beginnings. Christian theology, doctrine, and
church discipline have directly or indirectly dealt with many of the issues that fall
under the heading of theological aesthetics: the theology of revelation, the use of
the arts, especially images and music, the relation of beauty to God and to ethics.
With the exception of rhetoric, which was a subject of reflection because of its rela-
tion to preaching, ecclesial aesthetic criteria generally developed accidentally and
in an ad hoc manner. As with dogma, the definition of official church positions on
aesthetic matters was frequently the result of the rejection or correction of per-
ceived errors.
Above all, however, Christian religious aesthetics shows itself implicitly in the
artistic practice of Christian communities. A primary locus is found in the specifi-
cally Christian artistic genres and forms that developed over the centuries: in ritual
(for example, the Eucharistic liturgy, or Holy Week services); in rhetoric (the homily
and sermon); in painting and sculpture (genres like the crucifix, the “Madonna and
child,” the Byzantine icon); in music (sacred oratorios, the Passion); in architecture (the
basilica church; the cathedral); in literature (sacred poetry, legends of the saints); and
in mixed forms (the illustrated book of hours, sacred dramas). In addition, we may see
an implicit religious aesthetics in the development of certain artistic styles that are inti-
mately connected with the religious consciousness and feeling of particular eras: the
monastic Romanesque, evoking the notion of a spiritual “city of God” in contrast to the
world; the ecclesiastical Gothic, embodying in its architecture the Scholastic theology
of light and in its sculpture and art the affirmation of the earth as God’s good creation
and as the locus of incarnation; Renaissance religious painting and sculpture, showing
the combination of the Christian message with humanism and with Platonic idealism;
modern abstract art, rejecting materialism and attempting to connect directly with
ideal spiritual forms.

2.3.2 Religious Aesthetics as Theory:

Christian Theological Aesthetics
Several religious traditions (especially within Hinduism and Buddhism) have reflected
explicitly on aesthetics in one or more of the senses defined. This chapter will focus on
specifically Christian aesthetics, because it is primarily in Western Europe that the par-
ticular concepts of aesthetics and religion referred to above have their roots.
Christian religious aesthetics centers not merely on a subjective experience of tran-
scendence, but on encounter with the personal God revealed in Jesus Christ. Hence the
theory of Christian religious aesthetics may be called “theological”—“speaking about
God.” Just as several different objects or centers of interest are possible for “aesthetics,”
so likewise for Christian theology. In a schematic way we may discern three intercon-
nected objects of theology’s attention: God; faith (or religious experience); and (in
extension of the second) theology itself.
In its broadest sense, the word theology is sometimes used to include any discourse about
God. In this sense of the word, which includes the “primary” language about God in the
Scriptures, theology may use images, metaphors, and other artistic means of expression.
We might therefore speak of an “aesthetic theology” that speaks imaginatively in metaphors
and that attempts to appeal through the beauty and coherence of its notions and images.
Rhetorically artful preaching might be an instance of such aesthetic theology. In its stricter
sense, the term theology usually refers specifically to the “secondary” level of speech about
God: the conceptual rather than the poetic form of discourse. Its immediate goals are knowl-
edge, understanding, and judgment, rather than feeling or emotional response. Hence theol-
ogy is traditionally thought of as being analogous to a science, rather than an art.
Theological aesthetics, then, encompasses both theoretical and practical pastoral
issues. It can include questions corresponding to any of the senses of “aesthetics” when
considered with regard to any of the objects of “theology”: God, religion, or the method
and hermeneutics of speaking of the sacred.
2.4 Major Issues, Movements, and

Figures: Historical Background
The church’s practice in the use of the arts will be the subject of other articles in this
volume. We shall therefore limit ourselves here to a brief examination of theoretical
theological considerations. This overview is presented without any pretence of com-
pleteness, with the purpose of indicating directions for further research and study.
Historically, Christian theological aesthetics has primarily been concerned with three
interrelated and overlapping issues: 1) mediation of revelation and tradition by sensible

symbols; 2) the relation of beauty to God; 3) the theological justification of sacred art
(including music). The last includes theologically motivated considerations of the
appropriate style or form of these arts for sacred use.
2.4.1 Theologies of Encounter with God through

the Sensible World
Among the most fundamental issues at the root of any Christian theological aesthetics is
the knowledge of God through nature and through revelation and its transmission. How
can the infinite and spiritual God be communicated through the sensible world? How
can the transcendent and ineffable be expressed to a finite mind that knows through the
physical senses? Such questions represent the theological side of “aesthetics” in its fun-
damental meaning: the theory of knowledge through sensation.
Closely related is the issue of religious epistemology. How is the message expressed
in word—and particularly in the Scriptures—related to the wider world of symbolic
expression? How are the non-conceptual modes of knowledge and expression related
to concept and theory? How is discursive intellectual knowledge related to feeling?
Intimately connected to these issues is the further question of the validity of art and
music as means of encounter with God, as vehicles for transmitting revelation, and as
elements in Christian worship.
That God is revealed in the world through sensible symbols—words, mental visions,
and actions—is presupposed by the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. The early church
Fathers frequently interpreted the Scriptures in the light of Platonic philosophy, which
proposed the idea of an “ascent” of the mind to God through the levels of being, from
matter to spirit and from spirit to its source. (It should be noted that Platonism can be
two-sided in its consideration of the material world. It may emphasize the positive value
of the world as a sign leading to God; or it may evaluate the world negatively, as that
which must be transcended in the “ascent” toward spirit.)5
At the same time, the theology of the Patristic and early medieval periods stressed the
idea of God’s “Word” (logos), a hypostasis of the divine being that was partially revealed
in the Old Testament and finally became incarnate in Christ. As an intelligible principle,
the Word can also be described as “light.” Neo-Platonic theology proposed the image
of being as light emanating from God, growing progressively less intense as it descends
into the “darkness” of non-being. In Old Testament revelation, the Word enlightened
prophetic minds. In the incarnation the Word itself became flesh and “the light shone
in the darkness” (John 1:4). Since knowledge was conceived primarily as mental “illu-
mination,” comparatively little emphasis was placed on its concrete sensible dimension,
which was in any case to be left behind in the mind’s ascent to the spiritual. (In certain
cases, this could apply even to the historical humanity of Christ, which was considered
primarily as the fleshly embodiment of his divinity).
In the period of high scholasticism in the West an attempt was made to reconcile
the Platonic theology derived from Augustine with the “empiricism” of Aristotle. This

allowed the development of an explanation of revelation that included the capacity of the
sensible world to serve as the symbolic medium for God’s communication to humanity.
Thomas Aquinas, for example, still considers revelation to be essentially the infusion
of a supernatural “light”; but what it “illumines” is an intelligible form (species) in the
mind. Such “forms” may be placed directly into the mind by God, but normally they are
derived by the intellect from the senses. Hence the senses can provide the material signs
that are “illumined” first by the mind and then by divine action to become revelation.6
This implies that the material world—because by creation it already “participates” in
God’s being—has the intrinsic possibility of being “elevated” to the supernatural level to
become a means of encounter with the self-revealing God.
Thomistic epistemology also permits the affirmation of an “analogy of being.” Certain
attributes that indicate perfection in existence are predicated both of God and of crea-
tures, because in creatures they are a participation of divine being. For this reason, every
finite being is intrinsically a “symbol” or an “image”: a created reality that refers to some-
thing beyond itself. The existence of such natural symbols is the ultimate ground for the
possibility of the use of humanly constructed symbols in a similar way.
While it is only “transcendental” qualities (being, unity, truth, goodness, beauty) that
can be affirmed strictly “analogously” of God and creatures, the analogous quality of
being itself (and therefore of all positive realities and relations) means that even purely
creaturely qualities may be used “metaphorically” to point to attributes or acts of God,
because of some similarity of those created realities to a quality of God, especially in
God’s relation to us.7 Thus, God may be compared to a good shepherd, to a potter mak-
ing vessels, to a victorious warrior, to a loving husband, etc.; conversely, such figures
may be thought of as “images” of God.
The analogy of being implies that the mind is always dynamically oriented to the full-
ness of Being, which is beyond any of our concepts. In analogous and metaphorical lan-
guage about God, therefore, we “intend” (Latin in-tendere, “move toward”) a reality that
is beyond the content of our words or symbols.8 The extension of this idea allows for a
wide use of symbols that point toward a transcendent object that is never grasped. (For
this reason Aquinas, in contrast to Augustine and later Calvin, can approve of the use
of sacred song even if the words are not understood; the “intention” of the singing itself
makes it prayer.9 )
The notion of the analogy of being allows a further expansion on the Platonic “ascent”
of the mind to God. It implies the world is essentially intelligible. Creation consists of
ordered patterns, repeated in endless variations, all of them referring the mind to their
ultimate source. Because of the economy of redemption, even sin is finally included in
this ordered whole. This worldview is exemplified in the medieval treatises called spec-
ula (“mirrors”), which use analogy and allegory to show how all things “reflect” God and
each other. (The most celebrated of these, the Speculum Maius of Vincent of Beauvais,
considers the “mirrors” of nature, doctrine, history, and morality.) The world, then, may
be seen as a work of art that glorifies God, its maker. The human arts (intellectual and
practical) both show this mirroring and contribute to it on a conscious level, thus fur-
ther glorifying God, the supreme Artist. (So, for example, music was intended to echo

the cosmic “music of the spheres.”) Bonaventure could therefore speak of how the (lib-
eral) arts all lead back to theology (Reductio Artium in Theologiam) and could even refer
to God as the supreme Act of artistry (summa Ars).
A primary area of concern for theological aesthetics has been the question of the rela-
tion of God to beauty. In what way is God beautiful or sublime? Does earthly beauty—
and the pleasure it affords—lead toward God, or is it an obstacle to spiritual progress?
How is beauty related to the cross of Christ and to Christian asceticism?
Already in the writings of some church Fathers we find reflections on the beauty of
God. Major Eastern representatives of this tradition were Gregory of Nyssa and the
writer called Pseudo-Dionysius. Augustine of Hippo emphasized the beauty of God and
the role of desire for the beautiful (both natural and artistic) in drawing us to God. At
the same time, he emphatically points to the danger that earthly beauty may keep us
enthralled on a level lower than the ultimate. He speaks explicitly of the moral beauty of
the cross of Christ, which challenges our identifications of beauty with mere pleasure.
The medieval scholastics developed a theory of beauty as a transcendental quality of
being, ultimately identical to goodness and truth. (Later Scholastics debated whether
“beauty” should be considered a separate “transcendental,” or should be included as an
aspect of “the good.”) Beauty has its preeminent exemplar in God, and all beings “analo-
gously” participate in it. From the thirteenth century onward, this analogy and partici-
pation were increasingly understood in terms of Aristotelian “causes,” which seemed to
accord better with the doctrine of creation than the “emanationist” scheme inherited
from (neo-) Platonism. However, with Nominalist philosophy’s denial of the analogy of
being, the metaphysical connections between God and beauty were largely broken. The
Kantian critique of metaphysics further weakened the ontological connection between
God and beauty. Nevertheless, the American Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards
wrote eloquently of the beauty of God on the basis of the doctrine of creation. During
the Romantic and Victorian periods, the critique of metaphysics and of the literal truth
of Scripture frequently led to the consignment of God and religion to the realm of feel-
ing, while intellectual knowledge was ceded to the empirical sciences.
2.4.2 The Justification of Sacred Art

The use of sacred art and its historical justification in Christianity will be the subject of
other articles in this volume. We therefore confine ourselves to a few general theoretical
remarks.
The essential theological principles justifying the use of sacred art in Christianity
emerged from the iconoclast (“image-breaking”) controversies of the seventh and
eighth centuries. The iconodule (“image-venerating”) theology is epitomized in the
writings of the Syrian patriarch John of Damascus (Yohanna ibn Mansur; 676–749). He
argues that the incarnate Christ is the image of the unseen God (Col. 1:15–20), and even
though his divinity as such cannot be portrayed, in portraying his human figure one
portrays the single person who is divine and human. Hence to deny the possibility of

portraying Christ is effectively to deny the reality of the incarnation. The honoring of
images is based on analogous argumentation from Scripture. Humans are made in the
image of God; in honoring God’s image in each other, we honor God. Similarly, when
we venerate painted images, the honor is directed to the person portrayed. Behind this
iconodule position was a (Platonic) notion that images participate in the reality of their
exemplar, and effect its presence to the beholder. The iconodules also argued that there
were divinely produced icons or images; that their use, although not found directly
in Scripture, was affirmed by Tradition; and that their legitimacy was shown by the
wonder-working powers some icons possessed.
Western theology generally accepted the decrees of the Second Council of Nicaea
(787) on images,10 but its justification of images (both in the medieval church and in
response to Reformation iconoclasm) was based much more on their didactic value.
Western theologians constantly repeat the saying of Pope Gregory the Great (reigned
590–604) that the illiterate can see in pictures what they are unable to read in books.
Sacred art was also seen as having a cultic function as adornment or “decoratio”—i.e., as
a means of making the church decus (fitting, suitable, beautiful) for the worship of God.
This embellishment or beautification was seen as a proclamation and extension of the
universal reflection of God’s beauty in creation referred to above. It was therefore also a
means of the “ascent” of the mind from the material to God. Western theology therefore
accorded to images primarily a functional role, rather than the quasi-sacramental status
that they attained in the East.
The classical Christian theology of sacred images may be seen to occupy something
of a middle position between the aniconism of Islam and rabbinic Judaism11 on one
side, and on the other, the manifold images of divinity in Hinduism (and some forms
of Buddhism), employed as mediators of both message and presence. 12 In comparison
to these traditions, crucial to the justification of the Christian sacred image is the affir-
mation of a historical incarnation of God in Christ. However, it should be noted that
the Christian understanding of images may tend in two opposed directions. The sacred
image may be seen as a “window” onto another, transcendent world (as in the Byzantine
icon). In this case, the image tends to eschew naturalism in favor of symbolism, and
there is a certain self-negation of the image. Or Christian sacred art may affirm precisely
this world, in its worldly and sensible reality, as the locus of God’s action and as a sign of
the transcendent (as in most Western sacred art, especially since the Renaissance).
A recurrent issue in the history of Christian reflection on the arts (even granted their
theoretical legitimacy) has been the tension between art and asceticism. The pursuit of
beauty is a form of pleasure; how does this relate to the religion of the cross? St. Basil the
Great and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, among others, complain of the association of art with
luxury and with the neglect of love of neighbor. Also classic is the charge that art is a dis-
traction: insofar as it seeks beauty or pleasure, it serves a goal that is independent of God
or morality. How then is beauty related to goodness? How is the pursuit of beauty related
to the quest for virtue? These questions became explicit in the Enlightenment and espe-
cially in Kantian aesthetics. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s radical distinction
between the aesthetic attitude and the ethical remains influential in such discussions.

2.5 Contemporary Directions
2.5.1 Theoretical Theological Aesthetics

2.5.1.1 The Problem of Secularization
Since the renaissance, Western thought has undergone increasing differentiation of con-
sciousness: the separation of life and thought into theoretically independent spheres.
Western culture’s “secularization” entailed the separation of religion not only from the
sciences and political life, but also from the arts. These increasingly looked to worldly life
for their subject matter, and to the secular marketplace (rather than ecclesiastical or aris-
tocratic patronage) for their economic sustenance.13 The independence of the arts from
religion would also raise the theoretical question: is art an end in itself—and, if so, can it
serve a purpose outside itself, including morality or religion or even beauty?14
The positive side of this development was underlined by Abraham Kuyper (pas-
tor, scholar, and one-time Prime Minister of the Netherlands) in a series of lectures at
Princeton University at the turn of the twentieth century. For Kuyper, the “alliance of
religion and art represents a lower stage of religious, and in general of human develop-
ment.”15 Kuyper follows Hegel and Von Hartmann in holding that “the more . . . Religion
develops into spiritual maturity, the more it will extricate itself from art’s bandages,
because art always remains incapable of expressing the very essence of Religion.”16
Religion and art are different “life-spheres”; in early stages, they may be scarcely distin-
guishable, but with “richer development” they separate.
For Kuyper, Calvinism makes a positive contribution to both religion and art by
insisting on their separation. Calvin’s critique of sacred art was meant “to release reli-
gion and divine worship more and more from its sensual form and to encourage its vig-
orous spirituality.”17 At the same time, Calvinism affirms the independent value of art:18
“Our intellectual, ethical, religious and aesthetic life each command a sphere of its own.
These spheres run parallel and do not allow the derivation of one from the other . . . Art
also is no side-shoot on a principal branch, but an independent branch that grows from
the trunk of our life itself.”19 Each of these includes the totality of existence, but under
different aspects.20 All the arts come from God, the supreme Artist and supreme beauty,
as a gift to believers and unbelievers; art is a manifestation of “common grace,”21 and
serves the glory of God apart from the economy of salvation.22
2.5.1.2 Responses to Secularity: Theologies of Beauty and the Arts

Kuyper’s writings had great influence on twentieth-century Reformed thought, spur-
ring a new quest for a “natural theology” in which God’s beauty has a prominent
place. Similar movements in contemporary religious aesthetics pursue the notion of
finding God in beauty (or sublimity) in general, both in nature and art. A retrieval of
the thought of Jonathan Edwards has played a significant role for some thinkers (e.g.,
Edward Farley).

A somewhat different direction is represented by Karl Barth and Hans Urs von
Balthasar. Like Kuyper, both developed a notion of the divine beauty from the Biblical
notion of God’s “glory.” But for Barth, God is beautiful in a unique way. Hence there is
a certain danger in the use of the word “beauty,” because of its connection with worldly
ideas of mere pleasure and enjoyment. Balthasar, unlike Barth, connects the idea of
God’s “glory” with the scholastic idea of the analogy of being and with the notion of
beauty as a transcendental. At the same time, he explicitly agrees with Barth in distin-
guishing between the “transcendental beauty of revelation” in Christ and “inner-worldly
natural beauty.”23 The Christian idea of beauty must include even the cross and all that
it implies for Christian life: things that a worldly aesthetics discards as unbearable.24
Nevertheless, God’s self-revelation, like God’s self, is necessarily and self-evidently
beautiful. It is for this reason that Balthasar uses the term “theological aesthetics” for his
theology of revelation.
Theologians inspired by Balthasar have concentrated primarily on the theologi-
cal connections between beauty, creation, and incarnation. (It should be noted that
Balthasar speaks primarily of the beauty of ideas and of the “theo-drama” of God’s
relation to humanity. He gives little attention to the arts, with the exception of litera-
ture; and even there, his interest is primarily in content. Thus, while his thought has
been very influential in some theoretical areas of theological aesthetics, it has had
comparatively little direct effect on the study of the relation of art to religion.)25 An
alternative, less intra-ecclesial approach may be found in the application to art of the
fundamental theologies of Transcendental Thomism (Rahner, Lonergan, Lotz). Here
the Thomistic-Aristotelian epistemology of “spirit in the world” is retrieved in light of
the critical turn of Kant. The present author has contended that these critical philosoph-
ical groundings for a theology of revelation can likewise be used to establish a theology
of the arts. In a somewhat similar vein, Anglican theologian David Brown in particular
has argued extensively for a wide “sacramental” view of the world and the arts, com-
menting on the religious dimensions of much non-sacred art.
An overlapping concern is represented by theologians who have taken issue with the
divorce of art from the sacred that has characterized the era of secularization. While
recognizing the validity of an independent sphere of secular art, these have attempted to
provide a renewed theoretical basis for sacred art.
A pioneering thinker in this area of theological aesthetics was the polymath Gerardus
Van der Leeuw. In his ground-breaking study of the holy in art,26 he attempts to arrive
at a phenomenological description of each art form,27 concentrating particularly on its
“comprehensible associations” with the sacred.28 He includes in each chapter a descrip-
tion of these associations (negative as well as positive), analyzing examples of diverse
works of art through a broad range of religions. He attempts to indicate the “theological
significance” of each form of art: that is, how it conveys religious meaning, and what
“points of access” it provides to the holy.29 He finds the point of commonality between
religion and art in the doctrine of Christ as the saving image of God. Against the
Biblicism of Kuyper, he points out that words, and in particular the Scriptures, are also
bearers of images.

From mid-twentieth century a number of theologians (notably Paul Tillich and John
and Jane Dillenberger) have followed the direction of Van der Leeuw’s studies, analyzing
the ways in which specific arts can function to convey sacred meaning, both outside and
within religious settings. One direction in the theology of sacred art has been a rein-
terpretation of the icon as a special form of art outside the norms of secular aesthet-
ics (Balthasar, Bulgakov). Another approach calls for a reexamination of the notion of
aesthetics in general. Some have challenged the Hegelian presuppositions of Kuyper’s
religious epistemology, as well as the presumption (inherited from Kant) that the arts
in their purity should serve no “extrinsic” goal. Notable in this area are the writings of
Frank Burch Brown. Some, including the present author, have explored the validity of
the arts as a genuine way of encountering and thinking about the transcendent, one that
is not inferior to verbal/conceptual modes of thought.
The problem of the relation of the arts to morality has also been a concern in modern
theological aesthetics. In a frequently neglected classic entitled What is Art?, novelist
Leo Tolstoy summarizes the history of aesthetics and presents his own theory. Tolstoy
rejects the idea that art serves “beauty,” a word that for him designates a purely subjec-
tive experience of pleasure.30 The essence of art is the conveying of feeling from the artist
to others. Good art with regard to form is art that succeeds in conveying feeling.31 Good
art with regard to content is art that conveys either explicitly moral feeling—namely,
the Christian feeling of universal love of all people—or basic human feelings that can be
appreciated by all.32 By these criteria, Tolstoy judges most of Western art to be “bad art.”
That such art is nevertheless prized by a certain class of people is the sign that their tastes
have been perverted. Bad art is a moral evil not only because it conveys immoral feel-
ings, but also because it is exploitative: the production of such art for the upper classes
depends upon the labor of workers who cannot appreciate it.
More nuanced than Tolstoy’s view is the neo-Scholastic theory of art proposed by
Jacques Maritain. Maritain’s approach emphasizes the making of art. He insists that art
as such has no moral purpose; it is dedicated solely to the good of producing a particu-
lar work. However, that work must then also be considered within a larger moral and
metaphysical framework. Maritain holds that the arts can serve faith in the way that
nature can be subsumed by grace; and when this occurs, they are themselves deepened.
Moreover, the arts can act as moral educators, not merely by communicating a moral
content, but precisely in their aesthetic function, by concentrating our attention on
something estimable in and for itself, apart from the ego. A similar position has been
argued persuasively, albeit in a different context, by twentieth-century philosopher
and novelist Iris Murdoch. In line with these ideas, the present author has pursued the
notion of the need for “aesthetic conversion” in Christian use of the arts.33
2.5.2 Retrieval of Art as a Text for Theology

Modern Western theology (since the Enlightenment) placed strong emphasis on
the propositional forms of faith. Academic theology largely lost explicit contact with

pastoral practice and the arts. Such theology took its sources primarily in the Scriptures
and in the transmission of dogma. At the same time, secular art history frequently
treated the religious content of artworks as incidental, and concentrated on matters of
technique, social context, and secular aesthetics.
In the twentieth century, theology began to retrieve a more intimate relationship
with practice and with non-conceptual intelligence. Already by mid-century, Roman
Catholic theologian Yves Congar considered the artistic “monuments” of the church as
an important locus of Tradition. More recently, David Brown has argued for renewed
attention to Tradition, including the arts, in opposition to the naïve Biblicism that has
reigned in some twentieth-century theologies. F. B. Brown has extended David Tracy’s
notion of the religious “classic” to include styles and genres in religious art. Historical
studies of Western art began taking more seriously its religious dimension. The works
of art historians Émile Mâle and Louis Réau remain important resources in this area.
Other more recent writers (including the author) have taken the arts seriously in discus-
sions of theology of particular periods or themes. In a notable step, the editors of the
currently progressing Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception have included art as one
of the categories of “reception” of the Scriptures.
2.5.3 Some Twenty-First-Century Concerns

The postmodern crisis of cultural values has prompted responses in at least two direc-
tions in religious aesthetics. On the one hand, there is the option for a particular tradi-
tion and its norms; on the other, there is the attempt to find some basis for universality
or at least for conversation across different traditions. Is “taste” in religion or aesthetics
simply subjective and relative? Is there some basis for some normative notion of reli-
gious taste, whether based in biology, psychology, ontology, or revelation? Is there a spe-
cifically Christian taste? The work of F. B. Brown suggests an “ecumenical” concept of
taste, and raises many questions for further exploration.
As we have noted above, there has frequently emerged a tension between Christian
ethics and aesthetics. Twentieth-century Liberation Theology raised religious con-
sciousness of the plight of the oppressed in the third world and of the gap between rich
and poor nations. Is there a place for aesthetics in a theology of liberation? At the same
time, the world has become increasingly aware of an ecological crisis. Can religious aes-
thetics have a place in addressing this situation?
It might be suggested that the use of the notion of “beauty” to designate one of the
goals of liberation can serve as a critical counter-balance to ideas of progress and devel-
opment that are exclusively material in scope, to the neglect of the spiritual and aesthetic
dimension of humanity. A religiously “converted” aesthetics may provide images and
ideas of beauty that entice us to the love of neighbor and of the world in a more effective
way than the preaching of duty.
Religious aesthetics in the present century also address the plurality of world cultures
and religions. Speaking of problems of global development, Pope John Paul II warned

against a “slavish conformity of cultures” to models derived from the West. “Western
cultural models,” he states, “are enticing and alluring because of their remarkable sci-
entific and technical cast, but regrettably there is growing evidence of their deepen-
ing human, spiritual, and moral impoverishment.”34 The opening of our idea of beauty
to the contributions of other religious and cultural traditions may provide yet deeper
resources for persuasive image of virtue. (To cite a single example: the “three jewels”
mentioned in the Tao Te Ching—modesty, economy, and deep love—have profoundly
influenced the aesthetics of Zen. Could they perhaps offer to Christianity as well a model
that both expands its tradition and addresses the need for an environmentally conscious
way of living and delighting in life?) Religious aesthetics would seem to be particularly
well-suited to the kinds of challenges that arise from the present situation; for beauty
and art are means by which we are perhaps most easily and persuasively invited to share
in the worldviews and values of others, and through which we can graciously present
our own.
Notes
1. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, 1, 14; Metaphysica 607, 662. Quoted in
Iesu Iturrioz, S. J., “Metaphysica generalis,” in Professores Societatis Iesu Facultatum
Philosophicarum in Hispania, Philosophiae Scholasticae Summa, vol. I, 614.
2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On Art (translation of Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik) in
Hegel, On Art, Religion, Philosophy. Introductory Lectures to the Realm of Absolute Spirit,
edited by J. Glenn Gray, 22.
3. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, edited and
translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, 2.
4. Ibid.
5. For a brief but insightful treatment of varieties of Platonic thought and their relation
to art, see David Brown, God and Enchantment of Place. Reclaiming Human
Experience, 61–79.
6. See for example Aquinas’s treatment of prophetic revelation in Summa Theologica IIª–IIae,
q. 173 a. 3.
7. See Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 4 a. 2 and 3; q. 13, a. 1–6; q. 1, a. 9.
8. In the alternative Scholastic account of mind in Nominalism, the focus is on concepts
rather than on judgments of being. Concepts do not directly intend anything but their
content, which is either empirical or a general name derived from some commonality in
empirical experiences. All “analogous” language, therefore, is in fact metaphorical. Radical
Nominalism would finally break the link between human knowledge of the world and a
God knowable only through positive revelation contained in the Scriptures.
9. Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 9, a. 2 ad 5. Aquinas here also mentions a “natural” affinity of
music to the affects of the soul.
10. But see Helmut Feld, Der Ikonoklamus des Westens, 11–32, for exceptions and qualifications
to this statement.
11. Contemporary scholars tend to think that the strict iconoclasm of later Judaism is the
result of the rabbinic practice of “building a fence around the Law,” and that earlier Jewish
religion permitted figurative sacred art to a certain (unknown) extent, as is demonstrated

by the decorated synagogue at Dura Europus. (Already in the Counter-reformation

polemics against Protestant Scripturally based iconoclasm, Catholic theologians pointed
out numerous Old Testament references to an approved sacred use of art). For many
Muslims, the prohibition of figurative art is modified by a Hadith according to which
Muhammad permitted decorative figures on cloth (specifically, a curtain). By the process
of “analogous reasoning” (qiyas), some interpreters of shari‛a conclude that figurative art
on paper is likewise permitted.
12. It is beyond our scope here to compare the theories of images in these traditions. It may be
noted, however, that the justification of images in the idealist tradition in Hinduism shows
some parallels to the world-affirming side of Platonic thought in the West. A difference
from Christianity, however, is found in Hinduism’s comparative devaluation of concepts
and of historical revelation. For many forms of Hindu thought an ultimately apophatic
theology relativizes all concepts and images. In contrast to the Jewish prophets, however,
most Hindu theology approves of the use of images of multiple forms of the divinity, on the
basis of the principle that the divine or reality is revealed on many levels, according to the
capacity of different people. (In Buddhism, a similar idea is developed under the notion of
upaya). It should be noted that although Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism encourage
the use of images, mental and physical, they are ultimately to be superseded in a higher
consciousness. Buddhism has also seen “iconoclastic” movements, especially within Zen
(which, however, extended its critique to the sacred books as well as to art, and could also
encourage the use of both in the service of personal illumination).
13. See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art,
translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1994). Belting refers to the “era of art” as the period when the arts became independent of
religious purposes, following the breakdown of the medieval synthesis and the hegemony
of Christianity in Western society.
14. Already Aquinas had distinguished between the “formal object” or goal of art and that of
ethics or religion; but the notion that art forms a norm unto itself began to attain currency
with the Renaissance ideal of the artist as a creative genius, and achieved theoretical
justification in Kantian aesthetics.
15. Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 2002 [1931]), 146.
16. Ibid., 148.
17. Ibid., 149.
18. Ibid., 157.
19. Ibid., 150. Cf. 157.
20. Ibid., 163.
21. Ibid., 161.
22. Ibid., 162.
23. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics. Translated by
Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, edited by Joseph Fessio, S. J., and John Riches. Vol. 1, “Seeing the
Form,” 41 and passim.
24. Ibid., 124.
25. A partial exception may be claimed for the thought of Aiden Nichols, O. P. Nichols’s works
on aesthetics are primarily in the line of Balthasar’s thought, centering on the relation
of incarnation to beauty. However, he has also ventured to a certain extent into the
examination of particular art forms, especially the icon.

26. Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty. The Holy in Art, translated by David
E. Green.
27. Ibid., 5.
28. Ibid., 6.
29. Ibid., 266.
30. Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? Translated by Aylmer Maude (Bridgewater, NJ: Replica
Books, 2000).
31. Ibid., 48.
32. Ibid., 153, 164.
33. See Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, chapter VI.
34. Pope John Paul II, “Dialogue Between Cultures for a Civilization of Love and Peace.”
Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, January 1, 2001.
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C HA P T E R 3
B E AU T Y A N D D I V I N I T Y
PAT R IC K SH E R RY
Thinkers from Plato onwards have recognized the power of beauty, even if they have
disapproved of some of its manifestations in art and literature. That power and the won-
der it evokes explain why so many thinkers have listed beauty, along with goodness and
truth, as subjects of utmost concern. Some theologians have gone a step further and
seen natural beauty as an outstanding example of God’s generosity in creation, and per-
haps as a reflection of His glory; and they have acknowledged also that art may have
a religious dimension, and may serve as a vehicle of religious vision. Many ordinary
people, too, wonder at the beauty of the world and regard outstanding works of art as
inspired by God.
Of course, beauty is only one aesthetic concept; and in the earlier decades of the twen-
tieth century it was depreciated by some artists. Many writers on aesthetics, too, pre-
ferred to speak rather of aesthetic merit and satisfaction; and, more generally, regarded
the critical evaluation of works of art as only one part of their subject. Historically, how-
ever, the concept of beauty has been of central importance; and since about 1970 it has
regained a place in the reflections of philosophers writing on aesthetics. At the same
time, theological aesthetics has become a growing field. I shall, therefore, treat beauty
as a central concept in what follows, while recognizing that it needs also to be “placed”
logically by showing that it is part of a network, so that its relationship with other con-
cepts (including religious ones like divine glory) should be elucidated.
Such modern reservations do not usually trouble ordinary people. After all, the word
is often used in everyday speech, and is the most common term of evaluation of both
landscapes, sunsets, and so forth, and of works of art. What is true, however, is that
religious people have sometimes had a suspicion of beauty, as being something transi-
tory and associated with the body or sensual pleasure, and so not of great importance.
Some have seen it as a temptation, not to be associated with the serious business of reli-
gion; or else there is the fear that the pursuit of sensuous beauty may become a trap that
keeps people away from the search for moral and spiritual beauty. Among the religious
“friends of beauty” I detect two groups: first, those who place a theology of beauty within
a theology of Creation and confine themselves to regarding beauty as a gift of God and

BEAUTY AND DIVINITY 45
a sign of His bounty; and second, those who accept the first view but then go much fur-
ther and seek to ground beauty in God’s nature. There are, therefore, two explanations
(not incompatible with each other) of why beauty has a religious importance, and I shall
distinguish them in what follows.
First, however, I must say something about the religious sources for these views. I shall
concentrate mainly on Christian and Jewish accounts, but also include a few examples
from other religions.
3.1 Some Sources
Christian claims about the religious importance of beauty can be traced back to two
main sources: parts of the Hebrew Bible, and Plato. Psalm 27:4 says “One thing I have
asked . . . that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the
beauty of the Lord.” The Hebrew term no’am, translated here as “beauty,” also denotes
“favor” or “sweetness.” Other such terms ascribed to God are hah-dahr (“splendor” or
“majesty”), as used in Ps.145:5, and tiphahrah (translated as “pride,” “glory” and “honor,”
as well as “splendor” and “beauty”), as in Ps. 71:8. The term yophee, which in later
Hebrew is probably the nearest term to “beauty” in the aesthetic sense, is used in Ps.50:2,
“Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth,” and ascribed to God Himself
in the Masoretic text of Zech.9.17.
Most of these passages are from the Psalms, many of which are songs of praise, even
love poems, to God. Thus the ascriptions of beauty to Him there seem to arise from a
powerful experience of His presence or an intense yearning for Him, and the language
used is that of joyful praise, awe, and adoration. An important related concept is that
of kabod (glory), used, for example, to describe the visible phenomena associated with
God on Mount Sinai and in the Exodus, such as the cloud. In Isaiah’s vision the ser-
aphs proclaim that Yahweh’s glory fills the whole earth, and they link it with His holiness
(Isa.6:3); and in the New Testament it is ascribed to Christ, e.g.. in II Cor.4:6, where St.
Paul describes the glory of God as shining forth on the face of Christ.
We find a different approach in a text from the Apocrypha, Wisdom 13:3-5, which
describes God as the first creator and author of beauty, and then says that “by the great-
ness and beauty of the creatures proportionally the maker of them is seen.” This text
perhaps shows the influence of Greek philosophy on later Judaism; and it is certainly the
ancestor of subsequent Christian approaches from natural theology.
The most important Greek text here is the famous “ladder of beauty” in Plato’s
Symposium 210–211, where Socrates narrates how the priestess Diotima told him that
lovers of beauty should ascend from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls, laws, institu-
tions, and fields of knowledge until they come to Beauty itself (it should be noted that the
Greek kalos, like beau in French, has wider connotations than the English “beautiful”).
But one should also mention the creation story in Plato’s Timaeus, where we are told that
the Demiurge (workman or creator) made the world with reference to unchangeable

patterns, and that, being good, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they
could be (28–9).
The first Christian theologian to have adumbrated a theological aesthetic was St.
Irenaeus (c.130–c.200). In his Against the Heresies he identifies God’s Word with the
Son and Wisdom with the Holy Spirit, describes them both as His “hands,” and as
being with the Father before Creation, and says that He made all things by the Word
and adorned them by Wisdom (iv.20.1-3). Irenaeus was thinking about natural
beauty; but another early Christian writer, St. Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215),
discussed the religious significance of art. After quoting Exod.31:2–5, which relates
how the Spirit of God came on the craftsman Bezalel, endowing him with wisdom,
understanding, knowledge, and skill in every kind of craft, Clement says that this text
shows that “artistic and skilful invention is from God” (Stromateis 1:4). Later in the
same work, however, he warns against artists claiming the divine prerogative of cre-
ation (6:16); and he took two steps that influenced subsequent discussion of the mat-
ter. He says that God (or Christ) is the true beauty, to be loved by all those who love
true beauty (2:5); and elsewhere he says that the best beauty is spiritual [psychikon]
beauty (Paedagogus 3:11).
Clement’s latter two claims seem to have influenced the early Christian writer
who had most to say about aesthetic matters, St. Augustine. He recognizes both nat-
ural beauty and the works of artists; and in his Confessions he calls on God, “O my
supreme and good Father, Beauty of all things beautiful” (3:6). He acknowledges
Him as the source of the splendor of the heavens and earth: “it was you, Lord, who
made them: for you are beautiful and they are beautiful” (11:4). Yet he feels that
earthly beauty risks becoming a trap that by its allure provides only a transitory
satisfaction and distracts people from God. In a famous passage in the Confessions
he exclaims,
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new! For behold Thou wert within
me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those
lovely things that Thou hast made. (10:27)
Perhaps because of such reservations, the topic of beauty was not on the whole a cen-
tral one in the reflections of theologians in subsequent centuries. Aquinas, for example,
makes a few perceptive remarks about it in his Summa Theologiae; but his most extended
treatment is in a minor work, his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’ treatise on The
Divine Names.
There are, however, some outstanding exceptions to this generalization. Jonathan
Edwards (1703–58) made beauty a central theme in his theology; and in his Essay on the
Trinity and elsewhere he keyed his discussions of it into a fully developed Trinitarian
theology. The topic attracted the attention of several theologians of the Russian emigra-
tion at the beginning of the twentieth century, most notably Paul Evdokimov (1900–70).
In that century, however, the theologian who had most to say on it was the Swiss Roman

Catholic Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88), especially in his Herrlichkeit (translated as
The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics). In this work he is adverting to the origi-
nal meaning of the Greek aesthesis as “perception,” specifically our perception of the
glory of God revealed in Christ, a revelation reaching its climax in the Cross, the Descent
into Hell, the Resurrection, and the sending of the Holy Spirit. But von Balthasar also
draws an analogy between our carefully attending to a work of art and our contemplat-
ing the Christian mystery.
The length and detail of his reflections may be contrasted with the boldness and
simplicity of those of Simone Weil (1909–43), who developed a distinctively Platonic
Christian theology, though without her becoming a baptized member of the Church.
She describes beauty as a “snare” through which God captures the soul in spite of itself;
indeed,
In everything that gives us the pure authentic feeling of beauty there really is the
presence of God. There is as it were an incarnation of God in the world and it is
indicated by beauty.
The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.1
Indeed, she thinks that beauty is an attribute of God himself: writing of Plato’s God, she
says that we are not dealing here with a general idea of beauty, but with “the beauty of
God; it is the attribute of God under which we see him.”2 In an argument reminiscent of
recent theological theses about “implicit” or “anonymous” Christians, she claims that
the love of beauty may be what she calls a “form of the implicit love of God,” for “The
Beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. He is really
present in the universal beauty.”3
Weil’s ideas here probably owe more to Plato than to any religious source: despite
her own Jewish roots, she was little interested in Judaism. Yet, not surprisingly,
the passages from the Psalms about God’s beauty and from Exodus about Bezalel’s
craftsmanship, helped to contribute toward a theology of beauty in Judaism as in
Christianity. The Talmud describes a kind of ladder of beauty reaching up to Jacob,
whose beauty reflected that of Adam, who in turn bore a distant likeness to the shek-
inah.4 One of the highest angels in rabbinic angelology bore the name “Yafefiah”
[beauty of God].5
It is among mystics, however, that the greatest interest in divine beauty is found in
Judaism, e.g., in the hekhalot [palaces] hymns composed by the merkava [chariot] mys-
tics in the third and fourth centuries CE. In one of them the ministering angels sing a
paean to the face of God:
Whoever looks at Him is instantly torn;
whoever glimpses His beauty immediately melts away,
Those who serve Him . . . their hearts reel
and their hearts grow dim at the splendour
and the radiance of their King’s beauty.6

Later on, in the Kabbalah, beauty is listed as one of the ten Sefirot, i.e., the emanations or
manifested world of the divine. A passage in the Zohar, a central Kabbalistic text written
in Spain in the thirteenth century, lists the Sefirot and says,
If the radiance of the glory of the Holy One, be blessed, had not been shed over his
entire creation, how could even the wise have apprehended him? He would have
continued to be unknowable, and the words could not be verily said, “The whole
earth is full of his glory.” [Isa.6:3]7
We find a similar line of thought expressed in Islam too. Several texts in the Qur’an
hymn the magnificence of the world; and there is a much-quoted hadith “God is beau-
tiful and loves beauty,” which is attributed to Muhammad.8 Many scholars regard this
as apocryphal; however, Al-Ghazali lists among the “Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of
God” Al-Majid [the All-Glorious], as being “one who is noble in essence, beautiful in
actions and bountiful in gifts and in favours.”9
In Hinduism beauty is particularly associated with Krishna, one of the incarna-
tions of the Lord Vishnu, and it is believed that there is an interplay between his beauty
and that of the physical beauty of the world. In the vision of Krishna described in the
Bhagavad-Gita his splendor is emphasized (xi:10–12). Likewise, other sources such as
the Alvar hymns (e.g., The Tiruvaimoli of Nammalvar) give very realistic descriptions of
his beauty.
3.2 Beauty and Creation
It will be seen that some of the texts I have quoted limit themselves to God’s creation of
beauty, while others also go on to present the latter as an expression of God’s own nature,
even if, as von Balthasar notes, it has been in general the most neglected divine attri-
bute.10 I shall start, therefore, by discussing the first, more limited claim.
The simplest form of a religious interpretation of beauty is to see natural beauty as
a gift of God, which does not by itself tell us anything about Him other than that He
is inventive and generous. It could be said (though I do not agree) that God can cre-
ate stones without being stony Himself, so He can create natural beauty without being
beautiful (or beauty) Himself; and that speculations about the latter are relics of the
neo-Platonism that spread into early Christianity.
One can go a step further and extend this simple approach to artistic beauty, by treat-
ing inspiration as a species of divine creativity. People have certain capacities that enable
them to create works of art and literature, and when these are enhanced by the Holy
Spirit in such a way that their possessors surpass themselves by producing works of
extraordinary quality, we speak of inspiration. Medieval thinkers thought that although
God can intervene directly in the world, for the most part He works through “secondary
causes,” i.e., the normal chains of causes and effects; thus through His providence He can

shape the ordinary course of events to His purposes. Thus one can envisage human cre-
ative capacities as a field of God’s creative action. If nature is God’s immediate creation,
then art could be regarded as what He creates through the mind of man. Of course He
can use other parts of nature as secondary causes in creating beauty, for instance in the
creation of coral through coral polyps.
To describe something as inspired is, in the first instance, to praise its outstanding
quality. We need not look for a single model of inspiration or an exact definition of the
term, either in religious or secular contexts. Sometimes, it seems, people have indeed
felt that they have been seized by an external power, as though someone else was acting
through them; but for others it is more like a sudden clarity of perception (often emerg-
ing after a period of tension); and for others again it may come as a dark and disturbing
force. It is an interesting question as to whether there are diabolical inspirations too, for
the human imagination, like any capacity, can be misused. In the present context, how-
ever, we are dealing with the emergence of beauty.
We can go yet further in the approach from Creation by enlarging our concept of
beauty. In one of his poems Gerard Manley Hopkins refers to “God’s better beauty,
grace”11 (such a play on words would be equally possible in Greek, where charis [grace]
also denotes physical gracefulness and charm). He often mentions kinds of beauty that
transcend the physical but can nevertheless be acknowledged in aesthetic terms, e.g.,
of mind, character, and soul. Also, Hopkins regards Christ as the divine archetype of
created beauty and as having made the principles of perfect physical and moral beauty
manifest in the created world through the Incarnation.12 But this is to anticipate our sec-
ond approach, from God’s nature.
Hopkins’s thought here is harking back to a tendency that we have already noted
in some early Christian writers, to rate moral and spiritual beauty above physical or
aesthetic beauty. Talk of the beauty of good deeds and of virtue was a commonplace
in the ancient world, and survived at least until the eighteenth century. David Hume,
for instance, wrote “There is no spectacle so fair and beautiful as a noble and gener-
ous action” (A Treatise on Human Nature, III.i.2). This way of speaking has not entirely
disappeared today: we talk of sweetness of character, moral deformity, and a beautiful
personality. But among Christian writers we have to look also to the concepts of grace
(as in Hopkins) and holiness.
The phrase “the beauty of holiness” has become familiar because it is used in transla-
tions of some of the Psalms (e.g., Ps.29:2) in the Authorized Version. It is a favorite theme
of Jonathan Edwards, who writes that “holiness is in a peculiar manner the beauty of the
divine nature.”13 He does not limit holiness to God, for he goes on immediately to say
that the moral image of God in the saints, i.e., their holiness, is their beauty; and indeed
that the beauty and brightness of the angels in heaven consists in their holiness.
Some writers have drawn more detailed parallels between aesthetic and spiritual
beauty. Thus the medieval writer Thomas of Citeaux, in his commentary on the “Song of
Songs” (a text which, not surprisingly, gave rise to many patristic and medieval discus-
sions of beauty, though most of them ignored its straightforward erotic significance)
correlates different kinds of external beauty with kinds of beauty of soul, comparing,

for example, the beauty of things without blemish to the beauty arising from purifica-
tion from sin.14 Likewise, Aquinas describes the saints as the beauty of the house of God,
for divine grace, which beautifies like grace, shines in them (In Ps. 25:5). He applies his
general analysis of beauty, in terms of wholeness, harmony, and radiance, to the vir-
tues, remarking that just as beauty or charm arises from good proportion and radiance,
‘so also beauty of spirit consists in conversation and actions that are well-formed and
suffused with intelligence’ (Summa Theologiae 2a2ae.145.2); although beauty goes with
every virtue, it goes especially with temperance because of its measured and fitting pro-
portion, and because it holds down the forces of debasement (ibid., 2a2ae.141.2 ad 3).
Those who exalt moral or spiritual beauty over physical or aesthetic naturally tend to
depreciate the latter as transitory and corruptible, as we have seen. But an interesting
variation on this theme is to combine a depreciation of beauty in this life with an extol-
ling of the glory of the resurrected body. The Spiritual Homilies ascribed to St. Macarius
(c.300–c.390) say that spiritual persons spurn earthly splendor because they have invari-
ably “tasted another beauty and have participated in other riches,” but then tell us that at
the day of resurrection,
. . . the glory of the Holy Spirit rises up from within, covering and warming the bodies
of the Saints. This is the glory they interiorly had before, hidden in their souls, for
what they now have, that same then pours out externally into their body.15
Such an appeal to eschatology is not limited to human bodies, and need not go with
a depreciation of earthly beauty. Rather, the latter can be regarded as a “first fruits”
or foretaste of heavenly beauty, a glimpse of the future transformation of the cosmos
that is symbolized in much of the imagery of the Book of Revelation (anticipated by
Isa.65:17).
An important text here is Rom.8:20–2, where St. Paul, writing of the revelation of
future glory and using the common biblical image of a woman in labor, says that the
whole creation has been groaning in travail until now, for it was subjected to futility, and
prophesies that it will be set free from its bondage to decay so as to obtain the freedom
of the glory of the children of God. Paul is rejecting the Stoic idea of a final conflagra-
tion of all things, and instead preaching that the universe will, like the human body, be
transformed and glorified in its own way. Thus God’s work of Creation is continuing, for
it has not reached its goal yet.
Of course Paul was not concerned with art. But many modern writers suggest that it
too may anticipate the coming renewal of all things. Etienne Gilson, for instance, says,
Thanks to the fine arts, matter enters by anticipation into something like the state
of glory promised to it by theologians at the end of time, when it will be thoroughly
spiritualized.16
Von Balthasar often draws attention to the way in which overwhelming beauty points
beyond itself; and, writing of Hamann, he describes it as “hidden eschatological

transformation.”17 Nicholas Wolterstorff sees art as an instrument in our struggle to

overcome the fallenness of our existence, and, by the light that it affords, anticipating
the shalom that is to come. He calls on Christian artists to share in the task of witnessing
to God’s work of renewal and to work for the greater glory of God: “Paradise is forever
behind us. But the City of God, full of song and image, remains to be built.”18
The passages that I have just discussed all bear witness to God’s creative power and
subsume beauty under it. They proceed downwards, as it were, from God to the world.
But there is also a tradition of natural theology that proceeds upwards, from world to
God, by seeking to make an inference from the existence of the world, or some aspect of
it, to God’s existence. Not surprisingly, some theologians have sought to draw the exis-
tence of beauty into such arguments, following the reasoning of Wis.13:3–5. Thus F. R.
Tennant used the appeal to natural beauty as part of his re-presentation of the argument
to God’s existence from the apparent design of the world.19 More commonly however,
religious appreciations of the beauty of the world seem to be based on experience rather
than inference, so that their subjects respond joyfully, as in the Psalmist’s exclamation,
“The heavens are telling the glory of God” (Ps.19:1), or Hopkins’s “The world is charged
with the grandeur of God.” It will be noticed, however, that such responses often appeal
to God’s own beauty as well as that of the world. It remains for me, therefore, to say a
little about this further move.
3.3 Beauty and God’s Nature
We have already seen many examples of writers who have wished to ground beauty
in God’s nature, and we have traced back such views both to Plato and to parts of the
Hebrew Bible. If, as is said, the good is diffusive of itself, then it is natural to see Creation
not just in terms of God bringing the world into being as an expression of His creative
love, but also of His imparting to it something of His own qualities. This idea is found
prefigured in both Genesis 1:26–7, which states that God created us in His own image
and likeness, and Plato’s Timaeus (29e). If this idea is extended to beauty, then the lat-
ter comes to have almost a sacramental character, because it is seen as a reflection of
God’s nature, as a sign that can lead us to Him. Hence just as some theologians, e.g.,
Edwards, have written of the beauty of holiness, so others have transposed the terms
and written of the holiness of beauty. Thus the Romantic critic Friedrich von Schlegel
(1772–1829), for example, punctuated an eloquent paean to beauty with the question,
“is not the beautiful also holy?,” and went on to relate the sense of beauty to humanity’s
“fearful unsatisfied desire to soar into infinity.”20
Some writers go beyond the claim that God is beautiful and created the world in
His own likeness, and argue that He is beauty. Thus Aquinas says in general that God
contains all perfections in His essence (Summa Theologiae 1a.4.2), and, as we shall see,
he extends this claim specifically to beauty in his commentary on the Divine Names.
Likewise, St. Anselm holds that God is not only beautiful but is beauty itself (Monologion

16). Another view, which Edgar de Bruyne finds in Duns Scotus, is that God’s beauty is
the harmony in the “ocean” of divine perfections, which are formally distinct but united
in the simplicity of the divine essence.21
It is difficult for people today to come to grips with such claims about God’s beauty,
because we tend to think of beauty in terms of colors, shapes, sounds, and other sensu-
ous qualities. So how can God, who is immaterial and imperceptible to our senses, have
(or be) beauty? An answer to this obvious objection can be found by recalling what we
have said about moral beauty; and we can extend the point by moving on to intellectual
beauty. People commonly speak of the beauty of scientific theories and of the elegance of
mathematical proofs. Furthermore, Wolterstorff points out that other aesthetic qualities
besides beauty can be ascribed to non-perceptible entities such as stories or proofs, e.g.,
“dramatic,” “awkward,” “coherent,” and “convoluted.”22 The ascription of beauty to vir-
tues and intellectual entities is of great theological importance, for it shows that beauty is
not limited to the perceptible qualities of material things. Thus God’s invisibility, imma-
teriality, and incorporeality are not necessarily obstacles to ascribing beauty to Him.
But why ascribe beauty to Him? Historically, there seem to be two main approaches,
from argument and from experience. As regards the former, I have outlined how beauty
has been drawn into arguments of natural theology, which claim that the perfections
of the world must be found in their Creator (or at least in His mind), or that God must
have all perfections in His essence. As regards the latter, we encounter a vast range of
experiences described in the relevant literature. There are those who claim to have had a
mystical vision of God’s beauty. St. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, describes King David
as having been lifted out of himself by the power of the Holy Spirit so that he saw, in a
blessed state of ecstasy, the boundless and incomprehensible Beauty, a Beauty which is
invisible and formless; a few pages later he exhorts his reader to mount a ladder from
earthly beauty to the vision of Beauty itself with the aid of the Holy Spirit.23 More com-
monly, however, divine beauty is said to be discerned in some powerful experience of
natural or artistic beauty, which is regarded as reflecting the nature of its Creator. The
Psalmist and Hopkins both exemplify this approach in the passages I have quoted, as
also, at a more theoretical level, does Simone Weil, who saw the beauty of the world
which attracts us as the appearance of divine beauty.
The distinction between the two kinds of experience that I have just mentioned cor-
responds to W. T. Stace’s distinction between two kinds of mysticism, which he calls
“introvertive” and “extrovertive.” The first of these is taken to be a direct apprehension of
God or whatever “ultimate reality” is regarded as the object of such experience, whereas
in the latter case the mystical apprehension is mediated through our experience of the
natural world. Here Stace quotes Jakob Boehme, “in this light my spirit saw through all
things and into all creatures and I recognized God in grass and plants.”24
In the case of both argument and experience the question arises of what is the rela-
tionship between earthly and divine beauty. The question is less troubling in the case
of experience, since both introvertive and extrovertive mystics have felt that they
have perceived God’s own beauty, albeit in different ways. Hence, typically, they use
metaphors like “reflection,” “mirror,” and “light.” Those, however, who favor a more

theoretical approach tend to borrow their language from Plato, who described par-
ticulars as resembling or participating in the Forms, or from neo-Platonism. In his
Phaedo Plato says specifically that if there is anything else that is beautiful besides
beauty itself, it is only so because it partakes of that beauty (100c). Thus, just to give
one example of a similar approach, Aquinas says that the source of all beauty is in
God, for things are beautiful according to their proper form, and every form, whereby
things have being, is a participation in divine radiance; similarly, all harmonies, e.g.,
friendships, proceed from divine beauty. Thus the beauty of creatures is a participa-
tion in the first cause, which makes all things beautiful, and is a likeness to divine
beauty that is shared in all things.25
Not surprisingly, such a metaphysical approach is not popular today, not so much
because metaphysics is out of fashion as because it is difficult to see how there can be a
single form, whether or not in God, for all examples of beauty. Such an objection echoes
Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s Forms: what does the great variety of things, in different
categories, that we call “good” have in common that they come under a single Form,
that of the Good (Nicomachean Ethics I.6)? But again there is an obvious reply: Aristotle
himself argues that different things are called good because the term is used analogically
of various types of things, and Wittgenstein claims that we call various activities “games”
because there are “family resemblances” between them (Philosophical Investigations
I.65-7), rather than because we have discovered a common definition or essence of
all games.
So it could be argued too that “beautiful,” like “good,” is an analogical term, which we
can apply to different sorts of things, like landscapes, pieces of music, and perfumes; and
indeed this claim has been made by some neo-Thomists, as well as by other writers.26
How then can we compare the beauty of different kinds of creatures with that of their
Creator? Again, we can point to what we do. It is quite common to compare things of
different kinds; and sometimes to make cross-categorial comparisons, in which, e.g.,
dispositions or abstract entities are compared with physical beings. Thus a stout heart
may be said to be worth more than all the gold of Croesus, and mathematics to offer
more intellectual rewards than poker. Many similes and metaphors are of this nature.
So Shakespeare compares pity to “a naked new-born babe” in Macbeth, and tells us that
“The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,” in The
Merchant of Venice. No doubt such a solution is not as neat as a Platonic one, which sees
all beautiful things as partaking in one Form. But why should solutions to intellectual
questions always be simple?
Of course, many problems remain, which I do not have space to tackle within the
confines of this chapter. What difference has the Fall made here, if any? Why do we lack,
it seems, a vocabulary to support our ascriptions of beauty to God, whereas in other
contexts we have a vast range of terms like “elegant” and “graceful,” and more particular
ones describing the qualities of colors, melodies, and so on? Nor have I space to explore
Trinitarian analyses of beauty, like that of Jonathan Edwards, who ascribed beauty and
beautifying to all three Persons, but in different ways, with each of them having different
roles within the one work.

3.4 Conclusion
There is a danger, however, that we get so bogged down in the philosophical and theo-
logical issues that I have touched on that we lose sight of why we have got involved in the
question in the first place. Simone Weil found the luminosity of beauty and its ability to
excite wonder and spiritual longing a particularly apt starting point for considering God’s
presence in the world. It may be that, as the twentieth century’s bias against beauty now
wanes, it is the best starting point. If that were to be so, then we would need to ask what
effect it would have on our doctrine of God and on our religious practice if we moved
divine beauty to the center of our reflections, alongside goodness, wisdom, and power.
One result, I think, would be to produce more joy in worship. We have seen that many of
the texts in the Bible that ascribe beauty, splendor, and so on to God are from the Psalms,
especially those that praise Him exultantly. Now Jurgen Moltmann has pointed out that
Western theology has one-sidedly emphasized God’s dominion more than His splendor
or loveliness, and thus subjected Christian existence to judicial and moral categories.27
Perhaps this helps to explain the lack of joy, not just in worship, but in much contemporary
Christian practice. It seems, too, that Christians follow the spirit of the age in regarding
aesthetic appreciation and practice as temporary releases from the pressures of everyday
existence, or as elite pursuits not closely related to the fundamental experiences of life.28
At a practical level, churches and religious bodies with a greater appreciation of
beauty would wish to affirm the integrity of the world through a concern with the envi-
ronment; with architecture, town planning, and slum clearance; with the role of the
arts both in religion and society in general; and with science. I mention the last of these
because many scientists, e.g., Einstein, have had a sense of the world as cosmos (liter-
ally “adornment”), and have seen beauty as a guiding principle in its workings. But to
prevent such concerns from becoming just another list of “good causes,” they need to be
rooted in the fundamental responses of wonder, awe, joy, and gratitude. Otherwise we
have not escaped the contemporary lack of imagination in religion and the consequent
moralism. A concern with the environment, for example, is not a matter of ethics alone.
The Authorized Version’s translation of Proverbs 29:18 tells us, “Where there is no
vision, the people perish.” A greater concern with beauty may well be the best way for
religions today to recover some of their inspiration and joy, and to communicate them
to the world.
Notes
1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. E. Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1952), 137.
2. Simone Weil, On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, trans. R. Rees (London: Oxford
University Press, 1968), 129.

3. Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. E. Craufurd (London: Fontana, 1959), 120.
4. Chaim Reines, “Beauty in the Talmud,” Judaism, vol. 24 (1975), 100–107, at 102.
5. The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1902), vol. 2: 618.
6. Part of the tract known as The Greater Hekhalot, in T. Karmi, ed., The Penguin Book of
Hebrew Verse (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1981), 196.
7. Zohar, edited and selected by Gershom Scholem (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), 78.
8. Doris Behrens-Abonseif, Beauty in Arabic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener
Publishers, 1999), 17, 19.
9. Al-Ghazali, The Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of God, trans. D. B. Burrell and N. Daher
(Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1999), no. 49, p. 120.
10. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Word and Revelation, trans. A. V. Littledale (New York: Herder
and Herder, 1964 ), 162.
11. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “To What Serves Mortal Beauty,” in Poems (4th ed.,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), no. 62, p. 98. Aquinas writes of the decor of grace
(Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae.109.7).
12. See Hilary Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 68ff., also 28ff. for John Henry Newman’s appreciation of the
beauty of grace.
13. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 257.
14. Migne, Patrologia Latina, 206: 309.
15. Homily 5, sections 5 and 9, in Intoxicated with God, trans. George Maloney (Denville,
NJ: Dimension Books, 1978), 53, 60.
16. Etienne Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful (New York: Scribner, 1965), 33.
17. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord iii, Studies in Theological Styles: Lay Styles,
trans. A. Louth et al. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1986), 277.
18. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1980), 199.
19. Frederick Robert Tennant, Philosophical Theology ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1930), 89–93.
20. Friedrich von Schlegel, “On the Limits of the Beautiful” [1794], in E. J. Millington,
ed., The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel, (London: Bohn,
1860), 417.
21. Edgar de Bruyne, Etudes d’esthetique medievale iii (Bruges: de Tempel, 1946), 356–9.
22. Wolterstorff, Art in Action, pt. 2, sec. 9.
23. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, chs. x–xi (Migne, Patrologia Graeca 46: 361, 364–5).
24. Walter T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1960), 60–79.
25. St. Thomas Aquinas, In Librum Beati Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus Expositio
(Turin: Marietti, 1950), ch. 4, lectio 5, esp. sections 337, 347, 349.
26. See, e.g., Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. J. W. Evans (New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1962), 30, 172–4; R. W. Church, An Essay on Critical Appreciation (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1938), 53–6.
27. Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Play, trans. R. Ulrich (New York: Harper and Row,
1972), 38–9.
28. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. N. Walter
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), ch.1.

Bibliography
Balthasar, Hans Urs von, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, trans. J. Riches et al.
(7 vols., Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1982–91).
Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, vol. II, Pt 1: The Doctrine of God, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al.
(Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1957), sections 29, 31.
DeLattre, Roland A., Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1968).
Edwards, Jonathan, Essay on the Trinity (New York: Scribner, 1903).
Evdokimov, Paul, L’Art de l’icone: Theologie de la beaute (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1970).
Maritain, Jacques, Art and Scholasticism, trans. J. W. Evans (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962).
Maurer, Armand, About Beauty (Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1983).
Mothersill, Mary, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Sherry, Patrick, Spirit and Beauty ( 2nd ed., London: SCM Press, 2002).
Viladesau, Richard, Theological Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Weil, Simone, Waiting on God, trans. E. Craufurd (London: Fontana: 1959).
Westermann, Claus, “Beauty in the Hebrew Bible,” in Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine
(eds.), A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies
(Sheffield, UK: Academic Press, 1997), 584–602.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1980).

C HA P T E R 4
THE RELIGIOUS SUBLIME
V I JAY M I SH R A
AS a style or rhetorical form, the word “sublime” in its current usage came to the
English language from Longinus’s Peri Hupsous (“On the Sublime,” first century CE) via
Boethius’s French translation (1674). Very quickly though, the word was transformed
into an object of wonder, initially representing a numinous form of something extraor-
dinary or supreme. With the rhetorical finesse that came with the definition given by
Edmund Burke (“1756 BURKE Subl. & Beaut. I. vii. (1759) 58 Whatever is fitted in any
sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort ter-
rible, . . . is a source of the sublime”),1 the word sublime entered into a binary set with the
word “beautiful” to indicate both an object as well as a point of view (a reflection in the
mind), depending very much upon where one stood on the definition. With Burke too,
the sublime became something “connected to the sense of power” and to randomness or
lawlessness, features that in architecture found their exemplary form in the etchings of
Piranesi.2 The specific collocation of the words “sublime” and “religion” (as in the “reli-
gious sublime”), however, has its own history and may be located in John Dennis’s (1657–
1734) directive: “I now come to the Precepts of Longinus, and pretend to shew from
them, that the greatest Sublimity is to be deriv’d from Religious Ideas.”3 Dennis’s reread-
ing of the sublime as an engagement with religious ideas (suggesting indeed that great
art is always religious art) was used by David B. Morris as the kernel of his highly sug-
gestive and useful book on the religious sublime. As quite possibly the first critical study
that brought together religion and the sublime, Morris’s study of eighteenth-century
religious verse shows how the Longinian sublime was consciously reworked toward reli-
gious ends. In poetry the ground of such sublimity is an “Enthusiastic passion.”4
Although the lineage is uneven, in matters of the sublime reflective judgment takes
center stage. And it is reflective judgment (of which Dennis’s “Enthusiastic passion” and
Burke’s “source of the terrible” are in fact subsets) that led Samuel Monk in his path-
breaking book The Sublime (first published in 1935) to write, “in theories of the sublime
[unlike theories of the beautiful that are ‘relatively trim and respectable’] one catches
the century somewhat off its guard, sees it, as it were, without powder and pomatum,
whalebone and patches.”5 The metaphors here are decidedly rouge-, powder-, and

corset-based, but by pointing out how the sublime catches the spirit of an age Monk
makes an important statement about the power and role of the sublime in culture gener-
ally. The sublime catches cultural history off its guard, which is why, especially since the
eighteenth century, it has been appropriated as a valuable signifier for an understand-
ing of matters central to judgments of reflection. By far the most influential, and philo-
sophically the most astutely analytical, text in this discussion was Immanuel Kant’s The
Critique of Judgement [The Third Critique] (1790) which, as its title implied, dealt with a
critical examination of judgment. Since judgment worked on principles independent
of our “cognitive faculties,” which in themselves could only work on a priori principles
(and would therefore exclude “the feeling of pleasure or displeasure and the faculty of
desire”), it followed that matters of judgment (whose source was always Dennis’s “enthu-
siastic passion” within our faculty of knowledge) had to be established on principles
independent of pure and practical reason. The tropes of the sublime and the beautiful
and how to theorize these—matters indeed of reflective not determinative judgment—
therefore became important. Referring to Kant’s well-known definitions of the beautiful
and the sublime, Paul de Man suggested that against the beautiful as a “metaphysical
and ideological principle,” the sublime aspired “to being a transcendental one.” As a
transcendental principle the sublime informs us “about the relationship between imagi-
nation and reason.”6 This is a crucial observation, which forms the cornerstone of our
understanding of the sublime. How is this link made? In the Third Critique we find that
for the idea of the beautiful, nature is a frame, a reference, whereas for the sublime,
nature resists totalizing. Connected to the limits of our own faculties, the sublime is “a
purely inward experience of consciousness”7 and is not, as Kant himself observed, “to be
looked for in the things of nature, but only in our own ideas.”8 Linked to reason, the sub-
lime now moves away from the object out there (to be sacralized in a hierophanic act),
that is, away from the signified to the signifier, indeed to the mind itself: “Unlike that of
the beautiful, the principle of the sublime must therefore be sought in ourselves who
project (hineinbringen) the sublime into nature, ourselves as rational beings.”9 Beyond
framing (as the beautiful is), “superelevation beyond itself,” “presented in its very inade-
quation,”10 at once the foundation of the pleasure (nirvanic) principle, the sublime pres-
ents us with the indeterminate concept of reason, as the beautiful does of the concept of
understanding. The distinction is important, as the sublime is a function of the “higher
faculty” in us.11 But that higher faculty, the faculty of reason, is defined by its capacity to
totalize, to make meaning through critical thinking. This being so, isn’t there, quite pos-
sibly, an irresolvable tension here? On the surface of it, yes indeed. Reason must totalize
but the sublime makes the act of totalizing difficult. To begin with, it creates a breach in
our capacity to represent in language an object because there is an excess in the object
that leads to the breaking down of the relationship between thinking and the object.
“There is thus on the one hand a failure of articulation and on the other the demand by
reason that questions of totality be addressed because the sublime is the point at which
the relationship between reason and imagination becomes most acute.”12 So what is
the payoff here? Why does reason (in defiance of understanding, which is happy with
the beautiful) allow a moment of an inward experience of consciousness that may, if

THE RELIGIOUS SUBLIME 59
unchecked, lead to the oceanic feeling (after Freud)? To put it in non-philosophical lan-
guage, the sublime is a test of reason; it is a necessary condition (experience) for the
primacy of reason to be established. For it is reason alone that can permit imagination
(the faculty of presentation) as well as the sublime to come into being. And it does so, in
a momentary lapse, a momentary letting-go of the totalizing power of the mind. A quick
look at the critical oeuvre of late modern writers such as Northrop Frye, M. H. Abrams,
Harold Bloom, Barbara Novak, and Jacques Derrida reinforces this fact.
Northrop Frye’s monumental study of Blake titled Fearful Symmetry appeared in 1947.
It was pathbreaking on two fundamental grounds: first, it resisted a banal periodization
that had hitherto slotted Blake into a “pre-Romantic” period and, second, it emphasized,
especially with reference to Blake’s prophetic books, the power of perception, Berkeley’s
esse est percipi: “to be is to be perceived.”13 Perception establishes at once the superior-
ity of mental things (“Mental Things are alone real; what is called Corporeal, Nobody
Knows of its Dwelling Place,” Blake wrote) and the unity of the subject and the object.
Hence, as Frye comments, “the more unified the perception, the more real the exis-
tence.”14 To be is to be perceived (after Berkeley) has an emphatically religious meaning
for if to be is to be perceived, then there has to be an ultimate perceiver of all things. For
the artist (who is a mystic only if he has a prodigious mind capable of an “unthinkable
metamorphosis”) poetry is a “spiritual discipline” like “the Eastern ‘yoga,’ which liber-
ates man by uniting him with God.”15 In this way Blake was “among the first of European
idealists able to link his own tradition of thought with the Bhagavadgita.”16 The artist
as a visionary, as a “sublime poet” has an active (not a contemplative) mind capable of
transforming experience into knowledge; he is no mere imitator as he recreates a vision.
That vision is divinely inspired and since it is perception rather than reflection that is its
foundation, the sublime has to be in the signifier in whom the subject seeks repose and
union. Harold Bloom’s “word and vision are one”17 (he has Blake’s Jerusalem in mind
here) makes the same point in his study as well.
Although less interested in reducing the sublime to a spirit present at the dawn of
civilization (which explained Blake’s interest in Druids and the “Fairies of Albion”), the
Romantic poets nonetheless showed keen interest in the concept. For M. H. Abrams,
who understood Romanticism better than most, the Romantic mind was not a mir-
ror, a reflector of nature, but a lamp, a projector of visionary powers. Coleridge and
Wordsworth arrived at this through a slightly circuitous route. The central philoso-
pher on this road to sublime understanding was Plotinus (and what came to be known
broadly as the neo-Platonic tradition) who suggested that poetic models were those of
God himself: “this form is not in the material; it is in the designer before it ever enters
the stone.”18 The shaping influences here are “Ideas or principles” informing the cosmic
structure, which is what the Romantics themselves had to rethink. What emerged was
the belief (encapsulated in the metaphor of the lamp) that the “content of art has an
internal origin . . . in the emotions, the desires, and the evolving imaginative process of
the artist himself.”19 Hence Abrams’s forceful argument in which Plotinian thought has a
mediating and not an absolute function: “the familiar figure of the spirit of man as a can-
dle of the Lord easily lent itself to envisioning the act of perception as that little candle

throwing its beams into the external world.”20 The mind here projects emotions and feel-
ings that are constitutive of aesthetic design; the mind reflects, but recreates the object.
The mind, though, is in tension between two polarized attributes of nature: a benevo-
lent and pastoral category of the beautiful and a terrifying, indeed wrathful, category of
the sublime. For this reading a “circumstantial document in this tradition was Thomas
Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth”21 first published, in Latin, in 1681–89 and a more
prescriptive document was none other than Edmund Burke’s own treatise on the sublime
and the beautiful.22 Here, in this reading, the sublime represented the infinite power of a
“stern but just God” who after the Fall or the Great Flood purposively ruined a pristine,
“a beautiful,” world with rocks, crags, cliffs, mountains, and the like. The two antithetical
qualities of the sublime and the beautiful are necessarily expressions of a powerful God,
contraries that the Romantic imagination captured as inescapable. In Barbara Novak’s
influential study of American landscape painting, “a theodicy of the landscape” is evi-
dent as she reads the artist as a God-like spectator who sees nature as existing in terms of
an all-pervading perceiver: to be is to be perceived. Here again the sublime is a feature as
much of the object (God, nature) as it is of the mind. With American landscape artists, as
Novak explains, we see a departure from the traditional aestheticization of the sublime
to a more self-conscious religious quietism. What we notice is the use of silence (the lake
as a sheeted glass, water “like molten glass cooled but not congealed”23 ) and a gradual
“Christianization of the sublime.”24 The sublime is part of a moral universe and has a
decidedly political meaning. The sense of moral self-righteousness embedded in the
experience of the (religious) artist, artists such as Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas
Cole, pointed toward a will to conquer the landscape, for it seemed that God had given
the Christian artist ownership of the full splendor of a hitherto uncharted America. In
this reading the vision of the savage beauty of the landscape (available, after Kant of
course, only to those affected by the Law of Reason) was not apocalyptic but revealing.
It is here that silence, which was in the traditional, older sublime “unsettling, even awe-
some,”25 is given a positive spin, and light (which turns “matter into spirit”26 ) begins to
signal “the newly Christianized sublime.”27 This sublime, though, does not lead neces-
sarily to a mystical oneness (except in “luminist quietism,” where the labor of the artist
disappears), but to dualistic distancing from God, which again reinforced a distinctly
Christian religious attitude. The Romantic imagination, one suspects, internalized the
sublime through a re-projection of feelings and emotions that the object aroused. But
on the whole, whether defined in Blakean or Wordsworthian terms or in terms of early
nineteenth-century American landscape painting, the sublime was a largely unified cat-
egory, understood with reference to the majestic in nature, and linked both to the object
and to the “perceiver’s state of mind.”28
In Novak we come close to the sublime as a fundamentally religious category that is
linked to the idea of wonder, awe, majesty, and so on. Although she writes about the old
and new sublimes—the old being the primarily eighteenth-century sublime—there is a
palpable continuity even as the sublime in the context of American landscape painting in
a good part of the nineteenth century also became an ideological system that reinforced
notions of colonization. But can one view the sublime through an aesthetic as well as a

religious pair of lens? It is an argument familiar to the ears of Indian bhakti (devotional)
poets. Tulsīdās (c.1532–1623) writes in the invocatory verses of his vernacular translation
of the Rāmāyaṇa (the Rāmacaritamānas): “The finest lines from the greatest poet have
no real beauty if the name of Rama (God) is not in them . . . but even bad verse, worthless
production of weak poets, if adorned with the name of Rama, is heard and recited with
reverence by the wise.”29 In the hands of Tulsīdās and the bhakti poets of North India the
aesthetic, as a version of the profane, is not placed sui generically in opposition to the
sacred. In the West, however, the opposition remains a little more marked. We get this
in a fine scholar of the subject, Gerardus van der Leeuw, who in his study of the holy in
art believed that the secularization of art, always evident in Europe at any rate since the
Renaissance, meant that the holy had to be understood through a different discourse.
In terms of this argument the sublime presence of God found in Blake, in Wordsworth,
and in nineteenth-century American landscape painting, is not to be read as true revela-
tion. But even when, to avoid misunderstanding, van der Leeuw declares in the opening
pages of his book, “In Christ God’s fullness has been revealed; there is really nothing
more to be added,”30 elsewhere he is more accommodating: “It cannot be assumed that
holiness and beauty are hermetically sealed off from one another.”31 Echoing the words
of Dennis he believes that all great art expresses a “particular aspect of the holy.” And
yet there remains the matter of hierarchy in that the beautiful (the work of art) has to be
approached from the holy and not vice versa. It follows, therefore, that the religious sub-
lime has to be distinguished from the more generic “aesthetic sublime.” Working from
Rudolf Otto’s reading of the religious sublime (the “holy,” which is of itself and is not
to be reduced from the aesthetic even if they “search for one another”) as the “wholly
other” whose presence can only be rendered in terms of awe, fear, dread, and the like,
van der Leeuw suggests that this awakening, which declares our own insignificance in
front of the infinite and at the same time connects us through love, at once repellent and
attractive, so remote and yet so near, is not to be found in the beautiful. In terms of this
argument, the beautiful is the work of art; the holy is the sublime. Writes van der Leeuw,
“If we succeed in finding paths from the holy to the beautiful, then the beautiful will
also have to call forth this consciousness within us, and will have to lead us to the wholly
other.”32 This does not mean that great texts do not have a religious meaning or a sense of
the holy. But what is manifestly clear is that the religious experience arising from a work
of art is not identical with the experience of the holy itself. In short, art, the profane, is
the beautiful; the holy, the sacred, is the sublime. Religion does not concern itself with
what is beautiful, with aesthetic matters, even though the latter expresses the idea of the
holy through beauty; it relates to eternal truths, to an understanding of the infinite in
whose presence one discovers a sublime rapture. The argument here is important, for
it retreats from aestheticizing religion absolutely (as it seems Tulsīdās had done), and
from looking at the sacred in terms of reflective judgment of beauty. It would follow
that, in places for van der Leeuw, the sacred as sublime revelation is a determinate judg-
ment, not a matter to be located in the mind. The religious sublime here is a category
apart, to be distinguished from the beautiful. And this category involves what Mircea
Eliade called “an act of manifestation,” to which he gave the word “hierophany.” For the

sacred, the ganz andere, the “wholly other” of Otto, is “equivalent to a power, and in
the last analysis, to reality.”33 This reality is not to be confused with ordinary perceptual
or profane reality. It is a reality that manifests itself (as being) in “nonhomogeneous”
space because for the religious man, all spaces are not identical; sacred space is the space
where sacred reality expresses itself and it takes a religious man to recognize this space
and commune with the totally other. In this argument the sublime is linked to a sacred
space that breaks away from the general continuum of space and that is available only to
the religious man. For Eliade though, this man is transhistorical as well as transcultural,
from which it follows that “primitive” man was equally capable of the experience of the
sublime.
The argument that the religious experience is the absolute instance of all sublimes is
attractive and rather neat too, as it establishes a hierarchy and opens the way for the reli-
gious sublime to be defined in a very systematic manner. In other words there is no need
for a qualification, for the sublime is, by definition, religious. Yet even as one accepts the
link between the two—religion and the sublime—there is the matter of monism versus
theism or more narrowly between a monistic mysticism and a theistic mysticism, which
requires further qualification. For Eliade the distinction is pedantic. For someone like
R. C. Zaehner it is pivotal because, finally, Zaehner sees even the mystical experience
as being salvation-seeking. And since for him salvation, after William James, involves a
“development and enlargement of the self ” and not “annihilation in something higher
and other” (42) the true sublime has to be located only in a theistic mysticism.34 Implicit
in much of Zaehner’s work (and I suspect among western theologians generally) is the
Kantian belief that the sublime is linked to the law of reason and some varieties of reli-
gious experience are incapable of finally comprehending the sublime because a belief
in an absolute identity of self and other (as absolute spirit) is in the end a non-rational
act. In the nirvanic sublime there is no retreat to the world of reason and to perceptual
reality. This is what Rudolf Otto himself discovered in his study of eastern and western
mysticism with reference to Śaṅkara and Meister Eckhart as the exemplary proponents
of each, although he gave this discovery a positive spin.35 Otto certainly parts company
with Zaehner in that he believed in “strong primal human impulses” that explained
resemblances in the mystical experiences of Śaṅkara and Meister Eckhart. In the end
God is being restructured as “Godhead,” an Absolute Spirit (like Brahman from whom
issues Īśvara, the personal God) that is “high above God and the personal Lord.”36
It should be clear that the discourse of the religious sublime (even when framed in
humanist terms as is the case with M. H. Abrams, for instance), at least in the twenti-
eth century, is written in the shadow of Rudolf Otto’s highly influential The Idea of the
Holy (Das Heilige). It is necessary to return to this study before we move on. Otto’s book
addresses the post-Kantian idea of the God of Reason, a theistic conception of God as
understood by the intellect. To attribute to God human qualities (albeit to degrees that
are superhuman) is to work within concepts that the human mind can grasp and ana-
lyze. There is no room for non-rational attributes in this understanding of God, and by
extension, of religion. However, human experience tells us something else. It tells us of
non-rational attachments to the figure of God. In the latter, the idea of God is embraced

through feeling and emotion; God becomes not simply a matter of the faculty of rea-
son but also a faculty of (aesthetic) judgment. In this different, non-rational, numinous
understanding of God, the subject confronts an absolute other, a wholly other, which
exists beyond concepts; it is “ineffabile—in the sense that it completely eludes appre-
hension in terms of concepts.”37 The discourse here is different from the discourse of
being morally uplifted or of faith or grace; it is instead a discourse of rapture and emo-
tion, of slight inebriation and intoxication, of a “feeling of dependence” which, unlike
Schleiermacher’s definition of it, is a feeling of being overwhelmed by one’s own sense
of nothingness in front of God. In other words, the feeling of dependence, which Otto
defines as “creature-consciousness” is not a matter of “a conceptual explanation of the
matter,” it is not a rational explanation of a self-consciousness; it is instead a conse-
quence of a numinous awakening from within as the mind turns spontaneously to an
experience that arises only after “the category of ‘the numinous’ is called into play.”38
To this quality Otto gave the name mysterium tremendum, a condition “before which
we do not reason but bow.”39 The latter is a particular experience of the numinous; it
may vary from rapture to spasmodic convulsions; and it denotes a negative sublime—
uncanny, unfamiliar, awe-inspiring, beyond representation, and the like. Yet the
point that Otto makes is that at the heart of the mysterium tremendum (as the words
themselves suggest) is a “religious dread” (the antecedent of which is in fact a “dae-
monic dread.”)40 The sublime here is a “negative pleasure” (negative Lust) which is why
Rudolf Otto reconfigures a benign, abstract God into a “terrible power” that arouses
in the believer feelings of dread, of terror, of mystery, albeit in a way that emerges as
positive feelings. In Christianity it follows that this terrible power has to be distanced
from the negative sublime and reconceptualized as a “mere moral allegory”41 for not to
do so would, as the mystics or more generally the monists believed, lead to the oceanic
feeling of self-dissolution and apocalypse. In one of the great apologists of Hinduism,
Swami Vivekananda, the moral allegory takes the form of a fusion of the macro and
micro worlds. In this reading the man-God divide is not absolute since the aim in life is
“to become divine by realizing the divine.”42 Reformulating Christ’s dictum “the king-
dom of God is within you” Vivekananda explains, “ ‘I and my Father are one.’ He (man)
realizes in his soul that he is God Himself, only a lower expression of Him.”43 The ter-
rible power of the sublime, its absolute negation, is internalized (made visible from the
interior not from the exterior, expressing a Blakean unity of the subject and the object as
unified perception) in a non-threatening fashion because God here is always pure spirit,
a free-floating first principle interchangeable with its neuter designation as Brahman.
The moral allegory that Rudolf Otto spoke of is now an allegory of reason: the sub-
lime God is also a God of reason. The latter is discussed at some length in Derrida’s
The Gift of Death, especially in the first chapter in which Derrida discusses Jan Patočka’s
Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History. What is at stake in Patočka is the question
of responsibility, of ethical propriety, which is possible only when one can move from
Platonic secrecy to “the Christian secret of the mysterium tremendum.”44 All great his-
torical moments—revolutions and the like—have borne witness to the sacred, connect-
ing zeal or fervor with the idea of a god within us. The mysterium tremendum therefore

announces a new responsibility, and along with it “deliverance from the demonic and
the orgiastic,”45 that is, from polytheism. To thematize the mysterium tremendum
adequately necessitates acceptance of the fact, in Patočka’s words, that “responsibility
resides henceforth not in an essence that is accessible to the human gaze, that of the
Good and the One, but in relation to a supreme, absolute and inaccessible being that
holds us in check not by exterior but interior force.”46 This supreme being or God holds
“me from within and [from] within his gaze defines everything regarding me, and so
rouses me to responsibility.”47 Heidegger, whom Patočka follows very closely, would
have rejected the identification made here between God as supreme being and the
“onto-theological proposition” because “the Dasein is in the first place not responsible
to any determined being who looks at it or speaks to it.”48 In taking possession of me, in
“falling” on me, God gives me the gift of death (the absolute negative sublime). This gift,
granted even as God remains inaccessible (there is no monistic oneness here), imparts
a new experience of death and hence rouses in us a new sense of responsibility. What
was to Rudolf Otto a non-rational experience (and yet a positive feeling) that energized
the self and endorsed the larger spirit of man but remained nevertheless an “ ‘ideogram’
rather than a concept proper,”49 in Derrida (via Patočka) becomes a matter of ethical
responsibility, for the internal power of God, in making us understand the ultimate gift,
the gift of death, informs in us an ethics of responsibility.
The religious sublime leans upon, in particular, the Romantic and Kantian sub-
limes, as the latter two reinforce a late modern paradox: how objects construct a state of
mind when the impression may not tally with the object; in short the sublime replays a
Romantic incommensurability between representation and the “real.” Fredric Jameson
sums it up well when he writes about an awareness, on our postmodern part, of a
“whole new type of emotional ground tone” or “intensities” that “can best be grasped
by a return to older theories of the sublime.”50 In an immediate sense, implicit in the
ongoing Romantic aesthetic of the disjunction between art and the object of representa-
tion (the real world) found in the postmodern is precisely an interest in the category of
the sublime as a principle through which the “unpresentable” may be countenanced.
Other discourses have used the word “numinous,” “mystical,” “other-worldly,” “myste-
rium tremendum,” even “hierophany,” and “paranormal” to speak of the religious expe-
rience. Our age, in an uncanny echo of an earlier theorization (a theorization that dealt,
in the main, with aesthetic matters) returns to the category of the sublime and forces us
to think the religious sublime differently. To many this shift—recalling Samuel Monk’s
observation that the sublime catches an age off its guard—reflects an unease about our
lives in the nuclear age (and latterly in an age of global warming and terror) as well as an
epistemological unease about our capacity to adequately represent the world in which
we live, once again either as an empirical fact or as its reflection in our consciousness.
It follows, therefore, that to speak of the “religious sublime” at the turn of the
twenty-first century requires us to rethink both words: “religious” and “sublime”; we
need to frame them differently, recast them (if not reinvent them) as words that an ear-
lier age may have associated purely with belief systems. We need to rethink them as
a category of the mind linked to the faculty of reason but available to all people, not

simply to those, as both Kant and Hegel would lead us to believe, who see their God as
being outside of any form of representation: thou shall not make graven images of me,
an austerely monotheistic demand that exists only in Islam and Judaism; Christianity,
by and large, dispensed with it long ago. Both Rudolf Otto and Eliade (though not van
der Leeuw and Zaehner) had obviously felt otherwise. The need for a postmodern emo-
tional ground tone now recodes belief rather differently even if belief itself (since it has
historical depth) remains unchanged. What then is the religious sublime given that at
least the “sublime” part of the expression now collocates with almost anything? To add
“religious sublime” to a long list of sublimes (the Kantian, the Romantic, the Gothic, the
nuclear, and so on) may, in one reading, trivialize religion for a word as pervasive as reli-
gion (around which civilizations have formed and decayed or declined) should surely
be saved from its association with a generalized usage of “sublime.” On the other hand,
it is equally legitimate to suggest that the ascendancy of the word “sublime” in our own
age (as it did, it seems, in the age of Romanticism) says something about religion as an
attitude, as a form of consciousness, as images registered in the mind and not as a purely
dualistic principle of self and God. In this regard, the religious sublime may well be a
form of the return of the repressed, but with a discursive and epistemological legitimacy
hitherto denied.
The religious sublime as a transcultural (and hence transreligious) and indeed a
“polytheistic” concept is very much a late (post)modern idea. Against the value-laden
dualisms of savior and tribal religions, mystical and dualistic systems, the one-godly
and the stone-godly (this from Salman Rushdie),51 the one and the many, monotheism
and polytheism—all of which are dualisms of absolute difference—the religious sublime
now departs from its earlier associations (in religious thought most cogently expressed
in Otto, in aesthetics in Novak’s theodicy of the landscape, and in ethics in Derrida’s
concept of a sublime responsibility). It is a category that transcends difference and
enables us to discuss in the same breath eroticism clothed in religion, Tolkien’s recast-
ing of characters as spiritual mercenaries, and Superman as Christ, son of Jor-El (“El” in
Hebrew means “of God”). The religious sublime enters a polytheistic field, and although
the phrase is ungainly, may now be called a “polytheistic sublime.” To arrive at this, the
law of reason built into the Kantian sublime has to be made into a feature of all cultures,
not simply those of the West.
In the Kantian sublime, reason places a lid on sublime excess moments after imagina-
tion has been given the freedom to enter into the sublime abyss. It could be said that the
sublime in fact tells us a difficult truth known as well to the Romantics: that the phe-
nomenal world cannot be adequately represented; it is in fact beyond adequation. For
the postmodern reason’s play with the imagination (and which leads to the establishing
of its own primacy) is transformed into the persistence of what Baudrillard has spoken
of as the simulacra, the image that presents itself as the truth because there is no “real”
behind the image.52 If in this sense the late (post)modern world sees in the sublime a
confirmation of its own aesthetic ideology that the unpresentable (as pure negativity)
cannot be signified, this world also parts company with another post-Kantian reading
of the sublime: that the sublime is finally linked to one’s capacity for reason, from which

it follows that cultures that have split reason (Vernunftspaltung) or have alternative
“reasons” cannot have access to the sublime. Since the sublime is really a discourse of
reflection (how we read a particular object, its substantialization) and not of the object
itself (its empirical existence) it follows that certain conditions of reflective judgment
are essential for the sublime to exist in any given civilization. And it is at this juncture
that the religious sublime, in its purely neo-Kantian form, needs to be rewritten. To do
so, that is to make the religious sublime meaningful in a late (post)modern age of the
simulacral absolute, which leads, in essence, to a polyvalent, postrational semantics of
the sublime, we need to mediate our argument via Hegel’s refusal to grant a civilization
where graven images of Gods were rampant the capacity to think through the sublime. It
is to Hegel’s reading of Hinduism, especially, we must now turn our attention.
Hegel’s fascination with the Orient cannot be delinked from his interest in the
sublime and even when he is dismissive about oriental religions and history, he has
an inkling that there is a certain sublime in the Orient. The difficulty here lies with
Hegel’s insistence on history (which comes into being through acts of labor) that cre-
ates self-consciousness and knowledge and hence the mind that ultimately creates the
Absolute Idea. And this idea of history is based on a particular kind of historical rea-
soning, for in the Hegelian system the mind that creates the Absolute Idea can do so
only at the behest of reason. In the absence of history (as Hegel understood it) Indian
culture (the extreme instance of anti-reason in the Orient) gives us an instance of an
under-theorized (or even a non-theoretical) sublime that does violence to history and to
the imagination. The religious sublime, thus far, in as much as it is linked to both reason
and history, is an essentially western principle. For Hegel this is a pre-given for which
the absolute negation is the Hindu self.53
For Hegel, Hindu India is an object as well as a source text of a fantastic imagination
because he read the “sign” of the Hindu Brahman (the Absolute Spirit) as a confirmation
of the total merging of Self and Other in a semantic universe from which the principle
of understanding and morality had been removed. The austere ideal of the Absolute
Spirit (Idea) gets troped in Hinduism through a pantheistic doctrine that transforms the
absolute (as pure thought) into a sensuous object. In this “Fantastic Symbolism” (against
true symbolism, which is marked by a sense of difference between the sign and what it
signifies) each object is referred back to the Divine in a pantheistic economy that fails
to distinguish between a monotheistic principle (that produces a “single field of uni-
fied knowledge”54 and hence prefigures the true sublime) and a polytheistic principle
of divine immanence in the totality of nature. In the Hindu pantheistic economy the
objects are not representations of the Divine but are its very being: the symbol becomes
the thing represented, the finite intermingles with the infinite since what is true of the
external world becomes true of the self as well: the distinction between consciousness
and self-consciousness totally disappears.
For Hegel, then, to arrive at the sublime there must be an “express separation of the
essential substance from the sensuous present, that is from the empirical facts of exter-
nal appearance.”55 This being the case, the sublime object cannot be compromised by its
possible symbolic equivalents: no matter what icons or images we construct, the two,

the idea and its symbolic referent, are never identical. For the Hindu it is not a mat-
ter of denying this proposition but of continually attempting to trope the infinite by
grounding it in the phenomenal even as the canonical texts (the Upanishads preemi-
nently) suggest the impossibility of such a grounding. The Hindu then trivializes sub-
lime empowerment by constantly transforming the Absolute into objects of sensuality.
The Hindu procedure of objectifying the Absolute through a fantastic symbolization
has the effect of grounding it in sensuous objects, in a subjective content known to the
self. This procedure, of course, is unthinkable to Hegel, for whom the sublime object is
pure thought, “unaffected by every expression of the finite categories,” and “only pres-
ent to thought in its purity.”56 Unlike Kant (who spoke about positive and negative sub-
limes, the mathematical and the dynamical), for Hegel the sublime is pure negation, the
Absolute always posited above “the particular appearance.” And here the negative rep-
resentation of the Absolute is to be found in Hebrew poetry, where the “positive imma-
nence of the Absolute is done away with.” Metaphorical language must disappear if the
divine essence is to be grasped, a principle that seems to be at the heart of austere Islam,
and certainly evident in many parts of the Qur’ān.
We have alluded to it already, but it must be spelled out. Underlying the sublime (and
certainly in Hegel’s rendition of it) is a grand narrative of history, a history of the con-
sciousness of the self, and linked to a consciousness about the power of reason. Remove
history, self-consciousness, and reason, and there is no sublime, certainly no religious
sublime in Kantian-Hegelian terms. To make the case, Kant had to rethink Christianity
as the religion of reason. And for Hegel too it is this understanding of the teleology of
history, intrinsic in a sense to western historical consciousness alone, that leads him
to discover true sublimity only in the Judaeo-Christian God who, after all, is crucial to
Hegel’s system. Where the Hindu God is measured either mathematically (as the sup-
posedly sixty-four million gods) or quantitatively (as grotesque and enlarged beings),
the Judaeo-Christian God stridently proclaims there can be no image-substitute for
him. In spite of Hegel’s fascination with the Hindu Brahman (whom he confuses with
its masculine counterpart), Hegel empowers some people with the capacity for the true
sublime; those who lack history only have its lower form—pantheistic art—available
to them.
How then can we rethink the religious sublime if indeed, after Hegel the matter is
closed since the true sublime has to be linked to the Enlightenment conception of his-
tory and reason? Can one speak of the religious sublime (equally a sublime beyond
representation) in terms of a different idea of a grand- or meta-narrative? We return to
postmodern theorization of the sublime at this juncture for we need to reinvent, from
our vantage point, the religious sublime. To do so a crucial disengagement of the nexus
between the sublime and history (as a grand narrative) is necessary. Further, Rudolf
Otto’s reading of the mysterium tremendum in terms of the non-rational has to be read
as “postrational.” Eliade, Otto, and before them Blake (of the people mentioned in this
essay) separated the sublime from the law of reason, and suggestively embraced panthe-
istic readings of belief. Northrop Frye felt that in Blake certainly there was an inkling
of the Bhagavadgītā and it is to this latter work that we must turn to reformulate the

religious sublime in our late (post)modern times. Our proof text will therefore be the
great Hindu work, the Bhagavadgītā (hereinafter BG), eighteen chapters embedded in
the sixth book (the Bhiṣmaparvan) of the world’s grandest epic, the Mahābhārata.
In the Indian (Eastern) sublime two principles are at work: the first a principle of
nondifferentiation and absolute nonrepresentation signified in the name of “Brahman”
(neuter); the second is its exact opposite, of excessive representation and differentia-
tion in the name of “Brahman” (masculine). For someone like the Indian monist thinker
Śaṅkara, the purity of the idea of Brahman as the Absolute (following Hegel’s model)
requires no defense. Indeed it is Śaṅkara’s shadow that dominates what came to be
known as Vedanta philosophy where, especially, in the wake of European colonization,
Brahman, neuter, became a monotheistic God substitute. Not surprisingly people like
Swami Vivekananda, a polemicist notoriously self-conscious about Hindu pantheism
and desperate to link Hinduism with a unified world religion, constructed, against the
evidence, Hegelian readings of the sublime Brahman, but without Hegel’s transcenden-
tal principle of history. This distinction is not necessarily maintained in the later texts,
and by and large not in the bhāṣā or vernacular bhakti (devotional) texts. What existed
in the earlier (and certainly in the BG) as a clear-cut distinction present both in gender
(masculine versus neuter) and in metaphysics (an absolute, foundational principle ver-
sus a theistic principle) collapses in devotional religiosity on both gender and metaphys-
ical grounds. Vernacular languages (Avadhi and Brajbhasa as well as modern Hindi, for
instance) use the masculine gender for both Brahman the Creator and Brahman the
Absolute First Principle. And certainly in Tulsīdās, Brahman the Creator is the head of
the Hindu trinity, reincarnating himself (through the figure of Vishnu as Rama) as well
as the absolute spirit that dwells within the individual soul. In bhakti God’s name (as
mystical utterance) is a supracategory or an archeseme.
For any understanding of the religious sublime beyond its Judeao-Christian (and
Islamic) articulation, a rethinking from the Hindu instance is pivotal. In retheorizing
the religious sublime we need to renegotiate Hegel’s fantastic or pantheistic symbol-
ism by considering the perennial Hindu engagement with questions of multiplicity (the
ontology of plurality-with-unity) as a structural principle at the heart of an alternative
reading of the sublime. How is it that the one Brahman (neuter) and the many Brahmans
(masculine) have maintained a peaceful co-existence all these years? And why is it that
this version of the sublime, a polyvalent version of it in fact, which is more in line with
a postmodern understanding of the proliferation of minor narratives, and the sublime
as the sign of the impossibility of representation (and hence with precisely the negative
connotations of fear embedded in Rudolf Otto’s retreat from God as an abstract idea to
God as a terrible power), arrests us creatively and resonates with our everyday lives?
In the BG two truths are told and both are conditioned by a larger legacy of monism
and theism. The first truth, which in the end does not require the idea of God, is all about
the identity of the self with an absolute spirit and this is, in the end, essentially a mysti-
cal union. The second is the foregrounding of the idea of a theistic God, someone who
makes the very idea of union with an absolute spirit possible. The first truth is primarily

philosophical, the second is religious. For Eliade, Otto, van der Leeuw, R. C. Zaehner,
and quite possibly Blake, both “truths” are religious.
The religious sublime postulated here via the BG raises the question: “How then does
one define God?” He/it/she exists in all religions in some form and it is quite possible to
construct (conceptually that is) those prime characteristics that would go into any defi-
nition of the figure of “God.” We can therefore say that God is the creator of the universe,
of worlds already created and yet to be created; he is omnipresent, omnipotent and
omniscient, eternal and incomparable, intransient and imperishable; he is the origin of
all knowledge, of language (not unlike St. John’s definition of the link between God and
the Word, Logos), of philosophy, of history and the like; he is also the preserver and
destroyer of the worlds; he is not unlike humans in that he may, if he so wishes, speak
to us; he is compassionate, he is a God of love, he is charitable, he may be addressed as a
friend, a father, a mother, even a lover and a husband; he may be worshipped; he rewards
the faithful; he is both in time and out of time; he is the savior; he lays down rules for
living, precepts, laws; he may even be a legislator; and so on. All the characteristics—
which the mind conceptualizes—belong to a broad semantic spectrum in which none
of these characteristics may contradict another. So we can choose any two to three items
and still have a pretty good idea of who he is: for example we can say he is omniscient,
the savior, a God of love; he is compassionate and merciful, perhaps even forgiving. But
the mysterious in him, the mysterium tremendum as Rudolf Otto understood it, may be
frightening.
In terms of this definition, what does Krishna declare?
He declares that he is the author of language, he is Logos (aum, the letter a), he is the
debate of the debaters, he is the author of philosophy, of Saṁkhya; he is the author of
the theory of guṇas, he has created the unity of puruṣa-ātman-brahman (as an idea), he
is the foundation of all knowledge and action, he tells us how to live, what to eat, what
to do before we die, and so on. He is the creator, preserver, and destroyer (kālo ’asmi
lokaṣyakṛt pravṛddaḥ) of the worlds. He is the author of social structures, of caste, he
emphasizes one’s svadharma and how important it is to follow that dharma—to be a
warrior is to dispassionately follow that dharma, to be a scholar has a similar dharmic
directive; he is a God of love, he is a brother, a father, a mother; one can speak to him; he
lays down what one should eat, declares the virtues of the sattva life over rajas and tamas;
he stipulates how to meditate, including where to sit and how to breathe; in Chapter 17
he lays down the various kinds of penance and the recitation of the aum tat sat mantra.
He stresses the importance of equanimity in our lives and endlessly reiterates the link
between the middle path and peace of mind. He says that in your hour of death you
should think on him, but he does not deny the value of iṣṭadevatas, for these too are
his creation (the idea at the very heart of plurality-with-unity). He wrote the Hegelian
narrative: The Absolute Spirit produces nature, which produces human beings who by
dint of labor produce history, which produces consciousness and the mind, which in
turn reproduces the Absolute Spirit. And he knows that, as with Buddhism, if we leave
the narrative as given we do not need a God at all, as this cyclical model explains itself.
So even as he stresses the importance of the immanent Brahman (the God within with

which one’s inner self identifies) he gives the God outside, the transcendent God, the
highest place. He makes it quite explicit at 14.27: brahmaṇo hi pratiṣṭhāham (“For I am
the foundation of brahman”). This idea is absolutely central to Hinduism—how to link
the monistic principle of unity of self with the absolute to the theistic principle of a loving
God who enters into history and who can be worshipped—an idea better captured in “a
polytheistic monism” than in “modified non-dualism.” In the end I think that Rāmānuja
(eleventh century) and Mahatma Gandhi (in his brief discourses on the BG) rather than
the strict advaitists got the BG right. It is also a thesis that one can defend through a very
close reading of the BG. One can open the Qur’ān and say, “Praise be to Krishna (God),
Lord of the Universe, the compassionate, the merciful, the guide of the true path.” But
unlike in the Qur’ān, God does not exclude “those who have incurred your wrath or
those who have gone astray.” For as God he is not a vengeful God, nor does he favor any
one. Anyone who has the virtues of equanimity or anyone who attempts at achieving
spiritual well-being is welcome. In this respect he is less like the Judaeo-Islamic God and
a lot more like Christ, who (as many would claim) is finally a God of Love, a point reiter-
ated time and time again in Vivekananda’s works.
The aesthetic object is also an object to which we bring a judgment arising out of
emotion (and not necessarily reason), which also means that judgment may bypass the
censorship of the law of reason because embedded in the texts is an entire history of
emotional, religious, and artistic response, a point extensively made by Indian bhakti
poets. We need to respect this but spell out the points at which interpretation is made on
these grounds. Texts are ideologically sedimented; they carry signs of their moment of
production, and these signs point to cultural values at a point in time, in history. Further,
unlike the relatively autonomous texts of the Judaeo-Christian traditions (including
Islam), Hindu texts are not autonomous, and the BG certainly is not to be read in isola-
tion. So as part of a heterogeneous corpus, what surfaces in the BG as contradictions or
incomplete philosophical arguments seem so only to those who are not aware that the
fuller argument has already been canvassed elsewhere, notably in the Upanishads and
in the BG’s larger frame of reference, the grand epic itself. What we gather even from
selective readings of texts from the canon is that there has been an ongoing debate about
the nature of prakṛti, the world, the self, the principle of oneness, and the principle of a
transcendental God. The last two are interrelated but parallel arguments and should not
be collapsed into a single order (or form), as the absolute unmanifest One into which
one dissolves as an immanent being is not the same as God, the transcendental abso-
lute. Hindu tradition arrives at this ( in the BG) rather late in its history and correctly so
because it required centuries of debates and commentaries before it could. And one of
the key debates revolved around the world as sensual representation, that is, the world
as the product of our senses. The materialists—the lokāyatikas, followers of Kārvāka’s
nāstika or atheist school—were adamant that nothing existed outside of the senses, a
point strategically used by Krishna at 16.8 of the BG: “The universe they say is without
basis or foundation in a God, it is brought about by desire (aparasparasaṃbhūtaṃ).” In
this materialist reading desire dictates the world; the corporeal matters, we are what we
sense, and reason reinforces this.57 The BG, of course, cannot buy this proposition.

The liberation that Krishna speaks of, however, has been in the making for some time.
In the Upanishads, where a semantics of liberation begins to take shape, liberation is not
to be mistaken for union with God, even when, as in scattered references in them, a God
is placed above Brahman. So the Upanishads, in line with Saṁkhya, agree that there is
a ground of pure being that must be realized for salvation to take place. To get out of
the bondage of prakṛti, which essentially means the karmic cycle of birth, death and
rebirth, this realization of identity of self and Ᾱtman (Puruṣa and Brahman) is essential.
Even where, as in the case of Rudra-Śiva, a transcendent God is given, self-realization
is not identical with union with God; self-realization is knowledge of the immanent
God within, the Brahman within. It is at this point that Krishna enters history in the
BG. For what Krishna does (as is clear from Chapter 11 onwards), is he declares that the
union with Brahman and knowledge of one’s inner self can happen only when karma
itself is seen in its pure form, when acts (which are essential) are seen as being selfless
(the point declared in the one-verse manifesto at 2.47 and endlessly repeated) then
alone is self-realization achieved. Only after this has happened does one enter the bliss
of the personal God, the latter-day Rudra-Śiva/Vishnu who is above Brahman, for this
Brahman, in the earlier literature was never a transcendent God (although as Prajāpati
he may have had this role).
To make the case, Krishna has to rewrite the narrative Brahman (neuter) into
Brahman (masculine) and, in doing so, make it clear that the Absolute Spirit is his cre-
ation as a transcendental metaphysic. To know the Absolute Spirit, Brahman, is to know
Krishna as God, as the prior understanding (of Brahman) is essentially an understand-
ing of the self. Krishna reworks, rethinks doctrines already noted in the Upanishads but
introduces the idea of a transcendental God who is himself and who is to be loved and
worshipped. The nirvanic sublime (of the Buddhists or of the Upanishadic/Saṁkhyan
oneness of Puruṣa-Ᾱtman-Brahman) is simply a prelude to one’s bhakti for which,
Krishna says time and time again, selfless acts are important. At the same time Krishna
cannot dispense with the baggage of polytheism, of fantastic-pantheistic symbolism,
and must suggest a sublime that is really a unity-in-diversity, the many and the one,
where minor narratives co-exist with the grand, unpresentable narrative. We move
toward a more finessed understanding of the religious sublime. We have in the BG a new
kind of revelation: personal, historic, and original. Hindu monism in the BG confronts
for the first time a fully fledged Hindu theism, albeit in the shape of a specifically Hindu
polytheistic monism.
Enter Krishna, already revered as God (remember the BG does not reach its final form
until almost the birth of Christ). He is made to reveal himself as the guarantor of social
stability and the upholder of dharma. He has an answer to the new attractive doctrine of
rebirth, and he puts the theory of renunciation in place and reveals himself as the savior
of all. Much of this has been canvassed in Chapters 1–9. In Chapter 10 Krishna reveals
himself to humankind as a savior God, who parts company from the śruti tradition of
the unuttered discourse to move to the smṛti tradition of remembered texts, who lives in
time and who makes a distinction between metaphysics and theism, as well as between
Brahman (neuter) and God (Brahman, masculine). He does, however, refer to himself

invariably as being both transcendent (formless, uncreated, eternal but capable of being
manifested in time, a personal God who is also an agent of change) and immanent
(living within, identified as the inner being, the Ᾱtman coalescing with Brahman). To
understand him one now needs bhakti or devotion. Bhakti, as a choice, then, appears as
a specifically Hindu religiosity through which one created a personal monotheism out
of a social polytheism. The believer, then, becomes a firm polytheist monist (not unlike
Rāmānuja’s viśiṣṭādvait believing that all other Gods (who continue to exist in the wider
social polytheism) work at the behest of his one God, whose manifestations they are and
who exist, as entire pantheons, for this God’s glorification.
Krishna makes a distinction between himself and the idea of becoming Brahman
(brahmanirvāṇa) with the latter now subsisting in him. So what happens is that the
realized self (inner being, Puruṣa, inner self) begins the journey of understanding
God. To realize one’s own identity as Brahman is the beginning of bhakti, which leads
one to God. Liberation is not the ultimate goal as God must be experienced not in this
abstract manner (which is mystical) but through active love and worship. This is what
the second section of the BG (Chapters 7–11), which culminates in the classic theophany
of God, stresses. Arjuna becomes aware of this from now on. Man exists in time and
although in the rest of the BG (Chapters 12–18) Saṁkhya thinking is referred to, it is
only to emphasize that Krishna the Personal God is higher than the Brahman of the
Upanishads, the Puruṣa and Ᾱtman of Saṁkhya. Since man has now entered time, and
God has entered history, God affirms what is dharma (righteousness, ethics, and so on)
as well as the condition of Brahmanhood, which is eternal Being. Men (and women of
course) come to know God only after the inner self has been understood, but to enter
into the bliss of God, of Krishna, one should have become Brahman.58 This is the new
religious sublime, a polytheistic monism where the principle of unity of being is main-
tained (Ᾱtman-Brahman) but modified by a theism because the original unity did not
require the idea of a theistic God: “bear me in mind, love me, and worship me . . . so
will you come to me” says the BG (18. 65). And it remains polytheistic because even as
Krishna becomes the transcendental God, above and beyond everything else, as is clear
from the dazzling theophanic vision given to Arjuna, the cosmos abounds with our own
iṣṭadevatas. This is something that requires a lateral, diverse, open-ended, and explor-
atory mode of thinking.
It is rather late in the history of Hinduism that we encounter a fully fledged creator,
a transcendent God who does not part company with tradition (as the New Testament
did in relation to the Old or Islam did in relation to Judaism) but incorporates and
completes the tradition so that abstract, philosophical metaphysics (the Upanishadic/
Saṁkhyan narrative of Puruṣa-Ᾱtman-Brahman) co-exists with a transcendental God.
What the BG establishes is not something absolutely unique to Hinduism—that the
immanent and the transcendental are not mutually exclusive—but the way in which
they can both exist, a spiritual unity of being alongside loving adoration of a personal
God, within a polytheistic monism. In the BG, then, we find a way out of the restric-
tions of the Kantian-Hegelian sublime (and a less defensive celebration of difference
than found in either Eliade or Otto), where history and reason were intertwined and

which had no room for a splitting of reason. Em McAvan quoting Zygmunt Bauman has
referred to the “experience of postmodern sensation-gatherers as essentially religious.”59
McAvan has also drawn attention to the ways in which a postmodern sacred cannot be
delinked from New Age Spirituality, in which a personal experience of religion is coded
through “textual simulations of lost texts—Celtic druids, North American shamans, and
so on.” In a “postrational” world, the religious sublime parts company with the received
Kantian-Hegelian definition in favor of a more open-ended postmodern reading of it
but keeps intact much of the Plotinian legacy. What the religious sublime, taking off
from the BG’s breaking of the binary between the one-godly and the many-godly, now
affirms is precisely a cultural logic in which the religious sublime can be inflected in
different ways. For that definition, currently played out in the sphere of popular culture
(from Superman to Tolkien), the religious experience itself has to be multiply centered.
And for that multiple centering the religious sublime must make way for texts excluded
from the Hegelian sublime. The religious sublime now makes sense only if we can bring
the one and the many together, celebrating multiplicity and the legacy of what Hegel
declaimed as fantastic symbolism.
Notes
1. The Oxford English Dictionary [The Compact Edition, 1987], II:3123.
2. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 30, 26. Tafuri (30) quotes from Diderot’s
Salon (1767) “[poets should speak] always of eternity, of the infinite, of immensity, of time,
of space, of divinity, of tombs, of hands, of lightning that splits open the clouds.”
3. David B. Morris, The Religious Sublime, 14.
4. Ibid., 48–57.
5. Samuel Monk, The Sublime, 3.
6. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 73.
7. Ibid., 74.
8. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 97.
9. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 132.
10. Ibid., 122, 131.
11. Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 58.
12. Vijay Mishra, Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime, 6.
13. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 14.
14. Ibid., 21.
15. Ibid., 431.
16. Ibid., 173.
17. Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 433.
18. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 43.
19. Ibid., 46.
20. Ibid., 59.
21. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 99.
22. Edmund Burke,A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful.
23. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 128. Quoted in Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture, 41.

24. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture, 37.

25. Ibid., 39.
26. Ibid., 41.
27. Ibid., 42.
28. Ibid., 35.
29. Tulsīdās, Rāmacaritamānas, I, 10, 2–3.
30. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, 4.
31. Ibid., 189.
32. Ibid., 5.
33. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 12.
34. R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane, 42.
35. Rudolf Otto, Mysticism East and West.
36. Ibid., 30–31.
37. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 5.
38. Ibid., 11.
39. W. Temple, cited in the OED.
40. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 14.
41. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 9.
42. Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works, I:16.
43. Ibid., I:323.
44. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, 21.
45. Ibid., 16.
46. Ibid., 31.
47. Ibid., 31.
48. Ibid, 31–2.
49. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 19.
50. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 6.
51. Salman Rushdie, Shame, 62.
52. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations.
53. A dialectical principle is at work here—one which took its most dramatic form, in Hegel,
in the figures of the master and the slave.
54. de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 111.
55. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, II:85.
56. Ibid., II:87.
57. See Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, III:512–550.
58. R. C. Zaehner, Hindu Scriptures, xix.
59. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents, 180.
Bibliography
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New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1958.
——. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 1973.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman. New York:
Semiotex(e), Inc., 1983.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. New York: New York University
Press, 1997.
Biardeau, Madeleine. Hinduism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.
Crowther, Paul. The Kantian Sublime. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
de Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Dasgupta, Surendranath. A History of Indian Philosophy. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975. 5 vols.
Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
——. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Dorsch, T. S., ed. and trans. Aristotle, Horace, Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969.
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt,
Inc., 1987.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University
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Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover, 1956.
——. On Art, Religion and Philosophy. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet, E. B. Speirs, J. Burdon
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——. The Philosophy of Fine Art. Trans. F. P. B. Osmaston. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975.
4 vols.
——. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1986.
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Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
McAvan, Em. “The Postmodern Sacred.” PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2007.
Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994.
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——. Mysticism East and West. Trans. Bertha L. Bracey and Richenda C. Payne.
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——. trans. Hindu Scriptures. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1978.
Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do. London: Verso, 2002.

C HA P T E R 5
A RT I S T I C I M AG I NAT I O N
A N D R E L I G I O U S FA I T H
G E S A E L SB E T H T H I E S SE N
5.1 Introduction
Where would we be without the imagination? Or rather, could we exist at all? Would
human life, relationships, or any kind of development in the personal, societal, artistic,
or scientific spheres be possible without the imagination? In this chapter our assertion is
that the faculty of the imagination is essential to human living and growth. Our particu-
lar focus will be to explore its relationship to religious faith and its role in the artistic and
religious realm.
It is the creation and re-creation of images that form a vital link between artistic imag-
ination and religious faith. The creative imagination is central to the work of the artist
and in the expressions of religious faith, i.e., in sacred writings, theology, liturgy and
worship, and in music, art, and sacred dance, etc. It is the power of the imagination that
enables us to perceive something of the transcendent, to deal with and transform reality,
to pray, and to disclose glimpses of ultimate reality. While the imagination and images
have concerned Christian theologians since the early church, in recent years—with the
rapid expansion of the field of theology and the arts—their role has been considered
by a number of theologians, such as Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, John McIntyre, Horst
Schwebel, Frank Burch Brown, amongst others.
In the following, I will focus on matters of the imagination and art as engaged by
notable theologians and philosophers of the Christian tradition. I will reflect on what
it means to imagine, i.e., the act of imagination, and look at contemporary writers and
issues on the relationship between theology and art. Finally, I will consider the eschato-
logical dimension as a vital connection in the relationship between artistic imagination
and religious faith.

5.2 Imagination and Faith—

Philosophical and Theological
Perspectives in History
The place of the imagination and images in the Judaeo-Christian tradition has been
ambivalent and controversial. The prohibition of making for oneself a graven image
in Exodus 20, 4–5 and other such passages in the Old Testament were instrumental
in the iconoclastic outbursts in the Byzantine Church in the eighth and ninth century
and during the Reformation. While Jews in ancient Israel were forbidden to embellish
their synagogues with images of the divine, we know today that synagogues, such as in
Dura Europos, were adorned with biblical scenes and sometimes illustrations of pagan
images, like the Zodiac. The Torah forbade images of the divine as God was beyond and
greater than any image could capture; yet it is clear that through history both Jews and
Christians ignored such prohibitions.
“God created humankind in his image” and it was “very good” (Gen 1:27, 31). Thus
God created humans with the ability to imagine. However, this was to be a mixed bless-
ing as “the human imagination becomes subject to evil in that it falls victim to its own
idolatrous creations,”1 starting with the Fall of Adam and Eve in their wish to eat “of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:17). After the Fall, therefore, the imagi-
nation would often be seen in negative terms. However, to imagine and to choose to do
either evil or good was ultimately left to the decision and responsibility of the individual.
Moving into the Hellenic world, it was Plato who was to provide the first properly
philosophical and critical account of the imagination.2 In fact, Plato had a deeply ambiv-
alent attitude toward the imagination, the arts, and artists. At the same time he laid the
philosophical foundations for aesthetics, which have been supremely influential, both
in philosophical and theological aesthetics. Plato affirms that reason attains truth, and
he relegates the imagination to the lowest of human thought—illusion.3 He considers
the artist as pretending to know more than he or she does, and claims that art has no
didactic value. The artistic imagination is irrational and the creating of images has the
power to corrupt humans. Art therefore has an immoral aspect and can be idolatrous.
Art is essentially mimetic, i.e., mirror-like image-making; it creates “appearances.”
The demiourgos, the divine maker, composes the universe as an imitation, a mimesis,
of unchanging and ultimate forms. The poet imitates the divine demiourgos. For Plato,
however, the truly real is not matter and image but ultimately it is the ideas that make
them real. Images are only imitations of these ideas. Thus artistic images are twice
removed from the plane of the forms, i.e., from truth.
Poetry was Plato’s favorite art form, even if in some ways he was reluctant to consider
poetry as genuine art. While he thought that it could “bewitch the soul” and subvert rea-
son through arousal of the emotions, he still would admit to the attractions of poetry.4
Plato speaks of techne, the know-how and skillful use of materials, and of poiesis, i.e.,

ARTISTIC IMAGINATION AND RELIGIOUS FAITH 79
aesthetic making, craftsmanship, and, more particularly, the making of plays, poems,
pictures, or sculptures. In the Septuagint (Latin version of the Bible), poiesis is the
term that denotes “divine making” or creation of the world proclaimed in the Book of
Genesis. This association of divine creativity with human creativity was to lead later
philosopher-theologians to incorporate Platonic theory into their thought on the true,
good and beautiful.
Plato contemplated the nature of beauty and developed aesthetic criteria that were
foundational to the whole development of aesthetics and the arts, especially the notion
of what constitutes an object as beautiful—radiance, proportion, harmony, unity. For
him the highest idea is that of the good, which is the form of forms. The chief propae-
deutic to the good is the beautiful. It is through the beautiful that we see the good. This
inherently moral dimension, the idea that the good, the beautiful, and the true always
belong together, was to be paramount to subsequent aesthetics until Kant. Both Plato’s
ambivalent attitude toward the arts and his love of the aesthetic were to play a central
role in Christian life and theological aesthetics through history.
With the beginning of Christianity, the notion of a trinitarian God and faith in Jesus
Christ as God incarnate were to be momentous in the development of the relationship
between faith and art in a Christian context. The incarnation was vital in developing a
positive attitude toward the image and in the idea of seeing the divine, the logos made
flesh. Christology encouraged and sustained the hope for the vision of God and pro-
vided the very basis for art in sacred settings and hence for a theology of the image.
In Christ the invisible, inconceivable, transcendent beauty of God had been revealed;
thus we are “allowed” to have images of the divine. The Eastern Church went so far as to
assert that both the icon and the word are of equal status in revealing the truth of Christ.5
Christian theologians, from Irenaeus, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa to Augustine
and Thomas Aquinas emphasized that only those who are pure at heart and desire
the good will see God. Like Plato, they saw truth, goodness, and the vision of God as
intrinsically related. Seeing the divine glory was understood primarily in spiritual
terms. Yet, while this emphasis on the spiritual could easily imply the denigration of the
physical-sensuous aspect of seeing, patristic and especially medieval mystical theolo-
gians frequently applied highly sensuous imagery in their theology.
Following Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Neo-Platonists, the Church fathers and
later medieval scholars would refer time and again to the transcendentals of unity,
beauty, truth, and goodness in their notion of God. While theologians, poets, musicians,
painters, and sculptors strove to give witness to God in their respective medium, they
were fully aware that no word, image, or hymn could ever “capture” the unfathomable
beauty of God. Still, the creative imagination was the means and grace that would at
least enable artists to attain such glimpses.
Some of the early and medieval Christian writers contemplated not only beauty
but also art. Artists during this time were understood as craftsmen; their names
remained anonymous. Interest in individual artists and their lives only arose during the
Renaissance. Ambrose and Augustine considered the imagination and images in terms
of mimetic representation. They saw God as the supreme creator, the divine artist, and

the artist as God’s co-creator. Augustine regarded the arts not only as embellishment but
as a direct means of participation in the divine. If the artist is guided by the divine will,
art can become a reflection of the divine. He wrote on numerous occasions about God’s
beauty, and even addressed God as “Beauty” in his doxologies.6
For Aquinas, the contemplation of the good as beautiful provides knowledge of the
good. In the Platonist-Aristotelian tradition, for him, clarity, proportion, and integrity
are the marks of beauty. In his work on the Trinity, Thomas discussed whether image
“is a name proper to the Son.”7 He maintains that it is the Son, as the “absolute Image” of
God, to whom beauty may be most fittingly attributed since in Christ there is integrity
due to the fact that he is perfect in himself. Proportion may be ascribed to Christ as he
is the “express image” of the Father. And he is radiant as he is the light of the world that
enlightens all.
In order to understand how the Reformers viewed the role of the image and of artistic
creativity in the context of faith and church, a glance at church interiors of the Lutheran
and the Reformed traditions will provide definitive clues. While Lutheran Churches
kept crucifixes, images, and statues of biblical saints, churches in the Reformed tradi-
tion are noted for their austerity, lacking pictures, statues, and even altar crosses. Luther
considered religious images a “small matter”; they are “neither good nor bad.” At times
he viewed them positively and defended them against the more radical reformers, like
Karlstadt, who, in Luther’s absence from Wittenberg, had embarked on destroying art-
works in local churches. The essence of the matter for Luther was not whether artistic
images of Jesus and the saints were to be permitted in churches or in homes, but the
idols in one’s heart. These false Gods and false images, created within the self, ought to
be destroyed.8
Zwingli and Calvin thoroughly disproved of art with Christian subject matter. Calvin
maintained that if the clergy had taken their task seriously of instructing the faithful
in their faith, images would be superfluous. In the strongest polemical, even arrogant,
terms he refutes any kind of image-making for the religious sphere, as all such images are
worthless in matters of faith. The word of God, as proclaimed in the Bible, preached in
worship, and taught among the faithful is sufficient in mediating Christian revelation.9
With Luther and Calvin we approach modernity with its turn to the human subject.
As Richard Kearney points out what “most distinguishes the modern philosophies
of imagination from their various antecedents is a marked affirmation of the creative
power of man.”10 While in Greek thought, in the early church, and in later medieval
times imagination and images were generally perceived in mimetic terms—at best as
an imitation or copy of some truth—and as subordinate to reason, in modernity the
“mimetic paradigm” has been replaced by the “productive paradigm.”11 The imagination
now becomes the hidden condition of all knowledge. It is acknowledged as being capa-
ble of inventing worlds, and not simply as a mirror and source of reproduction (Kant,
Fichte, Schelling). Thus images and, more particularly, works of art were to be increas-
ingly valued for their originality. The imagination would be hailed as the “divine spark”
in the human being. The possibility of original creation was no longer seen as exclusive
to the divine creator.

In the Enlightenment, criteria were developed for subjective experiences that could
not be quantified, in particular, experiences of the beautiful and the holy. Terms such
as feeling and sensibility were used to describe aesthetic and religious experiences. In
the mid-eighteenth century, the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
coined the term aesthetics as “the science of sensitive knowing” (Aesthetica, 1750/58, par.
I). He emphasized that this knowledge has its own autonomy and is not to be seen as
subordinate to logical knowledge.
However, it was Immanuel Kant who was the first to develop a systematic theory
of aesthetics as an integral part of philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
he writes on the imagination. He sees the work of the imagination as ranging from
a basic intuition or an awareness of bare sensation to the reproduction of images.
Unlike Locke and Hume, he considered the imagination as having a rather active role
in human knowing.12 Kant distinguished between the reproductive and productive
imagination. “The productive imagination makes a unity of our sense experiences,”
while “the reproductive imagination, dependent upon prior unified manifolds of
sense, completes the work of sense by ‘imagining’ what is unavailable.”13 In his Critique
of Judgement (1790) Kant focused his attention on aesthetic judgment and on the sub-
lime. Here he assigns a mediating role to the imagination “between the speculative
and practical reason.”14 He affirms that an aesthetic judgment is expressed when we
describe something as beautiful. Beauty is the central category in his aesthetics. He
applies it first of all to natural objects and then to works of art. Beauty is manifested
through a pattern or “an inner finality of form without use” (Zweckmässigkeit ohne
Zweck). As he sees it, the goal of art lies within the artistic experience itself, within
the free play of the imagination. Kant’s view that the object is to be perceived with an
aesthetic attitude of “disinterested interest” has played a pervasive role in philosophi-
cal writing ever since. The object is to be enjoyed for itself, without moral or practical
implications; aesthetic value therefore is autonomous. Unlike tools or other practical
instruments the work of art has no purpose outside itself. It was this dimension in
Kant’s thinking that was to prepare the way to the modern notion of l’art pour l’art, art
for art’s sake. However, aesthetic judgments, Kant claimed, are subjective and particu-
lar yet also necessary and universal, a notion that in some ways seems contradictory to
what he said about the autonomy of art.
Kant examined the sublime as an aesthetic category. This had already been discussed
by others, notably by Edmund Burke. In his book Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Burke writes on the nature of the
sublime which, according to him, is present in objects that are perceived as being in
some way terrible, thus instilling fear and awe. However, these experiences of the sub-
lime happen at a remove from an actual experience of terror where one is personally
threatened. Feeling the sublime is therefore “a sort of delightful horror” that is prin-
cipally produced by images that are evocative of unfathomable dimensions and over-
whelming power. Influenced by Burke’s Enquiry, Kant noted that the sublime performs
an outrage on the imagination. The sublime is awe-inspiring since, unlike beauty, it is
not formal or related to discursive understanding, but experienced as the overpowering

or the infinite. This interest in the sublime puts both Burke and Kant into close proxim-
ity with the Romantic thinkers and artists in whose works the sublime and an emphasis
on the free play of the imagination found particular expression.
Schleiermacher, often perceived as the first modern theologian, was at pains to make
religion once again attractive to its “cultured despisers.” Influenced by his contempo-
rary Romantic philosophers, he located religion primarily in the realm of feeling, and
famously pronounced that religion is the “feeling of absolute dependence.” As finite
things were essentially believed to be related to the infinite, the “sense and taste for the
infinite,” for the sublime and transcendent, was sought no longer in an unquestioned
Christian faith and in images with explicit Christian subject matter, but in private expe-
riences of religious feeling, especially through nature. Paintings by Friedrich, Runge,
Blake, and Turner serve as prime examples of these sensibilities. A free, apparently
unlimited, imagination, and a sense of panentheism, transience and melancholy were
evoked by these artists. At times reality is extended by the fantastic in their works, such
as in The Cathedral by Friedrich or Morning by Runge.
In his Transcendental Idealism (1800), Friedrich Schelling proposed that “[t]he
productive and synthetic imagination is the organon and pinnacle of all philoso-
phy.”15 This book was to become a sort of manifesto for the Romantic artists. Schelling
defined the imagination as the “creative power” that reconciles the opposites of being
and becoming, freedom and necessity, the particular and the universal, the temporal
and the eternal, and perhaps even the human and the divine. In a sense, the imagi-
nation becomes the panacea of all our problems. Moreover, Schelling’s highest claim
seems to have been his identifying of the human imagination with the divine mind.
As Kearney observes, this elevation of the imagination signified the collapse of the
“onto-theological dichotomy between divine and human creation,” as the imagination
was now seen as being within the “rank of divine omnipotence.” Implicitly, it thus also
challenged the Enlightenment’s insistence of the imagination remaining subservient
to reason.16
Søren Kierkegaard was a pioneer of the existentialist movement. Arguing against
Hegel’s ideas of the ultimate character of reality, he insisted that the quest for truth
and for an authentic life is grasped existentially and to be experienced. He concedes
that the aesthetic attitude is the first stage of existence in which the human discovers
the powers of her or his imagination as infinite desire. Kierkegaard tends to equate the
aesthetic stage with that of Romantic Idealism and points out that to remain in that
stage of creative imagination means that one remains inauthentic as one does not face
the either-or experiences of daily life. The artist, as he sees it, lives an illusory existence
as he or she evades the suffering of reality. It is the ethical and religious stage that pres-
ent limits to the aesthetic stage. The ethical stage demands responsibility of a person
to another or to society. Finally, the religious stage requires a radical transformative
leap of faith toward the absolute. This leap is existential, a leap into the dark, an absurd
faith that risks uncertainty as there we have no objective evidence of a divine being.
Kierkegaard did not deny the aesthetic attitude. We may enjoy it; but we should not
see it as the way of salvation.17

5.3 The Act of Imagination in the

Context of Faith and Art
In recent post-modernist views, the very idea of originality and of the imagination
has been challenged or even denied by way of deconstruction, which, for example,
finds expression in (self-)parody in art. But one would hardly question Kearney’s
view, that it is precisely in a world deprived of all certainties and in which the expe-
rience of immense human suffering is brought to mind daily through the media
that the imagination is urgently needed. Indeed, the power of the imagination as a
creative faculty is requisite in order to perceive anew, to imagine the as yet unre-
alized—whether in human relationships, politics, economics, or the arts. This act
of imagining, especially in the artistic realm in relation to faith, happens predomi-
nantly through symbols and metaphors. We only need to recall the iconographical
signs and imagery applied in Renaissance art, which make apparent just how much
artistic imagining of religious subjects was dependent on symbols so as to mediate
theological meaning. No longer do we live in that age when art functioned as the bib-
lia pauperum, but symbolic expression, metaphors, and allegories are still cardinal to
the production of art.
Sartre, one of the foremost thinkers in the twentieth century on the imagination,
went so far as to state that the imagination “is the whole of consciousness as it realizes
its freedom.”18 Sartre emphasized that the imagination is not a characteristic of con-
sciousness but rather “an essential and transcendental condition of consciousness.”19
Thus imagination as “the ability to think of what is not” (Sartre) is all-pervasive. It is
urgent in developing positive, life-enhancing relationships, societal structures, and
alternatives to the continuing destruction of our natural environment. Imagination
then has essentially to do with possibility. It is this sense of the possible, of transforma-
tion, that presents a fundamental link between imagination and religious faith. The
imagination allows us to ponder realms from the most trivial to the most profound,
from the fanciful light-hearted to the depths of human existence. The imagination
makes all things possible, even if sometimes only for a moment in our minds. We
imagine the good things we hope to achieve and enjoy in our lives, and we can also
imagine the suffering of famine, war, long illness, and death. Further, in its extreme
forms the imagination culminates in fancy and can take us into realms that we will
never experience. One may never be an astronaut, but one can imagine what it might
be like to set foot on Mars.
From the profound beauty of Beethoven’s symphonies to the ugliness of horror films
and war, the scope of the human imagination seems without limit. Yet, most of us tend
to avoid imagining the ugly, and rather prefer to focus on what makes life pleasant and
meaningful—friendships, good food and wine, holidays, lovely scenery, music, the
arts, etc. Thus it becomes apparent why the imagination has often been regarded as of
ambivalent value or even as dangerous: it can inspire the most wonderful acts of human

goodness, faith, and artistic creativity as well as the lowest, demonic outrages of destruc-
tion and exploitation.
At the same time, the imagination is indispensable in any form of knowledge or
understanding. In the act of understanding we are dependent on experience, con-
ceptual knowledge, empathy, and the imagination, all of which are essential to the
creative, artistic process as well as to the life of faith and to doing theology. The
symphonic interplay of skill, knowledge, empathy, and imagination are central
to the creation of a work of art. In fact, one would suggest that the more deeply
the artist engages with matter, words, or sound, the more her work may approach
and reveal glimpses of the transcendent. The artist through a heightened power of
imagination, sensation, and intellect may perceive in the world around and within
her things that might bypass the ordinary observer.20 As John McIntyre has shown,
the imagination—especially in artists and those who work creatively—has the func-
tions of being selective and integrative, constructive as well as interpretative. It has
a cognitive and also a communicative role as artists must choose and develop their
subject matter, material, and style, and must integrate and interpret it, thus com-
municating the work to their audience.21 In that way the imagination, moreover,
includes an important “conspatializing” function in that it can make the absent
present.22 For example, the portraits of a historical saint, queen, or pope can evoke
something of their lives to us, as the image of the crucifixion or of the Buddha will
hint at the life of Christ or the Buddha.
Further, the ethical role of the imagination, and for that matter of art, is not to be
underestimated. The artist’s work is capable of revealing through the very particularity
of the subject matter universally held values and aspirations—e.g., justice, peace, the
integrity of creation, the transforming power of love. As Gilkey has argued, art like reli-
gion can heal and re-create, as well as cut and cauterize.23 Picasso’s Guernica, as a radi-
cal image against war, comes to mind, as do Gauguin’s paintings of a “lost paradise” in
Tahiti, or Rodin’s Kiss.
A faith that seeks understanding and illumination through the work of art, i.e.,
which acknowledges the revelatory power of art, will appreciate not only the role of
the imagination in any artistic creativity, but imagination as being a very attribute of
God. As Christians believe God to have created everything ex nihilo, one will hardly
doubt that it is God whose act of imagination is infinitely supreme to any human
imagining. Human imagination and creation are finite and always limited; God’s
power of creation is free and without limit. We enjoy God’s creation of nature and
may even see in a flower, or in the power of the sea, or in the beauty of a sunset sac-
ramental signs of revelation that enhance our faith; but God’s supreme imagination
excelled when God revealed the Son to the world, to live and die and be resurrected
from the dead for the salvation of humankind. It is this story of the incarnation and
resurrection that, more than any other event, was to continuously animate artis-
tic imagination from the early church to the Enlightenment—and beyond into our
own times.

5.4 Art as a “Locus Theologicus”
It was Paul Tillich who was the first theologian to engage with the modern, autono-
mous work of art from a theological perspective. His many articles on the subject
are witness to his lifelong love of art. Tillich, in his theology of culture, emphasized
that the religious domain is present in all spiritual and intellectual life. In “Art and
Ultimate Reality,”24 his foremost article on this field of study, he establishes five
types of religious experience that he correlates with five artistic styles. Here he
clearly favored the “ecstatic-spiritual” type of religious experience, which he saw
manifested in Expressionism, his favorite artistic style. In expressionist works of art,
he believed, both human estrangement from one’s own being as well as the hope of
salvation come to expression. While Tillich has been criticized for his methodology,
including his lack of detailed engagement with individual works of art, his influ-
ence and status as a pioneer in the dialogue between theology and visual art remain
unquestioned.
After Tillich, the dialogue between theology and the arts expanded rapidly from the
1980s onwards. The leading voices in Europe include Horst Schwebel, Günter Rombold,
Friedhelm Mennekes, George Pattison, Jeremy Begbie, David Brown, Patrick Sherry,
and Richard Harries, and in North America Doug Adams, Diane Apostolos Cappadona,
Frank Burch Brown, John W. Cook, John Dillenberger, Jane Dagget Dillenberger,
Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, and Richard Viladesau.
What distinguishes all these scholars from Tillich’s approach and marks a clear devel-
opment from the pioneering work of Tillich is their in-depth engagement with artistic
images, avoiding preferences for any particular style. Further, they have acknowledged
more emphatically than Tillich the subjective element in works of art. Hence they (and
the present author, too) go beyond Tillich and take each work of art and draw theo-
logical implications from it rather than imposing a preconceived theological view on
paintings, sculpture, or music of a particular style. But like Tillich, they agree that the
spiritual, transcendent, or specifically Christian dimension in art experienced by the
recipient, is not—or at least is not necessarily—dependent on religious subject matter
and/or the artist’s personal adherence to organized religion. This was, in fact, one of
Tillich’s major insights.
Today the recognition that artistic imagination and religious faith are linked in vari-
ous fundamental aspects provides abundant questions and themes for discussion both
in the academic arena of expanding theological faculties with specific departments
devoted to theology and the arts as well as in the wider church: faith and art’s search
for meaning, their heightened use of images and the imagination, their employment of
symbols, their revelatory, prophetic, political, social, and moral dimensions, and their
eschatological hope for a world that could be but which is not yet. A variety of questions
about methodology in developing theologies of art, hermeneutical concerns, aesthetics,

iconoclasm, as well as “high” and “low” art, taste, and the mediative role of artistic rev-
elation in sacred places of worship continue to occupy contemporary scholars.
Moreover, it is interesting to note that the theology of art has found interest in a range
of churches. Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Presbyterian scholars engage in
this subject. In this way it has a clear ecumenical dimension, even if this has not been
explicitly intended. In the context of a world dominated by images and of globalization,
it is quite likely that art with religious subject matter will become a more relevant source
for discussion and intellectual-spiritual enrichment in the growing dialogue between
the religions.
Finally, the idea of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and in particular the notion
of God as supreme beauty has been addressed by theologians from Augustine to Barth,
von Balthasar, Frank Burch Brown, Hartshorne and Chittister. Indeed, this theme has
been constant throughout the history of theology and continues to hold its fascina-
tion among contemporary scholars. Art reveals such glimpses of divine beauty to the
beholder and thus sustains, challenges, and enlightens the life of faith as well as theo-
logical scholarship.
5.5 Imagination and Faith: The

Eschatological Dimension
In this final section I want to reflect on a theme that has been implicitly or explicitly
reverted to by most scholars who have dealt with the role of the imagination and of art
from a theological perspective. It thus deserves special consideration.
While the imagination plays its part in memory and in dealing with immediate real-
ity, it functions in particular in the perception of what might, could, and will be—i.e.,
in perceiving the possible. In more theological terms, it is the power of the imagination
that allows the followers of Christ to envision and comprehend something of the mean-
ing of the kingdom of God. It was hardly accidental that Jesus chose to mediate to those
who had eyes to see and ears to hear the presence of God through highly imaginative,
communicative means of image-filled stories and parables. As James Mackey has noted,
it was “through the poetry of parable, of prayer and of dramatic action, that he elicited
recognition of, and encounter with, what he called the reign of God; and in this way he
made new perceptions possible, marshaled emotion and moved people to action.”25 This
sense of change and of transformation is what associates the creative imagination with,
and makes it essential to, eschatological concerns. Without acts of the imagination and
of vision, hope for transformation is unthinkable.26 Transformed being, glimpses of the
kingdom of God realized through liberation, justice, peace, and the care of creation, as
well as eternity’s ultimate transcendence and fulfillment, have to be imagined—whether
in the worship of the faith community, in works of art, or in theological endeavor. In this
context David Tracy’s observation that religious language occurs basically in two forms,

the prophetic (proclamation) and the mystical (manifestation), is crucial.27 In fact, it is

in both their mystical and prophetic dimensions that the artistic and the religious imag-
ination are essentially connected.
Even Marcuse spoke of the meaning of art in eschatological fashion. According to
him, truth in art is encountered in the “estranging language and images which make
perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and
heard in everyday life.”28 He asserted that art is therefore “fictitious reality,” it is not less
but more real than actual reality and therefore contains more truth than present reality.
The “utopia in great art is never the simple negation of the reality principle but its tran-
scending preservation (Aufhebung) in which past and present cast their shadow on ful-
fillment.”29 It is significant and relevant to the whole dialogue between theology and the
arts that the religious dimension in artistic imagination, particularly its transcending,
transforming, hence its eschatological aspect, has been even acknowledged by thinkers
from a non-theological, even atheistic, background.
Through the gift of the imagination we may conceive of the possible, of an ultimate
wholeness in ever-new ways and in all the different spheres of life. Here again we have
to remember Paul Tillich, the pioneer of the modern dialogue between faith and art. It
was he who—in his appreciation of art, especially of expressionist works—pointed out
the salvific, i.e., eschatological, dimension of art. Art can express what concerns us ulti-
mately, our longing for revelation and salvation.
It is in their prophetic, mystical, and eschatological dimension that the artistic imagi-
nation and religious faith travel an often remarkably intertwined route toward the
transcendent other. This journey is ultimately one of hope, namely a hope for the trans-
formation of our daily experiences of suffering and fragmentation. It is the work of art
that can concretize and give shape to such hope.
Notes
1. Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, Towards a Postmodern Culture, 43.
2. Kearney, 87. Plato, The Republic, Book 10. For Plato’s ideas on aesthetics see also his
Symposium, Hippias Major, and Phaedrus.
3. Kearney, 90.
4. Plato, Book 10. Cf. Stephen Halliwell, “Plato,” in David Cooper, A Companion to Aesthetics,
327–330.
5. Here, however, one must take into account the special role of the icon. For the Orthodox
it is not so much a work of art, but primarily it has sacramental-theological meaning and
status. Icons were produced in an ascetic context in monasteries with strict rules regarding
their production. What matters in the icon is not so much artistic originality and creativity
but highly spiritualized images of the biblical figures presented in a specific format, inviting
the worshipper to prayer.
6. See, for example, Augustine’s Confessions, Soliloquies, The Book of Psalms.
7. Summa Theologiae, Father Son and Holy Spirit (Ia33-43), Ia q.35, q.39.
8. See my book, Theological Aesthetics—A Reader, for a more detailed discussion of this
subject, 124–129. See also Luther’s Works, vol. 40, Church and Ministry II.

9. See relevant text passages from Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion in my book
Theological Aesthetics, 136-142.
10. R. Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, 155.
11. Ibid., 130, 155.
12. Cf. Stephen Happel, “Imagination,” in Joseph A. Komonchak, Mary Collins, Dermot
A. Lane, eds., The New Dictionary of Theology, 503.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Schelling quoted in Kearney, 178. Cf. also Friedrich Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, 349ff.
16. Kearney, 178–181.
17. For Kierkegaard’s ideas on the three stages see my Theological Aesthetics—A Reader, 198–
201. See also Kearney, op. cit., 201–211.
18. Jean Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 270.
19. Ibid., 273.
20. Cf. John McIntyre, Faith Theology and Imagination, 159.
21. Ibid., 160–163.
22. Ibid., 165.
23. Langon Gilkey, “Can Art Fill the Vacuum?,” in Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Art, Creativity
and the Sacred, 187–192, at 191.
24. Cf. Paul Tillich, Main Works, 317–332.
25. James P. Mackey, “Introduction” in Mackey, (ed.), Religious Imagination, 22–23.
26. Cf. Dermot Lane, Keeping Hope Alive, 123–131.
27. David Tracy, Dialogue with the Other, 17–26.
28. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, 72.
29. Ibid., 73.
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C HA P T E R 6
C R E AT I V I T Y AT T H E
I N T E R S E C T I O N O F A RT A N D
RELIGION
DE B OR A H J. HAY N E S
What does creativity mean in the study of art and religion? Or, more specifically, how
is creativity understood throughout history and across cultures in relation to the arts
and religious traditions? This chapter may be differentiated from more general creativ-
ity articles or from discipline-specific discourse because it addresses these questions
directly. Following this brief introduction, the first section defines creativity both gen-
erally and specifically in relation to the arts and religion. The second section addresses
the creative process itself, while the third section offers an interpretive model centered
on the categories of creator, object, viewer, and context. In these two sections, examples
are drawn from a range of artistic traditions in the visual arts, though the model is appli-
cable to all of the visual and performing arts. The conclusion identifies two significant
issues for ongoing exploration, especially diversity and cultural differences in the inter-
pretation of creativity, and the relationship of creative work in the arts to contemplative
practice within and outside of religious traditions.
6.1 Definitions
Like the word “culture,” creativity is difficult to define because it is so multivalent.

Within different disciplinary arenas, definitions of creativity can be quite specific. For
example, since the late 1940s tremendous energy has been expended in creativity studies
in psychology and education, with the establishment of two major scholarly journals, a
creativity encyclopedia, and numerous publications.1 Analogously, in the visual, per-
forming, and literary arts, volumes on creativity tend to deal with the creative process of
productive individuals.2

In cultures of the European west, three major conceptions of creativity can be traced
to Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, respectively.3 The earliest discussion of creativity in the
arts can be found in Plato’s short dialogue, the Ion.4 There, Plato suggested that creative
activity is dependent upon a muse or external divine power that provides inspiration
for the performer, poet, or artist. But Plato’s view of inspiration and creativity cannot
be separated from his understanding of imagination. In the Republic (Books VI, VII,
X), he articulated a view of imagination as an inferior capacity of the mind, a product
of the lowest level of consciousness.5 The visions of poets such as Homer, as well as the
products of artistic creativity more generally, were part of the mantic or irrational world
of belief and illusion. As such, they were inferior to philosophy and mathematics, which
were higher forms of knowledge. For Plato, human creativity was therefore mimetic and
derivative, never able to claim access to divine truth.6
In contrast to this idea, Aristotle developed the notion of art as craft, a process
whereby the artisan’s plan is imposed upon a material to create an object, but not neces-
sarily a new form or new thing. If Plato was mainly concerned to protect the polis from
the problems of idolatry, Aristotle’s contribution to developing ideas about creativity
and imagination must be seen on a more psychological level. In On the Soul and On
Memory and Recollection, he shifted attention to the psychological workings of imagina-
tion, interpreting it primarily as the capacity to translate sense perception into concepts
and rational experience. Because of our imaginative images and thoughts, we are able to
calculate and deliberate about the relationship of things future to things present, which
has enormous implications for creative activity.7
Kant’s articulation of creativity as a function of genius established a third model that
has been influential in all modern and postmodern approaches to artistic creation.
According to Kant, a genius is capable of establishing new rules, developing new works
of art, and evolving new styles. These processes are thoroughly dependent upon imagi-
nation. Like the Greeks, Kant saw imagination as the mediator between sense percep-
tion and concepts, but he also insisted that it is one of the fundamental faculties of the
human soul.8 Without the syntheses of imagination, we would be unable to create a
bridge between these other mental faculties. In other words, imagination fuses sense
perception and thinking so that creativity is possible.
But there was an essential difference between the earlier premodern conceptions of
the Greek philosophers and Kant’s distinctly modern view. Whereas the premodern
philosophers saw imagination as dependent upon preexisting faculties of sense per-
ception and reason, modern philosophers such as Kant posited the imagination as an
autonomous faculty, both prior to and independent of sensation and reason.9 In his
Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment, Kant described imagination as a
free playful speculative faculty of the mind, “purposiveness without a purpose.” This free
play would lead to artistic creativity, as Romantic philosophers such as Samuel Taylor
Coleridge would also argue.10
These ideas have been enormously influential in all subsequent philosophies of cre-
ativity in European-based cultures. Since becoming a subject of analysis in the late
nineteenth century, creativity has continued to generate much interest across various

CREATIVITY AT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND RELIGION 93
disciplines. By the twentieth century, the word “creator” was applied to all of human cul-
ture, including the sciences, new technologies, and politics.
Most modern definitions of creativity emphasize qualities of originality and novelty,
although such definitions may be challenged, as we shall see. Originality may involve
making connections between what was previously unconnected or being open to
questioning, ambiguity, and unpredictability. Having a positive view of uncertainty,
with no particular attachment to outcome, can lead to unprecedented results. Novelty,
the ability to create something new, may result from vague, indefinable, and mysteri-
ous creative processes. Some definitions of creativity presuppose the idea of an innate
capacity, talent, or genius, while others emphasize the role of imaginative inquiry and
perseverance.11
All such definitions imply comparison. To say that something or someone is creative
is clearly a judgment, and judgments are always culturally specific. Thus, three ingre-
dients are essential to any general definition of creativity: a culture that has established
symbolic rules, a person or group whose activity is marked by novelty, and a group of
experts or critics who would validate this person’s innovative efforts.12 An artist must
create an object in a particular medium, which is received and interpreted by a viewer or
audience in a unique context.
Within the study of religion, creativity can be linked to cosmogonic myths or myths
of origin. Creation myths often combine motifs such as creation ex-nihilo, from chaos,
from a cosmic egg or from world parents; creation through a process of emergence; and
creation through the agency of an “earth diver,” where water is crucial.13 For much of
human history, creativity was the prerogative of the gods, the earth, or the waters. But
somewhere in this history, humans became the creators. By the nineteenth century, Karl
Marx and others insisted that we even created the gods. A more positive spin on this
idea has been articulated by constructive theologian Gordon D. Kaufman, who argues
that the human imagination creates images that provide orientation and guidance for
the conduct of human life, and that the divine mystery itself may be understood as
creativity.14
Finally, there are at least eight ways in which trying to explain creativity is fraught
with mystery and paradox; and each of these may be linked to religion.15 First, creativ-
ity is ubiquitous and every person is capable of creative acts. But creativity is also often
defined as extraordinary, as occurring outside of everyday life. In his description of
the ethics of creativity, for instance, Nicholas Berdyaev describes the inner and outer
aspects of creativeness. The inner aspect involves creative conception, where one stands,
as Berdyaev puts it, “face to face with God” and in touch with the mystery of existence;
while the more mundane outer aspect involves one’s creative action in the context of
others and the world.16
Second, novelty is often identified as the single most significant characteristic of
creativity. Yet, novelty alone is not sufficient for defining the full range of creativity. In
many cultures, including Orthodox Christian, Buddhist, and Native American that we
will discuss further, novelty is often shunned in favor of adherence to traditions. This
does not mean that individual artists never create new forms—one need only consider

the innovations of Russian icon painters Andrei Rublev (c. 1360–1427) and Dionysius
(1440–1510).
Third, creativity may be interpreted as different from, or the same as, intelligence in
general. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences sets forth an interpretation
of intelligence along eight distinctive axes.17 Of these, creativity figures prominently in at
least three of the models, including linguistic, spatial, and musical intelligences. Fourth,
creative works of art require knowledge and skill, but simultaneously an artist or per-
former must maintain freedom from the constraints of these conceptual and technical
abilities. A fifth point is related to this: creative people are encouraged, albeit tacitly, to
deviate from traditional social norms. Simultaneously, there are limits to what social
institutions and social norms will allow. Obviously, an artist’s location within a religious
or cultural institution, as well as the particular patronage associated with that location,
will determine the balance of technical skill and freedom from constraints.
Sixth, many definitions of creativity assume that there must be a creative product or
event of some kind. But creativity is often studied without reference to end products and
creative practice may or may not yield an enduring product. Medieval and early modern
religious paintings by artists such as Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516) and Lucas Cranach
(1472–1553), for instance, were designed to last for centuries, while Buddhist sand man-
dalas and Navajo sandpaintings exist for only a short time span. In contemporary art,
installation and performance art share this latter characteristic, whether done for reli-
gious or secular purposes.
Seventh, creativity often requires combining personal characteristics that would seem
to contradict one another. For instance, humility and modesty or deep self-confidence
and self-assertion may characterize, in turns, a given creative process. Finally, creativ-
ity can result from opposite types of motivations, from seeking self-aggrandizement to
creating as a gift, from seeking external recognition to treating creative work as con-
templative practice. In the contemporary world, artistic work in the service of religious
institutions may or may not lead to recognition and sales. But as Robert Wuthnow has
documented, many contemporary artists, writers, and poets have turned to spirituality
more generally as the source of their creative work.18
Other issues further complicate the nature and understanding of creativity. For
instance, age can be a significant factor in creative productivity, as recent studies
have shown.19 Supported by the research of E. Paul Torrance, Robert Sternberg, and
Howard Gardner since the 1960s, some attempts have been made to examine the role of
socio-cultural environments on the development of various abilities, including creativ-
ity and intelligence. A few published studies have sought to redefine creativity and intel-
ligence among diverse ethnic and racial groups, but little has been written about how
gender and class inform opportunities for creative work among non-western cultures.
We will return to these issues at the conclusion of the chapter.
In the end, creativity must be understood as a multifaceted construct with diverse
characteristics. Distinct ways of processing information and solving problems may be
called creative. Creativity occurs in a variety of domains from the visual and perform-
ing arts to the sciences and religion. It results in a wide range of subjective outcomes

and objective products, from feelings of fulfillment and self-worth to the production of
paintings, musical scores, poems, novels, and temporary objects and rituals.20
6.2 The Creative Process
Like definitions of creativity, the creative process is complex. It may be understood as

a process of change, development, and evolution in the organization of both the inner
life and in the wider context of society.21 Dating from the early twentieth century, schol-
ars have tried to define a series of four to six steps in the creative process that may or
may not be sequential, but are usually recursive.22 The first step is usually described as
preparation or gathering information, which may be conscious and critical or directed
by less willful processes of invention. An artist in any medium must master accumu-
lated knowledge, techniques, and skills; gather new facts; observe; explore; experiment;
and discriminate—all of which are conscious and voluntary activities. The second phase
involves incubation, during which this will to create is joined by more intuitive, uncon-
scious, and spontaneous dimensions of the process. Many artists, writers, and scientists
have described the experience as having religious qualities, from a sense of oceanic con-
sciousness to egolessness and complete mindfulness of the present moment.
The third stage is illumination or insight, when new connections are made spontane-
ously in what has often been called the “Aha!” experience. In actual creative processes,
this type of insight may occur at various stages. The fourth step involves evaluation of
what is genuinely valuable and worthy of further development, and what can be dis-
carded. This can be a stage of critical assessment, doubt, and uncertainty. The fifth step
is elaboration, which is often identified as the most difficult part of the process. At this
point, a person must engage in the hard work to give form to ideas and insights. And
here especially, the recursive aspect of the process comes into play, as fresh insights may
emerge, new skills must be learned, or innovative approaches must be explored. A sixth
stage, which is not always acknowledged among creativity researchers, may involve
communication to audiences, viewers, and critics, and levels of external validation of
the creative process.
Many factors influence how this process evolves for an individual creator, such as the
level of knowledge or insight; intrinsic motivation; courage; and other personal fac-
tors such as willingness to take risks, relevance, and the religious or other context that
supports an artist’s creativity.23 The success of a creative process is also dependent upon
diverse information-processing skills, such as problem-solving, critical and divergent
thinking, cognitive flexibility, and the ability to generate fantasies and visual imagery.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has linked the creative process to the “flow experience,”
which, like the steps described above, is not linear.24 His research among diverse groups
showed remarkable consistency in descriptions of this experience, which is character-
ized by clear goals, immediate feedback, and a balance between challenges and skills.
Action and awareness merge in mindfulness and one-pointed attention. Distractions

are minimized, and self-consciousness disappears. There is little worry about failure and
the sense of time is distorted. Finally, the activity becomes autotelic: it is often experi-
enced as an end in itself. There is no external reason or goal for doing such activities
other than the experience they provide. Of course, in reality many creative processes
involve both external goals and intrinsic enjoyment.
Given this discussion about creativity and the creative process, how can one best
examine the intersection of artistic and religious creativity? One might turn to philo-
sophical or theological texts, such as the work of John Dewey, Nicholas Berdyaev, or
Gordon Kaufman, or to the writing and art of historical artists such as William Blake or
Philipp Otto Runge. But the early philosophical writing of Russian philosopher Mikhail
Bakhtin offers a particularly vivid meditation on the crucial links between artistic cre-
ativity and religious and moral issues.25 Along with ideas developed later in his work,
answerability, outsideness, and unfinalizability form the core of his extended, if frag-
mentary, theory of creativity.
Briefly, answerability offers a way of naming the profound connectedness and reci-
procity of creative work to life and to living artistic and religious traditions. Art and life
answer to each other much as human beings answer each other’s needs and inquiries
in time and space. Answerability was his way of naming the fact that art, and hence the
creative activity of the artist, is always related, answerable, to life and lived experience.
Bakhtin’s interpretation of creativity emphasized the profound moral and religious obli-
gation we bear toward others. Such obligation is never solely theoretical, but is an indi-
vidual’s concrete response to actual persons in specific situations.
With the concept of outsideness, Bakhtin criticized and tried to balance Neo-Kantian
notions of aesthetic empathy and identification. For Bakhtin, aesthetic and moral activ-
ity only begin after empathy, which he interpreted as a form of “living-oneself-into”
the experience of another person. Creativity itself is only possible because of boundar-
ies between persons, events, and objects and the outside perspective these boundaries
establish. The meaning of a creative act evolves in relation to the boundaries—the inside
and outside—of the cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic spheres of culture. Indeed, creative
activity must be understood in relation to the unity of culture, including religion.
Unfinalizability emphasizes the unrepeatability and open-endedness of creative acts
that make change, including religious transformation, possible. Unfinalizability may
help us to articulate complex answers to questions about particular works of art. When
is a work finished? Can it ever be truly finished? When is a critical perspective or audi-
ence reception complete?
This sense of freedom and openness applies not only to works of literature and art,
but it is also an intrinsic condition of our daily lives. Such creativity is ubiquitous and
unavoidable, and cannot be separated from one’s responsibility toward others and
toward the world. There always is a tentative quality to one’s work, one’s action, and
to life itself. Even though a person’s life is finalized in death, that person’s work lives
on, to be extended and developed by others, an insight we certainly know in relation
to important historical artworks, such as Michelangelo’s Pieta, Leonardo’s Last Supper,
or Rembrandt’s paintings of biblical subjects. The creative process, too, is unfinalizable,

except insofar as an artist or writer says, “I stop here.” Precisely because it is always open
to change and transformation, artistic work can be a model for change in the larger
world of cultures and religions.
Thus far we have emphasized the ways in which creativity and the creative process are
defined, both as autonomous spheres and in relation to religion. The question of how the
creative process may be interpreted vis-à-vis actual works of art, however, has not yet
been addressed. The following section therefore proposes a four-part interpretive model
that is useful for understanding creativity at the intersection of religion and the arts.
6.3 An Interpretive Model
Any work of art may be analyzed in terms of its creator; the object, event, or ritual pro-
duced; the viewer or participant; and the wider cultural context in which it has been
made. Here we seek to demonstrate how this model actually works by analyzing diverse
cultural examples of creativity that are both artistic and religious. Each element in this
model may be identified in several ways. The creator of a work may be an artist or per-
former, a monk, priest, or shaman. An object may be a physical artifact, aesthetic event,
or ritual. A viewer or participant may be individual or the audience may be collective.
And the context always exists in a particular time and place. The examples consid-
ered here range from Russian Orthodoxy, Tibetan Buddhism, and Navajo religion to
European and contemporary art.
Creator. In examining the creator of a work of art in relation to religious values, it is
helpful to answer several questions. Are there special personality traits or motivations
in artists of all genres? Who gets to be an artist? Issues of caste and class must be consid-
ered. What is the role of the artist and how are characteristics defined?
In some cultural traditions the role of the artist remains very carefully prescribed.
Traditionally, Russian icon painters and Buddhist thangka painters, for example, were
anonymous; and they usually worked under canonical authority and strong artistic tra-
dition where both technical skill and personal conduct were carefully prescribed. Icon
“writers” use podlinniki, or pattern books, for painting their subjects. The act of paint-
ing an icon is described with the linguistic metaphor of translation: the painter quite
literally writes a perevod or translation.26 Analogously, thangka painters use iconomet-
ric diagrams for their work. But within both traditions, opportunities for individual
expression may still be found in decorative details such as landscape and ornamenta-
tion.27 Since the twentieth century, however, icons and thangkas have become market-
able objects, so the painter’s role has changed radically to a producer for the consumer
market.
In stark contrast to such definitions that emphasize anonymity and tradition, there
have been at least three historical moments when the artist has been esteemed as a cul-
tural hero: in Greek culture, in the early Renaissance, and in modern Europe, synchro-
nous with the Industrial Revolution.28 The first coincided with the birth of technology,

symbolized in the Greek myths of Prometheus and Daedalus. The promethean impulse,
however, has lived up to the present—in movements such as the Russian avant-garde
and in individual artists such as Joseph Beuys—where the belief exists that artists are
able to transform the world once they are aware of their powers.
The second period involved the separation of the fine arts from the crafts in the late
medieval period and early Renaissance. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were
years of transition in Europe. Artists, many of whom were anonymous, worked in royal
courts, in cloistered religious communities, and as masons who designed and built pal-
aces, castles, and churches. However, the establishment of private patronage by mer-
chant families and princely courts provided fertile ground for the professionalization
of the artist and the emergence of the myth of the artist-hero. Giorgio Vasari founded
the first academy of art, the Accademia del Disegno, in 1563, which provided an insti-
tutional framework for artists, offering them security and social prestige. There, artists
were given both a theoretical and practical education according to the stylistic ideals
Vasari had developed in his Lives of the Artists.29 His artist-hero myth was modeled on
the stories of Hercules and Launcelot; and it was primarily internalized to support male
artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo.
Another nineteenth-century model for the artist that emphasized the relationship of
religion and art was the notion of the artist as interpreter and prophet of God. William
Blake and Caspar David Friedrich exemplify this model, but in Philipp Otto Runge
we find an especially relevant example of such tendencies in European Romanticism.
Runge’s art, and his theories about it, were anchored in his Lutheranism, but they were
also deeply informed by his interest in the ideas of the seventeenth-century mystic Jacob
Böhme. In his ten-point manifesto Runge claimed that the artist should express “presen-
timent of God,” “consciousness of ourselves and our eternity,” and “perception of our-
selves in connection with the whole.”30 Romantics such as Runge, Blake, and the Russian
Isaac Levitan focused on the artist’s unique experience and ability to give expression
to the divine, thus fulfilling their image of the artist as mystic visionary and original
creator.
Object, ritual, or event. Many questions may be asked about the objects, rituals, or
events that are created. How are objects used? What rituals have developed around
them? What is an icon? How do religious objects or rituals function within their particu-
lar cultural context? How might seemingly secular objects carry religious connotations?
Ideas about the power of icons within Orthodox traditions can be traced to
eighth-century writings by John of Damascus. More recently, Russian philosophers
such as Pavel Florenskii have added important interpretive strategies.31 The icon depicts
objects in the visible world of the senses that act as reflections of the invisible world of
the spirit. Images, from this perspective, are material prototypes of the divine archetype,
which is invisible. Yet an image is not merely a symbol of the archetype, but in the icon
the holy is made present. Icons serve as channels of grace and mysterious vehicles of
divine power, and are often described as windows or doorways into the sacred.
Navajo sandpaintings, and the chantways of which they are a part, function some-
what differently as participatory healing ceremonies.32 The number of sandpaintings

for any given chantway vary, with as many as 300 sandpaintings still known. However,
for any particular ceremony, normally a maximum of four to six sandpaintings would
be prepared. Materials might include sand, pollen, charcoal, cornmeal and other plant
forms, rocks, ores that are pulverized with a metate (flat stone) and mano (handheld
stone). The duration of the ritual varies according to the chantway, from two to fourteen
days. Elements in the sandpaintings are stylized, with many forms that look human, but
they also might include animals, plants and herbs, sacred objects, natural phenomena,
and supernatural beings.
A completely different sensibility can be seen in the work of Constantin Brancusi, who
was the first distinctly modern abstract sculptor of the twentieth century.33 In his many
variations of the Beginning of the World, Brancusi used the image of the head or egg to
create an extended meditation on creativity itself, which had at least two aspects. First, it
concerned the fantasy of self-creating that characterized the work of many avant-garde
artists.34 Second, many of Brancusi’s sculptures on this theme were undertaken during
and after the devastation of World War I. The French government had waged a cam-
paign to urge women to have more babies; and there was resistance among women. The
government imposed draconian laws against birth control and abortion, but both per-
sisted. In this context the head/egg may be read as having to do with birth and regenera-
tion, including the rebirth of art itself. As Brancusi said in 1927, “There still hasn’t been
any art; art is just beginning.”35 Because his work is open to multiple interpretations, we
can also now see its prophetic dimension: for women, this century has opened up new
possibilities for control of their bodies. This issue has enormous religious and moral
implications up to the present day.
Viewer or audience. All images resemble religious images in the sense that they have
the potential to involve the beholder.36 Icons, thangkas, and sandpaintings, for example,
involve the viewer in both public and private rituals. Within Orthodox churches, view-
ers process around the church in devotional prayer, bowing, and kissing the icons. In
a Buddhist temple large images in the central sanctuary would be used by monks and
nuns for circumambulation, touching, and meditation. Both Orthodox and Buddhist
private homes would have an altar with holy images, as well as other objects such as
bowls of offerings or water, lamps or candles, incense, and flowers. Navajo sandpaint-
ings are usually laid out on a clean floor of a small dwelling called a hogan. While family
or community members observe, the patient sits in the middle of the sandpainting in
order to restore harmony and health. Parts of the painting may be sprinkled over the
person.
Such examples emphasize the viewer as participant in religious ritual. But what hap-
pens when a viewer examines the photographic documentation of Richard Long’s walks
and Andy Goldsworthy’s transitory ice sculptures, or experiences contemporary land
art such as James Turrell’s Roden Crater Project? These artists’ work draws attention to
the holiness and sacramental nature of the world in which we live, to the viewer’s own
act of perceiving, and to the presence of space. Such qualities may combine to create a
powerful sense of awe, as Turrell has observed, connecting us “with something that’s
beyond our secular life.”37

Context. The foregoing discussions of the creator, object, and viewer have already
alluded to the arts within worship, healing, and ritual contexts. But other key questions
remain. How do the historical time and place of an object’s creation influence its use
and interpretation? Or, how do the viewers’ experiences within another time and place
influence its ongoing interpretation, especially given commercial pressures? Context is
obviously a crucial dimension in analyzing all works of visual and performing art.
One of the most useful articulations of this idea is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the
chronotope, which is easy to understand.38 Coined from the Latin chronos and topos,
Bakhtin developed the term to describe the time/space nexus in which life exists and
creativity is possible. Neither experience nor artifacts of culture such as art and reli-
gion exist outside of historical place and time; and both of these always change. In fact,
change is essential. Therefore, subjectivity and created objects are always constituted dif-
ferently. In short, all conditions of experience are determined by space and time, which
are themselves variable. Within any situation there may be many different chronotopes,
values, and beliefs. What the idea of the chronotope shows, however, is that those val-
ues and beliefs derive from actual social relations. With this concept, Bakhtin was not
articulating a phenomenology that would objectify time and space, but rather he sought
to describe how experience is made palpable in particular times and particular places.
For example, a Wheel of Existence thangka was traditionally used in a monastery or
temple vestibule, where it served as a summary of Buddhist teachings. Now thangkas
of the Wheel of Existence are produced for commercial markets in Asia, Europe, and
the United States. Analogously, Mother of God icons are produced as small inexpensive
commodities and are sold in street markets of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities.
Sandpaintings, once created by a singer or chanter only for particular rituals, are now
glued to boards and sold as tourist art. Thus, in interpreting an icon, thangka, sand-
painting, or any other work of art with religious significance such as the Roden Crater
Project, it is most useful to investigate its chronotope.
So far, this chapter has focused on definitions of creativity and the creative process,
and it has presented a model for interpreting creativity at the intersection of the arts and
religious traditions. But this intersection might more aptly be called a major crossroads
of diverse cultures and unique chronotopes. For the historian of art and religion, as well
as the contemporary artist and religious practitioner, there are many possible avenues
for future exploration.
6.4 Conclusion
Much of this chapter has centered on the development of concepts of creativity in the
European west. But other issues regarding creativity deserve amplification, including
the following. First, how do diversity and cultural differences affect definitions of cre-
ativity and the creative process? Second, what is the relationship of creative work to reli-
gious or contemplative practice?

One of the major difficulties in interpreting creativity at the intersection of artistic and
religious practices concerns the dearth of reflection about the role of cultural diversity
in defining these terms and their interrelationships. Unique models for understanding
such creativity exist in diverse cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, including in
native traditions from Aboriginal Australia to the American Southwest, as we have tried
to demonstrate with brief references to Navajo sandpaintings.39 Many cultures in Asia
and Africa do not have a general term such as creativity. However, other long-existing
aesthetic categories have influenced the way creativity is understood and practiced.
Within Zen Buddhism in Japan, for instance, Shin’ichi Hisamatsu has described
seven major characteristics of the arts and culture: dissymmetry, simplicity, austerity,
naturalness, profundity, unworldliness or freedom from worldly attachments, and qui-
etness.40 Each of these characteristics must be understood in relationship to the others,
as none can be regarded as separate and isolated; and each may be considered as both an
aesthetic and religious category. In addition, others have described the idea of “deliber-
ate incompleteness,” which forces the viewer into direct non-analytical experience of
arts such as calligraphy, Zen gardens, and Noh drama. The term wabi describes the sim-
plicity and roughness of some Zen arts, where an appreciation of asymmetry, accident,
and chance are cultivated. Clearly, the emphasis in this tradition is on nonverbal and
non-cognitive experience in the creative process.41
In considering such an example, we should ask what creativity means in traditions
where the artist follows prescribed aesthetic and religious categories and models, or
where the work is anonymous. This is obviously a very different understanding of cre-
ativity than within most contemporary cultures, where the artist signs his or her name to
every work of art. One goal of studying creativity at the intersection of art and religion is
to challenge current definitions by demonstrating the importance of tradition and con-
tinuity alongside innovation and novelty. Beyond this, it is crucial to investigate more
deeply the ways in which diverse traditions define this intersection of the arts and reli-
gious experience, as well as how contemporary artists are appropriating historical reli-
gions and spirituality more generally. Such issues are a fruitful area for future research.
A second arena for further development concerns the relationship of creative work
and contemplative practice within contemporary cultures. Contemplative practice
includes forms of meditation such as centering prayer and mindful sitting; move-
ment and walking mindfully; focused experience in nature; certain artistic practices,
for instance, making the icons, thangkas, and sandpaintings that have been discussed
in this chapter; traditions of calligraphy and manuscript illumination; and liturgical
music and dance. Contemplative practices help artists develop the ability to observe, to
remain in the present, and to attend to the senses, and are directly related to developing
self-discipline, which will have a profound affect on all forms of artistic practice.
In addition to undertaking contemplative practice as an aid to the creative process,
artistic creativity itself may be a form of spiritual practice, with both inner and outer
dimensions. On the one hand, many traditional artists engage in practices of inner
purification through their work, cultivating values such as attentiveness, detachment,
patience, humility, and silence. On the other hand, the artist gives form to religious and

moral teachings. As such, the work expresses a calling or vocation to make spiritual
teachings available to various publics. For artists already interested in or committed to a
particular religious practice, this interpretation of art as spiritual practice might be eas-
ily incorporated into a working process. Although many secular artists actively repudi-
ate any form of organized religion, the inner dimensions of contemplative practice are
readily accessible to all visual and performing artists.
This chapter began by posing the question of what creativity means at the intersec-
tion of art and religion. It ends with another question: in the howl of contemporary
life, where do we have time or space for the solitude and silence that nurture creativity,
except in the religious community and the artist’s studio? The deep kinship and inter-
connectedness of the visual and performing arts and religious traditions are reflected in
creativity, the creative process, and in religious and artistic life.
Notes
1. See Creativity Research Journal, published since 1988 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates;
and Mark A. Runco’s and Steven R. Pritzker’s two-volume Encyclopedia of Creativity (San
Diego: Academic Press, 1999).
2. One of the best examples of this approach remains Brewster Ghiselin’s, The Creative
Process: A Symposium (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1954).
3. This idea is also developed by Philip Alperson, in “Creativity in Art,” The Oxford Handbook
of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 454.
4. Plato, “Ion,” in Two Comic Dialogues, trans. Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983).
5. Plato, The Republic, ed. and trans. by I. A. Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1966).
6. Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 105.
7. Aristotle, On the Soul 3, 7, 431b3-431b9, trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
8. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith
(London: Macmillan, 1958), 112, 142ff, 146, 165; and Immanuel Kant, The Critique of
Judgement, translated by J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 30–32, 86, 89, 115,
210, 212, 236.
9. Kearney, Wake, 111–112.
10. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria I, ed. J. Shawcross, 1817 (repr., London:
Oxford University Press, 1965), 167, 202.
11. Albert Rothenberg, “Creativity and Psychology,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael
Kelly, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 459.
12. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
(New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 6.
13. For a useful overview, see Charles Long’s article on “Cosmogony,” in Encyclopedia of
Religion, vol. 3, 2nd ed., editor-in-chief Lindsay Jones (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson
Gale, 2005), 1985–1991.

14. Gordon D. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1993); and Gordon D. Kaufman, In the Beginning . . . Creativity
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), esp. 100–106.
15. This discussion expands upon Arthur J. Cropley’s brief description of paradox in
“Definitions of Creativity,” in Encyclopedia of Creativity, vol. 1, 524.
16. Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper,
1960), 126–130.
17. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic
Books, 1983).
18. Robert Wuthnow, Creative Spirituality: The Way of the Artist (Berkeley : University of
California Press, 2001).
19. See Martin S. Lindauer, Aging, Creativity, and Art: A Positive Perspective on Late-Life
Development (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2003) for an excellent
summary of recent research that has reversed earlier assumptions about when creativity
peaks within the life cycle.
20. Giselle B. Esquivel and Kristen Peters, “Diversity, Cultural,” in Encyclopedia of Creativity,
vol. 1, 583–589.
21. Ghiselin, Creative Process, 2–3.
22. The original articulation of this multi-step process was in Graham Wallas, The Art of
Thought (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1926). It was further developed in Ghiselin’s “Preface”
to Creative Process in 1954; in Cropley, “Definitions,” 511–524; and in Csikszentmihalyi’s
Creativity, 79–81.
23. Cropley, “Definitions,” 516.
24. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 110–126.
25. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: The Early Essays of M. M. Bakhtin, translated by
Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom, edited by Michael Holquist (Austin, University
of Texas Press, 1990). For an interpretation of these ideas, see Deborah J. Haynes, Bakhtin
and the Visual Arts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Deborah J. Haynes,
“Answers First, Questions Later: A Bakhtinian Interpretation of Monet’s Mediterranean
Paintings,” Semiotic Inquiry 18 (1998): 217–230.
26. Robert L. Nichols, “The Icon in Russia’s Religious Renaissance,” in William Brumfield and
Milos M. Velimirovic, eds., Christianity and the Arts (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 140–141.
27. Pratapaditya Pal, Art of Tibet, A Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Collection (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1983), 51–53. Materials about the
training of thangka painters are few. Cf. David P. Jackson and Janice A. Jackson, Tibetan
Thangka Painting, Methods and Materials (London: Serindia Publications, 1984).
28. For a detailed explication of this theme, see Deborah J. Haynes, The Vocation of the Artist
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 101–108.
29. Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987), 83.
30. Rudolf M. Bisanz, German Romanticism and Philipp Otto Runge: A Study in
Nineteenth-century Art Theory and Iconography (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 1970), 49–55.
31. Saint John of Damascus, Orthodox Faith, in Saint John of Damascus: Writings, trans.
Frederic H. Chase Jr. (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1958), esp. IV.16, 370–373; and
Saint John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, translated by David Anderson (Crestwood,
NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980). See also Pavel Florenskii, “On the Icon,” in

Eastern Churches Review 8/1 (1976): 11–37; and Beyond Vision, Essays on the Perception of
Art, comp. and ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion, 2002).
32. Wade Davies, Healing Ways: Navajo Health Care in the Twentieth Century (Albuqu-
erque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001).
33. See Anna C. Chave, Constantin Brancusi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994),
esp. Chapter 4; and Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), esp. 310–314.
34. Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 163.
35. Chave, Constantin Brancusi, 162.
36. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 374.
37. James Turrell, “Open Space for Perception,” Flash Art 24 (January-February 1991): 112.
38. For examples of how the chronotope is useful in analyzing both visual art and literature, see
Haynes, “Answers First, Questions Later,” 224–226, and Haynes, “Bakhtin and the Visual
Arts,” 298–300.
39. Robert Paul Weiner, Creativity and Beyond: Culture, Values, and Change (Albany : State
University of New York Press, 2000), 143–193.
40. Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, Zen and the Fine Arts, trans. Gishin Tokiwa (Tokyo: Kodansha
International, 1971).
41. Steven R. Pritzker, “Zen,” in Vol. 2, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 745–750.
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PA R T I I
A RT I S T IC WAYS OF B E I N G
R E L IG IO U S
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C HA P T E R 7
M U S I C A L WAYS O F B E I N G
RELIGIOUS
F R A N K BU RC H BROW N
The uses of music in relation to religion are manifold and diverse, although individual
religious traditions are almost always selective in the kinds of music they embrace. The
music that is most easily identified as religious is usually combined with words or with
ritual action. Yet even purely instrumental music, or wordless and spontaneous song,
can be presented and perceived as spiritual or religious. Music accompanies most kinds
of religious drama and dance. Devotions and the reading of scripture can likewise take
musical form, through hymns and cantillation. Prayers (or calls to prayer) and sermons
often make use of intonations and rhythms that exhibit markedly musical traits. Entire
religious services can be sung—the Mass being a prime example. A still wider range
of music with religious resonance is encountered in seasonal festivals, pilgrimages,
and now in concert venues, as well as through recordings enjoyed in private. Within
the wider sphere of religious and spiritual music-making, one can find choral music or
instrumental; solo music or congregational; ecstatic music or meditative—a full spec-
trum from Pentecostal praise bands and Christian rap to Jewish klezmer ensembles and
Sufi Qawwali devotional singing.
The present chapter examines music with an eye (and ear) toward a fuller integra-
tion of the study of music into the study of religion and theology. Taking into account
the actual sounds of music as well as theories and ideas about music and its history, the
discussion reflects scholarship in multiple disciplines. Because there is relatively little
scholarship on the topic of music and religion as a whole,1 the chapter assembles a com-
posite picture through an examination of particular aspects of music and the questions
and discussions surrounding those.
Other chapters in this Handbook deal with specific religious traditions and genres of
music. To the extent that those are considered here, Christian music and theological
reflection receive considerable—but by no means exclusive—attention because of the
abundance and influence of such music and ideas, historically and geographically. The

main goal here, however, is to explore fundamental matters of how music in its different
dimensions engages and reflects religious experience, thought, and practice.
7.1 Emotion, Music, and Religion
Music’s importance to religion has much to do with the emotional and expressive
aspects of music. Since those powers of music seem especially mysterious, much of the
discussion and debate regarding music’s role in relation to religion has centered on the
topic of religion and emotion. Given the seemingly abstract quality of purely instru-
mental music, for instance, how could it ever sound amazingly joyful, or unspeakably
sad? How does one even know what wordless music is “about”—music such as the
instrumental ragas of Hindustani classical music from North India—let alone interpret
such musical practice as somehow spiritual, as is traditionally done? What gives music
an emotional and expressive quality at all? And to what extent is that related to cognition
and language, or to culture and context? And when it comes to emotion itself, how does
one distinguish, for example, the jubilation expressed in Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus”
concerning Christ’s ultimate kingdom without end, from jubilation over an earthly cor-
onation, such as that of King George II of England—a king who reportedly stood up as
this chorus brought the second of the three portions of Messiah to an exhilarating close?
Is this difference due to qualities discernible in the music alone, or is it a function of the
convergence of a complex of factors, audible and inaudible—as the present discussion
will assume and as most recent thinking about musical meaning seems to suggest? 2
Whatever the theoretical explanations for music’s emotional power, testimony as to
the close connection (and sometimes tension) between music, emotion, and religion
is not hard to find. A classic witness in this regard is Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE),
who in Book Ten of the Confessions writes of having been moved to tears by the music
sung in church, and having worried that this might distract him from giving due atten-
tion to the truth of the words being sung. A widely celebrated account of the therapeutic
power of music is found in the biblical account in First Samuel of how David played the
lyre (harp) for Saul in order to relieve the inner torment Saul experienced because of an
evil spirit.
Outside the Jewish and Christian traditions, mythical stories of Orpheus, from
ancient Greece, touchingly bear testimony to the emotive powers of music. They tell how
Orpheus—a singer, teacher, and prophet whose father was the god Apollo—descended
to the underworld in an attempt to retrieve his newly wed Eurydice, who (according
to most versions of the story) had died from a serpent bite shortly after their wedding.
Accompanying himself on a lyre, Orpheus sang in such a way as to touch the iron heart
of Pluto (Minos), the god of the underworld, bringing tears to his eyes. Because Orpheus
was so persuasive with his music, Pluto allowed him to lead Eurydice on the pathway
upward toward the realm of the living. The effort failed only because Orpheus trans-
gressed by looking back at the last moment to make sure Eurydice was still following.

MUSICAL WAYS OF BEING RELIGIOUS 111
The perennial link between music’s emotive side and matters of religion remains
evident in our own day. The American sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow con-
cludes, on the basis of hundreds of interviews, that music plays a major part in revital-
izing American religion and spirituality, and precisely because it is felt to be so moving.
Wuthnow sums this up with a quotation from an anonymous church member who
says, “Sometimes when we’re singing and the spirit is moving, it’s almost like the roof
goes away and you can see the heavens. When we’re all in sync, you can feel the spirit
moving.”3
7.2 Music as Divine Gift
Because music’s emotional qualities can evidently give indescribable pleasure, whether
the music sounds joyful or sorrowful, or ravishing in its very beauty, a wide variety of
music’s religious interpreters over the centuries have regarded music in general as a gift
of God. Typical of mainstream Roman Catholic views from Christian antiquity to the
present is an encyclical of 1955 in which Pope Pius XII writes, “Music is among the many
and great gifts of nature with which God, in Whom is the harmony of the most perfect
concord and the most perfect order, has enriched men, whom He has created in His
image, and likeness (cf. Gen. 1:26). Together with the other liberal arts, music contrib-
utes to spiritual joy and the delight of the soul.”4 Similar, but more abundant, affirma-
tions of music reappear in the writings of the musically inclined Pope Benedict XVI
(1927–).5
Among Protestant Christian theologians, Martin Luther (1483–1546) stands out as
one who repeatedly praises music as God’s greatest gift, which delights with its beauty,
and which stimulates and stirs the soul.6 Thinking of German part-songs, Luther
declares that when one voice is singing a melody while other voices adorn it in exu-
berant strains, the music becomes a kind of “divine dance” and, for those moved by it,
can be the most amazing thing in the world.7 Even John Calvin (1509–1564), known for
advocating austerity and restraint, declares that music is among God’s greatest gifts and
a primary way in which people find pleasure. Calvin is keenly aware that music can be
misused, but he finds it remarkable that music “has a secret and almost incredible power
to arouse hearts in one way or another.”8
When Luther speaks with admiration of the vocal polyphony of Josquin des Prez,
his favorite composer (c. 1450–1521)—and when he is moved by, and thankful for, the
divine dance audible in songs with multiple parts—Luther does not say what the music
is meant to express, or with what words, or how it might be morally edifying or used
in worship. He believes all those things are possible with various kinds of music, and a
further cause for gratitude. But for Luther, music as such has its own God-given value as
a natural gift, like the song of birds, although it is a gift that human beings cultivate. And
he understands music’s very nature, even when not directed toward worship, as implic-
itly a cause for thanksgiving.

Obviously, however, a thankful or joyful response to beautiful music as something

God-given, or indeed God-oriented, depends to a large degree on the disposition and
receptivity of the listener. This is something Luther himself recognizes, although in
negative terms, when he writes bluntly: “Any who remain unaffected are clodhoppers
indeed and are fit to hear only the words of dung-poets and the music of pigs.”9
7.3 Music in the Eyes (and Ears)

of Religion—Acceptable and
Unacceptable
The observation that the religious overtones of music may be inaudible to someone
insensitive to music’s beauty and to its more “spiritual” and expressive qualities has a
counterpart in the claim that music itself can go wrong, from a religious perspective,
and partly because of its emotional effects. We know Augustine thought this was so,
as shown by his anxieties about succumbing to an excess of emotion when singing in
church. Calvin certainly thought so, too, and was outspoken about it. When it came to
church music, Calvin insisted it should not be light or frivolous, but have “gravity and
majesty.” Accordingly, he wrote, “there is a great difference between the music which
one makes to entertain people at table and in their homes, and the psalms which are
sung in the church in the presence of God and his Angels.” Even when one is actually
rejoicing through music, especially in worldly settings, one is engaged in risky busi-
ness, according to Calvin. That is because, in his view, human beings are prone to “look
for all manner of demented and vicious rejoicing” associated with temptations of the
flesh.10 Furthermore, he says, combining music with reprehensible words only makes
matters worse. Echoing Plato’s censorial approach to music in antiquity, Calvin argues
that, when a melody is combined with evil words, it “pierces the heart that much more
strongly and enters into it; just as through a funnel wine is poured into a container, so
also venom and corruption are distilled to the depth of the heart by the melody.”11 On
the Catholic side of the discussion, and at about the same time in history, the Council
of Trent (1545–1563) can be found condemning songs and works of organ music that,
in church, ostensibly arouse wantonness rather than piety, and that excite lascivious
thoughts rather than religious.12
Such issues are recurrent in Christianity. Almost five hundred years after the period
just discussed, the blues, as a genre, was at first regarded by a number of African
Americans as well as European Americans as “the devil’s music.” The blues tended to
be associated with carnality and “baser” sexual feelings—even though, as African
American theologians of music such as James H. Cone and Jon Michael Spencer have
pointed out, there are important ties between the blues and spirituals (especially
laments).13 Similarly, in the early decades of the twentieth century, various objections
were raised with regard to the kind of gospel music that grew out of the Holiness and

Pentecostal movements and that eventually came to be welcomed for its vibrant, often
improvisatory “Spirit-filled” qualities. The tambourines and, later, Hammond organs
used by Pentecostals, as well as the popular tunes and rhythms, originally seemed to
many others to be motivated by a spirit of entertainment and worldliness very different
from the Holy Spirit.14 Examples can be multiplied almost without end, including con-
temporary controversies over music, in what are popularly labeled the “worship wars.”15
Christianity is by no means the only religion to harbor such concerns about music’s
alliance with emotions that are perceived as inappropriate. In addition to the five pre-
cepts that the lay Buddhist is expected to abide by, many Buddhist monks (especially
Theravada) take vows to follow three additional precepts, one of which is to abstain from
dancing, singing, music, and entertainments (as well as perfumes and ornaments). The
reasons for this have to do with avoiding sensuality and an indulgent approach to life,
and the emotional attachments that go along with such things. Likewise, the prohibition
against music in most Muslim worship over the centuries (with important exceptions
in the mystic, Sufi tradition) involves keeping a distance from certain kinds of emotions
music can evoke, including the erotic. The chief exception within worship services in
Islam in general is the beautiful chanting of the Qur’an, which, however, is technically
not regarded as music. Although Muslims disagree in interpreting Muslim law regard-
ing music, there is unanimity on one point. In the words of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “All
music which is lascivious, which may arouse the lower passions, has been banned.”16 For
different reasons, Orthodox Jewish worship has likewise shown considerable restraint
in its music. The Orthodox, for example, have set aside all musical instruments except
for the shofar (the ram’s horn)—a prohibition that has traditionally been interpreted
as having to do with a state of mourning since the destruction of the second Jerusalem
Temple in 70 CE, and thus with the avoidance of joyful emotions until the anticipated
restoration of both the temple and joyful music upon the coming of the Messiah.
Finally, with respect to music’s emotional qualities and the perception of those as reli-
giously appropriate or not, it is important to remember that religions have often valued
music less for its capacity to arouse emotions than for its capacity to calm them: to bring
a peaceful and harmonious state of being and perhaps to draw one into meditation. As
Saint Basil wrote in the fourth century: “A psalm is the tranquility of souls, the arbi-
trator of peace, restraining the disorder and turbulence of thoughts, for it softens the
passion of the soul and moderates its unruliness.”17 One reason for the near ubiquity of
chant as a form of religious music is doubtless that a great many forms of chant, includ-
ing Gregorian chant, can create a calm center or a quiet flow—while allowing words (a
psalm or a mantra for example) to float, as it were, on the tranquil surface of the stream
of sound.
Having considered the extent to which emotions in general are involved in music in
its relation to religion, and having also considered some of those musical emotions and
purposes that have been deemed less appropriate, we will turn now to a very different
understanding of music and its religious and metaphysical meaning. While still atten-
tive to music’s emotional side, we explore how music in its mathematical and intellectual
aspect came to have an exalted status of its own.

7.4 Religion and Musical Mathematics
There is an ancient and venerable tradition of regarding music—even when emotional

in its effects—as intrinsically intellectual and mathematical, and as having moral and
religious overtones because of that. Sir Thomas Browne, writing in England in 1643,
claims that even tavern music has a profound effect on him. He declares that there is
“something in it of Divinity more than the eare discovers,” for it is “an Hieroglyphicall
and Shadowed lesson of the whole world, and Creatures of God; such a melody to the
eare, as the whole world, well understood, would afford the understanding. In briefe,
it is a sensible fit of the Harmony, which intellectually sounds in the eares of God.”18
In Browne’s account, the music that is audible is a semblance of that highly elevated
music—the music of the spheres—that God supposedly hears not through any physical
sense but through the divine intellect. An elevated enjoyment of music that would truly
be in the image of the divine was thus assumed to be intellectual above all, and only sec-
ondarily audible: an appreciation of music as fundamentally a matter of number, pro-
portion, and mathematical harmony.
A century before Browne, Martin Luther had pointedly declared that music, with its
many powers, was not to be equated with geometry, arithmetic, or astronomy, but was
instead to be considered second in worth only to theology.19 Yet in making this state-
ment Luther, no less than Browne a century later, must have had in mind the long history
of a close association of music with mathematics. Geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy
were in fact the mathematical liberal arts with which music had been joined in the qua-
drivium of the curriculum of medieval universities, also serving in that way as a prepa-
ration for philosophy and theology.
The very idea of including music with those mathematical studies went back through
Plato to the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras (ca. 570–ca. 490 BCE). It was basi-
cally the Pythagorean view of music as mathematical, intellectual, and metaphysi-
cal that subsequently reappeared in the Roman Cicero and passed on into Christian
thought through Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and Boethius, among others.
Pythagorean philosophy expounded how the universe is supposedly made of num-
bers and how its order derives from the harmony of disparate elements that unite to
form a cosmos. Music was thought to exhibit that very order, because its most pleasing
intervals and effects came from mathematically beautiful ratios or proportions. And
since the soul itself was said to be a harmony, the Pythagoreans and their descendants
thought music had a special influence on the soul. Indeed, they described music as
medicine for the soul. At a cosmological and metaphysical level—especially as the the-
ory was later developed by Christians—the idea of God as creator of the harmonious
order of the cosmos merged with the idea of God as both source and goal not only of
the soul but also of music in the cosmic sense. This was music understood as something
mathematical, orderly, spiritually harmonious, and, in its highest form, inaudible.

Even when subordinate, the mathematical approach to musical pitch, harmony, and
rhythm became significant for many composers of music with religious and spiritual
aims. A prime example is J. S. Bach (1685–1750), who paid remarkable attention to musi-
cal proportions and to the symbolism of numbers in his cantatas and in the celebrated
Mass in B minor. Among modern composers whose music exhibits a significantly math-
ematical religious sensibility, an outstanding example is the Jewish avant-garde com-
poser Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), whose complex deployment of tone rows (using
a twelve-tone series) takes on religious connotations in his opera Moses and Aaron as
well as in his oratorio Jacob’s Ladder.
The mathematical aspect of music continues to have moral and theological implica-
tions, not only for musicians themselves but also for theologians and religious thinkers.
In our own time, Albert Blackwell devotes a significant portion of a book-length study of
the sacred in music to the Pythagorean tradition.20 He discusses not only the relevance
of that tradition to medieval thought but also its reinterpretation in the theology of the
American Calvinist Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), when the latter ponders the mani-
festations of beauty in the harmony, patterns, and proportions of geometrical figures
and of musical melodies, which Edwards believes echo primary beauty: the “consent”
of being and the harmony among spiritual and moral beings. Blackwell himself goes on
to argue that the Pythagorean tradition can be reinterpreted using modern physics and
an analysis of the overtone series. He points out that the most consonant and pleasing
intervals (the octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth, and major third) turn out to corre-
spond to the “beautiful” numerical ratios of the vibrational frequencies occurring in the
overtone series (whole number ratios 2:1; 2:3; 3:4; 4:5), which one hears (albeit mostly
unconsciously) along with any fundamental tone. Without resorting to natural theology
in the mode of claiming to have found “proofs” of God’s existence, Blackwell relates that
mysterious accord between beautiful sound and beautiful mathematics to a Christian
theology of creation and a sense of the wondrous and sublime.
In a more critical vein, Philip Stoltzfus has argued that Karl Barth’s theological treat-
ment of music and of the concept of form in relation to the beauty of God and Christ
constitutes, in effect, a new variation on Pythagorean ideas, albeit indebted more imme-
diately to the musical aesthetics of Eduard Hanslick and modern theorists. Stoltzfus
does not regard the Pythagorean influence favorably because he finds its metaphysical
assumptions to be dubious. As an alternative to the Pythagorean approach to music as
well as to the emotion- or expression-based approach he calls “Orphic,” Stoltzfus argues
for a pragmatic and performance-based approach to a liberation theology of music
based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thought.21 From a feminist theological standpoint,
Heidi Epstein similarly criticizes mathematical and metaphysical views of music, argu-
ing that they neglect the embodied and social character of music and that they typically
ignore or disguise the crucial element of desire or eros essential to the experience of
music.22
In actuality, of course, there have been many kinds of religious music that have been
transgressive of both mathematical order and musical modesty, even in the Christian
sphere. Such music can be perceived as engaging the sphere of sense and sound in ways

that disorder rational thought and confuse verbal clarity in the interests of infusing
sound itself with something more—possibly a sense of the mystical, or a state of trance.
We turn to the last of these functions of music first.
7.5 Music and Religious Trance
Nothing could be further removed from an emphasis on the inaudible, disembodied, or

mathematical aspects of music than the exploitation of musical resources for the pur-
poses of trance. Trance and its musical means have been prevalent in many traditional
forms of shamanism and spiritual exorcism, in the ritual experience of being “possessed”
by divine spirits, in various tribal practices of healing, and in certain rituals of initiation
and religious “excitation” globally. The foremost scholar of music in relation to religious
trance—the French ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget—locates examples from a wide
geographical range. These include the African-originated Candomblé cult in Brazil, the
African Orisha cult, Shamanism in Siberia and Tibet, ancient Greek mystery cults, and
Sufi “spiritual concerts” of Middle Eastern Muslims. While trance in this sense is of mar-
ginal importance in non-charismatic forms of Christianity, Stephen Marini and Judith
Becker, among others, have discussed how in Pentecostalism—a growing phenomenon
globally—music is experienced as facilitating the experience of baptism in the Holy
Spirit, accompanied by signs such as glossolalia (not only speaking in tongues but also
singing in tongues) and being “slain in the spirit” (falling to the floor). Here again, music
plays a major part in transformations that can be categorized as “trancing.”23
In his studies, Rouget makes a technical but important distinction between trance and
ecstasy, while acknowledging that neither French nor English is consistent in usage.24
As Rouget uses the term, trance typically relies on movement, often dance. It tends to
employ music that is repetitive and that increases dramatically in volume and tempo.
Accompanied by intense agitation and sensory stimulation, and usually taking place
in a group, trance involves states of dissociation, Rouget says. By contrast, ecstasy (in
Rouget’s sense) is solitary and quiet, entailing minimal sensory input and in fact tending
to be ascetic and introspective in character, even though the person who experiences
ecstasy may have visions—which Rouget labels “hallucinations.” Rouget acknowledges
that a given individual, such as Teresa of Avila, can at different times experience both
trance and ecstasy. Yet he sees trance and ecstasy as opposite ends of a continuum. With
respect to music, Rouget asserts that the contrast is actually a polarity: whereas trance
often requires music as a stimulus or trigger in the transformation and liberation of both
body and mind, ecstasy, he claims, never makes use of music at all.25
Significantly, Rouget and those informed by his work reject any one-to-one theory
of causality between a particular kind or technique of music and the trance state with
which it may be associated. There are many different patterns, Rouget argues. To be sure,
in the form of trance he calls “possession,” it is almost always the case that the one who
is possessed dances to music identified with the deity that is taking possession.26 Many

other things are variable, however. Sometimes trance happens at a musical climax,
sometimes not. Generally those who are “possessed” in trance are not the ones making
the music (such as drummers). Yet, in shamanic experiences, the shaman in the process
of traveling “upward” or “outward” to a visionary state may indeed make music, whether
by singing or playing an instrument.
By identifying multiple factors in the making of trance, Rouget and Becker call atten-
tion to matters that go well beyond trance as such. They point to the significance of the
ritual process and of what one can call the “social construction” of musical meaning
as shaped by language, communal expectations, and religious beliefs—and by the arts
associated with music, such as dance and poetry.27 When it comes to the mystical side of
trance, however, it appears there is a gap in their account. The next section will address
that gap, while acknowledging that their discussion has wide implications for religious
understandings of music in culture generally, and of music’s role in religion itself.
7.6 Music and the Mystical
When Rouget, as an ethnomusicologist, discusses music and trance, he says relatively

little about what has come to be called mysticism (a term of relatively recent origin).
But he uses the term on occasion and he discusses many practices and experiences that
religion scholars would be likely to identify as mystical in character, such as Sufi rituals
and the music accompanying the dances of “Whirling Dervishes.” Rouget refers in fact
to major Muslim figures associated with mysticism, such as Mohammad Al-Ghazzali
(1058–1111 CE). He discusses in detail sama’ ceremonies combining prayer, music, and
dance, which sometimes culminate in swoons, tears, and shrieks, and what is said to be a
kind of “annihilation” of self in the divine.
Becker, in her discussions of deep listening and deep listeners, extends the study of
trance to include experiences of music not overtly identified with religious or ritual
practices and to show their affinities with trancing of the kind studied by Rouget. Becker
argues that there are close analogies between religious “trancing” and secular versions
of what she calls deep listening. In the latter, too, there is total absorption in the music,
and often an ensuing “oceanic experience” in which one’s sense of space and time are
altered. And that, in turn, connects those secular musical experiences with aspects of
mysticism—which Becker understands not as invariable and universal in essence, and
not necessarily a matter of union or communion with a deity or with the Ultimately
Real, but as nonetheless having much commonality across traditions and individuals.
Without attempting to survey the voluminous scholarship on mysticism since the clas-
sic works of William James and Evelyn Underhill, Becker notes that mysticism typically
involves an ineffable transformation of ordinary consciousness and cognition. In that
process, the boundaries of the self tend to dissolve, the mind’s chatter or “inner lan-
guage” ceases, and there is a sense of the numinous, and of deep insight into truths
beyond the power of the discursive intellect. Characteristically, Becker insists—as do

many recent religion scholars—that mystical experiences, even with their remarkable
elements of similarity, are nonetheless conditioned to some extent by beliefs and by rela-
tively ordinary language and culture.28 Yet in the interests of the more scientific side of
her enterprise, which includes neuropsychology, Becker declines to pursue much of the
specific religious content or meaning in such experiences.
In support of Rouget and Becker, one can identify a wide range of music—reli-
gious or nominally secular—that seems capable of inviting or arousing the more
excited (and hence less meditative) forms of mystical awareness. Updating Rouget’s
own examples from Islam, one can cite music such as the Sufi Qawwali devotional
singing given popular international recognition by the late Pakistani singer Nusrat
Fateh Ali Khan. In Judaism, there are also joyful, wordless tunes or nigumim in
Hasidic mysticism going back to Rabbi Baal Shem Tov (1700–1760). Those tunes
are regarded in the Hasidic tradition as vital to restoration, returning the holy spark
to God and making possible ultimate communion with God. Moreover, as Becker
contends, there are analogues in secular music, including popular music. The col-
umnist Leonard Pitts, for example, memorialized Michael Jackson with these
words: “Once upon a time, there was a boy who channeled the gods. He invoked
them through his feet, moving without friction across the gleam of a thousand
stages. They possessed him through his voice, now rough like bark, now sweet like
butter and brimming always with an emotional depth once thought inaccessible to
children.”29 Although far distant from that in style, in Western classical music deep
listening of the elevated yet “aroused” sort seems to be invited by the final mystical
chorus of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (Symphony of a Thousand, 1906–1907),
in which the Eternal Feminine from Goethe’s Faust draws humanity upward toward
love’s ultimate consummation, a convergence of human eros with the divine cre-
ative spirit that was invoked in Part One’s setting of the Latin hymn “Veni Creator
Spiritus” (“Come, Creator Spirit”).
When it comes to mysticism of a less animated and outgoing sort, however, Rouget
and Becker may be less reliable guides. The only mystical mode that Rouget and Becker
believe involves music is the kind of mysticism encountered in trance, which they see as
agitated and highly aroused and therefore at the opposite pole from the form of mysti-
cism that is profoundly quiet and inward (for which Rouget reserves the term “ecstasy”).
The latter kind of mysticism, Rouget declares, makes no use of music at all.30 And
Becker apparently agrees. In her discussion of the classic Indian philosophies of rasa—
a technical term in Indian aesthetics referring to an essential aesthetic quality, emo-
tion, or flavor—she makes the most of the first of the rasas (out of eight, or eventually
nine), which is always identified as the sringara, the erotic. Relating that rasa to trance,
she refers to its discussion by the great Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta (ca. tenth to
eleventh centuries). And there is reason for her emphasis on the erotic, even if one is
thinking in terms of religion. No one familiar with mystic literature could deny that the
erotic is indeed part of, or akin to, certain kinds of mystical religious experience, as the
poetry of Rumi well testifies. Becker neglects to mention, however, that the ninth rasa,
not the first, is the one that Abhinavagupta describes as most suited to representing the

endeavor to attain moksha, or ultimate salvation/liberation. And that rasa is shanta, the
quiescent.31
It seems fair to suggest that the experience and interpretation of music itself across
cultures provides empirical support for the idea that music can be quietly mystical by
virtue of evoking a sense of great stillness and of the cessation of striving. One can find
intensely meditative spirituality of a mystical sort in Indian music itself, although that
aspect of music per se may not be identified or sanctioned by rasa theory.32 It has been
said by practitioners of North Indian classical music, for example, that every raga has
associated with it a dyana, a meditative presence. Likewise, in playing the opening,
improvisatory alap section of the presentation of a raga, a soloist on a sitar or sarod, for
instance—who at that stage is accompanied only by the soft, unmetered drone tones of
the tambura—explores the range and characteristics of the shape and intervals used in
the specific raga. In the process, we are told, “it is as if the boundless infinity of the raga’s
ground plan were being laid out, the values and profundities declared,”33 evoking the
interplay between time and eternity. It is true that Hindustani performances of ragas
move into much livelier sections, reaching a decisive climax, but it would seem to be a
mistake to suppose that their quieter moments have no association with mysticism in its
meditative mode.
Moreover, with reference to Mahler again, many would regard the final song of
Mahler’s last completed work, Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth)—his symphonic
song cycle from 1908–1909—as no less mystical than the exuberant conclusion of the
Eight Symphony. In the last song of the cycle (a setting of an ancient Chinese poem mod-
ified by the composer), the singer’s music of farewell fades by almost infinite degrees
into natural images and lingering sounds that, with each repetition of the German word
ewig (forever), slip further toward eternity. In his youth, the modern British composer
Benjamin Britten wrote a letter describing this music as having a supernatural serenity
that goes on forever and that, to Britten, seemed evocative of Indian philosophies.34 If
mysticism is epitomized by such things as the opening of the self onto the infinite or into
the divine, and the ineffable awareness of deep peace that is also a release into something
beyond even bliss or joy as commonly conceived, then this is surely music tinged with
the mystical.
The French Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen was wary of applying the term “mys-
tical” to his music, but quasi-mystical overtones are heard famously, albeit differently
from Mahler’s, in his Quartet for the End of Time (1941), in passages where the metri-
cal patterns are altered and the ordinary sense of division and flow is transfigured into
musical hints of eternity and infinity. For this music, which Messiaen composed in large
part after being captured as a soldier during the German invasion of France in 1940, and
which premiered in a prison camp, Messiaen provides musical markings such as “infi-
nitely slow” and “tender, ecstatic.”
Finally, and more recently, one notices the courting of silence in the music of “spir-
itual minimalist” composers of the present era, such as John Tavener and Arvo Pärt,
and entrancing ostinatos and figurations in Philip Glass. Pärt consciously draws on
Hesychastic Eastern Orthodox mysticism in seeking intensely quiet effects of utmost

and innermost meaning, and in the smallest musical gestures. Pärt’s music reminds us
that mysticism has its apophatic or negative, “emptying” mode and not only its kata-
phatic or positive, “overflowing” mode. Yet either of those approaches can be exceed-
ingly quiet and calm, in actuality. Whereas Pärt brings the apophatic to awareness,
Glass’s opera Satyagraha (1978–1979) closes serenely, in a more kataphatic mode. One
hears a repeated, ascending modal tenor line of beautiful lyricism, assurance, and inner
tranquility—and words from the Bhagavad-Gita describing the gracious way in which
Lord Krishna (who in this instance becomes not merely avatar of Vishnu but supreme
Lord) descends from age to age, whenever necessary for the renewal of righteousness
and virtue on earth.
Music has multiple parameters, of course, including rhythm, tempo, timbre, texture,
volume, melody, and harmony. One cannot assign any of them, alone, the responsibility
for conveying a mystical sense. As Rouget and Becker recognize, music never functions
entirely alone, anyway, but interacts with language and culture, and with expectations
shaped by ritual and belief. The specific content and character of religious beliefs, while
perhaps not so germane to the interests of Rouget and Becker, is important to an ade-
quate understanding of religious experiences of music—including the mystical aspect
of music.35 But since mysticism has what orthodox believers often regard as a promis-
cuous side, tending to blur identities and boundaries, and wanting to transcend words
and concepts, the musical relevance of particular religious beliefs and practices is more
apparent when music is undeniably wedded to specific religious words, theologies, and
acts, or is heard in ways informed by those.
7.7 Musical Acts: Manifestation,

Interpretation, and Transfiguration
Music aestheticians have long insisted that music is not simply the sound heard by the
ear. It is also, intrinsically, what one hears in the sound and what one perceives the sound
to be doing.36 Some of the ways in which one hears music are due to nature, some to
culture. People naturally hear a given musical tone as high or deep, perceiving a spatial
location that the sound does not literally have. By contrast, listeners may need time and
training, as well as sensitivity to late-classical-period style, to hear the spiritual depth in
Beethoven’s late string quartets and piano sonatas.
In this concluding section, the discussion turns to particular ways in which those in
the Christian tradition may hear significance in music, and sometimes at a depth per-
ceived to be deeper than words, though often in conjunction with them. Our earlier
discussion of music and emotion implied much of what is relevant about music in rela-
tion to Christian prayer and praise, and proclamation as well, because music in those
roles, aside from being an aid to memory, provides vital emotion and motivation.
Accordingly, our present entry point will be different: a brief consideration of instances

in which listeners in a Christian milieu hear certain music as having a sacramental qual-
ity, which is akin to the mystical but more closely associated with doctrine and verbal
interpretation.
If a sacrament is taken to be, in simplest terms, what various classic Christian state-
ments describe as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” and if
“visible” is broadened to mean sensory, it is apparent that, from a Christian perspective,
one is dealing here with a mystery. And it has to do with more than art. Indeed, none of
what the various churches officially recognize as sacraments—baptism and communion
being preeminent—are what one would think of as art forms. But there are features of
art, and of specifically musical art, that many Christian interpreters believe give music
a capacity to become sacramental in a broad and well-established sense: by conveying
a sense of transformative meaning and mystery, and of divine presence and power, not
merely a mood or background for liturgical action.
Albert Blackwell is one interpreter of the sacramental dimension of music who is pre-
pared to make strong claims for a potentially intimate connection between divine art-
istry and human artistry, answering in the affirmative the question of whether human
music potentially “resounds with transcendence.”37 He does so in resistance to the
common notion that music can mainly provide a pleasing and memorable allurement
toward a religious meaning that resides in the words alone. He is also resisting postmod-
ern deconstruction when it leads to a distrust of all claims to “presence” and a reduc-
tion of all signs to issues of political power and matters of social construction. Although
Blackwell does not restrict himself to a narrowly Christian perspective, Blackwell’s
Christian sensibility and theology are clearly what encourage him to hear “musical
incarnations” in Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G major, for instance. The same sensibility
apparently enlivens his son’s response to similar resonances in the very different genre
of Paul Simon’s Graceland (1986), which some of the lyrics also seem to support.38 While
Blackwell makes use of the general term “sacred,” he explicitly applies the term “sac-
ramental” to such encounters with music. There is likewise a Christian coloration to
his hearing of the second movement of Brahms Fourth Symphony, for example, which
Blackwell describes as providing an oceanic feeling that is also “sonic-to-spiritual tran-
substantiation.”39 Blackwell is well aware, however, that Brahms himself tended toward
agnosticism.
Blackwell borrows here and elsewhere from Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–
1834), the foremost Protestant theologian of Romanticism.40 Even so, there is not
much theological specificity to this idea of the sacramental. It is not radically dif-
ferent from the sacramental language George Steiner uses as an unorthodox Jewish
interpreter of literature and culture when Steiner discusses music in connec-
tion with “real presences.” According to Steiner, “the meanings of the meaning of
music transcend,” and it is this transcendent quality that allows music to become
the “unwritten theology” of those who lack or reject any formal creed.41 Although
Steiner’s claim regarding musical “real presences” comes across as rather daring in
the academy today, it nonetheless can seem to reduce music’s sacramental implica-
tions to something like a halo effect.

A clearer sense of Christian particularity emerges when the composer John Tavener,
writing during his years as a fully committed Eastern Orthodox composer, describes his
endeavor to work in close alignment with ancient church traditions. Tavener represents
himself as consciously creating music that is icon-like. And those musical icons of his
are meant to function in the same way that visual icons function—that is, sacramentally,
by mediating a sense of the power and presence of divine realities. For Tavener those
realities are ultimately connected to the incarnational reality of God in Christ.42 Olivier
Messiaen, too, invokes sacramentality in his massive organ work of 1984 Livre du Saint
Sacrament (Book of the Blessed Sacrament), the final seven movements of which have
titles referring to transubstantiation and Communion. Messiaen is not venturing in his
musical evocations, however, to equate his music with sacramental Real Presence, or
with iconicity in Tavener’s sense.
Even when a Christian musician or theologian openly applies sacramental lan-
guage to the experience of music, it is not always the most “Christian” music that
evokes such a response most fully and deeply. Among theologians writing at pres-
ent, none has been more eager than David Brown to apply sacramental language to
artistic expression and experience, including music. Brown acknowledges that the
music of Mahler, with its enormous complexities, contrasts, and tensions, is some-
thing he has usually found more immediately compelling than the symphonies of
Mahler’s younger contemporary Anton Bruckner. Yet Bruckner openly embraced
Catholicism in both music and life, whereas Mahler and his music were far from
settled in matters of faith—either Catholic (his adopted tradition) or Jewish (from
which he converted, perhaps mainly for pragmatic reasons). Brown professes to
hear something of the divine in and through Mahler’s music, which he believes is
more readily heard today as contemporary and authentic, even by many Christians,
than the music of Bruckner. Yet Brown suggests that Mahler, in turn, can lead to a
more complex hearing of Bruckner himself.43
In a Christian context (and not only Christian), any claim to have some sort of
powerful contact, however symbolic, with what is ultimately mysterious and holy,
or divine, raises questions about the adequacy of the medium, about its trustwor-
thiness, and about the risks either of illusion or idolatry. When it is recognized that
human creativity is involved, the question of where and how the divine enters the
picture (or the sound) confronts religious thought with major issues of the relation
of transcendence to immanence, of God to creation, and of the divine to the human.
For Christians, this entails theological questions of revelation as well, and of norms
and authority.
Never one to attempt to shrink the distance between God and humanity from the
human side, the twentieth-century Calvinist theologian Karl Barth avoids the language
of sacramentality when discussing music. Yet, as is well known, Barth hears in Mozart’s
music something like parables of the Kingdom of God. Mozart’s art, Barth claims, is
“music which for the true Christian is not mere entertainment, enjoyment, or edification
but food and drink.” Indeed, in his Church Dogmatics, Barth claims Mozart for the theo-
logians by saying Mozart’s music expresses better than they the goodness of creation,

the light that breaks forth from the shadow, and thus the peace of God transcending all
speculative reason in spite of such sufferings as those brought on in Mozart’s day by the
devastating Lisbon earthquake.44 Barth is not particularly interested in whatever words
Mozart might set to music, even in his Masses. To hear Mozart’s music as Barth does is
clearly dependent, however, on a certain proximity to Christian culture and worldview,
and on a Christian mindset informed specifically by doctrine.
Jeremy Begbie, who shares Barth’s leeriness of infringing on the special authority of
the biblical story and on the uniqueness of Christ as the supreme norm for Christians,
has published a number of significant Christian theological studies of music.
Concentrating not on texts but on the way music works with and in time, Begbie is
especially interested in the way time can be affirmed and reexperienced musically,
as an embodiment of freedom and, in the creation and resolution of tensions, as an
implicit anticipation of redemption. Affirming the created and creative order, includ-
ing time, is something Begbie believes is more consistent with a Christian commit-
ment to the Incarnation and to history than is the more mystical approach of someone
like Tavener, whose music seeks eternity without time. Because music is experienced
differently from the products of linear thinking, Begbie sees music as a genuine theo-
logical resource—not because it offers doctrines per se but because it provides, in a
veiled and figurative manner, a means for exploring what particular doctrines might
mean: even something as mysterious as the Trinity, which Begbie explores by contem-
plating the co-presence of multiple sounds in one three-note chord, each part existing
without mutual exclusion and yet without merger.45 For Begbie, the processes discern-
ible in music have especially to do with grace and the Christian community.46 While
Blackwell and David Brown might call those aspects of music sacramental, Begbie
is more inclined to speak of music in terms of created beauty, witness, and acts of
praise.47
Whereas Begbie is careful to turn to both Jesus and the “biblical story” as norma-
tive, with a sense of finality as well as ultimacy there, David Greene is among those
theologians and interpreters of music who have been more open to revelation as a
dynamic and open-ended process.48 According to this line of interpretation, music
can at times fully engage in theology, itself, as well as providing a kind of spiritual
exercise. Going a step farther than Greene might advocate, this could mean treating
the processes and realities of faith as active in their own recreation in every age and in
new mediums of thought and expression, in the way works of music, when performed
again, can be newly transformed, and thus become newly transforming. According
to this alternative approach, even when music is a setting of scriptural or liturgical
texts, it is not simply making old truths more accessible and appealing by means of
a richly imagined medium. 49 In the manner of creative Jewish midrash in relation to
the Torah, music is actively bringing something new into view, even without always
intending or claiming to.
If it is true that music, as heard in a Christian context, can provide a sense of sacra-
mental presence and gracious mystery, it is also true that music can serve as a mani-
festation not of the sacred only, but also of specific perceived realities and mysteries of

Christian faith. But music is always doing so as an aesthetic medium that interprets what
it manifests. In that way, when music acts theologically it shapes whatever “message” it
bears in such a way as to become integral to that message. While that process is subject
to critique, it is also critical itself. Music that is joined to the words or perceptions of
faith no longer sounds the same as it otherwise would, nor do sacred texts themselves,
once infused with music. Charles and John Wesley, in describing hymns as an exercise
in “practical divinity,” were keenly aware of the importance of music to the hymn texts
that would be sung, and of the effect music would have on the heart of the singer.50 The
present argument extends that intuition of theirs to include the awareness that the very
meaning of religious texts is transformed to some extent in the act of singing them, and
by the song that is heard.
The distinction between religious art and secular art, or between religiously
approved music and religiously disapproved, is a variable and fluid one, depending
on many factors. But explicit religious identification and approval is less important for
religion and for art than the nature of the act of attending that is called for, and called
forth. For many readers of Dante, Christian faith will never be the same after explor-
ing that work’s depths and heights, because the world of that art and the realities of
faith are both rediscovered and transfigured through the poetry. So also it happens
in various ways and degrees for many listeners who have lived with Bach’s Mass in B
Minor, or the soulful songs of African Americans, or—for others—the music of the
Irish rock band U2, or, for still others, the near silence in the music of Arvo Pärt. For
them, too, the world of that music and the realities of faith are at once rediscovered
and transfigured together. To include transfiguration of that kind within our under-
standing of music as well as within our understanding of religion is to expand our
ways of imagining both.
Notes
1. This point is borne out by the most comprehensive bibliography on the subject: E. Gardner
Rust, Music and Dance of the World’s Religions.
2. See Jeremy Begbie, “Faithful Feelings: Music, Emotion, and Worship,” 323–54; and Frank
Burch Brown, “Music,” in John Corrigan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and
Emotion, 200–22.
3. Quoted in Robert Wuthnow, All in Sync, iv.
4. Pope Pius XII, Musicae sacrae disciplina, Dec. 1955, in Robert F. Hayburn, Papal Legislation
on Sacred Music, 346.
5. See, for example, Pope Benedict XVI, A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and
Liturgy Today.
6. Discussed in detail, with quotations drawn from an array of Luther’s writings, in Robin
A. Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music, 277–91.
7. Martin Luther, Preface to Symphoniae jucudae [1538], in Luther’s Works, vol. 53, 321–24.
8. John Calvin, “Foreword [or Preface] to the Psalter” (1543), in Writings on Pastoral Piety, 95.
9. Luther, Preface, 324.

10. Calvin, “Foreword,” 94, 95.

11. Calvin, “Foreword,” 96.
12. See Hayburn, Papal Legislation on Sacred Music, 8–9.
13. James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues; and Jon Michael Spencer, Blues and Evil.
14. The religious legitimacy of gospel music, which now ranges widely in styles, is seldom
in question today. The concerns that arise have more to do with the influence of
commercialism and marketing. See Melva Wilson Costen, In Spirit and in Truth, 74–102;
and Stephen A. Marini, Sacred Song in America, 296–319.
15. For a discussion of the issues in terms of religious aesthetics and practical theology, see
Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste.
16. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Islam and Music: The Legal and Spiritual Dimensions,” in Lawrence
E. Sullivan, ed., Enchanting Powers: Music in the World’s Religions, 227.
17. St. Basil the Great, “Homily on the First Psalm,” Source Readings in Music History, ed.
Oliver Strunk, revised edition, 122.
18. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 80.
19. Martin Luther, letter to Ludwig Senfl, 4 Oct. 1530, quoted in Leaver, 94.
20. Albert L. Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 49–90. Compare Edward Rothstein, Emblems of
Mind, 192.
21. Philip Stoltzfus, Theology as Performance, 107–66.
22. Heidi Epstein, Melting the Venusberg: A Feminist Theology of Music.
23. See Marini, Sacred Song in America, 113–27; and Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music,
Emotion, and Trancing, 55.
24. Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance, 3–12.
25. Rouget, 12.
26. Rouget, 322–23.
27. Becker, Deep Listeners, 27–29.
28. Becker, 29–52.
29. Leonard Pitts, “Once upon a Time,” Baltimore Sun, Nov. 10, 2011, *http://www.baltimoresun.
com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-pitts-jackson-20111110,0,785348.story[http://www.
baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-pitts-jackson-20111110,0,785348.story]*.
30. Rouget, 12.
31. See Raniero Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta, 1956.
32. Classic Indian texts do not specifically associate music itself with the quiescent rasa;
and that might seem to underscore Rouget’s point that “quiet” mysticism and music are
incompatible. But that conclusion would seem to be overly literal.
33. Sri Aurobindo Society, Alaap: A Discovery of Indian Classical Music, 70, 72–73.
34. Benjamin Britten, letter to Henry Boys, June 29, 1937, quoted in Frank Burch Brown, Good
Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste, 124.
35. See Moshe Idel, “Conceptualizations of Music in Jewish Mysticism,” in Lawrence E. Sullivan,
ed., Enchanting Powers: Music in the World’s Religions, 159–88.
36. For philosophical discussions that propose and apply such ideas in a Christian framework,
see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action; and Brown, Religious Aesthetics.
37. Blackwell, 105.
38. Blackwell, 122.
39. Blackwell, 100.
40. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve, 46, 47.

41. George Steiner, Real Presences, 219.

42. John Tavener, “Towards a Sacred Art,” in David Brown and Ann Loades, eds., The Sense
of the Sacramental: Movement and Measure in Art and Music, Place and Time, 172, 78. See
also Terrence Thomas and Elizabeth Manning, “The Iconic Function of Music,” in the same
volume, 159–71.
43. David Brown, God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary, 267–78.
44. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III:3, 297–98.
45. Jeremy Begbie, Resounding Truth, 293.
46. Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music, and Time, 127.
47. See Jeremy S. Begbie, “Created Beauty: The Witness of God,” in Resonant Witness, 83–108.
48. See David Greene, The Spirituality of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, Bach’s Mass in B Minor,
and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time; and The Theology of Handel’s Messiah,
Beethoven’s Credo, and Verdi’s Dies Irae.
49. See, for example, Frank Burch Brown, Religious Aesthetics, 158–84; and David Brown,
Tradition and Imagination. D. Brown (not my pianist brother David Brown) discusses
music per se more fully in other books, but here discusses continuing revelation.
50. See John Wesley, Preface to A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists
(1780), in the Works of John Wesley, vol. 7, 74.
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C HA P T E R 8
NA R R AT I V E WAYS O F B E I N G
RELIGIOUS
DAV I D JASPE R
In the twentieth century, coming at the end of the great age of the novel, huge claims
were made for the importance of narrative and the ancient art of telling stories. With
typical rhapsodic gestures, D. H. Lawrence, in his posthumously published essay “Why
the Novel Matters,” calls the novel the book of life, “and in this sense the Bible is a great
confused novel”:
The Bible—but all the Bible—and Homer, and Shakespeare; these are the supreme
old novels. They are all things to all men. Which means that in their wholeness they
affect the whole man alive, which is the man himself, beyond any part of him. They
set the whole tree trembling with a new access of life, they do not just stimulate
growth in one direction.1
For Iris Murdoch, “the story is almost as fundamental a human concept as the thing, and
however novelists may try, for reasons of fashion or art, to stop telling stories, the story is
always likely to break out again in a new form.” Stories about human beings, she asserts,
are a response to deep and ordinary human needs. At the same time, if stories are the
greatest source of truth, the storyteller or novelist may also be expert “fantasy-mongers,”
and she warns against the consolations of form: “In the practical world there may be
only mourning and the final acceptance of the incomplete. Form is the great consolation
of love, but it is also its greatest temptation.”2
The relationship between story, or narrative, and truth has always been a vexed
one. The Pastoral Epistles warn us against profane and old-womanish stories—μυθοι
(1 Timothy 4:7)— which lead us away from the godliness of the true tradition, while
the suspicion that Christianity itself is “only a story” remains a lurking specter, empha-
sized again when the rise of historical biblical criticism in the eighteenth century estab-
lished a gap between historically verifiable truth and fictive untruth, and heralded the
“eclipse of biblical narrative.”3 Nevertheless, much of the Bible and the formulations of

NARRATIVE WAYS OF BEING RELIGIOUS 131
Christian doctrine consist of narratives: in the words of a recent Report of the Doctrine
Commission of the Church of England, “Typically, the Bible does not say ‘This is what
you must believe’ but ‘This is what happened.’ ”4 And if, as the Report goes on to say, nar-
rative is one of the most normal means by which people communicate, we need to be
very careful to determine exactly what we mean by a “narrative.” Much has been written
recently on the subject of narratology,5 but I begin here with one basic observation on
two distinct “orders” of the story, that is the “temporal” and the “logical.” E. M. Forster,
in his classic work Aspects of the Novel (1927) distinguishes between the temporal story
(“The king died and then the queen died”) and the plot in which one event happens as a
result of the other (“The king died and the queen died of grief ”).6 In the plot we perceive
a structure in which events exist in relations of subordination and not mere coordina-
tion.7 The fundamental text for such an understanding of plot in Western literary theory
is Aristotle’s Poetics, with its emphasis on unity (“The plot of a play, being the representa-
tion of an action, must present it as a unified whole.”)8 However, Aristotelian tidiness and
the acknowledgement of causality in the emplotment of narrative should not encourage
us to assume a simple model of cause and effect whereby a careful and persistent atten-
tion to the structure of the story will finally reveal a coherent and logical whole, how-
ever logical individual steps within the story may appear to be. Narrative mystery may
not finally yield to the logical analysis of a Sherlock Holmes or a Miss Marple, but may
rather embrace a deeper mystery that is inherently and ultimately mysterious. In such
narratives it may then be said that “To you has been given the secret (mystery) of the
kingdom of God” (Mark 4:12). The literary critic Frank Kermode, always seeking inter-
pretation, expresses this in a more negative way in his book The Genesis of Secrecy: On
the Interpretation of Narrative (1979):
World and book, it may be, are hopelessly plural, endlessly disappointing; we stand
alone before them, aware of their arbitrariness and impenetrability, knowing that
they may be narratives only because of our impudent intervention, and susceptible
of interpretation only by our hermetic tricks.9
From here we move to Erich Auerbach’s classic essay “Odysseus’ Scar,”10 which distin-
guishes between two very different forms of narrative—the Homeric, in an episode
from the Odyssey, and that of the Hebrew Bible, drawing on Genesis 22, the story of the
“sacrifice” of Isaac. As Auerbach describes it, Homer’s narrative style is all foreground,
dependent on visual details, while speech serves to externalize thoughts: “the Homeric
style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly object pres-
ent.”11 There is no depth of perspective, time and place are clearly defined, thoughts and
feelings apparent and expressed. The biblical narrative, however, is quite different. Here,
indeed, the narrative guards its secrets closely, is full of gaps and blanks, questions posed
and left unanswered. Auerbach describes the differences:
It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two
equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized, uniformly

illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected

together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely
expressed. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena
as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity.12
Auerbach’s characterization of the biblical narrative as mysterious and “fraught with

background” is suggested as inherently theological, for Yahweh, unlike Zeus, is incom-
prehensible and beyond any possible description. Indeed, Martin Luther in his lectures
on Genesis of 1542–1544 reads the strange narrative of Genesis 32:22–32, the episode
of Jacob’s wrestling at Peniel, as indicating that there is a dark side to God’s nature,13 a
shadowy and even hostile quality that is encountered by the reader in the struggle with
the text.14 We might go further and in the recognition of the antiquity and complexity
of the Genesis narratives, derived from even more ancient sources, perhaps both oral
and written, find in the “narrative sedimentation”15 cracks and fissures that perplex and
baffle attempts to establish interpretative harmony, a characteristic of the narrative itself
that constitutes the reader’s own encounter with the strangeness of God.
Such biblical narratives, and perhaps even more so the Priestly narratives of creation
in the first chapters of Genesis, share with the antique literature of Mesopotamia—
for example, the Babylonian Creation and the Epic of Gilgamesh—liturgical qualities
behind which lie ritual and performance that is already largely dead once the myth
has become a narrative in literary form.16 But yet there remains a performative quality
in the storytelling that draws in the reader or listener as a participant in the dramatic
action that becomes no less fascinating (and perhaps even more so) even when reli-
gious and poetic references and allusions become inaccessible through the mists of
time.17 Nor is this unique to the narratives of the Ancient Near East: the annual perfor-
mance of the Hindu epic Ramayana at the Durga Puja in Benares on the banks of the
Ganges has all the qualities of a liturgical performance participated in by thousands of
worshippers.
As literary criticism began to encroach upon the business of biblical criticism in
the second half of the twentieth century, so greater attention was given by scholars to
the narrative qualities of biblical texts. Books such as Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical
Narrative (1981) read the stories of the Pentateuch almost as if they were novels, while at
the same time acknowledging that they are not fictional “literature” in the modern sense
of the word, being “theologically motivated, historically oriented, and perhaps to some
extent collectively composed.”18 For Alter, the Bible may attract a “literary approach,”
but it remains a “sacred history,” though this itself, in the work of Herbert Schneidau,
is the ground for “the birth of a new kind of historicized fiction.”19 Drawing on ancient
Mesopotamian stories such as the Flood, the biblical narratives “truncated and dena-
tured”20 these stories of their mythological characteristics, stabilizing and reconceiv-
ing them within the institution of the Law and the narratives of Yahweh’s dealings with
his own People in history. A further consequence of this process is the recognition
in the biblical stories of just such anomalies and mysteries as we noted in the narra-
tives of the Sacrifice of Isaac and Wrestling Jacob, acknowledging in their resistance to

interpretation the mystery at the heart of a history lived under the rule of a finally inac-
cessible divinity.
Robert Alter attributes to the ancient Hebrew writers the invention of an “innovative
technique of fiction”21 that precisely allowed for a certain indeterminacy, an art of reti-
cence, despite (or perhaps paradoxically because of) processes of theological stabiliza-
tion, and produced results remarkably similar to certain kinds of modern fiction. Not
only do the narratives retain an enigmatic, lively obscurity, but freed from the varnish22
of centuries of theological and ecclesial interpretation, they can spring from the page
with extraordinary energy. Turning to the Bible, both Hebrew and Christian, the literary
critic Gabriel Josipovici remarked:
It seemed much quirkier, funnier, quieter than expected. . . . it contained narratives

which seemed, even in translation, as I first read them, far fresher and more
“modern” than any of the prize-winning novels rolling off the presses.23
If these narratives of the Hebrew Bible might be described as historicized fiction, then
the gospels of the Christian Bible have recently been characterized as “true fiction”24
in contrast to the concerns of the historical critical approach to them that has domi-
nated biblical studies for more than two centuries. Understood as literary narratives,
the gospels themselves throw out a challenge to the question of truth: in what sense is
fiction “true”? How does such truth relate to the “truths” of history? What is the role of
imagination in matters of religious faith and belief? These questions will be returned to
a little later.
Before moving on from the work of Alter, Schneidau and others of their “school” of
narrative readings of the Bible, mention must made of a major critic, herself a narratolo-
gist, of scriptural narratives as historicized fiction. Mieke Bal, in three remarkable books
of biblical interpretation,25 resists both the construction and interpretation of the stories
of the Bible as historical, regarding this as consigning the reader inevitably to the patri-
archal traditions that both define and confine interpretation. Seen within the historical
and religious tradition, the biblical narratives thus acquire a fundamental coherence,
celebrated by those in power, but devastating to those excluded from it. The narratives,
as narratives, Bal argues, provoke a countercoherence that exposes the very structures
that they are designed to engender and support. The gaps and silences in the stories,
and most especially, for Bal, those concerning the women, especially the voiceless and
usually nameless women of the Book of Judges, expose the narratives’ “power to under-
score power.”26 The point that Bal’s work powerfully makes is that narratives offer them-
selves to be read in a variety of ways—as literary texts, as social documents, as liturgical
events, and so on—and this very variety of readings at once complicates, deconstructs,
and affirms a narrative’s capacity to “be religious.” It is precisely on this question of the
complexity of scriptural narrative that Bal raises her fundamental criticism of Robert
Alter’s Art of Biblical Narrative. In her essay “The Bible as Literature: A Critical Escape”27
she points out that Alter’s readings of biblical narrative remain deeply historical despite
their overtly “literary” tone. At the same time his critical concerns rarely extend beyond

the aesthetic, lacking reflection on social concerns and the relationship between the text
and society. In other words, Alter fails to acknowledge the interdisciplinarity of proper
narratological analysis—both the social and historical reality in which it is embedded
as well as the philological and structural demands of the text of the story—and finally,
therefore, its deep religious claims in the narrative balance between immanence and
transcendence. Bal herself puts the matter rather more robustly. In the Book of Judges,
the (male) heroes “attempt to objectify the objects of their power by turning them into
textual things.”28 This is often read as being in the service of the “religious” tradition.
Within the text, however, these “objects” (often women), speak from within the dra-
matic context of the narratives, asserting their forgotten claims through a radical coun-
tercoherence—an obduracy of narrative that will find some of its greatest moments in
the Passion Narratives of the synoptic gospels, and is again forgotten as these, in their
turn, become established within the Christian tradition itself.
Another approach to this complexity and mystery of the biblical narratives and the
interdisciplinarity required in their interpretation is through the ancient form of rab-
binical exegesis known as midrash. Myrna Solotorevsky characterizes it thus:
Since the aim of midrash is to reveal the unlimited richness of the Word of God, it
brings to the foreground the polysemic nature of the biblical text. Each element of
the Bible (letters, words, verses, chapters) is allowed to function as an autonomous
unit which has endless possibilities of combination with other units. When a strategy
of destructurization is applied to this condition, it provokes the polysemic radiation
of the text.29
The rabbinical view of God absolutely denies his simplicity. With rabbinic and post-
modern perversity, Jacques Derrida (writing on the storyteller Franz Kafka and the poet
Edmond Jabès) writes that “proceeding within the duplicity of his own questionability,
God does not act in the simplest ways; he is not truthful, he is not sincere. Sincerity,
which is simplicity, is a lying virtue. It is necessary, on the contrary, to accede to the vir-
tue of the lie.” Quoting from Jabès, he goes on, “there is no writing without a lie and writ-
ing is the way of God.”30 Somewhere near the heart of this writing are the parables and
fables of biblical literature—in the Hebrew tradition the mashal, and in the Christian
Bible the familiar parables of the gospel tradition, some of which, in both traditions, are
tiny moments in the text hardly to be called story, whereas others are elaborate narra-
tives like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son of Luke’s Gospel. Such narratives are
not, of course, exclusive to the biblical texts. They are found throughout world literature
and remain energetically and enigmatically present to us in the parables of Kierkegaard,
Kafka, the Argentinean writer Borges, and many others. Martin Luther said of the bibli-
cal prophets that they “have a queer way of talking, like people who, instead of proceed-
ing in an orderly manner, ramble off from one thing to the next so that you cannot make
head or tail of them or see what they are getting at.”31 This complexity and perversity
is hardly surprising if the prophets hold close converse with the God characterized by
Derrida. But Luther might have said something similar about biblical narratives, the
mashal and the parable. In Auerbach’s expression, being “fraught with background,”

these often deceptively simple stories continually challenge the interpreter and baffle
conclusion. In his book Parables in Midrash, David Stern suggests:
A parable suggests a set of parallels between an imagined fictional event and an

immediate, “real” situation confronting the parable’s author and his audience. In
both parables and fables, though, the literary form tends to imply the parallel rather
than explicate it. The task of understanding the parallel and its implications, or levels
of implication, is left largely to the audience. Neither a simple tale with a transparent
moral nor an entirely opaque story with a secret or esoteric meaning, the mashal is
a narrative that actively elicits from its audience the solution of its meaning, or what
we could call its interpretation.32
Such narratives, then, place a huge burden on the reader, neither wholly transparent
not entirely opaque. They put the reader in positions of decision—“Go and do thou like-
wise”—or they prompt revisionary reflection. Even more radically, in Jesus’ mysterious
teaching on parables to his disciples in Mark 4:10–12, drawing on Isaiah 6:9–10, parables
are for the outsiders merely baffling and intended to prevent conversion or change:
but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that

they may indeed look, but not perceive,
and may indeed listen, but not understand;
so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.33
What is clear is that such narratives are not intended to be simple or straightforward.
When God says that he will speak to Moses (Numbers 12:7–8), it will be face to face,
openly, and not in “dark speeches,” as the Authorized Version translates what in the
Greek Septuagint version is ἁινιγματων, that is enigmas or riddles, a word very close
to “parable.” In other words, to speak in parables is the opposite of speaking plainly or
openly. Narrativity, as Kermode puts it in his discussion of parables, “always entails a
measure of opacity.”34
If for biblical narratives such opacity somehow enacts the mystery of God, for a secu-
lar literary critic like Kermode it simply indicates the negativity and disappointment that
finally concludes all attempts at interpretation. It equally confirms faith and disbelief,
holding its uncanniness or Unheimlichkeit. What remains are the parabolic narratives
in all their complexity, as, for example, in the stories of Franz Kafka and “his textuality’s
appallingly violent tradings with the Jewish Scriptures.”35 Kafka’s stories leave the reader
bruised and perplexed, sadder, perhaps, but somehow wiser with their themes of lying
and dissembling, and with their narratives that end in death and despair. They engen-
der an uneasy sense of guilt—that we are missing something, or have somehow got it
wrong; every reader is on trial, sensing identity with the opening of The Trial: “Someone
must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong
he was arrested one fine morning.”36 Every reader of these stories fears becoming one
of the perplexed recipients of the divine wrath of Matthew 25:44, protesting, “but how
were we expected to know?,” and concluding that lying has been turned into a universal

principle.37 But in Kafka, as in the parables of Søren Kierkegaard,38 even as we, the read-
ers, are perplexed we are also seduced and enticed by the narrative and its virtuous lying,
so that, as in the Arab poem that so entices Freud at the end of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, as he writes of wrestling Jacob and his dislocated hip, “it is no sin to limp.”39
Encountering God within the narrative of the text necessarily inflicts hurt, while inter-
pretation itself, far from being an objective and conclusive exercise, must participate in
the anguished life of the story.
Christian readings of scriptural parables, as of the wrestling Jacob narrative, have
tended to erase the necessary hurt, seeing in God’s marks not a scarring but the benign
and healing blood of the Savior, and the blessing that is given as a response to Jacob’s
demand for the stranger’s name (Genesis 32:30) is realized as the name of Love. Thus
Charles Wesley writes in his Jacob hymn:
Lame as I am, I take the prey,

Hell, earth and sin with ease o’ercome;
I leap for joy, pursue my way,
And as a bounding hart fly home,
Through all eternity to prove
Thy nature and thy name is Love.40
But if the narrative mark on the reader becomes, in Christian terms, a sign of eternal
blessing, it remains in the Passion narratives also a blood stain, at the center of which lies
ineradicably (though the gospels of Luke and John seek to erase it) the abysmal cry, “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In the European Age of Reason, as Christian
faith began to waver in the minds of intellectuals, the power and mystery of the story
was gradually diverted into new channels as “fact” and “fiction” became opposing terms
in the interpretation of biblical narrative.
Hans Frei, in his enormously influential book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative
(1974), describes how, in the eighteenth century, the development of historical biblical
criticism brought about the disintegration of the traditional coherence of the biblical
canon and its sustenance of a story that could be regarded as “the adequate depiction
of the common and inclusive world.”41 But as historical inquiry, under the probes of
Enlightenment reason, reduced the unity of the canonical story of salvation to a pile
of historical incoherences, the “logical and reflective distance between narrative and
reality increased steadily.”42 Learned professors like Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–
1827) in his “Introductions” to both the Old and New Testaments dismissed the Bible
stories as merely primitive outpourings of an almost prehistoric and unsophisticated
people (unsophisticated, that is, as compared to civilization defined in terms of German
Enlightenment scholarship), and the truth and validity of Christian theology should be
extracted from these primitive ramblings and narratives.43 Narrative, it seems, was no
longer a proper way of “being religious.” By 1835, in his Life of Jesus Critically Examined
(Das Leben Jesu), David Friedrich Strauss dismissed the gospel narratives as fictional
literature: “we stand here upon purely mythical-poetical ground; the only historical real-
ity which we can hold fast as positive matter of fact being this:—the impression made

by John the Baptist.”44 Some thirty years later, in another “Life of Jesus,” the French phi-
lologist and Hebrew scholar Ernest Renan wrote a fictionalized account of the gospel
story that Albert Schweitzer was to dismiss as insincere and lacking in conscience “from
beginning to end.” Famously, Schweitzer remarked:
He offered his readers a Jesus who was alive, whom he, with his artistic imagination,
had met under the blue heaven of Galilee and whose features his inspired pencil
had seized. People’s attention was arrested, and they thought they could see Jesus,
because Renan had the skill to make them see blue skies, seas of waving corn, distant
mountains, gleaming lilies, in a landscape with Lake Gennesaret for its centre, and to
hear with him in the whispering of the reeds the eternal melody of the Sermon on the
Mount.45
Renan’s narrative is undoubtedly seductive and mysterious, but it lacks, for Schweitzer,
“a historical plan.” Quite simply, it is not true. It took the novelist with whom this chap-
ter began—D. H. Lawrence—to dismiss the scholar’s critical nicety and reaffirm the
power of the story, even when faith itself has faded. Lawrence, in his essay “Hymns in a
Man’s Life,” reflects upon the Nonconformist hymns of his childhood, and the refrain,
“O Galilee, sweet Galilee / Come sing thy songs again to me!”
To me the word Galilee has a wonderful sound. The Lake of Galilee! I don’t want
to know where it is. I never want to go to Palestine. Galilee is one of those lovely,
glamorous worlds, not places, that exist in the golden haze of a child’s half-formed
imagination. And in my man’s imagination it is just the same. It has been left
untouched. With regard to the hymns which had such a profound influence on
my childish consciousness, there has been no crystallizing out, no dwindling into
actuality, no hardening into the commonplace. They are the same in my man’s
experience as they were to me nearly forty years ago.46
The world of the Bible story, even as it seemed to be fading under the scrutiny
of historical biblical criticism, continued to live in the narratives of fiction, while
the Bible itself became the paradigm of literature. Thus in the great age of European
Romanticism, as Stephen Prickett has argued,47 the biblical narrative gave birth to
the nineteenth-century novel. It was no accident that the translator of Strauss’s Life
of Jesus, Mary Ann Evans, was to become the novelist George Eliot, who sought in
fiction, in the ruins of her childhood faith, what Jeffrey Keuss has called a “poetics
of Jesus.”48 And if theologians and biblical critics sought to recover the unity and
coherence that once the biblical narrative, in a pre-critical age, had seemed to offer
to Christianity, the stories themselves, ever edgy in their necessary hurt, found new
life among the secular pilgrims of Victorian fiction49 and their “natural supernatu-
ralism,”50 and the novel as a forum for religious debate in an age of conflicting faith
and doubt.51 The novel allowed the complexity of biblical narrative new play in its
perplexing, disturbing crossing of boundaries, as, for example, in the eroticizing of
religious experience and the uneasy exchange between eros and agape—earthly and
heavenly love.52

Nowhere is this more acutely felt than in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). An unre-
mittingly bookish novel, Jane Eyre engages in continual exchanges with other books,
and above all with the Bible, its images and motifs. Against a background of work and
religion, the latter deadeningly presented first by Mr. Brocklehurst and the miseries
of Lowood School, and finally by St. John Rivers with his stern notion of duty and the
suppression of natural feeling. And yet, if the novel, like all Charlotte Brontë’s novels,
steadfastly rejects any sense of “life” after death,53 the end, disturbingly, lies not in the
Miltonic humanism of Chapter 37, with Jane and Rochester safely married and enter-
ing the restored world of their new family: “We entered the wood and wended home-
ward.” It ends with the “glorious sun” of St. John Rivers’ ministry in India, his mind
unclouded, his heart undaunted in spite of worldly disappointments. Jane Eyre fin-
ishes with the final words of what M. H. Abrams, in his study of Romantic literature,
Natural Supernaturalism, calls “the design of biblical history”—“Amen; even so come,
Lord Jesus.”54 The awkward narrative remains, uprooting the comfortable conclusions of
nineteenth-century romantic fiction, and still, the best is yet to be.
Even within fiction itself narrative remains a way of being religious, though in the
spacious world of the Victorian novel there is still the sense that it is “just fiction,”55
the celebrant of a religious humanism that is unable to contain the final mystery of St.
John’s vision.56 Insistently, however, narrative tends to reassert itself as a theological cat-
egory, though it was not until the latter half of the twentieth century, by which time the
great age of the novel had waned, that theology again began to describe itself in narra-
tive terms.57 It did so, however, with the suspicion of a guilty conscience. In the Report
of the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England referred to above, we find the
following words:
Narrative, after all, plays a vital part in human life. It is, indeed, one of the most
normal means by which people communicate with one another; for whatever reason,
our usual way of laying ourselves open to each other is by reciting some version of
our life-history. As a matter of fact it is only highly articulate people who regularly
communicate in any other way.58
The assumption still lurks that stories and narratives are for simple folk, and that ulti-
mately we grow out of them, just as for Eichhorn in the eighteenth century we have
grown away from the primitive stories of the early scriptural books. Yet “narrative the-
ology” attempted to capitalize on this very issue, with George Stroup seeing a return
to narrative categories as a way out of the “crisis of identity” that faces the Christian
community and its theology today.59 The narratives of the faith, Stroup argues, set lim-
its beyond which Christian theology should not speculate, and these are established by
the confessional nature of the narratives of the faith.60 Furthermore, narrative takes one
back to the Bible, and above all to the gospels, read as the story of Jesus, though not
simply, and to a restoration of the biblical narrative’s legitimacy after the nineteenth-
century suspicion of its fictionality. For Stroup, the particularity and the complexity of
the Christian narrative generate the “metaphysical questions”61 that emerge in Christian
doctrine. For other critics, the emergence of the Bible and its narratives, and above all

the Passion narrative, onto the stage of world literature, far from being a threat to bibli-
cal authority, allows us to see this narrative above all as paradigmatic for the great story-
tellers of modern fiction. F. W. Dillistone, in his book The Novelist and the Passion Story
(1960), used the gospels as a starting point for a study of the novels of Herman Melville,
Françoise Mauriac, William Faulkner, and others, perceiving each as writing “about his
contemporary world openly and frankly but with the essential pattern of the Passion
narrative forming the inner framework of his own story.”62
It is precisely this paradigmatic, universal, and legitimating character of these crucial
biblical narratives that falls under the disintegrating, deconstructive gaze of the post-
modern condition that fully enters the critical scene in the early 1980s. The claims of
such “metanarratives” no longer seemed tenable, the “old, old story” again debunked
as mere incoherence. In his enormously influential Report entitled The Postmodern
Condition (1979), Jean-François Lyotard stated:
I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. . . . To the obsolescence

of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis
of metaphysical philosophy. . . . The narrative function is losing its functors, its great
hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.63
Such narratives now become, at best, the impenetrable guardians of what Frank
Kermode has called the “unfollowable world,” before which the reader is doomed finally
to disappointment. In an age characterized by its cynicism, gone are the great romantic
heroes (including Jesus of Nazareth), the journeys driven by the great quest, the great
ideals. The telling of the story is replaced by the schematic diagrams of the structuralist
critic and the “narratologist,” more interested in theory than the story itself.64 We return
to Kermode’s Genesis of Secrecy (1979), which anticipates in so many ways the postmod-
ern collapse of confidence in the narrative, though interestingly he remains fascinated
by the tricksiness and elusiveness of the scriptural stories.65
Kermode’s is an interestingly perverse argument that takes us almost full circle to
what must be the conclusion of this essay. On his final page, he refers indirectly to one
of the greatest of modern parables, the story told by the priest, in the cathedral, of the
Doorkeeper, in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, surely one his most challenging and disturb-
ing “tradings with the Jewish Scriptures.”66 For the secular critic, waiting patiently out-
side the locked door that holds the secrecy of narrative and story, there is nothing but
disappointment.
Hot for secrets, our only conversation may be with guardians who know less and see
less than we can; and our sole hope and pleasure is in the perception of a momentary
radiance, before the door of disappointment is finally shut on us.67
Like either the man in the story, conversing with the Doorkeeper, or K himself, con-
versing with the Priest, we find ourselves applying to a religious tradition that seemingly
turns out to be even less aware than we are ourselves, with all our dashed hopes. But, at

the same time, Kermode’s book celebrates precisely that which has always kept narra-
tive, and especially in the sacred books, alive, provocative and revealing of truths that
they precisely and necessarily conceal in all their mystery. If to the outsiders all comes
in perplexing parables, to the insiders has been given the secret (μυστηριον) of the king-
dom of God (Mark 4:11). The story comes alive.
In a now largely forgotten work, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (1964),
W. B. Gallie characterizes the structure of the events in a story, though not with the ster-
ile schematism of the true structuralist.
Of greater importance for stories than the predictability relation between events
is the converse relation which enables us to see, not indeed that some earlier event
necessitated a later one, but that a later event required, as its necessary condition,
some earlier one.68
Living in a story-shaped world69 precisely involves the acknowledgement of its unfol-

lowability and mystery, and at the same time a hope in words and language rather
than despair in their crisis and their collapsing, postmodern, and ultimately inco-
herent games.70 To tell the story and pursue its narrative is to continue to believe
that its coherence is not granted to predication, but to a sense that the story can be
told because there is an ultimate meaning in its necessary conditions, and thus, as
Iris Murdoch affirms, “the writer has always been important, and is now essential,
as a truth-teller and as a defender of words.”71 She affirms repeatedly, as for example
at the end of her novel The Black Prince, that the art of the storyteller recounts the
only truth that ultimately matters. And this truth may indeed involve the necessity of
“being religious.” In a telling image, D. H. Lawrence reaffirms the irrepressible life of
the novel and narrative:
The novel is the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered.
Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own
time, place, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills
the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.72
The legitimacy of Gallie’s claims for narrative have repeatedly been reestablished
in fiction over the last hundred years or so as the driving force of the gospel narrative
has been recovered in endless fictional transfigurations.73 Most recently, and perhaps
unexpectedly, this has been so in the work of Anne Rice, best known to date for her
best-selling Vampire Chronicles. In her Note at the end of her novel Christ the Lord: Out
of Egypt (2005), Rice suggests that her earlier fiction “reflected my quest for meaning in
a world without God.”74 Later it was what she calls a “mystery without a solution” (that
is, the survival of the Jews) that drew her back to God, and to the story that pre-dates
the systematizations and structures of Christianity, in that dark period from which its
narratives, in all their particularity and universality, emerge. It is here that the necessary
conditions for the story that becomes the source of Christian doctrine are mysteriously

set. Thus Rice writes of the time before clarity and definition, what Iris Murdoch calls
the “temptation of form,” came to the Christian tradition:
I am convinced that the key to understanding the Gospels is that they were written
before all this ever happened. That’s why they were preserved without question
though they contradicted one another. They came from a time that was, for later
Christians, catastrophically lost forever.75
Thus, it might be said, for Christianity the business of “being religious” emerges out of,
and at the same time is constituted by, the mystery of narrative and story.
Notes
1. D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Heinemann,
1967), 105.
2. Quoted in A. S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch (Writers and their Work) (London: The British Council,
1976), 15–16.
3. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1974).
4. John Barton and John Halliburton, “Story and Narrative,” in Believing in the Church: The
Corporate Nature of Faith. A Report by the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England
(London: SPCK, 1981), 79.
5. For example, in the work of Mieke Bal, Roland Barthes, Seymour Chatman, Jonathan
Culler, Wolfgang Iser, Susan Sniader Lanser, Gerald Prince, Franz Stanzel, and many
others.
6. E. M Forster, Aspects of the Novel [1927] (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books,
1962), 93–94.
7. See Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shire, Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative
Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 52–82.
8. Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books,
1965), 43.
9. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge,
MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 145.
10. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature [1946] trans.,
Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 3–23.
11. Ibid., 7.
12. Ibid., 11.
13. See, John Rogerson, “Wrestling with the Angel: A Study in Historical and Literary
Interpretation,” in Ann Loades and Michael McLain, eds. Hermeneutics, the Bible and
Literary Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1992), 133–134.
14. The phrase is taken from Geoffrey H. Hartman’s essay on Genesis 32: 22ff., “The Struggle
for the Text,” in Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds., Midrash and Literature
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 3–18.
15. Ibid., 11.

16. See further N. K. Sanders, Introduction to the Epic of Gilgamesh (Harmondsworth,

UK: Penguin Books, 1960), 47–49
17. For further reflections on this, see Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia,
trans., N. K. Sanders (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1971).
18. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 23–24.
19. Herbert Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 215.
20. Ibid., 13.
21. Alter, 12.
22. In his attempt to recover the so-called “J” author of the Pentateuchal narratives, the literary
critic Harold Bloom commented, “I want the varnish off because it conceals a writer
of the eminence of Shakespeare or Dante, and such a writer is worth more than many
creeds, many churches, many scholarly certainties.” The Book of J, trans., David Rosenberg,
interpreted by Harold Bloom (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p.44.
23. Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1988), x.
24. See, Douglas A. Templeton, The New Testament as True Fiction: Literature, Literary
Criticism, Aesthetics (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999).
25. Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987). Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of
Judges (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988). Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre,
and Scholarship on Sisera’s Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
26. Death and Dissymmetry, 38.
27. Diacritics 16 (1986): 71–9. Reprinted in Mieke Bal, On Story-Telling: Essays in Narratology
(Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1991), 59–72.
28. Death and Dissymmetry, 244.
29. “The Model of Midrash and Borges’s Interpretative Tales and Essays,” in Midrash and
Literature, 255.
30. “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference,
trans. Alan Bass (London and Melbourne: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 68.
31. Quoted in Herbert Marks, “On Prophetic Stammering,” in Regina Schwartz, ed., The Book
and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 60.
32. Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 5.
33. This passage has attracted a huge critical literature. If Matthew’s Gospel was using Mark,
then it would seem that its author found it problematic and turned the last line around,
suggesting that parables are told to enlighten the hard of heart. For a detailed discussion of
this, see David Jasper, “On Reading the Scriptures as Literature,” History of European Ideas,
III, 8, (1982), 311–334.
34. The Genesis of Secrecy, 25.
35. Valentine Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 386.
36. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin
Books, 1953), 7.
37. “ ‘No’, said the priest, ‘it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept
it as necessary.’ ‘A melancholy conclusion,’ said K. ‘It turns lying into a universal principle.’ ”
The Trial, 243.

38. See Parables of Kierkegaard, ed. Thomas C. Oden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1978).
39. See further, Valentine Cunningham, “It is No Sin to Limp,” Literature and Theology, 6, 4
(1992), 303–309. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “The Struggle for the Text,” see above, Note 14.
40. “Wrestling Jacob,” in Donald Davie, ed., The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 167.
41. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), 3.
42. Ibid., 5.
43. See further, David Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics. (Louisville, KY: West
minster John Knox Press, 2004), 74–77.
44. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835), trans., Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot)
(London: SCM Press, 1973), 107. Emphases added.
45. The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), trans. W. Montgomery, J. R. Coates, Susan Cupitt
and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 2000), 159. Emphases added.
46. Selected Literary Criticism, 6–7.
47. The Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
48. Jeffrey F. Keuss, A Poetics of Jesus: The Search for Christ through Writing in the Nineteenth
Century (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002).
49. I take the phrase from the title of Barry Quall’s book, The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian
Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). The
subtitle refers back, again, to D. H. Lawrence’s essay “Why the Novel Matters.”
50. The phrase was coined by Thomas Carlyle.
51. See, for example, Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian
England (London: John Murray, 1977).
52. Prickett, The Origins of Narrative, 225.
53. See further, Barry Qualls, op. cit., 45.
54. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York and
London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973), 32–37. See also Revelation 22:20–21.
55. See J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame, IN and London: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1968).
56. See U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965) and T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
57. See, for example, George W. Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology (London: SCM
Press, 1981).
58. Believing in the Church, 80. Emphases added.
59. The Promise of Narrative Theology, 238–261.
60. Ibid., 242. See also George Aichele Jr. The Limits of Story (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).
61. Ibid., 246.
62. The Novelist and the Passion Story (London: Collins, 1960), 19.
63. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxiv.
64. See the essay “Structuralist and Narratological Criticism” in The Postmodern Bible, by the
Bible and Culture Collective (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 70–
118. Also Edmund Leach and D. Alan Aycock, Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Such writings tend to reduce stories to
pseudo-scientific maps characterized by arrows joining key words or concepts.
65. Less than ten years later, Kermode was to edit, with none other than Robert Alter, The
Literary Guide to the Bible (London: Collins, 1987), a fascinating and misguided, late,
attempt to reduce the Bible to “literature,” its shortcomings evidence of the wisdom of T. S.
Eliot’s admittedly rather prim observation that “the Bible has had a literary influence upon
English literature not because it has been considered as literature, but because it has been
considered as the report of the Word of God.” “Religion and Literature” (1935), in Selected
Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 390.
66. Valentine Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol, 386.
67. The Genesis of Secrecy, 145.
68. Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), 26.
69. The phrase is taken from the title of Brian Wicker’s The Story-Shaped World: Fiction and
Metaphysics: Some Variations on a Theme (London: Athlone Press, 1975).
70. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv.
71. Quoted in A. S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, 15.
72. “Morality and the Novel,” in Selected Literary Criticism, 110.
73. The word is borrowed from the title of Theodore Ziolkowski’s book Fictional Transfig-
urations of Jesus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
74. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005), 307.
75. Ibid., 316.
Bibliography
Aichele George Jr. The Limits of Story (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981).
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Narrative in Western Literature [1946]. Trans.
Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968).
Bal, Mieke. Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988).
Bal, Mieke. On Story-Telling: Essays in Narratology (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1991).
Cohan, Steven, and Shire, Linda M. Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction
(New York and London: Routledge, 1988).
Dillistone, F. W. The Novelist and the Passion Story (London: Collins, 1960).
Frei, Hans W. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century
Hermeneutics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974).
Hartman, Geoffrey H. and Budick, Sanford, eds. Midrash and Literature (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1986).
Josipovici, Gabriel. The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale
Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 1979).
Kort, Wesley A. Story, Text and Scripture: Literary Interests in Biblical Narratives (University
Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988).
Prickett, Stephen. The Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible

Schneidau, Herbert. Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1977).
Stern, David. Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge,
MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Stroup, George. The Promise of Narrative Theology (London: SCM Press, 1981).
Templeton, Douglas. The New Testament as True Fiction: Literature, Literary Criticism, Aesthetics
(Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999).
Wicker, Brian. The Story-Shaped World: Fiction and Metaphysics: Some Variations on a Theme
(London: Athlone Press, 1975).

C HA P T E R 9
P O E T I C WAYS O F B E I N G
RELIGIOUS
P E G G Y RO SE N T HA L
“Religions are poems,” writes Australian poet Les Murray (1938–) at the start of his
poem “Poetry and Religion.” The poem goes on to offer images of religion in terms of
poetry, and conversely images of poetry in terms of religion.
It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,
fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned.1
Through the ages and across cultures, people have often seen poetry and religion as
“the same mirror.” This chapter will trace ways that the special affinity between religion
and poetry has been expressed: first in scriptural texts themselves, then in major poetic
works of earlier epochs, and finally—and most fully—among contemporary poets
mainly in the English-speaking West.
Initially, however, we must suggest a definition of “poetry” that will cover such a broad
expanse of texts. Les Murray calls poetry “mobile” and “glancing,” so those terms are a
good place to start in crafting a definition. Poetry’s medium is the everyday language
of a culture—but with crucial differences. In everyday use, our language must commu-
nicate directly: it imparts information, it argues a point, it expresses feelings. In these
functions, language cannot be mobile and glancing; rather it must stand still and stare
directly at its object. Poetry takes the same vocabulary as ordinary discourse but plays
with it, dances with it, sings with it. Mobile and glancing, poetry moves us deep into the
nuances of a word’s multiple meanings; it shows us startling new angles on our experi-
ence; through imagery and metaphor, it pulls together things that in everyday life are
worlds apart, so that we’ll see afresh both their commonality and the gulf between them.
“Poetry isn’t a way of saying things—it’s a way of seeing things,” noted Pulitzer
Prize-winning American poet Karl Shapiro.2 Poetry draws us to “The Words Under the
Words,” as Palestinian-American Naomi Shihab Nye titled one of her poems.3 Pulling us

POETIC WAYS OF BEING RELIGIOUS 147
underneath the surface meanings of words, poetry’s language acts on us, affects us. Early
twentieth-century Russian poet Osip Mandelstam put poetry’s effect this way: “What
distinguishes poetry from automatic speech is that it rouses us and shakes us awake in
the middle of a word. Then the word turns out to be far longer than we thought.”4 One
way that poetic words shake us awake and lengthen their presence is through metaphor,
which—as contemporary American poet Jane Hirshfield has observed—“isn’t embel-
lishment.” Rather, “language discovers and creates itself through metaphor.”5
Along with metaphor, common features of poetry across epochs and cultures include
rhythm and sound-play. They create poetry’s song-like quality. Sophocles celebrated
this quality of poetry twenty-five centuries ago, praising the power of verse to grant
happiness in our “short narrow channel of life.”6 Poet Kenneth Koch offers a metaphor,
aptly, to call attention to poetry’s life-enhancing power. “Individual words in nonliterary
prose and in conversation are like persons holding onto a rope and hauling a boat out of
the water; the practical end, the beaching of the boat, matters infinitely more than the
beauty or the graceful movement of the haulers. Poetry makes us aware of the beauty
and grace of the words that are hauling in the meaning so that we have to respond to it
both as music and as sense.”7
9.1 Scriptural Poetry
With these general and indeed poetic definitions of poetry in mind, we can turn to the
texts that most foundationally link poetry and religion. “God is the poetry caught in any
religion,” Les Murray’s poem posits. His statement is borne out by the remarkable fact
that the major religions’ scriptures often take poetic form.
Moving in a loose chronology (loose because ancient scriptures are difficult to date),
we begin with Hinduism’s earliest sacred texts. Known collectively as the Vedas and
composed in India between 1500 BCE and about 600 BCE, these texts comprise literally
thousands of poems. Some are hymns addressed to the gods; some are chants recited by
priests officiating at religious rituals; some are philosophical reflections on the nature of
the Divine.
The next major addition to Hindu scripture came with the Upanishads, composed
around 700–500 BCE. Elaborating on Vedic knowledge, the Upanishads—also com-
posed in verse—focus on the single Truth that is named Brahman in its outer Absolute
being and Atman in its inner being in the individual soul. Finally, considered the cul-
mination of Upanishadic wisdom and a peak of Indian poetry, is the Bhagavad Gita
(“Song of God”). Though the Gita’s authorship and date are unknown (scholars sur-
mise between 500 and 100 BCE), its magnificence as poetry and as spiritual wisdom are
uncontested. The Gita is devotional poetry; its grand theme is the human soul’s spiritual
struggle toward fulfillment in the love of a personal God.
In China, the classic Tao Te Ching was also composed in poetic form, probably by
Lao Tsu in the sixth century BCE. Though often considered more a philosophical than a
religious work, the Tao Te Ching certainly shares religion’s speculation on the nature of

human life in relation to eternal wisdom. Indeed, the Tao Te Ching’s opening verse ends
by calling the Tao “the gate to all mystery.” For the Tao, this “mystery” takes the form of
opposites, and the Tao Te Ching is the world’s great poem of paradoxes.
The collection of writings known as the Hebrew Bible, composed over the centuries
of the first millennium BCE, contains a variety of prose and poetic discourses. Its most
acclaimed poetry is found in the parallelism of the Psalms, the exalted language of the
Book of Job, and the imagery of the Song of Songs. But Robert Alter argues persuasively
in The Art of Biblical Poetry that a much greater array of poetic techniques is employed
in these books and throughout the Hebrew Bible. The technique of gradual intensifi-
cation of an image, for instance, accounts for the effectiveness of many of the psalms
as well as the prophetic books. The prophets also employ metaphor—representing one
thing in terms of another—to convey their message that God is calling people to a fun-
damental transformation.
Turning to the Christian Gospels (first to second century CE), we don’t find the rich
array of poetic forms that characterize the Hebrew Bible. Yet Jesus speaks in poetry
when he uses similes and metaphors to depict the reign of God that is already in his
hearers’ midst. “The kingdom of heaven is like . . .,” Jesus says in Matthew 13, “a mustard
seed” or “yeast” or “a treasure hidden in a field.” Contemporary poet Franz Wright goes
even further in presenting Jesus as a master poet. In “Language as Sacrament in the New
Testament” Wright cites German Protestant theologian Joachim Jeremias, who posits
that the original Aramaic of Jesus’s sayings would have been full of alliteration and asso-
nance, conveyed through a four-beat rhythm.8
But for God as the poet of an entire scriptural text we must turn to the Qur’an (610–632
CE). God is the sole speaker in the Qur’an. Although his words are conveyed in Arabic
through the Prophet Muhammad, God insists “We have not taught him to be a poet”
(36:69). God alone is the author of this poetry—which is so magnificent that Muslims
have developed particular chant styles for reciting it. Perhaps the Qur’an’s most poetic
verse is its much-repeated line that has become the key statement of Islam’s shahadah or
confession of faith: “There is no god but God.” In the Arabic, transliterated as la ilaha illa
Allah, the repetition of the double-consonant “ll” between the open “a” vowels gives the
verse a powerfully flowing rhythm and emphasis.
For the scriptural poetry of all the religions above, we might apply what Alter says
about Hebrew biblical poetry: that it is “not just a set of techniques for saying impres-
sively what could be said otherwise. Rather, it is a particular way of imagining the
world.”9 Furthermore, as scholar Frank Burch Brown points out, since scriptural poetry
is usually considered by its community of faith to be divine revelation (as opposed to
“merely human poiesis or poetic making”), the sacred texts can be “valued by their dev-
otees or believers as the very model of poetic excellence.” So the Qur’an, for instance,
“helped inspire the extensive repertoire of Islamic poetry, in Persian as well as Arabic.”
Similarly, Burch Brown notes, medieval Europe’s typological and allegorical methods of
interpreting the Bible inspired Dante to envision his great epic, the Divine Comedy.10 But
this moves us from the poetry of sacred texts to the great non-scriptural religious poetry
of the ages.

9.2 Religious Poetry in Epochs of Faith
If religions produce sacred scriptures that are poetry, the converse posited in Les
Murray’s poem is also true: poetry across ages and cultures has often been explicitly reli-
gious. “Mobile, glancing” (in Murray’s terms), major poetic works have developed new
forms to re-enliven their particular religious tradition.
The European Middle Ages were particularly rich in such poetry. In his Divine
Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) invented in his native Italian a new verse form,
the terza rima (three-line stanzas with interweaving end-rhymes) that grounded in the
Christian Trinity a cosmological vision of the correspondences between divine truth
and the manifold particularities of human behavior. The Divine Comedy is a travel-
ogue trilogy, taking the reader on an imagined journey first through Hell, then through
Purgatory, and finally through the dazzling light of heavenly Paradise.
By contrast, the major medieval poets of Judaism and Islam wrote in short,
image-packed forms. The twelfth-century Hebrew poet Judah Halevi crafted a lyric
style modeled on the Psalms. Inventing (like Dante) a journey narrative, Halevi drama-
tizes the trials of travel that test his faith, then turns each poem’s end toward trust in the
God who will bring him to the holy city of Jerusalem. The Muslim poets Jalal ad-Din
Muhammad Rumi (thirteenth century) and Hafiz of Shiraz (fourteenth century) both
wrote in Persian, composing short, playful love poems to God. As Sufis (Islamic mys-
tics), Rumi and Hafiz drew on their exuberantly creative imaginations to express an
intimacy with the always-near yet ever-elusive Beloved. A frequent, perhaps surpris-
ing, image for both is getting drunk on divine love; their “wine,” as Jeffrey Einboden
observes in his Introduction to a 2010 translation of Hafiz, is intended as vehicle “both
of communication and communion” with God.11
The next period of great religious poetry in Europe and the Americas was the Baroque
era (primarily seventeenth century), which developed new poetic forms matched to the
sensibility of an unsettled time. With the Renaissance having celebrated the ingenuity
of the human mind, and the Reformation having split Christendom into warring fac-
tions, seventeenth-century poets desirous of expressing their Christian faith turned to
secular forms and a delight in the wit of wordplay. So Spanish poet Miguel de Guevara
(1585?–1646?) wrote love poems to Jesus modeled on Italian love sonnets; New Spain’s
Juana Ines de la Cruz (1651–1695) turned popular folk forms into religious dramas full
of dazzling puns; Frenchman Jean de la Ceppede (1548–1623) re-cast the Gospel texts
into an astonishingly inventive sequence of over five hundred sonnets; and British poets
like John Donne (1572–1631) and George Herbert (1593–1633) developed extended, often
paradoxical metaphors to liken God’s mysterious ways to startlingly mundane things
like a pulley or a map.
Reformation theology had another seismic effect on seventeenth-century poetry.
Shifting the center of Christian life from an outer cosmology mediated by religious hier-
archy to the interior of the individual soul, where God meets each person through the

medium of Scripture alone, the Reformation moved poets to seek God within them-
selves. Typical is “Meditation 2.24” by colonial American poet and pastor Edward
Taylor (1642–1729). Playing Baroque word-games with the Divine Word, Taylor sites
the Incarnate Word in his own flesh. “Thou’lt tent in me,” the poem says to Christ. The
Reformation poet John Milton (1608–1674) shared neither this sense of an indwelling
God nor the Baroque poets’ verbal playfulness. His epic re-casting of the Christian nar-
rative of the Fall in Paradise Lost is weighty theological verse. Yet the sequel, Paradise
Regained, adopts a Reformation interiority in the poem’s drama of Christ’s discovery of
his own inner identity.
9.3 Poetry Supplants Religion
The eighteenth-century European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment

brought the Renaissance celebration of the human mind to its peak. Human reason
became the sole source of truth, with revealed religion demoted to the status of mere
myth. Christian theologians, primarily in Germany, responded creatively to this chal-
lenge. The Divine was real, they argued, but divinity resided equally in all of humankind.
Every person, Jesus no more nor less, incarnated the divine spirit.
Poetry always speaks of and for its age. The major nineteenth-century European poets
that came to be known as the Romantics embraced this new sublimity of the human
person and declared poetry as the authoritative voice of the grandly exalted human
soul. Taking Les Murray’s metaphor that religion and poetry are “the same mirror,” we
might say that the Romantics turned poetry into a self-reflecting and magnifying mir-
ror. Poetry itself, often in communion with nature, was the only religion that humanity
needed.
So Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), in his poem “Harz Journey in
Winter,” envisions himself on a mountaintop crowned as divine poet laureate. William
Wordsworth (1770–1850) writes in his autobiographical poem The Prelude: “Thence
did I drink the visionary power.” The mystic and political radical William Blake (1757–
1827), who forged an elaborate symbol system with “Divine Humanity” and the creative
“Imagination” at its core, exclaims in his prophetic poem Jerusalem that “Every thing is
Human, mighty! sublime!” And across the Atlantic, Walt Whitman (1819–1892) boldly
announced in Song of Myself that “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” Whitman’s is not
an egotistical celebration, however, for his poem makes clear that every exalted state-
ment about himself applies equally to his reader: “what I assume you shall assume.”
Hence when he proclaims “Divine I am inside and out, / and I make holy whatever
I touch or am touch’d from,” he is including all humankind in his divinity.
Yet the decades following Romanticism saw all divinity—even that of humankind
and of poetry—coming into question. Well before Nietzsche notoriously pronounced
God dead in the 1880s, much of European culture was feeling abandoned by God. The
sense of mourning for traditional religious beliefs and structures was expressed most

famously by Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” in the 1850s, with its heart-wrenching
image of the “sea of faith” retreating, leaving behind only “its melancholy, long, with-
drawing roar.” But more influential poetically was the defiant tone of French poet
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), who in his poem “The Swan” paints the bird thirstily
twisting its neck upward toward an unresponsive heaven “cruelly blue.”
Baudelaire was convinced that, abandoned by God, humankind would need to create
its own transcendence. And artists would be these creators that the times desperately
called for. At the turn of the twentieth century, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875–1926) was still sounding this theme, but with a key temperamental difference. For
Rilke, as his late poems Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies demonstrate, the loss of
traditional religion was exhilarating, liberating. Humanity was now free to discover its
own ways to join the visible to the invisible, shaping a new religion truly worthy of a
self-creating people.
9.4 Twentieth-Century Secularism
Rilke is a pivotal figure in the religious life of Western poetry of the past couple centuries.
He represents both a culmination of Romantic poetry’s exaltation of itself to divine status
and an initiation of what became the twentieth century’s predominant poetic stance: a sec-
ularism sure that, with traditional religion discredited, the poet’s role was to create mean-
ing from scratch. Especially after the devastation of World War I, all traditional structures
had lost credibility: societal institutions as well as inherited forms of religion and the arts.
Not only was any mirroring of meaning between poetry and religion impossible; poet-
ry’s mirror itself was smashed to bits. The poem that most influentially dramatized this
total demolition of traditional meaning was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), with its
startlingly disconnected fragments of ancient myth and religion and cultural artifact, its
absence of familiar poetic form, and its bleak vision of a basically incoherent world.
As the century went on, Western intellectual and artistic circles enthusiastically
embraced secularism as a freedom from outmoded beliefs; the new belief was in sci-
ence as the source of truth. So firm was secularism’s reign as the era’s ideology that Eliot
himself soon complained of it. Having experienced a religious conversion, he joined the
Anglican Church five years after publishing The Waste Land, and complained in a 1935
essay called “Religion and Literature” that Western culture had entered a “phase of those
who have never heard of the Christian Faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism.”12
In this environment, what was poetry to do? Poetry speaks the meanings of its culture; but
mid-twentieth-century culture was crowing that no ultimate meanings exist. Major poets
found their own ways of speaking out of and for the secular worldview. Wallace Stevens
(1879–1955) crafted elegant poems like “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” and “Not
Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,” that cleverly posit the problem of whether any
reality exists apart from our mind’s construction of it. While Stevens flirted with solipsism,
Robert Frost (1874–1963) toyed with ambiguity. Drawn to questions of ultimate meaning

that science had presumably answered, Frost playfully subverted the certainties of science
while offering more questions in their place. Typical is his poem “Design,” which fashions
a series of questions about what designing force might have brought together a particular
spider and moth on a wayside flower. But Frost ends the poem by seeming to dismiss these
questions with a teasing “if ”: “If design govern in a thing so small.”
Stevens and Frost both re-assembled poetry’s mirror after its shattering, as dramatized
in The Waste Land. But in this secularist century, poetry’s mirror could only self-reflect.
Both of these brilliant poets held the mirror up to the human mind and enjoyed watch-
ing self-created meanings bounce back and forth between the mind and its reflection
of itself. Literary criticism of the era celebrated their efforts. The British critic William
Empson, in his influential Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), declared a poem’s ambiguity
the measure of its greatness. His compatriot I. A. Richards elevated “irony” to this status.
In this climate, the few literary critics with a sympathy for religious belief were natu-
rally on the defensive. William T. Noon, a Jesuit priest and literature professor, felt the
need to adopt secularist vocabulary in order to argue for the value of religious poetry. In
his 1967 study Poetry and Prayer, he praises religious poets like John Donne and Gerard
Manley Hopkins in terms of I. A. Richards’ much-touted “irony.” At the same time,
Australian critic Vincent Buckley, in his 1968 book Poetry and the Sacred, goes to great
lengths to establish the validity of the very concept of the “sacred,” so conscious is he of
writing in a secularized—and hence de-sacralized—world.
A few Christian poets, like Tomas Tranströmer in Sweden (1931–), Geoffrey Hill in
Britain (1932–), and Richard Wilbur in the United States (1921–), found subtle images
for their religious vision that were acceptable and engaging to a secular readership. But
with the exception of already famous poets who converted to Christianity (to whom
we’ll return later in this chapter), the rare poet of talent whose work was explicitly
religious had no hope of being accepted in literary circles. The classic case is France’s
Charles Péguy (1873–1914), who composed magisterial book-length poems celebrating
his mystical Catholic faith; ignored by his secularist epoch, Péguy’s astoundingly origi-
nal poetry was acclaimed only after his death.
Toward the twentieth century’s end, however, something started to change in Western
culture. Beginning around the 1980s, the possibility of religious belief was at least
entertained.
9.5 It Is The Same Mirror (Again)

fixed centrally, we call it a religion . . .
These lines, from Les Murray’s “Poetry and Religion,” are from his 1988 collection
The Daylight Moon and Other Poems. During this decade and the next, self-identified

Christians published poetry collections with major presses: the University of Pittsburgh
poetry series published Kathleen Norris’s The Middle of the World in 1981 and her Little
Girls in Church in 1995; Houghton Mifflin published Andrew Hudgins’s Saints and
Strangers in 1985 and his The Never-Ending in 1991; The University of Georgia Press
published Scott Cairns’s The Translation of Babel in 1990. Then in 1997, these poets and
twelve others were included in Upholding Mystery: An Anthology of Contemporary
Christian Poetry, published by Oxford University Press. The very publication of such a
collection by a major press implicitly announced that poetry and religion could again
mirror each other in plain daylight.
What accounts for the reconnection of poetry and religion toward the twenti-
eth century’s close? The compiler of Upholding Mystery, David Impastato, offered one
explanation in his Introduction: “Post-modernism has ruled everything off-limits. It
declares that we have only language, and a language of bias at that. All fabrications of
language like poetry, therefore, are equally suspect, but at the same time equally worthy
of our investigation. In other words, nothing is off-limits, and the Christian poet today
advances an appeal to scrutiny from the same equitable zero-point as any other member
of the writing community.”13
This might be called the negative reason for religion’s return to poetic legitimacy: sec-
ularism’s development into a relativism that had no grounds for judging any lan-
guage more or less valuable than any other. Concurrently, a positive impulse was also
at play: many poets and readers alike began to miss the God who had been declared
dead a century ago. Seeking for God, or at least longing for an unnamed transcendence,
became a popular motif among Western poets. Some, like Chinese-American poet
Li-Young Lee (1957–), whose first collection, Rose, was published in 1986, shared secu-
larism’s discomfort with traditional religious practice and yet wrote a poetry reaching
toward the spiritual. Lee told an interviewer in 1995 that he wanted to write “maybe not
a religious poetry but a poetry whose spirituality isn’t ironic. Which is genuine, sincere,
hungry. . . . Because for me secular poetry isn’t enough.”14 This desire to replace the “reli-
gious” with the “spiritual” has been common since the late 1980s, not only among poets
but in the culture at large. The term “religion” can still evoke dogma and strictures that
are uncomfortable to many, while “spiritual” evokes a sense of connection to transcen-
dent realities not bound by a particular creed.
Indeed many poets of this era who would not consider themselves “religious” write
poems out of a spiritual sensibility. Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, in
“Arabic Coffee” and “The Tray,” both in her collection Words Under the Words, describes
childhood memories of the family drinking coffee or tea together as if it were a sacred ritual.
Poland’s Adam Zagajewski evokes “The Mystery of Presence,” as a 2002 review of his poetry
was titled;15 though the darkness of Europe’s modern history is always before Zagajewski’s
eyes, a soft and beckoning light shines through poems like “Mysticism for Beginners,” while
“The Room I Work In” paints the poet as a contemplative whose “thirst exceeds the ocean.”
Transcendent light and a longing for it also pervade the poetry of American W. S. Merwin.
While these poets write a poetry of the spirit that keeps its distance from institu-
tionalized religion, others during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have

experienced religious conversions that brought them to a publicly announced turn

(or return) to Christianity. Since they had already made their names as secular poets,
their embrace of Christian practice caused a stir in the literary world. The most famous
among English-speaking poets are T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and W. H. Auden (1907–1973).
Their post-conversion works Four Quartets (Eliot) and For the Time Being and Horae
Canonicae (Auden) stand out as major mid-century poems that were deeply and explic-
itly Christian.
For Auden, as later in the century for Denise Levertov (1923–1997), the return to
Christianity was motivated by near-despair at the massive scale of human sinfulness,
manifested in World War II for Auden and in the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms
race for Levertov. Personal experiences motivated the conversions of Margaret Avison
in Canada and Franz Wright, Christian Wiman, and Mary Karr in the United States. The
fact that Wiman was editor of Poetry, the country’s most prestigious poetry journal, at
the time of his return to Christianity in the early years of the twenty-first century, and
Karr announced her conversion in a 2005 issue of Poetry, signaled that secularist domi-
nance of American poetry was waning significantly. Further evidence of religion’s new
respectability in the intellectual world was the appearance of Wiman’s personal religious
story in a 2007 issue of The American Scholar, the premier American academic journal.
As recently as thirty years ago, The American Scholar would not have printed an affirma-
tion of religious experience.
9.6 Poetry of Presence
A century after Nietzsche had pronounced God dead, then, God had come alive again
in Western poetry. Since the 1980s, a new vitality has energized poetry of faith. In the
United States, journals like Image and Cross Currents and Christianity and Literature
have given poets and critics a forum for speaking frankly of religious matters without
having to feel on the defensive. And poets with a religious practice have enjoyed the
challenge of writing out of their faith without sounding in the least dogmatic; they are
free to write exploratory, even playful, poems in language accessible to all, whether
believers or not.
This accessibility is significant. Poets probing religious questions—of how grace
touches our world, of how suffering and evil might be understood, of how eternity breaks
into time—feel free now to invite readers into their poems. They even see their poetry
as a dialogue with the reader. Canadian poet Margaret Avison speaks for many current
poets of faith in saying “It isn’t a poem until it is received.”16 The intentional welcome of
current poetry contrasts markedly with the difficult, often deliberately obscure religious
poetry of William Butler Yeats (with his private symbol system) and T. S. Eliot in Four
Quartets. As magnificent as these poets were, their audience has been restricted to read-
ers willing to work at deciphering their language. But now a poet like the Catholic Adélia
Prado, the Buddhist Jane Hirshfield, the Muslim Kazim Ali, the Orthodox Christian

Scott Cairns, or the Protestant Mark Jarman can comfortably engage religious themes
in poetry that is welcoming and even fun. Jarman, for instance, titled his 2000 poetry
volume Unholy Sonnets, playing off of John Donne’s sequence called “Holy Sonnets,”
though Jarman did not intend “unholy” to mean “irreverent.” Rather, as he explained in
an interview, “I didn’t want to make any sentimental assumptions about religious belief.”
Furthermore, he continues, “I knew I was writing religious poetry, devotional poetry,
but I didn’t want to exclude readers who might not believe as I did, and I didn’t want to
rely on the traditional language of religious belief. My aim . . . was to surprise a reader in
the midst of a religious poem.”17
The element of surprise characterizes the best religious poetry today—along with a
fresh engagement with everyday life and the natural world. For Christians, this engage-
ment is perceived as incarnational. Poet and professor Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, who
is Poetry Editor of The Christian Century, says that in choosing poems for the maga-
zine she seeks those that explore “the core human questions” and also “intensely engage
the senses. This is what sacramental language does.” In particular, she adds, “Christian
poets must bring the spirit into flesh just as the incarnation is Spirit becoming flesh.”18
Bringing the spirit into flesh is the joyous passion driving the poetry of Brazilian
Catholic Adélia Prado. Transcendent reality and the myriad things of daily life are inter-
woven in Prado’s sensuous vision. In “Pieces for a Stained-Glass Window,” she delights
in the God who made gold “and gave us the discretion / to invent necklaces to wear
around our necks.”19 As if in affirming response, though in his own more quietly discur-
sive idiom, the Polish-American poet Czeslaw Milosz takes God’s naming of each par-
ticle of existence as a model for how poetry must attend to the miracle of the particular.
“I wanted to describe this, not that, basket of vegetables with a redheaded doll of a leek
laid across it,” he writes in the poem “With Trumpets and Zithers.”20
Attention to the particular as it is touched by transcendence is the theme also of
Richard Wilbur’s deservedly famous poem “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,”
in which laundry hanging on a clothesline appears as angels to bless the dawning day.21
A similar vision is invoked by Irish poet Seamus Heaney in “Seeing Things,” a poem
describing a carved image of Jesus’s baptism on a cathedral façade: “in that utter visibil-
ity / The stone’s alive with what’s invisible.”22
Seeing the invisible in the visible: this has become almost a creed of contemporary
Christian poets. Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry from 2003 to 2013, writes that he
has become “impatient with poetry that is not steeped in, marred and transfigured by,
the world.”23 And for American poet Scott Cairns, himself steeped in the sacramental
practice of Orthodox Christianity, poetry is like the “holy mysteries” in being “utterly
involved with presence.” A frequent image in Cairns’s poems is of “leaning into” divine
presence, as he strives toward “loving attention to what is before me.”24
Among other contemporary American poets whose work is grounded in religious
faith, many find divine presence primarily in the natural world. Mary Oliver has writ-
ten decades of poetry evoking natural objects as the site of holiness, with poem titles
like “Goldenrod,” “Water Snake,” “Ice,” and “Lonely White Fields,” all in her 2005 New
and Selected Poems, Volume One. Charles Wright encapsulates his vision in the line

“Landscape’s a lever of transcendence,” from his poem “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” in the
1997 collection Black Zodiac. For Buddhist poet Jane Hirshfield, images of nature speak
of our internal life. So when she defines “Ripeness,” in a poem of that title, as “what falls
away with ease,” her description of autumn fruit is a metaphor for the human spirit.25
Heightened attention to nature characterizes also the poetry of Todd Davis, for whom
the Christian gospels come to life afresh in the natural world. In his 2009 collection
The Least of These, the poem “The Kingdom of God is Like This” describes a particular
mountain stream and then turns it into an image of our soul’s purging: “Because the
water flows in the dark, crawls / on its knees through dirt, it is made clean.”26
Nature minutely observed is an entry into the spiritual for Pattiann Rogers as well.
Her poems in Song of the World Becoming (1988) are long, leisurely attentions to nature’s
details, seeing them as if simultaneously from deep inside a natural phenomenon and
from a cosmic distance above it. “The Laying On of Hands” looks microscopically into
field and moonlight and tree trunk for lessons in how to form one’s own “gentleness” of
spirit. “On the Way to Early Morning Mass” imagines a journey through earth and cos-
mos, every element encountered in almost scientific detail—all as preparatory enactment
of the sacred ritual of Mass. Muslim-American poet Kazim Ali also writes a poetry of
cosmic encounter, but Ali’s dominant rhetorical mode is the interrogative. The poems
in his 2008 collection The Fortieth Day question the universe in order to probe the self ’s
relation to other beings and to elements of wind and sky, river and earth, in a fluid, mys-
terious cosmos.
9.7 Poetry of Absence
Kazim Ali’s poetry hurls questions not only at the universe but at God. These are not
anxious questions, however; they exude a speculative openness. Other recent poets of
faith also write a poetry interrogating the divine. Their sense that God is elusive or even
silent is not a rejection of their faith but rather a natural movement within faith.
Welsh poet and priest R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) is even known as the poet of “the
hidden God.” Poem after poem finds him kneeling in a dark empty church, waiting for
a God who refuses to appear or speak. The God of Thomas’s poetry communicates to us
only in echoes or whispers and appears only in shadows or footprints. Yet for Thomas,
this sense of God’s hiddenness is a dimension of faith itself. As he writes in the poem
“Kneeling,” “the meaning is in the waiting.”27
American poet Franz Wright titled his 2006 collection God’s Silence. And for Wright,
as for Thomas, God’s silence is not a negation of divine reality but an invitation for us to
listen for it more closely. “Religious experience is silent listening and waiting,” Wright
told an interviewer. “It points to our freedom to achieve a higher spiritual destiny or to
be murderers. . . . God doesn’t comment. It’s a reflection of the concept of free will.”28
Given free will, humans are inclined to sin; so a powerful sense of evil pervades
Wright’s poetry. A similar acknowledgement of the reality of evil characterizes the

vision of Sweden’s major modern poet, Tomas Tranströmer. Eerie images of darkness
populate his collected poems, The Great Enigma: a valley is “full of crawling axe handles”
(in “Night Duty”); “The squat pine in the swamp holds up its crown: a dark rag” (in
“A Few Minutes”). Yet into Tranströmer’s darkness, as into Wright’s, light can penetrate
unexpectedly and transformatively.
American poet Edward Hirsch is also unafraid to confront the darkness of human
existence. For Hirsch, the darkness is a descent into the unconscious self as well as into
the past century’s political evils. The darkness of political life, particularly in the Middle
East, colors the work of Israel’s leading modern poet, Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000).
And immersion in the reality of our era’s evil grounds the poetry of Adam Zagajewski
and Czeslaw Milosz, who write out of eastern Europe’s experience of domination by
Nazi and then Soviet totalitarianism. In his 1980 Nobel Prize lecture, Milosz observed
that when modern totalitarianism became an unbearable reality, poets felt compelled
to engage it. But they could do so only by simultaneously immersing their imaginations
in it and “soaring above it.” For the poet’s vocation is “to contemplate Being” both from
within and above.
To contemplate Being—in all its darkness and light, its suffering and hope—is what
these poets of divinity’s “absence” take as their vocation. It is a mode of the religious call-
ing of contemporary poetry.
9.8 Poetry as Religious, Poetry

as Religion

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any
religion, caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror
that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
Here we see how Les Murray extends his image of poetry and religion as “the same
mirror”: like God in the world, poetry is a law against “closure.” An infinite open-
ness characterizes both poetry and “full” religion (as Murray calls it elsewhere in the
poem). Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Ars Poetica?” shares this vision of poetry’s openness,
imaged by Milosz as an unlocked house inviting all to “come in and out at will.”29
For both Murray and Milosz, poetry’s essence is the religious impulse of unbounded
welcoming.
Other contemporary poets, as well, envision poetry in religious terms and reli-
gious experience in poetic terms. Charles Wright, in his poem “Body and Soul,”

imagines “That words were the Word.”30 Denise Levertov, in “A Clearing,” writes
that paradise
is a kind of poem; it has
a poem’s characteristics:
inspiration; starting with the given;
unexpected harmonics; revelations.31
A “harmonics” linking poetry and paradise: interestingly, Seamus Heaney uses the same
word. “The poem gives us a premonition of harmonics desired,” he writes in an essay;
indeed every art, including poetry, “is not an inferior reflection of some ordained heav-
enly system but a rehearsal of it in earthly terms.”32 For poet Jeanne Murray Walker, this
rehearsal is itself a graced entrance into mystery. In the preface to her poetry collection
New Tracks, Night Falling, she says that “reading a poem is like following tracks to an
interior realm . . . The mystery that ignites the best poems . . . is the same mystery that lies
at the heart of all we know and want.”
Given contemporary poets’ vision of poetry as inherently engaged with tran-
scendence, it’s not surprising that many write poems explicitly on religious themes.
Variations on the motif of human relations with God predominate in the work of R. S.
Thomas, Geoffrey Hill, Scott Cairns, and Mark Jarman, as well as the later poetry of
Denise Levertov, Christian Wiman, Mary Oliver, and Caroline Forché. Others, like
African-American Lucille Clifton, offer occasional gems of intentionally religious
verse: her “mary” and “jesus” cycles in Good Woman; her comical yet profoundly loving
“Praise Song” in Blessing the Boats.
But even when not choosing explicitly religious images and motifs, indeed even when
not self-identifying with a religion, the mainstream of contemporary poets see their
craft as engaging life’s spiritual dimension. This is an extraordinary development less
than a century after The Waste Land consigned all religious experience to the trash bin.
In his study How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry, poet Edward Hirsch
writes that poetry “is a way of delivering us up to our own spiritual lives and, there-
fore, to ourselves.”33 Poet and essayist Kathleen Norris agrees. Citing contemporary
poet Maxine Kumin’s description of herself as “an unreconstructed atheist who believes
in the mystical power of the creative process,” Norris comments: “This strikes me as a
poet’s confession uniquely suited to our age, when churches have ceased to be guardians
of mystery . . . It is in the poems where her deepest spirituality resides, where it is evident
that God has confronted her.”34
Norris also observes here that “the sacred is very much alive in contemporary
American poetry, maybe because poetry, like prayer, tends to be a dialogue with the
holy.” She is not alone among contemporary poets in noting an affinity between poetry
and prayer. “In a very real sense,” Pattiann Rogers has said, “my poems are prayers.
They’re prayers that say, under their words, “Here, I make this in praise, in confu-
sion. . . . Accept this, accept me.’ . . . I believe that when human beings perform creative
acts of imagination and do so with reverence and joy, they are praying.”35 For Robert
Cording, “both poetry and prayer acknowledge the limits of the ego. In this sense, their

origins are rooted in invocation—a calling out to that which cannot be seen or logi-
cally understood.”36 Canadian poet Anne Carson concurs: “I write not for the purpose of
writing. It’s worship, I think. One’s function as a human being is to praise things, which
means that you have to think into them enough that you see what the good is. And that
thinking requires expression for some reason.”37
Literary critic Jay Parini goes even further, calling poetry “at its best, a kind of scrip-
ture.” Parini’s terms return us to the start of this chapter, where we looked at ancient
scriptural texts that take poetic form. In Parini’s view, the inspiration behind these
sacred texts has not disappeared from our world. Poetry even today, he posits, “repre-
sents the inspired language of generations, language that helps us to live our lives by
directing us along certain paths.”38
“Religions are poems,” begins Murray’s “Poetry and Religion.” He continues:
They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Notes
1. The Daylight Moon and Other Poems (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press Limited, 1988).
Reprinted with the permission of Carcanet Press Limited, and Farrar Straus and
Giroux, LLC.
2. “What is Not Poetry,” in The Poet’s Work: 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry on the Origins
and Practice of Their Art, ed. Reginald Gibbons (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 100.
3. In Words Under the Words (Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1995).
4. “Conversation about Dante,” 1933–4, in Osip Mandelstam: Selected Essays, translated by
Sidney Monas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 13.
5. Interviewed in Atlantic Unbound (Atlantic Monthly online), September 18, 1997, http://
www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/bookauth/jhirsh.htm[http://www.theatlantic.
com/past/docs/unbound/bookauth/jhirsh.htm]
6. “Music,” translated by Reginald Gibbons, Poetry 189:6 (March 2007): 462
7. Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (New York: Scribners,
1998), 27–8.
8. Image 57 (Spring 2008): 91.
9. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 151.
10. “Poetry and Religion” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., Lindsay Jones, ed.,vol.11
(Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2005), 7205.
11. The Tangled Braid: Ninety-Nine Poems by Hafiz of Shiraz, translated by Jeffrey Einboden
and John Slater (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2009), xii.
12. Selected Essay of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960) 347.
13. Impastato, xxii.
14. In Poetry in Person, ed. Alexander Neubauer (New York: Knopf, 2010), 284.
15. Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books, May 9, 2002.
16. “A Conversation with Margaret Avison,” Image 45 (Spring 2005): 66.

17. “A Conversation with Mark Jarman,” Image 33 (Winter 2001–2): 67.

18. “Silver Catching Midday Sun: Poetry and the Beauty of God,” in The Beauty of God: Theology
and the Arts, ed. Daniel J. Treier et al. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007),148–9.
19. In The Alphabet in the Park, translated by Ellen Watson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
20. The Collected Poems 1931–1987 (New York: Ecco Press, 1988).
21. Collected Poems (New York: Mariner Books 2006).
22. In Seeing Things (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
23. “God’s Truth is Life,” essay in Image 60 (Winter 2008–9):141.
24. “A Conversation with Scott Cairns,” Image 44 (Winter 2004–5): 56–8.
25. In The October Palace (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994).
26. Reprinted with the permission of Michigan State University Press from the poem “The
Kingdom of God is Like This,” in Least of These by Todd Davis (2009).
27. In Collected Poems 1945–1990 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1983).
28. “A Conversation with Franz Wright,” Image 51 (Fall 2006): 77.
29. The Collected Poems 1931–1987 (New York: Ecco Press, 1988).
30. In A Short History of the Shadow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
31. By Denise Levertov, from This Great Unknowing: Last Poems, copyright © 1999 by
The Denise Levertov Literary Trust. Reprinted by permission from New Directions
Publishing Corp.
32. Government of the Tongue (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989) 94.
33. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999, 193.
34. Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 1998), 379.
35. Interviewed in Image 29 (Winter 2000): 52–3.
36. “The Art of Devotion: Some Thoughts on Poetry & Prayer,” Image 49 (Spring 2006): 86.
37. Interview in The Globe and Mail (Toronto), September 14, 2000: R5.
38. Why Poetry Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 156.
Bibliography
Studies
Alter Robert. The Art of Biblical Poetry. New York, Basic Books, 1985.
Brown, Frank Burch. Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
Countryman, Louis William. The Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Tradition.
New York: Orbis, 2002.
Jarman, Mark. “To Make the Final Unity: Metaphor’s Matter and Spirit.” The Southern Review
Spring, 2007 (vol. 43:2).
Jones, Lindsay, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., articles on “Poetry,” vol. 11, 7203–7224.
Detroit : Macmillan Reference, 2005.
Mariani, Paul. God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable. Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2002.
Parini, Jay. Why Poetry Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
Rosenthal, Peggy. The Poets’ Jesus: Representations at the End of a Millennium. New York: Oxford

Essays and Reflections

Domina, Lynn, editor. Poets on the Psalms. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2008.
Hirsch, Edward. Poet’s Choice. New York: Harcourt, 2007.
Poetry As Prayer Series. 7 vols. New York: Pauline Press, 1999–2003.
Wiman, Christian. My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2013.
Anthologies
Atwan, Robert et al., editors. Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998.
Davie, Donald, editor. New Oxford Book of Christian Verse. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988.
Impastato, David, editor. Upholding Mystery: An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Milosz, Czeslaw, editor. A Book of Luminous Things. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996.
Mitchell, Stephen, editor. The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry.
New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Olsen, W. Scott and Scott Cairns, editors, The Sacred Place: Witnessing the Holy in the Physical
World. Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press, 1996.
Rothenberg, Jerome, editor. Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America,
Asia, Europe and Oceania. 2nd ed. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1985.

C HA P T E R 10
D R A M AT I C WAYS O F B E I N G
RELIGIOUS
L A R RY D. B OU C HA R D
Is drama inherently a way of being religious? The safe answer would be no. Most plays,
performances, or films, whether we judge them good or bad, are not ostensibly “reli-
gious”—not in content, form, or intention. Historically and culturally, drama may be
said to relate to religion in all sorts of ways. But to call it inherently religious may seem
at least tedious (like insisting that a plague bacterium is one of God’s precious creatures)
or at worst an imposition of piety. And yet, like many art forms, drama and performance
often appear and reappear in historical proximity to traditions of myth and ritual. This is
so especially in stories where persons or deities imitate others, perform for others, or are
transformed through their own or others’ performances.
Does this frequent proximity mean that theatrical drama, by virtue of its form, inher-
ently opens for us religious, theological, and ethical meanings and relations? The main
task of this chapter is to survey how drama relates to religion: by historical interactions,
ritual functions, and shared themes and questions. Yet lurking backstage will be that
harder question. Even if we cannot answer it with finality, the question itself may have
catalytic value, helping us to notice things about drama and religion that might other-
wise be missed. Clearly, we will need definitions. But let us start with examples.
10. 1 Dionysus and Oedipus
Although Sophocles’s Oedipus the King (c. 425 BCE) and Euripides’s The Bacchae (c.
406) are both Greek tragedies, the latter also has its comedic aspects. Two venerated,
elderly gentlemen, Cadmus and Teiresias (he is not only old but also blind) have just left
the ancient city of Thebes. They are dressed up like young bacchants in fawn skins and
have ivy in their hair; each carries a staff with grape leaves called a thyrsus, and perhaps
they dance a little as they walk to the mountains to worship a god.

DRAMATIC WAYS OF BEING RELIGIOUS 163
CA DM US : And how sweet it is / to forget my old age.

T EI R E SI A S : It is the same with me. / I too feel young enough to dance. . . .
CA DM US : Are we the only men / who will dance for Bacchus?
T EI R E SI A S : They are all blind. / Only we can see.
CA DM US : But we delay too long. / Here, take my arm.
T EI R E SI A S : Link my hand in yours.
CA DM US : I am a man, nothing more.1
Are we certain this scene was funny? After all, the spectators would be expecting tragic,
not comic emotions.2 But it is hard not to smile at old geezers who cross-dress and
dance, and the vicissitudes of aging have long been sources of humor. The women these
men are imitating are not just any women but a chorus of foreigners from Asia Minor,
who have brought the worship of Dionysus (Bacchus, Bromius) to a city full of people—
including the new king, Pentheus—who have obstinately refused to receive it.
DION YSUS : Like it or not, this city must learn its lesson:
it lacks initiation in my mysteries. . . .
And when my worship is established here / and all is well, then I shall go my way
and be revealed to men in other lands. . . .
To these ends I have laid my deity aside / and go disguised as a man. . . .
CHORUS : Out of the land of Asia, / down from holy Tmolus,
speeding the service of god, / for Bromius we come! . . . . Bacchus! Evohé! . . .
—You on the streets!—You on the roads!—Make way!3
The Bacchae is about a god and about people who either oppose or worship this god.
The rites entail special objects (much like theatrical props), garments (costumes), and
performances (dancing). Moreover, the god has come in disguise (as if an actor), and
he deludes Pentheus into disguising himself as a woman. So, first, drama and religion
seem intermingled and in tension here, in the storyline itself and in its reflections of
culture and psychology.4 Secondly, the play was performed at The Great Dionysia, mak-
ing The Bacchae a rare instance when that god actually appeared in the plays that were
presented at his festival. Thirdly, its references to performance and disguise make the
play aware of itself as drama, as if commenting on its own theatricality.5 At the crux of
the story, Dionysus arouses in Pentheus a longing to spy upon the women of Thebes,
whom the god is punishing collectively for impiety: the sisters of Semele, Dionysus’s
late mother, have denied he is a son of Zeus. He has driven the Theban women to dance
wildly, suckle animals, slaughter cattle with their bare hands, and terrify men. Pentheus
has also denied Dionysus; his punishment is to be dismembered by his mother, Agave,
who thinks she is killing a lion. The sacrifice of Pentheus raises vexing questions: was
Euripides celebrating the theater and the god Dionysus, was he criticizing their powers,
or could he have been doing both?
Many will know of King Oedipus, at least because of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who
thought children (boys at least) go through a phase of wishing to kill their fathers and

marry their mothers. Yet what the play is really about is a city, Thebes again, in the grip
of a mysterious plague. Oedipus the King begins with a subtle role reversal, as a priest
of Zeus—who perhaps ought to be able to appease the supernatural—leads the city’s
children and the Chorus of elders to King Oedipus, who meets them near an altar. The
Thebans have come to him because they made him king after he rescued them from a
monster, the Sphinx. So now the priest places all their grief and despair before Oedipus.
You came and by your coming saved our city,

freed it from the tribute we paid of old
to the Sphinx, cruel singer. This you did
in virtue of no knowledge we could give you,
in virtue of no teaching; it was God
that aided you, men say, and you are held
with God’s assistance to have saved our lives.
Now Oedipus . . . find us some strength for rescue.
Perhaps you’ll hear a wise word from some God,
perhaps you will learn something from a man. . . .6
The internal references to performance are subtle, in the ceremonial roles the king and
the priest occupy. But more evident is that theater is also a forum for inquiry. The Sphinx’s
terror hinged on a riddle only Oedipus was able to solve: it was a human being who
moves on four legs as a baby, two as an adult, and three—using a staff—when old. Now
he must investigate another question, consulting divine and human sources of knowl-
edge, which will lead to a devastating self-discovery. In a modern version of Sophocles’
Antigone (1944) by French dramatist Jean Anouilh, Oedipus’s daughter observes that she
is “of the tribe that asks questions, and we ask them until the bitter end.”7 Theater, under
the aspects of Dionysus and Oedipus, relates to religion through historical interactions,
ritual-like performances, and interrogative encounters.
10. 2 Drama, Theater, Metatheater,

and Religion
If drama is an artistic way of being religious we must know what sort of art it is, yet it is
one of the more hybrid art forms. “Drama” has two areas of meaning, concerning action
and story (“the drama of Oedipus’s life”) and a mode of representing action through play-
ers and dialogue. “Theater” is often used synonymously with drama but emphasizes
seeing more than action or dialogue, and connotes everything having to do with live
persons performing before a live audience. This can hardly be overemphasized, because
strictly speaking there is no theatrical art except as it is being performed. The spatial and
temporal aspects of performance—including the physical, vocal, and personality traits
of each player—are all part of how theater makes meaning. In fact, one can sometimes

tell how a collegiate program has understood itself by whether it is a “drama depart-
ment” or a “theater and performing arts” department. The former may signal a focus on
interpreting and enacting dramatic literature, the latter on performance training, stage-
craft, and the business and economics of production. This chapter compromises by des-
ignating its subject “theatrical drama.”8
So, what of film or television? These are largely different art forms for reasons hav-
ing to do with 1) the lack of bodily presence of film actors to the audience, and 2) the
almost bodily control the “camera eye” has over the viewer’s eye. Since a stage play is
recreated in real time as well as space, it will change somewhat from night to night,
not only because the actors play it differently but also because we respond differently.
The presence of persons, usually playing absent persons, in the presence of other persons,
is crucial to how theatrical drama makes meaning. A movie’s “final cut” is supposedly
fixed in time; cinematic images are closer to painting and graphic design; film criti-
cism is especially interested in intertextual references to other films, which may repeat
cultural stereotypes and signal religious or political values.9 Still, cinema has much in
common with live drama. Both are temporal arts that can create cognitive and emo-
tional effects by means of people performing stories; and both, in different ways, cre-
ate dialogical and aesthetic relations between the audience and what it perceives.10
Of particular interest are films of stories about performance, such as Canadian direc-
tor Denys Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989): an actor revises a passion play and gets
fatally caught up in the part.
Let us return to The Bacchae and agree for a moment with Aristotle that art repre-
sents or imitates (mimesis) life. Part of the life to be imitated is theater itself. If one is
performing or attending a play, then that very much is life. So when Euripides makes
a play about dancing, clothing, and persons in disguise watching other disguised
persons, he is using theater to reflect both theater and theatrical aspects of human
nature.11 A term for this reflection is metatheater (or metadrama). Most often it means
certain kinds of plays, like the play-within-a play in Hamlet, or Six Characters in
Search of an Author (1921) by Luigi Pirandello, or Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938),
where the Stage Manager tells us about the play we are seeing as we see it. But there is a
sense in which nearly all theater is metatheatrical.12 A performance inevitably signals
its awareness of the audience and is aware not only that acting is about social dimen-
sions of life but is a social dimension of life. At the theater, we know we are seeing real
people playing other people, and they know we know. Metatheater is part of how the-
ater makes meaning.
Does metatheater relate distinctively to religion? It can happen that to enact or wit-
ness the enactment of sacred stories on ritual occasions is to undergo special transfor-
mations of identity or reality, without necessarily losing continuity with oneself or with
one’s sense of ordinary reality. Whether such transformations define “religion” falls out-
side the domain of this chapter. But one way religious experience can be defined is in
terms of “limit-questions” that transcend their own domains without necessarily losing
contact with them.13 For example, the question “Why be ethical?” can be raised within
ethics, yet it takes one beyond the realm of ethics. It can be asked but cannot be answered

there. So too questions like “Why is there physics?” or “Why love?” Metatheater implic-
itly asks about theater’s own boundaries, and in so doing it reconfigures or transforms
distinctions between appearance and reality, and between self and otherness. “Why the-
ater?” is perhaps like the implied limit-question of the Sphinx: why humanity?
10. 3 Origins and Interactions
Both ritual and drama involve repeated activities that are intentionally significant, and
are often performed for others to see and hear (be they persons, ancestor spirits, or dei-
ties). Hence, many discussions of religion and theater begin with the origins of drama
in ritual,14 or vice versa. The caveat signals that such discussions tend to be hypothetical,
for evidence of origins is inevitably thin or misleading. Yet what remains interesting is
how most art forms have mingled coextensively with religious traditions and practices.
Many accounts of Chinese theater begin with North Asian shamans, whose songs,
dances, and animal costumes could alter awareness and attract or repel spirits, in order
to sustain society.15 In Japan, Shinto music and dance forms (kagura) may reflect a myth
wherein the goddess Ame no Uzume rescues the world from darkness by enticing the
sun goddess Amaterasu out of a cave by dancing erotically, in a trance.16 Other deities
also enjoyed her performance. In both instances, imitating and performing on behalf
of others relates to the “origins” of these intermingled ways of being religious and being
dramatic. But as the history of Asian theater emerges, the interactions between drama
and religion can reflect currents distant from shamanistic practices. Confucian concepts
of cosmic harmony and filial piety inform such “marvel plays” as Gao Ming’s opera The
Song of the Lute (1358 CE). A number of Buddhist traditions bear upon the chants and
story patterns of nō theater in medieval Japan. Treatises by nō actor and theorist Zeami
(1363–1443) reflect older Mahayana cosmology as well as innovative Zen thought.17
Among Koreans, shamanist rituals, or kut, continue to inform traditional theatrical
performance.18
In the Western tradition, there is a claim in Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 330 BCE) that trag-
edy emerged from choral verses (dithyrambs) sung in praise of Dionysus; there is also
the legend that Thespis was the sixth-century actor who first stepped out of the chorus
to engage it in dialogue, during the Great Dionysia festival in the spring. The scenes
of fifth-century Greek tragedies are divided by odes, sung and danced by the cho-
rus. And from Aeschylus to Sophocles to Euripides, the number of actors who speak
individually increases, lending plausibility to the Thespis legend. But the suggestive
tragedy-begins-with-dithyrambs theory cannot be proved. Even that Euripides’s chorus
of bacchants reflects prior Dionysian rites has been challenged by the startling view that
The Bacchae itself may have become a model for subsequent Dionysian practices.19
The “evolution” of drama from ritual was a popular notion at the turn of the twenti-
eth century, and the rebirth of European drama seemed to repeat the Thespis pattern.20
A trope (embellishment of the Latin mass for special days) could become a liturgical

drama (drama incorporated into the order of worship) if the lines were divided among
singers. Hence, the tenth-century Quem Quaeritis trope, associated with Easter:
Whom seek you in the tomb, O followers of Christ?
Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified, O Heaven-dwellers.
He is not here, he has risen as he said; go announce that he has arisen.21
Similar dialogues occur later in vernacular Corpus Christi or “mystery” plays depicting
the Marys visiting Jesus’s tomb. But was this trope the origin of an incremental evolution in
drama? A moment’s reflection may give us pause. The clerics who assigned different lines
to different singers were obviously already familiar with imitation and dramatic form. So
drama would precede this instance of liturgy, or the mass itself might be said to already be
a drama representing redemption.22 Again, the historical developments of drama and reli-
gion are more matters of interaction, less of one being the origin of the other.
However, a common form of interaction has been hostility, as when Plato banned poets
from his ideal republic because of their distance from truth and their corrupting stories
about the gods.23 Aristophanes’s comedy The Frogs (405) was an instance of early literary
criticism, in that it parodied the tragedians. Aristotle defended theater by treating trag-
edy as serious ethical inquiry into how ill luck can make noble people fail.24 Nonetheless,
anti-theatrical critiques probably occur in all cultures that know drama. The Buddha was
ambivalent about performance: some texts associate him with actors, while others warn
monks against drama’s sensual distractions.25 Jesus used “playacting” (hupokrisis) to con-
demn showy displays of piety. That and the fact that theater could be licentious, cruel,
even murderous (as in Roman circuses) partly accounts for early Christian hostility to
the art form. This ageless association of drama with insincerity and immorality is intrigu-
ing. Playacting can be all too real—staged passions may draw on actual passions—and
unreal. And while imitating divine or sacred paradigms is perennial in religion, it rarely
leads “divines” to praise theater. St. Augustine (354–430) deemed theater a source of unat-
tached emotions: anger, lust, grief, even meaningless joy.26
After the Puritans gained power in seventeenth-century England, theaters were closed
until the Restoration of the monarchy, when women (not just boys playing women)
first appeared on English stages. The longstanding issues went beyond prudishness
and related to differences between Catholics and Protestants and even to competition
between preachers and players for audiences. For example, beginning in the fourteenth
century, Corpus Christi plays could be seen throughout Europe and England. About
the same time, there were proto-reformers known as Lollards, associated with John
Wycliff (1326–84), who were critical of doctrines such as transubstantiation and also of
the plays. When later Protestants derided the Roman mass as a magic show (the phrase
“hocus pocus” may be a parody of the Latin “hoc est enim corpus meum,” referring to the
eucharistic host) their invidious comparison also derided the plays, as had the Lollards.
But should the Lollards have been so at odds with mystery players?
Sarah Beckwith thinks there was an implicit convergence between them. In York,
England, as elsewhere during festivals of Corpus Christi, a cycle of as many as fifty
plays depicted the drama of redemption from creation to last judgment. Each play was

produced by trade guilds (e.g., tanners, barbers, butchers) and moved with its wagon
along a circuit through the city.27 Beckwith, observing how a separate actor for Jesus
would be required for the over twenty plays he appeared in, thinks that the effect of so
many lay persons embodying Jesus (across the urban lines of class, wealth, and power)
was in a sense sacramental. The “real presence” of Christ was invested in the labors of
common artisans, not priests—a rather Lollardly idea. So when the Lollards opposed
the mystery plays as hypocritical show, they failed to appreciate a possible alliance.28
By the late sixteenth century, writers like Shakespeare had to negotiate drama in an
England whipsawed between Catholic and Protestant monarchs; dramatists were for-
bidden from stating matters of doctrine. While this can be regarded as spurring the
secularization of theater, Jeffrey Knapp argues that Shakespeare—especially in histories
such as Henry V (1599)—used the social openness of theater to advocate for an inclu-
sive, “sacramental communitarianism”29 in keeping with the Dutch Catholic, Desiderius
Erasmus (1466–1536). In the Americas there were analogous episodes, when Franciscan
padres and Nahua Indians organized elaborate enactments of the conquest of Jerusalem
in Mexican plazas. Max Harris has investigated how these performances made an ironic
commentary against the conquest of Mexico, in that the native-dressed Nahuas played
the (good) crusaders while the (bad) Turks were costumed as conquistadors.30
The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, source of much modern aesthetic and
dramatic theory, paradoxically proposed another hostile interaction between theater
and religion: he accused Euripides of betraying Dionysus. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872),
“the Dionysian” names the spirit of nature and creative power, upwelling in the ecsta-
sies of dithyrambic music. The impulse to give form to this eruption Nietzsche called
“the Apollonian,” after idealized Greek statues of Apollo. Spirit does require form for
its expression, but in The Bacchae Euripides supposedly attacked the Dionysian spirit,
much as does Pentheus in the play itself. In thinking this, Nietzsche took the common
view that Euripides was a rationalist, skeptical of religion, which would have been fine
with Nietzsche, except where Dionysus was concerned. Today, however, it appears that
Euripides did not always oppose Greek religion.31 Euripides may have recognized the
disturbing dynamics of the holy in human experience and may have expressed what
Nietzsche—and Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka, who adapts The Bacchae in light of
Yoruba-inspired philosophy32 —would so appreciate about the god of wine and ecstasy.
10.4 Secularity and the Limits

of Naturalism
Another difficulty in assigning significance to ritual in drama is that, from some perspec-
tives, it becomes drama only as it ceases to be ritual.33 In a famous essay defining religion
as a “cultural system,” anthropologist Clifford Geertz contrasts the motives for perform-
ing an outdoor ritual drama in Bali to T. S. Eliot’s 1935 play, Murder in the Cathedral. As

the Balinese dancers enact the frantic battle between Rangda and Barong (a scary witch
and a friendlier beast) they have little awareness of “acting,” and the audience appears
to be entranced as well. Rangda and Barong take on a “real presence” in a way Thomas
Becket and the Four Tempters allegedly do not.34 So is the Bali performance ritual only?
Probably not: Geertz may have overly homogenized the mental states of the performers
and their diverse audiences, when in fact a range of attitudes should be expected when
drama and ritual coincide. However, in most histories of theatrical drama—in Africa,
China, Japan, India, and Europe—the stories soon cease to be exclusively religious, and
the motive of entertainment comes to eclipse ritual. The mystery plays (especially the
parody of the manger scene in the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play) functioned to
delight people as well as to provoke spiritual contemplation.35 “Morality plays,” such as
Mankind (c. 1470) and Everyman (1495), dramatized allegories of the soul confronting
vices and virtues, while entertaining audiences through spectacle and sometimes earthy
comedy. By the time of the English Renaissance, Hamlet’s motive would be to “catch the
conscience” of a usurper king.
When Hamlet instructs a company of actors on how to play his altered script, “The
Murder of Gonzago,” he is aiming for a kind of realism: the players are to “hold a mirror
up to nature.” They are to temperately fit their gestures and speech to the story’s mean-
ings and emotions; perhaps King Claudius will then display his guilt when he sees it
reflected in their performance. Shakespeare, here, is advocating a realism of a kind later
called “naturalism.” But realism is a very broad category, indicative of the pleasures of
learning Aristotle says we take from seeing the form of something imitated.36 Realism
can even be motivated by an interest in showing the hidden hand of God in the messy
details of history.37 But Prince Hamlet is more interested in peering into psychological
and bestial depths of persons and less into their spiritual depths. And the problem with
naturalism, even as pleasurable as it can be, is that it may contradict human reality.
First, if metatheater makes us question the difference between appearance and real-
ity, naturalism may suppress this question. The German, Marxist writer of “epic the-
ater,” Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), feared that the illusions of naturalism—stage sets with
working stoves, acting that puts us right in someone’s kitchen or bedroom—will make
us stop thinking about reality while merely consuming realistic appearances. Such plays
would be little more than narcotics.38 Secondly, human reality is temporal, and the great
virtue of theater is how it presents, in time, human life in time. But the play-as-mirror
eventually becomes the play as X-ray or dissecting board, that is, a laboratory device
that freezes its specimens in time. Naturalism comes into its own, in fact, when late
nineteenth-century writers like Emile Zola, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, and
Anton Chekhov portrayed persons as frozen in social and psychological traps, with sui-
cide a handy option, as in Therese Raquin (1873), Miss Julie (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890),
and The Seagull (1896), respectively.
There is yet another paradox to naturalism, epitomized by Russian director
Constantin Stanislavski (1863–1938), whose work led to the “method” school of acting.
He discovered that for an actor to succeed naturalistically, she needed to free herself
from the self-consciousness of being on stage. This she could do less by imitating the

role externally and more by pouring herself into the character, finding emotions within
her memory analogous to feelings and motivations in the part she is playing. The actor
would need to become another self without losing her own self, which—while poten-
tially risky psychologically—is also potentially liberating. For Stanislavski, mimetic
acting transcends imitation. He was aware that participation in the role can be some-
thing like a sacrament,39 an implication that may apply to other forms of acting as well,
including those chiefly concerned with bodily motion and vocal skill. However, given its
science-like premises, there remains the worry that naturalism in theater often fails to
represent spiritual depth in life, except perhaps to expose it as an illusion.
One strategy for remedying this failure, associated with poet-dramatists like
Anglo-American T. S. Eliot and American Archibald MacLeish, is to try to realize the
spiritual or even sacramental dimensions of a naturalistic story by heightening its lan-
guage and giving it a mythic or ritual armature. After being dissatisfied by his overt use
of liturgy in Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot wrote sacramental dramas in naturalistic dis-
guises, beginning with The Family Reunion (1939, based on the Oresteia of Aeschylus)
and The Cocktail Party (1949, from Euripides’ Alcestis). In allowing the latter’s verses
to approach conversational repartee, Eliot hoped to elevate Noel Coward-like comedy
and to refute a line from Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1944): “Hell is other people.”40
MacLeish took the opposite tack in J. B. (1958), in placing an existentialist moral (“Blow
on the coal of the heart, / The candles in churches are out”41 ) in a biblical structure,
the Book of Job. However, verse drama with religious subtexts has not had the impact
on popular theater that was hoped—with the bothersome exception of a musical by
Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on poems by Eliot, Cats (1981), with its bizarre feline
eschatology.
Another strategy, which has had greater impact, has been for dramatists to take a
broader sample of culture and language. Irish playwright John Synge’s one-act Riders
to the Sea (1904) begins as a naturalistic tragedy and ends with women ritually keening
over a body given up by an ocean storm. Even more startling is The Dybbuk (1914), a
play in Yiddish by Solomon Anski, who did cultural ethnography among Hasidic Jews
in Russia. It ends with the at once frightening and nostalgic image of a dead lover’s spirit
(a dybbuk) sharing the body and spirit of his would-be bride, after two rabbis’ attempt
at exorcism fails. Other naturalists, following Ibsen, share with Brecht the imperative to
make theater a forum for political and religious critique. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible
(1953), about the seventeenth-century Massachusetts witchcraft trials, was intended
as commentary on the hunt for Communists in American society, including the film
industry. Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and Top Girls (1980)
are typical of her uses of both epic theater and naturalism to recall historical moments
when social and gender emancipation became imaginable, only to be suppressed. Tony
Kushner employs both dramatic styles in Homebody / Kabul (2001), where a British
housewife encounters the Taliban, and in Angels in America (1991, 1993): Jews, Mormons,
and gays confront HIV and the Reagan administration. The Latter Day Saints also figure
in The Book of Mormon (2011), a musical satire by Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert
Lopez. Spoofing the initiatory mission trip of two young “elders” to a violence-torn

Ugandan village, the show expresses a severe yet friendly skepticism toward revealed
faith, practical ethics, and the feel-good conventions of the Broadway musical.
As religious and ethnic communities resist dissolution or oppression, they often cre-
ate theater that explores their histories, idioms, imagery, music, and spiritual resources.
In African-American drama, this has meant locating an ethos in America linked with
African religious and oral traditions. August Wilson has done this in plays depicting
Black life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in what he intended as dramatic equivalents of
the Blues,42 such as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1981) and The Piano Lesson (1990). The
chief problem with making African-American drama flourish—hardly disguised by
Pulitzer Prizes won by Wilson (Fences, 1987) and Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog / Underdog,
2002)—has been access to theater establishments where talent and audiences can be
developed and nurtured. Attempts to organize new establishments—such as the Spirit
House Players of Newark, New Jersey, founded by dramatist Amiri Baraka (Everett
LeRoi Jones) in 1966—are essential, yet are difficult to sustain.
10. 5 Avant-Garde Theater and the

Renewal of Ritual
What is collectively known as avant-garde theater has believed that the paradoxes of nat-
uralism finally lead to a dead end. Theologian and culture-critic Tom F. Driver observes
that when realistic drama holds up a mirror to its own mirror, the infinite reflection
eventually becomes a null point.43 The tramps in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
(1953) seem to have wandered off a music hall stage into a desert bereft of God, memory,
and humanity. They fiddle with hats and carrots, complain about ill-fitting shoes, are
beaten by offstage assailants, meet an idiot leashed to his master, and they finally cannot
move. Their stasis has been compared to an everlasting Holy Saturday, the liturgical time
when Christ is present only as an absence.44 And yet, Waiting for Godot is delightful, not
only for its attenuated realism but its rich theatricality.
First, what Martin Esslin called its absurdity is also empty space for actors to pour out
themselves; its logical gaps can glorify and transmogrify any style of acting. Second, it
owes much to expressionist and symbolist drama, which were among the first reactions
against naturalism. Godot is like a dream (though quite unlike Strindberg’s Dream Play,
1902). It is also a stage environment (mise en scène) of spaces, symbols, and rhythms
(a la French writer Maurice Maeterlink, 1862–1949, and Russian director Vsevolod
Meyerhold, 1874–1940). Third, these fragmentary symbols—such as the spindly tree in
Act I that sports a few leaves in Act II—would today be described in terms of the “semi-
otics” of theater. Indeed, Godot’s destabilizing, ironic interplay of signs includes itself,
since it is now an icon of modern theater, ripe for iconoclastic “deconstruction.” Fourth,
the body is such a sign, for the aches and pains of Vladimir and Estragon are less mark-
ers of character45 than a “site” that invites reflection on the (in)significance of human

embodiment. And fifth, while Beckett employs ritual only minimally—a night and day
pass, or is it two?—the attempts to overcome naturalism by returning to drama’s roots in
ritual have been a hallmark of the avant-garde.46 Ritual is also a place where theater par-
allels both the modern study of religion and the late-modern resurgence of traditional
religion throughout the world. Ritual in theater, for these purposes, can be compared to
ontological, social-cultural, and performative approaches to religious ritual (albeit these
categories are not always separable).
Ontological. French actor and theorist Antonin Artaud (1896–1949) envisioned a
“total theater” of images, motions, and sounds apart from texts, except that his precisely
imagined (but mostly unperformed) scenarios may be likened to musical notation.
These spectacles were to be a disclosure of metaphysical violence (akin to the Dionysian
in Nietzsche); with a bow to Oedipus, Artaud compared this revelation to the “plague.”
His proposed “theater of cruelty” was part of the inspiration behind Peter Shaffer’s The
Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) and Equus (1973). But perhaps the most important transla-
tor of Artaud into English-language drama has been British director Peter Brook. The
title of his book The Empty Space (which distinguishes among “deadly,” “holy,” “rough,”
and “immediate” theater) is indicative of ritual as a place of the “Invisible—Made—
Visible.”47 In his 1985 staging of the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, nothing less than
dharma (Sanskrit for truth, normative action) was at stake.
More suspicious views of ritual are associated with “postmodern” theorists who lift
the surfaces of culture to show that beneath them there is no ontological “depth” but
ever more arbitrary surfaces, as evident in language (Jacques Derrida), in power play
(Michel Foucault), in desire and vengeance (René Girard). For Girard, theater—indeed
all culture—is about imitating desire (we desire what we desire only because others
desire it) and about deflecting or masking the violence of desire through sacrifice. What
is distinctive, here, is the logic of sacrifice. The literal or symbolic sacrificial victim is
powerless and so cannot return the violence inflicted on it; thus, sacrifice dissipates the
cycle of retaliation, but only until such time as the sacrificial system (including legal sys-
tems, which Girard thinks are implicitly sacrificial) fails. Literary tragedy is the hidden
record of such sacrificial crises; it indirectly remembers (through figures like Pentheus
or Oedipus) actual scapegoats who were, in effect, sacrificed to Dionysus, “the god of
decisive mob action.”48 For Girard, religion not only repeats but is also a critique of the
scapegoat pattern, which is how he interprets the Christian gospels.
Social-Cultural. Geertz’s view of religion and cultural identity owes much to Freud
and to French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), for whom rituals repeat
totemic myths and founding histories and thereby strengthen the unity a society
requires for survival. The “social force” is thus the essence of religion.49 For Geertz,
the need for “meaning” is the essence of culture, and symbols and rituals function
to provide it. He distinguishes worldview—a culture’s overall “model of ” reality—
from ethos—its practical, aesthetic, and normative “model for” living.50 In a reli-
gious cultural system, these models are fused, as in the Shema, a Jewish prayer (Deut.
6:4-5): “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone” (worldview); and “You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart . . .” (ethos). The fusion of ethos and

worldview is not accomplished abstractly but by symbols, such as the Ranga-Barong

ritual, that in effect clothe people in the fusion, endowing them with identity and their
worlds with meaning. Geertz’s critics say this is too static a picture; there is politi-
cal give and take among the makers of ritual in a society,51 which the York mystery
players used to great advantage. But if one wants to fathom why certain dramas and
films come to have intense appeal—e.g., Ravi Chopra’s televised installments of the
Mahabharata (1988–90) in India, the miniseries of Arthur Haley’s Roots (1977) in the
United States, or Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ (2004) for millions of
Christians—then the social ritual model remains compelling.
Performative. Overlapping the social are performative approaches to ritual.
A speech is “performative” when, in the act of being performed, it brings its refer-
ence into reality; for philosopher J. L. Austin, saying “I promise” or “I do” under the
right circumstances brings to bear a new reality, that of the promise or the marriage.
Similarly, Victor Turner describes how ritual processes become “social dramas,”
which can create or resolve conflicts—such as the story of Thomas Becket’s struggle
with King Henry II in the twelfth century. What is intriguing in Turner’s and simi-
lar theories is that besides dramatic conflict, they also entail the loosening of iden-
tity so that a transformed identity may emerge. In a rite of passage and in the crisis
phase of a social drama, persons pass through a bounded liminal phase wherein they
are “betwixt and between” who they were and who they are about to become.52 For
Becket, liminality meant exile in France and a trial in England, where he assumed the
paradigmatic identity and role of martyrdom. For Simba, in Walt Disney Company’s
animated musical film, The Lion King (1994), exile from the pride means learning to
resist quietism (hakuna matata, “no worries”) and internalizing the lore of “the circle
of life,” so that he can confront the usurper, Scar.
The most radical avant-garde experiments dissolve not only identity but also the bor-
der between audience and performance. In the 1970s, Polish director Jerzy Grotowski
designed “paratheatrical projects” that took players and select audiences to remote loca-
tions, for initiation-like rituals that were also aesthetic performances. American direc-
tor Andre Gregory recounts one of these in Wallace Shawn’s film, My Dinner with Andre
(1981). Both Turner and Grotowski inform dramatist-theorist Richard Schechner’s exer-
cises in “environmental theater.” In 1968, his New York-based Performance Group trans-
formed The Bacchae in accord with a view of ritual that is more “ethological” (concerned
with animal behavior) than cultural. Dionysus in 69 was still a “play,” which basically fol-
lowed Euripides; but it also deconstructed theater, character, and culture as it attempted
to make its audiences both participate in and criticize the sexual-political ecstasies of
Dionysus.53
Today, avant-garde performances continue to put theater under critique. Video
screens imaging players’ naked body parts, arranged to cover their actual naked body
parts, were featured in Elizabeth LeCompte’s staging of To You, The Birdie (Phèdre)
(2002) in Brooklyn. Her Wooster Group, direct successor of Schechner’s Performance
Group, used Racine’s 1677 play to examine how we substitute virtual reality for
bodily reality, games for violence (in exciting badminton duels!), and voyeurism for

participation while we watch it all, seated in comfortable alienation. Except for a film
record by Brian De Palma, photographs, and accounts by the players, the immediacy of
Dionysus in 69 is, like that of all live drama, lost in space-time. Nonetheless, avant-garde
theater and performance art continues to unsettle and redraw the boundaries of main-
stream drama, film, and video—be it Julie Taymor’s acclaimed Broadway transformation
of The Lion King (1997); the poignant desire to escape the body in Mary Zimmerman’s
staging, in a pool of water, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1998); or the faux-orgiastic spring
break beach parties produced by the music channel, MTV.
10. 6 Drama, Kenosis, and “The Other”
The five-volume Theo-Drama, by Swiss Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar
(1905–1988), is an interpretation of Christology through the lens of the history and
phenomenology of drama. From its quixotic magnitude we may take three observa-
tions. The first is that with the eclipse of modernism, it has become possible for some
to recover the meaningfulness of the “theater of the world,” a metaphor Balthasar takes
from the Spanish playwright, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681). It reflects a scrip-
tural picture of God as writer, director, audience, and—along with individual persons in
“search for self-realization”54 —as a fellow actor on the world stage. Theater continues to
be created out of this theological-dramatic metaphor; how much it will further impact
theater practice and theory remains to be seen.
Secondly, Balthasar recognizes the paradox of naturalistic theater: as the actor tran-
scends herself through a dramatic role, she may well be playing a character entrapped
in a social role. His theological response is that Christ is the actor whose role is one
with his mission, where “mission,” appropriated in discipleship, realizes the person as
an individual through “world-embracing” self-transcendence.55 An implication is that
theatrical drama inherently poses questions about the integrity of persons and masks,
where “mask” (Latin, persona; in Greek, prosōpon means “mask” and “face”) can stand
for social roles, vocations and avocations, projects, relationships, etc. Sometimes the-
ater will answer in agreement with a sentiment of modernity: that external, “imposed”
forms contradict the inward, Dionysian authenticity of the autonomous self. At other
times, theater will find that masks—not “disguises” but modes of practice with other
players—catalyze personal and moral integrity. In the role and mission of kingship,
Oedipus finds that his responsibilities to his city are inseparable from yet fatal to him-
self and family; while in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’ Dream (1596) the actor,
Bottom, tricked into playing a donkey, discovers himself in a dream so deep that “it
hath no bottom.” A player may awaken to oneself by losing oneself, with other players
and other parts.
A third insight from Balthasar may seem far removed from theater, namely his
accounts of kenosis (“emptying,” from Philippians 2:7, where Christ empties himself into
the human form of a servant or slave) and the intra-personal relations of the triune God.

Just as an actor empties herself into other parts and receives parts emptying into her,
by analogy the persons of the trinity (Father, Son, and Spirit) eternally empty into each
other and realize their distinctness and oneness. A motive of recent trinitarian theol-
ogy—perhaps analogous to interest in the kabbalistic mysticism of Isaac Luria (1534–
1620)—has been less to imagine God as “wholly other” than to imagine how God’s love
“for the other” resides both in God and the world. For Luria, God “contracts” to make
space for independent others; for Balthasar, otherness is inherent in the community of
God.56 An implication to draw from kenosis is that the stage—Brook’s “empty space”—is
an ethical space in which to encounter others, be they gods, creatures, or persons. Max
Harris, drawing from the Russian discourse-theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and
Anglican theologian Nicholas Lash, considers the religious impulse of theater to be pre-
cisely the offering of one’s own dramas and texts for others to perform and interpret,
as if to say that one can finally return to oneself only through the voices and bodies of
others.57
Along these trajectories, the actor, as he pours himself into other parts, can be
imagined as receiving an ethical vocation. Playing as others for others is “entertain-
ing,” in the sense of being closely attentive to another’s joy and suffering. Such atten-
tion approximates what Emmanuel Levinas regards as the ethical priority of the
“face of the other.”58 To so entertain the other also approaches what Paul Ricoeur
defines as the ethical aim: namely, “the good life . . .” (be it Aristotle’s well being, or
Jesus’s abundant life) “with and for others, in just institutions.”59 With theater’s foci
on motivated action, enacted character, and attentive persons, it can be inherently
a forum for inquiry, which probes the lived complications entailed in Ricoeur’s
ethical-religious aim.
Peter Brook also realized how theater can be such a forum when he rearranged
Shakespeare in a one-act adaptation of Hamlet (2000). Brook assigned the play’s first
line to Horatio, who then repeated it as the play ended. The actor playing Horatio
gazed into and yet beyond the gaze of the audience, and asked, “Who’s there?”
Answers to this limit-question will not always be explicitly “religious.” But in the dra-
matic art of theater, they will appear before us as ensembles of living bodies, with
masks and faces.
Notes
1. Euripides, The Bacchae, lines 187–89, 195–98.
2. See Goldhill, Simon, Reading Greek Tragedy, 262–64.
3. Euripides, The Bacchae, lines 39–40, 48–50, 54–55, 64–67, 69.
4. See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, and Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and
Euripides’ Bacchae.
5. See David Wiles, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning, 8. His
view of Greek stage practice contrasts with Oliver Taplin’s more formalist account in Greek
Tragedy in Action.
6. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, lines 35–44.

7. Jean Anouilh, Antigone, 43.

8. See Richard Hornby, Script into Performance: A Structuralist Approach, and also his Drama,
Metadrama, and Perception.
9. See Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film; Michael
J. Shapiro, Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender; Margaret
Miles, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies.
10. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, 260–62.
On aesthetics intersecting other ways of perceiving, see Frank Burch Brown, Religious
Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning, 54–55.
11. See Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor.
12. See Lionel Abel, Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays in Dramatic Form.
13. David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology, 92–109.
14. For a classic, readable, though now dated account, see Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and
Ritual; see also Theodor H. Gaster, Thespis: Myth, Ritual, and Drama in the Ancient Near
East. A still interesting perspective on ancient to modern drama in light of Harrison’s view
of ritual is Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays. Recent interest
in the ritual origins of Greek tragedy in the Great Dionysia is reflected in Christiane
Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion.
15. For general knowledge of theater history and religious traditions, see Martin Banham, ed.,
The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, and fifteen major entries on drama and performance in
Lindsay Jones, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edition.
16. Yoshinobu Inoura, A History of Japanese Theater, vol. 1: 18; Benito Ortolani, The Japanese
Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism, 4–7.
17. See William R. LaFleur, The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval
Japan, 116-32, and Royall Tyler, “The Path of My Mountain: Buddhism in Nō,” in James
H. Sanford, William R. LaFleur, and Masatoshi Nagatomi, eds., Flowing Traces: Buddhism
in the Literary and Visual Arts of Japan, 149–79.
18. See Halla Pai Huhm, Kut: Korean Shamanist Rituals, 101–2.
19. Valdis Leinieks, The City of Dionysos: A Study of Euripides’ Bakchai, 5, 49–50.
20. See E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, and Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval
Church.
21. From a Latin text translated by O. B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the
Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama, 178–79.
22. Ibid, viii, 178–219; see also Dunbar H. Ogden, The Staging of Drama in the Medieval
Church, 19–24.
23. Plato, The Republic, especially Book 10.
24. See Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy; for Aristotle on tragedy as inquiry, see James Redfield, Nature and Culture in
the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, chs. 1–2.
25. H. V. Sharma, The Theatres of the Buddhists, 32, 35–40.
26. See Matthew 6:5,16, and Augustine, Confessions III.2.2–3.
27. See the introduction to York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, ed. Richard
Beadle and Pamela King, ix–xxxi.
28. Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi
Plays, xvi, 70–71, 89, 100.

29. Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England,
142. Knapp is qualifying the secularization thesis in Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean
Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England.
30. Max R. Harris, The Dialogical Theatre: Dramatizations of the Conquest of Mexico and
the Question of the Other, 86–92; see also his Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of
Reconquest in Mexico and Spain.
31. See David Kovacs’s introductions to the first and sixth of his Loeb Classical Library
translations of Euripides, and Jon D. Mikalson, Honor Thy Gods: Popular Religion and
Greek Tragedy, 225–36.
32. Wole Soyinka, The Bacchae: A Communion Rite, 1973. See also his Myth, History, and the
African World, including his seminal essay, “The Fourth Stage.”
33. Rainer Friedrich, “Drama and Ritual,” in James Redmond, ed., Drama and Religion, 187.
34. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 116.
35. See V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, 1966.
36. Aristotle, Poetics 4.1457.
37. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.
38. Bertolt Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre” (1948), in Modern Theories of
Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, ed. George W. Brandt, 233.
39. In My Life in Art, Constantin Stanislavski thought “the creative mood,” without which
actors cannot achieve the truth of their parts, “is not given them to control it with their
own will. They receive it together with inspiration in the form of a heavenly gift” (461). Of
this approach, Hans Urs von Balthasar comments, “there is something sacramental,” in
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, 1: 289.
40. E. Martin Browne, The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays, 233.
41. Archibald MacLeish, J. B.: A Play in Verse, 153.
42. August Wilson, “Preface,” Three Plays, ix–xi.
43. Tom F. Driver, Romantic Quest and Modern Query: A History of the Modern Theatre,
388–89.
44. William Mueller and Josephine Jacobsen, “Samuel Beckett’s Long Saturday: To Wait or Not
to Wait,” in Nathan A. Scott, Jr., ed., Man in the Modern Theater, 80.
45. See Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, and Elinor Fuchs, The Death of
Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism.
46. See Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre: 1892–1992.
47. Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 42.
48. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 134.
49. Emil Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 236.
50. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 89–90.
51. See Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, and Kathryn Tanner, Theories of
Culture: A New Agenda for Theology.
52. On Becket, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human
Society, 60–97. In From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, Turner writes that
in modernity, liminality becomes less bounded, more open-ended; we live in “liminoid”
rather than liminal societies, 52–55.
53. See accounts by performers and photographs, in The Performance Group, Dionysus in 69,
ed., Richard Schechner.
54. Balthasar, Theo-Drama 1: 413.
55. Ibid., 68.

56. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, 23–36.
57. Harris, Dialogical Theatre, 144–71.
58. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, esp. 194–201.
59. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 172. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.7–12 (but with
“well being” preferred over “happiness” for translating eudemonia); see also John 10:10.
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C HA P T E R 11
DA N C E A S A WAY O F B E I N G
RELIGIOUS
A N N E - M A R I E G A STON ( A N JA L I ) ,
W I T H TON Y G A STON
11.1 Introduction
The study of the nature and place of dance in religion and spirituality entails under-
standing dance’s history and development from the earliest times to the present. It
includes awareness of the various specific sacred dance traditions, with an emphasis
here on the especially rich dance traditions of India. The present discussion concludes
with a consideration of the most influential methods and figures of scholarship on dance
and religion, with an indication of possible areas for future investigation.
Inevitably, dance is intertwined with other arts in the service of religion. Its role is
determined partly by the general aesthetic of the religious community and their attitude
toward what is, and is not, appropriate in communicating with the divine. Religious
dances can range from spontaneous individual movement, to highly formalized sym-
bolic movements that appear in ritual and ceremony as part of structured religious
services. We concentrate on those dances that have some formal link to a recognized
religion and provide some examples of the myriad of religious dances that have existed,
or are currently practiced.
Devotional dance is a part of many systems of belief about creation, the universe,
nature, and the mystery of human existence. To qualify as dance, movements must
embody significant symbolic, athletic, or decorative aesthetic values. Dance can
be thought of as a unique form of expression that includes movement, emotion,
and symbolism. As Judith Hanna said, in dance “feelings, thoughts and actions are
translated into purposeful, intentionally rhythmic, culturally patterned sequences
of action.”1
The division between dance and other ritual movements is to some extent arbitrary.
The movements used by ritual specialists such as priests and shamans could, in certain

DANCE AS A WAY OF BEING RELIGIOUS 183
contexts, be seen as choreography, distinguished from dance only by context. In addi-

tion, dance grades into other theatrical traditions, especially drama. Throughout South
and Southeast Asia dance is treated as part of theater, and both are said to derive from
divine inspiration. In India these rules were formalized in the fifth century CE, as nar-
rated in the Natya Shastra.2
Dance has been described as the supreme means of religious expression, because it
gives form to abstract religious ideas. In this sense, any dance performer in a religious
context can be regarded as a medium, manifesting the spiritual uplift that forms part of
the religious experience.3 It is important to make a distinction between ritual specialists
in dance who act out religious songs or present dance as an offering and who therefore
can be viewed as transmitting or presenting spiritual ideas on behalf of others (e.g., tem-
ple dancers of India and Bali; dancing monks of Tibetan Buddhism) and dancers who
perform to achieve their own spiritual state (e.g., Sufi whirling dervishes; the Shakers of
Protestant Christianity).
For most of history, as well as in prehistory, recognition of a superhuman controlling
power was inherent in most aspects of life. Holidays usually occurred solely in celebra-
tion of religious festivals and many of them included dance as an important part of the
festivities. Along with all other arts, dance was, and continues to be, part of an offering
from humanity to the divine.
The ancient links between dance and religion notwithstanding, the attitude of for-
mal religions toward dance is more ambiguous than toward almost any other art. This
is probably because the emphasis on the body naturally lends itself to sexual interpre-
tations. Moreover, many fertility rites involve dance. Likewise, professional female
dancers attached to religious establishments were sometimes associated with prostitu-
tion. For these and similar reasons, religions that seek to impose restrictions on sexual
activity, either in the priesthood, in monastic orders, or in the population at large, tend
toward the control and/or the suppression of dance. The tension between dance and
religion may originate in the separation of mind and body that originated with Greek
philosophers, especially Plato.
Because religious arts are one of the most prominent elements of traditional culture
in many societies, they often are sustained by governments and patriotic citizens as
“cultural figureheads”: this is certainly the case with religious dances in many parts of
the world. Hula, whirling dervishes, Bharata Natyam, Tibetan monastic dances, Hopi
sun-dances, and a host of others, are all presented to tourists as examples of ancient
indigenous cultures. In India, Bali, Bhutan, Cambodia, and elsewhere they may be pre-
sented in religious buildings such as temples, although the practice today is not always
as part of the original ritual, or in the traditional location.
As an ancient art, dance is generally associated with music, and it seems likely
that, going far back beyond historical records, some of the earliest forms of music
were created in conjunction with dance. Almost certainly, music and dance were
performed in the context of spiritual rituals. It is even possible that movement
and rhythm in the context of early religious expression may have pre-dated formal
mythology.

We can speculate that the incorporation of dance into religion included:
1) expression of emotion through movement;

2) incorporation of movements into forms of worship, presumably in conjunction
with rhythm and music;
3) formalization of movements within religious ceremonies;
4) development of full-time specialists in religious dance.
The fourth stage was probably characteristic of early Egyptian and Mesopotamian cults4
and was also reached during the classical period of Greece and Rome by women atten-
dant on certain shrines. Professional religious dancers persisted until very recently in
many parts of Asia. Despite the ambivalent attitudes to dance,5 the Judeo-Christian tra-
dition has included dance in worship many times in its history. Christianity has rarely
produced professional sacred dancers, which is in contrast to the professional reli-
gious dancers found in numerous Asian traditions, mostly within the general ambit of
Hinduism (India, Bali, Nepal).
11.2 Funerals and Dance
Dances following a death are found in many cultures, especially in tribal societies (e.g.,
Igorot of the Philippines, Australian aboriginals, West African tribes).6 Funeral pro-
cessions are characteristic of many cultures and frequently have associated dances.7 In
South India, dance and music may accompany the corpse on its way to the cremation
site, if the person has lived a long productive life. Images of Shiva, the Hindu god of
both creation and destruction, show dance on the cremation grounds, as do images of
the goddess Kali. These images are decorated with skulls and other symbols of death. In
ancient Egypt, dancing at funerals is illustrated by bas-relief carvings (e.g., Sakkara, 1300
BCE, now in the Cairo museum).8
11.3 Dance in Processions
Religious processions, such as those exhibiting sacred relics, banners and icons, fre-
quently involve dance.9 As the purpose of the procession is to involve bystanders,
dances must communicate with onlookers. They may also function to strengthen bonds
within the community. Examples include dancing in the Shilosh Regalim (pilgrim fes-
tival) to Jerusalem10; processional dances in China, where dragon dances are frequent;
processions in South India, involving the circulation of temple images throughout the
streets. The latter were previously (but no longer) accompanied by dancers whose pres-
ence was essential to ward off evil influences.11 In modern Mexico, dancers continue to

accompany parades that include tableaux of Christian religious events, as well as cel-
ebrations of the cultural practices of the indigenous Indians.12
11.4 Dance in Shrines and Other

Sacred Spaces
Dance can be used to define a space as sacred. The importance of this is described in
the Natya Shastra and is inherent in the opening dance sequences of many Indian
classical dances. For example, in Odissi, the classical style of Orissa, the dancer on
the concert stage addresses the guardian deities of the eight cardinal points, then
drops flowers and performs propitiation to Bhumi, the Earth Goddess, before begin-
ning to perform.13 This sanctifies the stage, so that, as in a temple, shoes must be
removed before walking on it.
11.5 Masks and Pantomime
Many religious dances make use of specific costumes. Several Indian dance dramas
are of this type. Some include the use of masks (e.g., Chhau from Purulia, Seraikela)
or heavy stylized makeup to transform the dancer into the personification of good
or evil characters, as well as a generalized “everyman”14 (e.g., Kathakali, Yakshagana,
Ras Lila, Krishnattam, etc.).15 While the themes of many of the stories shown are
taken from religious texts such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the treatment of
these stories as “religious” can be questioned. For example the priests (Brahmins)
are usually portrayed as objects of ridicule in Kathakali dance dramas. Recently,
secular themes (e.g., Shakespearean plays) have been included in the repertoire of
these dances.
11.6 Preparing the Body for Dance
As a receptacle of divine power, the dancers may need to undergo consecration ceremo-
nies (e.g., gajjai puja of the devadasis, see below) and may need to undergo ritual purifi-
cation before dancing, such as fasting, restricting their diet by only eating certain types
of food (e.g., vegetarian) and omitting others (e.g., hot chilis, garlic). They may also be
required to pray and observe rituals so that their bodies can be perceived as cleansed ves-
sels of divine consciousness. Dancers may also be required to prepare their bodies by
applying auspicious decorations.

The twelfth-century Sanskrit text, the Abhinayadarpana, describes a dancing girl as

beautiful and sexually appealing: “She should be slender-bodied, young, with full round
breasts, self confident, witty, pleasing, having large eyes.”16 Sculptural examples of volup-
tuous dancing girls on Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu temples provide ample evidence of the
sensuous nature of the dance. While sex is considered an important part of life, the temp-
tation represented by temple dancing girls while on pilgrimage is included in several
Hindu texts (e.g., Matsya Purana).
11.7 Dance in Prehistoric Religion
The Neolithic period provides clear evidence of dance as an adjunct to religion. The
great rock shelter of Cuevas del Civil near Albocacer in Spain includes three dancing
men, while at Covacho de Cogull a small neolithic painting shows nine naked women
dancing around a small naked male.17 The rock paintings from the Tasili n’Ajjer range
in southern Algeria, dated to 6000 BCE, show dancers wearing decorated head-
dresses and carrying strips of cloth in their hands.18 Similarly, petroglyphs of dancing
men are a characteristic feature of rock art in North America (e.g., Gabriola Island,
Canada). The very widespread depiction of dancing figures in Neolithic cave art and
in petroglyphs attests to the universality of movement in ritual situations. These
works of art emphasize that, whatever the contracted role of dance in recent reli-
gions, it was important in sacred ceremonies of the past, as a means beyond language
to provide essential communications. This remains an important function of dance
in many tribal societies.
11.8 Dance in Tribal Religion
In non-urban societies organized around tribes or clans, religious dances were, and con-
tinue to be, mainly concerned with hunting success and crops, sometimes also with the
removal of evil influences such as drought, infections, etc. We can contrast the shaman-
istic dances of hunting societies, reserved for ritual specialists, with the dances of agri-
cultural societies that involved the whole community.19
The shaman’s dance, a widespread feature of hunting societies (e.g., Inuit angakok),
frequently involves the invocation of animal spirits. Dances of the North American
Plains Indians were frequently associated with hunting and often involved dressing
as and mimicking their prey (buffalo, elk, etc.).20 Dances associated with sowing and
harvest were very widespread in agricultural societies. The invocation of fertility for
the crop was often associated with rituals invoking human fertility, such as ritual cop-
ulation and the sacrifice of a virgin. Because many societies viewed the Earth as a

fecund mother, agricultural fertility dances usually involved women who were not
specialist dancers.
Tribal dances are frequently the prerogative of men, especially the chief and the
priests, although in African tribes there are often separate dances for women. Local
tribes tend to have individual deities and develop distinct local dances, but some
forms of dance may spread across tribes. Notable in this respect are the sun dances
performed by many North American Indian Nations of the southern and western
USA. These dances signify different things to different groups, although they all bear
some relationship to fertility or fecundity. Each nation has its own style, but the genre
has many unifying elements. Among North American Indians, dance was one of the
last customs to be relinquished after the arrival of Christianity,21 and many dances
persist today, either incorporated within Christianity, or performed as important
spiritual exercises.
11.9 Dance in Religions of the

Classical World
11.9.1 Greece
Egyptian and Cretan civilization, which preceded the classical period of Greece, left
considerable evidence of dance in worship.22 Lucian claimed that dance appeared at the
time of creation,23 an idea similar to the Hindu idea of Shiva’s and Vishnu’s dances of cre-
ation (as discussed below). Many Greek myths included dance, which was presided over
by the Goddess Terpsichore.24 Many Greek gods and goddesses such as Apollo, Jupiter,
and Athena were credited with being dancers.25
Lucian wrote, “dance is a practice at once divine and mystic, cultivated by so many
gods, performed in their honour.”26 Men of learning were also directly involved in the
dance. Aeschylus is said to have originated much of the choreography for the chorus in
plays, while Sophocles was famous for his solo dancing.27
During the classical period, dances were performed at most shrines. Among the more
famous was the dance of the priests of Diana (Artemis) at Ephesus. Their performance
recapitulated a vigorous dance performed on the occasion of the goddess’s birth.28 On
Delos, a troupe of virgins danced regularly at the altar of Apollo.29 Dancing was a major
part of the rites of Demeter and Persephone and of Artemis. The festival of Karneia,
especially associated with Doria, was celebrated by prolonged dancing of young men
and girls. According to Burke,30 “Not a single ancient initiation festival can be found that
is without dancing.” Less formal dances performed by worshippers, more frenzied and
trance-like, were associated with the rites of Dionysus (Bacchus), while nocturnal torch
dances were part of the Eleusinian rites.

Martial dances, often referred to as Pyrrhic dances (e.g., by Plato), were described first
by Homer.31 These dances can be thought of as religious, as one of their functions was
to promote success in military campaigns through the approval of the gods. However,
according to Athenaeus,32 the dances also functioned to keep men fit.
11.9.2 Rome
As in so many areas of their culture, dance in Roman society borrowed heavily from
Greece. Like the Greeks, the Romans seem to have viewed dance as an important activ-
ity of the heavenly sphere: Albius Tibullus (48–19 BCE) speaks of dancing in the Elysian
Fields and Virgil (70–19 BCE) describes dance to the music of Orpheus in the land of
joy. In the period before the empire, Rome drew religious influences from the Etruscans
and Egyptians, as well as the Greeks. Dances were associated with certain shrines and
festivals (e.g., round dances at the feast of Ceres).
The priesthood of Mars performed warlike dances, as befitted the god of war. Specific
martial dances that rehearsed military maneuvers were a feature of early Rome.33 These
may have derived from the Pyrrhic dances of Greece. The Saturnalia (festival of Saturn)
also included vigorous dances. In the later part of the imperial period, dance as enter-
tainment gave the art a bad name. Many writers of the period strongly disapproved of
dance, seeing it as a symptom of social decay.34 The prevalence of debased secular dances
in Rome during the early Christian period probably led the early fathers of the church to
proscribe it35 (see the following discussion).
11.9.3 Judeo-Christian Dance

Both Judaism and Christianity adopt contradictory attitudes toward dance. Although
the absence of dancing was equated with mourning and desolation in life,36 many
Christian traditions have no use for dance. In Africa, after the arrival of Christian mis-
sionaries, a Christian convert was known as “one who no longer dances.”
Gentz stated, “As in most societies, ancient and modern, except where artificially sup-
pressed, the dance was accepted and welcome in Biblical times as a natural and instinc-
tive expression of feeling and enthusiasm, whether secular or religious.”37 Detailed
references to dance in the Bible and the Torah are given by Davies.38 A few examples will
suffice: in Exodus 15:20 we read that Miriam led the Israelites in dance after the drown-
ing of the Egyptian armies in the Red Sea. In Psalms 149:3, it is said, “let them praise his
name in the dance” and in Psalms 150:4, “praise him with the timbrel and the dance.”
These references are normally cited in support of incorporating dance into Christian
and Jewish worship. Dance accompanies many Jewish ceremonies, especially weddings
and bar mitzvahs, but sanctions differ among Jewish sects.39
Christianity emerged in a world where many preexisting religions used dance to
create ecstatic states that enabled the devotee to communicate with and comprehend

God. Dance was an element of worship for many early Christian groups including the
Gnostics, the Messalians, and the Melatians. The Ecumenical council of Ephesus in 431
CE tried to curb the dancing of the Messalians. Both men and women danced. Theodoret
(393–458 CE) reported of the Melitians of Egypt, “Every day they purify the body with
a bath, they sing hymns to the clapping of hands and to a certain dance movements”40.
The angels were believed to indulge in dance, and dancing was thought to invoke the
bliss of paradise. Important references are in the Acts of John (ca. 180 CE) and the Acts
of Thomas (early third century). The Acts of John includes a hymn to which a circle
dance performed with Christ standing at the center is performed during the Eucharistic
meal.41 Clement of Alexandria (150–216 CE) describes a similar round dance to be per-
formed with the angels in heaven.42 This is convergent with the Ras Lila dance of India
(see discussion below). In early Christianity, bishops led dances in churches, but this
was later prohibited. However, in parts of France it continued as late as the eighteenth
century, when dancing by priests on saints days was practised.43 In the Coptic churches
of Ethiopia, dances have been continuous for certain festivals from earliest times.44 In
South India (Kerala), a priest, Francis Barboza, is famous for developing hand gestures
and movements, using Indian dance techniques, to tell Christian stories.
Dance at Christian weddings was sometimes allowed, and at other times forbidden.
Men and women dancing together was more often forbidden than dancing with the
same sex. Calvin (1547 CE) banned dancing throughout Geneva. He noted that refer-
ences to dance in the Bible were in the Old Testament and considered that dance showed
an accommodation to Judaism. A few churches went against the general trend: dances
at Easter were held regularly for many centuries in the Cathedral at Auxerres,45 while the
choristers of Seville danced in the cathedral from at least the fifteenth century onward.46
Sentiment against dance in worship often derived from a feeling that it reflected sym-
pathy with pagan religions that Christians had abandoned.47 Nevertheless, some prob-
ably pre-Christian religious dances survived by becoming secularized as part of popular
festivals: an example is the English Maypole Dance and related Morris Dances, which
were periodically banned on the general grounds of encouraging sex, but which sur-
vived through common practice.
11.9.4 Islam
Muslims, following the practise of Muhammad, revere the prophets of the Jewish tradi-
tion. However, although the Hebrew Bible allows for dancing, and dance is not expressly
forbidden in the Qur’an, it is condemned not only as irreligious, but also as unlawful, by
many followers of the faith (e.g., the Wahabite Sunnis and the Shias of Iran).
A notable exception to the general avoidance of dance in Islam is found among some
members of the Sufi orders. A particular sect, the Mehlevis, perform a rotating dance
(sema). Known as the whirling dervishes, the Mehlevis practice dance and music as their
essential spiritual exercise (dhikr). The thirteenth-century mystic, Jal’uddin Rumi (d.
1273 CE), is credited with founding the whirling Dervishes at Konya, Turkey. However,

the use of mystical dances within Sufism originated earlier in Arabia. Rumi described
the love of God expressed through song and dance in the Sufi tradition. Sufis, as a whole,
believe in the use of intuition and creativity in worship and place less importance on
the literal interpretation of the Qur’an.48 The sema continues to be performed in many
places in modern Turkey, although partially as a tourist spectacle.
The Chishti order of Sufis also maintains religious dances and music.49 The order is
known for its ecstatic practices and controversial doctrines. Worship includes both
musical sessions (sama) and dancing (raqs) to induce states of spiritual ecstasy, “a one-
ness that neither the senses nor reason can penetrate.”50 Small pockets of ritual dance
occur elsewhere within the Sufi framework (e.g., at Sehwan in Pakistan).
11.9.5 Religions of the Far East

China, Korea, and Japan share a common religious history, as all have been influ-
enced by Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, the latter stemming from India.
In Confucianism, music and dance are seen as integral to maintaining a harmoni-
ous universe—a principle aim of Confucius’s teachings.51 Hence it is not surprising
that sacred dances are found throughout the whole region, in some cases associated
with shrines, in some cases performed by monastic orders. The line between perfor-
mance art and religious ritual is very hard to define in this and other instances in the
region.
The founding philosophers saw no such distinction52 between performance art and
religious ritual. Consequently, it is possible to view the wen-wu, of the Han dynasty, a
formal dance performed in honor of Confucius, as either secular or religious, depend-
ing on perspective.53 In Korea, ritual movements in martial arts, as performed by monks,
merge into ritual dance movements.54
11.9.6 Japanese Religions

Autochthonous religion in Japan persists in the form of Shintoism, while both
Confucianism and Buddhism reached Japan via China and Korea. All these religions
share a common Japanese aesthetic and all incorporate dance in their Japanese incarna-
tion. The Kojiki (712 CE), one of Japan’s oldest historical texts, describes the dance of
the goddess of divine movement, marriage, and meditation Ame-no-Uzume-no-Mikoto.
The goddess performs a shamanistic dance to lure the Sun Goddess Amaterasu-omikami
from her self-imposed exile.55 This reference and the assignment of goddesses to preside
over dance suggest that dance was prominent in early Japanese religion. Dance is still
associated with the preeminent Shinto shrine at Isé in Honshu.
Kagura, a dance (and musical style) associated with Shinto shrines, included ritual
movements, as well as theatrical dances on mythological themes (e.g., the Amaterasu
legend). Shinto practices also included masked shamanic dances performed at festivals

and numerous ritual dances performed at shrines by virgin girls and by men. Buddhism
absorbed many aspects of preexisting religious rites after its introduction to Japan
in 552 CE. Masked dances known as Gigaku were introduced from Korea along with
Buddhism. Buddhist chants gave rise to folk dances such as odori-nembutsu, which
helped to disseminate Buddhism in Japan.
The Noh tradition, one of the better known Japanese theater forms, evolved from
sarugaku dancing. Although not overtly religious, Noh plays are usually moral teachings
and may have Shinto or Buddhist themes.56 Kabuki was founded by the ritual dancer
of the Shinto shrine of Izumo in 1604, who elaborated on the simple Shinto-Buddhist
dances (odori-nembutsu).57 However, the religious element in Kabuki has gradually
been eliminated.
11.10 South and Southeast Asia
11.10.1 India
Although India is home to adherents of all the world’s great religions, the various forms
of indigenous worship either fall under the heading of Hinduism, or are related to
Hinduism (e.g., Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism), and share many characters with it, espe-
cially in the field of mythology and arts. Religious dances that have survived to the pres-
ent are mostly associated with the current or recent practices of various Hindu sects.
Jain and Buddhist monuments abound in sculptures of sensuous dancers, suggesting
that dance was important for these religions in the past. Dance is strong in the Buddhist
tradition of Tibet and its associated cultural regions (Ladakh, Bhutan), as well as in cen-
ters where refugees were settled after the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Dances were also
performed during the Islamic Moghul period (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries CE), as
attested by miniature paintings. More recently, Christian themes have been included in
Indian classical dance.58
Traditional ideas about the origins of dance in India refer to the Natya Shastra (fifth
century CE). This text records how the author, Bharata, approached the gods and
requested the creation of dance-drama. The god Brahma gave him the techniques and
suggested that he produce the first dance-drama for the festival of the god Indra. The
performance used the theme of The Churning of the Ocean of Milk, which depicted
a struggle between gods (devas) and demons (asuras) for the nectar of immortality
(amrita). Having established the celestial origins of the dance, the remainder of the text
is devoted to descriptions of staging and techniques.
Apsaras, or heavenly dancers, are constant companions for the celestials. Temple
sculptures on Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain monuments from the Himalayas to the
southernmost tip of the peninsular give profuse examples of female dancing figures.
Dancing girl motifs appear from the second century BCE onward. Most mediaeval
Jain temples are decorated profusely with sculptures of dance, which suggest that

dance was commonplace. The postures and costuming are similar to those on Hindu
temples.
Many mediaeval Hindu temples incorporated an area dedicated to dance perfor-
mances. One of the most lavish examples can be seen in the immense ruins of the Sun
Temple at Konarak, Orissa (thirteenth century CE). The dance hall faces the sanctu-
ary and is profusely decorated with sculptures of dancing figures and musicians. The
huge scale of the building emphasizes the importance attached to dance. Dance halls
were also a prominent feature of South Indian temples, especially from the Chola
period onward (tenth to twelfth century CE), but the dance hall was placed to the side
of the main alignment of the shrine. In many cases, such as the Airavatesvara Temple
at Darasuram, Tamil Nadu (thirteenth century CE), the dance hall was an open-sided
pavilion, so that the dance would be visible to worshippers outside the shrine.
Another feature of South Indian Chola and later temples that confirms the impor-
tance of dance is the inclusion of numerous carvings of dancing figures on the gateways
(gopuras) in a great variety of poses, as well as representing the 108 types of movement
(karanas), as listed in the Natya Shastra.59
Ideas of what Indian dance was like in past centuries are mainly dependent on clas-
sical texts, such as the Natya Shastra and Abhinaya Darpana60 and on the accounts of
early European travelers and government officials. Dancers were an important part of
festival celebrations, which combined religious and secular functions61. As late as 1912,
local government reports stated that dancers were employed in temple establishments
in Assam, Madras State (i.e., present Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh) and in the
Jagannath temple in Orissa, but not in Bengal, Sind, Uttar Pradesh, or Gujarat.62
11.11 Dance in Hindu Mythology
The concept of the dancing god has been prominent in many cultures. In present-day
Hinduism, dance is especially associated with the god Shiva as Nataraja (literally “King of
dance”).63 His dance gives form to the concept of samsara, the idea that each soul is part of
an endless cycle of birth and death. The figure is poised with the left leg raised and stretched
across the body and with two of the four arms outstretched to the sides, the right hand bear-
ing a drum, from which emanates the rhythm of creation, while the left holds a fire symbol-
izing destruction. Hence, the image embodies the entire cosmic cycle.64 A similar role for
dance is ascribed to the god Vishnu when the world is remade at the end of each cosmic cycle.
11.12 Ras Dance and Similar Traditions
For the adherents of many Vaishnavite sects (Pustimarg, ISKON), dance is an impor-
tant metaphor for union with Krishna. This dance of bliss is known as Ras and is

frequently depicted in the traditional paintings of North India as a circle of devotees,

each separated by and linking hands with a replica of Krishna. They usually surround
a single image of Krishna (the godhead). This image is realized in popular religious
dance-theater performances known as Ras-Lila (lila—sport or game), performed prin-
cipally in Braj (the area around Mathura in Uttar Pradesh) by troupes of young boys
who act out stories associated with Krishna’s youth, especially the dalliance of Krishna
with his companions, the gopis (milkmaids).65 A similar dance, known as garbha is per-
formed by women, and takes place at festivals. Among the Pustimarg sect, who wor-
ship the form of Krishna known as Sri Nathji, even the priests (gosvamis) participate in
these dances,66 while around Cuttack, Orissa, young boys known as gotipuas dance out
stories of Krishna’s relationship with his consort Radha, especially the songs of the Gita
Govinda of Jayadeva (eleventh century). Another dance tradition based on Krishna
themes is Sattriya, performed by monastic communities on the island of Majuli in the
Brahmaputra River.
11.13 The Devadasis of South India
A group of dancers, known as devadasis (literally, “god’s slaves”), served in the temples
of South India. Their rise dates to before the ninth through tenth century CE: a period
of great temple construction. Their duties were to fan the sacred image with yak tail
fans (chamaras) and carry the sacred light (kumbh-arati). These duties were intended to
remove the evil eye from the idol.67
Devadasis were dedicated to the temple before puberty and married to the temple
deity. They were unique among Hindu women, as they were not permitted normal
marriage, but contracted other semi-formal sexual liaisons. Their relationships were
usually with higher-caste men who, in addition, were married to a woman of their
own caste.68
The orchestra leaders (nattuvanars) and musicians who accompanied dance in the
temple were usually men. While dance was an essential component of temple ritual,
most of the dancers and their accompanists were also free to accept secular perfor-
mances. The repertoire varied according to what appealed to the patron and dances
often accompanied festivals and life cycle events. The style of dance performed outside
the temples was known as sadir. This form became the classical dance known as Bharata
Natyam.
There were six prescribed ceremonies of dedication before a devadasi could take
part in temple ritual: marriage to the deity (kalyanam); dedication (muttirai); rit-
ual first dance lesson; the presentation of ankle bells (gajje puja); the debut recital
(arangetram) after the completion of dance training; and the selection of a patron
(prayojanam). All six ceremonies were supposed to be completed, at the latest, just
after the first menstrual cycle. The most important validation ceremony was the one

in which the devadasi was formally married and dedicated to the temple deity or to
a ritual object. This allowed the devadasi to dance as part of temple ceremonies and
celebrations.
11.14 Abhinaya: Natya/Bhava/Rasa
The Natya Shastra states that Indian dance was created as an adjunct to drama
(natya). The repertoire includes traditional dramatic themes taken from religious
texts (Ramayana, Mahabharata) as well as religious songs. The execution of the the-
atrical component of Indian dance (natya) is more commonly called abhinaya and is
expressed according to strict rules. What the artist projects through abhinaya is known
as bhava: what the audience feels is known as rasa (flavor). The ability to express feelings
is highly regarded. The delineation and appreciation of the nine emotions—shringara
(romance), hasya (contempt), bibhatsa (disgust), soka (sorrow), bhayanaka (fear), rau-
dra (anger), vira (bravery), adbhuta, (wonder), and shanta (tranquility)—is central to
the presentation of Indian dance and drama.
11.14.1 Shringara
The imagery of God as the lover is central to the themes of classical Indian dance,
miniature painting, music, and poetry. Consequently, surrender to God (bhakti)
was the dominant mood in all Hindu classical performing arts. In the writings of
the bhakti poets, who produced the foundational literature for the movement, the
relationship with God is frequently couched in the language of romance (shrin-
gara), expressed in overtly sexual language. The dance repertoire of the devadasis
included the same language of physical passion. Bhakti is an important element in
Indian dance, and some feel that the romantic element should be expressed through
an erotic interpretation, while others support an interpretation that suggests surren-
der to the deity, but without sensual overtones. The appropriate symbolic language to
express bhakti continues to be the subject of vigorous debate.69
11.14.2 Nayika-Nayaka
Shringara is classified into different psychological states. These states are personified as
nayikas or different female moods, most of which are defined by her relationship to the
beloved (nayaka). The songs are addressed to Him and the dancer enacts their intimate
relationship. The convention that is used to depict shringara is of eight (ashta) heroines
(nayikas) in different states of love. The erotic sentiment is believed to be heightened
during separation, aroused by expectations of future fulfilment. Hence, shringara is

dominated by love in separation (viraha). This is often interpreted as expressing the soul
in search of God.
11.15 Origins of Bharata Natyam and Its

Development in the Modern Era
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, four poet-musicians in Tanjore, Tamil Nadu
(the “Tanjore Quartet”) laid the foundations of the repertoire as we see it today. One of
the four, Ponnaiya Pillai (born 1804), who worked as a court musician under Raja Sarfoji
II of Tanjore (1798–1832), established the complete suite of dances (margam) for a con-
cert program. The repertoire in modern Bharata Natyam dates from that period, and the
compositions of the Tanjore Quartet are regarded as the most traditional.
Dancing in Hindu temples was formally banned in 1948, just after Indian indepen-
dence, by various state governments of India, largely because the dedication of minors to
the temple was seen as infringing their rights. However, these same hereditary dancers
continued to perform in secular situations. At the same time, their repertoire started to
be studied by non-hereditary women and men. The most prominent of these “revivalists”
was a non-hereditary dancer/teacher Rukmini (Devi) Arundale, who studied Bharata
Natyam and performed publicly for the first time in 1935. In 1936, she founded a dance
school, Kalakshetra, where mainly high-caste girls studied the dance.70 Other high-caste
people, such as E. Krishna Iyer (1897–1968), took it upon himself in the 1930s to encourage
“respectable” audiences in Chennai to support Bharata Natyam.71
All of the dances considered to be part of the Indian classical canon (Bharata
Natyam, Chhau, Kathak, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Manipuri, Mohiniattam, Odissi,
Sattriya, and Yakshagana) trace their roots to religious practices. Bharata Natyam
and Odissi, both formerly performed by women, formed part of temple worship.
Kathakali, a male dance-drama, was sponsored by temples and was performed adja-
cent to the temples. The others were all based largely on religious themes, and audi-
ences regarded them as part worship, part entertainment. Kathak may have been an
exception, having developed partly in Muslim courts as well as from the Ras Lila tra-
dition of Brindavan.
Indian classical dances share certain common features: the use of hand gestures
(mudras/hastas), stylized facial expressions (abhinaya), and extensive use of the rhyth-
mic beating of the feet (less so in the Manipuri style). All the classical styles include three
components: abstract dance (nritta), descriptive or expressive dance (natya/abhinaya),
and nritya, which is a combination of the two.
Although Indian classical dances have moved out of the temples, they have not lost
their religious associations, and their staging in secular venues has led to greater empha-
sis on elements of religious ritual. Images of Shiva dancing (Nataraja), of Jagannatha (a
form of Vishnu), or of other deities, have become important stage props. Many dancers

venerate the images before beginning their recital.72 Some new choreography, in India,
recalls the ritual activities of the priests and devadasis inside the temple. Not only is the
dance maintaining its religious content in the twenty-first century, in some ways it is
being amplified in the modern era.73 Moreover, the Indian diaspora has led to the trans-
location of Hindu dances to Europe, North America, and the world. For many Indian
communities living abroad, dance has become a means to maintain contact with tradi-
tional culture and to propagate Hindu stories to the younger generation. Globalization
has meant that the dance is no longer confined to one group and the country of its origin
but is taught everywhere to anyone.
11.16 Dances of the Ramayana
Hindu themes were disseminated throughout Southeast Asia by trade links and by
the Tamil conquests of the early seventh century. Consequently classical dances of
Thailand, Cambodia and Bali are, or were, based on Hindu themes, especially the
Ramayana74.
11.17 Sacred Dances in the Modern Era
During the twentieth century, religion and dance took two paths within Western societ-
ies. Firstly, some modern dancers chose biblical and other religious themes, using the
medium of their particular style. Secondly, a movement began to extend dance as a per-
sonal religious practice among mostly Christians, as well as other faiths and even those
who subscribed to no organized faith.
The first tendency is exemplified by the work of Isadora Duncan, Maud Allen, and
Loie Fuller, who all danced the Salome story; as well, Fuller choreographed Miriam’s
dance after the crossing of the Red Sea. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn performed
pieces on Salome, Jephthah’s daughter, and other Christian themes, as well as Hindu
religious themes. Biblical themes also appeared in ballet, with Michel Fokine cho-
reographing Joseph in 1914 for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, and George Balanchine
choreographing the story of the prodigal son for the Ballet Russes in 1929. Kassian
Goleizovsky choreographed Joseph the Beautiful for the Bolshoi Ballet and Ninette
de Valois choreographed Job for Royal Ballet, both in 1931. Ted Shawn also took up
the theme of Job. Lester Horton, Jose Limon, and Martha Graham were all inspired
by the Bible (e.g., Graham’s Embattled Garden; Limon’s There is a Time).75 These
were described by Giora Manor as “the most perfectly wrought biblical choreog-
raphies of our time.”76 Modern choreography of biblical themes has been produced
by John Neumeier, Yri Kyalin, Anna Sokolow, Laura Dean, David Earl, and Patricia
Beatty.

11.18 Sacred Dance Movement
Perhaps as a reaction to the lack of dance in regular Christian liturgy, the twentieth
century saw a movement to reinstate dance in spiritual practice. In North America, the
Eastern Sacred Dance Association, founded in 1956, rapidly morphed into the Sacred
Dance Guild (1958) to propagate religious dances within Christianity. Prime movers
were the Rev. Robert Storer and prominent professional dancer Ted Shawn. The move-
ment “promotes dance as prayer, spiritual growth, connection to the Creator and inte-
gration of mind, body and spirit.”77 Almost immediately, a dichotomy appeared between
those wishing to incorporate dance for congregations, hence simple movements that
could be performed by anyone, and those advocating more complex dances to be per-
formed by specialists. This divergence within the movement was never resolved.78 Later,
the movement encouraged dances from all ethnic traditions. It became allied to a move-
ment for greater emphasis on the female in religion and a revival of interest in Goddess
worship.79 These two streams meet in a production such as Patricia Beatty’s “Dancing the
Goddess,” staged in Toronto, Canada in 1995, where modern choreographers explored a
variety of visions of the universal mother.
11.19 Studies of Sacred Dance
As noted above, there have been numerous histories of sacred dances, most primarily
descriptive. Historical writings on dance in Christianity were frequently concerned
with arguments for and against the incorporation of dance into religious services. There
has been a preoccupation with the body and with removing any vestiges of religious
dances that might have seeped into Christianity. The struggle to find a place for dance
in the Judeo-Christian religious context has been continuous throughout the history of
these religions.
More recently, many sociologists and anthropologists have been more interested
in the sociology/anthropology of the many dance forms of South Asia, and to a lesser
extent Southeast Asia. Because many of these dances are still practiced, this has proved
to be fertile ground for participant observers to combine dance training and perform-
ing with academic study. Some practitioners have achieved professional recognition as
professional dancers within India and abroad, pursuing parallel careers in dance and
academia. This has led to a better understanding of the dance itself.
A pioneer in this field was Kapila Vatsyayan, and the participant-observer approach
has become the dominant research technique for Indian dance: Bharata Natyam
(Gaston, Kersenboom, Padma Subramaniam); Odissi (Gaston, Marglin); Kathakali
(Zarrilli); Yakshagana (Ashton). Others who took a more traditional academic
approach include Erdman, Orr, and Srinivasan. Recent research has dealt with the

status, role, and gender of the dancer within society, and especially within the blurred
lines between religious and secular ritual (e.g., Margalin on Mahari dancers of Orissa;
Gaston, Kersenboom, Orr, Srinivasan on the nature of the South Indian isai vellala com-
munity) and on the continuous evolution of traditional forms (Gaston).
11.20 The Future
Current and future issues include the role of caste in determining attitudes to the dance
and dancer and regarding access to the dance; the nature of the auspicious; rituals and
symbols in the transition from religious space to concert stage; the reinvention of tradi-
tions and the unraveling of stereotypes about the past; modernization, globalization and
hybridizing religious motifs; the nature of the sacred in the context of theater; as well
as continued investigation of folk arts and some of the religious rituals that accompany
their performance (e.g., Teyyam).
Perceptions of what is and is not sacred continue to change, as do perceptions of the
body. Art is moving toward mixed-media presentation. Television has become a major
medium for transmitting all types of religion, placing emphasis on spectacle, which
encourages the incorporation of dance. Evangelical and emerging religions may provide
material for future dance researches.
The lack of a means to compare movements and identify patterns and processes in
dance has been a major impediment to scholarship in the past. The advent of film and
video archives means that dance can begin to develop the kind of historical scholarship
and criticism associated previously with literature, painting, and sculpture. The future
will surely see more emphasis on the dance as movement, theater, and communication.
Notes
1. Judith L. Hanna, “Dance and Religion,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion, ed. M. Eliade
(New York: MacMillan Reference Books, 1993), 209.
2. Manmohan Ghosh, The Natyasastra, vol. I, second edition (Calcutta: Granthalaya Pvt.
Ltd., 1967).
3. Walter Sorrell, The Dance Through the Ages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967).
4. E. Louis Backman, Religious Dances (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952), 2.
5. John G. Davies, Liturgical Dance: An Historical, Theological and Practical Handbook
(London: SMC Press, 1984), 19.
6. Clark Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clarke, 1908), 358.
7. John G. Davies, Liturgical Dance: An Historical, Theological and Practical Handbook.
8. Clark Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clarke, 1908).
9. R. J. Zwiwerbowsky and G. Widoger, eds., Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 185.

10. Anne-Marie Gaston, Bharata Natyam: From Temple to Theatre (New Delhi: Manohar,
1995), 31–34.
11. Personal observation, Nov. 2006, Cuidad Guzman, Jalisco State, Mexico.
12. Manmohan Ghosh, The Natyasastra, vol. I, second ed. (Calcutta: Granthalaya Pvt. Ltd.,
1967), Chapter 2.
13. Anne-Marie Gaston, “Preparing the Ground for Dance,” in Dance as Intangible Heritage,
(Athens: International Organisation of Folk Art, 2002), 364.
14. John W. Nunley and Cara McCarthy. Masks. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999).
15. M. L. Varadpande, “Masks,” in Indian Dance: the Ultimate Metaphor, ed. Shanta Serbjeet
Singh (Ravi Kumar, New Delhi, 2000), 183–204.
16. Manomohan Ghosh, Nandikesvara’s Abhinayadarpanam (Calcutta: K.L. Mukhopadhyay,
1957), 43.
17. John G. Davies, Liturgical Dance (London: SMC Press, 1984), 3.
18. Ibid. 138
19. Joseph Campbell, The Many Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin, 1976), 282.
20. John W. Nunley and Cara McCarthy, Masks: Faces of Culture (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1999), 27–34.
21. Henry Schoolcraft quoted in Anya P. Royce, The Anthropology of Dance
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 21.
22. Walter Burke, Greek Religion. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 34.
23. Lucian, de Saltatione in Davies, Liturgical Dance. (London: SMC Press, 1984), 10.
24. See also L. Séchan, La danse grecque antique. (Paris: De Boccard, 1930); Liliane B. Lawler,
The Dance in Ancient Greece, (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1964).
25. Ibid, 11.
26. Ibid, 10.
27. See John G. Davies, Liturgical Dance. (London: SMC Press, 1984), 34 et seq. for further
discussion.
28. Walter Burke, Greek Religion. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 34.
29. L. Séchan, La danse grecque antique. (Paris: De Boccard, 1930).
30. Ibid., 102.
31. Marie-Helene Dalavaud-Roux, “War Dances in Ancient Greece,” in Ochesis: Texts on
Ancient Greek Dance, ed. A. Lazou, A. Raftis and M. Borowska. Athens: Way of Life
Publications, 2004, 117.
32. John G. Davies, Liturgical Dance. (London: SMC Press, 1984), 16.
33. Dionysus of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanae, in Davies, Liturgical Dance
34. John G. Davies, Liturgical Dance. (London: SMC Press, 1984), 22.
35. Ibid., 19.
36. The Bible, Lamentations 5: 15.
37. William H. Gentz, Dictionary of the Bible and Religion 1986, Nashville.
38. John G. Davies, Liturgical Dance (London: SMC Press, 1984).
39. R. J. Zwiwerbowsky and G. Widoger, eds., Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
40. E. Ferguson, Encyclopaedia of Early Christianity (London, New York: Routledge, 1990), 317;
John G. Davies, Liturgical Dance (London: SMC Press, 1984), 27.

42. Ibid., 76.

43. Ibid., 93.
45. Ibid., 77.
46. E. Ferguson, Encyclopaedia of Early Christianity London, New York: Routledge, 1990;
Garland, 317.
47. Shemeem Burney Abbas, The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual: Devotional Practices of Pakistan
and India. (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2002) 191).
48. Richard Maxwell Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur 1300-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1978), 317.
49. W. T. Stace, The Teaching of the Mystics (New York: 1960).
50. Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
(New York, Random House Digital, Inc., 2006).
51. Ibid.
52. Judith L. Hanna, “Dance and Religion.” In Encyclopaedia of Religion, ed. M. Eliade
(New York: MacMillan Reference Books, 1993), 209.
53. Kanishka Sharma, “Shaolin Kungfu: Reality or Myth.” Attendance 2003–04, 42.
54. Hallie I. Austen, The Heart of the Goddess. (Berkeley : Wingbow Press, 1990), 30.
55. A. C. Scott, The Kabuki Theatre of Japan (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955), 34.
56. Ibid., 35.
57. Francis P. Barboza, Christianity in Indian Dance Forms (Delhi: Sri Satguru, 1990), 197.
58. Manmohan Ghosh, The Natyasastra, vol. I, second edition (Calcutta: Granthalaya Pvt.
Ltd., 1967), 1.100 verses 104–105.
59. Ibid., 361.
60. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Mirror of Gesture (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal,
1970), 1.
61. Eckford-Lourard, Travels of Fray S. Manrique, trans. 1927, vol. 1: 71, Carmichael.
62. Anne-Marie Gaston, From Temple to Theatre (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), 47.
63. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva, (New Delhi: Sagar Publications, 1968), 66.
64. Anne-Marie Gaston, Siva in Dance, Myth and Iconography (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1982), 114.
65. Hein, The Miracle Plays of Mathura.
66. Anne-Marie Gaston, Krishna’s Musicians (New Delhi, Manohar, 1995), 42.
67. Anne-Marie Gaston, From Temple to Theatre (New Delhi, Manohar, 1995), 31.
68. Ibid., 40.
69. Ibid., 103–107.
70. S. Sarada, Kalakshetra Rukmini Devi (Madras: Kala Mandir Trust, 1985), 1.
71. Anne-Marie Gaston, From Temple to Theatre (New Delhi, Manohar, 1995), 84.
72. Ibid., 315.
73. Ibid., 337.
74. Faubion Bowers. Theatre in the East. (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1956), 130-165.
75. Giora Manor, “Dance,” in Bruce Metzger and Michael Coogan, eds., Oxford Companion to
the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 148–149.
76. Ibid., 149.
77. From the mission statement of the Sacred Dance Guild.
78. Carlynn Reed, And We Have Danced: A History of The Sacred Dance Guild 1958–1978, 2 vols.
(Austin, TX: The Sharing Company, 1978).
79. E.g., Hallie I. Austen, The Heart of the Goddess (Berkeley, Wingbow Press, 1990), 1.

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C HA P T E R 12
ARCHITECTURAL
E X P R E S S I O N A N D WAYS O F
BEING RELIGIOUS
R IC HA R D K I E C K H E F E R
Each of the world’s religious traditions has an architectural tradition that could be dealt
with separately: synagogues, churches, mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples all have
their long and complicated histories. This chapter, however, will be comparative, focus-
ing mainly on issues and problems that tend to arise in many if not all of these traditions.
One reason for this comparative approach is that these various architectural traditions
have not in fact been entirely distinct from each other. The design of Roman temples
had some influence on that of churches, in some regions the building of churches had
impact on the building of mosques, the architectural traditions of India have entailed
many borrowings, and synagogue architecture is highly adaptable, tending to resemble
the buildings of the various countries in which Jews have settled. Even apart from these
patterns of influence, however, similar issues often emerge in the design of sacred archi-
tecture, and the comparisons are worth noting and examining.
12.1 Common Features and

Distinguishing Features of Religious
Architecture
Broadly speaking, some religions have temples while others have places of assembly.
A synagogue, a church, and a mosque are all meant as places of assembly; the Greek
words synagogē (synagogue) and ekklēsia (church) both mean “assembly” or “place of
assembly,” and the Arabic term for a larger mosque, jami’, is also derived from a root
that means “to assemble.” These buildings are meant as places where the community

can gather in worship of God. A Hindu, Egyptian, Greek, or Roman temple is some-
thing quite different: a place where the gods dwell, incarnated in consecrated statues.
Individuals go to temples to offer sacrifice or other offerings to the deities there present.
The temple may serve as a place for festivals, but it is not primarily a place for the collec-
tive worship of many devotees. If we distinguish in this way between places of assem-
bly and temples, however, we must acknowledge that some types of churches do have
certain features in common with temples. Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican
churches, in particular, are also buildings with inner sanctums (referred to in the West
as sanctuaries), to which priests and those attending the priests usually have privileged
access. When the consecrated host (the wafer of bread that has been consecrated and
thus transformed into the body of Christ) is reserved in a tabernacle, the church too is in
that particular sense a dwelling place for God. And churches of this sort lend themselves
more than other churches to private devotion; while they are built for the assembly of
a congregation, they are often left open through the day for individuals to use them as
places of prayer.
The character of a building as an assembly place, a temple, or a mixture of the two
forms is reflected in its design and furnishings.
A synagogue is a place of assembly with two major foci: the ark, a chest in which the
Torah scrolls are kept, in medieval synagogues commonly positioned in the direction
of Jerusalem; and the bimah or platform from which the Torah is read. The ark for the
scrolls was found even in early synagogues, from the first centuries C.E., as we know
from representation of them in mosaics and wall-paintings. The bimah developed later.
Beyond these basic requirements, there has never been a great deal of uniformity in syn-
agogue design, which is not mentioned in the Bible and is not central to the writings of
rabbinic Judaism.
A mosque is also a place of assembly, and again it has two primary foci: a niche in the
wall (the mihrab) pointing in the direction of Mecca, and thus instructing worshipers
where they should face in their prayer; and a pulpit (the minbar), resembling a flight of
stairs, from which the imam preaches. In much of the Muslim world, a mosque also has
a courtyard that serves in part as a place for ritual purification before prayer.
Both a synagogue and a mosque are, then, unambiguously centered on the spoken
word: the reading of scriptural texts, commenting on these texts, preaching and instruc-
tion, and prayer. The other features are important in other ways, but the real center of
attention in either case is the pulpit or platform, the bimah or minbar, the center for
speaking to the assembly.
A Hindu temple is fundamentally a house for the deities, present within their
images. These images are placed within shrines or “womb-chambers”; in front of the
womb-chamber in a traditional temple is a space (often a pillared hall) in which the
worshiper can approach the deity. Four times daily, the deity in the womb-chamber is
ceremonially awakened by the priests, honored with elaborate mantras and mudras,
given food and flower offerings, then allowed to return to sleep. Between these priestly
rituals, individuals may come to make offerings and prayers to the deities, but lay-
people can approach only so far, and the priests must take over and do the actual act

ARCHITECTURE AND WAYS OF BEING RELIGIOUS 205
of offering in the innermost shrines. Worshipers congregate in the temple compound

in larger numbers for occasions of sacred dance and song, or for recitation and exege-
sis of sacred texts. In addition, there are festivals involving processions (in which the
images of deities are carried on ornamented chariots, seen as mobile temples) and
myths are acted out.
A Buddhist temple is in some ways similar to a Hindu structure. The most fundamen-
tal difference is that a devotee may pay honor there to a statue of the Buddha, yet in prin-
ciple for South Asian Buddhists the Buddha is recognized not as a deity but as a source
of enlightenment. The main purpose of entering a Buddhist temple is thus not worship
but rather meditation. Even in South Asia, however, the distinction between the use of
a Hindu and a Buddhist temple is complicated by hybrid forms, in which a statue of the
Buddha placed in a central position is flanked by images of Hindu deities. Furthermore,
the priests and monks connected with a Buddhist temple also engage in preaching and
instruction within the temple compound, even if that is not the function that chiefly
determines the layout of the temple proper.
Describing a typical church is a still more complicated undertaking, in part because a
church can have some of the attributes not only of an assembly place but also of a temple.
In the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Anglican tradition, as in religious traditions with
ritual taking place in temples, a church will have as a minimum a nave where the laity
gather, and a sanctuary where the priest officiates at the altar. The altar in these tradi-
tions has a position of primacy, as the focal place to which offerings are brought, and at
which the sacrifice of Christ is made present. The nave and the sanctuary are often sepa-
rated by a rail, which may serve also as a site for the administration of communion. In
the later Middle Ages, when preaching became more frequent in the West, pulpits began
to appear as places where the preacher could stand to be seen and heard more effectively,
and benches or pews were introduced for seating of the congregation. In Orthodoxy,
from the later Middle Ages onward, the boundary between the nave and the sanctu-
ary (or “altar”) has typically been a tall icon-screen or iconostasis, with the Royal Doors
in the center and other doors on either side; the bishop or priest passes back and forth
through the doors into the nave at various points in the liturgy, thus mediating between
the inner and the outer space.
With the Reformation, and the even greater importance of preaching that came about
in Protestant traditions, the pulpit assumed yet more significance, in some denomina-
tions replacing the altar as the primary focus of attention. In effect, the Reformers (espe-
cially those in the Calvinist tradition) sought to purify the church of elements shared
with temples and temple-worship. The significance of preaching is reflected in the gal-
leries that were often inserted, enabling more members of the congregation to sit closer
to the preacher. This Reformation emphasis on preaching took on new dimensions in
the nineteenth century, when church architecture developed alongside new theater
architecture, using similar forms of construction and auditorium-style seating, again
allowing close contact between preacher and congregation. A further development in
the later twentieth century, the construction of “megachurches,” such as Willow Creek
in the suburbs of Chicago, continues the tradition of building churches as theaters; these

churches can accommodate congregations of thousands, with platforms usable for the-
atrical performance, and with sound and light systems modeled on those of contempo-
rary theaters and concert halls.
More than the buildings of many other traditions, churches have often been built
with a variety of peripheral spaces: chapels, porches, and sacristies. One peripheral
space with the great ritual significance is the baptistery, for the sacrament of bap-
tism. Even the earliest known Christian house of worship at Dura Europos (third
century), had a sizable room set aside as the baptistery. The position and form of the
place for baptism may be a smaller building outside the church, a separate chapel
within the church, or simply an area within the church defined by the presence of the
baptismal font.
In all these religious traditions, the expected movement of worshipers into and
within a sacred building is typically reflected in its design. In a Hindu temple, two
forms of movement are of primary significance. First is the approach to the deity in
the womb-chamber, through a series of portals, which involve passage from light to
dark, from open space to the confined space of a womb or a cave, and from the world
of time to that of eternity. Second is the clockwise circumambulation around the
womb-chamber or, more broadly, around the entire temple. Passageways are often
laid out specifically to guide the movement of the worshiper in this clockwise move-
ment. In the larger temple complexes of Southern India, the inner space focused on
the womb-house opens out onto a broad walled courtyard where the deity and the
worshipers can go in procession, and the deity may undergo an annual marriage;
there may indeed be four or even five concentric courtyards, with walls and gate-
ways. Something of this invitation to movement can be found in Christian churches
that are laid out longitudinally: the laity in the nave are meant to move forward
toward the sanctuary, whether at the offertory or at communion. Even the circum-
ambulatory path can be found in churches where relics or miracle-working images
are venerated: devotees may approach these objects through ambulatories around
the east end, or in crypts beneath the east end of the church. The sense of movement
is especially important when the building is the terminus of a pilgrimage, and the
final stages of the pilgrimage are laid out within the surrounding precincts and then
within the structure itself.
The sacred building typically occupies a prominent position within its environment.
A church may have a bell tower, perhaps surmounted by a spire; the height of the struc-
ture allows the sound of the bells to travel further, but the prominence also marks the
church as a defining feature within the community. The minaret of a mosque manifests
the same dual purpose: it allows the call to prayer to be heard far and wide, and it gives
the building greater prominence. In the Hindu temples of North India, the shrine of the
deity has an artificial mountain peak (shikhara) towering above it; in South India this
structure is instead over the main gates of the temple compound. Jews were traditionally
expected to build their synagogues higher than surrounding buildings; when they lived
in Christian towns and could not do that, they would symbolically raise the height by
erecting a pole on the rooftop.

12.2 Issues in the Design of Sacred Space
Beyond these basic factors in religious architecture, there are issues that tend to arise
in any religious tradition: whether to aim for monumentality and splendor or rather
for simple and modest design; what sort of symbolism to use in the design and dec-
oration of buildings; whether to allow representational art or restrict ornament to
nonrepresentational forms; how much emphasis to place on principles of harmony
and mathematical proportion; how far buildings should be designed in deliberately
archaic “revival” styles, and whether it might be better to use contemporary styles;
and in what ways architecture can and should be affected by currents of liturgical
reform.
These issues will be dealt with here, so far as possible, in comparative perspective, but
they will be presented following (at least very approximately) the order in which they
arise in Christian architectural tradition. In other words, the material in this chapter
having to do with church architecture will form a historical overview of issues in church
design, to which comparative material will be added.
12.3 Monumentality and Splendor
When the Psalmist felt cut off from God, he reminded himself that the place where he
could renew his contact with the divine—where he could behold the power and glory
of God—was the Temple in Jerusalem. This is where God was present, the glory of God
could be seen, individuals went to offer sacrifice to God, and the people of Israel cel-
ebrated festivals (e.g., Psalm 42:4 and 63:1–2). The Temple of Solomon, described in
I Kings 6–7, was clearly a monument of exceptional magnificence: Solomon “overlaid
the inside of the house [of God] with gold” so that it “might be perfect”; he had carvings
of cherubim, palm trees, and flowers placed on the walls, and had the floor “overlaid
with gold” (I Kings 6:21, 29–30). The later Temple of Herod was clearly no less striking in
its design. After all, since the Deuteronomic reform (traditionally dated to 621 B.C.E.),
the Temple at Jerusalem was the only place in Israel where sacrifice could be offered, and
thus it vastly overshadowed all the synagogues that came later, which were places where
instruction could be given and prayer recited, but not sites in which God’s presence was
so fully manifested.
Of central concern in the architecture of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is whether,
how far, or in what ways a building is meant to resemble the Temple. In practice, any
time a religious group gains social and especially political power, it is likely to build
monumental places of worship that may remind people of the Temple and may often be
spoken of as having the character of the Temple. One can even speak of a certain nostal-
gia for the Temple as a key theme in religious architecture.

After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 64 C.E. there could be no Temple in
Judaism, only synagogues. The Temple remained an elusive ideal that would be reestab-
lished only with the coming of the Messiah. Even so, the identification of the synagogue
with the Temple remains important: even though the ritual is entirely different, cen-
tered on the spoken word rather than on actual sacrifice, the synagogue is conceived as a
Temple in miniature, with services timed to correspond to key moments in Temple cere-
mony. Not surprisingly, then, the synagogue rebuilt at Worms in 1174–75 had an inscrip-
tion referring to the construction of Solomon’s Temple. When confined to ghettos, Jews
were unable to build in a grand style, yet even a humble building might be thought of
as a miniature Temple. After Emancipation from the ghettos in the nineteenth century,
Jews quickly acquired the resources and motivation to build on a grander scale, and the
Reform movement in Judaism began referring to its synagogues as temples, thus declar-
ing that they did not live in a condition of exile and expectation but could build even in
Europe structures as sacred as the Temple had once been. Israel Cohen described the
Friday evening service at a synagogue in later nineteenth-century Paris: the synagogue,
“vast and lofty,” is “a scene of ornate and overwhelming grandeur,” with tall marble pil-
lars, vaulted arches, “celestial” cupola, stained glass, brilliant and towering candelabra,
all suggestive of a cathedral in its grand proportions and its beauty, yet free from the
“all-pervading gloom” that Cohen found in many cathedral interiors.
Christianity had a longer tradition of building in a grand style, emulating the Temple.
Such construction became possible in the fourth century, with the conversion of the
emperor Constantine and patronage that he and later emperors lavished on the Church.
In his Ecclesiastical History, the bishop and imperial courtier Eusebius noted that “cathe-
drals were again rising from their foundations high into the air, and far surpassing in
magnificence those previously destroyed by the enemy.” Eusebius recounts in particu-
lar the consecration of the cathedral at Tyre in Phoenicia, and he praises “its dazzling
beauty, the incredible vastness, the brilliant appearance of the workmanship, the tower-
ing walls that reach for the sky, and the costly cedars of Lebanon that form the ceiling.”
He then proceeds to an allegory in which the Christian people are themselves described
as a great church, which God constructs as “a great and kingly house, glowing and full
of light within and without.” This account of architectural magnificence is exceeded in
the sixth century by descriptions of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, as it was rebuilt by
the emperor Justinian. One writer, Procopius, emphasizes the height of the building (it
rises to heaven, it resembles a ship towering over other buildings, like a watchtower it
affords a view of the rest of the city), its brightness (it is so bright that one might suppose
the light comes not from the sun but from within the structure itself), and its harmony
(no part is excessive or deficient, and it forms a harmonious whole, leading spectators
to gaze in wonderment at first one part and then another). Another writer describing
Hagia Sophia focused more on the surface materials within the building: the richly
varied marbles, the gold tiles in the vaulting, the silver iconostasis, the jeweled golden
altar, the altar curtains shimmering with gold. When Russian envoys made their way
to Constantinople in the tenth century, they were so awestruck by the Byzantine liturgy
that they reported “we know not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth

there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know
only that God dwells there among men. . . . For we cannot forget that beauty.”
The traditions of lavish building and awestruck description continued for centuries.
Sometimes the prose is echoed even in accounts of provincial churches. Saint Wilfrid’s
seventh-century church at Hexham in England aroused one writer to awestruck wonder
like that of the Byzantines in Hagia Sophia: unparalleled north of the Alps, this “superb
edifice with splendid gold and silver ornaments, precious stones and silks and purples
for the altars” was surely inspired by God, and the writer’s “poor mind” was at a loss to
describe it. When Abbot Suger partially rebuilt his abbey church of Saint-Denis at Paris
in the mid-twelfth century, he insisted it should be furnished with the finest of furnish-
ings and vessels, on which expense should not be spared, and he was manifestly think-
ing of the Jerusalem Temple as his model: if the Old Testament prescribed golden vessels
to collect the blood of goats and calves, he said, surely gold and precious gems should be
used to receive the blood of Christ. Even a thirteenth-century account of the fictional
Grail Chapel describes it as a place of extravagant splendor, abounding in gold, enamel,
coral, and pearls, altars adorned with sapphires, windows “glazed with beryls and crys-
tals,” a roof of gold, and “precious stones shining like fire, sparkling with a blinding
light,” all done for God’s honor without heed to expense. The beholders weep for joy.
Like the writers who described Hagia Sophia, the poet professes his inability to describe
the magnificence.
Other traditions accommodate the urge for monumentality and splendor either by
distinguishing different classes of buildings or by allowing any building to be as monu-
mental as the builders have resources to make it. Muslims have a longstanding tradition
of restraint in art and architecture, and they distinguish between a smaller mosque or
masjid for private prayer or the gathering of a few Muslims and a larger one or jami’
meant for the collective worship of thousands, who stand in lines and perform synchro-
nized gestures such as kneeling and prostration. Hinduism has not had qualms about
building in grand and monumental fashion. Its temples are explicitly seen as residences
for the gods, and the grandeur of their structure is limited mainly by the availability of
resources, not by ideology that inspires restraint.
Not everyone has shared the fondness for this quest of monumentality and splen-
dor. In perhaps every religious tradition it is possible to find critical voices urging
restraint. Muslims sometimes remind each other that any place can serve the purposes
of a mosque; the grandeur of a jami’ is not needed. Rabbis have on occasion urged
that funds be used for charitable purposes rather than adornment of synagogue. The
twelfth-century monk Bernard of Clairvaux, representing an austere tradition of
Cistercian monastic reform, wrote a much-quoted critique of the grand churches with
their “vast height,” their “immoderate length” and “superfluous breadth” and their
carvings and paintings, all of which seemed to him reminiscent of Jewish tradition.
He recognized that it was meant for God’s honor, and that lavish gold ornament might
arouse worldly people to devotion, but he remained concerned about the expenditure of
funds that might be put to better use tending to the poor. It is probably no coincidence
that such critique came not at a time when large cathedrals came to be built (that had

happened centuries earlier), but rather at a point when many major churches were being
erected within the same diocese, and such buildings came to rival each other in their
magnificence.
Bernard was reacting also against a further tendency that emerged in the Romanesque
architecture and art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. During that time, art showed
a new fondness for artistic spontaneity, fantasy, color and movement, expression of feel-
ing, and sheer variety, without clear religious motivation—a delight in artistic variety
in itself. The enthusiasm for figurative work often seemed purely secular and meant
to evoke curiosity, in particular the representation of grotesque monsters. Such deco-
ration remained in a sense marginal, being mostly limited to exterior decoration and
to monastic cloisters. But even the framing of a distinction between the serious core
of the building and the potentially more frivolous margins was something new in the
Romanesque period, and to a stern observer such as Bernard it was deeply problematic.
12.4 Symbolism and Sacrality
Whether it is monumental or modest, a religious building typically differs from a secu-

lar one both in the uses to which it is put and in its nature as sacred space, although dif-
ferent traditions would view that sacrality in different terms and hold to it with widely
varying conviction. What makes a building sacred may be in part its being set apart and
cut off from ordinary or profane space. In many traditions a building is consecrated,
making it distinct from secular architecture. Perhaps more importantly, however, sacred
architecture is marked as such by a density of symbolic associations. A sacred space is
one that has multiple levels of meaning, touching in various ways on people’s lives, serv-
ing for rituals of birth and death, and opening more widely onto a symbolic world of
mythic and cosmic scope.
The sacrality of a Hindu temple is highly complex. According to early texts, the gods
and goddesses are attracted to mountains, waterways, and shady groves, and temples are
often laid out at such sites. Places of temples are also often sites where Krishna or some
other deity appeared, or where some god or goddess has a legendary association. When
a temple is to be built, a “vastupurusa mandala” is first traced on the ground in the form
of a square subdivided into eighty-one smaller squares, taken as a diagram of the uni-
verse: the temple is thus identified with the universal abode of the gods. This mandala
symbolizes not only the universe but also the pantheon of deities (each square being
associated with some god), and also the “cosmic man” (represented as lying diagonally
across the grid, with his head in one corner and his feet opposite). The precise moment
when this mandala is traced on the ground is determined by astrological observations,
which means the beginning of the temple’s construction is correlated with the move-
ments of the heavens. And on its completion it is ceremonially consecrated.
The seventeenth-century mystical poem Risāle-i Mi’māriyye ponders the relationship
between the architecture of the world and that of a mosque: the world is an “exalted

mosque” with lofty vault and lamp. The awestruck poet is inspired to ask who made this
edifice without drawings, mathematics, or analogy. The lamps hung in great numbers in
a mosque have symbolic meaning that is made explicit when a representation of a lamp
is surrounded by the quotation from the Qur’an, “God is the light of the heavens and the
earth; the likeness of his light is as a niche wherein is a lamp, the lamp in a glass, the glass
as it were a glittering star.”
Symbolism by definition points beyond itself, and Christian churches have often
been seen as achieving that goal not only by formal symbolic correspondence but also
by evoking a sense of wonder and drawing people’s minds toward God (the “anagogic”
function of architecture). Abbot Suger in the twelfth century commented on his early
Gothic expansion of the church of Saint-Denis, asserting the power of architecture
to lead the mind and soul toward spiritual matters. The allure of the building and its
jewel-encrusted furnishings led Suger’s own mind toward immaterial realities and gave
him a sense of being transported to a higher world. The sheer brightness of the new
building, with its broad Gothic windows, led his mind “through true lights to the True
Light,” to Christ. At the very beginnings of the Gothic movement, then, we find a delight
in surface ornament, a fascination with light, but most importantly an emphasis on how
these factors combine to lead the mind upward.
Christians have had elaborate consecration rituals for churches since the early Middle
Ages. In these rituals, as elsewhere, churches have been given rich symbolic interpre-
tation. Perhaps most distinctive is the allegorical interpretation of churches as repre-
senting the Heavenly Jerusalem, the city that in the Book of Revelation comes down
upon Earth in the grand renewal of all things. In the early twelfth century, the monastic
church at Fécamp was compared with the Heavenly Jerusalem, a gated palace for God
with high and fine walls. Liturgies of consecration as early as the tenth century included
texts such as Revelation 21 and the account of Solomon’s dedication of the Temple, plus
antiphons and hymns equating the church with the Heavenly Jerusalem. Such themes
are developed in the thirteenth-century allegorical commentary on the liturgy by
William Durandus: the material church symbolizes the Church built of living stones in
heaven; the stones are held together on earth by mortar and in heaven by charity. This
tendency toward allegorical interpretations of churches goes back to the fourth century,
but it flourished in the thirteenth century, in the high Gothic era.
12.5 Artistic Representation

and Ornament
Tension between iconic and aniconic impulses is a recurrent theme in the history of
sacred architecture. The extreme cases are Hinduism and Islam. Hinduism, with its
strong emphasis on the incarnation of divinity in the material order, has seldom been
shy about artistic representation of the gods. Islam, with an equally clear emphasis on

divine transcendence and a rigorous condemnation of associating nothing with God,

has allowed only nonrepresentational decoration of mosques, especially the painting on
interior walls of richly calligraphic texts from the Qur’an.
Judaism has shifted over its history from an iconic to an aniconic stance. Early syna-
gogues had floor mosaics with representation of the Zodiac and other themes, and early
rabbinic sources allowed wall-paintings in the synagogue, although some rabbis urged
spending the money on other purposes. For various reasons medieval Jews discontin-
ued using representational art in their synagogues. Jews in medieval Spain commonly
adopted Muslim standards for decoration, restricting themselves to geometrical designs
and scriptural texts in calligraphic script. Among Ashkenazic Jews, the Hasidim in par-
ticular discouraged the use of representational art, although customs varied, and in a
particular place it might be deemed appropriate to paint plants and flowers, or birds
and horses. Not even the Reform movement of the nineteenth century brought a clear
restoration of representational art, although the use of the Star of David and the Tablets
of the Law came at that time to be common distinguishing symbols of Judaism on the
interiors and exteriors of synagogues. Only in the twentieth century did figural painting
and stained glass become common in many Jewish communities.
Christianity has also struggled with the question whether images are appropri-
ate in churches, and it has on the whole moved in the opposite direction to Judaism,
more often than not finding justification for images. Christian writers of the early
centuries demonstrated less aversion to images than has been assumed. By the later
fourth century they were recommending images for their educational value; in the
late sixth century, Gregory the Great maintained their importance as the Bible for the
illiterate. But by Gregory’s time icons were being venerated, carried in procession,
honored with incense, and taken as miraculous, which provoked suspicion in both
the Latin West and the Greek East. By the mid-eighth century, Byzantine emperors
were forbidding such use of icons, but their final restoration came in 843, under the
Empress Theodora. The Iconoclasts insisted that images of any sort were in violation
of the Biblical prohibition of Exodus 20:4. However, John of Damascus in the 720s
replied that we come through the physical to spiritual realities, and icons are thus a
means for bringing people into contact with the spiritual order. Defenders of icons
believed God can be depicted since becoming incarnate in Jesus, whose divine and
human natures are so closely bound together that icons of him must give expression
to this union of the two natures.
Considerably more vigorous than the iconoclasm of early medieval Byzantium
was that of the more puritanical of the Reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, who insisted on purging churches of images and supervised the system-
atic removal of statues and the covering over of wall-paintings. The Calvinists in
Switzerland and in Scotland were particularly intent on such iconoclasm. In England,
it was most fully manifested during the Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century,
when Puritans came into power. Not all Reformers, however, were iconoclasts: Martin
Luther had no problem with images per se, but did insist that commissioning them
was not a meritorious work.

12.6 Harmony and Proportion
More than any other art, architecture combines principles of art with those of engineer-
ing, and it is not surprising if the structural principles come to be seen as having deep
symbolic resonance. The classical textbooks on Hindu temple architecture, such as the
Mayamata, emphasize the importance of measurement and proportion, laying down
principles for all the dimensions of the building and even features such as doorways. The
temple can function properly only if it follows the mathematical principles of propor-
tion set down in these texts. Indeed, the proportions of the temple exercise a power-
ful impact on the world about it: its perfection brings about “perfection in the universe
as well.”
In the Christian world intricate geometry was long integral to architectural practice,
and historians have worked out complicated and controversial theories of proportion
induced from the surviving buildings. Explicit theories of proportion became more
prominent and more fully developed in the Renaissance. Building on ancient Roman
architecture and on the writing of Vitruvius, Leon Battista Alberti developed theories
of proportion in his book On Building (1485), and Andrea Palladio did so in his Four
Books of Architecture (1570). For Alberti the key term was concinnitas, or total intercon-
nectedness of a building’s parts within the whole; he defined beauty as the “consensus
and conspiring of the parts into the whole.” Palladio, likewise, defined it as “the form and
correspondence of the whole, with respect to the several parts, of the parts with regard
to each other, and of these again to the whole.” The relative purity and simplicity of many
Renaissance churches, in comparison with their Gothic predecessors, made them all
the more clear in their manifestation of proportion. The building itself stood out more
clearly, with greater economy of ornamentation (at least until the Baroque period, with
its resurgence of ornament). The harmonies might be implanted in the natural order
by God, “the greatest architect,” but even so they could be determined and defined in
rational terms.
12.7 Historicist Revivalism
Religions have always derived much of their authority from appeal to the past. For his-
torical religions such as Judaism and Christianity there are particular moments in his-
tory that have normative significance. Even a religion not thus grounded in historical
events, such as Hinduism, maintains deep reverence for the texts, the traditions, and
even the language of a formative historical era. This reverence for the past is manifested
in sacred architecture in the tendency to revive historic styles of design. Architectural
revivalism is seldom merely inspired by stylistic preference; style and other attributes
of historical design are taken as important for theological or other reasons. When the

Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia sought to recover the simplicity of early mosques, this was
part of a broader program of restoring lost purity and rigor. Their appeal to early Islamic
design is in this respect typical: architectural revivalism tends to posit a golden age not
just of architecture but of religion.
Architects and architectural theorists of the Renaissance saw themselves as restoring
the superior art along with the generally superior culture of Greek and Roman antiq-
uity. Christopher Wren, working within the tradition of Renaissance classicism, con-
trasted the “good Roman manner” with “Gothick rudeness,” and pointed to what he
saw as basic structural deficiencies in Gothic design. François Blondel criticized Gothic
designers for believing they were “entitled to add to the inventions of the Greeks and
the Romans.” Innovation was caprice; progress came through fidelity to the rationally
established principles of classical design. In the 1830s the pendulum swung vigorously
in the opposite direction. Now it was the Gothic aesthetic and medieval culture gener-
ally that seemed superior. A.W.N. Pugin, in his book Contrasts (1836), sought to show
how the churches of the late Middle Ages were vastly superior to the “pagan” archi-
tecture of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Gothic was the truly Christian
architecture: its pointed arches distinguish it from pagan design; the cruciform plan
(with chancel at the east end, nave to the west, and transepts representing the cross
bars) symbolizes the redemption achieved by Christ on the cross; the Trinity is sig-
naled by the triangular form of the pointed arches and by the subdivision of the build-
ings into sanctuary, choir, and nave; the resurrection is “beautifully exemplified by
great height and vertical lines.” Within a Gothic church, Pugin said, “a burst of glory
meets the eye,” which is quickly absorbed in the intricacies of the structure and fur-
nishings. Buildings of this sort could only be designed by those who themselves are
“thoroughly embued with devotion for, and faith in, the religion for whose worship
they were erected”; thus, Pugin and his successors saw the profession of the architect as
a sacred, nearly a priestly calling.
At roughly the time Pugin was writing in England, Viollet-le-Duc was developing
parallel theories in France that were equally important for the understanding of Gothic
revival architecture. While Pugin was interested mainly in the symbolic nature and
liturgical use of Gothic churches, Viollet-le-Duc had more interest in the Gothic as a
glory of French national culture and in the rationality of Gothic design.
Elsewhere, the nineteenth century brought an eclecticism of taste, a competition
among various revival styles, and (especially late in the century) a commitment to
building in several different styles as a way of signaling the universality of the Church.
A Romanesque revival was particularly significant in Germany but extended to England
and America as well: it was a simpler style than Gothic, compatible with the simplicity
of early Christianity, and more economical than the more ambitious and ornamented
Gothic.
Historicist revival was not limited to Christian circles; it was at least important
among Jews, who displayed a clear tendency toward eclecticism. In nineteenth-century
Germany, synagogues were built at first in neo-Classical style, then also in Egyptian
style (on the theory that Solomon’s Temple would have resembled Egyptian prototypes),

Byzantine, and other revival styles. Moorish style, with horseshoe arches and turrets
resembling minarets, pioneered by the Leipzig synagogue in 1858, was popular through
much of the Jewish world as a clear alternative to Christian styles, and as a reminder of
the relatively benign treatment Jews had received under Moorish rule. For those who
found these styles overly exotic, building in the Romanesque mode was a way of harking
to the specifically German traditions of Rhineland Judaism while still avoiding the more
clearly Christian Gothic style.
12.8 Modern Design and

Liturgical Reform
Rethinking of sacred architecture often takes place in the broader context of litur-
gical change, particularly when that change takes the form of self-conscious liturgi-
cal reform. An early example of this connection can be seen in Judaism. The Reform
movement that emerged among nineteenth-century German Jews was in large part a
reform of liturgical practice. Israel Jacobson, “the father of Reform Judaism,” saw the
synagogue service as “sickly” and weighed down by customary but “useless” prayers
and formulas that kill devotion. The movement introduced prayers and preaching in
the vernacular language, German. In Reform worship, prayers were more often said
by the congregation in unison rather than by individuals. Instead of having the con-
gregation gathered about the bimah, a platform at the front of the synagogue accom-
modated both the ark and the reader’s desk, with seats arranged in rows facing the
platform, as in the churches of German Christians the pews would face the altar and
the pulpit.
In the early twentieth century, liturgical renewal developed in Christian circles
and was sometimes linked with early Modernist architecture. Liturgical reform-
ers and Modernist architects both tried to find ways of encouraging fuller con-
gregational participation, and they sought to simplify churches, cutting back on
ornament and on devotional art that they saw as distracting from the essentials of
liturgy. The work of Rudolf Schwarz in Germany is particularly important because
it brings several dimensions of early Modernist church design into focus. Schwarz
was a friend and associate of Mies van der Rohe and shared his minimalist pro-
clivities in design. His Corpus Christi Church at Aachen is essentially a pure white
box, noteworthy on the interior chiefly for its pure luminosity. But Schwarz was also
close to Romano Guardini, a pioneer in liturgical renewal. As early as 1928, in col-
laboration with Guardini, he designed a chapel at Rothenfels Castle that gave early
manifestation to elements in church design that later became widespread: minimal-
ism of design, use of simple and moveable furnishings, and a preference for circu-
lar arrangement of seats to promote a consciousness of the community gathered
before God.

This impulse toward greater congregational participation was enshrined in the

Second Vatican Council’s “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy” (1963), which insisted
on “full, conscious and active participation” of the laity, but the Council was not specific
about how architecture should promote this end. In following decades the goal of partic-
ipation came to be expressed in terms of an aesthetic of hospitality: a church should be a
welcoming environment that makes people feel at home, gives them a sense of belong-
ing to the worshiping community, and encourages them to participate in the liturgy by
joining in the responses and hymns. Reformers disdained monumentality and formal-
ity. They sought flexible and asymmetrical arrangement of furnishings. They preferred
flat rather than pitched roofs, and more than one commentator suggested that a church
should resemble a living room where people would gather in celebration. The American
architect Edward Sövik and the Belgian monk Frédéric Debuyst were among the leading
advocates of such design. In 1993 the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued
Environment & Art in Catholic Worship, urging architects and planning committees
to design churches marked by mystery but also by “a climate of hospitality,” in which
“people are comfortable with one another, either knowing or being introduced to one
another,” and able to see each other.
Jews of the mid-twentieth century, like Christians, began to advocate worship and
architecture that were less formal and more clearly recognized the social dimension of
religion. One Jewish architect began designing synagogues that were described as “small
and friendly, radiating a warm atmosphere.” Eric Mendelsohn favored a building that
would be either “an inspiring place for festive occasions that lift the heart of man” or
“an animated gathering place for a fellowship, warming man’s thoughts and intentions.”
“Synagogue centers” became houses of assembly and not just of prayer, useful for cul-
tural, social, and recreational activities.
Advocacy of contemporary church design has often been grounded in a sense that
religion itself must always remain contemporary and must never be seen as antiquate.
Traditionalists, however, insist on something like revival styles as a way of declaring
fidelity to their particular religious tradition, insisting, for example, that modern design
is not suitable for specifically Catholic architecture. Among immigrant communities,
use of architectural styles traditional in the home country is a way of signaling fidelity
to that homeland. For that reason, several Hindu temples have been built in America
that closely resemble prototypes in India, just as Serbian Orthodox churches have often
been modeled on late medieval Serbian buildings. When it becomes more important for
immigrant communities to declare that they are living and contemporary, they too will
adopt modern architectural idiom, and thus, for example, there are strikingly modern
mosques in the West as well as in traditional Muslim countries.
Like the other issues sketched here—nostalgia for the Temple, concern with sym-
bolic meaning, replication of divinely ordained harmonies, and the rest—the debate
between reformers and traditionalists is a conflict over how a building should be
marked as sacred, and what it means to build specifically religious structures, eloquent
with symbolic meaning and effective in leading individuals and communities toward
spiritual goals.

12.9 Approaches to the Study of Sacred

Architecture
Study of religious architecture has been carried out from diverse perspectives. Churches,
in particular, have long been central to the agenda of architectural history. Traditionally
this discipline has centered attention on the correlation of architectural styles with
their cultural contexts. One classic of the genre is Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Meaning
in Western Architecture. Also illustrative of classic architectural history in this mode is
Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, which attempts to correlate the
phases of Gothic design with mental habits shared by theologians and philosophers. In
recent decades architectural historians have given fuller attention to the relationships
between architects and patrons, and the political as well as cultural agendas they bring
to building projects. Focused as it is on particular contexts, this is a mode of inquiry that
lends itself less to overviews and syntheses. Kathleen Curran’s study of The Romanesque
Revival illustrates the approach, demonstrating how the Romanesque in the nineteenth
century served the interests of certain monarchs as well as architects and churchmen;
Jaime Lara’s City, Temple, Stage examines early church-building in Mexico as part of a
project of missionary work in a colonial setting. To the extent that synagogues, mosques,
and temples have come within the field of architectural history, they too have been stud-
ied from these shifting perspectives.
The field of archeology has also made vital contributions to the study of religious
architecture in numerous religious traditions, from early Buddhist cave temples, to early
and medieval churches, and structures in pre-Columbian America. Particularly impor-
tant for the study of Judaism and related traditions is the complex question of when and
how synagogues came into being, a matter recently discussed in Lee Levine’s book The
Ancient Synagogue. While architectural history focuses mainly on the fabric of buildings
in relationship to textual evidence, archeology attends more to a range of material evi-
dence, often as the basis for reconstruction of building phases, but also as evidence for
cultural milieux.
Architects and promoters of liturgical reform within their own religious tradi-
tions have studied religious architecture from a polemical perspective since the
mid-nineteenth century. A. W. N. Pugin’s writings were classics in this genre, fol-
lowed in a later stage of the Gothic revival by the works of Ralph Adams Cram. In the
years around 1960, Peter Hammond and his collaborators argued the importance of
new architectural forms for a reformed liturgy: churches that would be contemporary
rather than revival-style, modest rather than monumental, and not distinct in form
from secular design. Debuyst and Sövik (already discussed) continued the effort to
define an architecture suited for renewed liturgy. A reaction set in toward the end of
the century, when architects such as Steven Schloeder and Michael Rose insisted that
Catholic churches must be faithful to Catholic tradition, and pilloried modern church
design for its banality and sheer ugliness. Theology in Stone, by the present writer, while

articulating its own theology of church architecture, has as part of its agenda mediation
between these reformers and traditionalists.
Relatively little work has been done on the study of religious architecture in specif-
ically comparative perspective. The notion of “sacred space” is one defined by theo-
rists of religion such as Mircea Eliade. J. G. Davies, Temples, Churches and Mosques,
is the best overview of the field. Harold Turner’s From Temple to Meeting House, a
polemical work arguing the superiority of the “meeting house” over the “Temple”
concept, is both phenomenological and theological; as a phenomenology of sacred
space it has relevance to comparative study. Lindsay Jones’s Hermeneutics of Sacred
Architecture, highlights dimensions of sacred structures that lend themselves to
comparison (buildings as microcosms of the universe, myths and miracles con-
nected with them, memorialization of the dead, pageantry, building-sponsorship as
offering, etc.), not necessarily those most relevant to the design and use of buildings
within any religious tradition.
Bibliography
Bryan, Christopher, et al., Sacred Spaces: Sewanee Theological Review, 49, no. 3 (Pentecost 2006).
Craven, Roy C., A Concise History of Indian Art (New York: Praeger, 1976).
Davies, J. G., Temples, Churches and Mosques: A Guide to the Appreciation of Religious
Architecture (Oxford: Blackwell; New York: Pilgrim, 1982).
De Breffny, Brian, The Synagogue (New York: Macmillan, 1978).
Frishman, Martin, and Hasan-Uddin Khan, eds., The Mosque: History, Architectural
Development and Regional Diversity (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1994).
Gruber, Samuel D., Synagogues (New York: Metro Books, 1999).
Hammond, Peter, Liturgy and Architecture (London: Barrie & Rockliff; New York: Columbia
Hammond, Peter, ed., Towards a Church Architecture (London: Architectural Press, 1962).
Hillenbrand, Robert, Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning (New York: Columbia
Humphrey, Caroline, and Piers Vitebsky, Sacred Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997).
Jones, Lindsay, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison,
2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for Harvard University Center for the
Study of World Religions, 2000).
Kieckhefer, Richard, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Kilde, Jeanne, When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture
and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Kramrisch, Stella, The Hindu Temple (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1946).
Meek, H. A., The Synagogue (London: Phaidon, 1995).
Mitchell, George, The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to its Meaning and Forms (London: Paul
Elek, 1977).
Norberg-Schulz, Christian, Meaning in Western Architecture, trans. Anna Maria Norberg-Schulz
(New York: Praeger, 1975).
Rice, David Talbot, Islamic Art, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1975).

Schloeder, Steven J., Architecture in Communion: Implementing the Second Vatican Council
Through Liturgy and Architecture (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998).
Torgerson, Mark Allen, An Architecture of Immanence: Architecture for Worship and Ministry
Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007).
Turner, Harold W., From Temple to Meeting House: The Phenomenology and Theology of Places
of Worship (The Hague: Mouton, 1979).
Wigoder, Geoffrey, The Story of the Synagogue: A Diaspora Museum Book (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1986).
Williams, Peter W., Houses of God: Region, Religion, and Architecture in the United States
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

C HA P T E R 13
V I S UA L A RT S A S WAYS O F
BEING RELIGIOUS
DIA N E A P O STOLO S - C A P PA D ONA
From the beginning of history, there has been an intimate relationship between reli-
gion and the visual arts. Characterized by multiplicity and diversity, this relationship
is almost impossible to define; a situation of considerable appropriateness given that
there is no universally accepted definition of art or religion. Simply enough, if a room
were filled with art historians or historians of religion each scholar would have a distinc-
tive definition of religion and of art, let alone of their interrelationship. This difficulty in
enunciating a universal definition should not be understood as a negative but rather as
a positive, as it opens to a variety of perspectives. The commonalities between religion
and the visual arts are multiple, from their ingrained presence in the human psyche to
their oftentimes indecipherable distinctions within a particular culture, to their cultur-
ally embedded survival in self-identified “secular societies.”
Historians of religion suggest that every religious tradition has chosen, consciously
or unconsciously, between the image or the word. Those religions that advocate the pri-
macy of the word can be characterized as being rational, legalistic, and theological in
nature; while those which opted for the image are intuitive, creative, and sacramental
in nature; that is, Calvinism in distinction to Eastern Christianity, Islam in distinction
to Hinduism. Traditionally, religious studies scholarship has been premised upon the
exegesis of a written text as the foundation for interpretation and conclusions. Such
disciplined readings of the canon resulted in the visual arts serving merely as illustra-
tions for textual explications. Further, the inclusion of the visual arts has raised more
questions for scholars of religious studies, especially in the West, where it has been the
common practice to study religion separate from the practice and the experience of the
visual arts.
For modern western scholarship more broadly, the relationship between religion
and the visual arts likewise proffers more questions than answers and presents a chal-
lenging dilemma, given the strong tendency to separate the study of religion from
the study of the visual arts, and to experience the visual arts as disconnected from

VISUAL ARTS AS WAYS OF BEING RELIGIOUS 221
religion. This schooled methodological principle was predicated on the movement

from the Enlightenment to the present day, of religious meaning from institutional to
non-institutional settings. As the foundation of modern culture moved from traditional
religion and religious values and the construction and maintenance of meaning, the
power of religious symbolism has diminished, if not completely disappeared. A reli-
giously illiterate society evolved as fewer and fewer people were either introduced to or
educated in the symbolic language traditionally used to communicate a culture and its
religious values, creating a crisis of meaning.
Students of religion and the visual arts need to learn how different societal groups and
cultures define art and religion, and their interrelationship. However, to examine and
explore the variety of modalities intrinsic to the study of religion and the visual arts, we
must consider first the questions, methodologies, and investigative positions of those
classic and contemporary scholars engaged in this multidisciplinary field.
13.1 The Sacrality of Images: An Overview

of Religion and the Visual Arts
A fundamental premise of religious art is the acceptance of the creative interplay

between image and meaning-making as an interaction between the human and the
divine. To paraphrase the phenomenologist of religion Rudolf Otto in his classic
The Idea of the Holy (1967), art encourages “an experience of the numinous,” as the
human sensibilities are awakened by an encounter with beauty and truth to the aes-
thetic dimensions of religious experience. Through its natural action of capturing
and freezing the meaning of a ritual or a religious experience, the visual arts promote
a reexperiencing of the original encounter. The visual arts are primary modalities
of religious communication as religiosity and spiritual intentionality are expressed
through imaging; appropriately, the unique characteristics of the individual arts
of paintings, sculpture, and photography reinforce religious beliefs, customs, and
values.
The primary modes for the visual arts in the practice of religion are in worship and
religious education. Whether as a central element of religious worship or religious edu-
cation, the visual arts transmit traditional narratives that communicate religious truths,
identify religious ideas and practices, and facilitate worship for both the individual
and the community. For example, consider Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. This rep-
resentation of a significant scriptural event in the life of Jesus of Nazareth was acces-
sible immediately to a Christian who was familiar with the biblical narrative and the
Sacrament of Eucharist. Thereby, this work of art functions within a defined religious
faith and to those familiar with that community’s beliefs and practices. Yet it provides an
entry for the “outsider” who comes to the historical study of Christianity or the analysis
of Christian art for the first time.

13.2 The Field of Study known as Religion

and the Visual Arts
The study of Religion and the Visual Arts is by its very nature not interdisciplinary but
multidisciplinary. The methodologies and the nature of the questions these inquiries
incorporate is both stimulating and awesome. The troublesome reality is that no single
or even common methodology exists in this field, whether one is speaking specifically
of religion and the visual arts within a specific religious tradition, such as Buddhism,
or in terms of religion as a more general category. Rather, investigations of theologi-
cal, religious, or sacred arts are premised on preliminary analyses of either symbols and
signs, content and meaning of the art forms, or the creative process. The visual arts are
accepted as cultural manifestations of the Sacred as the vocabularies and methods of
multiple disciplines, including but not limited to art history, iconography and iconol-
ogy, church history, history of religions, and ritual studies, initiate the dialogue and
analysis. The question, then, of how to begin the study of religion and the visual arts,
relates directly to the lens through which each individual scholar observes, experiences,
and comes to know religion and the visual arts.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the traditional modes of analyses for the study
of religion and the visual arts were first and foremost iconography followed by symbolism
(either overt or disguised), history, liturgy, theology, philosophy (specifically aesthetics),
phenomenology, and iconology. However, from the 1970s forward, the critical questions
became the principle and lens for the newer modes of analyses from the questions raised by
the then emerging categories of “the marginalized” to gender, the body, class, and response
theory. The newest modes of analysis include those categories and questions related to the
new academic fields of study, including material culture, popular culture, performance and
display, visual culture, and museum studies. The operative principles here are simple and
straightforward: there is no formal or accepted methodology for this specific field of study,
therefore a scholar’s primary training shapes the lens through which she sees and uncon-
sciously defines her approach in the analysis of these materials. Further as a topical area
integral with concerns relating to the human body, the experience of religion, and the tradi-
tion of text-based scholarship, religion and the visual arts research is open to these “new”
ideas and modes of analysis, such as deconstruction, postmodernism, and gender.
13.3 A Diversity of Methodologies for

Religion and the Visual Arts
The absence of an identifiable methodology for this field of study is problematic given
the range of disciplinary methods that become elements in the study of religion and
the visual arts. These varied methodologies include but are not restricted to: history, art

history, church history, cultural history, cultural studies, gender studies, philosophy,
theology, liturgy, history of religion, and ritual studies. The primary point of departure
is the initial methodology and interpretative lens that a scholar is taught first to use. As
one’s work in this field progresses, its multidisciplinary nature becomes apparent as the
investigator is engaged by the variety of perspectives and materials.
Principal subjects for inquiries include historical relationships; religious attitudes
toward the image (or icon or idol); religious attitudes toward the veneration of images;
categories of the visual arts in world religions; characteristics of the visual arts in world
religions; religious responses to the visual arts; the visual arts in religious worship;
changing cultural attitudes toward religion, and toward art; and changing cultural and
religious attitudes toward the body and gender.
13.4 History of the Study of Religion

and the Visual Arts
The study of religion and the visual arts has no clear historical event or person to iden-
tify as the beginning of this form of analysis. More likely than not, this study began
with those mid-nineteenth-century texts on the theme of “the history of the history
of Christian art” by such diversely trained, or self-trained, writers as Alexis-François
Rio, Alfred Lord Lindsey, and Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson. Their publications,
especially Mrs. Jameson’s enormously popular books and serialized texts, initiated an
appreciation of the history and meaning of Christian art, especially as artistic objects
exemplifying moral values and good taste.
As “popular” texts on the signs and symbols of Christian art continued in the late
nineteenth century, the academic discipline of the history of religions emerged in the
German university system and other late nineteenth-century cultural events, including
the Chicago’s World Fair and the Parliament of World Religions, which created a climate
of intellectual and public interest in other religions, especially those in Asia. Historians
of these religions peripherally studied the visual arts as additional venues toward under-
standing Hinduism and Buddhism. Simultaneously, the academic discipline of art his-
tory was being codified in several European universities, and scholars recognized that it
was impossible to study medieval or renaissance art, or any historical division of west-
ern culture, without referencing religion and religious art. Further, it was impossible to
study the visual arts of the so-called Orient—India, China, and Japan—without knowl-
edge of their religious traditions. So from its very beginnings, the study of religion and
the visual arts was bifurcated and multidisciplinary.
Two twentieth-century historians of religion laid the groundwork for the contempo-
rary evolution of the study of religion and the visual arts. The phenomenologist of reli-
gion, Rudolf Otto, discusses the importance of art in his aforementioned classic The Idea
of the Holy. For him, there are experiential commonalities, thereby bonds, between reli-
gion and art. Authentic religious experience is beyond normal or rational descriptions.

Art in its own non-rational modes of communication and sensory perceptions facili-
tates religious experience. Although Otto does not venture into a comparison between
aesthetic and religious experiences, or any discussion of the creative process, he does
suggest the crucial importance of such realities when he tells us that the experience of
art can bring us to the silence, awe, wonder, and fear we know before the numinous.
These moments provide meaning and orientation, and transcend rational experiences.
The historian of religion, Mircea Eliade extends the boundaries of Otto’s discussion
to include a description of the envisioning of the otherwise invisible Sacred through
the visual arts. A direct connector to the Sacred, art was absolutely necessary to rituals
and religious ceremonies. Eliade understood art as embedded in world cultures and in
human universal unconscious through the visualization of symbols and images. Art and
the artist represented an enduring conduit for the manifestation of the Sacred even in
mundane “secular entertainments.” Art was a significant connector to the creation, ini-
tiation, and renewal of human experiences of the Sacred.
These two historians of religion identified the profound relationship between religion
and the visual arts as important to the study of religious experience, meaning, and val-
ues by envisioning and making accessible the myths of origins and the stories of ini-
tiation of all world religions. The visual arts, according to Otto and Eliade, provided an
additional lens through which to find and comprehend religion, and to grapple with the
meaning inherent in human existence.
There have been three points of origin in the study of religion and the visual arts—
art-centered, religion-centered, and religions-and-art-centered. These points of origin
relate directly to the initial lens with which a scholar begins research. The below-noted
scholars are only a representative handful of those art historians, church historians, his-
torians of religion, and theologians who have ventured into this investigative minefield
of religion and the visual arts.
Art-centered investigations: Scholars in this category include art historians, critics,
and aestheticians who analyze the religious art of one tradition, as, for example Stella
Kramrisch’s work on Hindu art and architecture, André Grabar’s texts on Christian art
and iconography, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi’s study of Zen Buddhism art, and Oleg Grabar’s
books on Islamic art and architecture. Art historians, especially those engaged in the
story of Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance art, recognized the centrality of religion
to their scholarly investigations. I am identifying these scholars as being “art-centered”
as their analyses, studies, and investigations begin from a fascination with the work of
art. Central to such examinations are the issues of how and why this work came to be,
and its symbols and imagery in relation to its cultural and historic context, as evidenced
in the writings of Émile Mâle, Suzuki Daisetz, Erwin Panofsky, and Otto von Simson.
Additionally, there is a concern for the creative process, not simply in terms of the com-
parisons to the spiritual experience, but in relation to the intrinsic energy and power of
the visual arts to fascinate, awe, and communicate, as attested to in the texts of Rudolf
Arnheim and Martin Heidegger.
Religion-centered investigations: Scholars in this category include art historians,
church historians, and theologians, who study the religious art(s) of one tradition,

as, for example, in Jane Daggett Dillenberger’s publications on Christian art, John
Dillenberger’s books on Christian art in the context of church history and theology, and
John W. Dixon Jr.’s studies of the theological impulse in Christian art. These scholars
are “religion-centered” as their analyses, studies, and investigations originate from the
theological impulse or religious character of works of art. Central to these studies are the
issues of how theology or a religious teaching affected the making and symbolic content
of a work of art, and the reading of its symbols and imagery in relation to the theologi-
cal context, as evidenced in the writings of Walter Lowrie, Charles R. Morey, and Roger
Hazelton. Additionally, there is a concern for the creative process, not simply in terms
of the comparisons to the theology, but in relation to the intrinsic character of the visual
arts to communicate theological ideas, as discussed in the texts of Jacques Maritain and
Nicholas Wolterstorff.
Religions-and-art-centered investigations: scholars in this category include
art historians, historians of religion, and aestheticians who emphasize a com-
parative study of the visual arts of two or more religions, as, for example, Titus
Burckhardt’s comparative studies of Hindu, Christian, and Islamic arts; Ananda
K. Coomaraswamy’s investigations in Christian and Hindu arts; and S.G.F.
Brandon’s texts on comparative rituals and iconography. These scholars are
“religions-and-art centered” as their analyses, studies, and investigations begin with
comparative analysis of two or more religious traditions, with the work of art as a
centering point. These works identify either the universality of the religious impulse
through art or a comparative analysis of the employment and reading of the symbols
and imagery, as evidenced in the writings of Mircea Eliade, Albert C. Moore, and
more recently, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. Additionally, there is a concern for
the place and meaning of the art of the world’s religions in relation to the intrinsic
energy and power of the visual arts to fascinate, awe, and communicate, as attested
to in the texts of André Malraux and F.S.C. Northrop.
The academic and interpretive questions raised by those scholars who represent “the
marginalized,” that is women, homosexuals, the middle and lower classes, and racial
and ethnic minorities were among those previously either ignored or minimized by
investigators prior to the 1970s. The opening toward understanding the cultural history
of women, and its impact on scholarship and society, is categorized under the rubric
of feminism, and attested to in the work of Margaret R. Miles and Celia Rabinovitch.
Similarly, scholarly interest is currently given to the visual arts that influenced, shaped,
and were formed by the middle and lower classes, involving the new disciplinary catego-
ries of material culture, popular culture, and visual culture, as emphasized in the publi-
cations of David Morgan and Colleen McDannell. Additionally, there have begun to be
books and exhibitions related to the religions and arts of the so-called “third world” as
found in the works of Rosemary Crumlin, Thomas Cummin, and Kenneth Mills. The
study of religion and the visual arts has benefited from the response theory delineated
by the art historian, David Freedberg, and the concepts of optics/vision, human emo-
tions, and the religious meaning of the visual arts in the stimulating studies of art histo-
rian and critic James Elkins.

13.5 Critical Questions in the Study of

Religion and the Visual Arts
Beyond the fundamental questions “what makes art religious?” and “what makes reli-
gion artistic?” are a myriad of factors in the study of religion and the visual arts. First,
there is the recognition that the visual arts, regardless of the medium, are neither benign
nor neutral. The visual arts are culturally embedded and thereby reflect past cultural his-
tories, connect to current cultural attitudes, and predict emerging cultural values. The
crucial question is the starting point—does one begin with an individual work of art or
a group of works, with an artist or a group (school) of artists, with a specific historical or
religious event, a new doctrine, or a singular motif?
The newer categories of ethnicity, class, race, and gender claim attention in the
analyses of the visual arts, especially pluralism and globalization. Contemporary
events raise the questions of the loss of religious art due to natural disasters, war, and
violence. Contemporary concerns include the collecting and display of religious art in
public museums and special exhibitions, thereby in settings and for purposes beyond
those religious criteria for which they were created. Is the integrity of sacred art com-
promised when it is taken out of its context and re-situated in a glass case in another
city or nation?
13.6 Relationships between Religion

and the Visual Arts
As the visual arts provide primary evidence for the understanding of religion, and for
the documentation of the history of a religion, they merit our attention to the creative
interplay between image and meaning. These multiple relationships may be character-
ized by five forms of the relationship between religion and the visual arts: dominance,
antithesis, reciprocity, division, and (re-)unification.
Whenever religion subjugates the visual arts, this is a relationship of dominance.
There is no room for artistic creativity, individuality, or originality; rather the visual arts
become simply visual propaganda. If the visual arts and religion are in postures of equal
authority, that is, when neither is subservient to or dominates the other, the relation-
ship is categorized as antithesis. Another formula for co-dependence is the relation-
ship of reciprocity; this is when religion and the visual arts, being of equal status in a
culture, work closely together in a symbiosis of spiritual nurture and creative inspira-
tion. Traditionally those religious traditions characterized as iconoclastic or cultures
whose arts are identified as strictly “secular” exemplify the relationship of division.
Finally, there is (re-)unification when religion and the visual arts become fused into one

identity, when it is impossible to distinguish the space in which the visual arts begin and
the religious traditions end.
There is no consistent historical or cultural attitude toward the visual arts in any reli-
gion. Attitudes can be said to vary within the same religious tradition and among dif-
ferent religious traditions within the same cultural or geographic identities. In his now
classic Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art (1963), the phenomenologist of reli-
gion Gerardus van der Leeuw analyzed Christianity as being “within” each of these cat-
egories—dominance, antithesis, reciprocity, division, and (re-)unification.
13.7 How Religion Sees the Visual Arts
All religions have established attitudes toward the visual arts and therefore to images.
Religions can be characterized by their attitude toward acceptance, advocacy, or denial
of images. For example, the sacred arts are central to the practice and teachings of
Buddhism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Hinduism; whereas Islam, Judaism,
and the majority of the Reformed Protestant traditions diminish or deny the visual arts
in worship and ritual space; and Advaita Vedanta and Lutheran Christianity advocate
ambivalent attitudes toward the visual arts, let alone sacred art. Such attitudes can be
characterized as iconic, aniconic, or iconoclastic. Advocating the use of images, a reli-
gion with an iconic attitude interprets the image as a representational or anthropomor-
phic figure predicated upon a perceived and known reality. This iconic attitude can be
seen in the mosaics and manuscript illuminations of Early Christianity or the narrative
sculptures of Hinduism.
The aniconic attitude interprets images as symbolic or allusional presentations of
reality. Avoiding the representation of the human form, aniconicism proffers a cryptic,
oftentimes idiosyncratic, symbolism that facilitates devotion, worship, and contempla-
tion. This aniconic attitude is exemplified in the abstracted but geometric designs in the
decorative carvings on the walls and capitals of mosques or the elegant calligraphy of a
Buddhist monk. The total rejection of the image, whether figural or symbolic, charac-
terizes the iconoclastic attitude that in its most extreme form destroys all imagery. This
iconoclastic attitude promoted the sophisticated simplicity of the clear glass windows
in the earliest Reformation churches, and the poetry and liturgical music of traditional
Judaism.
The historical variations of relationships within a religion toward the visual arts reveal
variants in attitudes toward the image. Many world religions have multiple perspectives
on the image: iconic, iconic to iconoclastic, iconic to aniconic, aniconic to iconic, ani-
conic to iconoclastic, or iconoclastic. Some religions like Buddhism have advocated all
of these attitudes throughout their historical evolutions. Similarly, Hinduism in all its
multiple manifestations originated with an aniconic attitude toward the image while
it slowly assimilated images into worship and religious practice, and ultimately estab-
lished a religious iconography composed of representational and symbolic elements.

As individual religions evolved, the attitude toward the image and the religious role
of the visual arts was transformed. A simultaneous variety of attitudes toward images
may be found within a single tradition, as, for example, in the diversification of Islam
and Buddhism. Some art is impossible to categorize, for example, the Muqarnas, or sta-
lactite decorations in Islamic architecture, identified by different voices as either “beau-
tiful form” or the multiplicity of God’s unity. For example, Buddhist art was affected
both by iconoclastic attitudes (e.g., Zen teachings and practice) and by aniconic atti-
tudes (e.g., earliest Buddhist teachings). As Buddhism became formalized, its bifurcated
attitude toward the image wavered between the iconic and the iconoclastic even to the
ceremonial creation and then ritual destruction of mandalas that contained iconic and
aniconic forms.
Traditional or written teachings, dogmas, or creeds may specifically prescribe or pro-
scribe a religion’s attitude toward the visual arts. A bifurcation may exist between the
otherwise appropriate theological position promoted by the hierarchy and the praxis of
the laity; as for example in the case of the Zen Buddhist master who creates elegant cal-
ligraphy as a reflection of his own meditation process while he denies the Zen novice any
form of imaging in his meditation.
13.8 How Religion Interprets the

Visual Arts
Images identified as sacred garner that distinction either from a naturally inherent
spiritual presence or from an act or ceremony of consecration. An image categorized
as “venerable” is holy or sacred in and of itself, and thereby deserving of respect and
adoration. The fundamental sacrality of such images is distinguished from humanly
inspired and produced works. Acheiropoietai (from the Greek for “not made by hands”)
are a singular group of sacred images which believers know to be divinely inspired
and divinely produced. Discovered either fully formed in nature, acheiropoietai, such
as many images of Buddha or Śiva or “hidden” images of mother/fertility goddesses,
such as the Black Madonnas and more recently, the Virgin of Guadalupe, are believed
to have “fallen” from the sacred to the earthly realm. Another group of images believed
created by direct divine imprint on cloth include the legendary Mandylion of Edessa
and the Christian apocryphal Veil of Veronica. A third sub-category of these singular
and inherently sacred images were those contemporary portraits for which the sacred
person posed and for which the artist may have been a holy person; for example, the
sandalwood images of the Buddha reputed to have been carved in his actual presence,
and the icons of the Theotokos and Child painted by Luke the Evangelist.
The miraculous image is another category of sacred image that merits adoration and
respect while receiving votives and gifts regularly from believers. Capable of perform-
ing miracles, particularly the healing of illnesses, ailments, and physical disabilities; the

dissipation of obstacles; and the conception and healthy birth of children to previously
barren women, these miraculous images include such well-known miracle workers as
the Black Madonnas and the Hindu “remover of obstacles,” the elephant-headed deity,
Ganeśa. Those miraculous images, which produce tears or aromatic scents, stream
oil or blood, or emit a glowing light as signs of reassurance or omens of disasters, are
understood by devotees as visual conduits of sacred power and energy; one example is
the renowned twelfth-century icon of the Theotokos of Vladimir. Certain miraculous
images, such as the icon of the Theotokos Hodegetria from Constantinople, were prayed
to in moments of impending invasion or disasters, so the preservation of the city and
the conditions for a good harvest revealed the inherent sacrality of the image and its
sacred power.
Some religious images require consecration by an external power such as the divin-
ity, holy persons, or the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Such consecration rites imbued divine
energy into the religious image, thereby making it worthy of adoration and respect.
Any religious image, such as an icon of Theotokos Treheroussa or a manifestation of the
bodhiśattva Avalokiteśvārā, might still require ecclesiastical approval and consecration
after the Christian or Buddhist collective of believers has accepted it as venerable and
having miraculous powers.
Sacred images become the object of specific behavior and attitudes by devotees after
the consecration. The viewing of the sacred image becomes in and of itself an effica-
cious ritual, which in Roman Catholicism and Hinduism results in the ceremonial acts
of the elaborate ornamentation and dressing of these objects. Offerings, ranging from
aromatic incense to objects precious to the believer, are presented to the sacred images,
either on significant festivals or following the fulfillment of the devotee’s plea. In a man-
ner similar to the ritual consecration of kings with precious oils and holy water, sacred
images are anointed with consecrated liquids, either holy water, precious oils, milk,
or melted butters, to both cleanse and honor the Sacred. Believers may kiss the sacred
image as they intone prayers before it, or offer prayers from positions of prostration,
such as kneeling or laying flat on the ground. Processions both incorporate and honor
the sacred image by extending the ritualized boundaries of sacred power and blessings
throughout the processional areas.
13.9 How Religion Understands the

Visual Arts
One of the primary purposes of the visual arts in religion is to transmit religious instruc-
tion by depicting the major tenets and stories of a faith tradition through representa-
tional imagery and symbols; such a didactic or pedagogical design is termed “visual
theology.” The visual arts that present the postures or modes of liturgical actions or
which are beautiful objects integral to religious ceremonies are deemed to be liturgical,

sacramental, or ritualistic in nature, and are categorized as “visual liturgy.” The category
of “visual contemplation” identifies those works of art which evoke or nurture individual
prayer or are the source of personal devotions. The visual arts characterized as “visual
mysticism” provide a spiritual orientation as the imagery supports or transports the
believer into a moment of transcendence and temporary unity with the divine. “Purely
symbolic” works of religious art employ motifs or symbolic imagery to transfer teach-
ings and religious meaning in a manner accessible only to the initiated. The aesthetic
dimensions of religious experience for either an individual believer or the community
may be found in the visual arts otherwise described as “purely decorative,” as is perhaps
true of the geometric patterns of Islamic carvings and mosaics or the elegant line of cal-
ligraphy. Finally, religious art can be a combination of any of all of the above categories,
that is, the same work of art may be symbolic and liturgical or didactic and mystical.
13.10 How Religion Describes the

Visual Arts
By the regular transmission of stories and doctrines through representational paint-

ings and sculptures, the visual arts provide religious instruction in a variety of settings,
depict scenes from sacred stories, and portray important religious figures and episodes.
Thereby, the visual arts are defined as religious for several reasons, beginning with the
characteristic of religious subject-matter and/or iconography. The topic may be the nar-
ration of a scriptural lesson, the presentation of a sacred person, or the depiction of a
religious image within the traditional requirements of a particular faith.
Typically, one of the significant identifiers of religious art is its function. By illustrat-
ing through visual symbols or representational imagery, or through bodily postures and
gestures a story or dogma of a religious tradition, the visual arts are categorized as hav-
ing the function of religious pedagogy. Similarly, those objects employed by priests or
religious officials in a sacramental manner or as part of a religious ceremony, such as
illuminated holy books or chalices, can be characterized as having a religious function.
The location or the placement of the visual arts—inside a temple or on the wall of a
church—identifies the art as religious. Such locations will vary from religion to religion,
from country to country, but will range from a temple, synagogue, cathedral, monas-
tery, and mosque to a tomb or shrine; thereby ecclesiastical, monastic, ritual, and/or
sacred site.
The commissioning of a work of art for use in an ecclesiastical, liturgical, sacramen-
tal, devotional, contemplative, or catechetical activity or space, will qualify it within the
realm of religious art whether the patrons be religious, monastics, or lay people.
The final consideration in the descriptor “religious art” is the definition of the artist
and his or her spirituality. How the artist is defined, the relationship between the art-
ist and his/her art, between art and personal spirituality, and ultimately, between the

aesthetic and spiritual experiences, are distinctive within each world religion and cul-
ture. Whereas the modern western view is to argue for the distinction between artist
and art, whereby a non-believer could create works for religious community, the more
typical pattern is that the artist is a believer and practicing member of a religious com-
munity, and that through his or her art has dedicated him- or herself to a spiritual path.
Thereby, the creative process is a religious ritual that begins with an act, or period, of
spiritual cleansing, including intense prayer, abstinence from sexual relations, and fast-
ing. A traditional series of forms, symbols, colors, and motifs are defined, for each reli-
gious image is a code book and must be adhered to in order to garner the descriptor,
“religious art.”
13.11 How Religion Responds to the

Visual Arts
How and why we respond to a work of art, especially a work of religious art, varies in
terms of our own belief system and how we religiously define the image. As the embodi-
ment of the Sacred or the divine, a religious image would allow for immediate and
permanent access to the deity. However, for such a response, one’s religious belief com-
mitment must include the primary sacred nature and the power of images. Should the
deity only reside or visit the image temporarily, then although the image endures for the
ages, the divine presence is fleeting. Even though the sacred presence has left the scene,
the image remains as a primary aid for personal devotion and prayer, and as a visual
remembrance of divine activity. The religious image becomes a visual reflection of the
divinity’s existence rather than an embodiment or temporary receptacle of the Sacred.
This image then becomes a centering point for prayer, worship, meditation, or religious
experience. However, many believers see the image as simply a starting point for their
individual “goal,” which is to transcend materiality in order to ascend to a mystical state
of imageless union with the divine. Further, some believers will be able to respond to
images only as pedagogical instruments, not as relevant for personal prayer, devotions,
or mystical experiences. Iconoclasts deny the intermediary role of images, as the icon-
clast communicates directly with the divine. Whether motivated by fear of idolatry or
sensuousness, or a simple distrust of images, iconoclasts believe it is their individual
responsibility to deny, if not to destroy, images.
13.12 New Directions
As contemporary scholars and students of religion and the visual arts struggle with the
perpetual questions of “what makes a work of art religious?” and “what makes religion

artistic?,” their frames and boundaries for modes of analyses and subject have shifted
away from works of art created in a vacuum to the cultural contextualizing of religious
art. One of the current challenges for the field of religion and the visual arts is the rec-
ognition that the “objects” we study have in the majority of cases been separated from
their original context—worship, ceremony, and ritual—and that their original locations
were in religious settings. Currently, we examine these works through the exhibition
cases and galleries of museums, or perhaps even worse, reproductions on the Internet.
By divorcing these arts from their original contexts, we deny them and ourselves the
recognition of the power and energy they exuded. We need to incorporate the charac-
teristics of their ritual, ceremonial, liturgical, or devotional use and to garner as much as
possible the recognition of their original power to inspire religious feeling and to guide
devotional practices. We need to raise critical questions as to the collecting, presenta-
tion, and display of the sacred in museums, special exhibitions, and performances out-
side of these objects’ original locations.
Another contemporary consideration must be the questions, if not better identified
as the challenges, raised by those contemporary arts that incorporate imagery or themes
problematic to religious authorities, transform traditional religious symbolism as a cri-
tique of religion, and represent questionable (sexually explicit, demonic, occult) motifs.
Careful study may affirm that the gauntlet these artists have thrown at the thresholds of
institutional religions is similar to those challenges presented by earlier generations of
religious artists. The other side of the proverbial coin requires scholarly attention that is
the reception of such works by the religious community(ies) and more important, the
response of the religious community(ies) to those arts that have been determined to
be dangerous or controversial, as for example voiced by the protests over the 1999 exhi-
bition, Sensation, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in which Chris Ofili’s painting The
Holy Virgin Mary (1996) included elephant dung or the protests over the assimilation
of Christian, Islamic, and “terrorist” imagery in two of the entrants for the 2007 Blake
Prize in Religious Art.
The contemporary challenge of globalization and religious pluralism is heightened by
the realization that our culture is preoccupied with a new visual language and symbol
system. This “visual (religious) culture” is predicated on daily technological advances,
the availability of the “information highway,” and the accessibility of digitization, as
well as a desire to retrieve the history and identity of religious traditions. The current
“morphing” of previously identifiable religious codes into either a pluralistic imagery
or visual nostalgia raises the importance of disciplined discernment of what were once
recognizable visual codes and religio-aesthetic values. For example, consider the intro-
duction of commercial symbols such as the Dove soap insignia, price label, and GE logo
superimposed by Andy Warhol onto his 1986 re-visioning of Leonardo da Vinci’s The
Last Supper, or Ofili’s employment of the Rhesus monkey in his 2005 installation work,
The Upper Room.
To further the dialogue between religion and the visual arts, we need to establish a
new language and methodology specifically designed to examine religiousness of the
visual arts and the artisticness of religion. Significantly, such a language and method

would include analysis not simply of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and prints but
of all the visual arts, and of all of the visual arts experienced and interpreted iconologi-
cally. Following the path of the magisterial art historian, Erwin Panofsky, I have come to
understand iconography as a carefully rendered description of an image or art form that
emphasizes symbolic analysis; while iconology is an explanation of an image or art form
within the context of the culture—social, political, religious, and engendered—that pro-
duced it. Interpretation and meaning are understood thereby to be dependent upon the
unity that undergirds and emerges from diversity. The visual arts are an imaged reflec-
tion, prophecy, and witness to human experience, as well as an expression of culture and
religion.
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C HA P T E R 14
F I L M A N D V I D E O A S WAYS
OF BEING RELIGIOUS
ROBE RT K . JOH N STON
14.1 Re-Framing Religion and Film
Cinema Paradiso (dir. Tornatore) and Bull Durham (dir. Shelton) both screened for the
first time in 1988.1 The first, which won an Academy Award in 1990 for best non-English
language film, tells the story of a young Italian boy, Salvatore, who loves the movies and
eventually becomes a famous director. The second, which many consider the best base-
ball movie produced to date, recounts the fictional story of how minor league pitching
sensation Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) is tutored by Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon)
and Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) into the big leagues. Both movies are “love” stories—
the real objects of affection being film and baseball respectively. But both films are also
more. As their stories unfold, these films offer trenchant observations about obstacles
to religious faith for which organized religion bears particular responsibility, as well as
quasi-religious possibilities for viewers to explore. Whether art house cinema or major
studio release, both movies invite religious dialogue and response. Here is the starting
point for any discussion of religion and film. The discipline might have had an initial
flowering in the sixties, focusing upon dialogue between Christianity and the European
cinema of such luminaries as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Luis Bunuel. But
contemporary criticism today embraces both “high art” and popular culture.
Bull Durham opens with baseball “groupie” Annie Savoy heading for the ballpark.
Her thoughts, which viewers hear in a voiceover, provide the audience the film’s the-
matic center. The game of baseball is going to function metaphorically, the film’s story
operating simultaneously on several levels. Annie reflects:
I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions and most of
the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees,
mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads

FILM AND VIDEO AS WAYS OF BEING RELIGIOUS 239
in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave
Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on
me. . . . You see, there’s no guilt in baseball, and it’s never boring. . . .
What was advertised in the trailers as being merely light entertainment, a movie about
“sex and baseball,” turns out on closer viewing also to be writer/director Ron Shelton’s
meditation on the nature of religious communities, their failures and possibilities. For
Shelton, unlike attendance at a baseball game, going to church has produced too much
guilt and it’s too often boring. Rather, the church’s love for God should result in the same
celebration, discipleship, and eschatological projection (e.g., the “big leagues”) that is
evident in Crash and Annie’s commitment to Nuke and the Durham Bulls.2
In Cinema Paradiso, Salvatore (Toto) reminisces about his childhood friend Alfredo,
the projectionist at the local theater “The Paradiso.” While church services put Toto to
sleep, movies captivate him, and Alfredo becomes his mentor. The young, impression-
able Toto peeks into the theater as the local priest censors all motion picture kisses from
coming attractions by ringing his bell to cue the projectionist. At the end of the film,
Salvatore, now a famous filmmaker, returns home for Alfredo’s funeral, receiving as a
bequest, a gift from the projectionist. It is a montage of all the movie kisses the church
forced Alfredo to excise. As Salvatore watches these wonder-filled moments, viewers
share with him a rich joy, tinged with sadness. How could the religious establishment be
blind to such ordinary, yet luminescent pleasures?
For all their obvious differences (e.g., tone, setting, genre, language, style) Bull
Durham and Cinema Paradiso share a common theme. Both films move through a nega-
tive judgment on organized religion to invite viewers to understand life anew from out
of the religion-like possibilities of play—whether movie-going or baseball.3 And these
movies’ interest in religion is anything but unique. In fact, the list of spiritually themed
movies has been burgeoning. In 1999, for example, these included The Matrix (dirs.
Wachowski and Wachowski), The End of the Affair (dir. Jordan), American Beauty (dir.
Mendes), The Sixth Sense (dir. Shymalan), The Third Miracle (dir. Holland), Dogma (dir.
Smith), Run Lola Run (dir. Tykwer), Magnolia (dir. Anderson), Fight Club (dir. Fincher),
Being John Malkovich (dir. Jonze), Go (dir. Liman), The Green Mile (dir. Darabont), and
Jesus’ Son (dir. Maclean), to give only a partial list.4
With Theodor Adorno, one can critique the culture industry, bemoaning commer-
cialism’s impact on film.5 With Margaret Miles, one can fear that spectators are being
seduced by representations that reinforce political and cultural ideologies and preserve
negative stereotypes.6 With Neil Postman, one can judge the Western world as simply
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1986). But one also finds in Hollywood and her worldwide
partners important expressions of spiritual vitality that invite religious dialogue and
appropriation. Film is a resource for ongoing religious reflection and experience that is
increasingly being recognized.
Interest in “religion and film” is at an all-time high. In colleges, universities, and semi-
naries, courses in the field are proliferating, publishing on the topic has mushroomed,7
and media discussion is ubiquitous. Churches and synagogues regularly use video,

DVD, and film clips to help congregants better connect God’s story to their own. Where
in the later half of the twentieth century the study of religion and literature garnered
the most interest among the various options in religion and the arts, it is religion and
film that has assumed that mantle as we have moved into the new millennium. Why
this interest? One can answer in at least three ways: 1) culturally, 2) existentially, and
3) theologically.
Culturally. Movies are ubiquitous. Over 95 percent of all Americans saw at least one
movie last year, more than double the number who read even one book. In 2005, the
average American saw forty-five movies. Ask any group of Americans whether they
have seen Schindler’s List (dir. Spielberg), or Finding Nemo (dirs. Stanton and Unkrich),
and the overwhelming majority will answer “Yes.” The importance of film is not just
an American phenomenon. India, Japan, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, China, South
Korea—all have thriving film industries. Titanic (dir. Cameron) was seen in rural Ghana
as well as in New York City. Mitchell Stephens, in his book The Rise of the Image, The Fall
of the Word (1998), documents the past shifts in world culture from oral communication
to written to print, and now recognizes we are moving to a video/image-based culture.
He is correct. Movies are close to a $50 billion industry; and advances in streaming tech-
nology continue to transform the distribution systems, making a wider number of films
available to a growing number of people. Across a wide range of cultures, movies are
providing people their common myths and stories.
In saying this, it is important to realize, as well, that a reprioritization of contempo-
rary values is taking place, with motion pictures playing a crucial role. Hollywood is
both shaped by and has become a shaper of current understandings of life’s meaning
and values. One can argue the particulars, but Tom Beaudoin is surely correct in his
recognition that in western culture today, people tend to (1) be suspicious of institu-
tions, (2) value experience, (3) recognize the relevance of suffering, and (4) admit the
centrality of ambiguity.8 Beaudoin’s observations, made in 1993, were in reference to the
attitudes and values of “Gen Xers.” But they can as easily be viewed as a description of
countless movies today [e.g., American Beauty (dir. Mendes), Stranger Than Fiction (dir.
Forster), Little Miss Sunshine (dirs. Dayton and Faris)]. Was film the genesis of these
perspectives, or the reflector of regnant cultural beliefs? It is both.
Existentially. The former poet laureate of the U.S.A. Carl Sandberg once com-
mented: “I meet people occasionally who think motion pictures, the product
Hollywood makes, is merely entertainment, has nothing to do with education. . . . [But]
anything that brings you to tears by way of drama does something to the deepest roots of
our personality.”9 Here is the experience of countless filmgoers. Thus, an emerging focus
of scholars working in the area of religion and film today is the transformative spiritual
experience that film potentially has. Viewers continue to share stories of profound, tran-
scendent moments that happen, whether watching Magnolia (dir. Anderson) or March
of the Penguins (dir. Jacquet), Juno (dir. Reitman) or Garden State (dir. Braff ), Raging
Bull (dir. Scorsese) or Field of Dreams (dir. Robinson), Life as a House (dir. Winkler) or
Life is Beautiful (dir. Benigni). Critics and scholars do likewise. For Roger Ebert, it was
the Japanese movie Ikiru (dir. Kurosawa) that spoke to the core of his being.10 For Jeffrey

Overstreet it was The Story of the Weeping Camel (dirs. Davaa and Falorni).11 For Greg
Garrett, Pulp Fiction (dir. Tarantino).12 For Andrew Greeley, Places in the Heart (dir.
Benton).13 For Robert Johnston, it was the film Becket (dir. Glenville).14 Film has the
ability to touch the deepest recesses of the human spirit, to provide audiences imagina-
tive possibilities, to usher viewers into the presence of others and the Other.
Scholarship in the area of religion and film over the last decade has found such
“viewer-oriented” criticism particularly fruitful as they have explored the religious
significance of film. Clive Marsh’s Cinema & Sentiment (2004), Gareth Higgins’ How
Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Footprints in Culturally Significant Films
(2003), and Craig Detweiler’s Into the Dark: Seeing the Sacred in the Top Films of the 21st
Century (2008) are representative of such criticism that focuses on the transformative
possibilities of film.
Theologically. Culturally central and existentially transformative, film is also theo-
logically important. From the perspective of Christian theology, one could say that it
helps viewers discern the work of the Spirit, both in themselves and in the wider culture.
In his film Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman has one of his characters speak of the
arts as providing “supernatural shudders.” Here is what film can do. Yet, Christian critics
have too seldom asked what filmgoers can know of the divine outside of our particular
community of faith. Nonetheless, given the multicultural and multi-religious world in
which we now live, such questions are of increasing importance, including the theologi-
cal role that the arts might play.
Unfortunately, Christian theologians have chosen to focus their attention almost
exclusively on “redemptive” history, rather than noting the existence of divine revelation
outside the believing community and its Scripture. Yet a careful reading of the bibli-
cal text invites a theologically more inclusive perspective. The sayings of Agur and the
words of King Lemuel’s mother that are recorded in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures
in Proverbs 30 and 31, for example, are proverbs written by those outside of the believ-
ing community. Yet, they have been received by these traditions as inspired, sacred text.
Readers of scripture might also note the words and actions of Melchizedek (Genesis
14), Abimelech (Genesis 20), and King Neco (2 Chronicles 35). Turning to the New
Testament, one notes Paul addressing the multi-religious world in Athens by building,
not on his Jewish roots, but on the wider spiritual insights of the Athenians. In Acts 17, he
compliments the people of Athens for being “extremely religious,” given their worship of
an “unknown God,” and goes on to quote with approval the classical poets Epimenides
(“in him we live and move and have our being”) and Aratus (“For we too are his off-
spring”). Here are theological models for those seeking to traverse the distance between
their own specific spiritual teachings and the spirituality of those outside their own wor-
shipping communities. It was Robert McAfee Brown who used still another of those
texts highlighting God’s revealing presence outside the believing community (Isaiah
10) to speak of contemporary storytellers as “Assyrians in modern dress.”15
It is not to these texts, however, that Christians engaged in religion and film criticism
have most often turned for theological direction, even though they could be seen as par-
adigmatic. Instead, Christian religion and film scholars have more typically considered

Jesus’s repeated use of parables as foundational to their own work. From the earliest
days of religion and film dialogue, reference has been made to movies as modern-day
parables. Writing in 1911, Herbert Jump, a Protestant minister, argued that, like the par-
ables of Jesus, contemporary movies are rooted in everyday life, realistic with regard to
evil, exciting in their depiction, and open-ended in their telling, allowing for ambiguity
to remain as they come to a close.16 Since this early pamphlet, film’s comparison with
religious parables has become almost ubiquitous (cf., for example, West African videos
being labeled “moral parables”). Movies, like parables, capture their viewers’/hearers’
attention by focusing on what is not often seen, causing those present to observe life in a
new way.
14.2 Historical Developments
Although many of the early experiments with film had religious themes (at least seventy
movies based on biblical stories were shot prior to WW1, and the first movie in Australia
was shot by the Salvation Army for their religious services), and though Christian sanc-
tuaries were often used to screen cinema in the early days, particularly on Sundays when
American Blue Laws prohibited exhibition elsewhere, by the 1920s, the industry’s rising
commercialism and increasing sensationalism caused opposition to Hollywood from
within the Christian church to mount. Thus from an original naiveté toward the movies
and an openness for dialogue, there developed in many religious communities a suspi-
cion and, at times, outright hostility.
Since those early days a century ago, it is possible to identify five types of responses
the Christian church has had toward the movies. (With religion and film criticism less
developed among other religious traditions, it is yet to be worked out whether such a
typology might be adopted more widely within other traditions.) All of these responses
continue up to the present within Christianity and all find biblical foundation, academic
exploration, and ecclesiastical support. But these responses can also loosely be said
to follow a chronological ordering: (1) “avoidance” was most typical in the 1930s/’40s;
(2) “caution” in the 1940s/’50s; (3) “dialogue” in the 1960s/’70s; (4) “appropriation” in the
1980s/’90s; and (5) “divine encounter” as we have now entered the new millennium.
Avoidance. Bryan Stone, author of the book Faith and Film: Theological Themes at the
Cinema (2000), recalls, “I grew up in a conservative Christian [Protestant] denomina-
tion that taught that it was wrong to go to the movies. The cinema was spelled s-i-n-ema,
and Hollywood, we were taught, was an industry that was as opposed to Christian val-
ues as anything could be.”17 Herbert Miles’ Movies and Morals (1947) and Carl McClain’s
Morals and the Movies (1970) are typical of books that argued for a blanket condemna-
tion of all films. Such rhetoric is less common today, though it can be found. More typi-
cal is the selective boycotting of films judged particularly objectionable. Often, those
films thought unacceptable and to be avoided have treated a religious theme in what
is considered an objectionable, even blasphemous, manner [e.g., The Last Temptation

of Christ (dir. Scorsese), Dogma (dir. Smith), The Passion of the Christ (dir. Gibson),El
Crimen del Padre Amaro (dir. Carrera), The Magdalene Sisters (dir. Mullan)]. But other
films have been rejected as simply morally offensive, lacking larger significance or even
redemptive irony.
Caution. With the advent of television and the possibility of viewing movies in one’s
home, “avoidance” became less tenable a solution to the perceived sensationalism and
materialism of the cinema. Typical are the stories of those, following World War II,
whose first movie was a Disney film, or later, The Sound of Music (dir. Wise). “Caution”
was still called for, and for some, it remains. For Michael Medved, a faithful Jew, while
Hollywood might function within a contemporary cultural consensus when it comes
to values, it is also always pushing the ethical envelope. Movies, he thinks, too often
promote promiscuity, bash America, stereotype church and synagogue, and gravitate
toward violence.18 It is, however, not just those on the social and religious “right” that
remain suspicious toward cinema. Margaret Miles, a liberal Protestant, also denounces
Hollywood for the way it shapes our culture’s attitudes. Her concerns, however, are
largely distinct from Medved’s. Miles criticizes much of Hollywood for reinforcing and
extending harmful attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexual orientation through
its use of stereotypes and symbolic markers.19
Dialogue. It was during the sixties that Americans increasingly came to recognize the
excellence of European “art house” films, those directed by such “auteurs” as Ingmar
Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Luis Bunuel. The result was
an initial collection of books in religion and film coming mainly from denominational
publishing houses that sought to encourage among their congregants a dialogue with
cinema.20 It was no longer possible to dismiss movies as “mere entertainment”; conver-
sation was called for.
Such religious/theological dialogue with film has continued into the present, mov-
ing ever more strongly into the academy. Particularly noteworthy are Joel Martin and
Conrad Oswalt’s Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American
Film (1995), a book that spans the spectrum of both religious and theological studies;
Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz’s edited volume, Explorations in Theology and Film: Movies
and Meaning (1997), a book that brought together theologians and biblical scholars
with film and media specialists; and Roy Anker’s Catching Light: Looking for God in the
Movies (2004), which sets perhaps a new critical benchmark for analysis of film texts
through its discussion of selected Academy Award-winning movies. Worthy of men-
tion, as well, are the significant number of intertextual studies between the Bible and
film. Representative are Larry Kreitzer’s The New Testament in Fiction and Film: On
Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, (1993), Robert Jewett’s Saint Paul at the Movies (1993);
Adele Reinhartz’s Scripture on the Silver Screen (2003), and Robert K. Johnston’s Useless
Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary Film (2004). With classes in reli-
gion and film scattered across a variety of academic fields, it is not unusual for faculty in
biblical studies to also both write and teach in the field.
Appropriation. “Dialogue” often focuses its attention on the film text and its engage-
ment with other religious texts. “Appropriation,” on the other hand, concentrates on

film’s effect on the viewer, on the potential religious significance of movie-watching for
the receptor. At the 2001 Conference on Religion and Cinema at Princeton University
the experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky spoke of his almost forty-year commit-
ment to the creation of a “devotional cinema,” one that had “the potential to be trans-
formative, to be an evocation of spirit.” Dorsky suggested that a movie’s shots and
cuts—its montage, the juxtaposing of absolute and relative time, the uncompromising
and self-confirming “present” of a film, the illuminated room—all contributed to pro-
ducing “health or illness in an audience.”21 That is, it was not simply a movie’s theme, but
also its images that worked to create transformation in the viewer.
Initially, it was those in the Roman Catholic tradition who were more likely to
explore theologically such a hypothesis with regard to religion and film. Catholicism’s
orientation to “image”—to sacrament over word, together with its comfort in locat-
ing God in the everyday messiness of life, allowed Roman Catholic scholars to con-
sider the religious possibilities of film-watching more easily than those from other
more word-oriented traditions. Neil Hurley’s book Theology through Film (1970)
is one such early work. Andrew Greeley, writing in God in Popular Culture (1988),
argued that with film studies, it is not primarily the ideas, but a sacramental sense
of awe and wonder that makes a movie religiously significant. Leaning heavily on
the work of David Tracy and his book The Analogical Imagination (1981), Greeley
suggested that film’s power to capture the viewer, both through its vividness and its
concentration of perspective, gave it a sacramental potential unrivaled in other art
forms. Later examples include Richard Blake’s AfterImage (2000), Andrew Greeley
and Albert Bergesen’s God in the Movies (2000), and John May’s edited book, New
Image of Religious Film (1997).
Although Roman Catholics might have been more inclined to see film sacra-
mentally, by the nineties such a concern had crossed denominational and religious
boundaries. Worthy of note is the Protestant David Dark’s Everyday Apocalypse: The
Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons and Other Popular Culture Icons (2002).
Dark finds in the films of the Coen brothers, as well as in The Truman Show (dir.
Weir) and The Matrix (dirs. Wachowski and Wachowski), apocalyptic visions that
open out into epiphanies. Perhaps the best academic discussion of film’s spiritual
significance in viewer’s lives is Methodist theologian Clive Marsh’s aforementioned
Cinema & Sentiment: Film’s Challenge to Theology (2004). The book argues that
cinema-going is a spiritual discipline that shapes one’s pattern of living by helping
to develop thoughts, feelings, and aesthetic and moral sensibilities. According to
Marsh, films provide narratives in which viewers find themselves and make choices
concerning how they might live.
Divine Encounter. As the millennium approached, Western culture evidenced
an increased interest in spirituality. And the momentum has continued to grow.
It should not be surprising, therefore, as John May perceptively has commented,
that from an earlier concern with the “morality” of film (cf., above the catego-
ries of “avoidance” and “caution”), those engaged in the field of religion and film
then turned to the explicitly “religious elements” of film and to one’s theological

conversation with film more generally (the category “dialogue”), and now more
recently to a focus on the “humanistic” (the category “appropriation”) and the “aes-
thetic” (what I am labeling “divine encounter”). It was the latter, May wrote in 1998,
that would prove the most fruitful arena for current exploration.22 Time has proven
May correct.
Movies have, at times, a sacramental capacity; they can provide viewers an experience
of transcendence, as the discussion above suggests. Perhaps the most influential book
that has wrestled with the Transcendent in film is that by the screenwriter and director
Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film (1972). Written as his masters’ thesis, the vol-
ume explores the “sparse” cinematic style of three classic directors—Ozu, Bresson, and
Dreyer—and finds in their long takes and slow camera movement, their repeated use of
silence and restrained acting and editing, a “common expression of the Transcendent
in motion pictures.”23 More recently, filmmaker and theologian Craig Detweiler’s
Into the Dark: Seeing the Sacred in the Top Films of the 21st Century (2008) makes use
of the Internet Movie Database’s (IMDb’s) Top 250 Films to explore how “God speaks
through people, places, and experiences outside of Scripture, specifically, within the
feature-film-going experience.”24 Noteworthy as well is Gerard Loughlin’s exploration
of film to “attain to the power of religious parable, to the austerity of the great icons, and
itself become the occasion of hierophany.”25 Influenced by the Russian Orthodox film-
maker Tarkovsky, Loughlin believes film can be more than mere metaphor conveying
spiritual truth. Rather, film can become iconic, allowing the invisible to be glimpsed in
the visible.
For each of these five approaches to religion and film, one notes within the Christian
tradition both ecclesial expression and biblical analogue. While there is in practice
much variety and overlapping of “types,” even by the same individuals, generaliza-
tions can still be made. Many fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches teach “avoid-
ance”; Baptist and conservative evangelical churches tend to counsel “caution”; those
Protestant churches in the Reformed tradition are apt to encourage “dialogue”; main-
line Protestant churches, “appropriation”; and Roman Catholics, “divine encounter.”
Similarly, Christian scholars seeking biblical warrant for their positions might turn to
I John as teaching “avoidance” and the epistles of Paul for a posture of “caution,” while
the Book of Proverbs provides models of “appropriation.”
14.3 Leading Figures and Works
In addition to the writers and works referenced above, mention can be made of
other scholarship that has been influential in this young field. During the eight-
ies and nineties, John R. May and Michael Bird’s collection of essays, Religion in
Film (1982) was widely used by students and scholars alike. Particularly helpful
was Bird’s use of the theologian Paul Tillich’s idea of “belief-ful realism,” together
with Mircea Eliade’s discussion of “hierophany.” Influential as well was May’s

adaptation of three theoretical approaches from the interdisciplinary conversation

between religion and literature then going on (“heteronomy,” which judged film by
an outside discrimen; “theonomy,” which found in a wide cross-section of film an
expression of humankind’s “ultimate concern”; and “autonomy,” which looked for
the artistic analogue of religious and theological concepts). For both writers, mov-
ies were understood as visual stories open both to religious interpretation and to
appropriation within the faith experience. More recently, Robert K. Johnston’s Reel
Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue (2000, 2006) has become a standard text
in the field. Grounded in both an understanding of the power of filmic narrative and
the relevance of film for Christian theology, the book centers its discussion on film
as a story told through image, word, and music that invites ethical and theological
response. Offering an overview of the field both historically and bibliographically,
as well as testimony to the power of film to shape viewers’ lives, the book provides
perspective on how to respond to movies aesthetically, theologically, and ethically.
Although scholarship in the field has up to the present been dominated by Western
Christianity, the landscape is changing. Greater use of world cinema and more dia-
logue with other religious traditions is increasingly evident. Three recent introduc-
tions to the field demonstrate this interest in widening the discussion: John Lyden’s
edited volume, Routledge Companion to Religion and Film (2009); William Blizek’s
edited work, The Continuum Companion to Religion and Film (2009); and Jolyon
Mitchell and Brent Plate’s The Religion and Film Reader (2007). Particularly notewor-
thy is Lyden’s volume. Written by leading scholars in the field, the book’s first section
offers a history of the intersection between religion and film, focusing on Western
Christianity (certainly the dominant religious tradition in the field up to the present).
The volume then turns to explore significant present critical approaches to the field
(feminism, audience reception, cultural theory, psychoanalysis, theology) and offers
how a wide variety of religious traditions are depicted in fi lm (Judaism, Christianity,
Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, postcolonial religious syncretism, Japanese religions,
new religious movements). In this way, Lyden’s volume broadens the focus of its read-
ers to include two critical growing edges for the discipline. Finally, the volume ends
with a discussion of such fruitful categories of critical reflection as narrative, apoc-
alyptic, redemption, superheroes, horror, Christ figures, and ethics. The book will
become a standard reference in the field.
Blizek’s volume is in some ways similar to Lyden’s. While recognizing the prepon-
derance of present dialogue between Christianity and film, it too provides chapters
on film and a variety of religious traditions (Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish,
Muslim, Indigenous, and more generic spirituality), as well as chapters on topics
commonly addressed in the field (Jesus movies, Bible movies, holocaust movies,
redemption, the afterlife, God, karma, the end of days, evil, etc.). However, central to
this book is its editorial commitment for each chapter to concentrate centrally on a
description of relevant film texts themselves. The book thus provides an encyclope-
dic overview of over one thousand worldwide films that invite religious engagement.
Interesting, as well, is the book’s intention not only to look at films that embody or

express various religious traditions, but to consider how eight different religious
traditions might provide interpretive windows into films not explicitly dealing with
their traditions.
Lastly, the strength of Mitchell and Plate’s anthology is also its multicultural per-
spective, with multiple resources taken from Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as the
Americas. Moreover, the diversity of the book’s purview is broader than geography,
including scholar and filmmaker, film studies and religious studies, biblical connec-
tion and theological dialogue, everyday life and the mystical, religion in film and film as
religion.
Research and writing in the field of religion and film can perhaps be divided into
two broad camps—those working in theological studies and those rooted in reli-
gious studies, with theological studies being perhaps the more prevalent. Among
theological forays in the field, Christopher Deacy’s Screen Christologies (2001) and
Gerard Loughlin’s Alien Sex (2004) are two of the best. The first explores film noir as
expressive of the Christian idea of redemption [e.g., Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (dir.
Scorsese)]. The latter explores the body and desire in both cinema and theology by
offering a methodologically complex, yet provocative, series of jump cuts between
film texts, theology, Scripture and philosophy. Loughlin argues that a dispossessive
desire with regard to our sexuality is of theological and ethical importance. Seeking
an alternative approach to that of theological criticism, John Lyden’s Film as Religion
(2003) uses the insights of religious studies to help readers understand the function
movies play in constructing a “religious” world, one involving myth, ritual, and social
values. In the book, Lyden points to the power of film in shaping people’s beliefs, val-
ues, and feelings.
Recently, a number of scholars have argued that the contours of religion/theol-
ogy and film have been too narrowly drawn. The boundaries need to be widened to
include such areas as critical studies and religious history. Melanie Wright in her book
Religion and Film: An Introduction (2007), for example, seeks to better engage film qua
film than scholars in theology and film studies have typically done. She argues against
eliding film’s meaning into narrative and explores how a cultural studies approach
to religion and film that engages film criticism more centrally might foster a greater
credibility in the field through taking film more seriously. Gordon Lynch, in his semi-
nal work, Understanding Theology and Popular Culture (2005), argues in perhaps a
more balanced way for the use of critical approaches rooted not only in theology/
religious studies and film, but in critical studies and in the sociology of religion. He
believes that theological readings of film can be strengthened by a consideration of
debates concerning contemporary cultural values and beliefs, just as studies in popu-
lar culture can avoid an indiscriminately celebratory style by employing more rigor-
ously a process of evaluation rooted in theological traditions and methods. Finally,
Terry Lindvall, in his books, The Silents of God: Selected Issues and Documents in Silent
American Film and Religion 1908-1925 (2001) and Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the
Christian Film Industry (2007), has sought to put the discussion of religion and film
into its larger religious and historical contexts, providing an historical foundation for

the current debate. As all three of these writers recognize, the interdisciplinary study
of religion and film must broaden by becoming a multidisciplinary endeavor, if it is to
fulfill its initial promise.
14.4 Contemporary Issues

and Directions
Studies in religion and film are in their infancy, yet interest in the field continues to bur-
geon. As the first doctorate in film studies was not offered until the 1960s, with uni-
versity studies in film production and in film criticism remaining largely distinct, and
at times even at odds, there are at present more questions than answers as to how best
to study film. Add religion/theology to the mix with its differences real and perceived,
and one only increases the unresolved questions exponentially. Among the many issues
needing further study are the following: (1) How can critical study best move beyond a
literary dependency when discussing film’s narrative to embrace image and music in
addition to word? (2) Are some movies more “religious” than others? And how can one
understand the spiritual experience of a viewer? (3) How might movie-watching move
from a problem to be negotiated to an ethical and spiritual resource to be mined?
Image, Music, and Dialogue. Although some have criticized the discipline of religion
and film for concentrating too exclusively on film narrative (Nolan),26 there is reason to
question whether that is really the problem. The heart of cinema is still story. The issue
has more to do, perhaps, with an adequate understanding of what makes up film nar-
rative—image, sound, and word. Film story has too often been (mis)understood by a
univocal use of literary paradigms, centering film criticism solely on a narrative’s script
without adequate recognition of the visual or aural aspects of a film’s storytelling. Movies
are, after all, both “pictured” and “heard.” Music enhances narrative, projects emotion,
and provides pace, shape, and coloring, in this way aiding the meaning-making pro-
cess.27 The visual elements of a movie (lighting, cinematography, editing, set design)
similarly convey meaning, focusing attention and shaping the viewer’s perspective. The
next generation of religion and film criticism must rest on a firmer tripod with image
and music joining dialogue as primary conveyors of meaning.
An example can clarify the importance of developing a more full-orbed critical
approach to film’s storytelling. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia ends with Aimee
Mann’s plaintive song “Save Me” (“If you could save me / from the ranks of the freaks /
who suspect they could never love anyone . . . come on and save me”) filling the theater.
We see Jim going to Claudia, a young woman who has suffered sexual abuse at the hands
of her father. With the camera looking over Jim’s shoulder at Claudia, we faintly hear
Jim’s voice through the song, saying, “You are a good and beautiful person.” The cam-
era remains focused on Claudia as she struggles to accept his gift of love. Miraculously,
Claudia smiles briefly as the movie ends. After over two and one half hours of heartache,

grace is experienced by viewer and film character alike. Script is insufficient to convey
this movie’s rich meaning. Camera angle, lilting voice, heartfelt words, an unexpected
smile—image, music, and dialogue come together to create meaning and invite spiritual
transformation.
Experiencing Transcendence through Film. Influenced by Paul Schrader’s semi-
nal work on transcendental style in cinema, religion and film studies have some-
times focused on a small group of mainly European directors (e.g., Bresson, Dreyer,
Kieslowski, Tarkovsky, von Trier) whose minimalist style has been viewed as central in
expressing that which lies beyond ordinary perception. For Schrader and his follow-
ers, though there are no surefire religious techniques that can be identified from across
the centuries, austerity and asceticism usher in the Transcendent more readily, not exu-
berance and expressionism. Schrader argues that filmmakers need to employ “sparse”
and not “abundant” means, for the divine is wholly other (the Wholly Other!). But is
this correct? Does not the silence of the monastery find its complement in the glossola-
lia of Pentecostal worship? Cannot the abundance of “too many” pictures, “too much”
sound, or “too human” a storyline also transport the receptor? There seems simply to be
a plurality of styles and genres in film that have ushered viewers into the presence of the
Other (see the testimonies of those above). The “sparse” is one possible style, but the dis-
cussion needs broadening. Are some movies more likely to create transcendent experi-
ences? The testimony of viewers would seem to indicate this. But in this, what is the role
of style? theme? content? genre? More work remains to be done.
There is the need, as well, to consider what goes into a “transformative viewing.”
What is the role of the viewer as one seeks to understand how a film might prove “spiri-
tual” in significance? Perhaps the medieval, four-fold method of biblical interpretation
might prove useful as a paradigm for religion and film studies.28 Dante and Flannery
O’Connor both applied such an interpretive strategy to reading literature. But further
work is needed to discover whether this hermeneutic might adequately describe a film-
goer’s spiritual experience as well. Early Christian exegetes believed that multiple levels
of meaning could unfold in the reader from out of a single text (a particular story [the
literal] could become my story [the allegorical], and our story [the tropological, or ethi-
cal], and even God’s story [the anagogical, or spiritual]).
Consider the experience of those who saw Field of Dreams (dir. Robinson) and were
captivated by the simple storyline. Somehow, they found themselves identifying with the
story of Ray Kinsella to such a degree that they were moved to reach out to an estranged
parent. Some even testified that they felt God nudging them to do this. Many still make a
pilgrimage to northeastern Iowa to visit the movie’s cornfield.
Film as Ethical and Spiritual Resource. As Jolyon Mitchell suggests, in religion
and film criticism, “ . . . cinema is now often portrayed not as a problem to be negoti-
ated, but more as a resource to be mined.”29 Though true, problems remain. In the
church, some still wrongly use the ratings system (which was meant to help viewers
decide age-appropriate movie selections) as a “moral compass,” confusing it with the
Production Code of yesteryear. They reject “R” rated movies based solely on their con-
tent (e.g., language, violence, sex), irrespective of a film’s larger intention or meaning.

Within the academy, there are parallel issues. Many still understand popular culture
to be simply manipulative of the spectator, providing a false sense of happiness. They
believe filmgoers to be little more than cultural dupes, distracted by the trivia of an
industry controlled by consumerism. Both ignore the fact that viewers still exercise
discernment, sometimes needing to watch movies with an “oppositional gaze” (bell
hooks),30 but always being able to bring their own cultural and theological viewpoint
into conversation with a given film’s perspective. Even more fundamentally, critics both
in the church and academy fail to understand the power of movies to help viewers see a
wide range of life’s possibilities and to respond authentically.
Work remains as to how best to mine cinema’s ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual mother
lode. By directing viewers to a wide range of possible interpretations of life’s meaning,
movies assist viewers in engaging in common dialogue over what is good, true, and
beautiful. Movies take their audience into new territory, focusing their attention on one
of life’s many possibilities. What is called for in the viewer is a “patience,” a willingness
to first look and listen, while seeking to enjoy, before turning to describe, evaluate, and
judge. Too often those in religion and theology end up “using” film’s story for other ends,
rather than first “receiving” it. In his insightful monograph, An Experiment in Criticism,
C. S. Lewis observes, “We are so busy doing things with the work [in the present context
the movie] that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet
only ourselves.”31 One need not be “indiscriminately celebrative.” As with all art forms,
some movies are trash; others are manipulative; still others, confused and confusing.
But many films open viewers honestly to life, if they will but look and listen. There is
often hidden beneath a story’s surface a resonance of meaning that invites one’s reflec-
tion and transformation. Here is the heart of all work in religion and film.
Notes
1. I would like to thank the Henry Luce Foundation for a generous grant that allowed
initial research for this chapter to be done. The discussion of these two favorite movies
first appeared in somewhat altered form in a preliminary report on the first phase of that
research. Cf., Robert K. Johnston, “Re-Viewing Hollywood and the Church,” Theology
News & Notes 52, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 2.
2. The movie opens celebratively with Annie walking into the ballpark where a clown is
providing pregame high jinks, families are sitting together and laughing, and a caring
community is present. As the movie continues, Annie and Crash function as trainers and
“disciplers” to Nuke. Their responsibility is to make him all he can be. And the goal in all
this is singular, getting to the “big leagues” (heaven) one day. For the director’s own take on
this, see Rick Grant, “Ron Shelton: The Door Interview,” The Wittenberg Door (January–
February 1998): 4–6.
3. Cf., Robert K. Johnston, The Christian at Play (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983).
4. Cf., Barry Taylor and Craig Detweiler, A Matrix of Meaning: Finding God in Pop Culture,
167–68.
5. Cf., Theodore Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture.

6. Cf., Margaret Miles, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies.
7. In 2004 and 2005, the journal Communication Research Trends devoted two entire issues to
an annotated bibliography of the field written by Terry Lindvall that stretched ninety pages.
8. Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X.
9. Carl Sandberg, quoted by Robert Konzelman, Marquee Ministry: The Movie Theater as
Church and Community Forum, 13.
10. Roger Ebert, “Preface,” in Albert J. Bergesen and Andrew M. Greeley, God in the Movies, vii–ix.
11. Jeffrey Overstreet, Through a Screen Darkly, 16–40.
12. Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to Hollywood, xiii–xv.
13. Andrew Greeley, God in Popular Culture, 245–249.
14. Robert K. Johnston, Reel Spirituality, 37–39.
15. Robert McAfee Brown, The Pseudonyms of God, 96–103.
16. Herbert W. Jump, The Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture (New Britain, CT: South
Congregational Church Private Distribution, 1911), reprinted in Terry Lindvall, The
Silents of God: Selected Issues and Documents in Silent American Film and Religion,
1908–1925, 55–56.
17. Bryan Stone, Faith and Film: Theological Themes at the Cinema, 5.
18. Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America.
19. Margaret Miles, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies.
20. Cf. William Jones, Sunday Night at the Movies (1967); Stanford Summers, Secular Films
and the Church’s Ministry (1969); Konzelman, Marquee Ministry; James Wall, Church and
Cinema: A Way of Viewing Film (1971); and Roger Kahle and Robert Lee, Popcorn and
Parable (1971).
21. Nathaniel Dorsky, “Devotional Cinema,” in Mary Lea Bandy and Antonio Monda, eds. The
Hidden God: Film and Faith, 261, 264.
22. John R. May, “Religion and Film: Recent Contributions to the Continuing Dialogue,”
Critical Review of Books in Religion 9 (1996): 105–121.
23. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, 10.
24. Craig Detweiler, Into the Dark: Seeing the Sacred in the Top Films of the 21st Century, 34.
25. Gerard Loughlin, “Spirituality and Film,” 302.
26. Steve Nolan, “Understanding Films: Reading in the Gaps,” 25–48.
27. Cf. Barry Taylor, “The Colors of Sound: Music and Meaning Making in Film,” in Robert
K. Johnston, ed., Reframing Theology and Film: New Focus for an Emerging Discipline, 51–69.
28. Robert K. Johnston, “Transformative Viewing: Penetrating the Story’s Surface,” in Robert
K. Johnston, ed., Reframing Theology and Film: New Focus for an Emerging Discipline, 304–321.
29. Jolyon Mitchell, “Theology and Film,” in David F. Ford with Rachel Muers, eds., The
Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, third edition, 753.
30. Cf., bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, 122–123.
31. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 85.
Selected Bibliography
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1991.
Anker, Roy M. Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2004.

Bandy, Mary Lee, and Antonio Monda, eds. The Hidden God: Film and Faith. New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 2003.
Barsotti, Catherine M., and Robert K. Johnston. Finding God in the Movies: 33 Films of Reel
Faith. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004.
Baugh, Lloyd. Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film. Kansas City, MO: Sheed &
Ward, 1997.
Beaudoin, Tom. Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
Bergesen, Albert J., and Andrew M. Greeley. God in the Movies. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 2000.
Blake, Richard. Afterimage. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2000.
Blizek, William, ed. The Continuum Companion to Religion and Film. (New York: Continuum,
2009.
Brown, Robert McAfee. The Pseudonyms of God. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972.
Christianson, Eric, Peter Francis, and William R. Telford, eds. Cinema Divinite: Religion,
Theology and the Bible in Film. London: SCM Press, 2005.
Clarke, Anthony J., and Paul S. Fiddes, eds. Flickering Images: Theology and Film in Dialogue.
Oxford: Regents Park College, 2005.
Dark, David. Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other
Pop Culture Icons. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2002.
Deacy, Christopher. Screen Christologies: Redemption and the Medium of Film. Cardiff: University
of Wales Press, 2001.
——. Faith in Film: Religious Themes in Contemporary Cinema. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.
Detweiler, Craig. Into the Dark: Seeing the Sacred in the Top Films of the 21st Century. Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008.
Flesher, Paul V. M. and Robert Torry. Film & Religion: An Introduction. Nashville: Abingdon,
2007.
Fraser, Peter. Images of the Passion: The Sacramental Mode in Film. Westport: CN: Praeger,
1998.
Garrett, Greg. The Gospel according to Hollywood. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2007.
Greeley, Andrew. God in Popular Culture. Chicago: Thomas More, 1988.
Higgins, Gareth. How Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Fingerprints in Culturally
Significant Films. Lake Mary, FL: Relevant Books, 2003.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
Hurley, Neil P. Theology through Film. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Jewett, Robert. Saint Paul at the Movies: The Apostle’s Dialogue with American Culture. Louisville,
KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993.
——. Saint Paul Returns to the Movies: Triumph over Shame. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1999.
Johnston, Robert K. Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue, second edition. Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006
——, ed. Reframing Theology and Film: New Focus for an Emerging Discipline. Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker Academic, 2007.
——. Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary Film. Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2004.
Jones, G. William. Sunday Night at the Movies. Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1967.
Kahle, Roger, and Robert E. Lee. Popcorn and Parable. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1971.
Konzelman, Robert G. Marquee Ministry: The Movie Theater as Church and Community Forum.

Kreitzer, Larry J. The New Testament in Fiction and Film: On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow.
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Lewis, C. S. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Lindvall, Terry. “Religion and Film, Part I: History and Criticism” and “Religion and Film: Part
II: Theology and Pedagogy.” Communication Research Trends 23, no.4 (2004): 3–44 and 24,
no. 1 (2005): 3–40.
——. Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry. New York: New York University
Press, 2007.
——. The Silents of God: Selected Issues and Documents in Silent American Film and Religion
1908-1925. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001.
Loughlin, Gerard. Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
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Miles, Margaret. Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies. Boston: Beacon, 1996.
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2005, 736–759.
—— and S. Brent Plate, eds. The Religion and Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Nolan, Steve. “Understanding Films: Reading in the Gaps,” in Flickering Images: Theology and
Film in Dialogue, ed. Antony J. Clarke and Paul S. Fiddes. Oxford: Regent’s Park College,
2005, 25–48.
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the Movies. Ventura, CA: Regal, 2007.
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Reinhartz, Adele. Scripture on the Silver Screen. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003.
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(Originally published, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1972.)
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Stone, Bryan P. Faith and Film: Theological Themes at the Cinema. St. Louis, MO: Chalice
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PA R T I I I
R E L IG IOU S WAYS OF B E I N G
A RT I S T IC

C HA P T E R 15
J U DA I S M A N D L I T E R AT U R E
I L A N STAVA N S
Judaism is a prophetic religion that centers on the written word. Text is not only the
medium through which the divine word is delivered to humankind in the Hebrew Bible
(known as Torah), but it is the conduit through which the entire legalistic system around
which Judaism rotates is established. Plus, the written word serves as the depository of
collective memory. That memory comes in the form of storytelling, which in biblical
Judaism acquires two presentations: Torah She’Beal Peh, the oral law or tradition; and
Torah She’Bemichtav, the written law or tradition. The centrality of text in Judaism has
persisted for millennia. Nowadays, the entire Jewish ritual has words as its gravitation
force: not only reading but interpreting them. Accordingly, Jews are called “the people
of the book.” Their role in the shaping of Western Civilization, also with text at its core,
is thus essential.
This chapter explores the role literature—and text—play in Judaism from the Hebrew
Bible to the present. It is concerned not only with how the idea of literature for Jews
has changed over time but how technology has made the written word ubiquitous. It
addresses how the readership has mutated and the way translation has made Jewish lit-
erature global. Finally, the chapter meditates on the transition between the written word
and the graphic image as literary agents.
The Torah (the Five Books of Moses, plus the various books about prophets and some
related material like the plight of Esther, as well as the assortment of “wisdom litera-
ture” that includes the Book of Psalms, the Song of Songs, and the narratives of Job and
Ecclesiastes) is an anthology of stories relating to the formation of Israel as a nation.
That formation is presented as a cosmic phenomenon: it begins as the world is created
as a storyline and it shall end when the world is redeemed and the storyline reaches its
conclusion.
The very act of creation (Genesis 1:3) manifests itself as a linguistic device when God
utters words to make things happen and soon after approves those creations with a form
of verbal consent. Adam, the first man, is given the capacity of speech (Genesis 2:19). He
uses that capacity to name the universe he inhabits. The plight of the three patriarchs
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is offered in anecdotal fashion as announcement of the core

scene, one with text as its base: the story of Moses, at the climax of which a legal codex,
known as the Ten Commandments, is handed down from Mount Sinai to the people
of Israel (Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21). The narrative of this encounter
between God and his people serves as the medulla of Jewish history. In equal measure,
the formation is the nation of Israel as a kingdom, from the anointment of Saul as king
(Samuel 1 and 2) to the Babylonian (Ezekiel and Jeremiah) and Roman exiles (described
by historian Josephus in his chronicle The Wars of the Jews).
In exilic Judaism, a period starting with the destruction of the First Temple in 586
BCE and the Second Temple in 70 CE, the centrality of literature is emphasized. The
rabbis replaced the king’s court as the ruling elite. Endurance for them depended on
keeping the memory of Jerusalem’s glory alive through specific acts of reading, remem-
bering, and interpreting past events. The Torah accentuated its sacred status. Around it a
series of hermeneutical writings were built, from the Talmud, a record of rabbinical dis-
cussions made of two parts: the Mishnah, a compendium of oral law written around 200
CE, and the Gemara, a discussion of the Mishnah compiled circa 500 CE. Just as there is
more than one Talmud (the Babylonian and Palestinian), there are apparently endless
rabbinical responses to every aspect of Jewish life. All those responses are literary in
nature. Keeping the Jewish people attached to the Torah was a survival strategy through
countless diasporas.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the loyalty to the text manifested itself in
various ways in Judaism. In the Iberian Peninsula, philosophers and poets like Samuel
Ha-Naguid, Yehuda Ha-Levi, Shlomo ibn Gabirol, and Moses ibn Maimon wrote the-
oretical treatises and lyrical compilations on the challenges of coexisting as Jews with
the other major prophetic religions, Christianity and Islam. Their writings allowed
readers to understand their role in a politically volatile world. Jews at the time lived
in geographically secluded areas. Their view of themselves as a nation was predicated
on the idea of a lost homeland. In other words, they were a landless nation. One might
argue that for them the home was the text: literature as a palliative, a unifying force in a
decentralized life.
The Enlightenment (in Hebrew, Haskalah) transformed that paradigm. As European
societies redefined the concept of civic representation, inviting previously marginalized
groups to have an active national role, Jews experienced the tension between a tradi-
tional religion that linked them with their past and a secular existence that promised
a degree of normality. That tension brought with it, in Judaism, a diametrically differ-
ent set of texts. Genres like the novel became fashionable. This isn’t surprising given
that novels have been a thermometer of social angst. For Jews that anxiety springs
from a double consciousness, to be hyphenated: to have an identity as the member of
a minority group while having an identity that ties in with the larger national project—
Russian-Jewish, French-Jewish, German-Jewish. . . .
Indeed, since the Enlightenment, which took place in the eighteenth century and
beyond, the Jewish novelist has replaced the rabbi as the interpreter of daily affairs. Of
course, unlike rabbinical literature, which addresses legal issues, novels delve into the
mundane realm (family affairs, romance, financial quests, Jewish-non-Jewish relations,

JUDAISM AND LITERATURE 259
questions of identity). Another fundamental difference is that while biblical and rabbin-
ical literatures are about myth, novels are concerned with individuals. And their audi-
ence isn’t leaders but just about everybody, male and female, young and old, religiously
engaged and otherwise.
Writing first in Hebrew and then in Jewish languages such as Yiddish, the
Enlightenment produced secular novels (Abraham Mapu’s first Hebrew novel, Ahavat
Zion [The Lovers of Zion], 1848; Mendele Mokher Sforim’s Yiddish novel Das Kleine
Menschele [The Little Man], 1865) exploring different features pertaining to Jewish life in
the modern world. At times these novels were set in Palestine and incorporated biblical
themes (faith, sacrifice, and the family) in order to join readers to the textual tradition
in Judaism. On other occasions they incorporated pedagogical motifs the authors saw
as important in acclimating Jews to secular European society. Non-Jewish languages—
e.g., national languages, such as English, French, German, Russian—became a channel
of expression too. For instance, Israel Zangwill’s picaresque novel The King of Schnorers
(1894) addresses the journey from the ghetto to civil society on which modern Jews
embarked.
A number of different trends characterize the Jewish novel as it has evolved from the
early decades of the Enlightenment to the present: humor is one of them, since the clash
between tradition and rebellion often results in comedic episodes, or at least the nov-
elist uses comedy to respond to the apocalyptic forces surrounding the Jews (Sholem
Aleichem’s Tevye der Milkhiker [Tevye the Dairyman], 1894 and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s
Complaint, 1969); another is the allegorical novel (Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung [The
Metamorphosis], 1915); there is also the novel of ideas, which might relate it to rabbinic
literature (Saul Bellow’s Herzog, 1964; and Roth’s Operation Shylock, 1993); as well as the
genealogical epic, in which various generations of Jews are depicted as they interact
with their respective historical forces (Israel Joshua Singer’s Di Brider Ashkenazi [The
Brothers Ashkenazi]; 1936) and finally, the psychological exploration, in which the inner
life of Jewish characters in a challenging situation is explored (Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep,
1934, and Amos Oz’s Michael Sheli [My Michael], 1968). The list of influential Jewish
novelists is vast: from Bruno Schulz (Poland, author of Sklepy cynamonowe [The Street
of Crocodiles, 1934) to Moacyr Scliar (Brazil, O Centauro no Jardim [The Centaur in the
Garden], 1981). Some novelists like Isaac Leib Peretz and Franz Kafka retrieved the reli-
gious path (in their case, the mystical world of the eighteenth-century group known as
Hasidim) to produce works appealing to today’s readers.
Other popular literary genres among Jews are the short story (Isaac Babel, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, Grace Paley), theater (Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Wendy
Wasserstein, Tony Kushner), poetry (Heinrich Heine, Paul Celan, David Pinsky), the
philosophical and political essay (Moses Hess, Theodore Herzl, Ahad Ha-Am), and
autobiography (Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, Primo Levi, Lucette Lagnaro). Each
of the genres has served as a tool to understand the dilemma of modern Jews in the
face of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, the volatility of contemporary life, and the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This means that the embrace of modernity by Jews has kept
the text at center stage, although it has shifted its content. While the Hebrew Bible and

rabbinical literature remains the cornerstone of Judaism, since the Enlightenment the
affinity has been with a text that doesn’t dwell on the relationship between the divine
and human. Instead, it seeks to represent, through symbolic language, the odyssey of
modern Jewish life in an accessible, entertaining, and occasionally pedagogical way.
As technology has advanced, the concept of the book as such has changed. This hasn’t
been a deterrent in the commitment of the Jews to text. On the contrary, Jews have
been at the forefront of this technological revolution, making the text available in as
diverse and heterogeneous a format as possible in other to retain the bond with a wide
readership.
It is pertinent at this point to reflect on translation as a mechanism of globalization
among Jews. The Torah is written in a number of different registers, from a Hebrew
closer to its Phoenician roots to Aramaic and a Hebrew permeated with Greek loan
words. These different registers are an expression of the way the Jewish language in bib-
lical times underwent dramatic modifications. The occupation of Palestine by various
foreign powers at diverse points in history brought along with it linguistic contact. This
contact was experienced as Jews were expelled from their homeland into exile after the
First and Second Temples were destroyed. Since then, the Jewish literary experience
manifests itself through a variety of languages, depending on the environment in which
Jews find themselves. There is Jewish literature written in Spanish, Russian, and Italian.
Conversely, the act of translation is at the heart of Jewish literature. As soon as Jews were
forced to a diasporic life, they recognized the need to travel from one linguistic term
to another. This was accomplished by means of a second, third, fourth, and other lan-
guages, and through the rendition of a work delivered in a language into another alto-
gether different. Not surprisingly, language not only as a vehicle but as a topic, and the
sensibility toward translation, are themes defining the literature of Judaism from the
outset.
The outburst of Jewish literary creativity in modern times is a staple of the Ashkenazi
population (e.g., with roots in Eastern Europe). The Enlightenment evolved there with
a unique fervor. Sephardic and Levantine Jews (with origins in Spain, living under the
rule of the Ottoman Empire) didn’t embrace modernity in equal measure. That is, con-
temporary angst was not a fixture of their identity until the early twentieth century. That
explains why the number of works of fiction from this region is comparatively smaller.
On the other hand, Sephardic Jews have always found expression through liturgical
literature.
As modernity advanced and technology opened up new vistas for literature, the Jews
ceased to be only the people of the book. They also became the people of the image. It
is impossible to talk about Jewish storytelling and about the crossroads where Jews and
the text meet each other in an infinite number of ways without considering the relation-
ship between Jews and cinema, the children’s picture book, comic strips, and the graphic
novel. This entails an association between literature and pictorial art. Or better, the eras-
ing of borders between these two spheres.
In the United States in particular, literature and Judaism have evolved in ways that
beg for a redefinition of literature as strictly limited to the written word. Through the

JUDAISM AND LITERATURE 261
connection between words and images, the concept of text has been expanded substan-
tially. Hollywood, for instance, while not exclusively known for its interest in Jewish
themes, has been a Mecca for Jewish directors, screenwriters, and producers. From the
Hebrew Bible to contemporary plots, themes concerned with Jewish life are omnipres-
ent. Filmmaking, as well as television programming, are other forms of reading, remem-
bering, and interpreting the past in Judaism.
The same might be said of children’s picture books. Through artists like Hans
Augusto and Margaret Rey (Curious George, 1939), Maurice Sendak (Where The Wild
Things Are, 1963), and Eric Carle (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, 1969), small readers
encounter a hybrid text inviting them to conceptualize their surroundings. Picture
books with Jewish themes (the biblical stories, immigration, and baseball) are a
popular way for parents to initiate the process of socialization. Comic strip artists
such as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (Superman, 1932) and graphic novelists like Will
Eisner (The Spirit, 1940) have combined dialogue with images to reflect on topics like
sexuality, the Holocaust, and a changing religious order. The precursor of the picture
book and graphic novel might be the Passover Haggadah, a book designed to be used
by children that tells the story of the deliverance of the Jews from Egypt with Moses
as their leader. But the graphic novel is a contemporary genre: Art Spiegelman (Maus
I and II, 1986 and 1991) follows the plight of his own family during the Holocaust,
while Ben Katchor (Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, 1998) depicts a Jewish
New York.
In the twenty-first century, literature remains a staple of Judaism, although never in a
stable, traditional fashion. The Internet, iPhones, and e-books allow literature to reach
an instant global audience. Authors are devoted to finding new ways to retell ancient,
traditional stories and to invent fresh new ones. And readers are hungry for material
that allows them to explore their role as Jews in a fluid world. The text in Judaism is
present today in the embrace of the Hebrew Bible, in the liturgy surrounding ritual,
and in the ways to identify who one is and to remember how that self finds its place in
history.
Scholars such as Robert Alter, Harold Bloom, Dan Miron, Ruth R. Wisse, and myself,
among others, have devoted their energy to understanding the way the secular literary
tradition in Judaism evolved from biblical times onward. These scholars have meditated
on the concept of “canon,” its formation, its impact on community. A Jewish literary
canon differs from other national canons in that it is transnational as well as polyglot.
These reflections pertain to various topics: Jewish literature not only as a mirror and
engine of collective identity; the tension between center (Europe, the United States, and
Israel) and periphery (Latin America, Africa, and Asia); the return to religion—more
precisely, to characters portrayed as orthodox in their religious practices—as a literary
topic; and the interest in mysticism (Kabbalah, in particular) as a motif. Plus, there have
been significant studies by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, and others,
exploring the storytelling facet of rabbinical narratives and its link with modern litera-
ture in general.
All in all, the juncture of literature and Judaism is eternally renewable.

Bibliography
Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
——. Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis. Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1977.
——, trans. with commentary. The Five Books of Moses. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1994.
Eisen, Robert. The Peace and Violence of Judaism: From the Bible to Modern Zionism.
Halbertal, Moshe. People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Hess, Jonathan. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Jelen, Sheila, with Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner, eds. Modern Jewish
Literature: Intersections and Boundaries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
Levinson, Julian. Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Miron, Dan. From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking. Stanford,
Rubenstein, Jeffrey L. Stories of the Babylonian Talmud. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
Stavans, Ilan. The Inveterate Dreamer: Essays and Conversations on Jewish Culture.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
——ed. The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
——, ed. The Schocken Book of Sephardic Jewish Literature. New York: Schocken Books, 2005.
Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott. Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
Wirth-Nesher, Hana, ed. What is Jewish Literature? Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1994.
Wisse, Ruth R. The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture.
New York: Free Press, 2000.

C HA P T E R 16
J U DA I S M A N D M U S I C
M A R K K L IG M A N
Music throughout Jewish history as manifest in religious life and culture is vast and
complex. Music is mentioned hundreds of times in the Hebrew Bible, in rabbinic litera-
ture of the first millennia and of every epoch of Jewish history. For this chapter I discuss
the music of Jews according to the Hebrew Bible, the development of the Jewish people
in Jerusalem and their various areas of relocation during the Diaspora. The biblical era
documents rich examples of music at key moments in Jewish history in religious life.
After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E., the playing of instruments
was banned by rabbis. In later periods, the explanation of the ban was for commem-
oration of the glory of the Temple, with the effect that as long as the Temple was not
rebuilt, music would not have the height it did during Temple times. This ban was cri-
tiqued and lifted in the nineteenth century with the development of Reform Judaism
in Germany and Central Europe, where the organ and other instruments were intro-
duced. The changes to Jewish life during the Modern Era, in Jewish studies the Haskahla
(Enlightenment), which began around 1800, brought challenges and new opportunities
to religious expression through music and its impact on Jewish life.
This chapter will begin with a discussion of music in the Bible and rabbinic literature
and will refer to important contributions. A general description is that music in Jewish
religious life historically and at present is found through cantillation of the Bible, in the
chanting of prayers and in synagogue song. While the majority of scholarship histori-
cally in Jewish music refers to Ashkenazic Jews (Jewish life in Europe) a separate section
of this chapter will describe Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish life (Jews whose heritage is
predominantly from Spain and Portugal who have migrated to Europe, America, North
Africa, and the Middle East). Comments on modern trends on a variety of issues will
conclude this essay.
The Bible provides a rich set of sources on a variety of contexts associated with music.
The first comment on music in the Bible is in Genesis 4:21, where Yuval is introduced as
the father of music with two instruments mentioned. Rashi, a famous eleventh-century
biblical commentator, says the music of Yuval was used for idolatrous practices. Perhaps
this first statement and its commentary is an appropriate metaphor for the conflict

about music in Jewish life, that it can be used for inappropriate purposes. Other bib-
lical statements include the singing of the shirah (Exodus chapter 15), the primordial
song, after the children of Israel cross the sea and Pharaoh’s army drowns. When the
Ten Commandments are given, two passages refer the greatness of the experience with
the sounding of the Shofar (Exodus 19:19 and 20:15). The books of the prophets describe
the role of music during prophecy and the anointing of the king (1 Samuel 10:5; Kings
3:15). Rabbinic literature of the third century C.E., the Mishnah, describes the role of
music during the sacrifices in the Temple (Sotah 48a and Shulchan Arukh, Orech Hayim
540:3). These sources provide a rich array of the use of music on one hand but also the
challenges of various sects that focused on idolatrous practices. Various statutes show
the use of instruments mentioned in the Bible. Braun’s study (2002) is a compendium of
biblical sources with archeological evidence and contextualizes these source with neigh-
boring cultures of the time.
After the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., rabbis worked to redefine Jewish
religious practices. During the second half of the first millennia the text of the siddur
[prayer book] formed and the role of a chazzan [cantor] developed as the prayer leader
for the congregation. Attitudes towards music were generally stern in this period, and
the singing of music in non-religious contexts was banned.
One of the enduring practices in Jewish religious life is the cantillation of the Bible.
Cantillation has been practiced since the Temple. Scholars differ in the dating of prac-
tice. The Ben Asher Family in Tiberius codified the system of ta’amim; these are accent
signs that indicate the grammar of a sentence of the biblical text in the ninth century.
They refer to a melodic formula, not an exact musical pitch. A. Z. Idelsohn, one of the
first Jewish musicologists, saw the various twentieth-century practices of cantillation
as a remnant of an ancient tradition.1 Modern scholars do acknowledge the similarities
of modern practices but are doubtful that twentieth-century practices faithfully main-
tain two-thousand-year-old traditions.2 A definitive documentation of the Lithuanian
Ashkenazic traditions is by Rosowsky; Avenary’s comparative study of Ashkenazic
practices provides insights into practices over time. Cantillation of the Bible has contin-
ued. One modern artistic usage is the use of cantillation from the book of Lamentations
in the third movement of Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony no. 1, Jeremiah.
Chanting in Jewish worship makes up the core of the liturgical practice. Blessings,
psalms, and rabbinical texts are chanted. Eric Werner’s landmark study The Sacred
Bridge explores the interconnection of music of the synagogue with that of the church.
He asserts that the music of the church came from the synagogue. In subsequent schol-
arship this has been reappraised and critiqued by Peter Jeffrey. Most scholars aim for
a more conciliatory view, as expressed by Avenary in “Contacts Between Church and
Synagogue Music.” The phenomenon of chanting is part of the oral tradition, through
the application of melodic formulas in particular modes that vary by cultural region, as
analyzed by Reinhard Flender, regarding the practice of psalmody. In the Ashkenazic
tradition the term nusach is used to describe musical modes in a systematic fashion,
where specific phrases are tied to particular parts of the liturgy on a given occasion. For
example, the HaShem Malakh mode (similar to a major scale but using a flat seventh and

JUDAISM AND MUSIC 265
a flat tenth) is used on Friday night for the Kabbalat Shabbat service; the regal nature of
this mode is used to praise God. Ahavah Rabbah (a mode with a lowered second and
raised third) is used on the Shabbat morning service, denoting an intimate connection
to God. This system is clearly documented in Baruch Cohon’s article “the Structure of
Synagogue Prayer Chant.” There are variations of this system in Central and Eastern
Europe, which was also brought to America as a fundamental part of Jewish worship.
For adherents to this European-based system the “right” nusach is often the litmus test
of what is proper and correct. Twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century chant-
ing practices have challenged the prominence of nusach in favor of synagogue song.
Notations of synagogue music appear significantly from 1750 onwards in Central
Europe. Prior to this date documentation is sporadic. One exception is the early
seventeenth-century publication by Solomone Rossi, a musician of the court of Mantua,
who composed, as part of his oeuvre, polyphonic music for a synagogue service and a
wedding ceremony. His music challenged the demands of tradition yet fueled the desire
for innovation; this subject is well studied by Don Harrán. The nineteenth century saw
a greater challenge for change with the full-scale encounter with modernity. Solomon
Sulzer (1804–1891) was a cantor in Vienna who wrote new music for the synagogue.
While his compositions for the High Holidays were based on traditional nusach, he also
composed synagogue songs significantly influenced by Romantic era composers (see his
Adon Olam, which is in the style of a Viennese Waltz). Developments of a modern aes-
thetic in the synagogue service continued with Samuel Naumbourg (1815–1880) in Paris
and Louis Lewandowski (1821–1894) in Berlin.3 Changes to Eastern European life came
more slowly. In bigger cities composers sought to innovate synagogue songs with new
melodies and the incorporation of modal harmony to nusach: Abraham B. Birnbaum
(1865–1922) in Moravia and Lodz as well as David Nowakowsky (1848–1921) in Odessa.
The organ was an instrument of great debate, with Reformers advocating for its use and
traditionalists adamantly arguing against it, due to the ban on instruments in a syna-
gogue service.4 With Jews from Western and Eastern Europe coming to America, the
twentieth century saw a significant change, with an ongoing debate about innovation
versus preservation of tradition, richly documented in Slobin’s Chosen Voices. With
changes in American culture to a more participatory form of worship, song styles from
folk, pop, and rock music became the form of aesthetic innovation. Some see this as the
downfall of synagogue music, while others see the incorporation of new and old styles
into prayer as a creative development of new worship.5
While tensions were abundant in the growth of music in the Ashkenazic tradition,
at the same time communities centered on mysticism idealized the role of music.
Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century mystics focused on the role of music in prophecy
and in the Temple to achieve a higher spiritual state. Music in this context was fused
with ritual practices to create a meditative state.6 With the growth of Hassidism, mysti-
cal and spiritual practices were incorporated into daily life; this began in the eighteenth
century and has been ongoing to the present day. Music in Hassidic life does not focus
on an artistic aesthetic but aims to inspire the individual, the congregation, and commu-
nity with more devotion (see Koskoff ’s study of Lubavitch Hassidim).

There are many parallels between the Ashkenazic musical changes and practices in
Sephardic communities. Sephardic Jewry covers a vast region from the traditions ema-
nating from Spain and Portugal to Europe, the Americas and the Middle East.7 The des-
ignation Sephardi/Mizrahi refers to the diverse practices of these Jewish communities.
Western Sephardic Jews in London, Amsterdam, and New York sought to continue the
music and ritual practices of their ancestors form Spain, which represented a Golden
Age of culture interaction in the tenth to twelfth centuries. Real or imagined Western
Sephardic communities take great pride in the dignity and precision of their worship
style and melodies.8 Recent scholarship has shown that historical idealism and modern
practice are often inseparable.9 Music from North African, Iraqi, Syrian, and Lebanese
Jewish communities are tightly connected to the Arab music drawing from many styles.
The flexibility of the makam system (Arab musical scales) allows for music and aesthet-
ics to be brought into worship. Often music is drawn from other sources in a common
practice of contrafact. Ottoman mystical and artistic influences were common in this
region. The practice of singing piyyutim (religious songs) has been part of Sephardi/
Mizrahi life for close to five hundred years and continues in earnest today. Payyatanim
(poets) adapt an existing Spanish, Arabic, Greek, or Turkish song by creating a new text.
The singing of these melodies takes place in the synagogue, at home during holiday
meals, and at life cycle events. Overtime the practice has become a highly artistic mode
of expression, and in Israel renewed interest has led to ongoing studies of new and old
melodies.10
Modernity has brought many new encounters to Jewish music with new contexts in
abundance. The rise in nationalism in the late nineteenth century was the impetus for
composers to draw upon nationalistic characteristics in their music. This was followed
by modern artistic and aesthetic developments in the early twentieth century by com-
posers expressing an individual style. Ernest Bloch (1880–1959), born in Switzerland,
struggled with these issues. His cycle of Jewish compositions during 1910–1920 cul-
minated in his Sacred Service (1933), a grand work for orchestra, choir, and cantor.
Commissioned as a synagogue service, it is more commonly heard in a concert set-
ting. Schiller’s book On Assimilating Jewish Music explores the work of composers who
drew from the Jewish tradition to create orchestral works through individual expres-
sion; this characterizes the works of prominent composers such as Arnold Schoenberg
(1874–1951) and Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990). Jews have been prominent in musical
theater and popular music from its very beginnings, and some speculate that motifs of
Jewish traditional music are found in well-known American melodies (see Gottlieb’s
book Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish). The growth and development of Jewish organiza-
tions and institutions in America and Israel led to a rediscovery of past musical tradi-
tions. The klezmer revival of the 1970s11 and the interest in Sephardic songs12 led to a
proliferation of reissuing of 78 rpm recordings, new recordings, concerts, lecture series,
and workshops. In past generations this music was part of Jewish life cycle events, now
it is a separate entity; the compositions often take a simple melody and develop and
reshape the music for a more artistic end. The variety of available music has influenced
religious communities to unproblematically use popular, rock, and many other styles

in their music (see Kligman’s study “Contemporary Jewish Music”). For young Jewish
Americans today the amount and variety of Jewish music is vast. Where cantors from
Europe who were immigrants to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries aimed to become Americanized, by the late twentieth century, American-born
Jews who trained as cantors strive to learn European Jewish musical styles and its vari-
ous developments.13
Recent studies on Jewish music have expanded the focus to the Sephardi/Mizrahi
communities, going beyond the focus of Ashkenazi Jewry. A wider array of topics has
been considered. Where national identity was the focus for the music of Jews in Europe,
now the complexity of individual identity as expressed in music is a subject of consider-
ation. Jews engage with the surrounding cultures in ways that are now complex, result-
ing in many syncretic and hybrid forms of music. Any definition of “Jewish music” has
always been problematic, as Jewish music grows in complexity during modernity. In
Philip Bohlman’s book Jewish Music and Modernity (2008), issues of identity, authen-
ticity, and invention are explored, showing an ongoing development of music in Jewish
contexts.
Notes
1. See Idelsohn’s Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (1929); see examples in Idelsohn’s
Thesaurus 1922–1932 for both Ashkenazic and Sephardic traditions.
2. See Shiloah, Jewish Musical Traditions, 1992:21–33, 96–109.
3. For a clear description, see Goldberg’s study “Jewish Liturgical Music in the Wake of
Nineteenth Century Reform.”
4. See Ellenson’s study on the use of the organ in nineteenth-century synagogues.
5. See studies by Adler and Summit.
6. See important studies by Moshe Idel and by Amnon Shiloah.
7. See Seroussi’s study “Between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean: Sephardic Music
After the Expulsion from Spain and Portugal.”
8. See studies by Avenary and Katz.
9. See Seroussi’s study “The Ancient Modernity of the Liturgical Music of the Portuguese
Synagogue in Amsterdam.”
10. See studies by Judith Cohen, Dardashti, Kligman, Seroussi, Sezgin, and Shelemay.
11. See Slobin’s Fiddler on the Move.
12. See Seroussi “New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews.”
13. See Judah Cohen’s study on the Reform cantorate, The Making of a Reform Jewish
Cantor: Musical Authority, Cultural Investment.
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——. Jewish Musical Traditions. Jewish folklore and anthropology series. Detroit: Wayne State
Slobin, Mark. Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate, first ed. Music in American
life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
——. Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World. American Musicspheres. Oxford: Oxford
Summit, Jeffrey A. The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish
Worship. American Musicspheres. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Werner, Eric. The Sacred Bridge: The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in Synagogue and
Church During the First Millennium. New York: Da Capo Press, 1959; vol. II, 1970.
——. A Voice Still Heard: The Sacred Songs of the Ashkenazic Jews. University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1976.

C HA P T E R 17
J U DA I S M — V I S UA L A RT A N D
ARCHITECTURE
E DWA R D VA N VO OL E N
Until well into the twentieth century, scholars have denied the existence of Jewish art.
At first glance, Jewish art indeed seems to be in conflict with the second of the Biblical
ten commandments, which states, “you shall not make for yourself a sculptured image,
or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or the earth below, or in the waters
under the earth” (Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 5:8). Literally interpreted, the verse
prohibits the possibility of visual arts amongst Jews and, according to some scholars,
reflects a Jewish aversion toward images—Jews being supposedly more inclined toward
the “word.” However, even in the Bible an absolute prohibition against the making of
images only concerns the adoration of idols, as it says in the verse immediately follow-
ing, “you shall not bow down to them or serve them” (Exodus 20:4). There is no prohibi-
tion against making objects in the context of the sacred service, and in the course of the
centuries Jews have commissioned and increasingly created art.
Shortly after these Biblical laws were formulated, Moses is commanded to construct a
traveling sanctuary, the Tabernacle, the details and furnishings of which were exactingly
described to him. Since Moses could not read the blueprints, the execution of cherubs—
winged animals on top of the Ark of the Covenant, and the seven-branched Menorah—a
candelabrum in the form of a tree—was left to Bezalel (his name means “in the shadow
of God”). This first Jewish artist is described as a man endowed “with a divine spirit of
skill, ability, and knowledge in every kind of craft; to make designs in gold, silver, and
copper, to cut stones and to carve wood” (Exodus 31:2–5). The Tabernacle and its imple-
ments are the first examples of Jewish art and architecture within the parameters of the
second commandment—not in the service of idolatry (as is the Golden Calf built in the
shadow of Mount Sinai), but for the abstract God of Judaism.
A few centuries later, around 960 BCE, King Solomon invited Hiram, a foreigner
from Tyre, to create all the metalwork for his Temple in Jerusalem, the successor
to the Tabernacle. It included a giant bronze laver (a basin supported by twelve
oxen). In this first permanent sanctuary for Jewish worship were to be found such

JUDAISM—VISUAL ART AND ARCHITECTURE 271
naturalistic forms as lions, flowers, pomegranates, trees, and cherubs (I Kings 7:1–
51). In Solomon’s own royal palace there was an ivory throne overlaid with fine gold,
two lions standing beside the arms, and twelve lions standing on the six steps, six at
each side (I Kings 10:18–20).
The battle against all kinds of idolatrous practices pervades the Bible, and lasted
till the Hellenistic period; the Maccabees revolted successfully against the placing
of Greek gods in the Temple in the second century BCE, giving rise to the festival of
Hanukkah. After this event, the fear of idolatry gradually diminished and gave in to a
more tolerant interpretation of the second commandment. In the first post-Christian
centuries, several stories in the Mishnah and the Talmud relate that rabbis (suc-
cessors to the Biblical priests) permitted works of art, even in their synagogue, the
sanctuary that replaced the Temple after its destruction in 70 CE. These written testi-
monies coincide with the wall paintings in the synagogue of Dura Europos (245 CE)
and mosaics in Israeli synagogues.
Medieval rabbis were more concerned with the question of whether the faithful
would be distracted by images than by concern for a literal interpretation of the second
commandment. Opposition to art on religious grounds coincides with iconoclasm (in
Christian Byzantium or sometimes in Islamic-ruled countries), and with ascetic trends
in Judaism amongst the pious in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Germany (Hasidei
Ashkenaz). However much the pietists expressed in their writings an opposition to aes-
thetic manifestations in private or public spheres, figurative art did not disappear. On
the contrary, most communities and rabbis supported the idea that ceremonies should
be performed in a beautiful synagogue with attractive objects, some executed by Jews,
others by non-Jews for their Jewish clients.
17.1 Liturgical Books and Objects
The Jewish people hold in high regard scripture and books, and above all the holy
book, the Torah (the five books of Moses), a scroll of which they could carry wher-
ever they traveled. The emphasis on and love of texts by the “People of the Book”
fostered the development of an extensive religious literature, and stimulated the cre-
ation of beautiful manuscripts, carefully written and at times illuminated. Preserved
manuscripts elucidate the differences between Sephardic (Iberian) and Ashkenazic
(central and Eastern European) Judaism, reflecting local aesthetic preferences at a
specific moment in time. In accordance with their intrinsic value, these manuscripts
were preserved within the community, bequeathed to descendants, and, beginning
in the Renaissance period, increasingly attracted the attention of Christian biblio-
philes and collectors.
Torah scrolls used in synagogue service are never decorated; Biblical manuscripts
in book form, however, may contain abstract carpet pages, drawings of the Temple,
or historiated initial capitals. Other manuscripts include rabbinical writings, such

as both versions of the Talmud, which are rarely illuminated and, if so, only with an
initial page, or with sketches of the Temple. Prayer books for the festivals (mahzorim)
and for the Sabbath and weekdays (siddurim) are equally preserved in manuscript
form—the most precious of these containing historiated initial capitals and text illus-
trations accompanying liturgical poems. More widespread are illuminated haggadot
designed for the domestic Seder ceremony held at the beginning of the Passover fes-
tival. From the Middle Ages until well into the eighteenth century, specimens are
found with illustrations to the various stories contained in this popular booklet. The
Biblical Book of Esther, read from a scroll (Megillah) on the boisterous Purim (Feast
of Lots) may also be illustrated, as it is the only Biblical book that does not contain
the divine name.
Compared to Hebrew manuscripts, a far smaller number of medieval Jewish cer-
emonial objects have been preserved. Here again there are differences between
Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Italian, and Oriental Judaism. Torah ornaments, as well as
artifacts for public festivals and private celebrations, were often made of precious
materials according to the precept to serve and glorify the divine with beautiful
objects (hiddur mitzvah, based upon Exodus 15:2). Many objects were lost during per-
secutions or as a result of looting, robbery, or pogroms, while others are preserved in
their original setting or in museums.
As soon as the Diaspora became a reality—even before the destruction of the
Second Temple—the synagogue became the primary Jewish institution. As a build-
ing, the synagogue is often part of a complex including a school, ritual bath, library,
a kosher restaurant, and reception hall—a community center in the modern sense of
the word. For Jews, the synagogue is the “little sanctuary” where they meet for prayer,
study, and social gatherings. Wherever Jews lived securely, synagogue architecture
and art prospered.
Two essential requirements characterize a synagogue. The first is the Ark, the Hebrew
name of which, aron ha-kodesh, recalls the Ark in the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle
of the desert and the Temple in Jerusalem. This shrine, placed in a niche or cupboard
directed toward Jerusalem, contains the holiest and most precious object Jews possess,
one or more handwritten parchment scrolls with the text of the Pentateuch (Torah).
Each scroll, with the text of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, is carefully dressed
in a wooden case or in protective textiles and decorative silver. The Ark is the syna-
gogue’s sacred space and is traditionally the place where these ritual objects are stored,
collected, and carefully preserved.
Equally important in the synagogue is the presence of a platform (bimah) from which
the Torah is read and expounded. This platform is situated in the middle of the sanctu-
ary, but may also be found toward the rear, or directly in front of the Ark. The synagogue
keeps Jewish collective memory alive, long before Jewish museums would assume this
function for secularized Jews in the late nineteenth century.
Jews decorate their sanctuaries, embellish their ceremonial objects, and illustrate
their sacred texts, all with the intent to glorify their abstract God, who is never depicted.
The Bible forbids idolatry, but not the making of images, as long as they are within the

context of the official religion. The image of Judaism is as multi-faceted as Jewish life.
The synagogues of antiquity, and centers like Toledo, Prague, and Amsterdam, have
retained their magical attraction until the present day, preserving traces of the golden
ages when Jewish religion and culture flourished.
17.2 Jewish Art in Modernity
The Jewish people have been deeply involved in the arts from Biblical times onward,
whether as commissioners or creators. Before 1800, Jewish communities enjoyed auton-
omy: they could live, to a large extent, according to their own laws and regulations.
Equality before the civil law—granted to the Jews first in the United States of America
and France, in 1789 and 1791, respectively, and later in other countries—did not guaran-
tee equal opportunity in society, as Jews were quick to discover. The emancipation of the
Jewish religious and cultural minority turned out to be a slow process, in which the Jews
tried to integrate into society at large—sometimes successfully, but often stumbling over
Christian religious or modern racial prejudices.
After discriminatory measures—such as the exclusion from guilds—were lifted, Jews
were permitted for the first time to express themselves in art and architecture unham-
pered by official restrictions. The wish to be accepted went hand in hand with the search
for identity.
Wherever possible, synagogues were turned into landmarks in the cityscape and
outward symbols of a new self-consciousness. In their commissions for synagogues
to Jewish as well as non-Jewish architects, communities chose a building style that
reflected their desire to embrace the country in which they lived. Romanesque
synagogues stressed the Jews’ centuries-old presence in Europe, whereas Oriental
(Moorish) architecture made reference to the Jewish golden age in medieval Spain
(Toledo) while self-confidently accentuating their historical origins in the Orient.
Building commissions and their architects frantically searched for the proper
architectural style to represent modern, emancipated Judaism, a challenge until
early-twentieth-century modernism presented a more neutral stylistic ground. The
Jews, who until the Emancipation eschewed impressive architectural constructions
in favor of “cathedrals in time”—celebrating traditional festivals rather than physi-
cal space—began to build the Jewish equivalents of the great Europe cathedrals. Such
mid- and late-nineteenth-century synagogues as those in Vienna (1858), Budapest
(1859), Berlin (1866), Paris (1874) and Brussels (1878) radiate the optimism of a
recently emancipated Jewish bourgeoisie.
In the nineteenth century, the first successful Jewish artists emerged. Examples
are the German artist Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800–1882), the English Solomon
Alexander Hart (1806–1881), the Dutch Jozef Israëls (1824–1911), the French Camille
Pissarro (1830–1903), the German Max Liebermann (1847–1935), and the Polish Mauricy
Gottlieb (1858–1879), all of whom occasionally reflected on a Jewish theme. Others

explored traces of past Jewish material culture and contributed to a modern renaissance
of Jewish art, like the Russian-born artists Marc Chagall (1887–1985), El Lissitzky (1890–
1941), Issachar Ryback (1879–1935), Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967), and Jacques Lipchitz
(1891–1973)—all of whom at the same time contributed to innovations in the arts in gen-
eral. Despite setbacks, the spirit of optimism prevailed—in Europe, in America, and in
Israel, where the first pioneers had settled in the nineteenth century.
Inspired by the search for national roots then popular in many European nations,
Jewish artists explored the traces of their past material culture and contributed to
a modern renaissance of Jewish art around 1900. The same current had given rise
to the search for an Israeli art once the first pioneers had settled there. Others, in
the early twentieth century, became innovators of the arts in general, with Judaism
playing only a marginal role in their work. Despite the prejudice that hounded
them—namely that Jews were by nature or “race” more inclined to the word than to
the image—the spirit of optimism prevailed for Jewish artists in Europe, Israel, and
increasingly in the United States, where twentieth-century Jewish artists thrived. The
Jewish artistic response to the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s came quickly—artists
and writers expressed their fears of expulsion and humiliation, and their premoni-
tion of the horrors to come.
17.3 Contemporary Jewish Art
After the systematic mass murder of six million European Jews, the philosopher
Theodor Adorno thought it would be forever impossible to create poetry—and by
extension, art—after Auschwitz. Yet, the Holocaust has become a major theme for mod-
ern Jewish artists as well as their non-Jewish counterparts. It has inspired architects to
erect impressive monuments—in Europe, where the atrocities occurred, but also in
Israel and the United States of America, where most Jews currently reside. The modern
Jewish experience is shaped by the memory of the Holocaust and the creation of Israel,
the two most influential events for Jews in the twentieth century—the former dealing
with collective death, the latter with the rebirth of an ancient nation.
After 1945, American Jewish artists, many of European descent, were the first to
reevaluate their assimilation into mainstream culture by responding to the atroci-
ties and to the nascent Jewish state. Israeli artists, primarily occupied with shaping a
national identity, integrated the Holocaust into the visual arts and compelling monu-
ments while concurrently absorbing the effects of a swelling Palestinian nationalism.
The postwar generation, shaped by the memories of survivors, attempts to come to
grips with the greatest trauma in Jewish history since the destruction of the Second
Temple.
There is as little a Jewish artistic style as there is a Christian, Muslim, American,
German, or Israeli style. Jewish artists play an integral part in all of the divergent artis-
tic movements of modern pluralistic society. While some are inspired by traces of

a now-lost world, others are attracted by the revival of Jewish mysticism. Amidst the
resurging nationalism and fundamentalism of our times, the universalistic, prophetic
dream of peace and justice remains, for many, enduringly vibrant.
17.4 Museums and Memorials,

Synagogues and Art
For thousands of years and nearly until the present day, in Judaism, time—interpreted
and actualized—prevailed over place. The Bible never specified exactly on which
mountain in Sinai Moses received the Torah (the present monastery was founded in
early Christian times), and the Pentateuch stresses the unknown location of Moses’s
burial, the founding father of Judaism. The Temple Mount stands in Jerusalem, but
exactly where the Temple stood is unknown. Before modern-day Israel’s conquest of
the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967, its remaining outside western “wailing” wall,
located in a narrow alley in Jerusalem’s Old City, was a place visited only by pious
Jewish pilgrims. The importance of the space itself, with its enormous square and an
open-air synagogue with separation between men and women, is a rather recent phe-
nomenon. That applies also to the tombs of Rachel in Bethlehem and of rabbinical
scholars in Safed and Tiberias; the tombs of the patriarchs in Hebron have become
a real bone of religious and political contention. From rabbinic times until well into
the nineteenth century, rabbis have de-emphasized the significance of Israel in favor
of Jewish life outside the biblical land. In other words, “home” could be virtually and
actually realized in the Diaspora.
All of this would change under the influence of modernity, in which Jews started
to construct a new orientation to their past history and culture to justify them-
selves and their place in society. A romantic nostalgia for the past became part
of the Jewish conscience for both religion, as one imagined it used to be, and his-
tory. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish exhibitions
and museums presented Jewish religion, history, and material culture to a secular-
izing Jewish bourgeoisie. Jewish museums, soon present in most large European
cities, emphasized the glorious past, like the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry before
the expulsion or Spanish-Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam. Publications proudly
presented Jewish ceremonial artifacts and newly discovered illuminated Jewish
manuscripts from the Middle Ages. Jewish travelers began to visit places in Europe
that reflected a glorious Jewish history, such as the Iberian Peninsula, where Jewish
courtiers, poets, and politicians had lived; the romantic ghetto of Venice; Prague,
home of the Golem; the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, where Rembrandt once lived;
or Budapest and Vienna, two cities close to the Ostjuden that, though negatively
perceived as immediate neighbors, possessed the very religiosity lacking in emanci-
pated Western Europe.

After the Holocaust, Jewish museums in Europe reopened, but their impact remained
limited until the 1970s. In the United States, the Jewish Museum of New York (founded
in 1904) opened new premises on Fifth Avenue in 1947 and quickly developed an inno-
vative exhibition program. In the past decades, the number of Jewish museums mul-
tiplied in the United States and in Europe, where at times the abandoned synagogues
of the cities where Jewish life had been almost completely destroyed were put to new
use, such as in Krakow. A real change occurred in the late 1980s when Jews decided to
take charge of their history themselves and, at the same time, national or local govern-
ments—for political reasons—chose to pay prominent attention to the fate of Jews in
their society. Museums of an unsurpassed size, impressive museological quality, and
located in prime locations opened their doors one after the other and soon attracted
large crowds: Amsterdam (1987), Frankfurt am Main (1988), Vienna (1993), Paris (1998),
Berlin (2001) and Munich ( 2007). The Jewish Museum, once a modest receptacle for
the religious and historical remains of an almost extinct people, became a major tourist
attraction and a Jewish pilgrimage destination. Most European capitals and major cities
now possess Jewish Museums of the same size and importance as those in the United
States.
Whereas in Europe, Holocaust-related sites like the former concentration camps
increasingly became professional museums, in the United States and Israel, Holocaust
museums and monuments arose for reasons more related to a Jewish need to connect
to this dramatic phase of its history. The expansion of Israel’s national Holocaust monu-
ment and museum Yad Vashem over the last decades into a vast and impressive area,
and the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on an expan-
sive site in the center of Washington, D.C., testify to the importance of this development.
After World War II, Jewish tourism expanded to the sites of destruction—pilgrim-
ages to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe or to the Anne Frank House in
Amsterdam, for example. Before, the glorious past had been the source of inspiration,
often found with a visit by the pious to the tomb of a scholar. And although this is still
the custom among traditional Jews, for modern Jews the focus has shifted. Now, visits
to Europe’s sites of persecution are coupled with hopeful, redemptory journeys to the
Holy Land. Europe was literally a dead end; the course of European Jewish history—
with its emancipation, integration, and assimilation—was perceived to lead directly to
the extermination camps.
Jewish memory has become fully secularized; history is presented in chronological
rather than cyclical order, as had been the tradition for centuries in the synagogues.
Place has fully taken over from time, in the same way as history replaces religion.
History rather than text has now become the arbiter, the point of reference for Jews,
with physical space rather than the cycle of time serving as the vehicle for meaning.
More Jews visit a museum, Jewish or otherwise, than a synagogue, even on Shabbat.
Just as the museum has become the cathedral of the twentieth and twenty-first centu-
ries for the Gentiles, Jews have equally made the museum their synagogue, where they
relate to the past, meet socially, and celebrate secularized festivals and lifecycle events.
Museums, memorials, and art remind them of their heroic or tragic past, and leave

them with the determination of “never again,” or more positively assert a strong Israeli
or Jewish identity.
17.5 Future Issues and Research

Questions
Art and architecture created by Jews reveal no unique style but reflect the taste and
the culture in which Jews participated, as the most recent general survey of Gabrielle
Sed-Rajna clearly shows. But what is Jewish? The “grand theme of Jewish iconoclasm,”
the engaged discussion on the Second Commandment, reflects more about the ideo-
logical perceptions, hang-ups, and prejudices of its participants than about the place art
occupies in Jewish life. The studies of Kalman Bland and Margaret Olin evoke still more
provocative questions about the supposed “artless Jews.” Ceremonial art, illuminated
manuscripts and books, and the architecture of synagogues and Jewish museums, until
fairly recently primarily produced by non-Jews, lead to as yet largely ignored questions
as to what extent this art reflects the cultural and political convictions of their commis-
sioners or of their executors.
Scholars have only just begun to compile written sources about Jewish attitudes
to art—ranging from rabbinic texts in Hebrew to artists’ statements in a variety of
modern languages. A good example is the work of Vivian B. Mann, whose work is
awaiting continuation. Innovative scholars like Richard I. Cohen have challenged
the field of Jewish art history—and by extension Jewish architectural history—even
more. Concepts like counter-history and invented nationalism should be applied
to Jewish art and architecture, and need to be examined in greater detail. Research
should focus on the extent to which Jewish artists acculturated or confronted the
majority culture subtly or openly: what message did they intend to convey? Who
commissioned or bought their work, and where was it displayed? How did critics
and public respond? What does synagogue architecture say about the (in)visibility
of Jews in the urban landscape? What does Jewish museum architecture say about
Jewish self-awareness; what message does the museum display have for its Jewish
and non-Jewish visitors?
As a minority, Jews are part and parcel of the public arena, and not even in the era of
the medieval ghetto nor during the Holocaust were they totally isolated: Ivan G. Marcus
and Ziva Amishai-Maisels are pioneers who have broken away from the stereotypes of
the past.
The best Jewish artists in Israel and the Diaspora are commenting on the numerous
challenges in the contemporary world and deal with questions of gender and iden-
tity. They do so from a perspective that more often than not reflects their individual
background as Jews with particular convictions and passions, thus placing the study of
Jewish art firmly within post-modernity.

Further Reading
Amishai-Maisels, Ziva, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the
Visual Arts. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1993.
Baigell, Matthew, and Milly Heyd, eds., Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern
Art. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Baskind, Samantha, and Larry Silver, Jewish Art: A Modern History, London: Reaktion
Books, 2011.
Bland, Kalman P., The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual.
Cohen, Richard I., Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of
Kampf, A., Jewish Experience in Twentieth-Century Art. Exh. cat. Barbican Art Gallery.
London, 1990.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, and Jonathan Karp, The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008
Kleeblatt, Norman L., ed., Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities. Exh. cat. The Jewish
Museum. New York, 1996.
Mann, Vivian B., Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
Olin, Margaret, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art. Lincoln
and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Raphael, Melissa. Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art. London and
Sachs, Angeli, and Edward van Voolen, eds., Jewish Identity in Contemporary Architecture,
Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel Publishing, 2004
Sed-Rajna, Gabrielle, ed., Jewish Art. New York: Abrams, 1997.
Soussloff, Catherine M., Jewish Identity in Modern Art History. Berkeley: University of
Van Voolen, Edward, My Grandparents, My Parents and I. Jewish Art and Culture, Munich,
Berlin, London, New York: Prestel Publishing, 2006.
Van Voolen, Edward, 50 Jewish Artists You Should Know, Munich, Berlin, London, New York:
Prestel Publishing, 2011.
Young, James E., At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and
Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.

C HA P T E R 18
C H R I S T IA N I T Y A N D
L I T E R AT U R E
R A L PH C . WO OD
The cultural achievements made by Christians during the two millennia of the Church’s
life remain permanently impressive, most especially during an age when Christianity is
not only a contested but perhaps a permanent minority religion.1 Among these mani-
fold achievements, literary works written and interpreted under Christian aegis stand
out. Augustine’s Confessions was not only the first autobiography in world literature but
remains perhaps the most impressive. Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost
are epics that match those of Homer and Virgil. While Shakespeare’s dramas can hardly
be called Christian in any simple sense, it is impossible to imagine their creation apart
from a Christian milieu. Considering Anglophone literature alone, there are few works
of greater world stature that Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” Herbert’s “The Temple,” Pope’s
“Essay on Man,” the satires of Swift and Johnson and Dryden, the hymns of Watts and
Wesley, the “terrible sonnets” of Hopkins, Eliot’s Four Quartets, or Auden’s For the Time
Being. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress remains an allegory with few peers, while Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings can fairly be claimed as a masterpiece of fantasy literature. Among
the world’s novelists, Dostoevsky surely ranks among the preeminent. Such literary cre-
ations serve to substantiate Christianity in the literal sense: they give imaginative sub-
stance to Christian revelation, challenging believers and unbelievers alike.
Even literary authors who have worked more at the margins than at the core of
Christian faith—Tolstoy and Chekhov, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Dickens and Twain,
Tennyson and Browning, perhaps most especially James Joyce—cannot be compre-
hended apart from Christian culture. Such writers engage Christian questions even
when their work does not provide Christian answers. So does the great host of “faith-
ful doubters” who dispute and even reject the Faith—Shelley and Emerson, Arnold and
Dickinson, Hawthorne and Melville, Lawrence and Faulkner, Frost and Stevens. They
constitute a powerful counter-witness that Christians must confront if their own wit-
ness is to be credited.

Christian readers have also assimilated many texts written prior to the Christian era.
Convinced that truth and goodness and beauty inhere in the very nature of things, the
Church has sought (at least since Augustine) to “take the spoils of the Egyptians”—to
sift the gold from the dross in pagan culture, claiming everything that rightly belongs to
Gospel. Thus while the naturalism of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things could hardly be
assimilated, many pre-Christian texts have been given a Christian interpretation. The
fourfold method of exegesis has enabled Christians to discern allegorical and anagogical
no less than moral and literal significance in writers antecedent to the revelation given
in the Jews and Jesus and the Church. Dante’s retrieval of Virgil is perhaps the most
notable instance of this ancient practice.
In approaching such a wide variety of imaginative texts, it must first be made clear
that there is no such thing as a strictly Christian criticism of literature. Both the making
and judging of literature are crafts that deal with crafted objects, determining whether
they are made well or ill. The chief criterion for determining such aesthetic worth lies
in the inseparability of meaning and form. (Such indivisibility thoroughly coheres
with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, which holds that the human and divine
natures of Jesus, while distinguishable, are also inseparable.) From Aristotle to Hegel,
the finest readers of imaginative texts have insisted that literary works embody ideas
imaginatively—through plot and character, through rhyme and meter, through tone
and atmosphere, through image and voice—so as to give them the emotional power and
life-changing conviction that they would otherwise lack. Unlike historical description
or philosophical argument, literary works create imagined but real worlds, enabling
readers to enter them and participate in their very life. Novels and poems and dramas
make a non-instrumental use of language by weaving matter and manner so inextrica-
bly that one cannot be separated from the other without doing violence to both.
The interpretation of literary texts becomes singularly and distinctively Christian
only when making theological judgments about the imaginative visions of reality
embodied in such texts—all the while honoring them as works of art and not as illustra-
tions of ideas. For the sake of brevity, if also at the risk of over-simplification, two basic
theological ways for making such judgments may be specified. On the one hand, there
are theologies that regard the Christian gospel as having a large overlap not only with
other religions but also with non-religious conceptions of the real. Their basic premise
is that there is no irremediable clash between nature and grace, between reason and rev-
elation, even between the Church and its host cultures. There are tensions, of course, but
there is no fundamental opposition. Instead, the two realms are seen as complementing
one another, since divine grace is to be found everywhere and in virtually equal mea-
sure, quite apart from the sacramental and prophetic witness of the church. Theologies
of this kind are sometimes said to “naturalize the supernatural.” They seek to make God’s
unique self-identification in the Jews and Jesus and the Church serve, at least not initially
as a word of offense and scandal, but as an invitation to discern the immanent working
of the Sacred in literary texts, making overt and explicit what would otherwise remain
hidden and implicit. Such an approach often seeks to probe the latently Christian quali-
ties of seemingly secular texts.

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 281
On the other hand, there are Christian theologies that regard even the highest cultural
achievements as dwelling as much in discord as in harmony with the Gospel. They point
out that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were marked by sharp discontinuity
and drastic conflict with his culture. His disciples are called, therefore, to a transfer of
aesthetic no less than political allegiance, often putting them in costly friction with the
world, including the literary world. Because the grace of God that is always and already
present within the good creation is usually suppressed, it must erupt from beneath the
ugliness of human life so as to transform and make it redemptively beautiful. It thus
“supernaturalizes the natural,” especially when the natural becomes violently unnatural.
Very roughly speaking, the first of these theological alternatives is represented by
the Protestant Paul Tillich and by the Catholic Karl Rahner. In The Dynamics of Faith,
Tillich argues that every person and every culture, even every work of art, has an
implicit concern for ultimacy: for those things that demand final rather than proximate
loyalty. In order for such ultimate concern to be authentic, it must be centered in God,
the source and ground of Being. If faith in God is not to be directed to an idol, it must
be expressed in symbols. For Tillich, a symbol not only points to something else but, in
a very deep sense, participates in the reality at which it gestures. True symbols must not
be regarded as deliberate inventions; they arise, on the contrary, from the primordial
depths of human experience. If we truly honor them, such symbols grasp us rather than
allowing us to manipulate them. They open up the depths and complexities of reality
that would not otherwise be accessible. This claim holds supremely true, for Tillich, in
the one unsurpassable symbol: the Cross. Unlike the swastika, for instance, it has final
and definitive status because, in Christ’s crucified surrender of all earthly ultimacies, it
becomes the only non-idolatrous symbol. A cruciform vision of reality is thus capable of
plumbing the abyss of human alienation while pointing to the deliverance found in the
final loyalty that belongs to God alone. Karl Rahner goes much further, declaring that
the Christian sacraments are the supreme symbols because they dwell in total accord
with the symbolic character of reality itself, which requires all persons both to expresses
their own inwardness and to give themselves to the “other” by means of symbols. It fol-
lows that, for Rahner, the incarnate Logos is “the absolute symbol of God in the world,
filled as nothing else can be with what is symbolized.”2 Rahnerians thus read the whole
of reality as implicitly symbolic. They often seek to identify all that is anonymously sac-
ramental in literary texts that are not explicitly Christian—for instance, in reclaiming
the deep religiosity of Rilke’s poetry. Hence Rahner’s all-encompassing claim: “The
word alone . . . can redeem that which constitutes the ultimate imprisonment of all reali-
ties which are not expressed in word: the dumbness of their reference to God. For this
reason the primordial word, before all other expressions, is the primordial sacrament of
all realities. And the poet is the minister of this sacrament.”3
A Christian interpreter formed in the Tillichian/Rahnerian tradition would thus
approach the Ike McCaslin stories in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses by show-
ing what is deeply religious in Ike’s youthful identification with the Indian chief-
tain Sam Fathers, in his sacred regard for the annual bear hunt amidst the fastness
of the unspoiled Mississippi forest, and most especially in his horror at the racial

evils that have supported his entire Southern way of life. Faulkner renders Ike’s first
hunting trip to the big woods, for instance, with the primordial sacramentality of
which Rahner speaks. Faulkner also reveals young McCaslin’s moral awakening
with unexampled power, enabling the reader to participate in Ike’s appalling discov-
ery that a Negro slave named Eunice had drowned herself on Christmas Day of 1832,
having learned that her fourteen-year-old daughter Tomey—sired on Eunice by the
plantation owner who is also Ike’s grandfather, Carothers McCaslin—is pregnant by
her (Tomey’s) own father.
So deep is Ike’s reverence for the sanctity of the big woods, so passionate is his con-
tempt for the increasing urban encroachments upon it, and so profound is his desire
to overcome the racial evils of his own plantation heritage, that he repudiates his entire
patrimony. He withdraws from life in both the town and the woods, so as to become a
childless solitaire carpenter in his own imitation of the Nazarene. Yet by making him-
self ethically immune from the iniquities of his own region, McCaslin removes himself
from the existential conflict (if also the sure failure) that would have marked his attempt
to remedy such evils. Ike’s pristine morality thus proves to be empty and ineffectual;
indeed, it is no better than the racial and economic corruptions he repudiates.
Despite the apparent moral nullity of Go Down, Moses, Faulkner is to be saluted for
what is profoundly counter-nihilistic in his literary genius, especially his ability to make
readers wrestle with the unacknowledged futility undergirding much of modern life.
Not to confront the metaphysical void is to be religiously unserious. Faulkner enables
such confrontation by mastering all of the techniques necessary for literary greatness in
the genre of fiction—the convincing depiction of human action and motive, the stun-
ning display of voices from a wide spectrum of characters (including the narrator’s), the
exalted rhetoric that echoes the seriousness of the (often violent) events being recounted,
the joining of the comic and the tragic in their unavoidable nearness, the evocation of
the racially fraught atmosphere of the pre-war American South. Such painstaking mas-
tery reveals that Faulkner was not a nihilist in his literary creativity, even if his literary
vision may have indeed been nihilistic. Go Down, Moses thus becomes a literary vehicle
of religious revelation, though not of a uniquely Christian kind.4
Advocates of the second Christian approach to literary texts are represented by the
Protestant Karl Barth and the Catholic Hans Urs von Balthasar. Barth resists all attempts
to yoke Christianity and literature—or, for that matter, to put the Christian faith in tan-
dem with any other cultural phenomenon, declaring thornily that the word “and” is the
worst enemy of the Gospel. He would thus recoil from identifying Ike McCaslin’s mysti-
cal sense of the pristine forest as sacramental. In fact, Barth is suspicious of any so-called
Christian literature, lest its aesthetic qualities domesticate the radically prophetic char-
acter of Christian faith. Yet Barth concedes that the highest cultural and literary achieve-
ments, while always retaining penultimate status, often contain far-off reflections and
parables of the Good News. And because Barth’s own understanding of the Christian
revelation is fundamentally joyful, Barthian interpreters of literature often seek such
glimmers of the Gospel in comic texts, especially when they are not overtly Christian.

Readers formed by the theology of von Balthasar are more likely to probe the work
of explicitly Christian writers, in order to retrieve them for the life of the church and
the world alike, lest the divine dignity of human life be lost. Pope Benedict XVI
was a Balthasarian theologian whose work could be put to such uses. In his ini-
tial encyclical—issued in 2005 and entitled Deus Caritas Est (“God Is Love”)—the
pope argued that the allegedly Christian contrast between eros and agape is based
on a mistaken neo-scholastic rendering of the nature-grace relation—the notion,
namely, that only when worldly love exhausts or bankrupts itself can divine love
then complete and perfect it. Like both Dante and Bernard of Clairvaux, Benedict
wanted to reclaim eros for the church, regarding it as an authentic sign and site of
the human hunger for the Holy.
Balthasarian theology envisions the divine eros as radically resident in the world and
thus as erupting, sometimes violently, from within it. Determined that his beloved not
be given over to spurious loves, God the Lover tracks and shadows his beloved. Such
a sacred stalking means, of course, that the cherished one may misread divine love as
malign or reject it as too demanding. Yet the incarnate God allows himself to be slain
rather than leaving his eros remain unrequited. “His death on the Cross,” declares
Benedict, “is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives
himself [as true Lover] in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most rad-
ical form.”5 Far from being a negative sign of the Ultimacy that refuses all idolatry, the
Cross here becomes the positive instrument of Love, the arrow that pierces the beloved
so as to enable a return (or else a refusal) of the divine eros.
The fiction of Flannery O’Connor, the most important Christian writer yet to emerge
in the United States, is filled with such violence that many readers wonder whether
her work can be called Christian at all. A Balthasarian reading of her story entitled
“Greenleaf ” reveals, on the contrary, both the Christian quality of her art and the
Christian trenchancy of Benedict’s theology. The story chiefly concerns Mrs. May, the
widowed owner of a large dairy farm. Vexed with many woes, failed by many so-called
helpers, and wronged by many alleged friends, she sees herself as a victim of every-
body and everything. The farm lady has thus twisted her unrelenting but self-pitying
labors into a proud denial of her fundamental dependency, mistaking autonomy for
self-sufficiency.
Because of its virtual avoidance of religious language, its clear allusions to the myth
of Zeus and Europa, as well as its openness to Freudian interpretation, the story can
be read in entirely psychological terms, as if Mrs. May’s moral self-enclosure had
taken the form of repressed erotic desire. She is obsessed, in fact, with the scrub bull
belonging to her neighbors, the Greenleafs. He repeatedly escapes from the Greenleaf
pasture and thus threatens to corrupt the pure blood-lines of her own herd. Wearing
only her nightgown, Mrs. May first hears the bull munching the shrubbery outside
her bedroom window as if he were “an uncouth country suitor,” a hedge-wreathed god
“come down to woo her.”6 She repeatedly imagines the bull as making a charge on her
until, with dread Chekhovian inevitability, he buries his head in her lap, impaling her
on his horns.

This bestial thrust can also be read in Balthasarian terms as a divine piercing, since
the narrator describes the otherwise prim Mrs. May as being penetrated with the force
of “a wild tormented lover” (CW, 523). Though initially terrified at the bull’s approaching
rush, Mrs. May seems at last to welcome it, discerning the prime Object of her desire—
namely, the divine Lover whom she has sought to close off, the ardent Suitor of her soul
who must erupt like a chthonic force into her primly self-sealed life. Thus opened by and
to the ultimate Eros, Mrs. May dies in an amatory state that seems also to be a religious
confession, as she whispers “some last discovery into the animal’s ear” (CW, 524). Under
such Balthasarian/Benedictine aegis, a Christian approach to literature seeks to identify
literary embodiments of this divinely erotic lancing, even when they are not made quite
so evident as in O’Connor’s story.
Thus do the two basic approaches for a Christian engagement with literature
serve nicely to complement each other. Tillichian and Rahnerian critics are best
suited for discerning the religious significance of non-Christian works wherein an
anonymous Christianity may be found, or else in prophetically naming the sun-
dry human horrors committed in the service of false gods. They enable their fel-
low Christians to deepen their faith by engaging with minimally Christian or even
atheistic writers, while also opening non-Christian readers to the religious depths
of allegedly secular literature. Critics schooled in the theologies of Barth and von
Balthasar, by contrast, will serve as guides to writers who, in giving literary embodi-
ment to the penetrations of the divine eros, become bearers of the Gospel’s saving
truth, enabling the Church to be more faithful to its own angular Gospel, while also
inviting non-Christians to embrace it.
Notes
1. For elaboration of this claim, see Joseph Ratzinger, The Salt of the Earth: Christianity and
the Catholic Church at the End of the Millennium, an interview with Peter Seewald (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 1997): 164; and Benedict XVI, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures
(San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006): 52.
2. A Rahner Reader, ed. Gerald A. McCool (New York: Seabury, 1975): 127.
3. Theological Investigations, vol. III: The Theology of the Spiritual Life (Baltimore: Helicon,
1967): 302.
4. In such admirable mastery of his art, Faulkner was imbued, even if unconsciously, with
what Tillich calls “the courage to be.” That the search for the meaning of life can be reduced
to despair, Tillich declares, does not necessarily entail godlessness. “As long as this despair is
an act of life [as Faulkner’s literary creativity surely was] it is positive in its negativity. . . . The
paradox of every radical negativity, as long as it is an active negativity, is that it must affirm
itself in order to be able to negate itself.” The Courage to Be (London and New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1952): 175–76.
5. Benedict XVI, God Is Love: Deus Caritas Est. Washington, DC: United States Conference
of Bishops, 2006): par. 12, p. 17.
6. Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988): 501–2. Further
references to this volume will be indicated as CW.

Bibliography
Auden, W. H. “The Dyer’s Hand” and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1962.
Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. III: Studies in
Theological Styles: Lay Styles. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986.
Begbie, Jeremy. Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts. Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1991.
Boyle, Nicholas. Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature. Notre Dame,
Brown, Frank Burch. Transfiguration: Poetic Metaphor and the Languages of Religious Belief.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975.
Jeffrey, David Lyle. People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture. Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1996.
Jacobs, Alan. A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001.
Lundin, Roger. The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World. Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993.
Scott, Nathan A., Jr. The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966.
Tennyson, G. B., and Edward W. Erickson Jr., eds. Religion and Modern Literature: Essays in
Theory and Criticism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1975.
Wood, Ralph C. The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American
Novelists. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.

C HA P T E R 19
C H R I S T IA N I T Y A N D M U S I C
PAU L W E ST E R M EY E R
19.1 Streams
The Christian church at worship has expressed itself musically most clearly in two
streams: one, what the assembly, mostly people who are not musicians, sings without
practice, the other what a choir practices to help the assembly and to sing what it cannot.
The first group is more aligned to the artistry of folk music, the second more to art music.
The normative Sunday gathering for Christians has been a Word and Table sequence,
known by names like Eucharist, Mass, Liturgy, or Holy Communion. The other six days
of the week have been characterized by brief prayer services at morning and evening
for the church generally and up to eight services throughout the day for those who, like
monks, live together in community. Both have “Ordinary” parts—ones that happen reg-
ularly (“ordinarily”), and “Proper” parts—ones that happen only on (are “proper” to)
specific days of the church’s calendar. Generally the Ordinary is congregational and the
Proper choral, though “Proper” hymns are congregational. Choirs sometimes sing both
the Ordinary and the Proper, as in some Orthodox and Anglican traditions.
Music for worship presumes a participatory group of worshipers, or the presence of some
people in the assembly who participate and help those who may not be familiar with the
service. The church has also stimulated an oratorio tradition that does not presume partici-
pation. It relies on the worshiping tradition and may even use its parts, but it presumes music
practiced by a group who performs for listeners. This stream is concert-like and can focus
more obviously on artistry, though worship’s dynamics can drive artistry even more strongly.
19.2 Music
The church has spawned some of the most remarkably artistic music the world has
known. This includes anonymous plainchant and compositions by many musicians,

CHRISTIANITY AND MUSIC 287
among them Hildegard (1098–1179), Perotin (fl. C. 1200), Machaut (1300–1377), Binchois
(c. 1400–1460), Dufay (1400–1474), Ockeghem (c. 1410–1497), Josquin (c. 1440–1521),
Palestrina (1525–1594), Victoria (1548–1611), Schütz (1585–1672), Lassus (1532–1594),
Pachelbel (1653–1706), Purcell (1659–1695), J. S. Bach (1685–1750), who Robert Shaw said
might be “the single greatest creative genius” of the Western world,1 Handel (1685–1759),
Haydn (1732–1809), Mozart (1765–1791), Bortniansky (1751–1825), Mendelssohn (1809–
1847), Franck (1822–1890), Brahms (1833–1897), Rachmaninov (1873–1943), Vaughan
Williams (1872–1958), Stravinsky (1882–1971), Duruflé (1902–1986), Distler (1908–1942),
Messiaen (1908–1992), and a myriad of other, sometimes lesser known but nonetheless
very able, craftspersons.
With the exception of Vaughan Williams, the above list does not include compos-
ers of service music or hymn tunes. These smaller congregational folk-like idioms are
sometimes remarkably artistic miniatures that have stimulated artistic traditions of
congregational singing. They include unaccompanied unison forms of plainchant,
chorales, metrical psalm tunes, black and white spirituals, as well as other tunes and
sophisticated forms of lining out and part-singing. Organists have improvised and
composed artistic introductions, hymn stanzas, and free-standing pieces; and the
nineteenth century increased the use of the organ to accompany hymn singing in
artistic ways.
19.3 Perspective
Some Christians have objected to music. Questions then surface about what “reli-
gious” and “artistic” mean. Nicholas Temperley isolates “three distinct attitudes to the
place of music in worship . . . throughout the history of Christianity.”2 The first excludes
music because of “mistrust” in music’s power, “in spite,” says Temperley, “of clear bibli-
cal injunctions to praise God with psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs, and with
instruments of music (e.g., Psalm 150:3–5; Colossians 3:16).” The second harnesses music
“for the good of men’s souls.” The third “denies the role of music as an actual vehicle of
religious expression, but values it as an ornament in the offering to God, as part of the
‘beauty of holiness.’ ”
Temperley’s analysis suggests that the third attitude is not religious. Karl Barth’s view
fits Temperley’s second attitude. Barth regarded singing as “the highest form of human
expression. It is to such supreme expression,” he says, “that the vox humana is dedicated
in the ministry of the Christian community.”3 However, he also regarded “the revela-
tion of God as the abolition of religion”4 and “Religion as Unbelief.”5 Barth’s theological
definition of religion suggests that Temperley’s first and third attitudes may be the “reli-
gious” ones. If religion is not defined theologically, but phenomenologically as human
expression of a set of beliefs and their practice concerning the cause, nature, and pur-
pose of the universe, “religious” may be construed to relate to all three of the attitudes
Temperley isolates. Whether they are all “artistic” is another question.

David P. McKay and Richard Crawford see the church’s “long, often fruitful relation-
ship with music” as an “uneasy truce”6 or “a classic dichotomy between musician and
theologian.”7 This view suggests that music is artistic and theology is not. There is a
“long history of the Church’s ambivalent relationship with its singers.”8 Christopher
Page locates it already in the first four centuries. But theology may yield the high-
est regard for music at its most artistic reach. Theologian Robert Jenson says that
the “prayer and proclamation of the church regularly bursts into beauty” and seems
“to insist on music.” He sees this “not as an adventitious hankering to decorate,”9 as
Temperley’s analysis may suggest. Music comes from God, says Jenson, and the Trinity
from eternity is always singing. “God is a great fugue. There is nothing so capacious as
a fugue.”10 God chooses to share this roominess. “The opening of that room is the act
of creation.”11 This means God shares truth, goodness, and beauty with the creation,12
which in turn means “a congregation singing a hymn of praise to the Father is doubling
the Son’s praise, and the surge of rhythm and melody is the surge of the Spirit’s glorifi-
cation of the Father and the Son.”13
Jenson’s view is religious and artistic, though coming from God’s side turns them
both upside down and gets at Barth’s point. What Jenson and the history of the church
demonstrate, however one interprets them, is that Christianity’s prayer and proclama-
tion have regularly burst into artistic musical beauty. In spite of disputes that often have
taken top billing, the superficial uses to which music has been put, and the attempts to
restrict or erase it, Christians over the long haul have laid aside the superficial and have
gravitated to the musical artistry of their congregational and choral streams. Poets and
composers, even ones whose beliefs may vary from theirs, have given them words and
music they have found to be just what they wanted to say and sing but could not find on
their own. They have hummed Sunday’s music all week long, have found that it “artisti-
cally” organized their lives (though they may not have used that word), and through it
have known deep peace. This reality, though least often acknowledged, is nonetheless
the most significant. More visible disputes have dealt with important points that need
attention. They should not, however, obscure the less visible but more significant under-
lying reality. The history, in any case, goes something like this.
19.4 History
The Jewish community created psalms, 150 of which were gathered into the Psalter of the
Old Testament. They encompass the whole round of humanity’s praise, prayer, sorrow,
anger, beauty, and horror; and they bring it all before God in song. This outpouring leads
in the Psalter to the whole creation singing and playing instruments before God. The
texts that express this were sung by Old Testament communities with instruments in
the Temple, where highly trained Levites led them, and in the synagogues by lay persons
without instruments. The communities that sang them would not have called what they
were doing “artistic,” but we are likely to see their religious impulse as being worked out

in musically artistic ways—more aligned to art music in the Temple and more aligned to
folk music in the synagogues.
The New Testament community took over the Psalms and their vocal performance
practice without instruments from the synagogues. They added Christocentric canticles
like the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), the Benedictus (Luke 1:67–79), and the Nunc dimittis
(Luke 2:29–32), plus “hymns and spiritual songs” (Colossians 3:16) that probably were
general rather than specific designations. Some early Christians seem to have changed
the perspective they inherited and used instruments to induce frenzy, like the priests
of Cybele,14 but from the end of the second century there was a strong reaction against
this. A direct argument against instruments was added to the received vocal practice
of the synagogues,15 driven by instrumental associations with idolatry and immoral-
ity.16 Calvin Stapert points out that “the early Christian writers aimed no polemic at the
nobler art music or folk music of their day.”17 Art and folk music turned out to be what
the church developed in its choral and congregational streams. “The denunciations of
music,” says Stapert, “were not general,” but “were aimed at” the music associated with
public spectacles, voluptuous banqueting, pagan weddings, and pagan religious rites
and festivities.18
This polemic had a strong ethical focus on behalf of the common good, directed
against the lascivious and lavish expenditures that only the wealthy could afford, and
should be understood in context. “The Christian Church was born in song”19 and did
not think of its music as ethical or artistic. With no clear distinction between speech
and song,20 lessons were cantillated, prayers were intoned, and virtually everything was
sung. Edward Foley describes music in the early church as the “aural aspect” of wor-
ship.21 Joseph Gelineau says there was “an intense lyrical quality in the life of the apos-
tolic church, particularly in its liturgical assemblies.”22
This “lyrical quality” introduced an artistic reality, as sounds were shaped and orga-
nized in time, forms were created, and artistic delight became palpable. Ambrose,
Augustine, and Pambo represent three ways the church reacted.23 Ambrose (c. 340–297)
affirmed the sound of music, happy that the congregational hymns (texts) he wrote were
sung. Augustine (354–430) was nervous about music and wanted to be sure it did not
obscure the texts and their meaning. Pambo (c. 317–367?)—to whom secondary sources
attribute such thoughts, though they probably come from the sixth century24 —felt sing-
ing turned away from the nourishment of the Holy Spirit. He compared it to the lowing
of cattle.
Pambo gave a minority report. The church continued to sing, developing its reper-
toire of congregational and choral chant. Around the end of the first millennium in the
West—not in the East, which continued to follow the early church—the organ was added
to the voices, became the primary instrument of the church in the West, and developed
a huge artistic repertoire. Before and after the introduction of the organ, a gradually
stronger artistic choral repertoire also developed. By the time of the Renaissance it had
minimized the singing of the assembly.
Martin Luther (1483–1546), John Calvin (1509–1564), and Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531)
reacted in different ways.25 Luther renewed both the congregational and the choral

practice of the church, joining together the utmost artistry of folk art and high art by the
historic practice of alternation. He welcomed the received vocal unaccompanied uni-
son of the congregation, the polyphony of choirs, and sounds of the organ and other
instruments, provided these were all well-crafted and fitting. Calvin, on the other hand,
erased choirs, polyphony, and instruments from worship, restricting music in the gath-
ered church to the unison singing of metrical psalms, which he thought alone had the
requisite weight and majesty for worship. “Lighter” polyphonic settings could be used at
home, but not when the church gathered in public for worship. Zwingli, the best musi-
cian of these reformers, erased music from public worship altogether. Unlike Luther,
who tied music to the Word of God, or Calvin, who tied it to prayer, Zwingli related it to
play outside of worship.
The Roman Catholic Council of Trent (1545–1563) supported choral art in the poly-
phonic music of Palestrina but paid scant attention to the congregational stream.
Anglicans continued the artistic choral tradition in the music of composers like
Christopher Tye (c. 1500–c.1573) and Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585), adding Calvin’s con-
gregational psalm-singing, which Presbyterians and Congregationalists also practiced.
Persecuted Anabaptists developed martyr ballads.26
Seventeenth-century English Baptists took a stance similar to Zwingli’s, but for differ-
ent reasons. Zwingli thought music at worship was showing off. He wanted people to have
an ear for the Word of God alone, without musical distractions. The Baptists thought
singing pre-composed texts “quenched the spirit.”27 Benjamin Keach (1640–1704) first
agreed with this view, but changed his mind. His introduction of hymn-singing changed
the Baptist’s position. Quakers avoided music at worship, regarding internal centering
down to the inner light as most important and devaluing all external forms; they did not
change their view on this.
Each of these positions may be construed as “artistic,” but the nature of the artistry is
different. For Luther, the religious impulse led to the highest possible artistry at worship
for congregations, choirs, and instrumentalists. For Roman Catholics and Anglicans, it
led to choral artistry, the latter in addition to the Calvinist folk tradition of psalm sing-
ing. For Calvinists with Separatist proclivities who were without choral or other liturgi-
cal music, it led to artistic restrictions at worship, a partial lifting of those restrictions
outside of it, and a development not governed “consistently and systematically.”28 For
Zwingli, the religious impulse shut down musical artistry at worship altogether, but at
least theoretically allowed it outside of worship. For Quakers, silence may be deemed
artistic, but ironically they produced Shaking Quakers who, led by Mother Ann Lee
(1736–1784), danced in artistically complex configurations with perhaps as many as
8,000 spirituals, such as “’Tis the Gift to Be Simple.”29
John Wesley (1703–1791) favored the ancient power of monophony, but was drawn to
Handel’s opera. He presents an inconsistent move toward the coming Romantic under-
standing of music’s emotional power.30 His rules for hymn-singing (lusty, modestly,
in time, not too slow, and spiritual) exude a certain artistic concern without a corre-
sponding choral development. The hymn texts of John Wesley’s brother Charles Wesley
(1707–1788) were more artistic than those of Isaac Watts (1674–1748), whose texts were

set to the psalm tunes he inherited. Charles’ texts stimulated tunes that often had to be
chastened for congregational use. Charles Wesley’s sons were musical prodigies,31 and
Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1766–1837), Charles’s grandson, became an outstanding
Anglican cathedral organist who wrote close to forty anthems and is still known for his
hymn tune AURELIA. Pietists restricted the liturgy and its music, which they regarded
as too artistic, though Moravians developed a highly musical culture in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, and in Salem, North Carolina.32 The harmonic development of the
Baroque, however, made longer artistic choral forms possible. J. S. Bach’s B Minor Mass
and Passions (though the latter were intended for liturgical use), Mozart’s Requiem,
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Verdi’s Requiem, Brahms’s German Requiem, and oratorios
like Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah formed an oratorio stream that stretches
from the eighteenth century to the present. Smaller forms—hymn tunes, motets, and
Bach’s quite artistic cantatas—continued for worship, but in the nineteenth century the
larger forms of the oratorio tradition took center stage.
After the French Revolution revivalism tapped the nineteenth century’s use of music
as an emotional tool of persuasion without much artistic concern, while liturgical and
confessional movements—Oxford-Cambridge for Anglicans, Solesmes and Caecilian
for Roman Catholics—looked with more artistry to chant as an ideal, but with the
church’s integrity a chief concern. White spirituals developed with shape notes, black
spirituals with a unique artistry that some would say was stimulated in surprising ways
by white oppression.33 The Fisk Jubilee Singers turned black spirituals into artistic con-
cert pieces that have become ubiquitous.34
In the twentieth century, the German Confessing Church faced Hitler with pro-
phetic artistic service music that looked to earlier periods as stimuli. Later, parts of the
American church used music in the fight for justice, but then other parts used it as a
sales technique for versions of Christianity more allied to the state. The church also con-
tinued its more historic proportions, with the culture’s needs and global music from var-
ious ethnic sources included.
All in all, Christians have taken a variety of positions about music—objecting to it,
restricting it, misusing it, and letting it blossom artistically and freely. Over the long
haul, they have welcomed the artistic splendor their prayer and proclamation have
produced.
Notes
1. Blocker, p. 71.
2. Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, vol. 1, p. 4.
3. Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume IV, p. 866.
4. Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume I, p. 280.
5. Ibid., p. 297.
6. McKay and Crawford, William Billings of Boston, p. 8
7. Ibid., p. 3.
8. Christopher Page, The Christian West and its Singers, p. 2.

9. Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, p. 235.

10. Ibid., p. 236.
11. Ibid., p. 226.
12. See ibid., p. 225.
13. Ibid., p. 235
14. Page, p. 32.
15. McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, p. 2.
16. Ibid., pp. 2–3.
17. Stapert, A New Song for an Old World, p. 145.
18. Ibid.
19. Martin, Worship in the Early Church, p. 39.
20. Foley, From Age to Age, p. 10.
21. Ibid., p. 57.
22. Joseph Gelineau, “Music and Singing in the Liturgy,” The Study of Liturgy, p. 444.
23. For more detail see Westermeyer, Te Deum, pp. 82–89.
24. See McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, p. 9.
25. For more detail, see Westermeyer, pp. 141–158.
26. Ibid., pp. 173–178.
27. Ibid., p. 184.
28. McKay and Crawford, p. 9.
29. Patterson, The Shaker Spiritual, 1979.
30. See Westermeyer, p. 214f.
31. See Temperley and Banfield, Music and the Wesleys.
32. See Westermeyer, pp. 222–225ff.
33. Ibid., pp. 280–286, 293–294.
34. See Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise.
Bibliography
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics, Volume IV, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Part Three, Second
Half, trans. G. W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1962.
——. Church Dogmatics, Volume I, The Doctrine of the Word of God, Second Half-Volume, trans.
G. T. Thompson and Harold Knight. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956.
Blackwell, Albert. Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning. Princeton,
Blocker, Robert, ed. The Robert Shaw Reader. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
De Bruyne, Edgar. Trans. Eileen. The Aesthetics of the Middle Ages. New York: Frederick Ungar
Publishing Company, 1969.
Faulkner, Quentin. Wiser Than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and
the Christian Church. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Foley, Edward. From Age to Age: How Christians Have Celebrated the Eucharist, Revised and
Expanded Edition. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996.
Garside, Charles, Jr. Zwingli and the Arts. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 1966.

Gelineau, Joseph. “Music and Singing in the Liturgy,” in The Study of Liturgy, ed. Cheslyn
Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarnold. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978,
pp. 440–454.
Jenson, Robert W. Systematic Theology, Volume 1, The Triune God. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997.
Martin, Ralph. Worship in the Early Church. Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1964.
McKay, David P., and Richard Crawford. William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century
Composer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.
McKinnon, James. Music in Early Christian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987.
Stapert, Calvin R. A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church. Grand
Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007.
Page, Christopher. The Christian West and its Singers: The First Thousand Years. New Haven,
Patterson, Daniel. The Shaker Spiritual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
Temperley, Nicholas, and Stephen Banfield. Music and the Wesleys. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2010.
Temperley, Nicholas. The Music of the English Parish Church, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ward, Andrew. Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
New York: Amistad, 2000.
Westermeyer, Paul. Te Deum: The Church and Music. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic. Grand Rapids, MI: William
B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980.

C HA P T E R 20
C H R I S T IA N I T Y A N D
V I S UA L A RT
G R A HA M HOW E S
The history of art, especially in the West, has customarily paid marked, even excessive,
attention to both the Christian Church as patron and the relationship of artists to reli-
gious institutions. Indeed, the careers and artistic output of, for example, a Michelangelo,
or Raphael, or even a Caravaggio, are often presented as largely unintelligible outside
such a context. Yet the same art-historical trajectory also carries with it a partially
reversed process, whereby an artist’s Christian identity, ideas, and personal beliefs are
themselves instrumental in shaping, even determining, artistic self-expression.
Within the Eastern Orthodox tradition, for example, icons were originally painted
by monks, although not invariably so. Such work is customarily unsigned. Indeed the
reconvened Second Council of Nicaea (787 AD) specifically stated that “icons are in
painting what the Holy Scriptures are in writing: an aesthetic form of the truth, which
is beyond the understanding of man and cannot be comprehended by the senses.”1 As a
consequence, many of today’s Eastern Orthodox icon painters have continued to pro-
duce the self-same figures, in the same style, acting out the same unvarying visual theol-
ogy. Their order books are reportedly full.
Nurtured within the same Orthodox tradition, but rapidly transcending it, both
aesthetically and visually, is El Greco (1541-1641). Although born in Crete, and trained
as an icon painter, it is clear that the stringent theological and stylistic constraints of
the genre (and perhaps his own professional ambitions) prompted him to migrate to
the West, and to re-invent himself within a less Orthodox, and more overtly Catholic,
cultural tradition. Although initially based in Venice and Rome, it was in Spain, and
especially in Toledo—where he remained for the rest of his life—that El Greco’s per-
sonal religious outlook and its artistic expression began to converge. It is not simply
that, on the evidence of his altarpieces alone, we can detect a fusion of visual and reli-
gious intensity. He also had a well-developed habit of personal devotion, focused and
deepened by the influence of the Counter-Reformation in general and Ignatian spiri-
tuality in particular. The practice of the Spiritual Exercises (probably more pervasive

CHRISTIANITY AND VISUAL ART 295
among his patrons than his fellow artists) encouraged an immediacy of experience
and a psychological participation in the events and details of the sufferings of Christ’s
Passion, which clearly quickened his artistic imagination and invested his painting
with an almost mystical intensity.
Nearly two generations earlier than El Greco, and more identifiably embedded within
a well-established Western monastic tradition, was the Dominican Friar Giovanni di
Fiesole, (known posthumously as Fra Angelico). His decoration, between 1438 and
about 1452, of the Convent of San Marco in Florence is one of the acknowledged master-
pieces of fifteenth-century religious art. However, it is less the oeuvre itself that demands
attention, than the credal mindset that informed it. For not only was Fra Angelico that
rarity in Renaissance art—an artist who was exclusively a religious painter—he was also,
equally rarely, a religious professional and an artistic one. At San Marco, as William
Hood meticulously documents, both roles converged, and the artist’s visual imagery (as
much as Dominican ritual practice) served to enhance prayerfulness in his own insti-
tutional setting. Fra Angelico, as both artist and long-serving Dominican, was clearly
aware of his key role in transmitting, pictorially, the basic ideals of monastic spirituality
from one generation of friars to the next, and how his images could be used program-
matically to shape the religious imagination of those “fellow-professionals” whose task
it was to preach to the laity. Such “experiential familiarity”2 with Dominican theology, as
much as his Christian faith, was a major factor in Fra Angelico’s work as both friar and
artist. It also enabled him—in the San Marco context at least—to articulate and commu-
nicate certain religious ideas and practices in a pictorial language of exceptional origi-
nality and power, albeit largely within the confines of his own order. It is an experience
happily still available to the visitor today.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69) inhabited a profoundly different Christian mindset
from that of Fra Angelico. The child of Protestant Reformed Church parents, Rembrandt
was baptized, and later married, within the same, essentially Calvinist, tradition, which
lacked any strongly developed tradition of patronage for religious subject matter. Yet
by the end of his life Rembrandt had etched, drawn, or painted about eight hundred
and fifty works, nearly all on Biblical subjects. The reasons for such productivity are
relatively clear. Rembrandt was very well aware that etchings were particularly suited
to those fellow-Protestants who wanted to install works of art in their homes relatively
inexpensively, and for whom meditation in front of them was quite acceptable, whereas
their liturgical use in churches was not. But there was far more to Rembrandt’s choice
of etchings as the primary genre for his religious art than mere entrepreneurial sleight
of hand. For one thing, his was rarely art created for a church setting. It was rather a
meditative art, one that centered on the individual consciousness, on the states of the
soul in themselves and then on their relation or non-relation to others. Its emphasis, in
any case, was on the difference that grace makes in specific situations—a mirror of the
gospel message. As Willem Visser ‘t Hooft (himself a distinguished twentieth-century
Dutch Protestant) puts it, “Rembrandt was a painter of the grace of God, exhibited to
the unworthy, the unimportant, those without merit, in such a way that only the grace of
God mattered.”3

Although there are other identifiable components of Rembrandt’s religious forma-

tion—his associations and friendships with Mennonites, his sympathetic acquain-
tance with the Jewish community, his links, in later life, with an informal Calvinist cell
devoted to Christian meditation and poetry—and its aesthetic expression—one other
powerful feature is crucial to our understanding of his art. It is his personal encounter
with the Bible. We know that his mother read the Scriptures to him as a boy, that his fel-
low students at the Latin school in Leiden read the Bible daily, and that as an adult he
was nourished by his reading of it. All this reinforced both his religious and his artistic
identity, and largely accounts for the overwhelming proportion of biblical themes in his
entire output. These not only document Rembrandt’s uncomplicated piety, and testify to
his intimate knowledge of Bible stories. They also focus on the humanity of Christ. Here,
as Christopher Joby has argued, Rembrandt “uses his craftsmanship to suggest also the
transcendental nature of Christ, and he tries, as far as is possible on a two-dimensional
plane, to represent both the human and the divine natures of Christ.”4 In these deeply
personal exercises in visual Christology, we are invariably presented with a Christ very
much of this world, but also, through the use of light, a Christ whose divine nature is
equally clear.
This preoccupation with depicting the corporeal yet transcendent nature of Christ,
(especially in a world where some scholars were beginning to challenge both His his-
toricity and His divinity), was central to the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painter, William
Holman Hunt (1827-1910). Indeed his capacity for personal religious reflection was, even
by mid-Victorian standards, prodigious. “My belief,” he wrote in 1870 (with Darwin
clearly on his mind), “is that as man was a new development in animal life, so was
Christ to us.”5 Unsurprisingly, he agonized continually over whether his own art “could
effectively serve as an auxiliary of the Protestant religion” or ever attain “real religious
feeling.” His artistic response was essentially twofold. One was a high-profile commit-
ment to topographical and emotional realism, acted out in regular visits to the Middle
East, “to make more tangible Jesus Christ’s history and teaching.”6 The other was to use
symbolism as well as realism. Here, as George Landow7 has clearly shown, Hunt (like
Ruskin) believed that a symbolism based on scriptural typology—the method of find-
ing anticipations of Christ in Hebrew history—would produce a religious art that would
simultaneously avoid the danger of materialism inherent in realism and the accompany-
ing perils of mere academicism or gross sentimentality. How successfully Hunt avoided
all three of these dangers remains open to question.
Elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe, “Christian” art, exemplified by both the
German Nazarenes and the “bondieuserie” of such Frenchmen as Paul Delaroche
and Puvis de Chavannes, showed precisely these weaknesses, and it took two outsid-
ers to break the mold. Vincent van Gogh, the son of a Protestant pastor from Brabant,
described by his sister as “groggy with piety” in his youth, was a failed candidate for
the ministry, then an unsuccessful lay preacher in the mining villages south of Mons.
Nonetheless he retained a fixation, even a self-identification, with the Christ whom, he
once remarked, “lived serenely as an artist, greater than all artists, disdaining marble and
clay and colour, working in living flesh.”8 Yet ironically, when, at the age of twenty-seven,

he finally became aware of his vocation as an artist, he realized (to judge from both his
letters and his art) that he would never be able to achieve the biblical compositions of
which he had long dreamed. Instead, he sought to infuse secular motifs with religious
significance through the very language of painting itself. “I want,” he told his brother
Theo, “to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used
to symbolise, but which we now seek to confer through the actual radiance of our colour
vibrations.”9 One consequence, supremely exemplified in his Potato Eaters (1885), was
not only Van Gogh’s own redefinition of his vocation as a “Christian” artist, but a crucial
mutation in the historical development of Christian art itself.
In September, 1888, three years after Potato Eaters, Paul Gauguin wrote to van Gogh
from Pont-Aven in Brittany: “I have just painted a religious picture, very clumsily, but it
interested me, and I like it. I wanted to give it to the Church here. Naturally they don’t
want it.”10 The painting is Vision after the Sermon—Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. This,
too, is far more than a religious genre painting. For this seminary-educated Christian
skeptic’s own religious beliefs went far beyond the conventional anti-clericalism and
apologetics of his time. He wanted, instead, to overcome the prevailing, Comptean,
positivist approach to reality, by deploying a new arsenal of visual forms through which
to seek transcendence and to point himself, and us, toward an ideal, supernatural
realm extending beyond everyday perceptual experience. In Vision after the Sermon,
we see Gauguin boldly entering such territory for himself. Hence the painting is not
a picturesque rendition of folk Christianity. It is rather, in Debora Silverman’s phrase,
“a composite meditation on states of consciousness and levels of reality”11 —a mirac-
ulous mutation from folk piety to interior vision that surely challenges H. W. Janson’s
well-aired art-historical judgment that Paul Gauguin “could paint pictures about faith,
but not from faith.”12
With the twentieth century, it is clear that two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Cold
War, globalization, mass communication, secularization, even modernity itself, had a
profound effect not only upon the traditional relationship of art to Christianity—and
Christianity to art—but more specifically upon that of Christian faith to artistic practice.
Here there are several complex, yet identifiable, configurations. One is that, perhaps for
the first time in history, major aesthetic movements—notably Post-Impressionism, as
well as German and American Expressionism—largely developed without at any point
making contact with organized religion, and the leading artists of these movements
rarely professed even nominal Christian identities. Picasso’s Guernica (once described
by Anthony Blunt as “the major religious work of the twentieth century”)13 and Dali’s
Christ of St. John of the Cross are perhaps prime examples.
There were, of course, exceptions. Otto Dix, one of the greatest German Expressionist
artists of the twentieth century, consciously reverted from secular social realism to
biblically–based religious themes in the aftermath of World War II. His thirty-three
lithographs based on the Book of Matthew (1960) are an immensely powerful fusion
of Expressionist technique and Christian narrative. Similarly, Henri Matisse’s rela-
tively conventional objectives for his 1951 chapel at Vence (“the creation of religious
space. . . . I want those who will come into my chapel to feel purified and relieved of their

burdens”)14 also carried a more explicitly Christian sub-text. “From a certain moment
on,” he told Father Couturier, “it isn’t me anymore, it’s a revelation; all I have to do is
give myself.” His Stations, in the Chapel, marked, he said, “the encounter of the artist
with the great tragedy of Christ, which makes the impassioned spirit of the artist flow
out over the chapel.”15 This does not, of course, make Matisse a “Christian” artist, but the
Vence project, late in life, clearly served to crystallize his personal religious identity if
not his faith.
One twentieth-century artist supremely secure in both was Georges Rouault
(1871-1958). Although we cannot, as William Dyrness advises, “measure Rouault’s art-
istry by his faith, the relationship between the two is nevertheless important.”16 Indeed,
that faith, Dyrness suggests, very perceptively, “was the personal and emotional expres-
sion of his painful vision of human depravity and suffering. It was an emotional refuge
rather than a reasoned apologetic. . . . It was precisely this lived-through quality of his
faith that gave his paintings their tender, sympathetic profundity.”17 Sadly, such quali-
ties did not impress the Church, which Rouault (a devout Catholic) had long hoped to
serve through his art. At Assy, in Eastern France, where he had contributed to an ambi-
tious decorative scheme commissioned by the remarkable Father Couturier (which
included work by Chagall, Richier, Matisse, Lipchitz and Leger), his stained glass
Christ of the Passion (1949) was described by Vatican officials (no less!) as “itself so ugly
that it would evoke in the pious observer a disturbing sense of the body in its deforma-
tion rather than transmit a spiritual message.”18 Note here that Rouault, one of the few
really gifted painters of the twentieth century who remained a practicing Christian,
and who continuously represented religious themes, especially from the life of Christ,
never received any formal recognition whatsoever from his own church, except from
isolated individuals.
Today, however, Wilson Yates’s contention that “the visual arts and the Christian mes-
sage are intrinsically related and mutually dependent upon one another in the midst
of their unique autonomy and distinctiveness”19 seems increasingly problematic.
Firstly, it may now be far more difficult for artist and public alike to identify, let alone
embrace, Christianity through art in a so-called “post-modern” culture where religious
consciousness is so fractured and diffuse. One result is the contemporary paradox of
a highly visual culture in which Christian imagery is now, at best, intermittently vis-
ible. Even here, complexity abounds. For one thing, the continuing expansion of global
Christianity, especially in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia (most notably South
Korea), has been accompanied by the extensive use of pan-denominational “popular”
Christian imagery in many communal spaces, adorning most forms of public and pri-
vate transport, and in the home. In addition, even in large segments of the supposedly
post-modern, “post-Christian” West, Christian iconography continues to articulate
Christian identity, whether as a fashion accessory, or as a denominational emblem (as in
Northern Ireland) or through film (Mel Gibson or Terrence Malick, for example). Such
visual evidence for the continuing physical presence and cultural efficacy of Christian
symbolism seriously challenges the more simplistic sociological assumptions concern-
ing the corrosive consequences of secularization for Christian art itself.

A more identifiable consequence of secularization for Christian art—and artists—

is, paradoxically, essentially “pre-modern” in origin. It springs from a—perhaps
the—theological problem that has perennially challenged Christian art. How, by the
visible, can we suggest a reality that is invisible? How, in whatever visual medium, can
we articulate a Christianity for our own day, when, in a normatively post-Christian
culture like our own, any fully functional, didactic relationship between Christianity
and the visual arts remains unsustainable? Put differently, today’s “Christian” art-
ists (with a few honorable exceptions) are unlikely to be keyed into Christian cul-
ture because there is no longer any identifiable Christian culture for them to be
keyed into.
Should we therefore seek to recalibrate, for the twenty-first century, the his-
torical relationship of art to faith—and faith to art—within the Christian tradi-
tion, or should we start again “from where we are”? Two things seem already clear.
One is that with the advent of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the cul-
tural matrix that has been the foundation of traditional Western Christianity has
finally begun to fragment, accompanied by a movement away from religion and
toward spirituality. This process, initiated by Caspar David Friedrich and German
Romanticism, and fully, if somewhat opaquely, articulated in Wassily Kandinsky’s
book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), has had far-reaching consequences for
“Christian,” indeed all, art. One is an identifiable movement away from a narrowly
and exclusively Christian art towards what Rosemary Crumlin has described as
“works which are only implicitly religious in their inspiration, and so without iden-
tifiable religious themes or traditional symbols.”20 A mutation, in short, from reli-
gion to spirituality—itself a major shift in cultural history. A second consequence
is that today’s artists are now more likely to search for meaning within themselves
rather than from supernatural stories or the rituals of institutional churches.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, many contemporary “religious” artists deliberately side-
step any literal depiction of the Gospel, tending to proceed instead away from all
literary or narrative content and toward an art largely without symbols or imag-
ery, and therefore without any specific doctrinal allusions whatever. Such art is not
necessarily antithetical to contemporary Christian culture and institutions. Indeed
it may also carry with it genuinely credal, if not overtly theological, resonances.
Hence one of the most appropriate perspectives for today’s “Christian” artists might
well be to not profess a specifically confessional commitment, nor to try to lift the
dominant current aesthetic taboo against specific narrative content. It is rather to
profess—indeed encourage—a self-guided religious imagination that no longer
merely reflects existing religious tradition, but creates and expresses new spiritual
perceptions that we are all invited to share. Such an approach inevitably offers a
daunting, yet creative challenge, to contemporary Christian art and theology alike.
But as the editor of this Handbook so presciently observed over twenty years ago,
“the art that has the greatest significance is not necessarily the art of institutional
religion but rather the art which happens to discern what religion in its institu-
tional focus needs most to see.”21

Notes
1. Ouspensky, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 134–5.
2. Hood, 1990, p. 188.
3. Hooft, Rembrandt and the Gospel, p. 37.
4. Joby, “How Does the Work of Rembrandt van Rijn Represent a Calvinist Aesthetic?”
Theology 107, no. 835: 24.
5. Bell Scott, 1892, vol. II, p. 90.
6. Hunt, 1905, vol. I, p. 349.
7. Landow, 1979 (passim).
8. Roskill, ed., 1972, p. 93.
9. Roskill, p. 151.
10. Thomson, 2005, p. 53.
11. Silverman, 2003, p. 204.
12. Janson, 1962, p. 508.
13. Blunt, 1969, p. 26.
14. Couturier, 1989, p. 94.
15. Billot, ed., 1999, p.101.
16. Dyrness, 1971, p.16.
17. Dyrness, p. 70.
18. Rubin, 1961, p. 95.
19. Yates, 1992, p. 2.
20. Crumlin, 1998, p. 9.
21. Brown, 1989, p. 11.
Bibliography
Blunt, Anthony (1969). Picasso’s Guernica. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, Michelle P., ed. (2008). The Lion Companion to Christian Art. Oxford: Lion Hudson.
Brown, Frank Burch (1989). Religious Aesthetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Couturier, Marie-Alain (1989). Sacred Art. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Crumlin, Rosemary, ed. (1998). Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination.
Melbourne, Australia: National Gallery of Victoria.
Dyrness, William A. (1971). Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation. Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans.
Graham, Gordon (2007). The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hood, William (1990). “Fra Angelico at San Marco: Art and the Liturgy of Cloistered Life.” In
Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, eds., Christianity and the Renaissance. Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, pp.108–131.
Hooft, Visser ‘t (1947). Rembrandt and the Gospel. London: SCM Press.
Howes, Graham (2007). The Art of the Sacred: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief.
London: I. B. Tauris.
Hunt, William Holman (1905). Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols.
London: Chapman and Hall.

Janson, Horst Waldemar (1962). History of Art: A Survey of the Visual Arts from the Dawn of
History to the Present Day. London: Thames and Hudson.
Joby, Christopher (2004). “How Does the Work of Rembrandt van Rijn Represent a Calvinist
Aesthetic?” Theology 107, no. 835: 22–29.
Landow, George P. (1979).William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Matisse, Henri; Couturier, Marie-Alain; Rayssiguier, Louis-Bertrand; Billot, Marcel, eds.
(1999). The Vence Chapel: The Archive of a Creation. Milan: Menil Foundation.
Miles, Margaret R. (1985). Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and
Secular Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Morgan, David (1998). Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Images. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Ouspensky, Leonid (1992). Theology of the Icon, 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press.
Pattison, George (1998). Art, Modernity and Faith: Restoring the Image: London: SCM Press.
Roskill, Mark, ed. (1972). The Letters of Van Gogh. London: Fontana/Collins.
Rubin, William S. (1961). Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Scott, William Bell (1892). Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, 2 vols.
London: Osgood, McIvaine & Co. (reprint, 1970, New York: A.M.S. Press).
Silverman, Debora (2003). Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Thiessen, Gesa E., ed. (2004). Theological Aesthetics: A Reader. London: SCM Press.
Thomson, Belinda (2005). Gauguin’s Vision. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland.
Williamson, Beth (2004). Christian Art: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Yates, Wilson (1992). “Reflections on the Arts and Theological Disciplines.” ARTS 4, no 3,
(Summer): 1–2, 28–30.
Useful Journals
Art and Christianity (London: ACE, 1995 onward)
ARTS (The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies. Minneapolis/St. Paul, 1988 onward)
Material Religion (The journal of Objects, Art and Belief. Oxford, 2005 onward)
Religion and the Arts (Boston, MA, 1996 onward)

C HA P T E R 21
I S L A M A N D L I T E R AT U R E
TA R I F K HA L I DI
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible
degree”: thus wrote Ezra Pound . The Qur’an, arguably the most self-referential of sacred
texts, puts forward the language of its revelation as one principal claim for its unique
and divine origin. It is a sacred text that promises salvation in and through the power of
rhetoric. Such salvation is of course fortified by theological certainty and ethical imper-
atives born from an acute awareness of the alienated and illusory character of the human
reality. Hence, the Qur’an summons mankind to a radical transformation where rheto-
ric and thought combine to deliver the overwhelming message:
Had We sent down this Qur’an upon a mountain

You would have seen it humbled,
Shattered from the fear of God. (Q.59:21)
To describe its rhetorical power, the Qur’an uses the term Bayan, truth eloquently
expressed, and this term became one of the self-designated names of the Qur’an,
perhaps the most significant of them all. But this rhetorical claim ensured that a ten-
sion would ensue between Qur’anic Bayan and poetry. In pre-Islamic Arabia, poets
were what Shelley wanted them to be, “the hierophants of an unapprehended inspira-
tion . . . the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Fiercely rejecting the comparison
with poetry, the Qur’an turned its anger against the poets’ way of life, describing them as
a deceitful and boastful lot, led astray by seductive demons. Bayan was an entirely dif-
ferent order of eloquence: it was the eloquence of divine truth. The tension between the
two truth claims has never been resolved. While most pious Muslims today would be
loath to speak of the Qur’an as in any sense poetical, literary critics from earliest times
and down the ages have not hesitated to apply the same aesthetic criteria of judgment to
both Qur’anic Bayan and poetry, while poetry itself continued to thrive in Islamic cul-
ture despite the Qur’an’s hostility.
But poetry was not the only arena of convergence with Qur’anic Bayan, since Qur’anic
diction began to seep into the earliest preserved Arabic belletristic prose, as for instance
in the Epistles of `Abd al-Hamid al-Katib (d. 750), the renowned state secretary of the

ISLAM AND LITERATURE 303
Umayyad dynasty (661–750). In these public Epistles the intention behind such Qur’anic
usage was arguably propagandistic, i.e., to advertise the piety of a dying dynasty as it
faced a revolution accusing it of impiety. Far more ambiguous is the prose of a contem-
porary, Ibn al-Muqaffa` (d. 756), who set out to establish a model of eloquence almost
consciously different from the Qur’anic, owing far more to the canons of the Hellenistic
literature of Late Antiquity than to the Qur’an. These two writers were instrumental in
setting the stage for the rise of Adab, or Islamic literary humanism.
As the sayings of Muhammad were collected into a systematic corpus in the ninth
century, the tension between Qur’anic Bayan and poetry appears to have abated some-
what. It is conceivable that those who redacted the Prophetic sayings had come to recog-
nize that Qur’anic Bayan had not made poetry superfluous. Though inimitable, Bayan
nevertheless shared with poetry the “enchantment” of inspiration. To the Prophet were
ascribed sayings such as “some eloquence is enchanting.” Then again, not all poetry is
necessarily reprehensible, particularly, says the Prophet, if the poetry was ethical in
intent. As the transmitter of revelation, Muhammad was endowed with a kind of elo-
quence only slightly less sublime than Qur’anic Bayan. Thus to Muhammad is ascribed
the saying: “I was granted speech most concise and comprehensive,” in reference to both
the message he delivered and to his own everyday discourse, i.e., charged with mean-
ing to the utmost degree, as Ezra Pound might phrase it. The most meaning in the least
words would henceforth become one standard Arabic literary criterion of eloquence.
For present purposes, one may distinguish three stations in the historical evolution of
the relationship between religion and literature. The first station is the Age of Jahiz, i.e.,
the ninth century AD. It is in that age that we begin to encounter systematic attempts
to define Bayan in detail and to construct a theory of prophetic excellence based on
supremacy in eloquence. Literary critics of that age, such as `Abdullah ibn al-Mu`tazz
(d. 908), marked out the field of figural language as the determining factor in assessing
eloquence, and used both Qur’anic figural speech and poetry for illustration. It was Jahiz
(d. 868), however, who spread the net wide to include both prose and oratory, in addi-
tion to poetry, as realms of eloquence from which examples could be drawn. In Jahiz’s
great work on Bayan, quotations from the Qur’an occasionally appear to illustrate vari-
ous criteria of eloquence, e.g., consistency in excellence as seen in a perfectly formed
ode or oration and the claim of consistency in rhetorical excellence made by the Qur’an
itself. Other criteria of eloquence singled out by Jahiz are naturalness, simplicity, and
concision, all of which can also be found in the Qur’an and in Muhammadan discourse.
Undergirding this intimate relationship between literary and Qur’anic eloquence was
a theory first clearly enunciated by Jahiz that prophets are sent at certain eras where one
particular art is dominant, and the prophet concerned then proceeds to excel in his own
age in mastery of that art. Thus Moses with his magic excelled in an age of magic, and
Jesus with his healing excelled in an age of medicine. Muhammad and his Qur’an, as one
might expect, excelled in their own eloquent age in eloquence. All these prophetic sin-
gularities are demonstrations of miracles and so of the truth of a prophetic mission. But
Jahiz believed that the Qur’an was a beginning and not an end, that its eloquence served
merely to spur the imagination to unearth eloquence wherever one might find it. The

eloquence he found in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry was a tacit argument that the Qur’an
held no monopoly on literary perfection.
The second station on the historical evolution of the relationship between religion
and literature is represented in the works of the great polymath, Jalal al-din al-Suyuti (d.
1501), some six hundred years after Jahiz. Much had happened in that interval of time
by way of both refining and challenging the arguments for the literary excellence of the
revelation. Heretics of various hues would claim that there was nothing miraculous or
inimitable about Qur’anic language, while theologians would argue amongst themselves
as to how exactly one should define the inimitability of the Qur’an. Did God miracu-
lously divert or otherwise disempower (i`jaz) mankind from creating its equal or was
the very structure and style of its discourse itself inimitable? These debates often blurred
the difference between theological and literary argumentation, creating a common
space between Islamic spirituality and literary sensibilities.
Suyuti’s celebrated work, Al-Itqan, was a kind of Summa of Qur’anic scholarship as
it had evolved to his own time. It is a high point in Qur’anic studies of the later Islamic
middle period and in many of its literary judgments it looks forward to modern times.
Suyuti’s discussion of Qur’anic badi`, or rhetorical excellence, occupies more than
half of his Al-Itqan. He quotes at great length the opinions of earlier authorities but
appends or interweaves his own opinions throughout. He begins by reviewing Qur’anic
tropes such as simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, transposition, and so forth,
then considers stylistics such as concision, ellipsis, prolixity, reiteration, antithesis, sud-
den transition, and the like. For Suyuti, the i`jaz of the Qur’an, its miraculous and inimi-
table character, resides in the manner in which it combines the perfection of all genres
of speech, namely poetry, oratory, and literary epistle, but cannot itself be described as
belonging to any of these genres. But the question remains: can certain verses of the
Qur’an be considered more eloquent than others? The answer is that though all of it is
the speech of God and thus equally eloquent, certain verses, e.g., the Throne Verse (Q.
2:255), concentrate in a short space a plurality of meanings that are found dispersed else-
where. In other words, a preference is once again expressed for the literary principle of
“most in least.” Moreover, though certain verses may outwardly possess more grandeur
than others, it remains true that the context of each determines its literary excellence.
Thus, though a verse glorifying God, for instance, may appear more magnificent than
another that curses enemies, each in context must be judged as achieving rhetorical
perfection.
The third station in the evolution of that relationship may be described as the literary
moment, namely, the increasing attention paid to canons of literary judgment, derived
partly from France, which found a congenial home among certain reformist thinkers of
Egypt in the mid-twentieth century. When these modernist critics turned their atten-
tion to the Qur’an, they found much to criticize in the traditional science of exegesis
(tafsir), which in their view had failed across time to shed its atomistic, verse-by-verse
analysis of the sacred text. Armed with such concepts as the composite nature of a text
and the need to understand the Qur’an thematically rather than as a string of revelatory
moments, these thinkers proposed to highlight the artistic character of the text as its

truest claim to inimitability. In the words of one of them, “the literary explication (tafsir
adabi) of the Qur’an must precede any attempt to understand its legal, ethical or theo-
logical content.”
The first in that series of modernist critics was Amin al-Khuli (1895–1966), author of
the quotation above. He argued that true exegesis lies in analyzing the Qur’an in terms
of broad themes that must be pursued across the text, and that the literary artistry of the
Qur’an cannot be a case of art for art’s sake but is ultimately intended for social reform.
A theme such as the responsibility of leadership is presented in the sacred text in the
form of “eloquent images” that a person with literary tastes would find both psycho-
logically accurate and marvelously artistic in expression. A close reading of such pas-
sages would reveal, for example, that the effect of bad leaders on society is far worse
than that of ordinary sinners. Much is said about the way in which the Qur’an evokes
images so vivid that readers or listeners imagine them to be alive and moving before
their very eyes.
His pupil, Muhammad Ahmad Khalafallah (d. 1991), went further, stirring a huge
controversy in a work entitled Artistic Narrative in the Qur’an, published in 1951.
Building on Khuli’s literary approach, Khalafallah argued that Qur’anic narratives were
principally parables of the human spirit expressed in artistic form and not intended to
be true or accurate history. A literary understanding entailed specifying what a text con-
tains by way of “rational, emotional and artistic values.” In the case of the Qur’an, the
narrative content is deliberately vague and impersonal in order to direct attention to the
moral of the stories. Thus history in the strict sense is not a Qur’anic goal. All attempts
by “missionaries, atheists and orientalists” to criticize the historical accuracy of Qur’anic
narratives or their “garbled misreading” of parallel biblical texts can be set aside as irrel-
evant. Apart from their sermonizing function, these narratives serve to illustrate social
and psychological theories such as the conservatism of societies or the sense of soli-
darity among groups, or are intended to reflect Muhammad’s own spiritual trials. At all
times, the literary critic should bear in mind the particular conditions of Muhammad’s
own days and apprehend these parables accordingly.
What these modern critics held in common was their willingness to make strident
claims for the capacity of the imagination to reveal ultimate realities, and literature was
of course the home of the imagination, of art and beauty. If the Qur’an was above all a
literary text, a new hermeneutics was being heralded, one that eventually encouraged
some critics to pass over from literary criticism into a hesitant theology. Fazulr Rahman
(d. 1988) on the nature of inspiration, Mohammed Arkoun (d. 2010) on semiotics, and
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (d. 2010) on Islamic humanism were all in a sense heirs to that lit-
erary moment described above. Fazlur Rahman argued that the Qur’an must be under-
stood as “God’s response through Muhammad’s mind to an historic situation” and went
on to draw a sharp distinction between the ideal and the contingent in Qur’anic ethics.
Arkoun’s project, which he called “Applied Islamology,” called for a comparative reli-
gious approach to Islamic studies and for the application of a whole gamut of literary and
social science theories to the Qur’an and to Islamic intellectual history. Abu Zayd, in his
various Qur’anic studies, stressed the Qur’an’s human dimension rather than its eternal

and fixed divinity. All three thinkers developed their ideas against a background of deep
dissatisfaction with the strictly philological methodologies of traditional exegesis.
Beyond this symbiotic relationship between religion and literature looms the larger
distinction, made already in pre-modern Islamic culture, between the strictly religious
sciences and the rational sciences. Where did Adab, that is, the humanistic disciplines
embodying such fields as belles-lettres, history, foreign wisdom literature, and so forth,
fall in this division? Were there avenues to truth that did not necessarily pass through
religious piety? And does Adab have anything to teach us when its principles and meth-
ods are applied to the interpretation of the sacred text? These questions continued, and
continue, to be asked in the Muslim context, especially at periods when Islamic culture,
past and present, felt the need to engage more directly with foreign cultures. As early
as the ninth century, the celebrated theorist of Adab, Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), had stated
that, “the paths to God are many, the gates of virtue are wide open, and the well-being
of religion depends on the well-being of temporal matters.” Modern thinkers, no less
than pre-modern, continue to search for ways in which literary methodologies, broadly
defined, can shed light on the nature of revelation and how the words of God can be
made meaningful to a human community.
Conclusion: Islam and Foreign

Cultures
Two periods of history appear to have witnessed particularly vivid confrontations

between Islam and foreign cultures: the ninth and the nineteenth centuries. In the
ninth century, Islamic culture first came into wide-ranging contact with alien cul-
tures, both ancient and contemporary, and was forced to respond to an urgent chal-
lenge: where do we stand vis-à-vis these cultures? Do we need their wisdom when we
possess the wisdom (Hikma; a frequent Qur’anic term) of our own revealed Book?
This was a challenge faced some centuries earlier by the Christian Church Fathers
as they took on Greek wisdom. In the case of both early Islam and early Christianity,
one similar response may be detected: alien wisdom is insignificant when compared
to our divine truth. This was not by any means a unanimous response among either
Christian or Muslim scholars, but it became common enough among traditionist
or conservative circles, whose scholars feared the seduction of rationalism. It was a
response at once triumphalist—both religious communities had achieved imperium—
as well as fearful—both feared for the integrity of their divine scriptures. In the case of
Islam, the cultural debate also had ethnic undertones. The defense of revelation was
frequently accompanied by a defense of the culture of that revelation’s cradle, Arabic
and Arabia. Put more simply, those who upheld the superiority of foreign cultures
resorted to attacking pre-Islamic Arabian culture and ways of life as a roundabout way
of attacking the revelation itself.

The ensuing debate into which was drawn a very wide gamut of views on all sides
entitles us to call that period of the ninth century the Age of the Great Debate in Islamic
cultural history. One effect was a greater degree of specialization in Islamic sciences,
many of which began to define their boundaries more strictly. All the Islamic sciences,
religious and “secular,” felt the impact of that debate. The evolution of Sufism, or Islamic
mysticism, for example, was clearly spurred on through contact with foreign mystical
traditions, while other sciences, like philosophy, theology, and philology, greatly sharp-
ened their tools in the course of internal and external polemics. One keyword in that
debate was Hikma and its proper definition. Does it refer to the wisdom to be found in
the Qur’an, or to some other body of wisdom outside its confines? For the Qur’an had
described the goal of revelation thus: “to teach you the Book and Wisdom.” If Hikma
lies within the Book, how can it be sought? If it also lies outside the Book, what is its
relevance?
A strategy of cultural co-optation, assuming diverse forms, now came into being.
Co-optation, in this context, means bringing in under the rubric of the Book, even
if only as lip-service, all attempts to homogenize foreign sciences and to lay claim to
them as reformulated Islamic sciences. In many ways co-optation was a natural pro-
cess: if the Qur’an consummated all divine revelations, it was only natural to assume
that Islamic culture consummated all earlier (and contemporaneous) cultures. A natu-
ral scientist, no less than a philologist or man of letters, would feel compelled to begin
his work with a bow to piety, justifying the need for his particular science by quoting
some relevant verses of the Qur’an. Thereafter, however, these scholars would launch
forth with great freedom to pursue their particular interests in literature, history, phi-
losophy, or whatever, and to take on the wisdom of the world around them. A body of
stock quotations from the Qur’an and from Muhammadan Hadith came to their aid,
having to do with the religious obligation to examine the created world and to seek wis-
dom “even in China.” This was a tacit recognition that other wisdoms existed beyond the
confines of the Book and this in turn helps to explain the activity of thinkers like Jahiz
and Ibn Qutayba, detailed above. Their primary achievement was to textualize their cul-
ture completely, to downplay the role of the oral in that culture, and most important of
all to turn the Qur’an itself from something essentially recited to something to be read
and pondered on as a text alongside other wisdom texts, of whatever origin: pre-Islamic
Arabian, Greek, Persian, Indian, and so forth.
In the nineteenth century, the challenge to Islamic culture came, not from a diversity
of cultures as in the ninth century, but overwhelmingly from western Europe. The ear-
lier self-confidence in the centrality of their culture was now for many Muslims a mem-
ory to be clung to rather than a heritage naturally assumed. The terms of the new debate
were very different from the old. The earlier strategy of co-optation was no longer possi-
ble at a time when natural science was being advanced as an alternative to revelation and
as an ultimate explanation of reality, and when higher criticism of the Bible turned its
attention to the Qur’an and other Islamic religious texts. Western European orientalism
combined with obvious political and technological superiority presented a challenge to
Muslim culture and societies far more formidable than the earlier encounter. In Islamic

countries under direct or indirect European rule, and where the European literary
canon was imposed as a fixed part of the curriculum of Islamic colleges and universities,
a diglossia became common, making it seem as if foreign “wisdom” was now the only
alternative, the only road to truth, all else being mere superstition. Shakespeare, Racine,
Goethe: what can Muslim culture offer by way of competition? Were these authors’ sub-
lime works not, as it were, counter-Qur’ans? And how to defend Islamic revelation from
the devastating literary, scientific, and philosophical skepticism overtaking all religions?
If holy scripture was merely another form of literature, another literary text, subject to
the canons of literary criticism, and if the halo surrounding its inimitability was fading,
answers were urgently needed as to the relevance of scripture to a culture that increas-
ingly felt that modernity in its many forms came from outside its frontiers.
Muslim scholars assumed, and continue to assume, diverse attitudes to that chal-
lenge. Modernity, self-generated or else encountered, had dislodged God slightly off his
throne. Science first and then literature offered new and exciting prospects, new ways of
understanding that transcended traditional theology. A brand new genre like the novel,
for instance, an early twentieth-century genre in Islamic literatures, made for attractive
didactic reading, an indirect competitor with sacred texts. Though these early novels
were often suffused with religious beliefs, the God that appeared in them was more like a
principle than a power. The epic struggles embodied in these novels revived interest in a
sort of heroism not particularly welcome among pietistic circles. Again, the new poetry,
with its increasing interest in myth and pagan symbol, seemed set on resuscitating a
world that had always lain awkwardly alongside the divine.
Today, many Muslim intellectuals, literateurs, poets, and academics have come to
settle in the west. Many of them are entirely at home in two cultures. Western literary
critics have already made room for a genre of the novel that is distinctly a product of two
spirits, but a novel that often reflects upon its Muslim heritage from its western stand-
point. Ideologies like humanism and secularism have led to the attempt to rediscover
and recapitulate these ideologies in the Muslim tradition itself. It may well be that this
new chapter in the encounter between Islam and global literature, to which, though
almost half a century old, no name has yet been given, would help to restore Islamic cul-
ture’s ancient involvement in world culture at large.
Further Reading
Jane D. McAuliffe, ed. Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2001–2006),
articles “Inimitability,” “Contemporary Critical Practices and the Qur’an,” “Exegesis of the
Qur’an: Classical and Medieval,” “Exegesis of the Qur’an: Early Modern and Contemporary.”
John Renard. Seven Doors to Islam: Spirituality and the Religious Life of Muslims. Berkeley :
University of California Press, 1966.
John Renard. ed. Windows on the House of Islam: Muslim Sources on Spirituality and Religious
Life. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998.
Stefan Wild, ed. The Qur’an as Text. Leiden: Brill, 1996.

Suha Taji-Faruqi, Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’an. London: Oxford University
Press, 2004.
Isa J. Boullata, ed. Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur’an. Richmond,
Surrey : Curzon Press, 2000.
G. R. Hawting and A. K. A. Shareef, eds. Approaches to the Qur’an. London and
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, “The Dilemma of the Literary Approach to the Qur’an” in Alif: Journal
of Comparative Poetics 23 (January 1, 2003): 8–47.

C HA P T E R 22
I S L A M A N D V I S UA L A RT
M A RG A R E T S . G R AV E S
What makes the objects referred to as “Islamic art” Islamic? Most commonly, the terms
“Islamic art” and “Islamic architecture” are used to refer to all products—not just reli-
gious artifacts—of historic cultures that were predominantly Muslim in practice, or at
least under Muslim rule; the perhaps unavoidable dominance of the art of the elite has
engendered a dynastic cultural model here as elsewhere in the history of art. However,
secular manuscripts of Persian poetry illustrated by Hindu painters working along-
side Muslim artists in the Indian ateliers of the Mughal emperors, or the Freer Gallery’s
thirteenth-century metalwork canteen inlaid in an “Islamic” style with Christian ico-
nography, demonstrate the limitations of this definition. More fundamentally, the prob-
lem is one of characterization. To call all the art of such cultures “Islamic” carries the
misleading implication that all material creativity in those cultures is entirely driven
by religious impulses. Along with related misconceptions in common currency—chief
amongst them the belief that all art from the Islamic world entirely avoids the depiction
of living creatures—the fiction that all the arts of all Islamic cultures throughout history
must be demonstrably pious has led to some far-fetched interpretations.
In a related vein, the enormous geographical sweep of the Islamic world—in
reality extending far beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries of the Middle
East and North Africa to encompass areas of Southeast Asia, India, western China,
sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe, as well as the diaspora com-
munities in Europe and the Americas—militates against an essentialist definition of
“Islamic art.” Even the architectural components that are in near-universal employ
in mosques, such as the mihrabs described below, are subject to huge variations in
appearance and interpretation from one regional culture to another, and as Islam
came to new areas the religious arts invariably assimilated and adopted pre-existing
artistic traditions, rendering impossible a static definition of Islamic art. In truth,
the negotiation of the term “Islamic art” is an ongoing exercise in Islamic art history.
The discipline has its roots in the nineteenth century, and the legacies of connois-
seurship and colonialism continue to inform a subject area that sits somewhat pre-
cariously between art history and Islamic studies. Since the 1970s, and particularly

ISLAM AND VISUAL ART 311
in the last twenty years, the number of practitioners in the field has grown dramati-
cally, while the increased interest taken by the West in the Muslim world following
the terrorist attacks of 2001 has contributed to the growth of Islamic art history as
an academic discipline and museological focus, just as it has also had its effects in
more obviously politicized scholarly arenas. In the twenty-first century Islamic art
history is now, for the first time in its existence, reaching a critical mass. The weight
of this is beginning to fracture the discipline into discrete geographical, chrono-
logical, theoretical and media specializations, and the exorcism of an essentialist
“Islamic art” from the larger framework of the discipline is underway.
As this essay is intended to provide an overview of the religious arts of Islam, this is
one of the rare situations when the term “Islamic art” can be used with impunity. The
subject is of course too vast to survey here, rendering an approach that verges on the
essentialist something of a necessity. To give the reader tools for going forward, the
focus is here restricted to the pre-modern periods, but of course a diverse and fas-
cinating body of modern and contemporary religious visual culture also exists and
some reading on this is suggested below. Only a tiny selection of the monuments,
objects, and images that exemplify material aspects of religious life in the Islamic
world will be presented. At this stage, I ask only that the reader would bear in mind
that all of the things presented here were once part of a larger sphere of human activ-
ity—the marketplace is often very close to the mosque—and also that every object
and monument is understood to have its own unique context, too rich and complex
to lay out in any detail here.
22.1 Early Religious Structures
The nature of the surviving material necessarily frames discussion of the early devel-
opment of Islamic religious arts within an architectural context. Muslim religious life
has been formed around madrasas (religious schools), tombs, shrines, and, above all,
mosques. Although Muslims do not require elaborate structures in order to worship—
the Hadith (Traditions of the Prophet) record that “Wherever you pray, that place is a
mosque (masjid)”—Islamic cultures have given the world some of its most spectacular
religious monuments. The rapid spread of the faith in the first centuries of Islam was
followed by a medieval period that saw the refinement and articulation of a multitude
of regional forms of Islamic visual identity, many of which found their most enduring
manifestations in architectural construction and decoration.
The early evolution of both congregational Friday mosques (jami‘)—huge structures
theoretically capable of accommodating the entire adult male population of a city for the
communal noonday prayer on Fridays—and smaller mosques (masjid) for daily salat
(ritual prayer), saw the initial development of sacred architecture in Islam encompass
several different building types. The garrison towns of the early Muslim expansion wit-
nessed the creation of enormous oriented enclosures, refining the archetypal structure

of the Prophet’s house at Medina: a large enclosed courtyard with a columned covered
area at one end, for communal prayer and the delivery of the khutba, or Friday sermon.
Following this model, most sizable mosques of the early and medieval periods com-
prised a large enclosed courtyard, surrounded by arcades and often containing a foun-
tain, while the musalla or prayer hall was normally located at the end of the courtyard
that lay in the direction of Mecca.
At the same time, early imperial mosques in ancient urban centers could incorpo-
rate extant architectural models: the Great Mosque of Damascus (705–715) is a paradig-
matic example of this, with its gabled prayer hall and tripartite façade strongly recalling
a re-oriented Christian basilica. The earliest surviving Islamic monument, the Dome
of the Rock in Jerusalem (completed 691), is a rather different creation, although it
too makes dramatic use of a pre-existing architectural vocabulary. While it has come
to operate as a commemorative shrine to the Prophet’s miraculous night journey and
ascension (the Isra’ and Mi‘raj), the Dome of the Rock does not in fact appear to have
been built for that purpose, and the original motivations for construction have been
the subject of much discussion. The octagonal structure, with its massive golden
dome dominating the skyline of Old Jerusalem, can certainly be compared with early
Christian ambulatory structures, such as the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and,
considering its supremely visible and emotionally charged site, the Dome of the Rock
must be understood in part as a triumphal monument to the new religion of Islam.
The huge mosaic programs of these two great religious buildings from the first
centuries of Islam represent an astonishingly confident early body of architectural
decoration. Originally, mosaic covered both the interior and exterior of the Dome
of the Rock. Although only the interior remains, this alone comprises 1,200 square
meters of mosaic, with vine-scrolls, fantastic blooms and trees decorated with jew-
elry against a gold ground, and a 240-meter long inscription of Qur’anic and foun-
dational texts in an angular script somberly set out in gold against a dark green-blue
background.
The mosaics of the Great Mosque of Damascus are rather different. Only parts
remain, but the famous “Barada panel” on the western portico and the partially restored
façade allow today’s viewer a sense of how overwhelming the original ensemble must
have been. The mosaics show a landscape dominated by architecture and enormous
trees, set on a shimmering, modulated gold ground. Houses, palaces, and other struc-
tures have been executed with superlative skill in the representational modes cur-
rent in the Late Antique and Byzantine Mediterranean world, but the architecture of
the Damascus panels is strikingly unpopulated. The schema of both monuments have
been much discussed in terms of their debts to earlier Byzantine and Sasanian models
of decoration and representation, as well as their possible meanings: paradisal imagery,
triumphal metaphors, a brave new world under Islam. While not necessarily directly
aped in later monuments, both mosaic programs are of the greatest significance for the
subsequent development of a vocabulary of sacred decoration. The early requirement in
Islam for a model of religious art that was not based on narrative images (see the discus-
sion of aniconism below) gave rise to an unparalleled richness of non-figurative forms,

encompassing the curvilinear vegetal motifs and fantastic flora that Islam has inargu-
ably made its own; geometric designs in every conceivable permutation; a persistent fas-
cination with non-structural architectural elements as decoration; and the written word
of God as the supreme ornament of the faith.
22.2 The Ornaments of Religion
The high esteem in which calligraphy—“beautiful writing”—has traditionally been held

in Islamic cultures derives in large part from a theological basis. The Arabic text of the
Qur’an, imparted to Muhammad through a series of revelations, represents to believers
the eternal and sacred Word of God. While the initial revelation was oral, the Qur’anic
text was soon committed to writing and Qur’anic inscriptions very quickly became a
key aspect of the ornamentation of buildings, coins, textiles, and objects from the early
Islamic period onwards; thus, written Arabic has almost invariably formed the center-
piece of Muslim identities, both public and private. But it was in copies of the Qur’an
itself that the medium of calligraphy was developed and refined to the most extraordi-
nary degree.
The early evolution and initial predominance of the stately rectilinear script
types collectively known as Kufic, in near-universal use amongst early architectural
inscriptions (as in the Dome of the Rock) and Qur’anic manuscripts, gave way from
the tenth century to a variety of rounded cursive scripts. Although Kufic contin-
ued to be used in epigraphic contexts, and sometimes for chapter headings or verse
markers in Qur’an manuscripts, the peak of Kufic Qur’an production occurred in
the ninth and tenth centuries. Magisterial examples such as the Qur’an of Amajur
(completed before 876) or the famous “Blue Qur’an” exploited the elasticity of the
Arabic script, developing a calligraphic form that could be horizontally elongated
(mashq) or contracted as desired, enabling regular, stately, and yet aesthetically
pleasing compositions to be formed, page after page. The later rounded scripts were
less severe and often more legible, evolving as they had done out of chancellery
scripts, and the codification of the nascent cursive scripts under such legendary cal-
ligraphers as Ibn Muqla (d. 940) and Ibn al-Bawwab (d. 1022) eventually gave rise
to the canonical Six Pens (tawqi‘, riqa‘, thuluth, naskh, muhaqqaq, and rayhan). As
the copying and donation of the Qur’anic text represent pious acts in themselves it is
little wonder that manuscripts of the Qur’an constitute the peak of the calligrapher’s
art, and of the illuminator’s. The primacy of the written text also led to the creation
of an entire class of ornament based on religious inscriptions, more or less informed
by the refinements of calligraphic practice, and visible across many media but par-
ticularly architecture.
The generic components of religious architecture have, perhaps inevitably, formed
focal points for ornamentation of all kinds through the ages. The principal liturgical
requirement for a mosque is simply orientation toward the qibla or direction of prayer,

aligned with the Ka’ba in Mecca. From this directional emphasis there developed a
series of highly recognizable elements that came to characterize the functional life of the
prayer hall: notable amongst these are the minbar and the mihrab.
The first of these, the minbar, is a furnishing, although a great many examples are
truly monumental in both dimensions and decorative conception. A raised platform
or canopy reached by a set of steps, the minbar is usually placed against the qibla
wall, to the right of the mihrab (see below), and is used for the pronouncement of the
khutba at Friday prayer; as such, the minbar is normally employed only in congrega-
tional mosques Minbars could be made of stone, or brick decorated with glazed tile,
but by far the most common material is wood: many of the finest surviving examples
of medieval Islamic woodwork are found on minbars, with complex designs created
through carving and inlaying. A right-angled triangle in shape, the minbar presents a
large surface for decoration on two sides. The earliest surviving minbar, in the Great
Mosque of Qayrawan, Tunisia, is thought to date to the ninth century. That example
is ornamented on both sides with teak panels carved with a multiplicity of small geo-
metric and curvilinear grilles, some of them framed within tiny sprung arches. Later
examples of the minbar from the central and eastern Islamic lands show a greater
propensity toward complex repeating geometric designs, such as the strapwork
star-and-polygon designs of the beautiful ebony minbar, dated 1155, in the Alaeddin
mosque at Konya, Turkey.
From an early stage, one element above all others came to be a consistent focus of
ornamentation within religious architecture: the mihrab. Essentially a recessed, arcu-
ated niche in the qibla wall, from its first appearance in Islamic structures in the early
eighth century the mihrab quickly became the primary component in the construc-
tion of a specifically Islamic category of sacred space, and a mihrab will be found in vir-
tually every mosque and madrasa, and in many tombs. Nominally, it functions as an
orientational device. The origins of both the name and the form of this architectural
construct continue to provoke dispute, while attempts to isolate meaning in the form
have been even more fraught. In time, this simple directional marker came to accom-
modate a remarkably broad range of mystic and popular interpretations, some of which
were directly reflected in the diverse ornamental programs that grew up around the
mihrab. While concerns about distraction from devotion have at times impacted on the
ornamentation of the mihrab, particularly the central field, one of the most frequently
utilized and apparently unproblematic forms of mihrab ornament is that of Qur’anic
texts inscribed around the arch, sometimes in great number, creating a complex frame
of sacred words. This form of decoration is exemplified in the lustre-tile mihrabs of
thirteenth-century Iran, one of which is displayed in the Museum für Islamische Kunst,
Berlin (inv. No. I.5366).
The imagery of the mihrab is somewhat complicated by its multiplication as a
mobile iconographic unit: the distinction drawn between the recessed mihrab and its
two-dimensional counterpart, the surat mihrab (“mihrab image”), is not always clear,
and also need not mean that the “mihrab image” did not also function as a mihrab. In
both the three- and two-dimensional incarnations of the mihrab, the arched outline

appears to have suggested the notion of a portal from an early stage. The introduction
of vegetal and floral decoration, which reached something of an apogee in the Iranian
cut-tile mihrabs of the Safavid period such as that in the Shaykh Lutfallah Mosque in
Isfahan (1617), brought an implicit paradisal association to the mihrab, furthering the
impression of a point of transition to a different spiritual realm.
Most striking of all elaborations of the mihrab, however, is the interpolation of
the image of a vase-shaped hanging lamp into the central field. Surviving examples
of this phenomenon date from the twelfth century onwards. Rather than reading
the image as a literal representation of a hanging lamp, of a type widely associated
with the illumination and demarcation of sacred space, this should be understood
as a visualization of the metaphors of illumination enshrined in Qur’an 24:35 (the
Ayat al-Nur or “Light Verse”). Within the Qur’anic text the lamp is drawn as a met-
onymic representation of God, and by extension can also be understood to repre-
sent the illumination granted by the Qur’anic revelation. Medieval Sufistic texts such
as the Mishkat al-Anwar (“Niche of Lights”) by al-Ghazali (1058–1111) expanded the
mystical dimensions of the metaphor, and probably contributed to the popular-
ity of the image. The circulation of the mihrab image with hanging lamp was also
effected through its frequent use on semi-architectural materials such as grave stele,
tile friezes and prayer rugs (sajjada). Indeed, the image is possibly best known from
prayer rugs, used to protect the worshipper in a state of ritual purity from perform-
ing prayer on unclean ground. Although early prayer mats must have been consider-
ably less ornate, almost every surviving prayer rug is ornamented with, and indeed
defined by, the arch-shaped image of a mihrab. The iconography of the prayer rug
is an exemplar of the transference of forms across media, and parallel tendency
toward multivalence, that can be argued as recurring tropes in the religious arts of
the Islamic world.
22.3 Aniconism and the Image
The scriptural origins of Islamic aniconism lie not in any Qur’anic text but rather
in certain Hadith, or Traditions of the Prophet, which stress the dangers of idola-
try stemming from the creation of images, as well as the presumptuousness of the
artist. Only God can create life, leading to concerns over the usurpation of divine
prerogative through the creation of lifelike images. The best-known Hadiths on the
subject warn that on the Day of Judgment all artists will be called upon to breathe
life into their creations, which command they will of course be unable to fulfill, and
they will be punished accordingly. Naturally, such strictures concerning images of
living things have not been approached uniformly down the ages. While some his-
toric cultures have been notable for their overall avoidance of figurative arts—some
of the Mamluks of Egypt, for example, favored calligraphic motifs in metalwork
where their predecessors had used figures—others are characterized by an obvious

enjoyment of figuration. The proliferation of the human image that took place in the
arts of Seljuq Iran, for instance, or Fatimid Egypt, amply subverts the notion of a
blanket aniconism at work throughout all Muslim cultures.
It would appear, however, that an intentional differentiation between the types of
imagery employed in the secular and the religious spheres was in existence from an
early stage. The mosaic programs of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Great
Mosque of Damascus were indicative of future developments in their emphatic ani-
conism: as intimated above, the vast majority of medieval religious buildings have been
ornamented in ways that scrupulously avoid images of animals or people. However,
certain images that might not have been possible in highly visible architectural decora-
tion were able to develop in the more exclusive medium of illustrated books, and luxury
manuscripts are the major source for pre-modern images of religious figures. While the
imagery associated with the ahl al-Bayt (“People of the House,” meaning the family of
the Prophet), as well as earlier prophets and various holy men, is also of great interest,
it is representations of the Prophet Muhammad that have garnered the most scholarly
attention to date, and the most controversy.
Reservations about depicting the person of the Prophet undoubtedly inhibited the
development of a large or widely dispersed cycle of such images, and much of the surviv-
ing material has been intentionally mutilated, but from the thirteenth century onwards
such images were indeed created within the rapidly evolving miniature-painting
genre of Iran and the surrounding areas. Relatively small cycles of events from the life
of the Prophet are illustrated in history texts, such as the 1307 manuscript of the Athar
al-Baqiya ‘an al-Qurun al-Khaliya (Chronology of Ancient Nations) of al-Biruni and
its near-contemporary, the Jami‘ al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Histories) of Rashid
al-Din, while the Ottoman Sultan Murad III commissioned the largest cycle of images
of the Prophet ever made in the copiously illustrated six-volume Siyar-i Nabi (Life of the
Prophet) created in the imperial workshops of sixteenth-century Istanbul.1 The image
of the Prophet’s night journey, which took him from the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca to
“the farthest place of worship” (al-Masjid al-Aqsa, generally interpreted as Jerusalem)
and thence to the heavens, also appears in textual encomia and their accompanying
illustrations in a number of poetic texts created in Iranian, Indian, and Turkish paint-
ing traditions. A complex iconography developed out of the rich exegetical writings sur-
rounding this enigmatic Qur’anic event, including most commonly the fabulous winged
steed Buraq, the angel Jibril (Gabriel), and the Ka‘ ba in Mecca. In many later images,
Muhammad the Prophet’s face is covered with a veil to circumvent concerns about depict-
ing the features of the Prophet, and visual symbols are occasionally employed in place of
mimetic depiction, as also occurs in some prayer manuals. A golden disk inscribed with
the name of Muhammad, a surrogate for the image of the Prophet’s body mounted on
Buraq in one ascension illustration, embodies the theological construct of the Prophet
as the light source of the world (Nur Muhammad or “Light of Muhammad”),2 a concept
also visualized in the flaming nimbus that is often depicted around Muhammad’s head. It
should be noted that anthropomorphized images of the Divine, i.e., God, are unsurpris-
ingly absent from the religious painting traditions of Islam.

22.4 Conclusions
While this essay has sketched out some of the major artistic manifestations of religious
life in Islam, it has only been possible to acknowledge certain key subjects and images in
passing—the recurring Qur’anic image of paradise as a verdant garden, for example, or
the topographical and symbolic imagery of pilgrimage manuals and certificates—that
have played a pivotal role in religious visual identity within certain Islamic cultures.
Equally importantly for the religious arts, esoteric interpretations of Islam have at times
led to a cross-pollination of mystical ideas and nominally secular subjects. This can
be seen in the wine-drinking and amorous themes of the Persian poetry of Hafiz and
Sadi, for example, and in the reflection of those mystic tropes, concerning the quest for
spiritual union with the Beloved, within accompanying manuscript illustrations. The
development of a highly refined Sufi mysticism in medieval cultures of the Iranian pla-
teau had a powerful impact on artistic developments in the region, and aspects of this
mystic sensibility were transferred, via the Timurid dynasty of Iran and Central Asia,
to sixteenth-century Islamic India under the Mughals, as well as later Iranian cultures.
Intriguingly, within the English-language history of Islamic art there are few sur-
vey texts that focus specifically and sustainedly on the material aspects of religious life.
One recent exception to this is Baker’s Islam and the Religious Arts, which is also nota-
ble for continuing its themes up to the contemporary era and into popular culture, as
well as its admirably broad geographical conception of the Islamic world (although the
author’s specialization in Iranian art brings that country to the fore). Another is Wright’s
Islam: Faith, Art, Culture, which examines Muslim religious life as refracted through
the world-class manuscript collections of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. The rela-
tive sparseness of earlier texts dedicated specifically and comprehensively to the reli-
gious arts may result from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century disciplinary construct
of an “Islamic art” that tended to frame the entire cultural production of the Islamic
world in religious terms, as well as the perceived difficulty of separating the sacred from
the secular in Islamic cultures. In many ways the study of the religious arts in Islam is
best undertaken by reading the survey texts above in tandem with shorter articles and
book chapters on specific religious materials; because of the youth of the subject area, as
well as the comparatively small number of practitioners, much relevant material is to be
found in scholarly articles rather than in more widely accessible monographs.
Overall, a disciplinary movement away from the idea of a monolithic Islamic culture
has taken place over recent decades, turning instead toward the acknowledgment and
examination of alterity and plurality. The breadth of knowledge and expertise demon-
strated by Islamic art historians of a previous generation, chief amongst them Richard
Ettinghausen (d. 1979) and Oleg Grabar (d. 2011), is being augmented by an increas-
ing number of closely focused specialists as the field expands, particularly in the United
States. In common with developments taking place elsewhere in the humanities, inter-
ests in historiography, reflexivity, and critical theory are growing. Some of of the most

exciting research being undertaken in Islamic art history today interweaves close stud-
ies of material with theoretical approaches, and exhibits a growing fascination with the
role of earlier authors’ worldviews in shaping our understanding of the subjects of study.
Such methods are symptomatic of the subject area’s increasing alignment with larger
developments in art history.
Notes
1. The 1307 al-Biruni manuscript is in Edinburgh University Library (Arab 161). Three
illustrated manuscripts of sections of the Jami‘ al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din are
known: Edinburgh University Library (Arab 120); a volume dated 714H/1314–1315 CE in
the Khalili Collection, London; and a volume dated 1314, in the Topkapi Palace Libraries in
Istanbul (H. 1653). The six-volume Siyar-i Nabi (‘Life of the Prophet’) is now dispersed.
2. Makhzan al-asrar (“Treasury of Secrets”) of Nizami, western India, ms dated 1441, Topkapi
Palace Library H. 744, illustrated in Gruber 2009, fig. 11.
References and Suggested Reading

Don Aanavi, “Devotional Writing: ‘Pseudoinscriptions’ in Islamic Art,” The Metropolitan
Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 26, no. 9 (1968), pp. 353–358.
Thomas Arnold, Painting in Islam: A Study of the Place of Pictorial Art in Muslim Culture,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928, rev. ed. New York: Dover, 1965.
Eva Baer, Ayyubid Metalwork with Christian Images, Leiden: Brill, 1989.
Patricia L. Baker, Islam and the Religious Arts, London: Continuum, 2003.
Sheila S. Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2008.
Jonathan M. Bloom, Ahmed Toufiq et al., The Minbar from the Kutubiyya Mosque, New Haven,
CT/ London: Yale University Press, 1998.
P. Chelkoswki, “Popular Religious Art in the Qajar Period” in N. Pourjavady, ed., The Splendour
of Iran: Volume III, London: Booth-Clibborns Editions, 2001, pp. 324–341.
K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, reprint of 1932–1940 publ., 2 vols. in 3,
New York: Hacker Art Books, c. 1969 and 1979.
James Dickie, “The Iconography of the Prayer Rug,” Oriental Art, 18 (1972), pp. 41–49.
Richard Ettinghausen et al., Prayer Rugs, Washington DC: Textile Museum, 1974.
Géza Fehérvári, “Tombstone or Mihrab? A Speculation,” in Richard Ettinghausen, ed., Islamic
Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972, pp.
241–254.
Carol Garrett Fisher 1984, “A Reconstruction of the Pictorial Cycle of the ‘Siyar-i Nabi’ of Murad
III,” Ars Orientalis, 14 (1984), pp. 75–94.
Finbarr B. Flood, “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum,”
Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 4 (2002), pp. 641–659.
Finbarr B. Flood, “From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of
Islamic Art,” in Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and Its
Institutions, London/New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 31–53.

Alain George, “Calligraphy, Colour and Light in the Blue Qur’an,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies,
vol. 11, no. 1 (2009), pp. 75–125.
Alain George, The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy, London: Saqi Books, 2010.
Lisa Golombek, “The Draped Universe of Islam,” in Priscilla Soucek, ed., Content and Context of
Visual Arts in the Islamic World, University Park, PA/London: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1988, pp. 25–50.
Oleg Grabar, “The Earliest Islamic Commemorative Structures, Notes and Documents,” Ars
Orientalis, 4 (1966), pp. 7–46.
Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art, rev. ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament, Princeton NJ: Princeton, University Press, 1992.
Oleg Grabar, The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996.
Oleg Grabar, “Art and Architecture and the Qur’an,” first published in Jane D. McAuliffe, ed.,
Encyclopedia of the Qur’an, vol. 1, Leiden, 2001, pp. 161–175; republ. in Early Islamic Art 650–
1100, vol. I: Constructing the Study of Islamic Art, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2005, pp. 87–104.
Christiane J. Gruber, “The Prophet Muhammad’s Ascension (Mi’raj) in Islamic Painting and
Literature: Evidence from Cairo Collections,” Bulletin of the American Research Center in
Egypt, 185 (2004), pp. 24–31.
Christiane J. Gruber, “Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nur): Representations of the Prophet
Muhammad in Islamic Painting,” Muqarnas, 26 (2009), pp. 229–262.
Christiane J. Gruber, The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and
Images, Bloomington: Indiana University (forthcoming, 2015).
Perween Hasan, “The Footprint of the Prophet,” Muqarnas, 10 (1993), pp. 335–343.
Markus Hattstein and Peter Delius, Islam: Art and Architecture, Königswinter: Könemann, 2004.
Robert Hillenbrand, “Islamic Art, §1: Introduction, 8. Subject Matter,” in Jane Turner, ed., The
Dictionary of Art, vol. XVI, London: Grove, 1996, pp. 127–140.
Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning, Edinburgh: University
of Edinburgh Press, 2000.
Eva R. Hoffman, “Christian–Islamic Encounters on Thirteenth-Century Ayyubid
Metalwork: Local Culture, Authenticity and Memory,” Gesta, vol. 43 no. 2 (2004), pp. 129–142.
Nuha N. N. Khoury, “The Mihrab Image: Commemorative Themes in Islamic Architecture,”
Muqarnas, 9 (1992), pp. 11–28.
Nuha N. N. Khoury, “The Mihrab: From Text to Form,” International Journal of Middle East
Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (1998), pp. 1–27.
Mika Natif, “The Painter’s Breath and Concepts of Idol Anxiety in Islamic Art,” in Josh
Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft, eds., Idol Anxiety, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2011, pp. 41–55.
Katharina Otto-Dorn, “Figural Stone Reliefs on Seljuk Sacred Architecture in Anatolia,” Kunst
des Orients, XII, part 1 (1978–1979), pp. 101–149.
Nasser Rabbat, “Ajib and Gharib: Artistic Perception in Medieval Arab Sources,” The Medieval
History Journal, vol. 9, no. 1 (2006), pp. 99–114.
Nasser Rabbat, “What is Islamic Architecture Anyway?,” in Moya Carey and Margaret S. Graves,
eds., Islamic Art Historiography (special issue of The Journal of Art Historiography), 2012,
http://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/number-6-june-2012-2/.
Kishwar Rizvi, “Art,” in Jamal J. Elias, ed., Key Themes for the Study of Islam, Oxford: Oneworld,
2010, pp. 6–25.

David J. Roxburgh, Writing the Word of God: Calligraphy and the Qur’an, Houston: Museum of
Fine Arts, 2007.
Boaz Shoshan, “High Culture and Popular Culture in Medieval Islam,” Studia Islamica, 73
(1991), pp. 67–107.
P. Tanavoli, “Religious and Ritual Paraphernalia,” in N. Pourjavady, ed., The Splendour of
Iran: Volume III, London: Booth-Clibborns Editions, 2001, pp. 312–323.
Stephen Vernoit, “Art and Islam,” in Stephen Vernoit, ed., Occidentalism: Islamic Art in the 19th
Century, London: Nour Foundation, 1997, pp. 16–71.
Elaine Wright, Islam: Faith, Art, Culture, London: Scala, 2009.

C HA P T E R 23
ISLAM AND MUSIC
A M NON SH I LOA H
23.1 An Introductory Note
Shortly after the advent of Islam a sophisticated art music developed that became
a “universal’ element of the new supranational civilization. It was widely accepted,
spreading over the vast territories under Muslim domination. Its great success arose
through the integration of disparate elements through a subtle process of Arabization of
the diverse foreign borrowings.
However, no one can tell how this music sounded because it was transmitted orally
without leaving concrete documents. It was described in many sources, representing
a spectrum of different approaches ranging from anecdotal and entertaining accounts
to philosophical and scientific speculations. Shortly after its inception the study of this
music became intertwined with several related areas of knowledge, revealing an intense
intellectual activity that paralleled a sumptuous musical life. At the same time as this
happy moment of development the first signs of hostility emerged—the critique of jurists
and theologians who argued against the harmful influence of music. Hence arose the
reservations of radical religious authorities toward music, and the prohibition of its use
in worship was a major factor in the absence of recognized official mosque music. The
debate whether music is prohibited, permitted, or tolerated, from a religious viewpoint,
has since then filled up a whole literature, which has continued vigorously to our own day.
The controversy involved such dichotomies as sacred vs. secular, or tarab-ghinā’ vs.
samā‘; composed music vs. chanting, devilish vs. divine origin, extreme emotional
excitement vs. puritanical and contemplative behavior.
23.1.2 Tarab-Ghinā’
The term tarab is a common and recurring concept figuring in most Arab sources; it
is used to define the effect of music on the listener. Originally it designated a strong

feeling of joy or of sorrow stirred up, for instance, by hearing beautiful verses. Later it
was applied particularly to the gamut of emotions engendered by an art music called
ghinā’, a term whose literal meaning is singing or cantus. This term was exclusively used
by all protagonists to indicate sophisticated art music and its practice. Other forms of
sound combinations such as folk songs and Qur’ān chanting were, interestingly, consid-
ered “non-music.”
The ghinā’, its practice, and its effect are treated in multifarious literary and theoreti-
cal writings. All such questions concerning the lawfulness of music are essentially the
subject-matter of an extensive category of writings called samā‘.
23.2 SamĀ‘
Samā‘, which means listening to music or audition and by extension the music lis-
tened to, is a literary category that also includes writings on dance as practiced mainly
by Sufis.
One of the major difficulties encountered in dealing with the problem of law-
fulness is the fact that the most sacred text, the Qur’ān, contains almost nothing
expressly concerning music. In view of this lack, commentators turned to another
authoritative source, the hadīth (Traditions of the Prophet) on which they based
their evidence. The hadīth is said to represent sayings and acts of the Prophet during
his lifetime, which have been preserved after his death. In the course of time this lit-
erature acquired the force of law. It is generally admitted that there was also a grow-
ing number of fabricated hadīth invented to serve various political and ideological
interests. As a result, an identical hadīth was often used to prove a given point and
its opposite.
23.3 Art Music vs. Chanting
The dichotomy of music vs. non-music was theoretically defined by the Arab histo-
rian and philosopher Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406). In the chapter on music of his book
al-Muqaddima (The Prolegomena) he declared that music as art and science is part of
the development of sedentary culture and that it is associated only with the sophisticated
form based on codified norms and practiced by professional musicians in urban centers.
Other musically gifted people achieve expression by nature and do not need any special
instruction. Thus Ibn Khaldūn reached the conclusion that all forms of folk music, and
the cantillation of the sacred texts, cannot be and in reality are not regarded as music
because they do not refer to the established norms of art music; they are grasped by
nature without any instruction.1

ISLAM AND MUSIC 323
23.4 The Qur’Ān Cantillation
In view of the importance of correct and careful solemn recitation of the Qur’ān the
study and establishing of proper norms became an urgent task from the very begin-
nings of Islam. Known as tajwīd, the embellishment of recitation, that developed
as a branch of the Koranic sciences, a remarkable system evolved that resulted in
the chanting or reading (cantillation) of the sacred text, with respect to the laws of
phonetics, correct diction, and correct rendition. Tajwīd consists of a codification
of the various rules of cantillation and contains a great richness of vocal utterances
and timbres designed to ensure linguistic purity in the transmission of the text. The
text thus is unquestionably predominant and the musical component subordinated.
The text component comprises two major elements: one is phonetic and the other
concerns the proper rules of recitation, that is to say, flow, force, and emphasis. The
meaning of the text should be rendered as a whole in a form comprehensible and
moving for the faithful, with adequate rests and pauses. There is a hadīth about
this component that says that the Prophet has recommended reading the Qur’ān
with melodies of the Arabs from the Najd region in Arabia, avoiding Jewish and
Christian melodies.
As the adoption and use of art-singing became more and more widespread, it aroused,
under the term qirā’ah bi’l-alhān (reading with melodies), furious attacks on the part
of legalists and traditionalists, who violently disapproved of borrowing art melodies
and procedures in reciting the Qur’ān. They maintained that it violated the spirit of the
sacred text and distorted the rules of tajwīd.
Many who insisted on the unlawfulness of music claimed that the best emotion is that
evoked by listening to the chanting of the Qur’ān.
23.5 The Good Influence of Music
The ghinā’, with its aims as an emotional tarab, is closely linked to the strong belief in the
overwhelming influential power of music.
Supporters considered ghinā’ to be a means of expression and communication, with
the power of affecting the lives of men and animals and exerting an influence on individ-
uals, societies, and the orderliness of the universe. Under the influence of neo-platonic
teaching, these authors described and extolled its inherent ethical and therapeutic
qualities, its power to influence the affirmations of the astrological laws and create inner
harmony among the contradictory forces of man’s soul, and the role it fulfills in the edu-
cation of intellectuals.

23.6 The Bad Influence of Music
An opposite view that ensues from the same idea of the overwhelming power of music is
seen in the attitude of the legalists and theologians who consider its effect on the soul of
believers to be harmful and who believe it can act as a debasing agent. Music became an
object of attack and interdiction.
The first complete treatise dealing with the question of the lawfulness of music was
written during the high period of Muslim civilization by Ibn abī’l-Dunyā (823-894),
a great student of tradition who lived a reclusive life devoted to religion. He titled his
major work Dhamm al-malāhī (condemnation of the malāhī), essentially commenting
on seventy different hadīth. The term malāhī is a derivative of lahw (pastime, diversion)
and is often used as synonym for musical instruments. Although the term samā‘ is not
central here, the treatise became a major source for subsequent authors of the samā‘.
The primacy given to diversion in this treatise was aimed at equating listening to and
performing music with a gamut of forbidden pleasures and immoral behavior, which
for the author meant adoption of a puritan life. Ibn abī’l-Dunyā’s doctrine served as an
inspiring model for the subsequent generations. Support of this approach is found in a
notion concerning the ultimate origin of music, which ascribes it to devilish inspira-
tion and delusion. Ibn abī’l-Dunyā reports in this respect the following hadīth: “No one
raises his voice in song without Allah sending him two devils who sit on his shoulders
knocking out his breath with their heels till he stops.”2
Subsequent generations of authors dealing with the lawfulness of music developed
their arguments around the following central points: in their highly emotional state,
listeners lose control over their reason and act under the dominion of their passions.
Hence, music is an intoxicant provoking worldly passions in the soul and it is associ-
ated with sensual pleasures such as drinking and fornication. Music has a harmful effect
on the behavior and judgment of people, driving them to act like lunatics. On a more
sophisticated level the competitive influence of a humanly created world of sounds
might have been regarded as a kind of polytheism.
Ibn al-Jawzī, a jurist and preacher (d. 1200), devoted his work Talbīs iblīs (The Devil’s
Delusion) to the devil’s maneuvers, including music and dance. He violently attacks the
assertions of mystics concerning music, dance, and ecstasy, arguing that all these are
basically a devilish temptation or delusion and that the devil dominates the soul and
makes it the slave of its passions.
23.7 Sufism
Among the mystical orders, music and dance played a vital part in the Sufi performing of the
spiritual and ecstatic rites. The most remarkable of these rites is the dhikr (lit. remembrance),

ISLAM AND MUSIC 325
which refers to the Koranic injunction to remember God as often as possible. The dhikr
includes singing and instrumental accompaniment and occasionally dancing, highly styl-
ized in the ceremony of the Mevlewi or whirling Sufi adepts. Music and dance played a
prominent role in spiritual exercises leading to ecstasy and mystical union with God.
23.8 Conclusion
To conclude, the following quotations express concisely the opposing opinions in the
controversy and suggest some insight into the essence of the respective viewpoints con-
cerning the lawfulness of music. The first derives from the treatise of Ibn abīl-Dunyā
referring to the following hadīh: “Singing makes hypocrisy grow in the heart as water
makes the seed grow.”3
In the second quotation, the metaphor of “water” is transformed into another natu-
ral metaphor—the sun. It is found in a Persian extensive treatise on mysticism, Kashf
al-mahjūb li-arbāb al-qulūb (The uncovering of the veiled for People of Heart) of a
prominent author of mystic doctrine, ‘Alī al-Hujwīrī, who lived during the tenth century
in Ghazna (Afghanistan), and was a strict observant of religious laws who reconciled his
theology with an advanced mysticism. This is what he wrote:
“Samā‘ (Audition),” is like the sun, which shines on all things but affects them
differently according to their degree [meaning their cognitive degree]; it burns or
illuminates or dissolves or nurtures.”4
This definition assumes that men are unable to resist the charm of music, while the sim-
ile refers to a basic idea in the doctrine of Islamic mysticism and its approach to music
that is used to help the devotee to establish direct contact with God. Music combines
good and evil forces and there are two categories of listeners: those who hear the spiri-
tual meaning and those who hear the material sound.
Notes
1. Rosenthal, F. tr. The Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldūn: An Introduction to History (3 vols.),
Princeton, Bollingen Series XLIII, Princeton University 1967, Chapter III, section 13.
2. Robson, J., ed. and tr. Tracts on Listening to Music: Being Dhamm al–malāhī by Ibn abī’l–
Dunyā, and Bawāriq al–ilmā‘ by Majd al–dīn al–Tūsī al–Ghazālī. London: The Royal
Asiatic Society 1938, p. 25.
[The tracts of James Robson include the Arabic texts of the treatises written respectively by
Ibn abi'l-Dunyā and al-Ghazālī along with their English translation. The above mentioned
reference is exactly the same as it is usually presented.].
3. Dhamm al–malāhī in Robson, op. cit., p. 24.
4. al-Hujwīrī ‘Alī, The Kashf al-Mahjūb, The Oldest Treatise on Sufism, trans. by R. A.
Nicholson, London: Gibb Memorial Series n. 17, 1911, reprinted 1970, pp. 406–407.

Bibliography
Farmer, H. G., Historical Facts for the Arabian Musical Influence. London: W. Reeves, 1930 (Rep.
Hildesheim, Germany : G. Holms, 1970).
Faruqi-Ibsen, Lois, “The Cantillation of the Qur’an,” Asian Music 19 (1987): 2–25.
Meier, F., “The Mystic Path,” in The World of Islam: Faith, People, Culture, edited by Bernard
Louis, London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. First paperback edition, 1992.
Nelson, K., The Art of Reciting the Qur’an. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.
Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context and Meaning in
Qawwali. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Shiloah, A., The Theory of Music in Arabic Writings (ca. 900 to ca. 1900), series
B. München: RISM, 1979.
Shiloah, A., The Dimension of Music in Islamic and Jewish Culture, collected studies series
CS393. London: Variorum, 1993.
Shiloah, A., Music in the World of Islam, A Socio-Cultural Study. London: Scolar Press and
Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1995 (Rep. 2000).
Talbi, M., “La qirā’ah bi’l-alhān,” Arabica 5 (1958): 183–190.

C HA P T E R 24
HINDUISM—AESTHETICS,
DRAMA, AND POETICS
SU N T HA R V I SU VA L I NG A M
24.1 Between Sacred and Profane: Six

Attempts at Artistic Resolution
Any discussion of the “religious” uses of art must necessarily begin with a closer exam-
ination of the opposition between the “sacred” and the “profane,” the applicability of
which to the Hindu context is problematic.1 Demarcation in terms of activity (worship),
setting (temple), content (depicting deities), intent (spiritual edification), and so on—
which may be readily applied in the Abrahamic and modern secularized cultures—is
less reliable in Indian aesthetics, precisely because the latter often hovers ambiguously
between transcendent values and worldly pursuits, while sometimes claiming to con-
stitute a third and distinct domain. It may be legitimately argued that Hindu aesthet-
ics, which has shaped the Indic sensibility as a whole, has been mostly about bridging
the distance between the religious and the worldly. The two perspectives are often
superposed, such that the artistry may consist in playing upon the opposed registers,
sometimes holding them together even while keeping them scrupulously apart, and
at other times refusing to recognize the very distinction. This is best illustrated by the
deployment of (the semblance of profane) “humor” (hāsya) around the (ritual) clown
(vidūṣaka) of the Sanskrit theater, whose obvious purpose is vulgar entertainment,
though his stereotyped role and characterization is intelligible only in terms of a sacred
function.
Despite overlap in both practice and theory, at least six fundamentally different
approaches to the “sacred” may be distinguished that, in the Indic context, correspond
roughly to the following currents: 1) sacrifice (yajña), 2) renunciation (sannyāsa), 3) sec-
ularization (kingship), 4) possession (āveśa), 5) devotion (bhakti), and 6) transgression
(tantra).2

24.2 Vedic Sacrifice, Heterodox

Renunciation, and Worldly Theater
The religious may be opposed to the worldly in several distinct modes: the first is
one that carefully demarcates a sacred space and time subject to a ritual order that is
immune to the vicissitudes of ordinary life even while aiming to regulate and (re-) struc-
ture the latter. In the brahmanical context, the religious in this sense was defined above
all by the Vedic sacrifice, which provided the paradigm and model for all other human
activities, including the expression of animal propensities such as sex3 and violence.4
The “refined” (Sanskrit) hieratic language, already from its earliest canonization in the
Rigveda, was intent on establishing, maintaining, and renewing the (symbolic) “con-
nections” (bandhu) between the otherwise dispersed “nodes” of the ritual activity, its
mythical backdrop, and the “outside” world. There were, however, entire regions, peo-
ples, and cultures that were originally beyond the pale of this expanding tradition that
was then centered in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent.5 The subsequent rise and
spread (from 500 BC) of Buddhist renunciation, which disenchanted and devalorized
this inherited symbolic universe, was a powerful catalyst for opening up and consolidat-
ing a “secularized” domain that straddled both the brahmanical tradition that it called
into question and the extra-Vedic peoples whom it proselytized and acculturated.6
Jainism and Buddhism are hence representative of a second and different approach
that amounts to a rejection of life-in-the-world, whether immediate (monks) or post-
poned (laity), for the sake of a transcendent (spiritual as opposed to material) reality.
The aims of life (puruṣārtha) were accordingly reordered into an ascending hierarchy of
hedonism (kāma), wealth-security-power (artha), socio-religious duties (dharma), and
renunciation culminating in “liberation” (mokṣa) that was sometimes opposed to the
preceding three “worldly” values. For dharma, despite its by now competing religious
underpinnings oriented towards either (Vedic) sacrifice or (Buddhist) renunciation,
was understood in this “secularized” context more as the scaffolding and glue that held
a complex, segmented, and hierarchical (varṇa) society together, making the harmoni-
ous and equitable pursuit of kāma and artha possible in keeping with one’s station in life
(āśrama).7
Both the (Buddhist) renunciatory and “reformed” (Vedic) sacrificial outlooks ini-
tially rejected the arts because of their profane character, for they served only to enter-
tain by soliciting and pandering to the sensual and emotional entanglements that
were the antithesis of the spiritual life and by creating their own imaginary worlds that
were doubly removed from the sacred, as if intent on escaping from the burdens of
life through the backdoor. Eventually, the brahmanical tradition embraced theater as
the Fifth Veda, open to all, by transposing the sacrificial paradigms into even appar-
ently worldly dramas, while the Buddhists likewise harnessed its possibilities to pro-
mote the ideals of renunciation, especially among the laity.8 The integrative thrust of
the dramatic art and its paradoxical results are best exemplified by The Little Clay Cart

HINDUISM—AESTHETICS, DRAMA, AND POETICS 329
(Mṛcchakaṭikā), touted as evidence for the secular achievements of Indian theater.9 The
worldly narrative is of a noble merchant (Cārudatta) falsely accused of strangling his
beloved Sanskrit-speaking courtesan (Vasantasenā) for her gold and vindicated only as
he is about to be executed at the stake. This plot is elaborated upon the canvas of a pal-
ace “revolution” where an unjust king (Pālaka) is killed and replaced by a commoner
(Āryaka) who is endorsed by popular assent. However, a closer reading of the semiot-
ics of the play, starting from the sustained metaphors used in the final (tenth) Act and
the devious role of the vidūṣaka, reveals an underlying sacrificial framework derived
from Vedic ideology. “Faithfully” creating dire obstacles for his unsuspecting friend and
patron, the perverse clown is aligned with the villain (Śakāra) of execrable deeds and
lisping, hilariously garbled, speech. The trans-sectarian story also features in a favor-
able light the conversion of a repentant gambler into a Buddhist monk, who eventually
saves the courtesan-heroine and then the Brahmin hero: originally a sensual masseur,
this “heretic” renouncer serves to encode and project the ascetic pole of the consecrated
(dīkṣita) sacrificer.10 Except for the high characters, who speak Sanskrit, the other actors,
including the Brahmin “jester,” speak as always in regional and class dialects. The many
episodes of mistaken identity and quid pro quo can thus be enjoyed by all, with ample
scope for humor, at a purely worldly level, but also by the initiated on the ritual plane: the
true artistry of the playwright is measured by the skillful manner in which these two
registers, the obvious and the hidden, have been carefully held apart even while being
seamlessly woven together. For Kālidāsa, “the Indian Shakespeare” (c. fourth century),
the dramatic performance is a “sacrifice (rendered) delightful to the eyes.”11
24.3 Aesthetics of Power:

“Secularization” of Universal
Kingship
The “secularization” of Sanskrit theater, the third approach, is thus better understood
as a cultural strategy aimed at re-sacralizing the “profane” world of the senses rejected
by the religion of renunciation, but now through the mode of transposition. The “hero”
or protagonist (nāyaka) is typically the king (sacrificer) or, as in the Mṛcchakaṭikā, a
stand-in for the latter, whereas his dīkṣita state has been split off into his clownish alter
ego, the “anti-hero” (vi-nāyaka) with hidden ritual affinities to the villain of the plot.12
When the jealously guarded esoteric language of the gods began descending upon and
annexing the world of men—from beyond the Hindu Kush, through peninsular India,
across Indonesia, and arcing back way up to Indochina—its rich polysemy and obscure
workings were studiously categorized, secularized, and generalized into intricate “fig-
ures of speech” (alaṅkāra) exemplified by the pun.13 Classical theater betrays the same
genealogy whereby the Vedic enigma-contest, preserved by the vidūṣaka in the ritual
preliminaries (pūrva-raṅga) to the worldly drama, was translated into the riddle-play

(vīthī), whose constituent elements subsequently penetrated all the other surviving
dramatic genres. Grammar, prosody, metrics, etymology, hermeneutics, and other
“philological” disciplines that had been ancillary to the Vedas now lent their resources
to and were transformed by the emerging trans-local, trans-ethnic, trans-sectarian,
and universalizing aesthetic cultivated within the courts and centered on the king. The
ideal ruler was not only a fearsome warrior, judicious administrator, munificent patron
of the arts, and public servant intent on maintaining the socio-religious order, but also
was himself a knowledgeable connoisseur and versatile poet; such was the illustrious
Bhoja (tenth century), architect of the Śṛṅgāra -Prakāśa, a monumental treatise on
philosophical aesthetics that elevated the erotic sentiment into a metaphysical prin-
ciple. The new cosmopolitan dispensation recognized worldly ambition (artha) to be
the driving force of social intercourse, violence as pandemic and existentially consti-
tutive, even while seeking to contain their likely excesses within a shared royal ethos
(rāja-dharma); religious dissensions were relegated to the transcendental (mokṣa)
realm to be addressed by the rules of philosophical debate. Hence, non-Hindus con-
tributed wholeheartedly to nurturing the Sanskritic ideal of the refined (twice-born)
“gentleman” (ārya) exemplified by (the poetic accomplishments of) the Buddhist phi-
losopher Dharmakīrti whom Abhinavagupta, his unrelenting Śaiva critic, simply and
admiringly addresses as “Ārya.”
The primary socio-political function of literature was to harness the petty chieftain’s
self-aggrandizing greed, tame his lust for power, and channel his personal aspirations
into becoming a universal monarch, whose moral (if not physical) suzerainty would
extend across the entire Sanskrit Cosmopolis. Raghu’s legendary “conquest of the quar-
ters” in Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṁśa and Samudragupta’s imperial acquisitions bequeathed
in verse to posterity upon the Allahabad pillar are among the many mirrors constituting
a unified aesthetics of power. The seductive “body of fame” that poetry (kāvya) sought
to confer upon the sovereign is a reflection, within the secular realm, of the immortal
“self ” of the dīkṣita constituted through the sacred hymns and the semiotics of ritual.
Even his readiness to be martyred in the attempt to slay rival kings and acquire their
territory could be construed as the profane exteriorization of (self)sacrifice through a
substitute victim. The denouement of the Mṛcchakaṭikā is the usurper Āryaka killing
(the) Pālaka (“Protector”) just about to immolate the sacrificial animal to which the
unrighteous king is thereby assimilated. These clan lineages performed costly (imperial
horse-) sacrifices that redistributed (even plundered) wealth, and consistently endowed
land and other privileges to Brahmins; the ostentatious inscriptions that bore these pan-
egyrics were often occasioned by such acts of royal munificence. Regional overlords
could stake concurrent claims to being the “pivot of the universe” (cakra-vartin), for
the belligerent Indra, the king of the gods, had been already receiving competing sac-
rifices from rival Rigvedic chiefs. Crucial here is how this expansive secular domain
remained constrained and worked through by the Vedic religio-cultural matrix within
which it emerged.14 From the religious perspective, the ruling “autocrat” was merely the
sacrificer par excellence, which is why the hero of The Little Clay Cart could be a poor
brahmin merchant surreptitiously identified with the usurper Āryaka. The royal deity

that Hindus worship in the nuclear temple identifies the mortal king-sacrificer with the
undying transcendental god.15
24.4 National Epics and Popular

Devotion: Riddles, Jokes, and the
Esoteric Art of Storytelling
The two Hindu epics, rendered diversely from Sanskrit into the regional sensibilities
of the vernaculars, address the entire puruṣārtha spectrum through engrossing nar-
ration accessible even to the illiterate and have remained the bulwarks of a shared
popular culture. Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa, which depicts the ideal king and society, pro-
vided the exemplars for just and stable human relationships. Rāma, who ruled over
Gandhi’s heart and inspired his trans-sectarian political struggle, could at the same
time be regarded as God, as in the Hindi rendering of Tulsīdās (sixteenth century),
on which the festive enactment of the Rāmlīlā is based, and in the soulful composi-
tions of Carnatic music by the musician-saint Tyāgarāja (late eighteenth century). The
Mahābhārata, distinguished by the contestation and confusion of values, similarly
inculcates a trifunctional (priesthood, aristocracy, producers in descending) order
through the internal hierarchy of the five Pāava brothers wedded to the common
weal incarnated by their wife Draupadī.16 This monumental work of high and sus-
tained drama is interspersed throughout with profound spiritual teachings, above all
the “Song of God” (Bhagavad Gītā) that Lord K a discloses to Arjuna, the exem-
plary warrior-prince, on the eve of the great sacrifice of battle. However, these (often
all-too-) human actors also serve as masks for divine persona as exemplified by the
worship of Draupadī in Tamil Nadu. In Nepal, she is the dark goddess Kālī, flanked by
a vegetarian Arjuna and the bloodthirsty Bhīma, identified with the “terrifying” god
Bhairava. Such ritual notations are omnipresent beneath the “historical” drama and
battles of the epic and have been understood in folk religion. The prior sojourn of the
disguised Pāavas within the Fish Kingdom, where the heroic Arjuna assumes the
patently ridiculous role of a transvestite befitting the vidūṣaka, is cast in the language
and imagery of the Vedic initiation (dīkṣā), which was a regression to the maternal
womb. Such “embryogonic” symbolism is invested in the island of La kā—stage for
the monkey-god Hanumān’s comic performance—and this is how the Rāmāyaa too
has been understood by (tantric) Theravādins in Cambodia and Laos. Rāvaa, the
demon-king—great brahmin, who excels in the science of music, knows the secrets of
the Veda, and whose sonorous ode to the dancing Śiva is still cherished with innumer-
able renderings on YouTube—is set aflame every year amidst great rejoicing during the
Rāmlīlā.17 Popular song-recitations and vernacular enactments of epic episodes across
Greater India are not only entertaining exercises in worldly didactics but amount to
religious performances in themselves.

The intellectual scaffolding and emotional gratification offered by the fine arts is
rooted, ontogenetically, in childish pleasure at problem-solving, exemplified by the
nonsensical riddle, and in “cathartic” mirth at the release of nervous energy, espe-
cially at and through the comic. For Abhinavagupta, the “semblance of (any) sentiment
(rasābhāsa) engenders humor (hāsya),” such that through (imitating) their varied sem-
blances “all the (other) rasas are included in hāsya.” Even the “semblance of humor”
(hāsyābhāsa)—like the infectious sight of another guffawing for no reason—can pro-
voke “illogical” laughter: “thus, through incongruous speech, costume, ornaments,
behavior, etc., the vidūṣaka too deploys hāsyābhāsa.” The “bisociative” principle under-
lying (these enigmatic pronouncements on) humor is the abrupt mutual neutralization
of two opposing cognitive (associative) fields invested with incompatible emotional
charges, triggering the involuntary discharge that constitutes the laughter reflex. The
depiction of love-in-union (sambhoga) in Sanskrit poetry and light-hearted romantic
comedies (nāṭikā)—where mutual attraction is interlaced with negative emotions—is
invariably suffused with humor arising from the ambivalent juxtaposition of conflict-
ing perceptions and feelings of the warring couple. The evocation of love and sorrow
through aesthetic identification (tanmayībhavana) with a protagonist ensures the “puri-
fication” (catharsis) of these dramatized emotions, generalized thereby into the purview
of the entire audience. Abhinava adds, however, that onstage “humor” (hāsya) can pro-
voke unmediated laughter (hāsa) just as directly as mundane jokes cracked around the
water cooler: is stand-up comedy a fine art or a shared exercise in profanity?18 Whereas
the incongruity underlying wit must remain preconscious or even unconscious for the
punchline to register as funny, the riddle entertains by soliciting a deliberate effort on
the part of the confounded listener to bridge otherwise unrelated cognitive fields: biso-
ciation is at the heart of all intellectual and artistic creativity. The vidūṣaka’s (semblance
of) worldly, even ribald, “humor” thus becomes the opaque, hence innocuous, recoding
of the sacred enigma (bráhman).
The vīthyaṅgas are discrete formulas that served to transpose the bráhman—along
with the agonistic context in which its sacred knowledge was acquired—onto the pro-
fane stage. They are best epitomized by the nālikā, which is defined as a humorous
“riddle” (prahelikā).19 The (Varua-) vidūṣaka exploits the nālikā in his cosmogonic
altercation with (the royal) Indra in the ritual preliminaries. The (transgressive) nexus
(bandhu) between order and chaos has been thus conserved in the silly vernacular “jok-
ing” of this “perverse brat” ridiculed as a “would-be (great) Brahmin” (brahma-bandhu).
The conflicting, sometimes diametrically opposed, definitions proposed for the remain-
ing elements of the vīthī reveal the underlying intentionality: “word-play” (vāk-keli)
with several replies addressing a sole query or a single answer resolving multiple ques-
tions; unintelligible words or interrogations complemented by other words chosen with
due deliberation (udghātyaka); incoherent chatter or salutary words of wisdom whose
meaning is not grasped by fools (asat-pralāpa); verbal disputation that reciprocally
inverts virtues into vices and shortcomings into merits (mṛdavam); outvying where the
piling up of (counter-) propositions generates a surplus of meaning (adhibala); single
intervention that achieves a dual purpose or digression that contributes to a total result

(avalagita); emotional outburst, often uncannily predicting an inauspicious event, that

is immediately reinterpreted innocuously (avaspandita); insincere and amusing flattery
for a self-serving ulterior motive (prapañca); ironical pleasantry (chala) that provokes
anger (from the butt) and ridicule (among onlookers); sound-resemblances that artfully
resonate with multiple meanings (trigata); abrupt impetuous remarks, often left hang-
ing, that intentionally bewilder the opponent, throwing him off guard (gaṇḍa).
When Vasantasenā deposits her gold ornaments for safekeeping at the end of Act
I, the great brahmin takes the blessed “gift” with greedy delight only to be rebuked by
Cārudatta:
CĀ RU DAT TA : Fie you fool, it is only a deposit!

V I DŪ A K A : (Aside) If so, then may thieves steal . . . .
CĀ RU DAT TA : In a very short time . . . . ”
V I DŪ A K A : this deposit entrusted by her to us . . . . ”
CĀ RU DAT TA : I will return it.20
Subsequently, in Act III, the sleep-talking Fool happily hands over the entrusted jew-
els to an otherwise reluctant thief, setting off a chain of events that (almost) results in
his bosom friend’s execution at the (sacrificial) stake. Given their biunity, the forked
tongue that interrupts the hero’s straightforward declaration imitates the “unconscious”
speaking through and against the protagonist’s avowed intention, dramatizing thereby
the psychopathology of everyday life. Such rhetorical transposition not only pervades
the classical theater but forms the basis of storytelling. In the Mahābhārata, Agni,
the Fire-God, appears as a gluttonous brahmin, with telltale traits of the vidūṣaka, to
devour an entire forest named “sweetmeat” (khāṇḍava). This sudden interruption of
Arjuna-and-K a dallying with the women of their royal harem insinuates the (tan-
tric) equation of sexual pleasure to (sensory) “food” and alludes further to the “inces-
tuous” regression to the maternal womb that accompanies the fiery expansion of
Consciousness.21 Rooted in the collective “unconscious” (ásat), the drama of Hindu
existence (sát), (re-) constructed artfully as a continuous chain of dialogue and interac-
tion, is the sacred enigma (bráhman) that offers the keys to its own solution and (Self-)
realization, at least to those who know to ask it the right questions.
24.5 Ecstasy, Possession, and Spiritual

Realization: Yoga of Dance
Though shamanic ecstasy and spirit possession both deconstruct (“slay”) or at least
suspend the “normal” personality, they are induced by techniques of immanence
that valorize the human body and harness its animal physiology: “primitive religion”
(the fourth approach in this discussion) is a misnomer because such cultures have

too well integrated these privileged experiences into the symbolic life of the com-
munity, as attested by the ubiquity of the mask.22 Nor is there the space, opened by a
rift between sacred and profane, for a separate aesthetic domain, for “art” was wholly
functional and “beauty” subservient to life. Dance and music, however enjoyable in
themselves, induce trance in Indian (rural illiterate) “folk” religion that continues
to reflect the holistic integrity of the “pre-classical” Vedic outlook.23 Post-Buddhist
Hindu culture conserved and cultivated such techniques in ascetic strands marginal
to mainstream society to the extent of violating (conventional understandings of)
dharma. Though inwardly chaste, the naked Pāśupata had to make lewd gestures
(śṛṅgāraṇa) before women, feign epileptic fits (spandana), babble unintelligibly,
snore, and limp.24 The brahmin ascetic, intent on destroying his worldly identity,
courted censure by making a fool of himself in public and laughing explosively.
This Śaiva adept is hilariously, crudely, and accurately depicted, from the outside,
in the genre of the farce (prahasana). Esoteric techniques of self-transcendence
enumerated as aphorisms in later compendiums, like the Vijñāna-Bhairava Tantra
and Spanda Kārikā, have abstracted out the cognitive and aesthetic essence of such
practices from their original cultic context. When the Śiva Sūtra declares that “the
Self is the Dancer” (or Actor), they are not simply borrowing a colorful metaphor
from the performing arts but revealing the sacred origins and underpinnings of the
Sanskrit theater.
Theater (nāṭya) was considered the total art form because it encompassed everything
else, such as representation, poetry, dance, music, makeup, architecture, etc., and its
authoritative compendium took shape (c. 200 BC–200 AD?) as Bharata’s Nāṭya Śāstra
(NS). Their discerning use converged on the sustained evocation and intensification of
aesthetic emotion (rasa), the thread that strung these elements together both conceptu-
ally and in practice. The NS is a synthesis of three distinct schools of the performative
arts: the brahmanical (whose sacrificial imprint upon the whole is evident in the ritual
preliminaries to the plays proper), the Śaiva (which has elaborated dance and music),
and the epic (that drew upon these resources to dramatize edifying tales in an engag-
ing manner accessible to all sectors of an otherwise segmented and stratified society).
The theatrical depiction of the eight traditional rasas (love, humor, heroism, wonder,
anger, sorrow, disgust, and fear) served to mirror the real world, now transfigured by art
to promote the legitimate pursuit of the puruṣārthas, a schema that sought to reconcile
the claims of both the religious and worldly poles of human existence. The vidūṣaka
crowns this synthesis: the “great Brahmin” embodies the (hidden) initiated state of the
(royal) sacrificer (hero); his (symbolic) violations of socio-religious norms reinforce the
puruṣārthas through negative example; while the plot is both hindered and furthered
through the unpredictable “blunders” of this Joker. The inarticulate, most sacred Vedic
syllable AUM-kāra (OM) presides over the spiritual praxis of the Pāśupata, the theatri-
cal role of the clown, and the “grotesque” beauty of the elephant-headed mouse-riding
Gaeśa, the Lord of Obstacles. The patron deity of humor in the NS, who derives from
the deformed hosts (gaṇa) of goblins accompanying Śiva, is probably the prototype for
this ludicrous but most popular Hindu god.25

The Vedic landscape was peopled by dancing nymphs (apsaras) coupled with sin-
ister musicians (gandharva) flaunting onomatopoeic names such as Hāhā, Hīhī, and
Hūhū: the science of music is called Gāndharva Veda. A vigorous (tāṇḍava) dance
was cultivated by later Pāśupata ascetics to facilitate ritual self-identification with their
divinity, Śiva, hence stylized in myth and sculpture as the many-armed Nața-rāja (“king
of dance”). Similarly, gentle interpretative dances (lāsya) of temple-courtesans led
public worship by offering the whole range of human sentiment to the divine Lover.
This vocabulary of dance, with its varied postures, rhythms, movements, and musical
accompaniment was adopted, refined, and systematized by the NS to ensure a much
broader appeal. Its comprehensive codification has in turn shaped the repertory and
aesthetics of the regional dance-dramas of India, viz., Kathakali, Kathak, Manipuri,
Odissi, Kuchipudi, and especially Bharata Nā yam. Not only could the same music be
performed in either religious (e.g., temple) or profane (e.g., courtly) settings, but the
performances often deliberately lent themselves to interpretation and enjoyment on
both registers, for example, when Kathak was patronized by the Muslim courts more
for its universal aesthetic appeal than for its persistent Hindu underpinnings, or the
otherwise “idolatrous” Bharata Nā yam is adopted and de-paganized by Christian mis-
sionaries to propagate the gospel, especially among Indians already attuned to such a
sensibility.26 Abhinavagupta’s (pseudo-) “etymology” of svara (musical note) in terms of
its capacity “to restore one’s true nature” could have well served as the motto for the Sufi
adoption of Hindu music and rasa-theory not only to express devotion but also induce
trance-like union with (the Islamic) God. Later commentaries on the foundational
treatise of the Pāśupata discipline stipulate that the ascetic, otherwise intent on mokṣa,
should study the NS and be conversant with its techniques, attesting to the expansive
nature and scope of Hindu aesthetics that drew its resources from both the religious and
the profane realms.
24.6 Rasa, Bhakti,

Reflexivity: Autonomy and Triumph of
the Beautiful
The furtive principle behind art may be arrested at the reflexive moment of the simple
(not just verbal) “metaphor” (rūpaka): the “moon-faced” cliché applied with almost
unthinking Indian generosity to both sexes, human and divine, springs from the refresh-
ing coolness of this fragile ray of beauty before the heart (hṛdaya) is lost in sensual desire
or inward contemplation.27 The most popular and delectable sentiment depicted in the
arts, especially literature, is eros (śṛṅgāra), the “juice” (rasa) that (pro-) creates and sus-
tains the worldly drama of human life. Though the unruly emotions (bhāvas), driven by
passion, are the prime cause of such entanglement, the Buddhist theater sought legiti-
macy by inculcating their restraint and cessation through sympathetically portraying

the ideal of non-attachment in exemplary Buddha-like personages, so much so that

śānta (“tranquility”) was championed as the paradoxical ninth rasa. Though Hindu
orthodoxy initially resisted the incorporation of this anti-rasa, they came to recognize
that the “universalized” aesthetic emotions evoked through art were cognitively dif-
ferent from their egocentric real-life counterparts. These insights into the sui generis
(alaukika) nature of rasa were developed most fully and synthesized by the towering
tenth to eleventh century polymath, philosopher, and mystic, Abhinavagupta, in his
insightful, comprehensive, and authoritative NS commentary. The underlying literary
appeal of alaṅkāra and other qualities (guṇa) of literary speech having been already sub-
sumed within the powers of poetic suggestion (dhvani) expounded by Ānandavardhana
(ninth century) in his Dhvanyāloka, the finality and supremacy of rasa-dhvani was
firmly established by Abhinava in his Locana commentary. His crowning synthesis of
aesthetics, which assimilated and eclipsed all preceding efforts, sought to demonstrate
publicly that turbulent and typically painful emotions such as lust, anger, fear, sor-
row, etc., become distanced from and purified of their instinctual bases when evoked
through the artistic medium,28 and suffused as it were by the transcendental peace and
joy of the universal consciousness. He therefore upheld the supernumerary (ninth) and
supreme śānta, even while insisting that it permeates all the other “worldly” rasas. Thus,
a discerning connoisseur enjoying highly sensuous, even erotic, poetry with no, not
even implicit, reference to transcendental values, is nevertheless graced by a foretaste of
the sort of spiritual bliss otherwise achieved only through strenuous efforts at introver-
sion by yogins who have turned their backs on the world. Here the content of art remains
profane though its relish is recognized to be quasi-religious.
The fifth approach under discussion, which arose in response to the renunciatory
currents, sought to re-valorize this world and the objects of the senses as opportuni-
ties for and instruments of worship. Whereas both the Vedic sacrifice and the Buddhist
nirvāṇa attached little positive value to the emotional states of the ritualist or the monk,
the religion of love (bhakti) sought instead to transfigure the inner life by focusing the
devotee’s energies on an external (-ized) personal God. The spiritual detachment striven
for through asceticism arose more naturally as a consequence of such sublimated eros,
while the sort of ritual activity imposed as impersonal or self-interested obligation by
scripture was embraced rather as the outer behavioral framework for sustained tran-
scendental (and more than just “artistic”) delight. The relationship between the human
and the divine was diversified by anthropomorphizing the Formless such that bhakti
overflowed the sublime reverence and self-abnegating supplication of the temple to
annex the whole range of “worldly” human emotions. The dualistic Bengali Vai avism
of Rūpa Goswami (sixteenth century) envisages a hierarchy of devotional attitudes
where śānta is merely the first rung in the ascent through servitude, mutual friendship,
and parental affection, to culminate in the “sweet” bhakti of a transfigured śṛṅgāra. Such
personal intimacy that accommodates even playfulness, anger, jealousy, scorn, mis-
chief, humor, and so on, is exemplified by the (devotee assuming the) lovelorn attitude
of adulteress wives courting the gracious attentions of the flute-playing divine Cowherd
(K a), and by ecstatic songs (Venka a Kavi’s Alai-Pāyude in Tamil) and dance-dramas

(Jayadeva’s Gīta-Govinda in Sanskrit) that transform the climax of sexual union into
a metaphor for complete surrender of the individual soul to God.29 Harnessing the
rasa-schematic into the service of devotion to transform the whole world into a stage,
the performance of Hindu bhakti has become thoroughly aestheticized in the sense of
appealing to the refined taste of even a secular temperament. Worship, in Abhinava’s
non-dualistic doctrine of “recognition” (pratyabhijñā), is ultimately a means to realizing
and expressing one’s true Self: to re-descend from transcendental peace so as to enjoy
the “mundane” aesthetically is to become God-like.
What justifies retaining the label “religious” for so many disparate, even conflicting,
approaches is the common orientation towards a transcendent principle as structuring
human experience and endeavor.30 The founding opposition between the spirit and the
flesh that uneasily unites the Christian and secular outlooks has been readily mapped,
through Western Indology, onto the Indic polarity of mokṣa and saṁsāra and thereby
generalized onto the Indian cultural landscape as a whole. Hindu aesthetics has resisted
such attempts by enthusiasts and detractors alike to reduce its unique status to either
its religious or worldly dimensions. Since Abhinava epitomizes these tensions and their
“resolution,” such “enlightened” scholarship cuts him down to size (while bloating what
remains beyond proportion), gleefully uncovers his blatant “contradictions” (under the
guise of restituting hitherto suppressed aspects of Indic experience), pits against him
another synthetic larger-than-life figure (such as Bhoja) to demonstrate the fundamen-
tal inadequacy of Indic categories of self-understanding (reduced to caricature in the
funhouse mirror of an alien intelligence), charges him with “plagiarism” for modeling
the universal appeal of poetic language and dramatized emotion on the Vedic injunc-
tion to sacrifice,31 and “exposes” his public conservatism as (typical brahmanical)
“hypocrisy” in the dark light of his equally engaged secret commitment to transgressive
sacrality. Pioneers Jeffrey L. Masson and M.V. Patwardhan concluded that Abhinava,
the mystic, must have “philosophized” about śānta to assuage a guilty conscience for
his persistent indulgence in profane and sensuous literature. This has not prevented
contemporary “connoisseurs” from gushing over their “spiritual” experience of rasa in
not just Sanskrit poetry (kāvya) but even Hollywood movies (and rap music?) simply
because they too excite the emotions, forgetting that kāvya is a formal domain governed
by stringent rules of propriety (aucitya) and that rasa is also likened to a golden veil
upon the face of Truth (Yoga Sūtras). Edwin Gerow has correctly intuited the subtle con-
vergence of aesthetic and philosophical perspectives in Abhinava that does not reduce
mokṣa to (śānta-) rasa nor artistic delight to religious instruction. Donna M. Wulff
argues that rasa is intrinsically religious: obviously so in Rūpa Goswami’s bhakti, by
implication in Abhinava’s conflation of its vocabulary with that of his spiritual experi-
ence, and even in the “secular” Kālidāsa because many Hindus contemplate his verses
with a reverence verging on the mystical. Because the earliest and sustained examples
of kāvya are found in royal inscriptions that are panegyrics to the cosmopolitan aes-
thetic of power, Sheldon Pollock paints a secularized picture of Sanskrit literature and
its exemplary appeal across (Southern) Asia. “Hindu” aesthetics would be another mis-
nomer for it has been also cultivated by not just Jainas and Buddhists, but also Muslims

and Christians, by foreign conquerors from the northwest and cultural vassals to the
southeast, all on the road to becoming Indians, and mostly in a trans-sectarian spirit
that also embraced the worldly minded. What this chapter suggests is that the apprecia-
tion of beauty is in itself neither sacred nor profane; but the cultivation of rasa—through
a tradition of martial arts even today by Javanese Muslims—remains suffused by a tran-
scendental dimension. One need not be good, much less a mystic, to be a great artist, but
to transform one’s “worldly” life reflexively into a sustained work of art amounts to being
“religious” in a novel sense.
24.7 Brahmanical Order and

Carnivalesque Inversion: Transcending
Caste and Gender
Hindu aesthetics, so privileged a medium for the dissemination and interiorization of

religion, also points the way forward toward the resolution of its constitutive aporia. The
Veda is universalist even “imperialist” in intent, but its conservation and application
was the sole prerogative of the patriarchal Brahmins to the extent that (the servile caste
of) Śūdras (and more so the Untouchables) were barred from listening to their recita-
tion and from learning Sanskrit. The Śūdra played a key semiotic role in the pre-classical
ritual but only to be beaten and robbed of his Soma, to fight a losing battle for the sun
against an Ārya, and to revile the brahmanical sacrifice from the edge of its arena, mak-
ing it impossible to decide whether he is within or without. Even after the language of
the gods consolidated its secular hold upon the world of men, the ritual qualification of
being “twice-born” that was the prerogative of the three upper castes was largely con-
flated with the cultural attainment of being a refined “gentleman” within the single hon-
orific address of Ārya. The classical theater illustrates the resulting paradox especially
well in that this Fifth Veda, based on “promiscuous” role-playing, remained in the cus-
tody of Śūdras, so much so that terms for actress were often synonymous with prostitute.
However, not only were these “non-Āryas” called upon to assume Brahmin roles but
the stage-manager (sūtradhāra), at the very least, must have had a profound under-
standing of the Vedic sacrifice to be able to craft the play according to its esoteric prin-
ciples. Indeed, to enact the Mṛcchakaṭikā such that the “joints” (sandhi) between the
sacred and the profane were seamlessly articulated would be beyond the ability or even
comprehension of most certified priests, who recite the Vedas by rote or perform the
rituals by the rule-books. Was the obscenely idiotic “manikin” of a vidūṣaka always
addressed as “Ārya” and treated deferentially as a friend by the king himself simply
because he happened to be a (great) Brahmin (by birth) and insisted on being treated
with such reverence? Though Hindu kings were often of Śūdra origin they were oppor-
tunely (re-) “christened” into protectors of the “Āryan faith,” as exemplified most

recently by the “nationalist” Shivaji. From the start the Mṛcchakaṭikā names the lowly
cowherd destined to usurp the throne as Āryaka, yet its authorship is (self-?) attrib-
uted in the Prologue to a mysterious Śaiva king, master of the Vedas and performer of
the horse-sacrifice, who is simply named Śūdraka. This anomaly points to the (other-
wise hidden) ritual identity of the Hindu king as an “untouchable” initiate (dīkṣita).
Abhinava insists that the Sanskrit-speaking Sūtradhāra is correctly addressed as a “scion
of the Āryan race” in the prologue, because this Śūdra is “initiated into the (mysteries of
the) great sacrifice of the Veda (in the form of) theater.” This stage manager, who already
personifies Brahmā in the ritual preliminaries, switches to the vernacular when he steps
into the “make-believe” world of The Little Clay Cart to assume, it would seem, no less
a role than that of the (ritual) “reviler” (vidūṣaka) to artfully wield his signature staff,
Brahmā’s own crooked present to the Sanskrit theater. Our own “comic” deference to
the follies of this “great Brahmin” (mahā-brāhmaṇa) is an unwitting acknowledgement
of Abhinava’s insistence, in his esoteric tantric treatises, that the Kaula initiation (dīkșā)
not only trumps its more “constricted” Vedic antecedent but restores the latter’s potenti-
ality to all its hidden fullness.
The ongoing revolt against brahmanical hierarchy and patriarchy often takes religious
avenues as when Dalits (formerly “Untouchables”) convert en masse to “egalitarian”
Buddhism and Islam, or the “individual freedoms” of Western Christianity, even when
their underlying motives remain secular. The liberating inversion of power relations is,
however, already intrinsic to the Hindu worldview finding obligatory expression in popu-
lar culture. The riotous carnival that regularly punctuated the ordered life of traditional
societies—such as the spring festival of Holi (and Muslim observance of Muharram in
India)—was characterized by the collective suspension of religious norms and prohibi-
tions. The licentious eruption of the animal body and base instincts was epitomized by
comic behavior and universal laughter that embraced all and spared none. Not only were
the high parodied and humiliated by the lowest, this “Śūdra festival” was characterized,
especially in the pilgrimage region around Mathura sacred to Lord K a, by “normally”
submissive women ganging up to thrash their “lordly” husbands with cudgels. A key ini-
tiator and symbolic focus of the Indian carnival was the mock-brahmin—often coupled
with a long-tailed monkey (or irreligious Muslim chaplain)—who parodied and trans-
gressed all the obligatory values invested in the sacred thread he continued to wear. Upon
ascending from this all-encompassing “theater” of life onto the spectacle of the “stage with
footlights,” this vernacular-speaking “great brahmin” stood beside—in dialectical opposi-
tion to, yet subtly identified with—the king-as-prime-mover and pivot of the socio-cosmic
order. The clown’s name alternates between those of highest Vedic pedigree and of a fertile
“man of spring” (Vasantaka), with numerous associations to this aphrodisiac season of
Nature’s self-renewal. Brandishing his crooked phallic staff in suggestive gestures and trav-
estied into and laughed at both on stage and by the audience as a ridiculous transvestite,
this “counselor in the secrets of love (kāma-tantra)” was depicted dancing in gay abandon
with the teasing maids of the royal harem by whom he was physically “manhandled.” The
literate, refined, and spiritual ethos of India’s traditional elite thus remained continuous
with, grounded in, and nourished by ‘Rabelaisian’ popular culture. 32

For the carnival is the temporal projection of a more fundamental, all-pervasive, and
ever-present dialectic of order (sát) and chaos (ásat), interdiction and violation, that
governs and regulates the entire life of archaic societies. The original meaning of bráh-
man was sacred enigma constituted by semiotic links (bandhu) that anchored sát in ásat,
which is why the 'nonsensical' joker is ridiculed as brahma-bandhu. The ultimate goal,
through and beyond this outward oscillation, is “freedom” (svātantrya)— at the “heart”
(hṛdaya) of Abhinava’s aesthetics of Indian culture—not only from external constraints
of law and convention but also from the inner tyranny of our animal nature. The “great
brahmin” spontaneously transgresses the very norms he embodies only because, like the
supremely creative artist, he has thoroughly internalized them.33
Whereas many high-caste women rebel against their stifling upbringing by rejecting
their heritage outright, others have found in traditional dance the means, previously
taboo in respectable society, to (re-) gain self-esteem and social approbation. While the
Great Goddess inspires liberationists of Judeo-Christian background, their Hindu and
Muslim counterparts seduced by the sensual aesthetics of Bharata Nā yam and Kathak
are discovering a newfound reverence for their former custodians, the deva-dāsī and
courtesan respectively. The refined Sanskrit-speaking Vasantasenā, despite her innate
nobility and sensitivity, is repeatedly abused by the royal villain and even by her lover’s
confidant, the brahmin clown, as a (venal) “prostitute” (to be avoided at all costs). The
pure and faithful wife, observing strenuous ritual vows (fasting, etc.) to retain her way-
ward husband as partner in the next life to the point of abetting his “adulterous” adven-
ture, offers a studied contrast. The Little Clay Cart nevertheless establishes their deep
sisterly bond, a symbolic identification deriving from two equally religious models: sub-
missive yet indispensable wife of the brahmanical sacrificer and liberating partner of
the tantric adept. The contemporary Hindu “feminist” is seen reclaiming her individ-
ual autonomy through an often intensely spiritual harmonization and merger of these
opposing images of ideal womanhood. Moreover, cultural exposure to the indepen-
dence achieved by Anglo-Saxon women nourishes attempts to redefine gender relations
and “equality” within a distinctly native ethos, presided over by Na arāja, Lord of Dance,
the Androgyne (Ardhanārīśvara) as polarized union of opposites, worshipped by the
traditionalists and appreciated by the secular regardless of sex.34
24.8 Grotesque Body and

Transgressive Laughter: Tantric
“Hedonism”
The earliest surviving fragments of Buddhist theater already depict the would-be monk
curiously coupled with the brahmin vidūṣaka. The evolution of Hindu culture may be
interpreted through aesthetics as it consolidates into an independent domain mediating
between the religious and the worldly in a manner that tends to dissolve this opposition

and minimize its significance. When the sacrificial model of life-in-the-world was
eroded by the double-pronged assault of renunciation-cum-secularization, the struc-
tures underlying the former were transposed onto the theater and the arts as a form of
“re-creation” that could be enjoyed by all, including and especially those who do not
subscribe to, nor are interested in, nor even aware of these Vedic values. The aesthetic
emotions evoked by the arts were then shown to be sui generis (alaukika), different in
nature from their correlates in the real world, suffused with and magnifying the innate
reflexivity of our very Consciousness.
Abhinava was especially well-equipped for this task because he was steeped in and
drew his secret inspiration from (radical Kaula) Tantra: this sixth approach to the sacred
seeks to transform all sensuous experiences, including the basest of the emotions and
instincts, into sacrificial “food” offered to the all-devouring Fire of Consciousness, just
as the Vedic brahmins lived to make oblations to Agni culminating on the funeral pyre.
Whereas disgust and its ancillary fear are correlated to spiritual liberation in the purifi-
catory (ascending) mode within the puruṣārtha scheme sanctioned by the NS, they
constitute the aesthetic essence of the “terrifying” Bhairava—criminal god par excel-
lence, defined by his decapitation of Brahmā—worshipped and identified with as the
all-encompassing Absolute by Abhinavagupta, the brahmin par excellence. Whereas
the vulgar laughter reflex is frowned upon as an ignoble waste of nervous energy and the
highest characters barely manage the benevolent smile of the ideal monk, Śiva-Bhairava
is characterized by frighteningly loud laughter (aṭṭahāsa) more worthy of the “Laughing
Buddhas” of China. While inheriting and conserving core principles of the “obsolete”
Vedic religion (his very name is often of the most sanctified pedigree), the stereotyped
figure of the clown-reviler has been subsequently invested with radical tantric nota-
tions that clarify what it really means to be a “great Brahmin.” In the traditional context,
where the sacred was an exclusive and pure domain hemmed in by a rigorous network of
taboos and injunctions and where spiritual liberation was predicated on the rejection of
the senses, the alchemy of rasa could be catalyzed by transgressive practices that, to the
uninitiated, would be indistinguishable from hedonistic acts of sacrilege. The vidūṣaka,
who opens a strategic window onto such “profane” antecedents within the Vedic corpus
itself, is a comic figure, hardly a role model for the vast majority of his audiences, pre-
cisely because he incorporates within himself such a dialectic of transgressive sacrality.35
24.9 “All the World’s a Stage” for

this Clown: God as Ultimate and Sole
Connoisseur
Not only is “the Actor the (absolute) Self,” the “stage is the inner (psychic) self ” and
“the spectators the (introverted) senses” (Śiva Sūtras). This is why a professional Hindu
danseuse, who earns her “profane” livelihood by entertaining cosmopolitan audiences

worldwide, can claim on YouTube that the centrifugal dispersal of her rhythmic ges-
tures, evoking variegated sentiments, has gradually unified her fragmented inner
being.36 As for the “servants of God” (deva-dāsī), who seek “union” with their exclu-
sive connoisseur, the (temple-) deity (within), dance-drama still retains the potential
of supreme Yoga. Among the (gross) physiological reflexes (sneezing, tickling, sudden
fear or anger, orgasm, etc.) that the Vijñāna-Bhairava Tantra enumerates as opportune
springboards for spiritual enlightenment, is the pervasive sense of well-being follow-
ing sexual gratification or filling the stomach with food and drink.37 The self-indulgent,
often indiscriminating, delight that the (Indian) dilettante (or would-be rasika) hankers
after these days in (Bollywood) cinema—populated with “moon-faced” larger-than-life
screen-goddesses—is but a pale distracting refraction of the elixir of life objectified in
the coveted sweetmeats (modaka), a “condensation” of the Vedic Soma, that this glut-
tonous and burping clown shares with the pot-bellied Gaeśa, “ungainly” dancer who
is often praised in the same breath as a great connoisseur (sahṛdaya) of poetry, the-
ater, and the arts.38 The Mṛcchakaṭikā inaugurates its “worldly” drama with the wistful
self-portrait of the vidūṣaka surrounded by so wide a palette of dainty dishes that he
contentedly dips his finger in each only to brush it aside like a consummate artist: the
very image of our revered elephant-headed god.39 While we discerning humans keep
laughing at the unseemly appetite of the grotesque Fool, this Godlike Clown remains
the secret “wire-puller” (sūtra-dhāra) and ultimate enjoyer of the tragi-comedy of life.
By reintegrating the increasingly fragmented and kaleidoscopic mosaic of the sacred
into the ever-present—even if hidden in plain sight—unity of the lost “origin,” Hindu
aesthetics could be the launch-pad for “renewed” (abhi-nava) and universal apprecia-
tion of Indian culture.
Notes
1. This chapter is dedicated to the cherished memory of Ursula Kolmstetter, Head Librarian
at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, who has remained a living source of inspiration
throughout the formulation of these reflections on beauty.
2. These six approaches to the sacred-profane tension, opposition, and superposition relate
more to shifts in perspective—often within the shared context of a single phenomenon—
rather than constitute distinct domains of experience. So this chapter introduces each
approach at the appropriate moment within the elaboration of a historical-conceptual
schema. Armed with the latter, the analytical categories can be fleshed out through further
readings.
3. Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam, “Union and Unity in Hindu Tantrism” in Hananya
Goodman, ed., Between Jerusalem and Benares (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), available
online at http://www.svabhinava.org/union/UnionEli/index.php[http://www.svabhinava.
org/union/UnionEli/index.php].
4. Sunthar Visuvalingam, “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita” (section B “The Royal
Murder of the Brahmanized Dīkṣita”) in Alf Hiltebeitel, ed., Criminal Gods and Demon

Devotees (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). http://www.svabhinava.org/dikshita/RoyalMurder/

index.php[http://www.svabhinava.org/dikshita/RoyalMurder/index.php].
5. Despite the chronological and conceptual overlaps and the contested uncertainties of dating
in Indian history, the following periodization would serve our purpose: cryptic hymns
of the Rigveda (1500–1000 BC), brahmanical sacrifice (1000–800 BC), Upanishadic and
Buddhist renunciation (from 800–500 BC), epic narratives of Rāmāyaa and Mahābhārata
(200 BC–200 CE), “secular” court poetry (third to eighth century CE), temple worship
(after fourth century CE), radical Tantrism (by 700 CE), devotional (bhakti) Hinduism
(post-Islamic: fourteenth to seventeenth century), and “primitive religion” (possession,
shamanism, blood-sacrifice) of ethnically diverse pre-Aryan tribes (prehistoric until
present).
6. Sunthar Visuvalingam and Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam, “Paradigm of Hindu-
Buddhist Relations: Pachali Bhairava of Kathmandu,” in Makarand Paranjape, ed.,
Evam: Forum on Indian Representations, vol. 3: 1 & 2 (New Delhi: Samvad India, 2004),
http://www.svabhinava.org/HinduBuddhist/index.php[http://www.svabhinava.org/
HinduBuddhist/index.php].
7. The puruṣārtha schema may be legitimately understood as a “secularization” of Vedic
life in response to the renunciation ideal as providing sole access to transcendence.
Whereas there remained a relative disjunction between the sacrificing householder
and (premature) permanent sannyāsa on the brahmanical side, the ethico-spiritual
code of the Buddhist (and Jain) dharma intended to transform the “worldly” life of lay
adherents into a daily preparation for monkhood. Edwin Gerow (1979, 1980), for example,
interprets the plot-structure—and hence rasa-aesthetics—of Kālidāsa’s crowning drama,
Abhijñāna-Śākuntalam, in terms of the tension between kāma and dharma and its eventual
resolution through the birth of the princely heir from the love-union of the royal hero and
heroine.
8. The scant historical records suggest the priority of Buddhist drama—represented by
fragments of Aśvagho a (c. second century CE)—emerging in the northwest of the
subcontinent, probably under the influence of Greek theater and the Dionysian cult
prevalent in Bactria (modern Afghanistan). He also wrote the first known epic poem,
which narrates and extols the life of the Enlightened One, Buddha-Carita.
9. Arthur W. Ryder’s complete and enjoyable English translation (1905) is available online at
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/lcc/index.htm[http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/lcc/
index.htm].
10. Upon undergoing the consecration (dīkṣā), the Vedic sacrificer regressed into a deathly
embryonic state, laden with evil and impurity, from which he emerged, rejuvenated
with a reconstituted body. The self-abnegating ascetic phase that precedes the dīkṣā is
inwardly maintained even amidst its subsequent transgressive notations. The bewildering
metamorphoses of the Buddhist monk (hero’s servant, masseur, gambler, savior, national
chief of all the monasteries) exteriorize and elaborate ideas and values invested in the
dīkṣita, as do the clown and villain in their own ways. As exemplified by the drama, the
sacrifice aims to assimilate the “outside” world to its own schema.
11. The Nāṭya-Śāstra (NS), foundational treatise of Sanskrit theater, explicitly states that
all its elements were taken from the four Vedas. The ritual preliminaries to the public
performance retain elements of Vedic cosmogony. No systematic attempts have been
made till now to decipher an entire play in terms of the sacrifice, least of all The Little
Clay Cart (Mṛcchakaṭikā), which has been instead celebrated by Indians as a triumph of
“secular” populism. A detailed scene-by-scene sacrificial hermeneutic of each of its ten

Acts is available online (unpublished) at Visuvalingam (2009): http://www.svabhinava.

org/abhinava/SuntharMrcchakatika/index.php[http://www.svabhinava.org/abhinava/
SuntharMrcchakatika/index.php].
12. Among the ten major dramatic genres canonized by NS, the overtly ritualistic had long
become obsolete with no or few surviving specimens, whereas the full-fledged legendary
play (nāṭaka) has received privileged treatment and proliferated within classical Hindu
culture. Apart from its plot drawn from the epics and mythology, the Nā aka is hardly
distinguishable artistically from the worldly play (prakaraṇa), inspired by profane themes
and exemplified by The Little Clay Cart. The prakaraṇa was no doubt originally popularized
by the Buddhists as the backdrop to renunciation and its earliest known specimens are the
fragments from Aśvagho a, where the would-be Buddha (bodhisattva) is already curiously
accompanied by a brahmin vidūṣaka, who attempts to dissuade him. Though the clown
is not called “Vināyaka”, Gaeśa—instigator of obstacles, propitiated for their removal at
the beginning of all undertakings—seems to have borrowed this alternate name from the
conceptual underpinnings of the vidūṣaka.
13. The Vedic brahmins, by then dispersed all over the subcontinent, resisted the use of
Sanskrit for non-hieratic ends; e.g., royal inscriptions were invariably in the vernaculars.
Curiously, foreign invaders were the first and foremost to promote Sanskrit in such secular
contexts, to be eventually and zealously adopted by other non-Aryan ethnicities, whose
wholly distinct languages (Dravidian, Newar, Javanese, Cambodian, etc.) and literatures
became increasingly sanskritized both linguistically and culturally. This breach between
sacred and profane is reflected in the fact that Sanskrit poetics—alone among other
disciplines such as grammar and the various schools of philosophy—lacks an authoritative
foundational text formulated aphoristically. Instead, there are two rival treatises, by
Bhāmaha and Dain, on figures of speech that sometimes differ, even conflict, in their
definitions and judgments.
14. Pollock (2006), who develops this aesthetics of power in great historical, linguistic, and
cultural detail, does so by opposing the appeal of its secular cosmopolitan thrust to the
closed conservative Vedic domain. He does not satisfactorily account for the peculiar
ethos of trans-sectarian Indian kingship, nor the fact—for which he unwittingly provides
ample evidence—that the sovereign, his court, and the wider polity participated in both
worlds.
15. The ambiguous status of the “god-king” should be emphasized: the aesthetics of power, on
the one hand, (politically) enslaves the populace by sacralizing their worldly dominator
and, on the other hand, ensures their (ritual) “participation” (bhakti) in the sacrificial
dynamic of which he has become the pivot. His violent overthrow is likewise justified, in
the Mṛcchakaṭikā, through Śiva destroying, and thereby fulfilling, the (more restrictive
understanding of the) sacrifice.
16. Dharma-Yudhi hira represents the sacerdotal caste (Brahmin), Arjuna and Bhīma
represent the warrior in his disciplined aristocratic and savagely brutish aspects,
respectively; the twins Nakula and Sahadeva represent agricultural and mercantile
productivity, respectively, and Śrī-Draupadī represents the shared prosperity of the
Āryan realm.
17. A sacrificial reading of the Rāmāyaa reveals that Rāvaa is, in the final analysis, the “evil”
dīkṣita alter ego and substitute victim of the royal Rāma, which is why he assumes the
yellow-garbed disguise of a renouncer (sannyāsin) to abduct the chaste and tragic Sītā,
whose relationship to her ravisher is “unjustly” doubted by her righteous husband. This

identity of hero and villain is explicitly proclaimed by the victorious Rāma to Rāvaa, dying
in his arms, in the American “world” musical Sītā-Rām, incorporating “exotic” elements
from diverse non-Indian cultures, that played in Chicago in December 2012 before touring
major Indian cities in January 2013. Similarly, celibate Hanumān, Rāma’s larger-than-life
emissary, is literally a “brown monkey,” stereotyped description of the vidūṣaka, both
figures having their prototype in the “Virile Monkey” of the Rigveda.
18. Even while shoring up the sui generis nature of the aesthetic experience, Abhinava
explicitly extends this blurring in practice to all the other rasas, excepting love and pathos,
and thereby acknowledges that differentiating, from the emotional perspective, between
theater and the world is more problematic than theorized. And, when he presses on to justify
the distinction between our (fleeting) appreciation of (aesthetic) “tranquility” (śānta) and
the (definitive) “cessation” (śama) depicted by an actor on stage as its sustained (sthāyin)
grounding, by invoking this very hāsa and hāsya (non-) distinction, the opposition
between the artistic and the religious seems likewise at the risk of inversion. For if the
relish of rasa were to “spiritually” transcend its real-life counterpart, is our phenomenal
experience, as spectators, superior to the Buddha’s nirvāṇa?
19. What follows is a conceptual summary of chapter 10 on “Wit and Linguistic Ambiguity”
of my PhD thesis (1984): http://www.svabhinava.org/humorphd/Thesis-10/index.
php[http://www.svabhinava.org/humorphd/Thesis-10/index.php].
20. This exchange is analyzed in greater detail in the Appendix to my 1984 PhD thesis: http://
www.svabhinava.org/humorphd/Appendix/index.php[http://www.svabhinava.org/
humorphd/Appendix/index.php].
21. As the terrified beasts flee before the all-devouring fire of Consciousness intent on
consuming the untamed forest of the “unconscious,” a mother snake swallows her
son, saving his life by sacrificing her own. The oviparous snake, like the brahmin, is
“twice-born” and the return to the womb is thereby invested, in this sexual context, with
phallic symbolism.
22. The subcontinent has been at the confluence of Africa-type possession from the Dravidian
South and out-of-body shamanism from the North and East; the Rig Vedic hymn to the
“long-haired” sage suggests flight of the soul. The “sacred” here is expressed through a
semiotic web that integrates the (symbolic) life of the “primitive” community into the
experience of the shaman. Utilitarian tools are artfully crafted into ritual objects, festivals
both entertain and renew the tribal universe, and the initiate does not hide behind the
mask of the theatrical clown but openly transgresses binding interdictions: there is no
religious-profane opposition to generate a distinct aesthetic domain.
23. Sunthar Visuvalingam, “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita” (section C on the
Tamil folk-deity Kāttavarāyan) in Alf Hiltebeitel, ed., Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees
(Albany : SUNY Press, 1989). http://www.svabhinava.org/dikshita/Kattavarayan/[http://
www.svabhinava.org/dikshita/Kattavarayan/].
24. Sunthar Visuvalingam, “The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dīkṣita” (section A on the
Pāśupata) in Criminal Gods, http://www.svabhinava.org/dikshita/PurityPower/index.
php[http://www.svabhinava.org/dikshita/PurityPower/index.php]
25. The hermeneutics of the elephant-headed god has long since descended from
the academic ivory tower into the transnational realms of public controversy,
as attested by this online digest: http://www.svabhinava.org/TransgressiveSacrality/
Dialogues/Ganesha/index.php[http://www.svabhinava.org/TransgressiveSacrality/
Dialogues/Ganesha/index.php].

26. Controversy is mounting over expanding Christian appropriation of Indian dance forms
within this politics of inculturation. While the Western-controlled Church hierarchy
remains wary of legitimizing pagan doctrines through accommodating their artistic
expressions, a growing Hindu faction accuses the missionaries of secularizing these
traditional modes of worship to Christianize their meaning, intent, and audiences all
the more easily. Others feel flattered that the rival religion is valorizing and helping to
preserve endangered art forms, such as Kathakali (http://ibnlive.in.com/news/a-xt
ian-touch-to-kathakali/185522-60-123.html[http://ibnlive.in.com/news/a-xtian-to
uch-to-kathakali/185522-60-123.html]), that Hindus themselves have been neglecting.
Indeed, such political concerns are encouraging some anti-conversion activists to take
renewed interest in the underlying aesthetics and worldview of an ancient heritage
otherwise taken for granted: an irony of recent history, for Victorian India’s campaign
against temple dances had been under the moral tutelage of a puritan colonial ethos.
If practitioner-spokespersons such as Shobana Jeyasingh (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=FIIG3AYPdQM[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIIG3AYPdQM]) and Saju
George SJ, the Dancing Jesuit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfYjgbMVbYk[http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfYjgbMVbYk]), can be taken at their word (allowing
for the delicate balancing act of showing genuine appreciation for the Hindu essence of
the newfound Passion without seeming to betray one’s otherwise exclusivist faith), the
likelihood is of both religions being eventually transformed by such artistic encounters.
27. The moon-face is beautiful because of its rounded symmetry, the cool light it sheds, and
hence its gladdening effect on the heart. This over-worn poetic conceit regains something
of its original freshness, for example, when musically repeated and variously represented
through dance gestures. Whereas the woman’s attraction is sensual, the mediation of the
metaphor introduces the reflexive moment (vimarśa) of (self-) “repose” (ātma-viśrānti)
that, for Abhinavagupta, defines the “aesthetic” experience. The choice of metaphor is not
innocent, for the moon (soma) is invested with the elixir of life (soma).
28. Beyond the vicarious reliving and discharge of (especially negative) emotions (as through
our laughter at comedy), this is the deeper significance of (even Aristotelian) katharsis.
These all-too-human “affects” are themselves “purified” or “purged” through aesthetic
identification, depersonalization, and generalization. Though the Mṛcchakaṭikā, with its
obligatory happy ending, is not tragedy in the Greek sense, it serves the cathartic (also
in the psychoanalytic sense) healing function of bringing us face-to-face, even if only
subliminally, with a primal scene.
29. For a detailed word-by-word translation and rasa-bhakti hermeneutic of Alai Pāyude that
is also pertinent for the Gīta Govinda, see the online digest of the email discussion at http://
www.svabhinava.org/abhinava/Dialogues/AbhinavaBollywood-frame.php[http://www.
svabhinava.org/abhinava/Dialogues/AbhinavaBollywood-frame.php].
30. Those who rightly claim that Abrahamic (and especially Christian) “religion” is not the
same as dharma and therefore insist on using the latter term exclusively to denote the
Indic (especially Hindu) traditions, tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater by
implying that the two terms are incommensurable. See the online debate and my defense
of “religious studies” at http://www.svabhinava.org/HinduCivilization/Dialogues/
HinduismReligion-frame.php[http://www.svabhinava.org/HinduCivilization/
Dialogues/HinduismReligion-frame.php].
31. That “profane” drama is an aesthetic transposition of Vedic sacrifice is taken for granted
by the foundational NS and by exemplary poets like Kālidāsa, to be explicitly endorsed

by Abhinavagupta. However, Bha a Nāyaka was the first theoretician to have attempted
to conceptualize the generalization of otherwise personal emotions into the impersonal
relish of literature, and more specifically by attributing to poetic speech a unique power
of universalization (sādhāraṇī-karaṇa) modeled on the efficacy of Vedic injunctions.
Whereas his predecessor proposed this quasi-ritual mechanism to obviate the need for
Ānandavardhana’s dhvani theory, Abhinava demonstrates how Nāyaka’s generously
acknowledged insights are better accounted for by the power of suggestion. See my
(unpublished) exchange with Pollock, with link to his paper, at http://www.svabhinava.org/
abhinava/Sunthar-LapakJhapak/WhatBhattanayakaReallySaid-frame.php[http://www.
svabhinava.org/abhinava/Sunthar-LapakJhapak/WhatBhattanayakaReallySaid-frame.
php].
32. The Christian elites of medieval Europe likewise participated fully in unschooled
popular culture and the (lower ranks of the) clergy even took the initiative in celebrating
carnivalesque rites of inversion amidst paschal laughter within the precincts of the Church.
Steeped in theology and classical letters, François Rabelais, who gave learned, undisguised,
exaggerated, controversial, and eventually censured expression to the crude obscenities of
the ‘unruly’ marketplace in early Renaissance literature, was himself a monk then priest.
During this transitional epoch, when the elites were becoming more distant and separate
from the illiterate folk and the (abuse prevalent under the existing) Catholic dispensation
was being challenged from within and without, attempts were underway to reform and
even redefine the practice of the faith. Unable to conceptualize transgressive sacrality,
especially within the specifically Christian problematic, Mikhail Bakhtin understood the
‘subversive’ European carnival as a universal phenomenon solely in the mode of opposition
to “Stalinist” officialdom. Nevertheless, the persecuted Russian’s impassioned espousal
of “carnivalization” now provides the unifying theoretical basis for the socio-political
unleashing of Global “Spring” that respects no boundaries.
33. This is the ‘humanist’ principle that Rabelais extracts from the medieval carnival for our
own (not just Hindu) Renaissance: “do what thou wilt!” (motto presiding over the Abbey
of Thelema, where both sexes freely intermingled). For Christianity, unlike all the other
religious traditions, was founded on the public suspension and (eventual) superfluity of
the (external) Law. See my keynote presentation “Carnivalesque Laughter of the Great
Brahmin: Tradition, Transgression, and Liberty” at the first international conference
(August 19–21, 2013, at Gandhinagar, India) on “Bakhtin in India” (http://www.svabhinava.
org/abhinava/BakhtinInIndia/BakhtinInIndiaAbstracts--frame.php).
34. Kuchipudi depiction of divine androgyne: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
joxolNG1F9E[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joxolNG1F9E]. Though Pārvatī
is associated with the gentle lāsya dance, the Goddess is also depicted attempting to
outperform Śiva in the otherwise masculine vigor of his own tāṇḍava, sometimes in
the mythological context of a mortal challenge, graphically depicted in Indian cinema.
The Telugu movie, Ānanda-Bhairavī, depicts such a contest (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=p3sUbjwOX3I[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3sUbjwOX3I]) that the
heroine wins in order to prove that women are just as capable of learning, performing,
and transmitting the religious dance style of Kuchipudi, where female roles had been
hitherto impersonated by males. In the Bollywood movie, Dāmini, the heroine (Meenakshi
Seshadri) is confined unjustly to a madhouse: the sight of a Goddess (Durgā) procession
outside triggers her suppressed rage into frenzied yet awe-inspiring performance
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7YUGTXsKJY[http://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=W7YUGTXsKJY]). The award-winning Telugu hit movie Saptapadī (“Seven

Steps,” i.e., the marriage ceremony) sensitively depicts the submissive brahmin heroine
obliged to marry her cross-cousin, the temple-priest, despite having lost her heart to her
accompanist, an untouchable flute-player: trapped in a “schizophrenic” impasse between
duty and passion, her primal instincts burst into an tempestuous tāṇḍava that is finally
allayed by his flute (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQjBVMqyRYI[http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=OQjBVMqyRYI]) . In the mythical prototype, bloodthirsty Kālī,
played by actress Hemamālinī, is “pacified” only after standing astride her lover, Śiva, prostrate
beneath her like a corpse (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dirs-A6Z3KE[http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=dirs-A6Z3KE]). In this way, subconscious socio-sexual conflicts are
expressed, transcended, and resolved through sacred dance.
35. My 1984 paper on “Transgressive Sacrality in the Hindu Tradition” was the focus of an
international pilot-conference on this problematic at the 1986 South Asia conference at
the University of Wisconsin (Madison): http://www.svabhinava.org/TSHT-old/index.
php[http://www.svabhinava.org/TSHT-old/index.php].
36. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpEongPa5d4[http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=YpEongPa5d4]. In a specially composed and choreographed rendering in the
rāga Hamsadhvani, Malavika Sarukkai also recounts how the four basic dance-syllables
(tat-tit-tom-num) of Bharata Nā yam are produced from an anklet bell breaking loose
from the “destructive” frenzy of Śiva’s celestial tāṇḍava and hurtling towards earth like
a doomsday comet. The compassionate savior muffles the impact with his matted locks
(tat), such that the musical projectile loses momentum as it bounces off his shoulder (tit),
knee (tom), and ankle to safely roll (num) onto the ground. Not only does this suggest that
the cosmic rhythms of life originate deep within the human organism but, by donning the
anklet to reproduce these primeval sounds, the artist is retracing their (inner) itinerary
back to the unitary source. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxiuj_Lwh3o[http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxiuj_Lwh3o].
37. The primitive equation, even etymological, of sex to food, which has been retained in the
locutions of modern languages, points back to a fundamental psycho-biological affinity. In
Sanskrit, both eating (bhojana) and (sexual) “enjoyment” (bhoga) derive from the same root
(bhuj), and the metaphor is extended even to “cooking” (the world). In the Mahābhārata,
Agni, the Fire-God, appears as a ravenous brahmin, with traits of the vidūṣaka, to devour
an entire forest named “sweetmeat” (khāṇḍava) in an erotically charged context. See note
21 above.
38. For example, in Muttuswami Dikshitar’s musical composition “Mahā-Gaapati” set to
the rāga Nattai, the auspicious remover of obstacles is invoked in the heart as “the great
aficionado of poetry, drama, etc., with the mouse for your vehicle and ever hankering
after modakas” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3elIEZlOao[http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=j3elIEZlOao]). Conversely, the vidūṣaka accuses one of the rival masters
in Kālidāsa’s play Mālavikāgnimitra of pilfering these rounded sweetmeats offered to the
goddess of learning and the arts—Sarasvatī, who presides over the heroine of the Sanskrit
drama—under the pretext of teaching dance. After which, the “supreme connoisseur”
faults one of the competing dancers for not having propitiated this “great brahmin” before
her performance. Bollywood icon Meenakshi Seshadri shows just how beautifully this
pot-bellied elephant-god, with his “ungainly” gait and lolling trunk, could be depicted
through Bharata Nā yam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1koDBlnhqLk[http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=1koDBlnhqLk].

39. Gaeśa is absent in the NS. Most classical plays, including the Mṛcchakaṭikā, begin by
invoking Lord Śiva as patron of theater. However, this most popular and obligatory god
of auspicious beginnings, also of subsequent dance and drama performances, seems to
have been largely influenced by—if not derived from—the (symbolism invested in the)
clown: the wavy proboscis (and single tusk) from the (upraised) crooked stick, the pot-belly
from his ravenous appetite, sculptural depictions playing musical instruments or dancing
exuberantly, creating and removing obstacles, and especially deformity transformed
into grotesque beauty. The transgressive praxis of the dwarfish goblin hosts (pramaṭha)
accompanying Śiva was visually translated into deformity. While the pramaṭha-deity
presides over humor in the NS, Gaeśa is the “great lord of the hosts” (mahā-gaṇa-pati),
spiritual status coveted by the Pāśupata ascetic.
Bibliography
Gerow, Edwin. “Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics as a Speculative Paradigm.” In Journal of the
American Oriental Society 114, no. 2 (April–June 1994): 186–208.
Gerow, Edwin. “Plot Structure and the Development of Rasa in the Shākuntala: Parts I and
II.” In Journal of the American Oriental Society, 99, no. 4 (1979): 559–72 and 100, no. 3
(1980): 267–282.
Ingalls, Daniel H. H., Jeffrey M. Masson, and M.V. Patwardhan. The Dhvanyāloka of
Ānandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1990.
Jeffrey L. Masson and Patwardhan, M.V. Śāntarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics.
Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969.
Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power
in Premodern India. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2006.
Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “Abhinavagupta’s Conception of Humor: Its Resonances in Sanskrit
Drama, Poetry, Hindu Mythology, and Spiritual Praxis” (1984). PhD thesis at Banaras Hindu
University, Varanasi, India. Available at http://www.svabhinava.org/HumorPhd/index.php.
Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “The ‘Little Clay Cart’ (Mṛcchakaṭikā) as Sacrificial Theater: Deciphering
the ‘Anthropology’ of the Nāṭyaśāstra” (2010). Available online only at http://www.
svabhinava.org/abhinava/SuntharMrcchakatika/index.php.
Visuvalingam, Sunthar. “Towards an Integral Appreciation of Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics
of Rasa.” Introductory overview in Makarand Paranjape and S. Visuvalingam, eds.,
Abhinavagupta: Reconsiderations. New Delhi: Evam 2006. This essay and many others of
relevance are available at http://www.svabhinava.org/abhinava/.
Wulff, Donna M. “Religion in a New Mode: The Convergence of the Aesthetic and the Religious
in Medieval India.” In Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54, no. 4 (1986): 673–689.

C HA P T E R 25
H I N D U I S M — V I S UA L A RT
AND ARCHITECTURE
J E S SIC A F R A Z I E R
The Hindu visual arts range through images of worship in dimly lit shrines, to orna-
mental statues clustered on the vast temple towers; they include narrative depictions in
mural, tableau, painting and film, and abstract decorative patterns on paintings and fab-
rics, buildings and bodies, and even across the landscape itself. These diverse art forms
have drawn increasing scholarly attention in recent years, because they offer a window
onto aspects of Hindu life that would otherwise remain hidden. Yet scholars trained in
Western arts and aesthetics require a hermeneutic key to break the code in which Hindu
images are crafted. In what follows we look at some of the theories that have been pro-
posed to illuminate the “notions of vision and visuality that are specific to South Asia.”1
25.1 Hindu Visual Hermeneutics
While a range of strong textual traditions—both written and performed—have flour-

ished in India, they give only a very limited picture of the culture that real people expe-
rience “on the ground.” By contrast, the visual arts present an invaluable resource for
understanding creators and consumers of art who are not active participants in the liter-
ate culture of India. Thus, for instance, painted images from Mughal, Rajput, and other
courts show lifestyles of which we have little evidence in written texts, helping us to
reconstruct the society of the time. The visual arts have not, perhaps, had as widespread
a level of creative participation as the performed arts, due to the need for artists to have
access to an industry of materials and techniques. However, the fact that they speak in a
direct way to an audience that crosses boundaries of class, literacy, and language means
that their discourse is a strikingly inclusive one.
But in addition to presenting a historical record, the visual arts also have their own
unique mode of expressing Hindu theology—one that relies on the unique character

HINDUISM—VISUAL ART AND ARCHITECTURE 351
of visual art. Many statues and posters of deities are not merely figurative representa-
tions—they make the divine materially present in the world, turning artistic creation
into a form of in-carnation or embodiment. Tantric abstract images are not mere
symbols—they transform the very fabric of reality. And illustrations of poetry are not
only mnemonic reminders of stories, as with the “poor man’s bible” found in Christian
church windows; they are transformative arts meant to cultivate devotional mood and
work a profound change in the subjective state of the viewer.
Such visual theologies are determined by two axial features of Hindu belief. Firstly,
they are informed by the widespread belief, much influenced by Tantric practice and
Vedantic philosophy, that the divine can come to presence in the phenomenal world.
Thus, in a world saturated with the divine, religious artifacts may be “crystallizations”
of the sacred. Secondly, an influential branch of Hindu aesthetic theory developed
by medieval and early modern writers such as Bharata, Abhinavagupta, and Rupa
Gosvami, argued that emotional affectivity is what defines something as an artwork.
Visual representation is only a means to generating emotion in the viewer. This idea pro-
vided a new manifestation of the goals of yoga: the transformations previously achieved
through arduous and slow yogic practice—ordering people’s thoughts, harnessing their
desires, and focusing their concentration—could now be achieved instantaneously
through artistic evocation. Both of these beliefs—in embodiment and emotion—were
highly influential on the unique character of Hindu arts.
Thus Stella Kramrisch,2 Partha Mitter,3 Vidya Dehejia,4 Woodman Taylor,5 and others
have called for a shift from Western to Indian ways of interpreting the arts. In particu-
lar, Mitter encourages scholarly liberation from Western aesthetic tastes, and Kramrisch
has pioneered the careful application of textual study to art historical interpretation.
The notion of the plastic arts as a medium of divine incarnation or “embodiment” is
emphasized by Diana Eck,6 Joanne Waghorne and Normal Cutler.7 The ways in which
this embodiment facilitates an aesthetics of divine presence and personal interaction
is explored in Rachel Dwyer’s work on filmic manifestations of the divine,8 Kenneth
Valpey’s work on the awakening9 and mobilization10 of worship images through initi-
ation, and Christopher Pinney’s suggestion that images should be seen as “speaking”
their desires to observers. The transformative effects of Hindu architecture are consid-
ered by Heather Elgood11 and Dennis Hudson.12 The historical perspective opened to
us by the arts have been explored by Richard Eaton in relation to particular images,13
and by Philip Lutgendorf in relation to symbolic tropes such as representations of the
deity Hanuman,14 or David Smith in relation to the dancing image of Siva Nataraja.15
Still others see the dynamics of the Indian economic, social, and political arena as the
key to interpreting Hindu arts, focusing on deity images in popular printed calendars,16
nationalist icons,17 satirical temple sculpture,18 nationalist video and television images,19
and portrayals of Indian territory as a goddess or protectorate of Hindu heroes.20 Each of
these insights has helped to decode the Hindu arts.
But in a culture where the creation of discrete “art-objects” for isolated viewing was
rare, it can also be misleading to interpret an item separately from the context of cul-
ture and praxis that gives it meaning. In order to understand the cumulative effect and

inter-referentiality of these arts, one can imagine encountering them on a visit to a tem-
ple—in this case the Meenakshi Sundareshwar Temple in Madurai, an ancient pilgrim-
age town of South India.
25.2 Hindu Visual “Style”
On the way through residential side streets at festival-time, one might see that each
entrance overshadows intricate circular patterns in the dust. The artists are the female
members of Madurai’s households, and these complex rangoli patterns drawn in colored
rice flour are freshly made in the morning to bless the house. By evening they will be dis-
persed by the traffic of visitors, but this domestic act of public creativity is repeated daily
to dispense blessings to the world at large, from the passersby to the ants who eat the flour.
This is an art of sacralization, but it also has a uniquely Indian aesthetic character: one sees
a similar style of complex patterns on the borders of sari, the henna tattoos on a young
bride’s hands, the crowded signage, and the script of the Tamil graffiti in the street. Indeed,
complexity and curvature are distinctive characteristics of many Indian visual styles.
Far from the prioritization of simplicity and subtlety that the West derived from Greek
and Roman sources, the popular Indian aesthetic encourages a profusion and intensifi-
cation of imagery. Colors are vivid, compositions are crowded, and figures are emotive.
The overall effect is to cultivate rasa, a conception of emotion as a powerful affective
response that is refined and made self-aware through art. This aesthetic theory became
popular from the early medieval period,21 and a number of later Hindu devotional tradi-
tions advocated the intensification of such emotion into a rarefied “love of God” as their
goal. Rasa-influenced poetry heaped together images and epithets in a multi-sensory
assault that is echoed in the progressively complex elaborations of traditional Indian
musical composition, the convoluted story-within-a-story narratives of the epics and
folktales, the detailed visual patterns of the decorative arts, and the crowded architec-
tural ornamentation. Throughout this overall stylistic ethos of the culture, heightened
sensory input aims to create an intensified emotional response.
25.3 Temple Ornamentation
As one nears the temple itself, the busy visual structure is continued on a larger scale.
The towering “gopurams” are the structural equivalent of a spire or minaret, yet the
style is drastically different. These are huge temple-towers rising out of the landscape,
designed to resemble man-made mountains of color scattered across a great distance
with jasmine trees and temple ponds between them. Few architectural features are
visible, because each gopuram is crowded with figures—animals and heroes, angelic
apsarases and demons, demi-gods and gods. The composition is dynamic, with figu-
rative images continuing the style of curlicues and “ ‘corkscrew’ twists” reminiscent of

yoga-poses.22 Most are active—riding horses, dancing—and they have been carved by
local craftsmen according to classical style but with a realistic “modern” character. The
temple thus appears less as a fabricated structure than as an intensely-packed habitation
of supernatural beings, “intended to operate as a link between the world of man and
that of the gods.”23 These are the neighbors of the citizens of Madurai. Faced with this
community, Kramrisch writes that the devotee looks at the temple “as a ‘seer’, not a spec-
tator,” greeting live divine persons rather than merely observing representations.24 The
“inhabited” character of the architecture serves to remind us that the Hindu temple is
essentially a “shrine,” a house for the divine presence on earth (like the original Hebrew
temple, or a Shinto shrine), rather than a prayer-house (like Christian churches, Jewish
synagogues, and Muslim mosques). The purpose of this religious building is to have a
face-to-face encounter with the deity who lives within.
In passing through the inner gate, one sees that the temple is not a building at all but
a small village of shrines. Blessed food, prasādam, is served nearby for a few rupees, and
those who have finished eating are washing at the vast water tank. There is a sunlit social
life in the temple, with its own routines and schedules. But following the worshippers for-
ward into a long arcade of pillars effects a sudden change of mood—into cool shade, dim
light, and a tightly controlled space that channels visitors toward the shrine of the Goddess.
25.4 Abstract Hindu Art
The corridor ahead is flanked by pillars from which carved horses and human figures
emerge. Above, the ceiling is painted with a series of complex circular patterns called
maṇḍalas. These are not merely abstract decoration however; each of these Tantric sym-
bols marks and enhances the spiritual energy of the place, transfiguring the mundane
building material into a point of access to a “transformed rarefied inner presence” that
is latent in reality.25 The geometry of the individual mandalas relates to the sacred geom-
etry of the temple itself: although the current structure was built in phases from the
fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, the pattern is an unchanging one, determined by the
ancient Hindu architectural treatise of the Vāstuśāstra according to Tantric principles
shared by temples in every region. The city around the temple—one of the oldest on the
subcontinent—is also designed as a maṇḍala. Each maṇḍala delivers the worshipper
deeper into a transfigured liminal space, in which the divine can come to presence.
25.5 Temple Architecture
The darker space toward the center of the shrine focuses the senses, and for Heather
Elgood the whole physical passage is designed as a carefully manipulated sensory
and emotional experience: “the length of the passage from the outer door to the inner
sanctum assists the sense of journey, marking the spiritual transformation of the

worshipper.”26 Although popular worship in temples has come to predominate over

meditative practice in the religious life of many Hindus, the yogic goal of interior focus
is replicated through the architecture of the Hindu shrine. The sanctum where the deity
dwells beneath the mountainous gopuram is sometimes spoken of as a cave, just as the
Upaniṣads describe yoga as a discipline for discovering the soul which dwells in “a cave
within the heart.” The sanctum is also called the garhba-gṛha, the womb-house. As a
soul is incarnated in the womb, so here the divine becomes “embodied.”27
25.6 The Divine Image
In the sanctum the isolated worshippers condense into attentive and wide-eyed queues.
While all else is in shadow, light is focused on the goddess, her essence made concrete in
the form of a burnished metal statue. She has agreed to become this mūrti, or material
form, garlanded in blossoms, silks, and jewels, for her devotees’ ease of access. Visitors
come to experience darśan: meeting God’s eyes. The image has been “awakened” through
tantric rituals, and the goddess now sees out from it: “the gaze as it is deployed in contexts
of viewing religious displays of Hindu deities [is] . . . a visual activity that is both recipro-
cal and inter-subjective” and links the viewer to the image through a “current of sight.”28
The viewer of the image sees and is seen by it. In many ways this diminishes the artistic
significance of the statue, while heightening its theological meaning. This is not a crafted
representation but a body that the divine has temporarily assumed, “the congealing of
form and limit from that larger reality that has no form or limit.”29 The priests’ interaction
with the object is strikingly physical to Western art-viewers, as they “repeatedly smear it
with unguents, shower it with flowers, and bathe it in liquids of many kinds”30 resulting in
a “keenly sensualised involvement.”31 The art that lies at the heart of Hindu religious prac-
tice is not experienced as a viewing of something but as a meeting with someone.
25.7 Posters and Prints
On the way out of the temple one can stop to buy a “souvenir” in the great hall.
Overflowing stalls stand between the pillars, and innumerable faces stare from their
racks: Mīnāk i, Śiva, Ganesh, and Murugan, their sons, and the other deities are all
available as brightly colored paper prints to take home. But these are more than remem-
brances: once initiated, the deity also looks from its two-dimensional mass-printed eyes
and can be placed or pasted anywhere for worship. The divinity found in the shrine is
refracted throughout the daily environment. While some early “God-posters” were the
work of famous artists such as the nineteenth-century painter Raja Ravi Varma, mod-
ern images tend to be anonymous and standardized in their style. Some have implied
that this is a commercialization of “kitsch” representations of the sacred in a “bazaar”
economy of art, but Kajri Jain and others have disagreed: the proliferation that printing

makes possible is an appropriate expression of Hindu approaches to the divine—infi-

nitely present in a personalized form for each individual.32
25.8 The Moving Image
Heading out of town will lead past colorful advertisements for films showing nearby.
One might see signs for Swadesh, in which righteous King Rāma is recast as a mod-
ern Indian immigrant returning to help his people, or Khabhi Khushie Khabhi Gham
and Main Hoon Na, in both of which two modern human brothers are likened to the
divine incarnations Rāma and Lak maa. Through the filmic reworking of texts that are
“founders of discursivity,” which enable tradition to “be maintained even as modernity
is endorsed,” the life of the gods comes to presence in a new way.33 The same intense,
colorful and multi-sensory style draws the viewer into this emotionally absorbing,
rasa-filled art form, so that, like classical Indian drama, the film “completely envelops
the mind of the appreciative reader or spectator, and becomes an object of his deep con-
templation.”34 The omnipresence of the gods is imprinted onto narrative models of one’s
own life, and the profound identification created by the intense emotional engagement
further elides the distinction between the divine and human spheres.
25.9 Presence and Emotion in Hindu Art
In each art form we see how visual arts function to make the divine present in multi-
ple forms: as blessing (rangolis), transfiguration of the material world (maṇḍalas), and a
divine community that lives alongside the human one through divine images on temples,
mūrtis in shrines, and on posters or the big screen. But the bringing to presence of the
divine is not the whole purpose of Hindu art: it must also make us receptive to that divine
presence by sensitizing us to its effect. Just as the stone of the temple and the bronze of the
image must be made receptive to the divine through Tantric rituals, so too must Hindu
devotional arts make us receptive, transforming the personality through emotion: in
both cases art functions not as a window onto the divine, but a door by which to let it in.
Notes
1. Woodman Taylor, “Penetrating Gazes: The Poetics of Sight and Visual Display in Popular
Indian Cinema,” Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, 297.
2. Stella Kramrisch, Exploring India’s Sacred Art: Selected Writings of Stella Kramrisch.
3. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art.
4. Vidya Dehejia, Indian Art.
5. Woodman Taylor, “Penetrating Gazes: The Poetics of Sight and Visual Display in Popular
Indian Cinema,” Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India.

6. Diana Eck, Seeing the Divine Image.

7. Joanne Waghorne and Normal Cutler, Gods of Flesh, Gods of Stone.
8. Rachel Dwyer, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film.
9. Kenneth Valpey, Attending Krishna’s Image: Caitanya Vaisnava Murti-seva as
Devotional Truth.
10. Kenneth Valpey, “Hindu Iconology and Worship,” in the Continuum Companion to Hindu
Studies.
11. Heather Elgood, Hinduism and the Religious Arts.
12. Dennis Hudson, The Body of God: An Emperor’s Palace for Krishna in Eighth Century
Kanchipuram.
13. Richard Eaton, Lives of Indian Images.
14. Philip Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey.
15. David Smith, The Dance of Siva: Religion, Art and Poetry in India.
16. See Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art.
17. See Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger, Bharat Mata: Printed Icons from the
Struggle for Independence in India.
18. See Archana Verma, Performance and Culture: Narrative Image and Enactment in India.
19. See Christiane Brosius, Empowering Visions: The Politics of Representation in Hindu
Nationalism; Christiane Brosius and Melissa Butcher, Image Journeys; Audio-Visual Media
and Cultural Change in India.
20. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India.
21. Vidya Dehejia, Indian Art, 11.
22. Vidya Dehejia, Indian Art, 164.
23. George Michell, The Hindu Temple.
24. Stella Kramrisch, Exploring India’s Sacred Art: Selected Writings of Stella Kramrisch.
25. Heather Elgood, Hinduism and the Religious Arts, 129.
26. Heather Elgood, Hinduism and the Religious Arts, 130.
27. Joanne Waghorne and Norman Cutler, Gods of Flesh, Gods of Stone, 7
28. Lawrence Babb, “Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism,” Journal of Anthropological
Research, 391.
29. Diana Eck, Seeing the Divine Image, 38.
30. Richard Eaton, Lives of Indian Images, 19.
31. Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, 57.
32. Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art.
33. Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, 4.
34. Y. S. Walimbe, Abhinavagupta on Indian Aesthetics, 48.
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Brosius, Christiane. Empowering Visions: The Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism.
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C HA P T E R 26
HINDUISM AND MUSIC
G U Y L . BE C K
From the ancient culture of the Indo-Aryans to the present, Hindu religious tra-
ditions have exhibited a persistent preoccupation with musical features of tone,
rhythm, and dance, along with textual support and interpretation in both Sanskrit
and vernacular sources. Although there are abundant theological and philosophi-
cal schools in India promoting textual study and written commentary, the average
ritual life of the practicing Hindu is invariably permeated with the sounds of man-
tras, prayers, recitations, songs, and musical instruments. But while music forms
a central part of Hindu experience, in some religious traditions it is non-existent
or ambiguous, for example in Theravada Buddhism, early Rabbinic Judaism, Sunni
Islam, some forms of Calvinist Christianity, Quakers, and religious orders that
observe vows of silence.
Considered divine in origin, music is an important part of Hindu mythology. The
goddess Sarasvatī holds the vīā and is honored as the divine patroness of music. The
creator god Brahmā fashioned Indian music as the “Fifth” Veda. Vishnu the preserver
sounds the conch and plays the flute in the form of Krishna. Śiva as Na arāja (lord of the
dance) plays the amaru drum during the cosmic dissolution. Manifestations of these
deities in India have spawned the cultivation of music and serve as paradigms for musi-
cians. While sages in ancient India were chanters of the Vedas, founders of religious lin-
eages were patrons of music or skilled in music, and nearly all great musicians and music
teachers are associated with religious lineages.
Despite the above, textbooks and reference works in religious studies have gen-
erally fallen short in describing the Indian musical arts.1 And while many books
and articles in ethnomusicology cover Indian music, it is often analyzed as a secu-
lar skill apart from its context of the daily and seasonal worship of specific com-
munities. A rising interest among musicologists in devotional genres and temple
music, however, may be attributed to their recent gains in Indian popular support
and appreciation.
Hindu religious music is essentially vocal music that highlights the song-text
and its clear pronunciation. Ancient authors have stressed that words, melody, and

HINDUISM AND MUSIC 359
rhythm should be balanced in order to create a unique synthesis of emotional and

aesthetic experience. Modern religious congregations carry forth this equal empha-
sis in fostering the mutual sharing of Bhakti devotional experiences through chant
and music. Religious leaders in India and the Diaspora also consider music indis-
pensable for propagation of their faiths. While wide variations exist among reli-
gious groups in terms of lyrical content and doctrine, there is less disparity with
regard to styles of singing or performance, leading to the conclusion that music pro-
vides a common root for a pan-Indian religious expression. Whether venerating
Nirgua-Brahman (Brahman without qualities), Sagua-Brahman (Brahman with
qualities), Vaishnava, Śaiva, or Śākta deities, Hindu musicians draw upon the same
evolving genres, clarity of word enunciation, rāga and tāla structures, and assort-
ments of instruments.
The Vedas and Upanishads (4000–1000 BCE), as the earliest sources for study of the
Indo-Aryan religion arriving from the northwest, convey information on sound and
music. The oral texts are said to be the eternal embodiment of the primeval sound Om
(Śabda-Brahman) that generated the universe. Brahman, the cosmic Absolute, is also
defined as aesthetic delight (rasa) in the Taittirīya Upanishad (2.7.1). Metaphysical spec-
ulations on Brahman were advanced in the Ᾱgama, Pañcarātra, Tantra, and Yoga texts,
forming the concept of Nāda-Brahman, sacred sound in the universe as well as within
human consciousness. In theistic traditions—Vaishnavism (Vishnu or Krishna wor-
ship), Śaivism (Śiva worship), or Śaktism (goddess worship)—concepts of Nāda-Śakti
(“female potencies of sacred sound”) prevailed as coterminous with the male divinity. In
musical treatises, Nāda-Brahman is described as unmanifest (anāhata, “unstruck”) and
manifest (āhata, “struck”), and Yoga traditions use the term to refer to musical sounds
heard during meditation (nāda-yoga or nadopāsana). The theoretical dimensions of
sacred sound have been discussed in terms of ‘sonic theology’ in Guy L. Beck (1993), fol-
lowed by the practical ritual dimensions as ‘sonic liturgy’ in Beck (2012). Annette Wilke
and Oliver Morebus have provided analysis of Sanskrit phonetics and aesthetical issues
related to sound in Hinduism.
The primary religious event of the Vedic tradition was the fire sacrifice (yajña), including
the chanting of mantras meant to petition the natural forces and secure immortality. Sound
and speech as Vāc (precursor to Nāda-Śakti) was believed to inhere in the syllables and
metrical structure of the mantras. Verses from the older Rig-Veda were chanted in roughly
three notes, expanded up to four of five in the Yajur-Veda and seven in the Sāma-Veda,
the musical Veda. Sāma-Gāna, the unaccompanied singing of hymns (sāmans) from the
Sāma-Veda, including the added syllables (stobha) with elongated vowels, was essential
to the success of the sacrifice. While fire sacrifices along with the three-note chanting of
Sanskrit verses still occur, Sāma-Gāna is rarely performed. Nonetheless, these traditions
reveal to us that musical sound has been closely linked to the sacred from the beginning.
And while Vedic studies have tended to focus on literary issues and social context, the sin-
gular work in the field of Vedic music by G. U. Thite contains copious references to gods,
mantras, scales, notes, meters, and music in heaven. In addition, Wayne Howard and G. H.
Tarlekar (1995) have provided definitive works on Sāma-Veda chant.

The non-sacrificial, musical counterpart to Sāma-Gāna in ancient times was

Gandharva-Sa gīta, later Sa gīta, which has three divisions; vocal, instrumental,
and dance. Performed by “Gandharva” musicians in Indra’s heavenly court, earthly
Gandharva-Sa gīta was a replica of this celestial music. According to mythology, the
sage Nārada Rishi, son of Brahmā, brought music from heaven to earth for the benefit
of suffering humanity, as both a means of enjoyment (bhukti) and a vehicle for attain-
ing liberation (mukti). Primarily vocal, it includes musical instruments like the vīā,
flutes, drums, and especially cymbals. Gandharva-Sa gīta was also associated with
pūjā, a form of worship with non-Aryan or indigenous roots that eventually replaced
the yajña as the cornerstone of Hindu religious life. Instead of oblations into a fire,
pūjā involves offerings of flowers, incense, food, water, lamps, and conches directly to
deities or symbols on an altar. In pūjā, singing and playing instruments are conceived
as offerings that are integrated with the other elements.
The oldest surviving Sanskrit texts of Gandharva-Sa gīta are the Nāṭya-Śāstra of
Bharata Muni and the Dattilam of Dattila (ca. 400–200 BCE), which describe (and
prescribe) the music performed in dramas, festivals, courtly ceremonies, and rituals
in honor of Śiva, Vishnu, Brahmā, Ganesha, and Devī, among others. Tarlekar (1975)
and Natalie Lidova have explained the multiple connections between ancient rituals,
music, and drama. As part of the ancient dramas, special songs called Dhruva were
rendered in Prakrit, the vernacular counterpart to Sanskrit, and may be viewed as
prototypes of the later classical and devotional songs in vernacular in both the North
and the South. E. Wiersma-te Nijenhuis (1970) and Mukund Lath provide commen-
tary on the texts and traditions of Gandharva music, and Solveig McIntosh analyzes
ancient music with reference to linguistics and acoustics. The most complete docu-
mentation of Indian music history using all available sources is by Shahab Sarmadee.
The important texts and musicians, as well as many other aspects of Indian music,
are discussed by Nijenhuis (1974), Lewis Rowell, Richard Widdess, Thakur Jaideva
Singh, and Prem Lata Sharma.
Indian music employs seven basic notes, Sa, Ri, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni (cf. Do Re Mi),
first organized into jāti scales in Bharata Muni, and later formed into rāgas (melodic
patterns, from rañj, “color or mood”) by the eighth or ninth century in the Brihaddeśī
by Mata ga. Besides Sa and Pa (tonic and dominant notes), which remain fixed, the
other notes may be flattened (komal) or sharpened (tīvra, in the case of Ma) to create
varieties of rāgas that arouse aesthetic and emotional states (rasas) meant to please
the gods. Rasas are the artistic or aesthetic expressions of particular emotional expe-
riences that are otherwise found to be universal traits of humanity, like love, sor-
row, and heroism. Bharata Muni had originally listed eight rasas: śri gāra (love),
hasya (humor), karuā (sorrow), raudra (anger), vīra (heroism), bhayānaka (fear),
bibhatsa (distaste), and adbhuta (surprise). After music severed its connection with
drama, only four rasas— śri gāra, karuā, vīra, and adbhuta—sustained their asso-
ciations with rāga performance, along with the addition of Bhakti-rasa (devotional
love). Individual rāgas have also found expression in poems (dhyāna-mantras) and

paintings (rāgamālā) that link them with a season, time of day, and gender (i.e., male
rāga and female rāginī).
Indian music is essentially monophonic (single voice), without harmony, key sig-
natures, or chords as in the West. Indian melodies follow modal patterns, are per-
formed in unison when in groups, and follow metrical time units called mātrās.
Rhythm (tāla) is fundamental to all Indian music, and is performed in slow, medium,
and fast tempos. Rhythmic cycles, called tālas, are composed of fixed numbers of
mātrās that are either stressed, indicated by a clap (tāli), unstressed, indicated by an
open hand (khāli) or wave, or neutral. The very first mātrā of any tāla is called sam,
meaning “coming together” of note, beat, and word. Tālas also reflect the notion of
merit accumulation originally tied to Vedic ritual and mantra chant. In Gandharva
music, mātrās were marked by the playing of hand cymbals and drums that gener-
ated merit to the musicians and audiences. Though unacknowledged, the consistent
emphasis on cymbal playing in most Hindu religious music supports the conten-
tion that the theory of merit accumulation has continued into the present time, as
explained in Beck (2012) .
The new Bhakti movements of the sixth century favored a devotion-centered
Hinduism, including devotional music (Bhakti-Sa gīta) that was composed for wor-
ship in regional vernacular languages. Gradually, the brahmanical temple tradi-
tions made provisions for the inclusion of vernacular songs, as also endorsed in the
Bhāgavata-Purāṇa. The earliest anthologies of vernacular hymns to hold equal status
with the Veda are in Tamil: the Tēvāram of the Nāyaārs (Śaiva saints) and the Divya
Prabandham of the Ᾱvars (Vaishnava saints), compiled during the fifth to ninth cen-
turies CE. Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Vasudha Narayanan have discussed these
hymns in their original contexts. Gradually, large collections of hymns emerged in
Kannada, Telugu, Hindi (Braj Bhasha), Bengali, Gujarati, Rajasthani, and Marathi
languages.
During the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century, Indian classical music separated
into southern Carnatic and northern Hindustani, which was influenced by Persian
culture. The most important Sanskrit treatise on Indian music was written during this
period, the Saṅgīta-Ratnākara of Śārgadeva, which summarize all theoretical and
practical knowledge up to this point. Carnatic music employs up to seventy-two melas
(scale permutations), along with many varieties of rhythms played on the mridangam
(drum) and other percussive instruments. Though forming its basis in the Tamil region,
Carnatic music owes much to Purandaradāsa, a sixteenth-century Vaishnava from
Karnataka whose numerous Kīrtanas in Kannada influenced Tyāgarāja (d. 1847), whose
Kritis (“compositions,” evolved from Kīrtanas) in Telugu form the core of the current
repertoire of South Indian music. Tyāgarāja is part of a trinity of great poet-musicians
including Śyāma Śāstri and Mu uswami Dīkshitār. The most thorough study of
Carnatic music is by Ludwig Pesch. While the best general introduction to Indian clas-
sical music is by Bonnie C. Wade, William Jackson has focused on religious music in
the South.

Hindustani music is initially associated with the tradition of Dhrupad, formalized

vocal and instrumental music performed in the courts of Rajasthan, Maharashtra,
Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh, ca. 1400–1700. The four-fold structure (sthāyi, antarā,
sañcāri, and ābhog ) of Dhrupad, adopting the pure form of a rāga and set to the rhythm
of Cautal (twelve beats) and Dhamar (fourteen beats), proved to be an ideal vehicle for
vernacular lyrics, especially those in the Hindi dialect of Braj Bhasha. Alain Danielou’s
work on northern music provides a solid historical survey of texts and styles, and
Induram Srivastava and Ritwik Sanyal, a leading exponent, each discuss the history and
style of Dhrupad in much depth.
In the temples, forms of Dhrupad-influenced Bhakti-Sa gīta accompanied deity wor-
ship, especially of the youthful Krishna, who became a favored topic of musical com-
position in the Braj region. The aesthetic categories of Bhakti-rasa (devotional love)
and Śānti-rasa (peaceful) were also added by theoreticians to the original eight rasas of
Bharata. In Braj, Vaishnava groups such as the Vallabha, Rādhāvallabha, Nimbārka, and
Haridāsī sects fostered music known as Haveli-Sa gīta and Samāj-Gāyan in Braj Bhasha.
Beck (2000) provides a general introduction to these and other forms of religious music
in the North. A more comprehensive study of Braj music traditions and their influences
occurs in the work of Selina Thielemann. While Anne-Marie Gaston has described
music in the Vallabha tradition, the Samāj-Gāyan music of the Rādhāvallabha tradition
is presented, with audio recordings, in Beck (2011). The Gauīya tradition (founded by
Caitanya, sixteenth century) generated devotional music in the Bengali language known
as Padāvali-Kīrtan, as outlined by Ramakanta Chakrabarty. Vernacular songs of Hindu
poet-saints like Sūr Dās, Tulsidās, Mirabai, Raidās, Nāmdev, and Jñānadev have become
standards in the Hindu, Sikh, and classical music catalogs. The repertoires of Dhrupad
and Khyāl in honor of goddesses and other deities have attracted less scholarly atten-
tion. Many relevant scholarly articles on devotional music in various regions of India
have been collected by Alison Arnold.
By the eighteenth century, Khyāl, with its two-fold structure (sthāyi, antarā ), became
prevalent in the Hindu and Mughal courts. Sung by both Hindus and Muslims, yet
retaining much of the Krishna theme, Khyāl allowed more freedom in improvisation,
more complex ornamentation and tāla patterns, and stylistic diversification into sepa-
rate gharāās (“houses”) such as Gwalior, Agra, and Kirana. This trend also included
the development of instrumental music played on the vīā, sitar, sarod, and tabla
drums. After the gradual dissolution of the courts by the twentieth century, classical
music reached a wider audience through public music education, national music con-
ferences, and the sponsorship of All India Radio. Light-classical genres that drew upon
folk music, such as Thumri, Dadra, Ghazal, Kajri, and Bhajan also became popular. In
addition, new songs originating in the twentieth century combined religious with sec-
ular emotional experiences. The Bengali songs of poet-laureate Rabindranath Tagore
(Rabindra-Sa gīta) are widely sung in West Bengal and Bangladesh, as analyzed by
Reba Som.
Hindu religious music is usually a group endeavor, with participants seated near a
lead singer, standing in temples, or walking in procession. Reading from a hymnal,

lead singers often accompany themselves on the harmonium, a floor version of the
portable reed organ brought by nineteenth-century missionaries. The metal reed
of the harmonium is of South Asian origin, found in the Indian snake-charmer’s
instrument; it is also the basis for the Western harmonica and accordion. Group
singers, who may play other instruments, repeat after the leader in unison in call
and response format. With full concentration on the lyrics, the art of singing musi-
cal compositions in rāgas (rāga also means “attachment”) and tālas enables per-
formers and listeners to most effectively meditate on the chosen deity in devotional
situations of worship.
The ancient instrument classification scheme of Bharata Muni influenced the
modern four-fold “Sachs-Hornbostel system” used by ethnomusicologists since
1914: strings or chordophones (tata), wind or aerophones (su ira ), drums or mem-
branophones (vitata), and other percussion instruments or idiophones (ghana).
Percussion instruments used in religious music include hand cymbals called kartal
or jhāñjh, drums such as the tabla, pakhāvaj, dholak, or khole, and occasionally bells,
clappers, or tambourines. Bowed chordophones such as the sāra gī or esrāj accom-
pany singing, but these have largely been replaced by the harmonium. Solo playing
of instruments like the vīā (plucked chordophone) and the shehnai or nāgasvaram
(double-reed aerophones) have been associated with temple worship. A background
drone is provided for musicians by a tānpura (four-stringed lute) in Hindustani and
the śruti box in Carnatic music.
In many current religious congregations, earlier styles of devotional music have
been replaced by less formal types of Bhajan that promote greater class and gen-
der egalitarianism, are not tied to liturgical action, are more flexible regarding
attendance and time, and that allow for eclectic religious views. Beginning with
the chanting of Om, a typical session proceeds with invocations to a guru or deity
followed by selections of devotional songs. In closing, a simplified pūj ā service is
conducted, followed by distribution of food, flowers, lamp, and consecrated water.
The songs range in form from simple melodies to refrains of divine names. The
most common rhythm is Keherva of eight beats, roughly corresponding to a lilting
4/4 beat. Other rhythms include the sixteen-beat Tintal, and Dadra, sixbeats cor-
responding to 3/4 or 6/8.
The singing of divine names, as in Sītā-Rām, Hare Krishna, Hare Rāma, Rādhe
Śyām, Om Nama Śivāya, and Jai Mātā Dī, is called Nām-Kīrtan or Nām-Bhajan. Set
to simple melodies accompanied by drums and cymbals, Nām-Kīrtan is very popu-
lar in India. It was first brought to the West in 1965 by ISKCON (International Society
for Krishna Consciousness) in the form of the Hare Krishna Mahā Kīrtan, “Great
Mantra for Deliverance.” In its wake, various forms of Nām-Kīrtan have permeated
Yoga and Vedanta societies worldwide. Indian-style Nām-Kīrtan is also performed by
non-Hindus, including Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Christians (Hindi: “Yesu” for Jesus),
Jews, and Sufi Muslims. Moreover, American and European singers have succeeded in
popular styles that employ Celtic, Middle-eastern, Blues, New Age, Jazz, and African
features, as discussed by Linda Johnson and Maggie Jacobus.

Since the 1980s, a revival in commercial popularity of devotional music and culture
in India, first through cassettes and then CDs, has witnessed classical singers enlarg-
ing their repertoires of devotional music and cinema vocalists showcasing devotional
songs as featured in films. Film Bhajans are now widely used by Hindus in home and
temple worship. In addition, the careers of musicians in the devotional genres have
reached unprecedented heights. Peter Manuel has studied this phenomenon over sev-
eral decades.
The association of religion with the production of the arts, while present in Western
history, is paramount in India. Currently, the content of artistic production is largely
taken from Hindu religious texts, with many performance genres derived from religious
rituals. Countering the traditional emphasis on textual studies, Susan L. Schwartz con-
firms the importance of performance as vital to understanding the Hindu religion, and
scholars like Terry Muck have made strides in comparative research into religion and
music that includes Hindu songs. For scholars and students, E. Gardner Rust has com-
piled a useful annotated bibliography of music and dance in world religions, including
Hinduism and South Asia.
Note
1. Exceptions are the entries, “Music,” in Encyclopedia of Hinduism (London: Routledge,
2008), “Music” and “Kirtan and Bhajan,” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 2010).
Bibliography
Arnold, Alison, ed. Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 5, Indian Subcontinent. New York
and London: Garland Publishing, 2000.
Beck, Guy L. “Religious and Devotional Music: Northern Area.” In Garland Encyclopedia of
World Music, vol. 5, Indian Subcontinent. Alison Arnold, ed. New York and London: Garland
Publishing, 2000, 246–258.
——. Sonic Liturgy: Ritual and Music in Hindu Tradition. Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 2012.
——. Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina
Press, 1993.
——, ed. Vaishnava Temple Music in Vrindaban: The Radhavallabha Songbook. Kirksville,
MO: Blazing Sapphire Press, 2011, with 18 CDs.
Chakrabarty, Ramakanta. “Vai ava Kīrtan in Bengal.” Journal of Vaiṣṇava Studies 4.2 (Spring
1996): 179–199.
Danielou, Alain. Northern Indian Music, 2 vols. London: Halcyon Press, 1949–1954.
Gaston, Anne-Marie. Krishna’s Musicians: Musicians and Music Making in the Temples of
Nathdvara, Rajasthan. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1997.
Howard, Wayne. Sāmavedic Chant. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1977.

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Johnson, Linda and Maggie Jacobus. Kirtan! Chanting as a Spiritual Path. St. Paul, MN: YES
International Publishers, 2007.
Lath, Mukund. A Study of Dattilam: A Treatise on the Sacred Music of Ancient India. New
Delhi: Impex India, 1978.
Lidova, Natalia. Drama and Ritual of Early Hinduism. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1994.
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Manuel, Peter. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
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Narayanan, Vasudha. The Vernacular Veda: Revelation, Recitation, and Ritual. Columbia,
SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.
Nijenhuis, E. Wiersma-te. Dattilam: A Compendium of Ancient Indian Music. Leiden: E.
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——. Indian Music: History and Structure. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974.
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Peterson, Indira Viswanathan. Poems to Śiva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints. Princeton,
Rangacharya, Adya, trans. Nāṭya-Śāstra. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2003 (1996).
Rowell, Lewis. Music and Musical Thought in Early India. Chicago: University of Chicago
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all Available Important Writings in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and Other Allied Languages on
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C HA P T E R 27
B U D D H I S M — I M AG E A S I C O N ,
I M AG E A S A RT
C HA R L E S L AC H M A N
27.1 Introduction
The Buddhist religion, based on the insight and teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (the
“Buddha” or Enlightened One, ca. 560-480 BCE) originated in northern India some
twenty-five hundred years ago. Although Buddhism grew only slowly in the first several
centuries following the Buddha’s death, it eventually flourished and spread throughout
the Indian sub-continent and beyond, becoming—and remaining—a major religious
tradition in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand, China, Tibet, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and
elsewhere. By the twelfth century, however, it had virtually disappeared in the land of
its birth.
Buddhism today is characterized by considerable geographical and doctrinal diver-
sity, but one feature shared by its many disparate strands is an emphasis on the ritual
importance of images. Indeed, regardless of the country or the sectarian “school,” the
most commonly performed activities at virtually all Buddhist temples center on burning
incense, making prostrations, and worshipping before painted and sculpted representa-
tions of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. These images constitute the core of the category of
“Buddhist art” as it is commonly understood, but a fundamental issue that will be taken
up below concerns some of the significant differences between how such objects are
viewed by Buddhist practitioners and how they are viewed by art historians.
Thus, what follows focuses on the role and status of images in Buddhism, on the vari-
ous art-historical approaches that have been used to interpret them, and on the inherent
tension between these two perspectives. It also considers some of the ways in which
contemporary artists have engaged Buddhist ideas and themes in their practice.

27.2 Images in Early Buddhism and the

“Aniconic” Controversy
The first several hundred years after the death of the historical Buddha Sakyamuni in the
early fifth century BCE remain something of a mystery, since no Buddhist texts, ritual
objects, or other material remains from this period have survived.1 Dating to the first
century BCE, gateways and railings made of stone and decorated with relief carvings
and sculptures comprise the earliest extant examples of Buddhist art or architecture.
These structures were built to enclose the large funerary mounds (known as stupas) that
were the primary monuments of Buddhist monasteries. According to tradition, such
mounds were originally constructed to hold the physical remains of the Buddha, which
had been divided up following his cremation.2
These early stupa gateways and railings have several distinctive characteristics. For
one, the stone is often deployed in a way that clearly mimics construction in wood or
other perishable materials, such as thatch or brick, and thus suggesting why earlier
structures failed to survive. Secondly, although many of the carved reliefs depict themes
from the life (and previous lives) of the Buddha, no representations of the Buddha in
human form appear among them; instead, the Buddha is indicated by a wide range of
symbols or signs. For example, a scene might show followers of the Buddha clustered
around a large wheel, or an empty seat under a tree. In the former case, this could repre-
sent the Buddha delivering a sermon, with the wheel serving as a symbol of the Buddha’s
teachings (commonly referred to as the Wheel of the Law); in the latter instance, the seat
and tree refer to the Buddha’s enlightenment experience as he sat in meditation under
the bodhi tree.
The practice of avoiding the representation of the Buddha in anthropomorphic
form and relying instead on the use of such symbols as the empty seat or wheel (among
others), has been referred to for more than a century as “aniconism.” The question of
why there was this artistic avoidance in the first place has been answered in various
ways. Several scholars have seen this as the natural outcome of a religious tradition
that emphasizes emptiness and the ultimate impermanence of all phenomena. More
recently, the very idea of aniconism has been challenged, most vociferously by Susan
L. Huntington.3 Huntington argues that many so-called aniconic narratives are actu-
ally depictions of practitioners worshipping at sacred places associated with the life of
Sakyamuni Buddha, rather than depictions of actual events that transpired during his
lifetime. Vidya Dehejia, meanwhile, has challenged many of Huntington’s conclusions,
while proposing her own theory of “multivalance” or multiple meanings, positing that
the seat or wheel, for example, are not simply “symbols” of the Buddha but simultaneous
emblems of the Buddha’s presence, of a sacred site, and of Buddhist ideals or attributes.4
The debate about the nature of early Buddhist narrative art is ongoing, but regard-
less of how one assesses aniconism, the surviving physical record makes clear that the
absence of anthropomorphic images of the Buddha represents but a brief moment in

BUDDHISM—IMAGE AS ICON, IMAGE AS ART 369
the broad sweep of Buddhist art history. Indeed, by the first century CE, the practice
of making Buddha images had become common in India, and would also become the
norm in every region to which Buddhism later traveled.
27.3 The Image of the Buddha
The question of why was it not until roughly five hundred years after the death of
Shakyamuni Buddha that his image became widespread remains unanswered. Just as the
motivations that underlie the lack of anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha
in early reliefs are seemingly impossible to recover, the impulses that led to the even-
tual emergence of such representations are equally murky. The most influential theories
concerning the origins of the Buddha image were articulated by Alfred Foucher (1865–
1952), a French archaeologist who was also central to the formulation of the theory of
aniconism. In a seminal article first published in 1905, Foucher proposed that the sculp-
tural depiction of the Buddha originated in the region of Gandhara (an area covered
today by parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan), under the influence of Bactria and other
nearby Greek colonies. As he wrote about a famous standing Buddha from Gandhara:
Without doubt you will appreciate its dreamy, and even somewhat effeminate, beauty;
but at the same time you cannot fail to be struck by its Hellenic character. . . . Your
European eyes have in this case no need of the help of any Indianist, in order to
appreciate with full knowledge the orb of the nimbus, the waves of the hair, the
straightness of the profile, the classical shape of the eyes, the sinuous bow of the
mouth, the supple and hollow folds of the draperies. All these technical details, and
still more perhaps the harmony of the whole, indicate in a material, palpable and
striking manner the hand of an artist from some Greek studio.5
Foucher (and others) used the term Greco-Buddhist to denote this hybrid style, though
it is clear even from the short passage above that the “Greco” influence is seen by him as
the driving force behind its origins.
Quite apart from Foucher’s condescension towards Indian artists and undis-
guised air of cultural superiority, several scholars challenged his account of how (and
where) the image of the Buddha originated. Chief among these opponents was A.K.
Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), a prolific writer who was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon),
then raised and educated in England, and who served for 40 years as the first Keeper
of Indian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In a brief but important article on
“The Indian Origin of the Buddha Image,” Coomaraswamy states at the outset that he
has found it necessary “to abandon the commonly accepted theory of the Greek ori-
gin of the Buddha image.” Having studied the so-called Mathuran type of Buddha and
Bodhisattva figure, executed in a style both distinct from that of Gandhara and also
clearly related to earlier Indian art, Coomaraswamy concludes that “the Buddha image
is of Indian origin” [original emphasis]. He goes on to claim that “the Gandhara and

Mathura types were created locally about the same time, in response to a necessity cre-
ated by the internal development of the Buddhism common to both areas” and, more-
over, that “the Mathura type is the main source” of later developments in India.6
A version of Coomaraswamy’s main argument—namely, that the Gandharan and
Mathuran images of the Buddha evolved essentially independently and simultane-
ously—can be found in most contemporary scholarship that treats the question of
origins. However, his supporting argument that the image of the Buddha emerged in
response to “internal” necessity is less widely held. As suggested above, there is still no
clear scholarly consensus either about why the earliest known phase of Buddhist art
eschewed anthropomorphic images or why in the next phase they became ubiquitous.
Also, for all of the stylistic differences between the Gandharan and Mathuran represen-
tations of the Buddha, the two types share a core of important iconographic features: the
presence of a halo-like mandorla; elongated earlobes (a sign of the Buddha’s renunci-
ation of the material world); a pronounced cranial protuberance (or ushnisha); a tuft
between the eyes (urna); the wearing of simple monastic robes; and so on. Moreover, the
two types share a certain conceptual similarity, in the sense that both representations are
more concerned with evoking a spiritual ideal than with capturing anatomical reality.
Ultimately, it was the iconographic features first developed in India, rather than the sty-
listic features of any one region, that proved to be most constant as the image of the Buddha
was transmitted to other lands. In general, as these foreign sculptural conceptions inter-
acted with native traditions, there was a tendency for local aesthetic preferences to gradu-
ally assert themselves, resulting in the creation of distinct national styles. This is readily
apparent in China, as an example, where early Buddha images (such as the well-known
seated figure in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, or the colossal Buddha of Cave
XX at Yungang) clearly hew quite closely to Indian prototypes. Slowly, however, images of
the Buddha become much more Sinicized, taking on Chinese facial features and wearing
the robes of a Confucian scholar rather than those of an Indian monk, while still retaining
the iconographic features first witnessed at Gandhara and Mathura.
This process essentially repeated itself each time Buddhist images began arriving
someplace new and in many respects parallels the situation of Buddhism more gener-
ally. That is, just as Buddhist practice in Thailand, for example, is very different from
Buddhist practice in Korea, despite important and fundamental commonalities, so, too,
are a Thai Buddha image and a Korean Buddha image each utterly distinctive and rec-
ognizable. But while differing significantly in terms of style, they nonetheless exhibit a
shared iconography that harkens back to the earliest Indian paradigms.
27.4 Living Icons
As Robert H. Sharf, the prominent scholar of Buddhism, has noted, in East Asia (as else-
where) “depictions of Buddhist deities are everywhere: in homes, on street corners, in
shops, restaurants, and offices, in cars and taxis, on billboards and student backpacks.

And, of course, Buddhist images abound in temples and monasteries, where a single
complex might house hundreds or even thousands of images of all shapes and sizes.”7 In
order to better understand why images came to figure this prominently in Buddhism as
it developed and expanded, it will be useful to consider some of the specific functions
and roles that images played in Buddhist traditions.
Although the sutras (or sacred texts) of early Buddhism are surprisingly silent
about the use of images, one telling anecdote about the “original” image of the Buddha
is preserved in several sources. According to this well-known legend, a sculpture of
the Buddha, carved from sandalwood, was commissioned by King Udayana so that he
could gaze upon the sacred form of the Buddha while the latter was off preaching to
his mother in the heaven of Indra. This popular account also reports that the Buddha’s
disciple Maudgalyayana transported thirty-two craftsmen up to the heavenly realm so
that they could observe the special marks of the Buddha firsthand, thereby insuring
the representational accuracy of the image they created. When the Buddha eventu-
ally returned to the earth, King Udayana’s statue rose into the air to greet him of its
own accord, and the Buddha proclaimed that it would one day help to transmit his
teachings.8
This idea of a sculptural image being endowed with supernatural abilities is widely
attested in Buddhist history. In Japan, such feats often figure prominently in the found-
ing tales of temples and shrines, such as the Kokawa-dera, which is said to have been
built on the spot where a statue of a thousand-armed Kannon miraculously material-
ized in a hunter’s rustic hut. Buddhist literature is also filled with accounts that ascribe
protective and apotropaic powers to images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. A Chinese
collection of miscellaneous anecdotes compiled in the seventh century, for instance,
tells of a gang of thieves who pilfered miniature bronze Buddhas from local temples.
After melting them down to make currency, the thieves died howling, “and their bodies
were found to be scorched and split as if they had been burned to death.”9 The diary of
the famous monk-pilgrim Xuanzang (600–664) also describes magical images that he
encountered on his journey to India, such as the white marble Buddha that confronted
a band of robbers and so frightened them that they repented on the spot and became
champions of the faith.10
In addition to providing the paradigm of the miraculous image, the story of King
Udayana’s statue exemplifies another highly important concept in Buddhism, namely
that of the “living” image. This notion is one that is also widely attested, and Buddhist
literature is filled with accounts of practitioners behaving towards images as they
would toward living beings. The “living image” can also be associated with the impor-
tant ritual known commonly as the eye-opening ceremony. As the name implies, this
rite of consecration entails painting in the eyes (or carving the pupils) of an image
in order to bring it to life: up until this act is performed, in fact, the image has no
particular sacred value and is not treated with any great reverence, and only after the
eye-opening does it become an object of worship. Historically, one of the most famous
consecrations was that of the Great Buddha of Todaiji, conducted in Nara in 752.
Reportedly, some ten thousand monks participated in the ceremony, and the emperor

himself stood atop a ladder and wielded the large brush that was used to complete the
eyes and thus “activate” the Buddha.11 Not merely a popular practice of the distant
past, eye-opening consecrations continue to play an important role in Buddhist com-
munities around the world.12
27.5 Art and Icon
In light of the central role that miraculous, “living” images play in Buddhism, it is some-
what puzzling to notice that this aspect was almost completely unaccounted for by
scholars until recent times. Several factors might be adduced in searching to explain this
curious silence. One would be what the renowned Buddhologist Gregory Schopen has
characterized as “Protestant presuppositions” in the study of Buddhism; that is, a ten-
dency on the part of many Western scholars to privilege textual sources over archaeo-
logical materials and over the actual practice of Buddhism as it can be observed in the
world.13 A corollary to such attitudes, and also quite evident among earlier scholarship,
in particular, is the notion that image worship in Buddhism bordered on idolatry and
reflected an unsophisticated and “primitive” worldview that was at odds with the philo-
sophical sophistication of Buddhist literature. Thus, a kind of scholarly dualism evolved,
opposing “real” or “pure” Buddhism (as found primarily in certain canonical texts)
and “popular” Buddhism (as practiced by actual Buddhists, who were largely viewed as
credulous and naive).
A similar kind of dualism characterizes most of the early art-historical investiga-
tions of Buddhism, which tend to implicitly oppose “real” art (comprising a small
number of sculptures and paintings that correspond to accepted Western categories
of aesthetic value) and “popular” art (the vast majority of Buddhist images which, to
the extent that they are even noticed, are deemed deficient in aesthetic and historical
value). These assumptions were so pervasive and influential that even an “enlight-
ened” scholar of the stature of Ernest Fenellosa (1846–1908) could not escape their
effects. Fenellosa was extremely knowledgeable about Asian art, having served as
the director of the Japanese Imperial Museum in Tokyo, and as curator of Oriental
art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (He was also a Buddhist convert, and his
ashes are buried at a temple in Kyoto). Despite this background, his discussion of
Buddhist art in Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, a magisterial two-volume survey
published in 1912 and the first of its kind, draws comparisons to Western art at every
turn: Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo; the Greeks, Egyptians, Aztecs, and Persians;
all of these artists and traditions—and more—are invoked in order to confirm that
Buddhist painting and sculpture can, at times, rise to the level of Art.14 While later
art historians would increasingly approach the topic of Buddhist art with greater
recognition of its inherent characteristics and values and without searching for the
validating echoes of Europe or classical antiquity, the focus until relatively recently
remained squarely centered on style and iconography.

From an art-historical point of view, such analysis is important, of course, but it rarely
allows the function and ritual status of Buddhist images to enter into the equation. Some
scholars, however, have questioned whether it is even possible for art history to account
for the notion of “living” icons. As Donald McCallum writes in Zenkoji and its Icon:
Throughout this study I refer to art, art history, and art historians, but I must confess
great unease with regard to the applicability of the term “art” to the types of icons
with which we are concerned. Of course, this is a broader issue within the study of
religious imagery, since obviously aesthetic motivations were not primary in the
production of religious paintings and sculptures. . . . In the case of monuments that
are universally recognized as “great art,” there is an all-but-irresistible tendency
to shift the focus from religious to aesthetic factors, to offer explications in terms
of “art.” The Zenkoji-related icons lack such dramatic aesthetic qualities, and thus
more easily accommodate a different approach. However, I would like to generalize
this methodology to the degree that we can begin to look at all icons outside of the
context of “art” as an aesthetic category.15
Some of the implications of such a methodological approach—of dispensing with art as

an aesthetic category in the discussion of Buddhist images—will be returned to below.
27.6 Art and Expression
As witnessed above, most critical examinations of images in Buddhism focus on the

nature and status of the object, and rarely devote much attention to the makers of those
objects or to the motivation for their production beyond the obvious circumstance of
patronage and commissioning. In part, this can be attributed to the fact that far and
away the vast majority of Buddhist images have been made by unknown or unrecorded
sculptors and painters (as is also true for much of the world’s religious art). When
anything is known about the creation of an image—and this is so in only a very small
minority of instances—the information is typically derived from an inscription of some
sort, many of which are brief or only partly decipherable. Accordingly, and with a few
notable exceptions, relatively little is known about many individual Buddhist artists or
their motivation for producing artwork.
Historically, perhaps the greatest exception to this tendency towards anonymity is
provided by the example of Chan (Zen) painting, which in Western scholarship is one
of the most noticed and celebrated forms of Buddhist art, and one of the only categories
that can be associated with a substantial number of named artists.16 Even if detailed bio-
graphical information is still difficult to come by in most instances, the fact that specific
paintings can be linked with specific painters seems to have made Chan/Zen painting
more approachable to Western art historians. That is, for scholars whose disciplinary
methods are rooted in the concept of the individual creative genius, the Chan/Zen nar-
rative proved familiar.

But as various scholars have pointed out in recent years, the general Western under-
standing of Zen was based largely on misperceptions and misapprehensions. As Robert
Sharf sums it up.
[T]hose aspects of Zen most attractive to the Occident—the emphasis on spiritual

experience and the devaluation of institutional forms—were derived in large part
from Occidental sources. Like Narcissus, Western enthusiasts failed to recognize
their own reflection in the mirror being held out to them.17
In many ways, these comments are also relevant to the way in which Zen painting has
been understood in the West, in that the art-historical emphasis on the supposed self-
expressivity of Chan/Zen painting and on the function of painting as a vehicle for spiri-
tual creativity are ideas that similarly derive primarily from Occidental sources: when
critics and art historians first peered into the mirror of Chan/Zen painting, they saw
(with approval) analogues of Modernism and Abstract Expressionism reflected back at
them. While the qualities so admired in Chan/Zen ink painting (directness, spontane-
ity) have been aptly linked to doctrinal values, there is no evidence to support the con-
tention that these characteristics were linked with the act of painting at the time of their
execution. In short, the notion of employing art as a vehicle for religious self-expression
is anachronistic when attributed to Chan/Zen painting, just as it is with regard to virtu-
ally all other forms of Buddhist art.
If, historically, images in Buddhism were primarily made to serve specific ritual func-
tions and purposes, in recent decades a significant number of artists have in varying
ways engaged Buddhist philosophical ideas and/or imagery in creating works that fall
outside the parameters of traditional Buddhist worship. The ongoing “On-Air” series
by the Korean photographer Atta Kim (b. 1956), the lost-wax “Melting Void” installa-
tions of the Thai artist Montien Boonma (1953–2000), or the multi-media “Nirvana” by
the Japanese video artist Mariko Mori (b. 1967), to cite but a few prominent examples,
engage such fundamental Buddhist concepts as impermanence and personal transfor-
mation in diverse and often surprising ways.18 One thing these works have in common
is that they were expressly created to be viewed in a gallery or museum, rather than, say,
a Buddhist temple. In other words, unlike the vast bulk of traditional Buddhist images,
they were conceived from the start as “art” objects rather than as “icons”; ironically,
however, to date few histories of Buddhist art seem willing or able to accommodate such
unconventional expressions within their boundaries.
27.7 The End of Buddhist Art History?
Broadly speaking, art historians have typically treated “Buddhist art” as a straightfor-
ward and self-evident category (primarily comprising paintings and sculptures of
Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and related figures). As the discussion above has suggested,

however, this position has increasingly come under attack from practitioners of
Buddhism and historians of religion (among others) who have challenged the appropri-
ateness of invoking the concept of “art” to refer to the animated Buddhist icon. The con-
flict between (secular) art object and (sacred) icon, is certainly not unique to Buddhism,
and has arisen in connection with numerous forms of religious art. Indeed, this is
precisely the issue that prompted the Archbishop of Westminster to ask the National
Gallery in London in 2008 to transfer Piero della Francesca’s “Baptism of Christ” to his
cathedral. “It is a mistake to treat it as a work of art,” said the Archbishop, “it is a work of
faith and piety.”19
In some sense, it could be argued that the issue here is one of semantics, though it
also points to the importance of context and framing in determining an object’s mean-
ing: a sculpture of a Buddha (or a Renaissance “Baptism” for that matter) addresses a
very different audience and also functions very differently when it is removed from a
site of worship and placed in a museum. From this perspective, in fact, it might be fair
to say that the sculpture on a temple altar and the sculpture in a museum vitrine are not
the “same” object in different locales, but rather different objects all together. To bor-
row Wittgenstein’s famous dictum which, though not originally meant to apply to visual
artifacts, is apposite here: the meaning is the use.
Ultimately, what is at stake in this debate? Why and to whom does it matter if an
image is called an icon or a work of art? For Buddhist believers, certainly, this is essen-
tially a difference without a distinction: “art” and “icon” are conventional designations,
born of discursive consciousness and a failure to recognize that both are ultimately illu-
sory, “empty” categories. For art historians and historians of religion, however, these
distinctions have a direct and significant impact both on what constitutes the object
of study, and on how such study will be carried out. By its very nature, a method that
focuses almost exclusively on style, iconography, and aesthetics will tend to understand
Buddhist images in terms of Western categories of value, while also overlooking whole
categories of objects that lie beyond the pale of art. Such an approach, which also tends to
privilege historical value, will also overlook centuries of production: Robert E. Fisher’s
popular survey text, Buddhist Art and Architecture, for instance, does not include a
single object more recent than the eighteenth century, while Denise Patry Leidy’s more
recent The Art Of Buddhism ends in the nineteenth.20
If traditional Buddhist art history has essentially been rooted in exclusion—ignoring
objects that are too new, too naive, too crude, too derivative, and so on—an increasing
number of scholars have been taking a somewhat different approach by adapting the
paradigm of “visual culture” as a useful way to proceed without simply perpetuating the
presumptions of earlier generations. The visual culture model, which originally evolved
from concerns about incorporating new media and modes of representation into the
framework of art history, approaches visuality in a neutral way, one that attempts to
erase distinctions between supposedly high and low forms of expression. In the context
of Buddhism, this method makes it possible to look at objects in multiple ways, and also
to incorporate into the field of study the numberless images that have been historically
invisible. In Ordinary Images, for example, Stanley K. Abe very clearly demonstrates the

valuable insights that can be derived from the close analysis of Buddhist objects that
were long ignored precisely because they were deemed to be ordinary, and thus unwor-
thy of attention.21 While it is too soon, perhaps, to declare the end of Buddhist art his-
tory, all indications are that it will be strongly challenged if not eclipsed in the future by
the narrative of Buddhist visual culture that is slowly being written.
Notes
1. The paucity of Buddhist remains for this early period is not so startling when considered
in a broader context. As Frederick Asher has noted, not “a single material remain
survives from the entire 1,600-year period” in India between the end of Harappan
culture and the reign of King Ashoka in the third century BCE. Frederick Asher, “On
Mauryan Art,” in A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, ed. Rebecca M. Brown
and Deborah S. Hutton (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 421.
2. Illustrations of many of the works referred to in this chapter can be found in Denise
Patry Leidy, The Art of Buddhism: An Introduction to Its History and Meaning
(Boston: Shambhala, 2008).
3. Susan L. Huntington, “Early Buddhist Art and the Theory of Aniconism,” Art Journal 49,
no. 4 (1990): 401–408
4. Vidya Dehejia, Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India (New Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997).
5. Alfred Foucher, The Beginnings of Buddhist Art, trans. L.A. Thomas and F.W. Thomas
(Paris: P. Geuthner, 1917), 151.
6. Ananda Coomaraswamy, “The Indian Origins of the Buddha Image,” Journal of the
American Oriental Society 56 (1926): 165–166.
7. Robert H. Sharf, “Prolegomenon to the Study of Japanese Icons,” in Living Images: Japanese
Buddhist Icons in Context, ed. Robert H. Sharf and Elizabeth Horton Sharf (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 1.
8. For more on the King Udayana image, see Marsha Weidner, ed., Latter Days of the
Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism 850–1850 (Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art, 1994),
221–225.
9. Alexander C. Soper, Literary Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China (Ascona,
Switzerland: Artibus Asiae, 1959), 58.
10. Si-yu-ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, trans. Samuel Beal (1884; repr.,
New York: Paragon Books, 1968), 1:103.
11. Sarah J. Horton, Living Buddhist Statues in Early Medieval and Modern Japan
(New York: Macmillan Palgrave, 2007), 12.
12. See Richard Gombrich, “The Consecration of Buddhist Images,” The Journal of Asian
Studies 26, no. 1 (1966): 23–36.
13. Gregory Schopen, “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian
Buddhism,” in Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 1997), 1–22.
14. Ernest F. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East Asiatic
Design, rev. ed., 2 vols. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), see esp. vol. 1, 28–168.

15. Donald F. McCallum, Zenkoji and Its Icon: A Study in Medieval Japanese Religious Art
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5–6.
16. See Helmut Brinker, Zen in the Art of Painting (New York: Arkana, 1987), for a convenient
introduction.
17. Robert H. Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study
of Buddhism Under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), 140.
18. See Atta Kim, On-Air Eighthours (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009); Apinan Poshyananda,
Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind (New York: Asia Society, 2003); and Mariko Mori
(Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998).
19. David Itzkoff, “Archbishop Says Picture Belongs in a Church,” The New York Times
November 29, 2008.
20. Robert E. Fisher, Buddhist Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993);
Leidy, The Art of Buddhism.
21. Stanley K. Abe, Ordinary Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
References
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Baas, Jacquelynn. Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to
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Brinker, Helmut. Zen in the Art of Painting. New York: Arkana Books, 1987.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda. “The Indian Origin of the Buddha Image.” Journal of the American
Oriental Society 56 (1926): 165–170.
Davis, Richard H. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Davis, Whitney. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2011.
Dehejia, Vidya. Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India. New Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997.
Fenollosa, Ernest F. Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East Asiatic
Design, rev. ed., 2 vols. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912.
Fisher, Robert E. Buddhist Art and Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.
Foucher, Alfred. The Beginnings of Buddhist Art. Translated by L. A. Thomas and F. W. Thomas.
Paris: P. Geuthner, 1917.
Gombrich, Richard. “The Consecration of Buddhist Images.” The Journal of Asian Studies 26.1
(1966): 23–36.
Horton, Sarah J. Living Buddhist Statues in Early Medieval and Modern Japan. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Huntington, Susan L. “Early Buddhist Art and the Theory of Aniconism.” Art Journal 49.4
(1990): 401–8.
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November 29, 2008.
Jacob, Mary-Jane. Grain of Emptiness: Buddhism-Inspired Contemporary Art. New York: Rubin
Museum of Art, 2010.
Kim, Atta. On-Air Eighthours. Ostfildern, Germany : Hatje Cantz, 2009.

Leidy, Denise Patry. The Art of Buddhism: An Introduction to its History and Meaning.
Boston: Shambhala, 2008.
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Okudaira, Hideo. Narrative Picture Scrolls. New York: Weatherhill, 1973.
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Schopen, Gregory. Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology,
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Sharf, Robert H., and Elizabeth Horton Sharf, eds. Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in
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Soper, Alexander C. Literary Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China. Ascona,
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Weidner, Marsha, ed. Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism 850–1850. Lawrence,
KS: Spencer Museum of Art, 1994.

C HA P T E R 28
TAO I S M A N D T H E A RT S
DE B OR A H A . S OM M E R
The Chinese term “dao” (which appears in older romanizations as “tao”) means “way”
and can be understood literally as a road, path, or pathway or as the way the entire cos-
mos operates. Many Chinese texts and spiritual practices explore the significance of the
Way, or Dao, and how it might be enacted in human life, but whether it is valid to label
them “Daoist” is questionable. Usages of the term “Daoism” or “Daoist,” and even more
so “Daoist art,” are in fact controversial, and not all sources mentioned below even nec-
essarily describe their object of study as Daoist. Debates over these issues are beyond
the scope of this essay, but for an introduction to this problem one might turn to Nathan
Sivin’s review article “Old and New Daoisms” or to the Daoism Handbook, edited by
Livia Kohn, which is a compilation of articles by specialists on Daoist art, music, ritual,
and literature.
In this chapter the term Daoist will be used in a very broad sense to refer to beliefs
and practices associated with the apprehension of the Dao; similarly, the net of “reli-
gious ways of being artistic” will be cast wide. Here it includes such diverse phenomena
as painting, calligraphy, talismans and diagrams, visualization, sculpture, architecture,
the construction of sacred space, ritual performance, and body movement. Works in
the bibliography are limited to studies in Western languages. Daoist art and visual cul-
ture are as yet little understood and have received far less attention than, for example,
Buddhist art. Scholars of Daoist studies have themselves given much more attention
to texts than visual culture: the two-volume Encyclopedia of Taoism, edited by Fabrizio
Pregadio, for example, devotes only two pages to art.
The very question of what might be considered Daoist art is addressed in Stephen
Little’s article “What is Taoist Art?” And for a concise historical introduction to the state
of the field, one might consult his contribution to the Daoism Handbook: “Daoist Art,”
which surveys major visual and textual sources from antiquity to the end of twentieth
century. Little notes that Daoist art is as yet barely studied; many objects in museums
worldwide are not even recognized as being Daoist and remain unidentified. Stephen
Little is also the editor of an important catalog of Daoist art: Taoism and the Arts of
China, which documents one of the largest exhibitions of Daoist art ever convened in

North America. Largely devoted to paintings, this work also includes such objects as
calligraphic works, sculpture, ceramics, embroideries, and talismans. This volume
greatly exceeds the traditional exhibition catalog in scope, as in addition to provid-
ing extensive object descriptions it also includes articles by specialists on Daoist art,
thought, and architecture and hence provides an excellent illustrated introduction to
Daoist art. Materials are arranged chronologically and topically. Another monumental
exhibition of Daoist art, one comprised largely of objects from European collections,
was shown at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2010. The profusely illustrated exhibition cata-
log La Voie du Tao: Un Autre Chemin de l’Etre (published by the Grand Palais and the
Galeries Nationales) includes articles by specialists on such subjects as Daoist painting,
temple architecture, cosmology, ritual, and talismans.
Turning from images to texts, Franciscus Verellen’s “The Dynamic Design: Ritual and
Contemplative Graphics in Daoist Scriptures” surveys the many kinds of illustrations
found in the massive Daoist canon. Verellen’s work suggests how difficult it is to distin-
guish between “text” and “image” when textual graphs expand into symbolic talismans
that are visually very complex. Calligraphic works themselves, whether created by brush
or carved on stone, have for centuries been considered works of art in China that are
in no way seconded by painting. Shawn Eichmann’s “Art of Taoist Scriptures” analyzes
the art of creating written texts for Daoist purposes. For an English-language handbook
to the Daoist canon itself, consult The Taoist Canon, which is edited by Verellen and
Kristofer Schipper. This work is intended for specialists but contains illustrations acces-
sible to a wider audience.
The mythic Laozi, the purported author of the Daodejing, the “Classic of the Dao
and Inner Power,” is one of the most frequently depicted figures in Daoist art and has
been imagined in various ways. Looking at medieval textual sources, Livia Kohn’s “The
Looks of Laozi” describes how Laozi’s body was conceptualized and visualized in reli-
gious texts as a body of signs bearing cosmic significance. Focusing on depictions of
Laozi in sculpted form rather than textual descriptions, Yoshiko Kamitsuka’s “Lao-tzu
in Six Dynasties Taoist Sculpture” emphasizes the significance of Buddhist influence
in the development of early Daoist sculptures and explores their ritual uses. The ico-
nography of lesser divinities is documented in Keith Stevens’s Chinese Gods: the Unseen
World of Spirits and Demons. This book’s many color photographs capture contem-
porary folk sculptures of deities in situ in their home temples in southern and eastern
China. Questions of how one might appropriately depict the numinous are addressed
in Florian Reiter’s “The Visible Divinity,” which is a historical study of Daoist writings
about creating icons.
What might constitute “Daoist” art as opposed to Chinese “Buddhist” art, and what
exchanges occurred between them when Buddhism entered China in the early centu-
ries of the Common Era? Debates ensue concerning the direction and extent of artis-
tic influence: some have suggested that Daoist iconography was heavily influenced by
Buddhism, and yet others have suggested that Daoist images of the Han (206 BCE–220
CE) and Wei-Jin (220–420) eras hark back to native models that pre-date the entry of
Buddhism in China. Liu Yang’s “Origins of Daoist Iconography,” which studies a body

TAOISM AND THE ARTS 381
of fourth- and fifth-century Daoist sculptures, argues for the Chinese origins of certain
visual motifs. Liu’s approach is art-historical and focuses on the description of objects,
but Stephan Bokenkamp’s “Yang Boduo Stele,” which considers materials of roughly the
same era, looks primarily at texts recorded on stone. Book-length studies on exchanges
between Buddhist and Daoist art in early medieval times are heavily weighted toward
Buddhist images, as is Stanley Abe’s Ordinary Images, which as its title implies focuses
on less monumental works. Writing from an art-historical perspective, Abe emphasizes
the complexity of the interchanges between early medieval Buddhist and Daoist sculp-
ture. Christine Mollier’s Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face emphasizes texts rather
than objects, but a chapter on a Daoist divinity that bears similarities to the Buddhist
Guanyin also considers painted and sculpted images.
Several studies explore the political context of Daoist art, particularly with regard to
imperial patronage. Liu Yang’s “Images for the Temple” provides historical and visual
descriptions of Tang era (618–907) Daoist images and temples and considers stylistic
shifts in Tang Daoist art. Studying the significance of imperial support for the develop-
ment of Daoist art, Yang suggests that symbolic associations that imperial families tried
to establish with the powers of Daoist divinities bolstered their political aspirations.
Drawing on textual sources when the archeological record is lacking, Yang describes
the history of Daoist temple architecture and the iconography of sculpted images from
the Han through the Tang. Turning to the much-later Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Xun
Liu’s “Visualizing Perfection” focuses less on stylistic concerns in this study of rela-
tionships between painting, court politics, and religious practices. Liu explores how
nineteenth-century depictions of Our Lady (niangniang), who was revered by some as
a folk divinity associated with female reproduction, were also created as illustrations of
the processes of inner alchemy. Liu places the creation of these paintings within the con-
text of relationships between the White Cloud Temple in Beijing and elite and imperial
families.
Some studies are site-specific, as is Paul Katz’s Images of the Immortal, which explores
the iconography of the Palace of Eternal Joy (Yongle gong), a temple in Shanxi province
associated with the mythic Daoist immortal Lü Dongbin. Taking an interdisciplinary
perspective informed especially by religious studies, Katz sets out to explore the cultural
diversity of this site and its many different representations, both visual and textual, of Lü.
Katz provides a multilayered cultural history of the temple’s murals and inscriptions and
describes their didactic content and ritual uses. Turning farther south, to Hubei prov-
ince, Pierre-Henry de Bruyn’s studies of Wudang Shan consider Wudang Mountain sites
that became important in the Ming (1368–1644). He discusses the iconography of the
divinity Zhenwu and considers its importance for imperial interests. Jing Anning looks
at the iconography of Jin and Yuan caves in Shanxi in “The Longshan Daoist Caves,”
focusing also on their connection to liturgical traditions and to questions of orthodox
transmission within Quanzhen (“Complete Reality”) Daoism.
Most studies of Daoist painting of necessity focus on works dating to the Ming or later,
for few paintings exist from before the Yuan (1279–1368). The largest illustrated stud-
ies of Daoist painting are the Grand Palais’s La Voie du Tao and Stephen Little’s catalog

Taoism and the Arts of China. A smaller, earlier exhibition of Daoist paintings and other
objects is documented in Little’s Realm of the Immortals: Daoism in the Arts of China.
Traditionally, studies of Chinese painting, Daoist or otherwise, have been informed by
connoisseurship: the art of describing an image’s visual content and examining its seals,
colophons, and other inscriptions with a view to determining its authenticity. Such an
approach informs Wan-go Weng’s “A Tall Pine and Daoist Immortal.” More recently,
studies of painting have been informed by interdisciplinary approaches drawing upon
the fields of religious studies, ritual studies, anthropology, visual culture, and medicine.
Shi-Shan Susan Huang’s “Summoning the Gods: Paintings of Three Officials of Heaven,
Earth and Water and Their Association with Daoist Ritual Performance in the Southern
Song Period,” as its title suggests, focuses on these painting’s uses in ritual contexts.
Huang is one of the few scholars who specializes in Daoist visual culture.
Performative practices such as ritual and liturgical dramaturgy may be considered
arts themselves. Works in this subject are often the product of anthropologically based
field research combined with analysis of premodern documentary sources. Kristofer
Schipper’s “Mu-lien Plays in Taoist Liturgical Context” compares Buddhist-influenced
plays about the mythic figure Mulian to Daoist funerary services in terms of struc-
ture and the theater of liturgical performance. Robin Ruizendaal’s “Ritual Text and
Performance in the Marionette Theatre of Southern Fujian and Taiwan” explores
another kind of dramaturgy, puppet theater, from the perspective of ritual studies.
Considering texts and performances of marionette troupes from Fujian and Taiwan,
Ruizendaal describes the rituals’ exorcistic aspects. Marionette theater as practiced in
southern China utilizes almost-lifesized representations of the human body to instanti-
ate cosmic forces within a community.
Two-dimensional illustrations or diagrams of the human body produced on paper
and silk or incised on stone steles have received considerable scholarly attention. Such
images depict the body in its ordinary, cosmic, inner, and visionary forms and are used
to supplement ritual practices. Many of these images are known as tu, or diagrams.
Catherine Despeux’s Taoïsme et Corps Humain: le Xiuzhen Tu explores several versions
of diagrams (tu) for cultivating (xiu) the body to the point at which it becomes “realized”
(zhen) or perfected. She provides detailed descriptions of the diagrams and the spiritual
practices associated with them. Similar kinds of materials are explored in her “Visual
Representations of the Body in Chinese Medical and Daoist Texts,” an article whose title
indicates the overlap between the religious and healing arts in China. Those looking for
“Daoist” visual culture will also find sources in such studies of Chinese medicine as Paul
Unschuld’s Medicine in China: Historical Artifacts and Images, which contains illustra-
tions of body charts from earliest times.
Many illustrations explore how the body inhabits the cosmic landscape and how the
cosmos abides within the body. One particular diagram, the Neijing tu, maps the inner
(nei) landscape (jing) of the human body and provides a template for transforming the
self through the alchemy of inner vision. Louis Komjathy’s “Mapping the Daoist Body”
(Parts 1 and 2) considers the image’s historical context, its visual content, and its use
as an aid to spiritual practice. Depictions of how to journey through the astral planes

of this landscape are the subject of Shi-shan Susan Huang’s “Daoist Imagery of Body
and Cosmos, Part 1: Body Gods and Starry Travel,” an interdisciplinary exploration of
Ming era illustrations. Diagrams and other graphic images appeared in many forms,
and in addition to depicting the body, they illustrated numerous other symbolic sys-
tems. Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China, edited by
Francesca Bray et al., explores the shape and significance of diagrams in many areas of
learning in China, from ancient divination to modern cartography. Catherine Despeux’s
“Talismans and Sacred Diagrams” considers other kinds of visual depictions used to
interact with the spiritual realm, and she discusses their historical, textual, and religious
significance.
Images on paper facilitated visualizations created within the mind. Isabelle
Robinet’s Taoist Meditation: The Mao-Shan Tradition of Great Purity deals in
part with visualization practices. So do several articles in Taoist Meditation and
Longevity Techniques, edited by Livia Kohn, and this volume also contains articles
on body cultivation. Tian Xiaofei’s “Seeing with the Mind’s Eye: The Eastern Jin
Discourse of Visualization and Imagination” explores the vocabulary and the cog-
nitive aspects of visualization practices from the fourth and fifth centuries. Tian
explores both Daoist and Buddhist perceptions of landscape and their expressions
in literature and the visual arts.
The study of material culture is in vogue in sinology, and one can find its influ-
ence in Daoist studies. The title of Suzanne Cahill’s “Material Culture and the
Dao: Textiles, Boats, and Zithers in the Poetry of Yu Xuanji” speaks directly to this
topic. Considering how material objects exist also as ideas and mental images, Cahill
looks at how a courtesan turned Daoist nun uses images of textiles, boats, and zith-
ers in her writings. Cahill considers another kind of object—mirrors—in her “The
Moon Stopping in the Void: Daoism and the Literati Ideal in the Mirrors of the Tang
Dynasty,” again crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries between religious stud-
ies and the visual arts.
Regarding Daoism and architecture, one of the largest studies is Qiao Yun’s Taoist
Buildings, one volume of the illustrated series Ancient Chinese Architecture, which was
originally published in Chinese. Created from the perspective of architectural history,
this volume first discusses Daoist thought, history, and practice before focusing on
architectural studies of structures, construction techniques, and the selection of sites.
Taoist Buildings surveys monasteries, grottoes, mountain temples, and other structures
throughout China. Nancy Steinhardt’s “Temple to the Northern Peak in Quyang,” on the
other hand, looks at the architectural history of a thirteenth-century temple in Hebei
from a more historical and political perspective and considers it in terms of ritual praxis
and the cultural interests of Mongol rulers. Turning to vernacular architecture, Ronald
Knapp’s China’s Living Houses explores how people inhabit their own living spaces and
understand them as imbued with spiritual significance.
Regarding Daoist architecture in general, one might nonetheless question what pre-
cisely constitutes a “Daoist” structure, which might otherwise look very much like a
“Confucian” or “Buddhist” building save for the identity of the residing deities or its

ritual uses. And the locations of statues of iconic figures, and even their identities, can be
altered at will. For example, a statue that is now labeled as an image of the “Confucian”
figure of the scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200) currently resides at the Daoist White Cloud
Monastery in Beijing. But the statue originally had another, now unknown identity and
was relocated to the Daoist temple from an unknown location.
How people experience sites, spaces, and places is also shaped by understandings of
the Way. China’s Sacred Sites by Nan Shunxun and Beverly Foit-Albert, who are archi-
tects and historians of architecture, studies how structures are related to their sur-
rounding topography. Their photographs survey many sites throughout contemporary
China. They document many lesser-known places and include not just individual
buildings but also mountain villages, cave and cliff complexes, and riverside and lake
sites. James Robson’s Power of Place focuses on one mountain site, the Southern Sacred
Peak (Nanyue), and approaches his materials from the perspectives of history and
cultural geography. He considers the peak as a site of pilgrimage and temple-building
and explores the nature of Buddhist and Daoist interactions in the Tang (618–907).
Mountains were a favorite abode of Daoist immortals and transcendents (xian), and
mountains might exist both on the earth and in the mind. The religious significance
of mountains and the many ways their sacrality is depicted visually is explored in
Munakata Kiyohiko’s Sacred Mountains in Chinese Art, which surveys everything from
Daoist mountain sites to miniature sculpted simulacra of realms of the immortals.
The many complex and ill-defined phenomena loosely known as Daoism also trav-
eled beyond China proper into Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Several studies explore these
regions on this subject, and each is very different in approach and choice of subject mat-
ter. Kenneth Robinson’s “Daoist Geographies in Three Korean World Maps” is unusual
for its choice of subject matter, for the study of Asian cartography, not to mention Daoist
cosmological cartography, is in its infancy. Looking at selected Korean maps from the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Robinson explores their Daoist cosmologies of space
and analyzes how they visually articulate phenomena such as continents, islands of the
immortals, and paradises.
Turning to Japan, Stephen Addiss’s “Daoist Themes in Early Modern Japanese
Painting” takes a more traditional art-historical approach and describes selected paint-
ings and calligraphic works from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries that have
Daoist content. Herman Ooms in his Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan
takes an interdisciplinary approach in his study of intellectual history, semiotics, and
politics. Ooms considers how early Japanese rulers employed Chinese Daoist thought,
ritual praxis, architecture, and material culture (swords and mirrors) in the construc-
tion of political and symbolic systems.
Daoism also was important among the Yao people (who are known by various names)
who inhabit what is now southern China and northern Vietnam. Eli Albert’s History
of Daoism explores their visual symbolic systems, and Christine Hemmet’s and John
Lagerwey’s “Un manuscrit taoïste Yao du Vietnam” studies their ritual attire and paint-
ings. Significant collections of Yao ritual art are housed at Ohio University.

The study of Daoist visual culture has only just begun, and significant issues remain
regarding the very usage of the term “Daoist.” Until the past few decades, even Daoist
texts, let alone images, were not well-known in the West, and few of the hundreds of
texts in the Daoist canon have been studied. Much work remains to be done on this rela-
tively little-known subject.
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C HA P T E R 29
C O N F U C IA N I S M A N D
T H E A RT S
DE B OR A H A . S OM M E R
Before considering Confucian ways of being artistic in a religious context, one must
consider certain issues regarding the term “Confucian,” which has been used in many
different ways in academic and popular writing: it has referred to everything from the
teachings of Confucius (551–479 BCE) to Chinese culture in general. In sinology, the
current trend is to avoid labels such as “Confucian,” a Western term derived from the
latinized word “Confucius,” which is itself a sixteenth-century Jesuit romanization of
Kongzi, Confucius’s name in Chinese. The English word “Confucian” is not a translation
of any Chinese term in use in Confucius’s time, and Confucius was not a founding figure
of a religious tradition called Confucianism. Scholars of early China in particular avoid
using such labels as “Confucian” or “Daoist,” especially for the period before the first
century BCE.
The historical construction of the term “Confucian” is beyond the scope of this essay,
but all caveats aside, here it will be understood to refer to a legacy of worldviews and
practices associated with a body of literature compiled largely anonymously by roughly
the fourth century BCE. Important works in this corpus are texts such as the Book of
Change (Yijing), Book of Odes (Shijing), Book of Documents (Shangshu), Master Zuo’s
Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu Zuo zhuan), the Analects of
Confucius (Lunyu), the writings of Mencius (372?–289? BCE) and Xunzi (313?–238?
BCE), and the somewhat later Book of Ritual (Liji).1 This chapter will take as its subject
matter selected aesthetic phenomena generally associated with the content of this body
of material and its later commentarial tradition, which was a scholarly, literati, or classi-
cal tradition that often had little or nothing to do with Confucius.
As these texts discuss a wide range of subjects—self-cultivation, interpersonal human
relations, the family, religious praxis, and all aspects of governing the state, to name a
few—one might reasonably conclude that there is very little in Chinese culture that is
not in some way “Confucian.” This body of literature moreover influenced people of
all spiritual persuasions, even the atheistic or nontheistic persuasions of modern-day

CONFUCIANISM AND THE ARTS 389
Maoists. And one might well ask whether some phenomena discussed below are nec-
essarily “Confucian,” since they might be associated with the worldview of anyone of
any religious persuasion or of no religious persuasion at all. The architecture of shrines
to Confucius, for example, might be remarkably similar to that for imperial build-
ings, shrines to Laozi, or Buddhist temples. No doubt the authors of many of the works
described herein would not consider their subject matter to be particularly “Confucian.”
Yet if their works somehow consider the aesthetic qualities of phenomena related to
such subjects as ritual or governance or to the legacy of the classical texts noted above,
I have taken the liberty of including them here.
Even the notions “religious” and “artistic” beg to be defined in the Chinese context.
No term for “religion” as understood in a denominational or institutional sense existed
strongly in China, where the general term “teachings,” or jiao, was more commonly used.
The Chinese term currently used for “religion”—zongjiao—is actually a borrowing from
the West via Japan and was imported into China in the nineteenth century. Generally
speaking, however, “being religious” might be understood to encompass many levels
of belief and practice in premodern China, ranging from a personal sense of spiritual-
ity, participation in family rites, the performance of rites at the regional and state levels,
or the quest for sagehood. Notions of Confucian spirituality and religiosity have them-
selves only recently become subjects of interest in their own right in Chinese studies,
where for decades Confucianism was perceived as a kind of secular or philosophical
humanism. Confucian religiosity is explored in the two-volume Confucian Spirituality,
edited by Tu and Tucker, although no article in that work specifically addresses the aes-
thetic dimensions of the tradition.
In premodern China, “the arts” often consisted of subject matter very different than
that found in the modern West. In the centuries shortly after Confucius’s time, what
were known as the “six arts” (liu yi) were not the plastic arts of painting or sculpture
but were instead the arts of ritual, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and math-
ematics. Most of these were performative in nature, and most were practiced not by
professional “artists” but by nonprofessionals who participated in them for purposes
of self-cultivation or as part of their ascribed familial and social responsibilities. These
responsibilities included conducting ritual performances that sustained communica-
tions between the human community and the spirit world.
Sculpture, architecture, and even many kinds of painting were not necessarily con-
sidered “art” in many periods of Chinese history and were often considered craft or
artisanry, although painting became an elite avocation in later centuries. This chapter,
however, in addition to exploring several of the traditional six arts as they relate to reli-
giosity, will moreover consider such media as sculpture and architecture to fall under its
purview. Hence, it must be recognized that this chapter is informed not just by catego-
ries derived from premodern Chinese sources themselves but also by modern Western
notions of what constitutes artistic expression.
Study of the aesthetic or artistic aspects of the Confucian tradition, particularly its
visual aspects, is still in its infancy, both in Western and Asian secondary sources.2 The
so-called Illustrated Encyclopedia of Confucianism is in fact very sparsely illustrated,

and even massive historical surveys of Chinese art such as Chinese Sculpture devote
barely three pages to Confucian sculpture.3 The study of what has usually been called
Confucianism has until very recently been primarily the study of texts. Until the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century, few scholars of these texts explored visual resources.
But as sinology has become more interdisciplinary, visual and material sources that once
largely fell under the purview of art historians or archeologists are now beginning to be
taken more seriously as important cultural documents in their own right. Particularly
for the early periods of Chinese history, this trend has been facilitated in recent decades
by remarkable archeological discoveries of previously unknown kinds of objects.
Ritual and music (li yue) are two of the “six arts,” and they were sometimes under-
stood to belong to the bright or perceptible (ming) aspect of the cosmos that had its
counterpart in a hidden or nonvisible (you) world of spirits. Rites involved the presen-
tation and display of food offerings in sometimes phenomenally elaborate and costly
bronze vessels, and they were accompanied by theatrical dance performances.4 Rites
and music facilitated communication with the realm of spirits, and hence participation
in the visual, audial, and tangible world of rites and music could be understood as a
way of being religious. As early as the third century BCE, Xunzi discoursed on the cos-
mological significance of both ritual and music, and those phenomena are described in
greater detail in the Book of Rites.5 This latter text moreover records views on rites tradi-
tionally attributed to Confucius’s disciples, who were particularly noted for their skills
in ritual. Throughout Chinese history, the performance of rites was impingent upon
most members of society, from commoners who participated in weddings, funerals, and
commemorative rites to rulers who performed state-level rituals to heaven and earth.
In early times, rites were often mentioned in tandem with music, and premod-
ern forms of music and musical instruments have been the subject of several studies.
Social, economic, cultural, and technical aspects of ancient bronze musical instruments
found in recent archeological excavations are analyzed in von Falkenhausen’s Suspended
Music. To turn to a much later period, music’s association with ritual in later imperial
times has been studied extensively by Joseph Lam’s work, who looks at Ming era (1368–
1644) musicology from a historical and cultural approach and from the perspective of
ritual studies.
Besides bells, other forms of ancient bronze ritual vessels have been the subject of
numerous studies, although many have focused not so much on the objects themselves
as on the historical implications of the written inscriptions they bear. Some exhibition
catalogs, shaped by the interests of Western museum culture, present formal descrip-
tions of “artifacts” as objects of the museum-visitor’s gaze. Entries in museum catalogs
by nature focus on isolated material objects that have been displaced from their original
cultural matrix and have then been situated in juxtaposition to completely unrelated
objects. This is seen even in the exhibition catalog Confucius a l’aube de l’humanisme
chinois by the Musée Guimet that is ostensibly about the figure of Confucius but that
actually uses “Confucius” as a synecdoche for Chinese ritual practice, which is the focus
of the exhibition. Yet some catalogs address the religious and cultural significance of
material objects: works such as Yang Xiaoneng’s Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology and

the Hunan Provincial Museum’s Noble Tombs at Mawangdui, edited by Chen Jianming.
The longer articles in Mysteries of Ancient China, edited by Jessica Rawson, provide
even more substantial historical and religious context. Figuratively speaking, Anthony
J. Barbieri-Low’s Artisans in Early Imperial China removes material objects from the
museum and returns them back to the hands that made them, for he uncovers the for-
merly unknown lives, identities, and commercial aspirations of the artisans and crafts-
people who actually created the grave goods for the afterlife.
Moving beyond objects into places and sites, Wu Hung’s Monumentality in Early
Chinese Art and Architecture explores visual and cultural qualities of material objects
through an overarching theme he terms “monumentality,” and he extends that explora-
tion to include larger architectural phenomena such as tombs, temples, and even cit-
ies. Elsewhere, Wu focuses on one specific site in his Wu Liang Shrine, which closely
reads the complex iconography of the sculpted bas reliefs of a mortuary complex in
Shandong province and relates it to textual traditions that discuss concepts such as fil-
ial piety and cosmology. This particular site is revisited, and its iconographic narratives
deconstructed and reconstructed, in Recarving China’s Past by Liu et al., which ques-
tions many of the historiographical assumptions art historians have heretofore relied
upon in studying stone sculptures and inscriptions.
Turning inward, some studies see connections between the visual world of material
objects and the inner realm of the self. Martin J. Power’s Ornament, Society, and Self
in Classical China proposes that in early China there might have been deep underly-
ing associations between the structure and patterning of graphic designs on mate-
rial objects, on the one hand, and the construction of self and society, on the other.
Regardless of whether one finds this hypothesis convincing, one might note that
Powers’s philosophical and semiotic approach is considerably more abstract and even
psychological than the historically focused object-by-object format of museum cata-
logs. Dealing with later periods, the various articles in Self as Image in Asian Theory and
Practice, edited by Ames et al., also study notions of the self, and several contributions
in the book’s sections on China and Japan consider subjects relevant to the legacy of
Chinese classical texts. “Image” in the title of this volume is understood both literally
and figuratively as a manifestation of self or identity symbolically expressed in painted,
literary, and dramatic forms.
Chinese architectural history is explored in several recent studies, some of which dis-
cuss the religious aspects of buildings and spaces. Chinese Architecture is an illustrated
chronological survey of religious buildings, city plans, and residential and imperial
architecture. Edited by Nancy Steinhardt, who has published extensively in this area, the
volume includes articles by noted Chinese architectural historians, whose work is pre-
sented here to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Several of these scholars
were also involved in the compilation of a series on Chinese architecture that produced
Ritual and Ceremonious Buildings, which includes building elevations as well as pho-
tographs. This work, compiled by Sun Dazhang, devotes considerable attention to the
structure and history of buildings in Confucius’s home town of Qufu, to other shrines to

scholars located throughout the country, and to ritual sites in Beijing used for perform-
ing imperial-level sacrificial offerings.
One of the key focuses of Confucian discourse is the organization of the family, and
recent studies of residential architecture illustrate how families in different parts of
China shaped their living environments. Since ancient times, the home was not merely
a secular edifice but contained ritual spaces and clan altars; it was subject to spiritual
influences both malevolent and benign. Ritual, social, structural, and aesthetic aspects
of residential buildings are presented in the bilingual, illustrated Living Heritage edited
by Lo and Ho, which also considers how houses were connected to their environment.
Looking more specifically at how homes are inhabited, the various articles in House
Home Family: Living and Being Chinese, edited by Knapp and Lo, present a cultural and
social history of living spaces from the perspectives of various disciplines: religious
studies, the history of art and architecture, anthropology, and so on.
Clan altars in the home were often hung with portraits used in the performance of
commemorative offerings for ancestors. Such rites were discussed in detail in the
ancient Book of Rites, although portraits have only been used in the performance of rites
since perhaps the tenth century. Ancestral portraits have only recently been studied
in the West, as they fall outside the purview of the usual categories of Chinese paint-
ing and calligraphy, and their study is more closely associated with anthropological
research on the family than with the field of art history. Stuart’s and Rawski’s Worshiping
the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits catalogs a 2001 exhibition of ancestral
portraits and provides extensive background on their ritual and visual significance.
Siggstedt’s “Forms of Fate” considers the relationship between painted ancestral por-
traits and the practice of physiognomy, a form of divination that perceives the human
face as a microcosm of the universe. Siggstedt’s approach is textual and historical in
focus, as is Ebrey’s “Portrait Sculptures in Imperial Ancestral Rites in Song China,”
which considers the history of less-common three-dimensional sculpted portraits from
the eleventh century.
Physiognomy, ancestral portraits, and other ways of representing the human body
are studied in the various articles in Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture, edited by
Wu and Tsiang. Insights from the fields of visual and material culture studies are becom-
ing more evident in Chinese studies as scholars become more interdisciplinary in their
approach. This kind of interdisciplinarity has long been evidenced in the work of Craig
Clunas, whose Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China is
but one example. Clunas brings conceptual freshness to the study of objets, which in this
work he sees not as still objects in a gallery but as visible manifestations of intellectual
and social attitudes toward space, time, directionality, and emotion.
Both painted and sculpted ancestral portraits are anthropomorphic, but other impor-
tant visual phenomena from the Song era and later imperial times were abstract and
diagrammatic. Such were the various diagrams (tu) used by Song thinkers to chart
their philosophical and cosmological systems. Plotting the transformations of the Five
Phases of earth, metal, water, fire, and wood within the fluctuations of yin and yang and
the Great Ultimate (tai ji), scholars divined the movements of the cosmos and devised

human responses appropriate to them. Michael Lackner’s research on this subject ana-
lyzes the visual grammars of tenth- through fourteenth-century diagrams and relates
them to textual discourses about signification. His article “Diagrams as an Architecture
by Means of Words” is included in the monumental Graphics and Text in the Production
of Technical Knowledge in China, edited by Francesca Bray et al. Exploring diagrams
in China from ancient to modern times, this work understands tu diagrams as visual
means of communication that precipitate human action. Diagrams accompanying phil-
osophical texts became very popular in Korea and are studied by Michael Kalton in his
To Become a Sage: The Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning by Yi T’oegye.
Woodblock prints and other forms of illustration for classical texts became popular in
Ming times (1368–1644), and this is an area much studied in the works of Julia Murray.
For example, her Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian
Ideology is an interdisciplinary work that considers the relationship between the pro-
cesses of narrative illustration, textual commentaries, and ideals of governance.
During the same time period, focusing on different kinds of images, scholars began
to debate how the human body of figures such as Confucius might appropriately be
depicted during sacrificial offerings. Their arguments were based on beliefs about verisi-
militude and the relationship between images and their prototypes. Iconoclastic debates
on this subject are documented by Deborah Sommer in such works as her “Destroying
Confucius: Iconoclasm in the Confucian Temple.” In her “Images for Iconoclasts,”
she explores iconoclasm fueled by different motivations that appeared again in the
Confucian temple during the Cultural Revolution.
Finally, some studies examine not only the visual and material objects of the human
gaze but analyze how the gaze of visual perception is itself constructed. Michael Nylan’s
“Beliefs about Seeing: Optics and Moral Technologies in Early China” takes a compara-
tive philosophical approach and juxtaposes Chinese and Greek understandings of per-
ception. The importance of visuality and perception to the process of becoming a sage
is assessed in Brown’s and Bergeton’s “Seeing Like a Sage,” which is a textual exegetical
study of seeing in early Chinese texts that surveys the bibliography on this subject. Roel
Sterkx’s “Le Pouvoir des Sens: Sagesse et Perception Sensorielle en Chine Ancienne” also
analyzes the role of the senses in the project of sagehood.
Notes
1. For bibliographic introductions to these works, see Michael Loewe’s Early Chinese Texts
and the RoutledgeCurzon Encyclopedia of Confucianism, edited by Yao Xinzhong.
2. Only Western-language materials are included in the bibliography.
3. Edited by Taylor and by Howard et al., respectively.
4. Illustrated instructions for dances for ritual performances in later imperial times are
discussed in Standaert’s “Ritual Dances.”
5. For a complete translation of the Xunzi, see Knoblock’s three-volume Xunzi. The Book of
Rites is still available only in the nineteenth-century translation by James Legge: his Li Ki,
which appeared as volumes 27 and 28 of Max Mueller’s Sacred Books of the East Series.

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2003.

C HA P T E R 30
S H I N T Ō A N D T H E A RT S
SY BI L A . T HOR N TON
Shintō (the way of the gods) is a very problematic term which has been used to describe
a broad range of Japanese objects of veneration, rituals, and institutions from earliest
times to the present. The word itself only occurs 186 times between the years 720 and
1603/4 and 33 times in Chinese texts (shendao).1 In the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan,
also Nihongi, 720), where the word for the first time appears—in Chinese characters
and only four times—shintō means “shrines and their kami [gods],” i.e., not Buddhism;
moreover, it was read jindō or kami no michi and as shintō first only in a commentary by
a Buddhist monk in 1419.2 The meaning of the word itself changed along with the devel-
opments in the shrines, practices, and belief systems.
Nevertheless, a certain amount of homogenization was imposed over the centuries as
the main shrines were absorbed into the imperial shrine system in the eighth and ninth
centuries, as a process of identifying Buddhist deities with Japanese ones was devel-
oped, as the followers of (Urabe) Yoshida Kanetomo (1435–1511) and the Yoshida Shrine
received the right to grant ranks and licenses to all shrines but those connected with the
imperial family until 1868, as the state appropriated all shrines and their personnel until
1945, and, in the present, as priests seek training in one of only two institutions of higher
learning.
Shintō practices are generally dedicated to purification and renewal, bestowal of
worldly benefits, oracles, and communication with the dead. They share a body of prac-
tices, including washing hands and mouth, clapping hands, bowing, swishing paper
wands (gohei) and branches of sasaki (Cleyera japonica), parades, dancing, music,
prayers, and offerings. Rituals are usually focused on the body as needed, or organized
according to a yearly calendar; agricultural rites are organized according to the agricul-
tural calendar.
Concomitantly, the style of the visual imagery of Shintō art and architecture is dif-
ficult to pin down: before the seventh century there was neither sculpture, painting,
nor shrine. The objects of veneration, the kami are, briefly put, the invisible, formless,
and weightless forces that animate the world and those things, sentient and insentient,
possessed by them or controlled by them: the spirits of the living and the dead, of the

SHINTŌ AND THE ARTS 397
emperor and executed criminals; shape-shifting foxes and “badgers,” and sprites of the
water (kappa); waterfalls, trees, stones, mountains, wind and water; and even words.
Artifacts identified as Shintō art are objects that function in the worship of kami: as the
sites of veneration and vehicles of the kami; as offerings; as the costumes and accoutre-
ments of ritual performers; as the graphic and didactic representations of the shrines,
the kami, their Buddhist equivalents, and their place and significance in the cosmos; and
as the plastic and graphic representations of the kami themselves. What is clear is that all
models came from the continent and changed in conjunction with continental develop-
ments or lack of continental developments.
During the early part of the Heian period (794–1185), under the influence of
Buddhism, kami first came to be represented in a variety of media. Like their Buddhist
counterparts, they were initially carved from single blocks of wood and portrayed,
like the Buddhist deities themselves, with round faces, curved eyebrows, straight but
rounded shoulders, and crossed legs with knees flattened often to the floor. The god-
desses are readily identified by their heavy hair (as thick as Egyptian wigs!), thick lap-
pets hanging over the bosom, and a pony-tail falling from the top of the head; their
Chinese dress is from the Tang period (618–907): skirt and jacket or tunic in red and
green with ties falling from the neck or with a shawl. They may sit cross-legged or with
one knee up and gather their sleeves into their hands. The males sit cross-legged or on
their heels; they wear the attributes of officials: black (horsehair) hat, loose robes with
sleeves covering their hands, and short, flat staff of authority held erect. Often their faces
are stern, even angry-looking, because of their wide-open eyes or eyebrows meeting in
a “v” between the eyes. Having continental models and sculptors trained in the con-
tinental traditions made it inevitable that the kami should resemble their continental
counterparts.
Shintō kami developed from protectors of Buddhism and beings in need of salva-
tion to Japanese manifestations of Buddhist deities. A corresponding development in
representing kami emerged. The female kami are a little thinner, their robes resemble
Buddhist robes, when sitting cross-legged their knees hit the floor, and their hands, now
visible, are posed in magical gestures (mudra) of Buddhist deities. In this syncretic style,
some male kami are portrayed as monks, with shaved heads and full Buddhist robes, as
the image of Hachiman by Kaikei in the Tōdaiji in Nara.
In the Kamakura period (1185–1335), the development of naturalism in religious and
secular portraiture affected representation of the deities. The most representative, and
most beautiful, is the image of Tamayori-hime (1251) of the Yoshino Mikumari Shrine.
There she sits on her heels, dressed like any Heian court lady in a many-layered robe;
her hair is parted down the middle and is merely painted to hang in two lappets over her
bosom. Unlike the earlier images, she reveals a high forehead; her face resembles a nō
mask rather than a Buddha’s head, with a very faint smile, dimples, and thick eyebrows
painted above her shaved eyebrows; her hands are still hidden in her sleeves, although
the left hand is raised. The Izusan Gongen of the Hannya-in, Shizuoka Prefecture (incar-
nation of the Thousand-handed Kannon, Amida Buddha, and the Nyoirin Kannon) is
portrayed not only as a fat, jolly man but as a noble in informal dress with a monk’s robe

tied on his left shoulder. Male kami would normally appear in courtiers’ robes from this
time on. (Some were portrayed in the nude, hopefully with the idea of being dressed
by worshippers!) In paintings, too, the same rules were followed. Even the portraits in
their deified forms of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Hōkoku Daimyōjin; 1536–1598) at Saikyōji
in Ōtsu City, Shiga Prefecture and Tokugawa Ieyasu (Tōshō Daigongen; 1542–1616)
by Kanō Tanyū (1602-1674) at Nikko’s Tōshōgū portray them in courtiers’ robes, even
though they might just as easily have been portrayed as generals; Hideyoshi’s robes are a
little unusual in being white.
Most of the images, plastic or graphic, were hidden and brought out on the most
important occasions only. In the modern period, people are more accustomed to the
representation of an enshrined kami as a mirror, a shiny metal disc. As early as the first
century, bronze mirrors were being exported to Japan from China and buried in the
tombs of regional leaders. In about 240 A.D., one hundred bronze mirrors were pre-
sented to Queen Himiko by an embassy from the kingdom of Wei. Just what the func-
tion of these mirrors was is not clear (signs of legitimation or simply expensive gifts).
But they came to be acknowledged as the bodies of the kami or shintai by the seventh
century: the Nihon shoki records the mirror as one of the three imperial regalia given by
Amaterasu to her grandson when she orders him to descend to the world and rule it. She
instructs him to look at the mirror as if he were looking at herself, to keep it in his resi-
dence, and to keep it by his side. The founding ancestress and sun goddess Amaterasu
(invented probably as late as the sixth century) was enshrined at Ise only in the reign of
Temmu (r. 672–686). This Great Mirror or Sacred Mirror (yata no kagami), kept in the
main Inner Shrine of Ise, may or may not be the original: it was badly damaged in three
palace fires between 960 and 1005 and then lost and perhaps recovered from the sea at
the battle of Dannoura (1185). It probably resembles the typical Japanese-made bronze
mirror with concatenated arcs or flower-petals (naikōkamon-kyō), with a diameter of
46.5 centimeters uncovered in 1965 from a late-Yayoi site in what is now Itoshima City,
Fukuoka Prefecture.
To be worshipped, a kami must be summoned, whether by an individual or a commu-
nity. Every morning, a serving of the first rice cooked that day and fresh water are placed
in the family shrine in the kitchen, a miniature of a real one with an amulet representing
the kami enshrined there, and the kami (one or more—a family shrine can contain sev-
eral amulets) is summoned to receive the offerings with a clap of the hands. At New Year,
a clap of the hands and a ring of the bell summon the kami enshrined in the local shrine
to bestow blessings on each and every worshipper (and money is dropped into the box).
Drumming summons the war gods of Suwa.
For important occasions, or more important kami, more formal procedures must be
observed. The gods must be transferred to a site of worship. In some places, a kami is
invited to mount a horse—or the child mounted on the horse. In other places, the kami
is welcomed with a boat. These vehicles are identical in function with the miniature
shrines (mikoshi) paraded through the streets of Tokyo at the Asakusa Sanja Festival or
the gorgeous floats of Kyoto’s Gion Festival. Anything or anyone functioning to attract
a kami is called a yorishiro. They are the flowers on the hats of participants in parades

SHINTŌ AND THE ARTS 399
or the things held in the hands of dancers—trays, fans, or swords. They are the bells in
the hands of the shrine dancers who perform for the kami and the paper wands (gohei)
swished by a Shintō priest over a newly-married couple or land on which a building is
to be erected. They are also the women who used to be stationed around a noblewoman
giving birth to decoy malevolent spirits and prevent them from attacking the woman or
her infant.
Originally, kami were worshipped in the open air; sometimes they were invited to
temporary shrines, which were razed when the ceremonies were over. In any case,
storage was needed for religious regalia. In the late seventh century, as Shintō was
being developed in connection with the imperial court, permanent shrines were first
built: both Ise Shrine and Izumo Shrine were built (to be rebuilt every twenty years) by
the Imbe family, ritual abstainers and keepers of the imperial storehouses for regalia.
The imperial house co-opted the existing shrine of the Watarai clan at Ise, pushed it to
the side, and built what is now the Inner Shrine with a complete staff of ritualists from
the Imbe and Nakatomi families. The shrine was built with the technology of the time: a
floor raised on stilts; walls of boards notched and overlapping in the corners; two extra
pillars to support the weight of the thatch roof, its ridge pole, the short logs keeping the
thatch down, and the extra supports for the roof overhanging the veranda. As technol-
ogy improved, shrines changed. Ise and Izumo managed to preserve much of their origi-
nal style because they were rebuilt every twenty years (Izumo had to cease). The official
separation of Buddhism and Shintōism (shinbutsu bunri) begun in 1868 did much to
exaggerate the differences between the two, including the visual imagery.
The study of Shintō art as a distinctive strain of religious art in Japan was begun after
World War II by Kageyama Haruki, Maruyama Shūichi, and Oka Naomi. Scholarship
in English by Christine Guth, Susan C. Tyler, and Royall Tyler carries on in the tradi-
tion they established by focusing in the main on the art associated with specific shrines,
which speaks to the consciousness of Shintō as a religion specific to particular places
and communities.
Notes
1. According to the research of Murei Hitoshi, Chūsei shintō setsu keisei ronkō (Ise,
Japan: Kōgakkan Daigaku Shuppanbu, 1996). The dates refer to the publication of
the Nihon shoki and a Jesuit Japanese Dictionary. Mark Teeuwen, “From Jindō to
Shintō: A Concept Takes Shape,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 29, nos. 3–4
(Fall 2002), 236, available at http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/publications/jjrs/pdf/636.
pdf[http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/publications/ jjrs/pdf/636.pdf] (accessed March
18, 2010).
2. Teeuwen, “From Jindō,” 240–242. For commentary, citing Mitsuhashi Takeshi, “Kiki
to shintō to iu go,” in Kojiki Gakkai, comp., Kojiki no sekai jō, Kojiki Kenkyū Taikei 11
(Tokyo: Takashina Shoten, 1996), 112

Bibliography
Breen, John, and Teeuwen, Mark (2010). A New History of Shintō. Chichester, UK and Marden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Guth, Christine (1985). Shinzō: Hachiman Imagery and its Development. Cambridge, MA:
Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University : Distributed by Harvard University Press.
Kageyama Haruki (1973). The Arts of Shintō. Translated and adapted with an introduction by
Christine Guth. New York: Weatherhill/Tokyo: Shibundo.
Mitsuhashi Takeshi (2000). “Kiki to shintō to iu go.” In Kojiki Gakkai, comp. Kojiki no sekai jō.
Kojiki kenkyū taikei 11. Tokyo: Takashina Shoten, 99–124.
Murei Hitoshi (1996). Chūsei shintō setsu keisei ronkō. Ise, Japan: Kōgakkan Daigaku
Shuppanbu.
Teeuwen, Mark. (2002). “From Jindō to Shintō: A Concept Takes Shape.” Japanese Journal of
Religious Studies 29, nos. 3–4 (Fall 2002), 233–63.
Tyler, Royall (1990). The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tyler, Susan C. (1992). The Cult of Kasuga Seen Through its Art. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for
Japanese Studies, University of Michigan.
Watanabe Yasutada (1974). Shintō Art: Ise and Izumo Shrines. New York: Weatherhill/
Tokyo: Shibundo.

PA R T I V
I S SU E S A N D T H E M E S

C HA P T E R 31
A RT I S T RY A N D A E S T H E T I C S
IN MODERN AND
P O S T M O D E R N WO R S H I P
D ON E . S A L I E R S
At the heart of every religious tradition are concepts of worship and its practices. In
some traditions, such as Christianity and Judaism, communal worship is primary. In
others, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, except for specific festivals and in Hindu daily
temple puja (food ritually offered to a god), individual prayer and devotion is primary.
The study of aesthetics in those traditions pays particular attention to the role of the
human body and its artistry in devotional acts, characteristically honoring a specific
image of divinity. Thus in forms of Buddhism and Hinduism as well as in Christianity
paintings and sculptures are created as aids to prayer and meditative practices. Physical
images function to arouse and sustain the divinity’s presence to the mind and heart of
the worshipers. Communal worshiping traditions employ artistic means in various
ways, even when the suspicion of human senses is present within a particular religion or
its sub-communities, including non-theistic traditions. The academic or practical study
of artistry across the range of religious worship practices requires, as shall be noted,
interdisciplinary methods and resources.
The engagement of religious faith with art and aesthetic perception in public ritual
and private devotion has a long history. Sacred rituals contain a vast array of artistic
expression, including dance, song, poetry, story, images, and symbolic acts. This engage-
ment runs through the centuries in all of the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. In Judaism and Christianity, changes and developments in wor-
ship aesthetics reflect shifting theological perspectives, often resulting in conflict and
fierce polemics. Examples of conflicts range from the early church’s invective against
certain forms of music, to seventh- and eighth-century iconoclastic controversies
over the use of images, to the Protestant Reformation debates concerning the uses of
art and the problems of idolatry generated by human imagination. Jewish traditions
have struggled with issues such as how far Western musical traditions could enter the

liturgy. For example, as Lawrence Hoffman has pointed out, “Ashkenazi Jews cultivated
their own cultural foliage to block out musical accomplishments elsewhere. Knowing
that they themselves had not made it to the guild that churned out the great Christian
music, they assumed no Jew had, whereas, in fact, a long line of Jews in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Mantua . . . had successfully adapted the sound of the court to syna-
gogue melodies.”1
Some worship practices place emphasis on how well the rites are performed, while
others pay less attention to matters of quality and more to questions of ritual efficacy.
When comparing traditions of practice, there is a scale of concern for “doing the ritual
artfully,” depending upon the cultural codes that have accumulated for worshipping
communities. In the case of those traditions that value “good performance” of the rites,
matters of aesthetic adequacy and inadequacy—such as awkwardly spoken texts, poorly
done gestures, or ignorance of basic religious symbolism—become central. For exam-
ple, in high Anglo-Catholic churches, presiding ministers are expected to know and to
perform all the proper details of the ritual actions. In Vodou rituals, elegance is not a
primary value. Ritual efficacy may override aesthetic considerations. However, in nearly
every communal religious tradition congruence between the ethos of the enactment
and its content is paramount. Casual indifference to words and symbols in funeral rites,
for example, diminishes the meaning of participation in the rite. The quality of how a
ritual action is performed may either deepen or prohibit the participation of the com-
munity. Studies of artistry in worship must examine the aesthetic expectations that are
ingredients in each particular religious tradition and its associated cultural codes. Such
assessments can only be made by participant observation of actual worship contexts,
requiring attention to the whole environment of the occasion, including changing ele-
ments in the history of practice. This fact suggests the need for ethnographic skill.
31.1 The Study of Aesthetics in

Worship: Scholarly Sources
While there has always been aesthetic awareness among pre-modern theologians such
as Augustine, John of Damascus, Hildegard von Bingen, or Martin Luther, it has been
the twentieth century, together with the twenty-first, that has developed a new theoreti-
cal appreciation for the aesthetic dimensions of liturgy, generating both scholarly and
practical/theological reflection. The study of artistry and of the aesthetic dimensions
of worship occurs at the intersection of several disciplines: cultural anthropology, rit-
ual and performance studies, art history, phenomenology of experience, and religious/
theological aesthetics. Other chapters in this Handbook feature the general study of reli-
gious aesthetics belonging to particular religions. The emergence of a discipline called
liturgical aesthetics, still perhaps in its formative stages, supplies the basic approach
taken in this chapter.

ARTISTRY AND AESTHETICS IN WORSHIP 405
Among works that have helped to shape contemporary liturgical aesthetics are
Rudolph Otto’s Idea of the Holy 2 and Gerardus van der Leeuw’s Sacred and Profane
Beauty: The Holy in Art, an inquiry concerning how each of the basic arts articulates
and expresses “the Holy.”3 Many studies in the history of liturgical music offer particular
analyses, such as Idelsohn’s Jewish Music in Its Historical Development 4 and Quasten’s
Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity.5 Much of the new appreciation
for the cultural and ritual aspects of this inquiry can be traced to cultural anthropolo-
gists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas, whose work established the con-
cept of cultural relativity so dominant in the postmodern temperament. Victor Turner’s
The Forest of Symbols (1967) and The Ritual Process (1969) have strongly influenced
subsequent developments in studies of comparative worship patterns across religious
traditions.
In the final third of the twentieth century, a range of cultural and theological studies of
liturgy comprise a substantial set of scholarly resources. Questions of aesthetics in wor-
ship, and especially in Christian liturgical traditions, have become fully integrated into
the study of worship. Following the Second Vatican Council, questions of adaptation
and inculturating Christian worship in non-Western cultures contributed to growing
methodological reflection on cultural aesthetics in worship. Anscar Chupungco’s pio-
neering work has spawned further ethnographic methods of study.6 Roy A. Rappaport’s
Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity provides a framework for more specific
analyses of the aesthetic dimension of ritual.7 The Concilium series #132, Symbol and Art
in Worship, broke new ground concerning cultural arts and the process of inculturation
in liturgical reforms.8 Aidan Kavanagh’s Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style
offered a primer with a new consciousness of the Roman rites and aesthetic questions.9
More recently, Performance and Authenticity in the Arts has connected the field of per-
formance studies to the interdisciplinary character of liturgical aesthetics.10
Writing in Liturgy Digest in 1996, John Witvliet suggested that the discipline of liturgi-
cal aesthetics has a proper subject in the artistic/aesthetic dimensions of worship and
the art forms that service it; and that it aims to develop criteria for assessing the liturgi-
cal arts.11 The methodology proposed below focuses on relationships between specific
art forms and the qualities of “performance” in communal worship. Criteria for judg-
ment combine aesthetic, pastoral, historical, and theological norms. Hence, the study
of aesthetic dimensions of liturgy is integrative, showing that aesthetic judgments in the
worship context are always more than self-contained criteria. Any study of the artis-
tic or aesthetic dimensions of communal worship requires integrative judgments, since
the aesthetic, cultural, and theological/religious dimensions are bound together as form
and content. This is because communal worship, whether highly structured or relatively
“free,” is always a participatory action. Liturgy, broadly construed, is a performative
matrix in which what is believed about God, the world, and human life and destiny is
enacted. While the word “liturgy” is primarily a Western theologically bounded term,
the methodology it carries is useful in comparative study of artistry in religious ritual.
Lawrence Hoffman, writing about Jewish liturgical matters, made a major contribu-
tion in his work, especially in The Art of Public Prayer: Not for Clergy Only,12 and Beyond

the Text: A Holistic Approach to Liturgy.13 His main point is crucial to any future study of
artistry and aesthetics in the liturgical domain: “the holistic study of liturgy may begin
with the text but must eventually go beyond it—to the people, to their meanings, to their
assumed constructs, and to their ritualized patterns that make their world uniquely
their own.”14 Jewish liturgical prayers such as are found in the liturgies of Shabbot (the
Sabbath) and high holy day services such as Yom Kippur and the Passover sequences
constitute a whole “liturgical field.” This liturgical field includes poetic, music, gestural,
and symbolic ritual actions. Thus the singing of the Kol Nidre asks the cantor to sing
with particular emotional intensity, and various musical settings show variable aesthetic
qualities, each of which accent certain qualities of the text. Hoffman’s method can be
applied to other traditions as well.
The study of artistry brings attention to beauty, skill, and creativity in the whole
range of liturgical arts. This opens new possibilities for comparisons across so-called
“liturgical” and “non-liturgical” traditions. Within Christianity, some patterns
of worship focus especially on preaching and music, to the neglect of sacramental
ritual actions. This is the case with many so-called “free church” patterns. Others
show forth an intimate connection between what is sung and gestured and the ico-
nography of the architecture. This is characteristic of Eastern Orthodox traditions.
Still others feature processions, highly stylized ritual actions, and the need for skilled
presiders who know how to “do the ritual actions” at the altar table, baptismal font,
or burial place. Yet in practice these distinctions are changing across both Christian
and Jewish communities. These very cross-influences are part of what some view as
the positive side of “postmodernism”—a new freedom to borrow across religious dif-
ferences in discovering neglected aspects of heretofore self-contained or proscribed
worship practices. In this sense “postmodern worship” prizes ambiguity and the
exploration of hybrid religious identity.
It is useful to distinguish officially texted from non-texted worship traditions. With
the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and most Lutheran traditions, most of the primary
texts of the liturgies are found in official books. Within highly texted and authorized
liturgical forms, we look for how well the forms are themselves performed, and the
relationships between the fixed and variable elements of worship. Some Protestant
communions do not favor using liturgies that are “written down.” This is especially
true of the range of Baptist and especially of Pentecostal traditions, where the very
notion of a “written” prayer is problematic. However, examples of “praying in the
Spirit” often exhibit formulas that are preserved in oral tradition, and characteristi-
cally require a certain “sound” or rhythmic pulse—often connected with intensive
breath and emotional crescendo and diminuendo. Within traditions of worship
where patterns are not dictated by official books, qualities of creativity and improvi-
sation are crucial. This does not mean that creativity within set orders does not exist.
It has a different character. In either case improvisation may be done well or poorly,
appropriately or inappropriately.
Artistic creativity in the celebration of faith is of central concern to liturgical aes-
thetics. In this respect it is difficult to make a simple distinction between “modern”

and “postmodern.” We can, however, observe that more recent technological devel-
opments are making an impact on a wide range of worshiping traditions, Christian
and non-Christian. The emergence of electronic projection of music and of images
in many churches marks what some commentators mean by the “postmodern”
character of contemporary worship. This, however, picks up a relatively superficial
notion of postmodern, making it appear to be another way of contrasting so-called
“contemporary” or “emerging” worship from “traditional” worship. Artistic cre-
ativity and improvisation, however, cannot be relegated to the appearance of new
technological aids to worship, however remarkable these may be. The study of the
aesthetic and artistic dimensions of liturgy applies to any historical or cultural
period, provided we have some access to the non-verbal dimensions of the “perfor-
mance” of the liturgy.
Anthropologists and theologians who study communal worship practices have
come to recognize that every tradition carries with it both explicit and implicit con-
victions about how the physical and the spiritual realms are related. Creative tensions
between the material elements of human life and the cultural modes of communi-
cation employed in worship give rise to primary religious experiences of that which
transcends the physical and material world. The study of these phenomena is restoring
to the term “aesthetics” its root meaning of perception (aesthesis). A recent collection
exemplifies how the scholarly study has combined factors to open new dimensions
of the field. Postmodern Worship and the Arts, edited by Doug Adams and Michael
E. Moynahan, S.J., opens the issues of liturgy in the context of increasingly diversity of
cultures and languages.15
Precisely because communal worship uses language, silence, music, gesture,
images and movement in particular times and spaces, it displays aesthetic and
artistic characteristics. In those religious traditions professing belief in a divinely
created order, the role of beauty and goodness in creation provides a distinctive
theological reason for the artistic dimension of the praise of God. Such traditions,
as in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, also accent the process of redemption of
the world from its brokenness and from its rejection of the beauty and goodness
of the creation. The encounter with God therefore must include both creation and
redemption in image, song, prayer, and symbolic action. This implies that the pri-
mary words, symbols, and actions be adequate to the reality they convey. Thus wor-
ship that is self-aggrandizing or overly pompous, or thoughtlessly and casually done
lacks the artistic means of opening the depth of primary symbols of faith for a spe-
cific tradition.
In the case of many aboriginal traditions, and in specifically native North American
traditions, ritual and ceremony are crucial. Honoring the earth—its four directions
and its seasons—is more than a matter of words. The marking and remembrance of
the sacrality of earth, water, wind, and sky is a matter of ritual gesture and appropriate
attitudes. One can observe a distinctive “aesthetic” belonging to such ceremonies and
ritual occasions, even though the attention to the “artfulness” of doing the ritual may
yield considerably different qualities from those found in other religious traditions. The

ritual use of symbolic material from the created order opens the non-material or spiri-
tual meanings of those very materials. Thus the opening smudging ceremony with sweet
grass or the ceremony involving passing a pipe in specific ways among the participants
exhibits the manner in which the ritual acts are themselves both aesthetic (involving
sense perception) and sacralizing.
For the more sacramental traditions of Christian public worship, we may distinguish
between the symbolic value and beauty of various elements in the liturgy from the holi-
ness or sacred encounter. A Christian liturgical scholar may claim that the symbolic and
aesthetic elements derive from the material and the forms employed, while the sacred
character of the liturgy derives from the transaction with the divine. Thus the analysis
of relationships between the aesthetic and the sacred may be traced to certain theologi-
cal claims, namely that God has created the world and called it good, and in becoming
incarnate in Jesus Christ, gathers a human community—always culturally embodied
and embedded—to worship God and serve one’s neighbor.16
31.2 Worship as Culturally Embedded

and Embodied
The history of worship, whether communal or individual, is also a history of the

variable cultural artistic means that are available in any given age and cultural con-
text. Understanding the nature and meaning of worship in these traditions involves
paying attention to the artistic means in language, music, the visual environment,
movement, gestures, and images. Each of these aspects of communal worship may
be considered as “art”—rhetoric, poetry, musical form, iconography, architecture,
dance, sculpture, vesture and calligraphy. Each of these liturgical arts has origins
and development in the cultural life of a particular people in a particular social/
historical context. Thus sermons, hymns, prayers, ritual acts of bathing, eating,
and drinking—all are part of the aesthetic spheres of human existence. At times the
culture in which a religion is practiced lives in deep tension with religious convic-
tions. Other times the art itself becomes deeply embedded in the practices that form
and express human lives in the acts of worship. So, for example, when the Christian
churches moved from simple wall paintings depicting biblical figures and scenes
to frescoes and brilliant mosaics, the very way in which worshippers pictured the
divine was altered. When Christianity co-mingled with the African religious tradi-
tions of the slaves, a new aesthetics of song and ritual emerged, found in the “ring
shout” and in improvisation as a formative style. When the first Hasidic niggun
(a spiritually expressive wordless song) was sounded in a liturgical service, a new
element in Jewish worship was experienced. These became new idioms for under-
standing and for praising the divine. In the Qur’an, Arabic calligraphy is part of the
beauty of reading and praying the text.

31.3 Modern and Postmodern Worship
More recently scholars have come to refer to “modern” and “postmodern” liturgies, just
as art historians have come to speak of “postmodern” art. “Postmodern” is a term with a
broad range of uses. Often it is used to refer to a set of characteristic features of worship
that are in contrast to inherited (modernist) Enlightenment influences such as “linear
thinking” and overly rational conceptions of how worship engages people—principally
in Christian Protestant worship. More specifically, “postmodern” is a kind of sensibil-
ity, referring to recognition of great pluralism and an intentional eclecticism as well as
to the loss of confidence in established conventions of worship. In this sense the rise of
Pentecostalism and charismatic movements across many traditions may be noted as a
“postmodern” development. Of course these developments bring radical shifts in the
forms of experience that worship engenders. They bring a new aesthetic, and new “poet-
ics” to how worship is enacted and to what the worshippers expect, most notably to the
role of strong emotional expression, in contrast to more formal intellectual approaches.
Deeper issues emerge when postmodernism is associated with the traumas of the two
world wars of the twentieth century. In Jean-François Lyotard’s phrase, since Auschwitz
there is a “sort of grief in the Zeitgeist.”17 Here “postmodern” comes to be located in the
horror of death camps and a decisive break with modernity—a radical break with the
myth of human rationality and unlimited progress. This deeper sense of the postmod-
ern brings with it forms of uncertainty that inherited patterns and practices of worship
did not face, with questions about the very relationship of God to the world of human
affairs. As Edith Wyschogrod has stated, “There is no denying that post-modernism is
fine-tuned to the apocalyptic dimensions of twentieth-century history.”18 The notion of
the easy accessibility of God in and through liturgical forms is called in question.
In this latter sense, “postmodern worship” appears quite unevenly in various tradi-
tions. In the West it may be most evident in Christian churches and Jewish synagogues,
where the difficult themes of massive suffering and a post-Holocaust world have shaped
prayer, sermons, and hymns. At the same time it is clear that many shifts are occur-
ring in worship practices that mark a break with settled rationalist orientations often
called “traditional worship.” Recent times have witnessed a rebirth of “pre-modern”
concerns—the recovery of ancient chant forms, of patterns retrieved from the first six
centuries of ritual practice, forms of prayer that express doubt, skepticism about conti-
nuity in the meaning of central symbols, and a new appreciation for the great diversity of
practices within Christian and Jewish traditions.
For the most part Islam, with a few exceptions, such as in Turkey, has shown little
interest in changing the patterns of ritual prayer; yet the role of beauty is strong in sun-
nah, the tradition of the Prophet’s manner of life. Here one may study the artistry of indi-
vidual lives that strive to emulate the beauty of the Prophet—the quality of spirituality as
the aesthetic of all of life. At the same time, the Sufi tradition has explored a wide range
of arts and worshipful acts—especially song—that has shown an alternative aesthetic to

orthodox Islamic practices. An illuminating comparison can be made between Sufi and
Hasidic aesthetics in Islam and Judaism. These have some elements in common with
Pentecostal movements within Christianity, and with ecstatic practices in other tradi-
tions as well.
31.4 Artistry in Worship

Practices: Performance of the Verbal
and the Non-Verbal
Artistry and Christian liturgy have a long history, just as the intersection of Christian
theology, art, and music have a long history. Central to liturgical aesthetics is a claim
about “performance”—worship is something done, it is an action of a community, an
enactment of certain patterns of words, gestures, ritual acts, song, prayer, etc. Significant
inquiry begins with the concept of worship as performed. Worship, both so-called “litur-
gical” and “free,” like music and drama, is not simply a set of words, or a script. Liturgy,
like music, dance and drama, does not exist apart from a living performance by an
assembly. In the study of worship we encounter traditions of performance that require
training, skill, and artistry both of the leaders and of the worshipping assemblies. Some
of the most important features of “performance practice” in worship have to do with the
art of improvisation, as we shall note. We must always ask: what are the inherited ways of
doing worship that constitute a particular tradition?
These may be written or scripted orders found in authoritative books such as the sac-
ramentary of the Roman Catholic Church. Inherited ways of doing worship in other
traditions may not be written down, but may simply be carried by the remembered
patterns of gathering, reading, praying, and singing—by oral tradition. Because a way
of worshipping is not found in official books does not mean that there is no “liturgy.”
Liturgy in this sense is a broad term originally meaning “work of the people.” Whether
written or not, each liturgy bears assumptions about what constitutes appropriate wor-
ship forms and ways of ritual behavior. At the same time, each liturgical tradition and
sub-tradition carries patterns of “perception” and assumptions about what counts as
authentic religious experience. The “poetics” or the “making sense” of worship brings
with it inherent patterns of perception and recognition.
Understanding how liturgy moves the worshipping assembly to participate in the
ritual actions such as prayer involves understanding both verbal and non-verbal “lan-
guages” and how they work together. The continuing interaction of words, symbols,
and ritual acts as living worship necessarily involves time, space, sight, sound, move-
ment, and a range of sensory perception. These may be considered general “symbolic
languages” that are intrinsic to worship. Inquiry into liturgical aesthetics claims that
the verbal or textual aspects of worship depend radically on the non-verbal for mean-
ing and point. Attending to each of these and their interaction in worship provides a

phenomenological approach to the aesthetic dimensions of liturgy. We must also bear in

mind that the aesthetic qualities found in such symbolic languages are constantly inter-
acting with other factors such as beliefs, authority, ideas about God and humanity, and
always with a larger social/cultural environment.
Worship is always in time and over time. The keeping of a pattern of feasts and seasons
brings with it a perceived rhythm of memory. Thus marking time in worship is crucial to
how a specific community conceives of the natural world or of history and temporality.
The significance of repeated aspects of worship such as particular prayers, ritual meals,
and the celebration of holy times and places accumulates over time. Within Christianity
and Judaism, the cycle of readings from sacred Scripture is correlated with the keeping
of time. The “liturgical year” is, in essence, a narrative for the unfolding “drama” of feasts
and seasons, each with its distinctive images, colors, music, and prayer.
A deep feature of aesthetics in worship is how fasting and festival over time form a
community of memory. This is noticeable in Ramadan as well as in Christian Lent.
The language of space is a second symbolic domain. The physical places where
people assemble have a deep influence on the understanding of the divine and human
relationship. Worship in a great cathedral such as Chartres or Canterbury is perme-
ated with complex aesthetic qualities. Light and a sense of vast space, as well as the
particular acoustics, play into the experience of the liturgy itself. By contrast, worship
in a storefront church or former movie theatre produces a very different environment
for prayer and song and human interaction. Different architectural settings determine
how worship is ordered, and especially its visual and acoustical properties. It is useful
to distinguish two different ways space and a sense of place affect participation. On the
one hand, the shared embodied history of meeting in a particular space becomes part
of the expected “framing” of worship. The sense of place and local history of worship is
part of the theological aesthetic that forms and expresses the community’s approach to
God. On the other hand, the way worship space is arranged creates a particular visual
theology. The placement of the altar, the pulpit (in the case of Judaism, the bema), the
baptismal pool, and the congregational space forms people theologically. The place-
ment of the musicians and the accessibility (or non-accessibility) of the “sanctuary
space” is part of this aesthetic. In the case of Christian Orthodox traditions, the ico-
nostasis forms a key to the perception of the mystery of faith in the building itself.
Religious histories may be observed in the arrangement of the space as in comparative
Buddhist temple designs. In Christianity, a stone altar in the center of the room speaks
of the sacramental mediation of the divine, whereas a plain central preaching pulpit
signals the centrality of the Word.
A third symbolic language is sound, already referred to above. Worship requires
ordered sounds that both signify and express states of devotion and prayer. Jewish litur-
gical prayer depends upon the skill of the cantor, and the chants of Eastern Orthodoxy
issue from deacons and celebrants alike. Ordered sound is but one of several primary
artistic means by which worship is enacted. In this way, the artistry of ordered sound is
intrinsic to the very act of communal worship. The same is also true of visual, architec-
tural, gestural, and related performative arts, as these form the aesthetic dimensions of

worship. One cannot imagine, for example, the Easter liturgy of the Russian Orthodox
Church without the rich combinations of aesthetic qualities in what the worshippers
see, hear, touch, and taste. These perceptions are ingredients in the sense of mystery and
of divine-human encounter intended by the liturgical action itself.
A key to understanding worship is found in how ordered sound and silence are related
in specific traditions. Consider, for example, the role of sound in awakening and sus-
taining certain religious states of consciousness. The Islamic call to prayer heard daily at
the appointed times of prayer; the use of bells in Hindu temple rituals and in Buddhist
prayer as well as ringing from Christian church spires; the sound of drums and cymbals
in indigenous African religions; the shofar and the trumpet sounds in ancient and mod-
ern Jewish worship—all of these contribute to the aesthetics of worship. The language of
praise is also sounded by organs and pianos, and more recently by electronic keyboards.
Alongside the ritual music of such instruments is the sound of congregations, cantors,
and choirs singing and praying. In these examples we also find degrees of artistry in
the “performance” of sound that contribute to our understanding of the phenomena of
“sacred sound.”19
Everything that occurs in a given pattern of common worship may be construed as
“musical.” That is, if we regard music as the extension of human speech, each spoken or
read word can be heard to have pitch, rhythm, intensity, tone, and tempo. This is true of
all utterances. Communities become habituated to the acoustic shape of their worship.
Thus even in evangelical and Pentecostal traditions, the “spontaneous” prayer comes to
have a recognized tone. Recognition and participation in such forms as the Korean tong-
sung kiddo (praying simultaneously individual prayers while a leader prays in a loud
voice) shapes the worshipping assembly’s sense of prayer.
Particular styles of singing, such as are found in the Islamic Sufi traditions or in
African American worship, mark a distinctive acoustical aesthetic. While such congre-
gations can sing in uninflected styles and in traditional hymnody, it is when a soloist or
choir moves into the recognized rhythms and vocal elaborations that the congregation
becomes especially alive and engaged in both sonic and kinesthetic responsiveness to
the flow of praise.
Gestures figure prominently in some forms of worship. The position of the body is key
to awareness and intensity of participation. Bowing, kneeling, prostration, and stand-
ing are found as part of the aesthetics of ritual behavior across many traditions. Prayer
postures are central in expressing such attitudes as praise, lament, contrition, and grief.
Comparative study of gestures and bodily postures reveals both religious and cultural
levels of meaning encoded in worship traditions. When gestures combine with spe-
cific ritual acts such as washing, anointing with oil or ashes, and eating and drinking in
sacred contexts, the connections between body and religious belief become apparent.
A fifth aesthetic order in worship is touch and tactility along with olfactory sensate
experience. The taste of food, the smell of incense, and the sensed textures of ritual
objects form a profound intimate and lasting symbolic language of participation. All
of these exhibit a wide range of aesthetic qualities that connect ritual with everyday life
as well.

A sixth symbolic language to be studied is that of bodily movement. Dance as expres-

sion of religious devotion and participation in worship is found across many tradi-
tions. Tom Splain S.J., has studied indigenous dance forms in the South Pacific and their
impact on Christian worship. His video “The Dancing Church” is a case study in cultural
anthropology and the creative inculturation of liturgy among Fijian, Tongan, Samoan,
and Micronesian peoples.20 Apart from explicit liturgical dance forms, one finds proces-
sions of varying kinds across religious traditions, from the art of street processions in
Hispanic and Latino cultures to African-American “offerings” that are danced by the
congregation, to simple processions with sacred objects as well as the common proces-
sions with the gifts at the offertory in many Christian churches. The power of movement
is perhaps found most strikingly in the fervent marches in American civil rights and
more recent anti-apartheid movements in South Africa, characteristically accompanied
by song such as “We Shall Overcome,” or “Siyahamba” (“We are Marching in the Light
of God”).
The study of artistry in worship begins with understanding these domains or “sym-
bolic languages” that constitute the heart of “living” or performed worship. Each may be
investigated separately, and divided into sub-categories. Yet all these studied domains
are continually interactive in worship contexts.
The visual and the auditory experiences of praying, or processions, or of singing
combine with the properties of the room, and the qualities of personal interaction.
Traditions differ significantly in the extent of bodily participation. Some traditions favor
restraint, while others demand exuberant singing, gesture, and movement. Buddhist
temples in the Mahayana and Tantric/Vajrayana traditions are permeated with figures,
distinctive colors, altars, and the depictions of scenes from the life of the Buddha. What
is visible is crucial to the act of prayer and meditation. Zen Buddhist temples are more
restrained visually, along with Theravada temple worship. Yet surprises remain, as when
we find in Theravada temples in Sri Lanka a richly permeated environment of images.
The following example brings together a number of these “languages” simultane-
ously. “Bishop Desmond Tutu celebrates the Eucharist at an ecumenical gathering in
New York. He wears full South African vesture. He dances the Eucharistic prayer, end-
ing with an ecstatic soliloquy of praise prior to the communion. Here is a case where
political meaning (Bishop Tutu’s identification with oppressed South African blacks),
aesthetic meaning (the artistry of the dance), and theological meanings (the text of
the prayer) mutually enrich and transform each other. Any of these without the other
would be impoverished.”21 In this case there are multiple interactions among aesthetic,
social/political, ritual, and theological dimensions. But the vivacity and the power of
this liturgy shows that artistry is central. Poorly or indifferently celebrated, such a lit-
urgy would come close to being a contradiction. Moreover, the “spirit” of the liturgy
is best seen in the combination of artful symbolic actions. It is obviously not a concert
nor a mere piece of theatrical performance art. In order to understand the religious and
theological power of such an occasion of worship our approach must bring together the
phenomenology of space, time, sound, sight, movement, and the sensate participatory
means that constitute a full analysis of the aesthetics and artistry of worship.

31.5 The Artistry of Leading Worship
Persons designated to lead a worshipping community play a crucial role in animating

the assembly. There is an “art” of leading. The Jewish cantor who cannot sing well or
who does not know the appropriate modes of chanting the Scriptures can subvert or at
least diminish the experience of the assembly gathered for Shabbat services. The one
who preaches indifferently or with no interest in communicating the Scriptures lacks
the necessary means of engaging the congregation. The reader who stumbles over every
other word prohibits the hearing of the text. The leader of prayer who has no sense of
awe, wonder, or gratitude will diminish.
Distracted leaders lead to distracted congregations. The art of leadership thus requires
three things: knowledge of what is required to perform the task, a sense of being present
to the action, and the necessary skill or artistry to communicate with the assembly with-
out simply calling attention to oneself. These are also critical aspects of the aesthetics of
worship. This leads us to consider the artistry of planning and preparing the assembly
for worship. Recent treatises, such as Robert Hovda’s Strong, Loving and Wise (1976) and
Touchstones for Liturgical Ministers, edited by Virginia Sloyan (1978), address the ques-
tion of how best to prepare both leadership and the whole assembly to participate in
Christian liturgical worship. These practical guides exhibit awareness of the phenomena
that have emerged for further scholarly study in the literatures already mentioned.
31.6 Artistry in the Worshipping

Assembly
Commenting on participation in Christian liturgical assemblies, Joseph Gelineau

remarked: “Only if we come to the liturgy without hopes or fears, without longings
or hunger, will the rites symbolize nothing and remain indifferent or curious ‘objects’.
Moreover, people who are not accustomed to poetic, artistic or musical language or
symbolic acts among their means of expression and communication find the liturgy like
a foreign country whose customs and language are strange to them.”22
It is appropriate to speak also of the “artistry” of the worshipping assembly. One may
have a beautifully designed and led service of worship, but if the people gathered do
not listen attentively or participate intentionally in prayer, lament, or praise, something
essential to the meaning and nature of worship is missing. The beauty and the aesthetic
qualities of the various elements of worship must be complimented by the qualities of
perception exhibited by the persons who constitute the worshipping body. Not to see
and hear and engage bodily in the event of worship is to diminish the “fruitfulness” of
worship.

Vital liturgy asks something of the assembly, and congregations are capable of devel-
oping ever deepening ways of participation. This deepening may be regarded as entering
into the artfulness of the symbolic acts; in effect it is a capacity for liturgical imagina-
tion. In some instances this involves learning how to sing and to pray more explic-
itly. In other instances it will involve the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility linked
to the actual poetry of Scripture, and to the drama and choreography of the liturgy. In
all cases this deepening is an awakening and sustaining of perception—not so much
learning more about the arts, but a practice of receptivity to the reality conveyed in and
through the artistic forms that are ingredient in a particular tradition. In this sense the
“artistry” of the assembly is aimed at active receptivity to the object of worship—to the
divine self-communication—and not toward making the liturgical event itself into an
“art object.” The artistry of the assembly therefore includes an intention to live what is
patterned and rehearsed and proclaimed by the worship event over time. While these
points have been developed in connection with Christian worship, they may be usefully
applied to non-Christian ritual as well, at least as a way of determining the extent to
which the artistry of participation is crucial to a specific religious tradition.
31.7 Improvisation in Worship
Skill in improvisation is most vividly found in African American patterns of worship.

The intensity of worship experience is often directly traceable to the preacher’s ability
to improvise on an image, a text, or a song that clues the congregation in. The rise and
fall of emotional intensity depends also on the organist or pianist’s ability to “tune in” to
the content and tone of the sermon or the prayers being offered. In the case of someone
giving “testimony” from the congregation, the congregation itself listens for inflections
and phrases that allow them to join in with the individual. Often what begins as an indi-
vidual’s lament ends on a communal doxology of praise and affirmation of trust.
Music initiates forms of prayer as well, and is the key to vital participation It is no
accident that the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic forms of improvisation that emerge
in jazz have their origins in African American forms and styles of worship. This is found
in the call-and-response forms. One voice builds upon another in response. In the great
French organ traditions improvisational skills are highly prized. Often at the end of the
liturgy, the organist will improvise on one or more hymn or chant melodies that were
heard during the worship itself. Some of the greatest compositions for organ had their
origins in such improvisations.
The Jewish cantor also displays great artistry in song, often with ornamentation of
chant melodies, and occasionally with improvised forms. In some Christian congrega-
tions who have been exposed to psalm singing, the possibilities of improvised psalm
tones are present. Hindu dance exhibits a precision of specific meanings in positions
of the body and especially of the hands. At the same time, a truly skilled dancer brings
innovation and a particular spirit of individual intensity and devotion to the dance.

The study of artistry in communal and devotional worship patterns requires continu-
ing investigation of the living performance and the phenomenological orders of bodily
experience within and across every religious tradition.
Notes
1. Lawrence A. Hoffman and Janet Walton eds., Sacred Sound and Social Change: Liturgical
Music in Jewish and Christian Experience (University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 330.
2. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (1923); 2d ed. (New York: Oxford
3. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, trans. David E. Green
(New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1963).
4. Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (New York, 1929,
rev. 1967).
5. Johannes Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity, trans. Boniface
Ramsey (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1983).
6. Anscar Chupungco, Cultural Adaptation of the Liturgy (New York: Paulist Press, 1982).
7. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge
8. Symbol and Art in Worship, Louis Maldonado and David Power, eds. (Concilium series #132).
9. Aidan Kavanagh, Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style (New York: Pueblo, 1982).
10. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, eds. Performance and Authenticity in the Arts
11. John Witvliet, Liturgy Digest, Nathan Mitchell, ed., vol. 3, No. 1, (Notre Dame Center for
Pastoral Liturgy, 1996).
12. Lawrence A. Hoffman, The Art of Public Prayer: Not for Clergy Only (Washington, DC: The
Pastoral Press, 1988).
13. Lawrence A. Hoffman, Beyond the Text: A Holistic Approach to Liturgy (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1978).
14. Hoffman, Beyond the Text, 182.
15. Doug Adams and Michael E. Moynahan, S.J., eds., Postmodern Worship and the Arts (San
Jose: Resource Publications, 1992).
16. Cf. Don E. Saliers, Worship As Theology: Foretaste of Glory Divine (Nashville: Abingdon
Press, 1994), especially 139–153 and 203–216.
17. The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985, Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas,
eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 78.
18. Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism, xxi.
19. Cf. volumes in the Two Liturgical Traditions series: especially vol. 3, Sacred Sound and
Social Change: Liturgical Music in Jewish and Christian Experience, Lawrence A. Hoffman
and Janet R. Walton, eds. (Notre Dame Press, 1992).
20. Cf. Tom Splain’s essay, “Cultural Anthropology and Creative Inculturation of Liturgy in the
South Pacific,” in Post-Modern Worship and the Arts, Doug Adams and Michael Moynahan,
S.J., eds. (Resource Publications, 2002), 155–160.
21. Liturgy Digest, op. cit., 76.
22. Joseph Gelineau, The Liturgy Today and Tomorrow, Dinah Livingstone, trans. (Paramus,
NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), 98–99.

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Saliers, Don E. Worship As Theology: Foretaste of Glory Divine. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. London: Routledge, 2003.
van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1963.
Walton, Janet. Art and Worship: A Vital Connection. Michael Glazier, Inc., 1988.
Woltersdorff, Nicholas. Art in Action. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1980.

C HA P T E R 32
A RT, M O R A L I T Y, A N D
JUSTICE
J OH N W. DE G RU C H Y
Our topic begs many questions. Each of the words in the title is the subject of debate,
for what precisely do we mean by art, morality, or justice? A moment’s reflection on each
word indicates part of our dilemma. By art do we mean what is often referred to as “fine
art,” or art more broadly defined, including “popular art” and the art of the “outsider?”
And to which of the arts do we refer? The visual, plastic, dramatic, written, and audio
arts share certain characteristics in common but they are not the same, so issues relat-
ing them to morality and justice will take on different contours. For example, issues of
morality in architecture, insofar as it is regarded as an art form, may have to do with the
creating a habitat that enables human and social well-being, whereas music may stir the
soul in ways that engender self-giving love for others or patriotic sacrifice. Our primary
focus here is on visual art in its various forms, and therefore more specifically on its con-
nection to morality and justice, though much applies to art in all its forms.
But what do we mean by morality? Do we mean a moral code or set of principles, per-
haps associated with some religious tradition or political ideology, or the formation of
mature people able to make appropriate moral choices both for themselves and for the
common good? We will use the term in both senses, but suggest that good art is more
about the shaping of consciousness and the formation of perception rather than didactic
prescription. Ethics, to clarify its meaning, is critical reflection on morality, that is, the
attempt to evaluate moral action. Doing justice is a key moral action, subject to various
definitions and ethical evaluation. By justice we primarily have in mind social justice,
that is, freedom from oppression of various kinds, and the affirmation of human rights.
At the same time, the relationship between art and morality raises other sorts of ethical
issues related to justice, such as censorship, plagiarism, and property rights, which must
be acknowledged.
In the Western tradition, the influence of Plato (c. 247-347BCE) is seminal for
much of this discussion, as it is for philosophy as a whole. This not only indicates
that the issues at hand have long been debated, but it also reminds us of the extent

ART, MORALITY, AND JUSTICE 419
to which Plato has set the agenda for discussing them, not least within the Christian
tradition. As such, he may be regarded as the founder of philosophical aesthetics,
and also one of the chief sources for the Christian approach to art and theologi-
cal aesthetics. In his Republic, Plato’s position reaches maturity in his discussion of
poetry, primarily, but also of drama and painting.1 The stridently negative view of
art Plato expresses there is largely determined by his rejection of the claims made by
the sophists and dramatists of his day that art was the best guide to the good, that is,
moral life. Plato would have none of that, hence his caricaturing of art as little more
than a form of play based on illusion and evoking pleasure. That is why he insisted
that art must always be subject to the controls of reason, moral, and political sense.
Yet the fact that art appeals to the deep wellsprings of feeling could, on Plato’s reck-
oning, also bring out the best and not just the worst in human life. A sense of beauty
can and does, as many Christian theologians following Plato from St. Augustine
to Hans Urs von Balthasar have argued, evoke a longing both for the good and
for God.2
If Plato laid the foundations for its eventual flowering, setting the agenda for much
of what was to follow, aesthetics as a philosophical discipline emerged many centuries
later during the Enlightenment. Initially understood as the science of perception, it
soon became more centrally the philosophy of art and beauty. The latter is of particular
importance for aesthetic theory and for relating art to morality. Yet “beauty,” the most
significant aesthetic value, is notoriously difficult to define, and, Plato notwithstanding,
it is not obvious how it relates to moral value. For some, the link between aesthetics and
ethics, or beauty and morality, has to do with good or bad taste. But this too begs many
questions, for is taste simply a matter of individual preference, or can it be evaluated
on the basis of certain criteria that may receive more widespread acknowledgement?3
In seeking to respond to such questions, and to the broader issues already raised, it is
important to recognize at the outset that all art, like morality, is located within particular
historical contexts and cultures.
32.1 The Cultural Location of Art
A product of collective experience as much as individual imagination, art is always

located within a particular cultural matrix and historical context. As such, it expresses
that ethos even if it does so in ways that are counter-cultural, or representative of a
sub-culture. Invariably at the heart of each art tradition, whether overtly expressed or
not, is a dominant religious tradition or philosophical perspective that has shaped the
artist’s perception, informs aesthetic and ethical reflection, and so shapes the connec-
tion between art and morality. Taste, likewise, is culturally and contextually formed,
though good taste is not the sole possession of a particular ethnic community or some
company of the culturally elite, neither is bad taste a characteristic of those who do not
belong there.

Whether religious or not, cultures embody moral values. Historically, these have pro-
vided the filters through which reality is perceived, and much of the substance repre-
sented in art. Even where this is not obvious, or in some sense no longer true, as in the
Western secular disenchantment with Christianity, art cannot entirely escape its his-
torical connections to the religious tradition in which it was nurtured, even if in radi-
cally new ways. This leads us to a further qualification in defining the boundaries of our
inquiry.
Our discussion is informed by the Western European art tradition that traces its ori-
gins to classical Greece and Rome, and then wends its way through Byzantium and the
Renaissance to the modern period, often characterized by an antipathy to the tradition.
Much of this tradition has been premised on the Platonic triad of truth, goodness, and
beauty, a philosophical perspective in which moral and aesthetic values inform each
other in a harmonious whole. But much of it has also challenged this sense of organic
wholeness in which aesthetic and moral values inhere by reflecting the fragmentation of
human experience and expressing criticism of the overarching narrative.
As reflected in its art, the Byzantium tradition that shaped the Middle Ages empha-
sized iconic faithfulness to the Christian tradition, stability, and organic views of
society. By way of contrast, the Renaissance, emerging on the cusp of the breakup of
Christendom, retrieved the classical humanist tradition of ancient Greece and Rome in
a way marked more by creativity than faithfulness, and contributed to social and reli-
gious ferment. This opened up a wholly fresh departure in the Western art tradition
that eventually led to a relationship between Christianity and art that was more diffuse,
and finally fractured. So whereas it was previously possible to have a unified vision of
art, morality, and belief, by the post-Enlightenment period it was increasingly not so.
Western art and morality were increasingly alienated from their religious roots, and art,
for many, became a religion.
Although the Western art tradition is more complex than this linear account
may suggest, it certainly now embodies a diffuse range of cultural experiences and
traditions, religious and philosophical, separated by both time and location, and
co-existing in critical and often creative tension with each other. Moreover, it is only
one of many global traditions, not least through European colonialism and mission-
ary expansion, that have redrawn its contours and thinking about morality and jus-
tice. In the process, Western art has undergone mutations that have often rescued it
from banality, a mere reproduction of past forms, and unleashed new creative ener-
gies. Perceiving accepted reality with different eyes, such art on the cultural bound-
aries probes inherited assumptions with the brush as though it were a surgeon’s
scalpel, breaking open the past in ways that challenge the present in anticipation of
something fresh. In doing so it may engender hope, but it may also reflect the anxiety,
emptiness, oppression, and despair of a world that is falling apart, thus acting as a
barometer of the human condition.
Just as cultural circumstances evoke different artistic expression, so too does the
social location of the artist. Today, as a result of the sociology of knowledge, we
are far more aware than were previous generations that perception and value are

often biased by class, gender, race, and ethnicity. No contemporary discussion of

art, morality, and justice can avoid recognizing the extent to which such biases are
reflected in art or aesthetic theory. Thus, some artists of so-called “high-culture” in
times of cultural stability may well reflect the orderly patterns of nature and society
in ways that evoke calm and comfort. Yet it is also true that others may also read
reality beneath the surface, detecting cracks that are widening into chasms that will
radically change what is taken for granted. In the same way, artists that perceive
reality “from below,” from the perspective of those who are oppressed or alienated,
will represent both the anger of experienced injustice, and the longing for freedom
from bondage. Such “outsider art” challenges what has been perceived as normative,
appropriate, and acceptable. So the fact that art is nurtured within a cultural milieu
does not mean that it uncritically reflects its ethos. It may well reveal deep chasms
within a particular culture, thus probing questions of morality and justice, especially
by new generations, in terms of their own experience of reality.
32.2 Art and Moral

Value: Aesthetic Theory
The breakup of the medieval synthesis between religion, morality, and art within
Western European culture led many to conceive of art and morality as inhabiting two
separate spheres or domains. This led post-Enlightenment philosophers engaged in
the emerging science of aesthetics to seek new ways of relating them. The question
was not whether they were in some respect linked, for all knowledge and experi-
ence are connected in some way, but how they were linked. We will briefly consider
four representative figures in this enterprise, the German philosophers Immanuel
Kant (1724-1803), G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900),
and the Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Even if we cannot here convey
the subtleties of their thought, we can discern the different approaches to our theme
that have emerged in European aesthetic theory, each of which has also influenced
our discussion.
Kant was the first major philosopher in this period to include a comprehensive trea-
tise on aesthetics and the arts into his philosophical system, thereby setting the agenda
for the discussion that has followed ever since. In his Critique of Judgement (1790), he
argued that a sense of taste for what is beautiful is inevitably subjective, stirring indi-
vidual imagination and providing a source of individual pleasure. Such pleasure is dis-
interested and non-utilitarian. We appreciate and enjoy the beautiful simply because it
is beautiful. It does not serve a sacred or moral end, but is an end in itself, to be enjoyed
in private. This notion of “disinterestedness,” Kant contended, prevents art from being
ideologically abused or becoming purely utilitarian rather than something to be enjoyed
for its own sake. But it also prevents sensuous knowledge from controlling reason and

determining morality, for then truth and goodness would be subject to the vagaries of
subjective taste. From this perspective, differences of opinion with regard to the beauti-
ful cannot be resolved through rational argument or an appeal to what is moral. At the
same time, taste for what is beautiful is more than merely private preference. Beauty is
a symbol of morality, something about which we ought to agree. Indeed, certain moral
values, such as love, cannot be fully expressed or explained in rational terms, but only
through sense experience. Thus art and morality while necessarily separate from each
other are profoundly linked.
Hegel, in contrast to Kant, in his lectures on the Philosophy of Art (1817), attempted
to reunite art and morality in an all-embracing synthesis. Geist or Absolute Spirit,
Hegel argued, realizes itself in history through human consciousness and its activ-
ity, expressing itself in religion through spiritual representation, in philosophy in
speculative concept, and in art in the shape of sensible intuition. For Hegel, beauty is
the manifestation of Geist in sensuous form. To grasp its significance it is necessary
to know the symbolic conventions that are employed in describing it. This is what
aesthetics is about. The clue is the recognition that the human struggle for spiritual
freedom finds its expression in the “universal need for art.” Men and women satisfy
their need for such freedom by making explicit what is within themselves and corre-
spondingly by giving outward reality to their selves, thereby bringing what is inter-
nal into sight and knowledge both for themselves and for others. In other words, art
is Geist expressed in particular historical cultural forms, something we have already
acknowledged and considered.
Hegel’s philosophy helped foster Romanticism, a movement that struck
deep chords in the hearts of many who felt constricted by the rationalism of the
Enlightenment, the moralism of Kant, and the dogmatism of religious orthodoxy.
Romanticism comprised various strands, all striving to express the deepest human
emotions across the artistic and intellectual spectrum of Europe in the nineteenth
century. Whereas the Enlightenment had privileged reason and empiricism,
Romanticism sought the truth through emotional intuitionism. Romantic art, like
the Gothic art of the Middle Ages that inspired it, was often originally explicitly
Christian. But gradually, as Hegel suggested, it became separated from its religious
roots, emphasizing moral themes that had more to do with the knightly life of chiv-
alry than either Christian morality per se, or with the values of modernity encap-
sulated in human freedom rather than Christian faithfulness. Such art provided its
own way of gaining access to the truth, thus making aesthetic formation essential
for human flourishing and for morality. Art was essentially a spiritual activity of
discerning what was being revealed primarily in nature, and in expressing what was
experienced through the act of creative imagination. It was profoundly spiritual in
that it expressed the human yearning for freedom, for life, for joy intent on creating
a new consciousness, indeed, a new religious consciousness.
Romanticism was responsible for the retrieval of classical mythology, and of myth
as an epistemological category. This was strikingly evident in its art and philosophy.
Goethe and Wagner are prime examples, as are Schlegel and Schopenhauer, and the

latter’s protégé Nietzsche. Brought up as a pastor’s son, Nietzsche turned angrily away
from his Christian background, regarding it as hostile to life, to art, to aesthetic value.
For Nietzsche, as for much of Romanticism, the aesthetic had to be separated from eth-
ics and science, as Kant had decreed, but for a different purpose. For Kant it was largely
to prevent the aesthetic from controlling reason and morality; for Nietzsche it was to
prevent reason and morality from controlling the aesthetic. Reason and morality after
the “death of God” had lost its categorical claims. Meaning, if there is any, can only be
found in pursuit of the aesthetic. If this is the case, then true art has nothing to do with
conventional morality; it sets its own standards. Art becomes the true religion, the arbi-
ter of morality. Artistic freedom, rather than adherence to a tradition, was essential to
artistic creativity. Moreover, aesthetic perfection was achieved through expressing an
inner vision rather than the outer appearance in form. Creative imagination dominates
cognition and reflection.
One of the most trenchant critiques of aestheticism was that made by the Danish
writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), whose personal struggles led him beyond the aes-
thetic to the moral and finally to religious commitment. But his decision to pursue the
ethical was not so much the rejection of the aesthetic, the place of the imagination, or
the role of creativity, but rather their dethroning. The problem was not art but the aes-
thetic values that Romanticism made absolute. The issue at stake was not beauty, but the
seductive feelings elicited by beautiful objects that led to a self-centered focus and deep-
ened the sense of human estrangement from both self and God. The aesthetic continu-
ally needs reinterpretation within the sphere of the ethical, for it is incapable of healing
and overcoming the deep alienation of the divided self. The reconciliation promised by
art on its own is illusionary and cannot be fulfilled. Yet ethics, and especially the ethics
of rationalism as reflected philosophically in Kantian idealism and the morality of bour-
geois society, was itself barren and incapable of healing the individual person. Similarly,
Hegel’s system, which Kierkegaard regarded with loathing, excluded the surprising
in-breaking of transcendence into human experience with its gift of genuine freedom.
The only way out of the iron cage of historical inevitability or the banality of bourgeois
morality, was a “leap of faith” in which we discover our true selves and our freedom as a
gift of grace.
The paradigmatic form of aestheticism was the bohemian art-culture of Paris
that emerged in the cultural and social chaos of the post-Napoleonic era and soon
spread across Europe. Such artists did not accept the obligations of bourgeois society
or established religion, quite the contrary. Some espoused poverty as a sign of their
commitment to art and its integrity. But in their pursuit of “art for art’s sake,” they
were alienated from the broader public who could no longer understand let alone
appreciate their work. Ironically, artists now free from church or civic patronage, and
no longer serving the common good, became the captives of the wealthy art collector
and dealer. What was of value was no longer the truth served by art, but the aesthetic
value of a work of art, and this was increasingly judged in terms of its economic
value. But far more ominous was the danger of art becoming the servant of closed
and dehumanizing ideologies.

32.3 Art Controlled by Ideology
We have already noted the extent to which bias of race, gender, and class can influence
the work of artists. But the problem is not confined to individual artists. All religions,
philosophies, political systems, and cultures presuppose and encourage particular ways
of understanding or viewing the world and are, in that sense, ideological in character.
However, some worldviews are more open to fresh perspectives, adaptation, and change
than others that are closed, seek to control every aspect of life, both public and private,
and resist change. All art, as culturally located and shaped by religious and philosophi-
cal traditions, is ideological in the first sense; but sometimes art becomes the victim of
closed ideological control, whether religious, philosophical, or political.
Censorship is the primary way in which societies seek to exert moral control over art.
This is a complex issue because some censorship may be necessary, for example, in order
to protect society from forms of pornography that promote violence and the abuse of
women and children. The problem is how to distinguish between art and pornography, a
subject that has often led to legal battles across the world. With the advent of mass forms
of communication and especially the Internet, this problem has become increasingly
more difficult to resolve. The freedom of expression and artistic creativity need to be
upheld. But can society allow hate speech, the display in public of works of art that deni-
grate certain groups of people, the publication of books that are offensive to religious
sensitivities, or the showing of movies that glorify war and violence? It is not an easy
matter to arrive at a satisfactory answer, nor is it made easier by the fact that there are too
many examples of censorship that have been misguided and counterproductive. This
is particularly the case when censorship is promoted for religious or political purposes
that are ideologically closed.
During the twentieth century, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism all sought to
control what they labeled “decadent art.” The most notorious example of such cultural
arrogance was The Degenerate Art exhibition in Nazi Germany in 1937. The notion
of “art for art’s sake” was rejected, and art that did not fit the dominant ideology was
ridiculed, confiscated, and sometimes destroyed (or, ironically, stolen) by those in
power. At the same time, such regimes co-opted artists for their own political agendas.
A cause célèbre was the Nazi filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, whose documentary of the
Nazi rallies at Nuremberg, The Triumph of the Will, was both an artistic triumph and a
glorification of the Third Reich and the goals of National Socialism. What was unde-
niably demonic in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union is, however, evident within the
broader cultural public of a particular nation when the art and artifacts of other cul-
tures are designated inferior, or their own are made subject to patriotic fervor.
Those who wish to abuse art for the sake of ideological goals capture the loyalty of
those who have no sense of discrimination between what is good or bad taste. Sectarian
graffiti in Northern Ireland is a case in point. But so too is much vulgar advertising and,
even worse, advertising or propaganda that uses artistic talent and “beauty” for morally

questionable or even evil purposes. This abuse of art does not necessarily reflect a lack
of aesthetic sensibility, but manipulates it to great effect because people do not have the
ability to evaluate its character or consequences. All of which demonstrates that moral-
ity and aesthetic judgment (or taste) are connected. Taste enables us to discern moral
implications in aesthetic forms, to estimate the morally good or bad within the beauti-
ful, and thus enables us to act accordingly.
32.4 Art, Beauty and Social Justice
Freedom from ideological control and interference does not mean that art in its vari-
ous forms cannot or should not fulfill a vital public role, or that artists have no moral or
political responsibility. Artists do not exist in an autonomous sphere separate from the
rest of life without any public responsibility and accountability. Art is not ideologically
neutral, and artists are not located above social reality any more than anyone else. As
such they are socially responsible human beings even if their art is not directly social
in character. Recognition of this responsibility is not something new. Renaissance art-
ists were public figures. Their work was not just an expression of their own genius, but
intended for the common good of society and the church. But this recognition was not
confined to those artists who worked under religious patronage. Diderot, the skepti-
cal philosopher of the French Enlightenment, whose Encyclopédie was a landmark of
the times, insisted that artistic autonomy did not mean that the artist had no social and
moral influence. On the contrary, artists, through the use of their imagination, engaged
social reality, appealing to the heart and conscience.
This was strongly affirmed by the art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), who had a remark-
able influence on British culture in the nineteenth century, making articulate the connec-
tions between art, beauty, morality, and social justice. Working independently and often
unaware of the philosophical debates on aesthetics in Germany, Ruskin refused to separate
aesthetics from ethics, art from morality, and in a way that anticipates much modern theory,
recognized that art both reflected and contributed to the social construction of values. In the
first volume of his classic study entitled Modern Painters, Ruskin insisted that perfect taste
and an appreciation for beauty has to do with our moral rather than our intellectual nature.4
Influenced by Ruskin, William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, like-
wise insisted on the links between beauty and social justice, ugliness and injustice.
Ruskin, Morris, and others within their circle, many of them artists belonging to the
pre-Raphaelite school, were responding to the dehumanizing ravages that resulted from
the Industrial Revolution. In doing so they were trying to recapture the social vision of
the Christian Middle Ages in which art, morality, and religion were not disparate enti-
ties but part of a holistic understanding of reality, both personal and social. Central to
this movement was the conviction that the creation of objects of beauty was a necessary
part of the struggle against the ugliness that resulted from social injustices. Beauty had
redemptive and moral power.

This redemptive power of beauty was forgotten for much of the twentieth century, when
beauty was banished from aesthetic discourse in reaction to the aestheticism of those who
pursued beauty for its own sake. Such Romanticism, it was argued, is a form of escapism obliv-
ious to the ugly realities of a world gripped by war, violence, and oppression. Much art protests
the debasement of beauty in, for example, the advertising industry, by producing works that
are often shocking in their ugliness. It is precisely this protest against unjust ugliness that rein-
forces the value and significance of beauty as something potentially redemptive.
In more recent times, precisely because of the ugliness of injustice, there has been
a concerted attempt to recover beauty as the key category for aesthetic theory and
praxis. As Elaine Scarry has argued, the political complaints against beauty are incoher-
ent, indeed, a commitment to beauty may well enhance our capacity to seek justice.5
From a Christian perspective, the recovery of beauty has largely been the result of the
pioneering work of the Catholic theologian von Balthasar, who insisted that in a world
without beauty, the good or moral “loses its attractiveness.” Truth without goodness and
beauty degenerates into dogmatism and lacks the power to attract and convince; good-
ness without truth is superficial, and without beauty—that is, without graced form—it
degenerates into moralism. From this perspective the moral power of art has to do with
its power to express or embody the beautiful. This presupposes a recognition of beauty
that is more profound than its many banal counterfeits. But none of this detracts from
the importance of beauty as something that gives us pleasure and adds color and enrich-
ment to life. True beauty does not seduce, it attracts and transforms us.
Taste traditionally has to do with what is regarded as beautiful. Bad taste, it has been
argued from a Christian perspective, can be regarded as a moral liability, whereas good
taste, properly understood, generates human community and helps express the glory of
God.6 The formation of good taste from this perspective does not mean simply devel-
oping an appreciation for “fine” in the Western tradition, but an appreciation for good
art in all its diversity as distinct from the mediocre. This is an appreciation of art as that
which both evokes pleasure and enables one to see things in new ways that may well
change consciousness and moral awareness. Awakened aesthetic sensibility thus sharp-
ens moral awareness. Taste obviously implies subjective judgment, but it is not simply
a private matter, for bad taste can infect a whole society for the worst, while good taste
may well contribute to its well-being. But can art do more than sharpen moral aware-
ness? Can it also enable the struggle for justice?
32.5 Art and Social Transformation
Many art critics are skeptical about the moral power of art to change society for the bet-
ter. Donald Kuspit, a North American art critic, argues that “activist art is inherently
anti-art, for the task of art is to find new ways of articulating desire, freeing it of all ideo-
logical—that is, didactic—predetermination.” Genuine art, he writes, “is a revolt against
the superego ideals and tasks the world wants to burden art with, whether they be

philosophical, moral, decorative, economic—all of which cross-fertilize.”7 Art certainly

does not have to be “politically correct” in order to be “good art,” and may well simply
end up as propaganda. But this does not mean that what might be called “pure art” and
art inspired by social commitment are exclusive of each other. All art has some social
significance even if it does not directly address political issues and only makes its impact
felt over time. But visual arts, like film, generally have a much greater, far more immedi-
ate potential for affecting social values.
Art serves many different purposes. For example, in existing for human contempla-
tion and pleasure, it contributes to human well–being, which in turn has moral sig-
nificance. But it can also protest against injustice and inspire struggles for freedom.
Significantly, it was the neo-Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, who insisted
that art had the potential to break open closed ideological systems, such as Soviet
Communism, and prepare the way for their transformation. This did not mean that
the power of art lay primarily in any overt political content or didactic intention, but
rather in its own creativity. “The work of art” writes Marcuse, “speaks the liberating
language, invokes the liberating images of the subordination of death and destruc-
tion to the will to live.”8 Art, as Theodor Adorno insisted, exercises its critical power by
being art, by simply being there.9 Such art is not the product of a social class or political
enclave, but the work of individual passion, imagination, and conscience. And as such,
it contributes to social transformation by challenging and transforming individual
consciousness. In this way ideological constriction is broken open, social conditions
transcended, and liberation achieved.
Deborah Haynes’s proposal for an ethical aesthetics that is not ideologically hardened
follows Marcuse’s account of the way in which art functions in society, especially with
regard to the role of the individual, the relationship between form and content, and
time.10 Art does not simply mirror reality, it establishes, writes Haynes, “another reality
that contrasts with the dominant reality principle governing the world in which we live.
By contradicting given realities, art thus can communicate new possibilities and new
truths.”11 In breaking open the possibility for such newness, art functions in several dif-
ferent ways within society: it negates present realities, challenging destructive, alienating
trends, and anticipating future possibilities. It enables us to remember that which was
best in the past even as it evokes fresh and creative images that serve transformation in
the present. Writing similarly as a Christian philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstorff speaks
of art as providing alternate images of reality and altering our consciousness. In this way,
art serves the cause of human liberation in all its several dimensions even if it cannot
deliver all it may promise.12 This demands a sense of public responsibility on the part of
the artist, something far more than simply self-expression, something akin to the role
played by social prophets in ancient Israel.13 Of course, influencing society may not be the
intention of the artist, but it is often no less real for being unintentional. The artist’s criti-
cal voice and vision can provide us with alternative ways of hearing and seeing reality that
are of crucial importance for the future of the world. As such artists “are antennae to new
visions of human possibility, new values and forms of personal and communal life, new
fuller theories of the good.”14

The four moments in this process identified by Haynes are: the ability to discern and
critically analyze what is happening in society in relation to the past, the ability to identify
with the plight of society’s victims, the ability to unmask hypocrisy, and the ability to evoke
hope that results in action. Artists, then, are not passive onlookers, but active agents in the
world, and what they do can and should make a difference. This does not mean that art
cannot or should not play other public roles, or that there is no ambivalence regarding its
role in social transformation. Such change is, after all, a complex, many-sided, unpredict-
able, and dynamic process that is difficult to measure. Yet, Haynes argues, “art has undeni-
able power: power to name, to criticize, to heal, and ultimately to change consciousness.”15
But it also keeps hope alive, and in doing so contributes to social change.
There are many people in all societies whose poverty keeps them in bondage to ugly
environments that crush their creativity just as they crush their bodies, and whose lack
of resources and education prevents them from developing an appreciation for art. At
the same time, through discovering their creative abilities, people are enabled to rise
above their circumstances and contribute not only to their own well-being but also to
the healing of their communities and keeping hope alive. To lose hope is to surrender
the power to bring about change. The importance of keeping hope alive in situations
of despair and oppression is self-evident, for it provides the driving force for struggle,
without which change is impossible. Hope is, in fact, part of the creative human capacity
of imagination that brings past and future into the present. In order to illustrate much of
what we have been considering, let us conclude by reflecting on the role art played in the
liberation struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and which it continues to play in
the ongoing process of transformation in that country.
32.6 Art in the Struggle for Liberation
The struggle against apartheid produced artistic creativity of remarkable intensity, and
there can be little doubt that the arts were significant within the broader struggle against
apartheid. Nadine Gordimer, the celebrated South African novelist, rightly noted that
“art is at the heart of liberation.”16 If art is genuinely engaged in bringing forth a new
reality amidst the brokenness of society, then the creative act is part of the struggle for
liberation. But art is also fulfilling an equally important role in the ongoing struggle to
transform post-apartheid society.
Sue Williamson’s Resistance Art in South Africa provides the classic documentary text
for the role of the visual arts in the struggle against apartheid. In her brief introduction,
she traces the beginnings of contemporary resistance art to the Soweto uprising in 1976,
and remarks that
Before 1976 a trip around South African art galleries would have given very little
clue to the socio-political problems of the country. Strangely divorced from reality,
landscapes, experiments in abstraction, figure studies, and vignettes of township

life hung on the walls. The work most admired was that which appeared in the
international art magazines.17
White artists tended to bury their heads in the safety of their cultural enclaves; black
artists produced non-confrontational works for white consumption. Yet there were
signs of change that predated the Soweto uprising, such as the manifesto sent out by the
Organization of South African Artists when it was formed in 1975 to challenge artists
to participate in the transformation of the country and realize the cultural potential of
Africa.18 Other initiatives aimed at the fostering of art in the black townships as part of
the struggle for political and cultural transformation came with the establishment of
the Federation of Black Artists that followed, and two conferences, one in Cape Town
(1979) and the other in Gaberone (1982), which opened up a debate amongst both black
and white artists that radically altered the face of South African art during the next
decade. Art became an instrument of political resistance. In a sense this was not an
entirely new departure but, as Williamson puts it, “a development of the old principle
governing traditional African art, which is that art must have a function in the commu-
nity.” But there was a new twist, namely that this “function” could bring about political
change.19 Art simply could not be isolated from the political context and its struggles.
Building on the foundations laid by others but now energized by the political struggle
and the glimmer of hope that was gradually being awoken, a new generation black artists
began to set the scene for a veritable explosion of art in all its many different variations.20
The distinctions between “popular art” and “fine art” crumbled, just as the separation
of aesthetics and ethics, art and politics, made no sense whatsoever. An explosion of
imaginative and colorful posters, T-shirts, graffiti (alongside township poetry and street
theater), along with some remarkable photography, to mention only a few examples,
became the “works of art” for communities engaged in the final years of the struggle
against apartheid. Such township artistic creativity was no longer peripheral to, but a
vital element of, protest and resistance, along with the work of progressive professional
artists.
The extent to which such an outburst of cultural resistance was perceived as a threat
to law and order by the apartheid regime can be judged by the fact that the state authori-
ties banned the Cape Town Arts Festival on the eve of its opening in December 1986.
But this could not stop the escalating contribution made by artists to what now, in ret-
rospect, can be seen as the final phase in the anti-apartheid struggle. Although he never
lived to see the end of apartheid, as he was killed in Botswana in 1985 in a cross-border
raid by South African soldiers, a year before his death Thamsanqa Mnyele spoke of this
vision and hope that was the task and joy of artists:
Our people have taken to the streets in the greatest possible expression of hope and
anger, of conscious understanding and unflinching commitment. This calls for what
all progressive art should be—realist, incisive and honest. We must restore dignity to
the visual arts. The writing is on the wall.21

The fulfillment of that prophecy came sooner than was generally expected, and with the
changing historical circumstances came a change in the production of art.
In the introduction to her second volume, Art in South Africa: The Future Present
(1996) Williamson commented that the political changes in the nineteen-nineties led
to a new level of aesthetic freedom. Clearly the demise of apartheid did not mean the
end of massive social problems that may be traced back to its legacy. It is not surpris-
ing, then, that works of art still reflect such issues, nor is it surprising that many others
have broken out of the “struggle mode” in order to embrace the new and hopeful signs
of transformation. But like so much of the country’s life, art reentered the world and
became part of its “normalcy” subject to market forces as any other commodity. As vari-
ous international art Biennales, some held in South Africa itself, demonstrated, South
African art burst onto the global scene refusing, along with African art more generally,
to be consigned to the exotic category of “the other.”
At the same time, this return to normalcy has not meant that many of the critical
theoretical issues concerning aesthetics have been shelved. But the current debate
has to do with who controls or shapes the interpretation of the past, for that deter-
mines in many ways how we live in the present. How do we remember the pain
and oppression of colonialism and apartheid, and who has the right to represent
it? The issue is not primarily about remembering the past, but on whether or not
that remembering brings healing or destruction, or paradoxically leads to amnesia
through the aesthetic trivializing of history. The importance of this discussion for the
erection of monuments and memorials in the public square should be apparent. How
often have the skills of the sculptor been abused to produce public works that instead
of healing the past perpetuate its wrongs, glorifying a triumphant nation or keeping
ethnic hatred alive?
At the outset we remarked on the social role of architecture as a visual art. Th is is
an appropriate point to revisit that comment and bring our discussion as a whole
to conclusion. Architecture is not always regarded as a form of art, yet, as Ruskin
recognized, it is one of the most concrete expressions of artistic creativity, certainly
the most public and the one that makes the largest impact on the material condi-
tions in which people live. Those familiar with South Africa will know that archi-
tecture, together with town planning, were often subservient to apartheid policies,
not only glorifying the granite nature of the ideology, but dehumanizing people in
the process. Of course, South African architecture of the apartheid era varied a great
deal, and some of it simply reflected global tendencies in architectural style that were
dehumanizing in character. By contrast, architecture that is humanizing in style, that
engenders a sense of human community and well-being, rather than simply reflect-
ing and reinforcing the interests of nation or commerce, has a sense of aesthetic value
that serves a moral purpose. Architects cannot build utopias, but as artists of the
public space, they can design habitats fit for humanity, homes and towns that serve
the best interests of both present and future generations. Nowhere is it more obvious
how art, morality and justice connect with each other.

Notes
1. The Republic of Plato, translated by Francis Macdonald Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1955), Book X.
2. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. vol. 1: Seeing the Form, The Glory of the
Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982).
3. See the comprehensive study on the relation between religion and taste in Frank
Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
4. John Ruskin, Modern Painters: Of General Principles, and of Truth (London: George Allen,
1897), 30–31.
5. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999), 57.
6. Frank Burch Brown, Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 146.
7. Donald Kuspit, Signs of Psyche in Modern and Post-Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 146f.
8. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 62.
9. Cf. Theodore Adorno, W., Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 321.
10. Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension.
11. Deborah J. Haynes, The Vocation of the Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 62.
12. Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 154f.
13. See P.T. Forsyth, Christ on Parnassus (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911), 29.
14. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
(London: SCM, 1981), 12.
15. Haynes, The Vocation of the Artist, 59.
16. The Introduction to Culture in Another South Africa, ed. William Campschreur and Joost
Divendal (London: Zed Books, 1989), 12.
17. Sue Williamson, Resistance Art in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989), 8.
18. Gavin Younge, Art of the South African Townships (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 58.
19. Williamson, Resistance Art in South Africa, 9.
20. See, e.g., Younge, Art of the South African Townships.
21. Quoted in Williamson, Resistance Art in South Africa, 10.
Select Bibliography
Adorno, Theodore W. (1984) Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Barzun, Jacques (1975) The Use and Abuse of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bernstein, J. (1992) The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno.
Oxford: Polity Press.
Brown, Frank Burch (1989) Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Brown, Frank Burch (2000) Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious
Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cooper, David E., ed. (1992) A Companion to Aesthetics. Oxford: Blackwell.

De Gruchy, John W. (2001) Christianity, Art and Transformation, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Dillenberger, John (1986) A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities: The Visual Arts and the Church.
London: SCM.
Feagin, Susan, and Patrick Maynard, eds. (1997) Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Forsyth, Peter T. (1911) Christ on Parnassus. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1986) The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, Peter (1998) Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order. London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Harries, Karsten (1997) The Ethical Function of Architecture. Boston: MIT Press.
Haynes, Deborah J. (1997) The Vocation of the Artist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, Georg W. F. (1975) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon.
Kant, Immanuel (1952) Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Clarendon.
Kuspit, Donald (1993) Signs of Psyche in Modern and Post-Modern Art. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Levinson, Jerrold, ed. (1998) Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. (1968) The Aesthetic Dimension. Boston: Beacon Press.
The Republic of Plato, translation with introduction by Francis Macdonald Cornford (1955).
Oxford: Clarendon Press
von Balthasar, Hans Urs (1982) The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1: Seeing the Form. The Glory of the
Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.
Walsh, Sylvia (1994) Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics. University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Welsch, Wolfgang (1997) Undoing Aesthetics. London: SAGE Publications.
Williamson, Sue (1989) Resistance Art in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip.
Wollheim, Richard (1996) Art and Its Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas (1980) Art in Action. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Zolberg, Vera L., and Joni Maya Cherbo, eds. (1997) Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in
Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

C HA P T E R 33
DOUBT AND BELIEF IN

L I T E R AT U R E
RO G E R LU N DI N
In the summer of 1870, Henry Adams sat in London and wondered what direction
his hitherto aimless life might possibly take. Although this 28-year-old grandson and
great-grandson of presidents had shown seeds of promise in his early years, his life expe-
riences had yet to bear much fruit. Henry had no desire to pursue the public life that had
engaged his family for generations, but he also found it hard to imagine what profession
or vocation might command his attention and satisfy the needs of his mind and spirit.
As Adams mulled over the possibilities, devastating news reached him in a telegram
from Italy. His brother-in-law reported that Henry’s sister, Louisa, had become gravely
ill as a result of an infection that had followed upon a minor accident. Henry rushed to
be at her side, making the journey from London to Tuscany in a little over a day. Yet by
the time he arrived, tetanus had already clamped its deadly grip upon his sister’s body.
“Hour by hour,” he wrote years later, “the muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained
bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died in convulsions.”
Henry was appalled by the contrast between the lavish beauty of the Italian landscape
and the barren torments of Louisa’s sickroom. In excess and splendor, nature played with
death and toyed with torture as his sister succumbed to its sinister power. “Never had
one seen her so winning,” Adams wrote of the visage nature wore in the vista from his
sister’s room. The “vineyards . . . bursting with midsummer blood” and the sweet hum of
“the soft, velvet air” gave hints of a seductive but destructive force: “For many thousands
of years, on these hills and plains, nature had gone on sabring men and women with the
same air of sensual pleasure.”
This was Henry Adams’s first intimate encounter with death, and he later claimed the
shock of it all set him permanently and implacably against religious belief. As he con-
templated the ruthless efficiency of nature, his “mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating
in a void of shapeless energies.” To his despondent spirit, “society became fantastic,” and
“the usual anodynes of social medicine became evident artifice.” Of all possible seda-
tives, “religion was the most human” but also the most unthinkable. How could anyone

believe that “any personal deity could find pleasure or profit” in the torture of a woman
as vibrant and dynamic as his sister? “For pure blasphemy,” Adams concluded, “it made
pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but he could not
be a Person.”1
Although it was unique in the sense that every experience of grief and doubt has its
own particular provenances and consequences, the crisis Henry Adams underwent was
hardly uncommon in his day. He came of age in the era of Darwin—he was 21 when On
the Origin of Species was published—and during his undergraduate years at Harvard, the
battle lines were already being drawn between the broadly evangelical moralists and the
newly emerging materialists. Like many artists and intellectuals who lived through the
Civil War and rose to positions of cultural authority in the following decades, Adams
greeted the future with equal measures of apprehension and elation. “You may think this
all nonsense,” he wrote to his brother in 1862, “but I tell you these are great times. Man
has mounted science, and is now run away with.”2
The frisson of excitement felt by many in those days had to do with the fact that for the
first time in the modern experience, open unbelief had suddenly become an intellectu-
ally viable and socially acceptable option across the cultures of the North Atlantic.3 This
nineteenth-century challenge to belief combined elements of epistemology and ethics
in its critique of Christianity, and Adams drew on both sources to analyze the role his
sister’s death played in his own loss of faith. On the ethical front, the difficulties centered
on the question of God’s character. Enlightenment standards of fairness and equality
made it hard to reconcile the arbitrariness of individual suffering with any idea of “a
personal deity” who might take pleasure in inflicting “fiendish cruelty” upon the body,
mind, and spirit of Louisa Adams Kuhn.
At the epistemological level, for Adams and others, philosophical naturalism put for-
ward a compelling alternative to the traditional narratives of providential design and
destiny. The Darwinian system provided a comprehensive account of the whole of life,
and it did so without recourse to any concept of God. With Darwin there was no need
for a divine designer to call life into being or to spin it through its endless permutations.
The principles guiding nature’s development were seen as unrelenting forces working
their way within living organisms rather than as transcendental powers creating and
sustaining life from without. When On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, the time
for it was ripe, for “Darwinism dropped into a cultural configuration already aligned to
accommodate it. Its fitness was generally appreciated before its rightness was generally
established.”4
33.1 The Shifting Nature of Belief
By the time that unbelief emerged as a potent cultural phenomenon in the

mid-nineteenth century, the meaning of belief itself had already undergone a dramatic
transformation. From the medieval period well into the seventeenth century, belief had

DOUBT AND BELIEF IN LITERATURE 435
a meaning that differed substantially from the one we assign to it today. It had to do pri-
marily with relationships of trust rather than with states of mind. In English, the word
belief dates to the late twelfth century, and it originally carried the sense we now ascribe
to faith. Belief was bound up with matters of loyalty, promise, and obligation; it involved
an action of the whole person that encompassed the willingness to trust and confide in
others and in God. Until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, belief also entailed
participation in liturgical life and communal ritual, and it had relatively little to do with
individual struggle and personal assent as we understand them.
Powerful changes were afoot, however, in the early modern era. Under the impetus of
the Reformation, the word faith, with its Latin root of fides, gradually came to stand for
the disposition of trust, and belief began to shade into our modern meaning of the term,
which focuses upon the mental act of acceptance and affirmation. In the understand-
ing of belief that developed over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, the mind is pictured as perceiving a fact or receiving a proposition purported to
be true. It then weighs the evidence of the senses, proceeds to judge arguments through
the reasoning process, and finally decides whether what it has perceived deserves to be
believed.
On the specific question of belief in God, a tension between affirmation and
denial—between belief and doubt—did not exist in any meaningful sense until the
Enlightenment period. Even then avowed unbelief proved to be the sensational excep-
tion rather than the conventional rule. Heterodox opinions and lax beliefs dotted the
spiritual landscape of early modern Europe, but until the late nineteenth century, “the
existence of God remained so interwoven with understandings of man and nature as to
be close to indubitable.”5
Nevertheless, as smooth and seamless as the cultural terrain may have appeared to be
in early modernity, tremors had begun to ripple beneath the surface, and the intellectual
ground had begun to buckle under the pressure of new ideas about nature, about the
self, and about the very meaning of ideas themselves. In good measure, from the time of
Socrates to that of Shakespeare—a span of two thousand years—ideas had been taken
to be the joint property of minds and objects together. Only in the early modern era did
“thought and feeling” gradually come to be considered as being “confined to minds”
alone. This relocation of ideas uncoupled the strong links that the Christian faith had
established between the lordship of Jesus Christ and the Greek concept of the Logos, the
Word to which the prologue to John’s gospel pays moving tribute. Sustained and nour-
ished by this association, Christian thought had long considered minds and objects to
be bound together mysteriously in an intricate, ordered system of meaning. But by the
end of the eighteenth century, the mind had come to stand alone, brimming with ideas
but facing an endless array of mindless objects. In this new epistemological order, the
mind’s central task became that of judging what is to be believed or doubted about that
world of objects and about the power that may or may not be at work behind it.6
So it was that by the nineteenth century, the center of belief had shifted from the realm
of relationships of trust and promise to the vast domain of human consciousness. John
Milton’s Paradise Lost captures brilliantly the dynamics of this shift. Composed in the

1660s, Milton’s epic has a prophetic quality about it, and in the speeches of Satan in par-
ticular, we hear a voice that sounds uncannily like our own. The Devil believes in the vir-
tues of self-fashioning, and as he calls together the fallen angels in hell, he boasts of the
ability they have to transform their hellish conditions through the powers of the mind:
Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and then profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.7
We might think of this and other speeches by Satan in Paradise Lost as pointing to the
timbers with which the cultural home of unbelief was to be framed and finished over the
course of the next two centuries. It was, after all, in the decades immediately following
Milton’s death (in 1674) that a series of bracing ideas began to call Christian orthodoxy
into question. New conceptions of history, nature, and knowledge raised vexing ques-
tions about the authority of the Bible, the reality of miracles, the efficacy of the sacra-
ments, and the deity of Christ. For some, the struggle over such issues led to a chastened
and deepened renewal of their Christian beliefs. Yet for others, the challenges threat-
ened to separate them forever from those beliefs.
Such crises spurred some of the late eighteenth century’s finest minds to seek new
ways to renew the ancient faith. Having discovered that holding on to scripture and tra-
dition “required some other evidence than those things themselves, [for] the authority
of tradition and established religion was no longer self-evident or self-certifying,” many
romantic poets and idealist philosophers looked for fresh sources of authority to sup-
port the spiritual riches and cultural legacy of historic Christianity.8
On both sides of the Atlantic, the quest for new sources and better evidence drew
some intrepid explorers ever deeper into nature and into the unfathomable self. To
William Wordsworth in his more rapturous moments, nothing within or beyond cre-
ation, including “Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir / Of shouting Angels,” could
fill him with “such fear and awe” as “the Mind of Man, / My haunt, and the main region
of my Song.” For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the answer to the threat posed by materialism
and the critical spirit was “a transcendental idea of the mind, . . . which actively shaped
experience and had access to spiritual dimensions beyond rational ‘Understanding.’ ”
And as far as their American counterpart Ralph Waldo Emerson was concerned, the
essence of Christianity could be saved only if its dross—i.e., the scriptures and sacra-
ments—could be discarded. “Dare to love God without mediator or veil,” he told a group
of Harvard divinity students in 1838, asking them to preach “the true Christianity,—a
faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in
some man or person old and departed.”9
For a few decades—in England from the late 1780s to the early 1800s and in America
from the late 1820s to 1850 or so—the romantic enterprise provided pillars that seemed
sturdy enough to support the new edifices meant to house the faith. Yet these structures

could not stand for long, for their foundation was a sanguine view of human nature
that could not bear the weight of the evidence against it. (Half a century ago, theolo-
gian Reinhold Niebuhr wryly said he concurred with the judgment that “the doctrine
of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”)10 On
the English side, the mayhem and terror that marked the French Revolution dashed
romantic hopes, while in America the abominations of slavery and the collapse of uto-
pian ventures unsettled the dreams and undid the schemes of what were meant to be
halcyon days.
33.1.1 Nimble Believing

The loss of this romantic hope left many writers in the second half of the nineteenth
century feeling empty-handed and bereft of spiritual comfort or assurance. A represen-
tative figure on this score was Herman Melville, who wondered aloud in Moby Dick
(1851) about what, or who, it is that lurks behind the “pasteboard masks” of the visible
world. Melville’s Captain Ahab moves back and forth incessantly between the belief that
behind every phenomenon “some unknown but still reasoning thing” may be at work
and the apprehension that perhaps “there’s naught beyond.” Yet whether Moby Dick is
the “agent” of a hidden, malicious power or is himself the unsponsored “principal” of
that power, Ahab will wreak his vengeance upon this creature in a desperate search for
relief for his anguished spirit. “I own thy speechless, placeless power,” the captain cries
out at one point, addressing the “clear spirit of clear fire” that burns at the heart of reality,
“but to the last gasp of my earthquake life [I] will dispute its unconditional, unintegral
mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.”11
A decade before Darwin, Melville’s Ahab found himself facing a mechanistic world in
which every reality outside the human mind seemed to project a visage of bleak, blank
indifference. In this situation, only consciousness, the play of the mind and language,
can articulate a view of reality as being infused with spiritual purpose, but to do so it
must trick itself into believing in a truth of its own making. The crisis of the alien spirit
housed in an indifferent universe more or less defines unbelief in the late nineteenth
century, and although this vision predates Darwin, his theories richly filled in the details
and firmly buttressed the arguments for it.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, then, the shift from the medieval to the
modern understanding of belief was complete. Belief and doubt as Melville and others
in his generation had come to view them had everything to do with the mind’s struggle
to assent to claims of truth and little to do with relationships of trust or rituals of partici-
pation. This view of truth hinges on an individual’s specific apprehension of nature, his-
tory, and human experience. In the literature of the late nineteenth century, the drama
of belief takes on an overwhelmingly inward orientation, as doubt and faith do battle
within the divided mind and restless spirit of the isolated individual. “The devil is strug-
gling with God,” Mitya Karamazov tells his brother in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, “and
the battlefield is the human heart.”12 Melville’s heart and mind provided a large stage for

conflicts of this kind, as Nathaniel Hawthorne explains in an account of his final meet-
ing with his friend and fellow novelist:
Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of

everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty
much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that
anticipation; and I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is
strange how he persists . . . in wandering to-and fro over these deserts, as dismal and
monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor
be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do
one or the other.13
This analysis of the Melvillean malady resonates with a self-assessment Dostoevsky put
forward in a letter written at the same time in the mid-1850s. To explain the renewal of
faith he had undergone during his recent imprisonment, he spoke of himself as a “child of
the century, a child of disbelief and doubt.” His “thirst for faith” had cost him “much ter-
rible torture,” but it had also brought him, as a gift from God, “instants” of complete “calm.”
During such times of peace, he had fashioned a personal Credo: “to believe that nothing is
more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly, and more perfect than Christ.”
Dostoevsky went so far as to say that “if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the
truth, . . . then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”14
Dostoevsky’s oppositional formula establishes a radical distinction between the
demands of the mind and the desires of the heart. The heart longs for God but the mind
has lost its way. As a result, the self finds itself shuttling between Christ and the truth,
between belief and unbelief. In a letter written in 1882, Emily Dickinson observes that
“on subjects of which we know nothing, or should I say Beings— . . . we both believe, and
disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.”15 In this letter, as
in the Melville and Dostoevsky passages, the act of believing in God is represented as
an endless toing-and-froing between the poles of affirmation and denial. Like others
in her day—including Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hardy, as well as Dostoevsky
and Melville—Dickinson took this ceaseless experience to be a distinctly modern
phenomenon:
Those—dying then,
Knew where they went—
They went to God’s Right Hand—
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found—
The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small—
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all—16
While it does not flatly deny the possibility of a heavenly destiny for the human race,
Dickinson’s poem holds out little hope for finding the vanished God. As was the case with

Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God—published in the same year Dickinson wrote
this poem—hints of violence and images of bloody hands greet the one who seeks after that
God. Nietzsche took the loss of God to be a call to the lofty labors of self-deification, while to
Dickinson the task was to adjust to a world in which “the abdication of Belief ” had made “the
Behavior small.” God’s absence leads to life’s emptiness, and as Dickinson said in a moving
tribute to novelist George Eliot, “Life’s empty Pack is heaviest, / As every Porter knows—.”17
Melville, Dostoevsky, and Dickinson were complex and singular artists. They founded
no literary movements, belonged to no intellectual schools, and certainly exercised no
influence on each other. Nevertheless, one senses in their work a solidarity of shared
anxieties and aspirations. And what made such writers particularly influential was that
their religious restlessness manifested itself not only in their thematic concerns but in
the forms and methods of their art as well.
In the case of Dostoevsky and Melville, for example, the quest for belief was tied to
the dialogical techniques they employed in their fiction. As Dostoevsky was wrestling
with his profound doubts, he was also furiously at work developing a new form of fic-
tion, which Mikhail Bakhtin was to call the dialogical novel. According to Bakhtin,
in fiction of this kind, the author cedes control of the thoughts and discourse of his
characters and permits them to embody and promote ideas profoundly antithetical
to his own. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky presents Alyosha as his hero, even
as he allows Ivan to espouse countervailing views with great force and clarity. In like
manner, in Moby Dick Melville clears a space in which two dramatically conflicting
visions—the grim idealism of Captain Ahab and the good-humored pragmatism of
Ishmael—flourish side by side. Propelled by these opposing visions, the novel repeat-
edly shifts from deadly serious assertions to comically absurd asides and back again.
For Dickinson the new, fluid status of belief and unbelief played directly into her poetic
vision and practice. It led her to conceive of individual poems as provisional explorations
of multi-faceted human experience. Many of her poems offer the feel of life as a believing
mind or trusting heart might experience it, but just as many or more offer the texture of
experience as a deeply doubting or openly disbelieving person might know it. No single
poem or any small ensemble of poems can represent Dickinson’s settled view of the issue
at hand, for the affirmation one poem may give with the right hand in one verse is likely to
be snatched away by the left hand in another. The dashes that punctuate her lines, the pro-
nouns that stand alone without a hint of antecedents, and the metaphors that alternately
entice our interest and spurn our inquiries—all are signs of the tantalizing ambivalence
of Dickinson’s mind as it explores the possibilities of belief and unbelief.
33.2 Into the Twentieth Century
In England and America, vigorous, open unbelief emerged in the four decades bounded
by the publication of Moby Dick in 1851 and Melville’s death in 1891. More often than
not, the religious struggles depicted in the poetry and fiction of those decades were

marked by a stark contrast between the pieties that had been in place when these writ-
ers were children and the hard-edged skepticism that pervaded their adult world. Like
Dostoevsky and Dickinson, such writers as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Lord
Alfred Tennyson came into their maturity just as unbelief was emerging from the cul-
tural shadows. They found themselves face to face with a world in which a vast body
of new ideas began to overturn longstanding beliefs and to point the way to previously
unimaginable possibilities, both cultural and religious.
To some, the initial shock proved all but overwhelming. “There never yet was a gener-
ation of men,” John Ruskin wrote, “who, taken as a body, so woefully fulfilled the words,
‘having no hope, and without God in the world’, as the present civilized European race.”18
To others, the situation seemed hardly so dire, and over time, the conflict between faith
and doubt lost its aura of crisis and doom. Philosophical naturalism came to reign
over the intellectual and cultural life of the late nineteenth century, and that being the
case, writers increasingly felt little pressure to reconcile new insights with established
beliefs. Instead, they considered themselves free of concern over the fate of what they
took to be an outmoded creed. In a study of the American reception of Darwin, his-
torian Jon Roberts locates “a host of factors in the cultural milieu of the United States”
that led at the end of the nineteenth century to a “growing tendency among literate
Americans to ignore the categories of Christian theology in interpreting their experi-
ence.” Having conceded so much ground to scientific determinism, many Protestants
“found themselves defending a very attenuated view of God’s role in the universe,” and
the thinned-out forces backing the God of liberalism could mount little more than a
token defense against the assaults of naturalism.19
In the universities that were developing at a rapid pace in that era, the study of litera-
ture was increasingly promoted as a means of securing the benefits of a religious sensi-
bility without the burdens of a creedal belief. At Harvard, for example, President Charles
Eliot vigorously promoted an ideal of “liberal culture” in which Homer, Dante, and
Shakespeare were pressed into service to promote “human spiritual growth” as a “sub-
stitute for the Christian drama of the biblical canon.”20 As Eliot explained, the study of
nature and culture inevitably “fills men with humility and awe” by bringing them “face
to face with inscrutable mystery and infinite power.” By his reckoning, such an encoun-
ter need not lead to dire consequences that had undermined the faith of Henry Adams.
Instead, borrowing the words of James Russell Lowell, Eliot urged students and profes-
sors alike to embrace
Whatsoever touches life
With upward impulse; be He nowhere else,
God is in all that liberates and lifts,
In all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles.21
On matters having to do with the relationship between literature and belief, the twen-
tieth century was to witness an ever-widening gap between the view of those matters
from the ivory tower and the perspective from the pews. Perhaps few things could give
us a better sense of this distance than a sermonic assessment that the frenetic evangelist

Billy Sunday made of Charles Eliot and his educational vision. With his vision of liter-
ary culture as a nimbus-giving surrogate for a departed God, Eliot had shown himself
to be, in Sunday’s words, a man “so low-down he would need an aeroplane to get into
hell.”22
Despite their personal and social significance for millions, neither fundamentalism of
Billy Sunday’s kind nor traditional Catholicism had a significant impact upon American
or British literature from the Civil War to the Great Depression. In this period, on mat-
ters of religious belief, literature assumed a valedictory air, as poets, novelists, and essay-
ists found themselves bidding adieu to a no-longer forbidding deity. Some writers of this
period, such as Edith Wharton and Stephen Crane, took the loss in stride. Throughout
most of her adulthood, Wharton took the “late nineteenth-century scientific rational-
ism” of her youth to be her guide, while Crane found what shelter he could under the
cover of cosmic irony.23 Others, such as Theodore Dreiser and Jack London, readily
embraced the liberating potential of materialism; in a deterministic world, sin became
an empty concept and guilt its rapidly diminishing consequence.
At the same time, other writers at the close of the century, Henry Adams and Mark
Twain among them, found themselves torn between their disdain for traditional
Christianity and their dismay over the heartlessness of a God-less world. While Adams
wrote in sorrow, Twain masked his pain with sarcasm. “Nothing exists; all is a dream.
God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars: a dream, all a
dream—they have no existence,” he wrote in The Mysterious Stranger. “Nothing exists
save empty space and you.”24 Consciousness and the empty void made for a lonely, mis-
matched pair, and Twain eventually came to believe life would be unendurable, were it
not for the gift of death. “Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows
how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He
brought death into the world.”25
Twain’s plaintive desperation proved to be the exception rather than the rule for many
authors in the early twentieth century. Following the lead of Flaubert and Baudelaire, a
number of English and Irish writers turned instead to the ideal of a self-contained aes-
thetic realm sealed off from the turmoil of ordinary life. For many, the passion for aes-
thetic development and cultural criticism proved too all-consuming to allow for more
than a fleeting concern for the passing of belief. In England, in Ireland, and in exile,
William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce were busy breaking new literary
ground and forsaking the cultivation of overtly Christian concerns. Denis Donoghue
sums up this state of affairs with his description of Yeats as a “residual Christian” and a
“Protestant of an unexacting theological persuasion” who propounded ideas that were
“heterodox indeed but not entirely a scandal to Christians.”26 With certain exceptions,
the modernist poets and novelists had little sympathy for religious orthodoxy, and they
took the legacy of Christian belief to be a curious, albeit resonant, remnant of a van-
quished faith and a vanished era. Because many of the modernist writers came into their
prime almost half a century after “the convulsions of the nineteenth century, . . . there
was no formal agony of religious belief ” in most of the writers of the early twentieth
century.27

Across the Atlantic, American culture appeared too preoccupied with the acquisi-
tion of wealth and the pursuit of pleasure to have time for rummaging in the ruins
of the European and Christian past. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “America
was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty
to tell about it.”28 Malcolm Cowley, who was both a keen participant in that spree
and a gifted chronicler of it, described the turmoil of the post-World War I genera-
tion as “a moral revolt,” and he was convinced that “beneath the revolt were social
transformations.” The “young men and women” of that era “had a sense of reckless
confidence not only about money but about life in general.” They were determined to
break with the beliefs and values of past generations, and in this time of rapid change,
what Cowley calls the “puritanism” of the culture and the “Protestantism” of its reli-
gion were “under attack.”29
33.3 Critical Establishments
By the middle of the twentieth century, it was clear that on matters of belief and doubt,
literary criticism and theory were content to follow the lead of poetry and fiction. Over
the first half of the century, criticism had gradually migrated from its home in the liter-
ary magazines and quarterlies to its new abode in the university. Once it had become
securely housed within the academy, criticism quickly developed a symbiotic relation-
ship with imaginative literature. Because the modern academic enterprise is driven by
nature to search for new paradigms and provocative interpretive schemes, the alliance
of criticism and literature had immediate and extensive consequences in the second half
of the twentieth century. Innovations in verse and fiction began to fuel revolutions in
theory, and influential theoretical movements in turn served to validate and promote
the work of key writers.
The shift of criticism from the magazines to the universities coincided with the col-
lapse of the spiritualized humanism that had informed the work of Charles Eliot and
countless others in the late nineteenth century. Whatever was left of what George
Santayana in 1913 memorably called the “genteel tradition” withered and vanished
during the First World War. Out of that collapse and at the close of that war, a sweep-
ing, transformational theological movement arose in Europe, spurred by the work of
Karl Barth and a host of others, including Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Dietrich
Bonhoeffer. However much they varied in their approaches, these figures shared a deep
desire to recover facets of the historic faith that had been discarded or dismissed by the
liberal tradition.
Although their work—particularly that of Barth and his great Catholic counter-
part, Hans Urs von Balthasar—has exercised a profound influence on the theology and
ecclesiology of recent decades, it has had scant impact upon literature or theory, save
in isolated instances. In the main, on matters religious, modern criticism has followed

literature’s lead by making its peace with philosophical naturalism. Twentieth-century

theories of literature accepted as a given the materialist narrative that had come to the
fore in late nineteenth-century literature and science. To flesh out their systems, critics
and theorists often turned to poets and novelists for their dominant images and narra-
tive patterns.
To see how this relationship of literature and theory functioned, we can examine the
close ties that bound one of the century’s greatest poets, Wallace Stevens, to one of its
most distinguished critics, Frank Kermode. Stevens broke upon the scene during the
First World War and continued to write poetry until his death in 1955, while Kermode’s
critical studies spanned six decades, from the early 1950s to the first decade of the
twenty-first century.
From the start, Stevens promoted poetry as the inevitable successor to religion in gen-
eral and Christianity in particular. For him, life was hardly a struggle between belief and
doubt, because the battle was already over, and unbelief had won. Like most modernists,
Stevens took that unbelief to be a given, and to him the only real question was, in the
words of Robert Frost, “what to make of a diminished thing.”
“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great
human experiences,” Stevens wrote near the end of his life. These gods had not disap-
peared or fallen victim to craftier, more powerful deities. No, they simply “came to
nothing,” and although “it was their annihilation, not our ours, . . . it left us feeling
that in a measure we, too, had been annihilated.” To Stevens, to live in the modern
age was to stand alone, “feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children
without parents.”30
In “Sunday Morning,” Stevens depicts unbelief as a whirling agent of change that
has brought about “an old chaos of the sun, / Or old dependency of day and night, /
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free.” In our state of spiritual poverty and confu-
sion, we must call upon poetry to assist us in writing the script for our otherwise
plotless lives:
The poem of the mind in the act of finding

What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
We write, that is, to articulate our lives by fabricating the connections that impart mean-
ing—or at least the illusion of it—to our lives. “From this the poem springs,” Stevens
explains: “that we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves /
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.”31
Images of dispossession and abandonment sound a somber note in these accounts
of belief ’s decline, but Stevens’s oracular tributes to poetry are often marked by a good
measure of brio and bravado as well. It is hard to lose the gods, these aphorisms concede,
but it is also good that poetry can take their place and play their roles. In the collection of

these aphorisms, titled “Adagia,” Stevens seats poetry securely on the throne so recently
abandoned by the gods:
The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which
takes its place as life’s redemption.
It is the belief and not the god that counts.
The mind is the most powerful thing in the world.
Poetry is a means of redemption.
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction,
there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction
and that you believe in it willingly.32
Kermode published The Sense of an Ending a decade after Stevens died, and although
that work rarely mentions the poet’s name, it bears the imprint of his thought on every
page. Kermode’s elegant study of narrative reads, in fact, like one long gloss upon
Stevens’s claim that “the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fic-
tion, there being nothing else.” Deprived of metaphysical solace, we desperately need
fictions, for “our poverty—to borrow that rich concept from Wallace Stevens—is great
enough, in a world which is not our own, to necessitate a continuous preoccupation
with the changing fiction.”33 Fictions clothe us in the illusions of truth, without which we
could not survive in a world as hostile and forbidding as the one we inhabit.
Like many theories of literature generated in the past century, Kermode’s account
rests upon a strong set of tacit assumptions about belief. It takes as a given a radical dis-
tinction between myths, which Kermode fears, and fictions, which he champions. This
distinction matters for ethical and political reasons. “Fictions are for finding things out,”
he argues, and we can adapt them to serve our purposes and meet our needs. They do
not require our assent, nor do they have the power to compel us, or anyone else, to any
specific course of action. “Myths,” on the other hand, come to life when fictions “degen-
erate.” That is, “whenever [fictions] are not consciously held to be fictive” they becomes
“myths,” i.e., dogmas. Myths are meant to establish “stability,” while fictions are “agents
of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent.”34
Kermode was a largely apolitical critic, but his “fiction-myth” distinction tells us a
good deal about the political transformation of the question of belief and doubt in mod-
ern literary studies. The virtues he touts in fictions—having to do with the malleability
of their claims and the modesty of their assumptions—are theoretical commonplaces
that grew out of nineteenth-century romanticism and pragmatism.
The story of how literary romanticism led to theoretical fictionalism was told repeat-
edly, and lucidly, in the essays and books of Richard Rorty. One of his pivotal works,
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, opens with a bold declaration about the political
transformation of religious belief: “About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth
was made rather found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe.” The French
Revolution taught us that language and social institutions could be overturned and
transformed “almost overnight.” As a consequence, what Rorty calls “utopian politics”

became the rule for the intellectual and artistic elites of the cultures of the North Atlantic.
On the matter of belief, “utopian politics sets aside questions about both the will of God
and the nature of man and dreams of creating a hitherto unknown form of society.”35
Rorty claims that the central argument of modernity no longer concerns the existence
or character of God. Instead, the only question of belief that now matters has to do with
the possibilities of dramatic, even radical, social and political change.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Rorty claims, the romantic view of history and
language had given way to a tightly focused, pragmatic understanding of them. Figures
such as Nietzsche and William James concluded that instead of providing access to the
truth, language is useful as a tool that can “help us get what we want.” The pragmatists
are content to live without “metaphysical comfort,” and they do not agonize over reli-
gious questions of the kind that had bedeviled the likes of Dickinson, Dostoevsky, and
their cohort. To be a pragmatist of the Rortyan kind is to be willing, even eager, to aban-
don belief and discount doubt as they have been defined in the history of Judaism and
Christianity.36
In the closing decades of the twentieth century, a hybrid version of Kermode’s fic-
tionalism and Rorty’s pragmatism came to exercise considerable influence over liter-
ary theory and criticism. This perspective recast the debate about faith and doubt by
changing it from an epistemological and theological struggle into an ethical quest. Fixed
beliefs, which buttressed established practices, became anathema, and for many the goal
of literature and criticism became that of envisioning a world in which flexible defini-
tions of the good, the true, and the beautiful would be free to flourish without impedi-
ment or harm. A belief in the unassailable virtue of self-definition and self-construction
became an all but unquestioned article in the humanist creed by the end of the twentieth
century.
As problematic as certain elements of this shift to the political have been, salutary
consequences have followed upon it as well. The foregrounding of ethical questions,
for example, led to a long overdue reappraisal of the African American literary tradi-
tion and of the rich religious traditions that had fed into it. From the slave narratives of
the nineteenth century to the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and the fiction of such
major writers as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, that literature has
had its share of powerful accounts of the struggle between belief and doubt.
But in this tradition, more often than not, questions of belief and doubt have been
driven by a concern for justice and righteousness rather than by a passion for mat-
ters epistemological and metaphysical. In the “Appendix” to his own slave narra-
tive, Frederick Douglass spoke openly of his crisis of faith. That crisis was fueled by
the contrast between the ideals of biblical religion and “the slaveholding religion” of
the United States. “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ,”
Douglass explains. “I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping,
cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”37 Douglass strug-
gled to distinguish between the Christianity of the nation and the Christianity of Christ,
but even as he was writing Narrative of the Life, he was beginning to part ways with the
faith of his youth. In the words of his biographer, “Douglass found that he could not

marry the two religions, Christianity and antislavery, though the one led to the other.”
He severed his ties to the church and “was now committed to a new faith, one for which
he would speak the word.”38
“He could not marry the two religions . . . though the one led to the other”—with this
description of Frederick Douglass’s struggles, William McFeely deftly traces the narra-
tive arc of belief and doubt in modern literature. The story begins, we have seen, with
the emergence of open unbelief at roughly the midpoint of the nineteenth century. For
the first generation of writers—including such greats as Melville, Dickinson, Nietzsche,
and Dostoevsky—the sense of conflict and uncertainty was palpable, as they grappled
on new ground with classic questions concerning the nature and existence of God, the
problem of evil, and the meaning of human life. In the generations that followed, from
the rise of naturalism to the heights of modernism into the postmodern, eclectic age we
call our own, the overtly Christian nature of the question of belief began to recede from
view, and a politically oriented understanding took center stage.
33.4 Pugilists and Poets: The Modern

Literature of Belief
Still, while these developments were unfolding within the academy, outside its walls men and
women continued to grapple with God and to record their struggles for others to read, to
hear, and to heed. Given the infinitely diverse and widely dispersed nature of modern cul-
ture, these individual accounts of faith and doubt perhaps have not had the same cultural
resonance that the explosive explorations of the nineteenth-century writers did. Yet at the
same time, they testify to the ongoing vitality of belief, and unbelief, in contemporary lit-
erature and experience. At their best, such works are marked by a creative pugnacity, and in
their willingness to mention the unmentionable, they continue to serve as a counter-cultural
force that challenges the pieties of the modern literary and theoretical establishments.
An incident from the life of Flannery O’Connor captures brilliantly the oppositional
power of this modern literature of belief. Several years after the fact, O’Connor wrote to
a friend to describe a sharp exchange she had had with the novelist Mary McCarthy at
a dinner party. It turned out to be a dispute, albeit a brief one, about the relationship of
religion and literature. “She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual,”
O’Connor wrote of McCarthy, and it was clear that the vaunted public intellectual intim-
idated her younger, fiction-writing guest.
The dinner began at eight, and by one in the morning, O’Connor reported, “I hadn’t
opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say.” She felt
like a dog “who had been trained to say a few words but . . . had forgotten them.” Then,
“toward morning,” the conversation turned to the subject of “the Eucharist, which I,
being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend.” McCarthy said that whenever
she received the Host in her childhood, she had liked to imagine “it as the Holy Ghost,”

that “most portable” person of the Trinity. But now, she explained, she took it to be
nothing but “a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very
shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ ” That was the only defense that a weary
O’Connor could mount in the middle of the night, but in her words, “I realize now that
this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of
existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”39
In a letter written in the final months of her life, Emily Dickinson described herself as
being both “Pugilist and Poet.” Like Jacob, who told the angel, “I will not let you go, unless
you bless me,” Dickinson would not let go of God, nor would Flannery O’Connor. And as
the stories of Walker Percy, John Updike, Toni Morrison, and Saul Bellow bear witness
and the poems of Richard Wilbur, Denise Levertov, and Czeslaw Milosz attest, many of
the modern world’s most accomplished writers have continued to refuse to relax their
grip as they have pressed ahead with their restless quests to believe, and rest, in God.
Notes
1. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, in Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education,
ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (New York: Library of America, 1983), 982–83.
2. Henry Adams, The Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 1: 1858–1868, ed. J. C. Levenson et al.
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 290.
3. For the intellectual and cultural background to the emergence of unbelief, see James
Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985), and Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of
Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
4. Louis Menand, Metaphysical Club, 140.
5. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed, 27.
6. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 184–92.
7. John Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: New
American Library, 1968), 54; Book I, ll. 250–55.
8. Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10.
9. William Wordsworth, “Preface” to The Excursion, in M.H. Abrams, Natural
Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton,
1971), 467; Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834 (New York: Pantheon,
1999), 393; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in Emerson: Essays and
Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 88–89.
10. Reinhold Niebuhr, Man’s Nature and His Communities: Essays on the Dynamics and
Enigmas of Man’s Personal and Social Existence (New York: Scribner, 1965), 24.
11. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 2nd ed., ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford
(New York: Norton, 2002), 140, 382.
12. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 108.
13. Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 2,
1851–1891 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 300.

14. Fyodor Dostoevsky, quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 160.
15. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 3, ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 728.
16. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, reading edition, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 582.
17. Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 3, 770.
18. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3 (New York: 1859), 258.
19. Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic
Evolution, 1859–1900 (1988; repr., Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2001), 238.
20. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to
Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 191.
21. Charles William Eliot, Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses (New York, 1898), 43.
22. Upton Sinclair, The Goose Step: A Study of American Education (Pasadena: Self-Published,
1923), 103.
23. R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1975), 510.
24. Mark Twain, quoted in Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer (New York: Knopf,
1997), 192. Emphasis in original.
25. Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, in Mississippi Writings, ed. Guy Cardwell
(New York: Library of America, 1982), 929.
26. Denis Donoghue, Adam’s Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 119.
27. James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House,
1999), xvi.
28. F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted in Malcolm Cowley, A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the
Lost Generation (1973; repr., New York: Penguin, 1980), 25.
29. Cowley, Second Flowering, 26, 25. By “Protestant churches” Cowley meant the mainline
churches, not the fundamentalist ones that were supplanting them. Of modernism, Alfred
Kazin wrote: “Modernism would become its own tradition after the 1920s, the only chic
tradition left in the academy. But modernism as the expression of an elite that believed in
nothing so much as freedom and venerated nothing but the individual personality.” An
American Procession (New York: Knopf, 1984), 395.
30. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson
(New York: Library of America, 1997), 842.
31. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry, 56, 218, 332.
32. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry, 900–903.
33. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford
34. Frank Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 39.
35. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 3.
36. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982), 150–51.
37. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, in
Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life, My Bondage and My Freedom, Life and Times, ed.
Henry Louis Gates (New York: Library of America, 1994), 97.

38. William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 84–85.
39. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1979), 124–25.
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MI: Eerdmans, 2009.
Milosz, Czeslaw. The Witness of Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Roberts, Jon H., and James Turner. The Sacred and Secular University. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Scott, Nathan A. The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature.
Turner, James. Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Wood, James. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. New York: Random House, 1999.

C HA P T E R 34
ICONOCLASM
M IA M . MO C H I Z U K I
From chaos there rises the world of the spirit.

—Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855)1
A hammer hits home with a dull thud. A scrap of paper decays imperceptibly. These are
two very different sounds of image destruction and their sights are no more alike. The
uneven surfaces, the bubbles and spots of inconsistent chemistry that only resist mois-
ture with varying success, the absolutism of roughly cropped edges curling away—in
short, the relentless aging of pen and ink on paper underscore the price age exacts. But
the random assault of time merely burnishes the brutality of man-made demolition this
drawing depicts, mischievously presenting convergence where we might expect none
(Figure 34.1). When the sixteenth-century Netherlandish artist Pieter Aertsen sketched
this stained-glass roundel—the Destruction of the Altar of Baal—he capitalized on the
scene’s implied violence to break the surface of the picture plane. Without a second’s
thought to make sense of the radically foreshortened torso bridging our visual path,
a quick glance casts us inextricably into the Old Testament world of Judges 6:25–27.
Cudgels and sticks are discarded after decapitating the statue and amputating its arms
and legs. A pole is wedged in to pry Baal’s festooned altar off its pedestal, while others
assiduously chop away at this god’s sacred grove, object and sacred space obliterated in
a single dark night. And there on the hilltop, away from the madding crowd, Gideon
builds another altar from the desecrated wood to offer a burnt sacrifice of two fatted
calves before an attentive audience. Material and form of icon are thus recycled into
image through the acts of man. An artist has painstakingly worked through the stages
of creation—preparatory drawing to completed stained-glass window—on the destruc-
tion of art. The gauntlet iconoclasm thrusts before us is the challenge of understanding
an idol in an age of art.
What then does the active interrogation of objects by objects communicate about
the limits of representation? In the frankly object-centered approach of an iconoclastic
attack, I will take the long view of abject, or literally “thrown away,” objects to explore the

ICONOCLASM 451
FIGURE 34.1 Pieter Aertsen, Destruction of the Altar of Baal, c. 1550–1555. Haarlem, Teylers
Museum. Gift of Mr. Matthijs de Clercq.
rhetorical performance of doubt that iconoclasm—taking sledgehammer to image—

interjected into the visual, the issues at stake in the crucible of religious representation,
and consider what this anxiety offers the criticism of the material manifestations of
belief.
34.1 Iconoclasms
Certainly on one level we all comprehend what is meant by iconoclasm. Iconoclasm is

the breaking of images, from the Greek “eikon,” or image, and “klân,” to break. Images
are destroyed, desecrated, vandalized, maimed, and mutilated. But as an art historian,

iconoclasm has always struck me as an eloquent argument for the importance of mate-
rial culture as autonomous, even insatiable sources for the critical study of religion.
Hitting closer to the mark, to my mind, are definitions of iconoclasm like Hans Belting’s
notion of “applied visual criticism” or Belden Lane’s description of “fierce landscapes,”
where God’s presence is found in extreme environments, stimulating a kind of “fierce
looking” for images.2 What these definitions share is a rejection of the passivity of sight
in favor of the dynamism of the eye, as evidenced in the traditional assault on loci of
sight, like eyes and heads. Marcus Gheeraerts’s visual definition of iconoclasm harnesses
just such a tension (Figure 34.2). With hollowed sockets and mouth frozen in silent
scream, a compounded cadaver of iconoclasts is embodied even as they metabolize the
soft tissue of their host. The flickering of twin identities—micro scandals and macro
monk—thematizes iconoclasm through the deconstruction of illusion-based sensation
itself.
For further clarification, we need only cast our eyes across exempla from four his-
torical eras: ancient, medieval, early modern, and contemporary. Biblical iconoclasm
reviews the genesis or production of the object. An image of “Abraham and the Idols”
in a seventeenth-century Dutch Haggadah (Amsterdam: Solomon ben Joseph, 1695,
New York, The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary) tells of a father, an owner
of an idol shop, and a son, a young man who cynically offers to feed flour to the idols,
only to destroy them in a fit of rage.3 Iconoclasm as a story of lineage—whether Terah
and Abraham (Genesis 11:28), God and Christ, or divine ancestor and emperor—is what
is shared with the ancient Roman tradition of damnatio memoriae, the erasure of impe-
rial predecessors, as was famously performed in the Arch of Constantine (c. 315 A.D.,
Rome).4 Abraham’s brandishing of mallet to religious object was likewise about a transi-
tion between temporal and spatial states—the “founder’s moment”— when the progeni-
tor of a new cycle separates himself from ancestors before and descendants thereafter
via participation in the ebb and flow of images.5 But it is Abraham’s descendant, Moses,
who was condemned to destroy out of a single, unconscious gesture in the Adoration
of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32, 34).6 This was the very human moment of anguish
Michelangelo’s Moses (c. 1513–1514, Rome, S. Pietro in Vincoli) reconstructs with the
closed pose of a figure whose head turns away while his beard pulls him back, the tab-
lets absorbed in physical counterpart to their psychological import, as memorably ana-
lyzed by Sigmund Freud.7 Moses is not simply one body with eternal law; his whole self
becomes the protector of the law, the guardian of bonds. And it is only with a second set
of tablets, wrought from destruction after the physical consumption of the poisonous
golden calf, that we see how iconoclasm, perhaps counter-intuitively, may be protective,
creative, and oddly preserving of the object’s intent.8
What the medieval cycle of image-breaking recognizes is the economy of the
eye in the face of the increasing ambiguity of the good image, or eikon, to Jean
Baudrillard’s misleading simulacrum.9 If the early Church Fathers gave us comple-
mentary and competing Incarnation and Trinitarian systems, Marie-José Mondzain
has shown how iconoclasm erupted when the pull of objecthood conflicted with the
object’s relational web.10 In the choice of Byzantium for a theotokos—Madonna as

ICONOCLASM 453
FIGURE 34.2 Marcus Gheeraerts (Attr.), Iconoclasm, c. 1560–1570. London, British Museum.
(© Trustees of the British Museum.)

“God-bearer,” as in the first post-iconoclastic mosaic of Hagia Sophia (sixth century

A.D., reconstructed 867 A.D., Istanbul)—or a simple cross, as in the apse of Hagia
Eirene (c. 730–787 or 814–832 A.D., Istanbul, Topkapi Palace), were the tensions
between mimesis and kenosis, the naturalistic repetition of an object’s appearance
and the draining of that vessel, that equally lay at the root of Christological relations.11
For iconophiles, or iconodules, the rejection of the image was equated with the repu-
diation of Incarnation, visually summarized in the Chludov Psalter (c. mid-ninth
century, Moscow, State Historical Museum), one of the three preserved illuminated
Byzantine manuscripts of the iconoclastic period. Indeed, Oleg Grabar has reminded
us, the medieval Muslim world would have been a haven for Incarnation iconodules
like St. John of Damascus, St. Theodore, and St. Theophanes, because in aniconism,
such as the vegetal and animal ornamentation of the mosaics of the Great Mosque
at Damascus (Syria, c. 715 A.D.) or the intricately carved facades of Mshatta Palace
(Jordan, c. 743–744, A.D., now in Berlin, Pergamonmuseum), images were not evil
per se, but simply irrelevant to divine manifestation.12 Yet if historical Islamic divine
representation can be conceptualized as finding the vanishing point between vision
and religious supposition, medieval Roman Catholicism located the gesture of the
divine in two kinds of miraculous objects: the relic and the acheiropoieton, or image
made without human hands, non manufactum.13 For what the Augustinian legacy of
visual relations found in the object, whether shroud or sudarium, head of St. John
the Baptist or veil of King Abgar V of Edessa, was a way to move the real weaving of
significance to the operations objects generate. The object was not so much deceptive
as the gaze was incriminating.
With the advent of the early modern cycle of iconoclasms, the viewer of religious art
came into his own. In Catholic Reformation we find the use of all five senses to explode
the material confines of the object and join the image to the relational context of the
Augustinian dream. Each glance, each gaze was not simply participation in the unity
of an Aristotelian communal endoxon, or sphere of opinion; it was a rupture, a schism,
a breaking of the barriers as “right” boundaries expanded beyond the perimeter of
the object.14 When Gian Lorenzo Bernini pulled the viewer around the many sides of
his David (1623, Rome, Galleria Borghese), winding up to catapult the tiny pebble of
Goliath’s incipient demise, he was forcing the marble to spin out from its original block.
When Peter Paul Rubens painted his Raising of the Cross for the Antwerp Cathedral
of Our Lady (1610), Christ’s wooden cross was meant to pierce the picture plane and
tumble into the viewer’s space, making the event present like never before. It was
extreme devotional art that stood up, shook the viewer by the collar, and demanded
“fierce looking,” or broken vision, to coalesce. Emerging Protestantism, however, sig-
naled a vote of “no confidence” in visual perception.15 The eye was tried and judged a
failure for both its ability to see what was there and what was not there. Viewers clam-
ored for systems of representation that acknowledged this disability in every glance.
Luther’s insistence that the Christian ontology of the image depended just as much
on dissimulation as resemblance, so man’s difference from Satan as much as his like-
ness to Christ meant every image also had to deny itself in its very presentation.16 Such

ICONOCLASM 455
was the brief of paintings, like Heinrich Göding the Elder’s Mühlberg Altarpiece (1568,
Mühlberg/Elbe, Frauenkirche), whose predella negated its presence through infi-
nite regression, or Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Crucifixion with Converted Centurion
(1536, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), whose verbal north star guided the
wayward viewer.17 More radical still were the text paintings, or tekstschilderijen, that
invaded the Reformed churches of Switzerland and the Northern Netherlands, and
filled the walls with words, phrases and paragraphs in an almost unstoppable wave
of Erasmian, Calvinist, and Zwinglian loquacity, like the text paintings of the Great
or St. Bavo Church in Haarlem (c. 1580–1585), where all fruit, vegetable and still life
objects were banished to the frame in a neat reversal of pictorial priority.18 This was an
iconoclasm of vision that redirected the path of neural and sensory synapses for each
religious work.
The modern cycle of iconoclasm then multiplied the disorientation of diffusion as
image activism took advantage of new media and an increasingly interconnected world
stage. Scholars have argued the blowing up of the Bāmiyān Buddhas in Afghanistan
was not so much a timeless attack on figuration as a calculated engagement with a cul-
turally and politically specific discourse at a particular historical moment.19 A photo-
graph documenting the active removal of a building-sized Buddha statue was not an
image encased in a special holy book, like a Haggadah or a closed triptych, unearthed
and opened on a special occasion. This was a kind of image that could be broken down
into millions of pixels that were almost instantaneously transmitted around the globe
everyday and at any time via the Internet. Contemporary media allowed iconoclasm to
multiply vision into a modern hundred-eyed hydra that immobilizes, actually freezes
us in shock. The reproach of the disembodied gaze, the very opposite of the Israelites
forced to drink their mistake, yields a post-modern form of iconoclasm made all the
more strange for the intimacy of confrontation with the foreign on a mass level. Its ver-
bose visual criticism replays its maddening commentary on its own destruction over
and over again in a media loop that threatens to desensitize through sensory overload.
Iconoclasm thus becomes the dread of aesthetics turned anesthetic for the modern con-
dition, in the auratic sense of Susan Buck-Morss’s Benjaminian perspective, the double
negation of the eradication of empathy by apathy, Aertsen’s representation of the vio-
lated torso to the disintegrating aged paper.20 Yet the visual economy of destruction may
still be our greatest hope. For to dismiss negation, absence, and embodied destruction
in a Christian context is much akin to celebrating the Risen Christ without acknowledg-
ing his Crucifixion. To deny the hold of iconoclasm is to eviscerate and short-circuit the
process of the religious imagination.
34.2 The Stakes
And yet. One of the hardest things for us to understand today about historical icono-
clasm is how images could actually cost human lives. How could battles over religious

FIGURE 34.3 Hans Holbein the Younger, Dead Christ Entombed, 1521. Basel, Kunstmuseum,
Öffentliche Kunstsammlung. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
images matter so very much ? Was iconoclasm merely a hands-on application of theol-
ogy or did it actively create its own visual exegesis, with destruction as its medium of
choice ? If we accept the charge of looking at annihilation, at confronting the iconoclas-
tic dismantling of convention before us, we must also admit images like Hans Holbein
the Younger’s Dead Christ Entombed are hard on the eyes (Figure 34.3). “Why, some peo-
ple may lose their faith looking at that picture!,” Dostoyevsky famously had his fictional
character Prince Myshkin exclaim over this painting.21
Almost five centuries later, Holbein’s image is still shocking, difficult, even repulsive,
the “melancholy moment” for Julia Kristeva.22 We, the viewers, are boxed into a claus-
trophobic space with a cadaver, and not just any corpse, but the body that has the poten-
tial to save mankind. Ribs jut out, every muscle, every tendon is revealed in the almost
skeletal mass. Rancid green face, hands, feet, and wounds have already begun to suc-
cumb to putrefaction. We are even denied the comfortable fiction of sleep as his eyes
continue their empty gaze upward. Only we see the slightest shadow to remind us of the
lid, shut and heavy, the door that brooks no exit. But this is also a painting that “gives
man a healthy ‘shock’, . . . draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resigna-
tion and being content with the humdrum—it even makes him suffer, piercing him like
a dart, but in so doing, it ‘awakens’ him, opening afresh the eyes of his heart and mind,
giving him wings, carrying him aloft,” the indispensable function of beauty in the eyes
of Plato.23 For iconoclasm was always first and foremost a story of the problems of bod-
ies—human and divine bodies, living and inanimate bodies, governing bodies and the
pushing and shoving bodies in the market square. These bodies, the implicit population
of the iconoclastic image, bring us to the specifics of Holbein’s vision and help explain
just what was at stake in image wars.
The racked torso. In iconoclasm we acknowledge the restraints of the human body.
Holbein’s Christ lies broken before us, and this failure of the strictly human is what
Biblical iconoclasm holds up par excellence. In focusing on patriarchal generation,

ICONOCLASM 457
Abraham rails against the limits of one life and the requisite extraction for the found-
ing of a new cycle. Without human distractions, Moses need not protect himself from
his actions, deadlocked between destruction and ostentation in the ambiguous ges-
ture of Rembrandt van Rijn’s Moses (Moses with the Tablets of the Law, 1659, Berlin,
Gemäldegalerie). Yet more paralyzing was conceding the endpoint of the human body
as metaphor. This is what had brought the divine into the realm of the human, Christ’s
body transformed into the everyman on the altar-like predella. This radicalism of
Holbein’s vision lay in his making manifest that broken bodies always referred to one
body in particular, the body of Christ, and this was the gold standard for the Christian
visual economy. His dissipated corpse not only reminds us of our own impending physi-
cal death, it also suspends the opportunity of salvific redemption. That most elastic of
sign systems, the human body, could no longer stretch and cover the divine. The trope
was exhausted. If man was molded as a wax figure after Christ, the horror Holbein’s
image elucidates is the statue melting before our very eyes.
But it is more than that. In medieval iconoclasm we confront the censure of materi-
ality and memory, the flip sides of existence. The pierced and putrefied hand Holbein
presents can also be read as a meditation on essence and its legacy. In iconoclasm it is
the clash of Incarnation and Trinitarian systems that we hear in the Eucharist and its
commemoration of Christ’s life and see in the popular contemporary depictions of the
mystic Mass of St. Gregory. If the Eucharist was the model for every Christian religious
image, attention quickly focused on the degree of presence that existed, co-existed, or
was merely symbolically present in the panel of wood, drop of linseed oil or block of
stone that housed it.24 Further, Eucharistic presence was understood in terms of a cov-
enant that vanquished the mortal remains left on sarcophagus or slab with eternal life.
But if matter was disputed, how should we understand its memorial or life span, the
silence after Christ’s death ? In the search for a vernacular of belief, the re-use of materi-
als, the home-grown solution of spolia, posed the potential rehabilitation of the human
body, just as standard figure was joined, re-membered, to new portrait bust in the Arch
of Constantine.25 With every layer of translucent paint on panel, artists like Holbein
breathed new life into well-worn, familiar materials and exhausted bodies. The history
of oil and panel, flesh and bone, ensured a performance of forgetting even as their pres-
ence reminded of what had come before, the place-holders of implied distance, and
what exactly triumphed. Iconoclasm flagged the symbiosis of substance.
A rotting head. The problem was not limited to the physicality of the object but rather
to its perception, where a very sixteenth-century sense of optics was reflected in the
choice for material, almost solid, prism-like rays of vision, as if the eye could wield its
own club, in Erhard Schön’s scene of iconoclasm, Complaint of the Poor, Persecuted Idols
(c. 1530, Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum). What early modern iconoclasts
understood was that the perception of the divine could easily be mapped on to the pic-
torial relationship of illusion to reality, image of corpse to actual cadaver. Embedded
within the play of “thinghood” was the problem of showing the unknowable as appre-
hensible, the infinite as tactile. Iconoclasm tended to erupt when subjectivity began its
awkward dance with objectivity, when neurological and sensory systems ran amok in

counterpoint and contradiction. As the frustrated viewer paced around the object—
trying to see from different vantage points, attempting to burn new paths through
the brain—the leap of faith was reconceptualized visually as a synaptic juncture.
Everything—ligament and limb—became a monitor of the limnal space between touch
and thought, faith and logic, actual and imagined. What we see in Holbein’s Christ is
Avery Dulles’s flawed conversion of the everyday, the compact of a new beginning each
morning that the poet Miguel de Unamuno memorably assigned Diego Velázquez’s
Christ on the Cross (1632, Madrid, Prado).26 With the still soft tufts of hair that hang over
the edge, underscoring the illusion of an open side of the box, we gain our release from
the claustrophobic sepulcher. Freedom and life are regained. In the very weakness of the
links between effective and affective man, the spiritual enterprise of form and essence
was reborn in equal parts physical and psychological.
Heart, hand, head, and let us not forget the unknown foot. It is in modern iconoclasm
that we brave the alter-ego of the devotional viewer: the eye-witness to destruction, the
world’s despairing gallery to the rubble of Bāmiyān Buddha remains, the audience that
makes the accusation real. For the image-destroyer, success was only achieved if there
were observers of the handicapped image—not necessarily in agreement with the icon-
oclast—who could rehearse the declarations of the New Testament. In iconoclasm the
viewer’s role was not so much to imitate the Stations of the Cross or to reenact the road
to Golgotha, as for earlier andachtsbilder, but rather to attest like the Apostles, drawing
on the powerful tradition of affective funerary sculpture like the ever-present Mourners
at the tomb of Philip the Bold (Jean de la Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier, 1443–
1456/57, Dijon, Church of Champmol, now Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts). Like martus,
the Greek root we preserve in our word “martyr,” the witness to Holbein’s elegiac image
visually engages in the destruction of the tortured human body for faith. With this gaze
the iconoclastic assault is complete. The aesthetics of terror risked no less than the canon
of daily custom, the habitus or way of proceeding.
34.3 What Remains
Just as, by taking away, lady, one puts

into hard and alpine stone
a figure that’s alive
and that grows larger wherever the stone decreases,
so too are any good deeds
of the soul that still trembles
concealed by the excess mass of its own flesh27
A snippet of Michelangelo’s “Poem 152” (c. 1538–1544) perhaps best describes an

otherwise difficult portrait of St. Matthew (Figure 34.4). In place of a dignified solid
stance, Matthew is shown writhing, unbalanced, his left knee polished to reflect
glinting highlights as he seems to break free of the rectangular slab, coarse-featured

ICONOCLASM 459
FIGURE 34.4 Michelangelo Buonarroti, St. Matthew, c. 1506. Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia.
Nimatallah / Art Resource, NY.
head rolling backward. The asymmetrical figure’s missing half has been absorbed
by a rough-hewn marble block that encases and supports his lower limbs. Giorgio
Vasari recounted the effect as that of a figure slowly being lifted out of water, a figure
from the Black Lagoon for us today, even if we are no less confused by the in-process
quality of a work we know to be finished.28 St. Matthew’s texture is the key to under-
standing the display of process in creating negative space. Michelangelo quarried
every stone himself, and believed the figure was already in the block of stone, waiting
for him to release a Christian visual vocabulary from a classical figure. Religious art
production thus became a form of subtraction. For Michelangelo to represent the
negation necessary for invention was no great stretch in 1506, due to the dramatic
resurrection, literally drawn from the bowels of the earth, of the ancient “Belvedere”

Torso (mid-first century B.C., Rome, Vatican City, Vatican Museums, Museo Pio-
Clementino) in the first major archaeological dig at the Vatican. Its absent limbs and
head, material whittled by time’s gnawing teeth, much like the decomposing paper of
Aertsen’s drawing, were exactly the hallmarks of passing years that breathed august
new life into the statue. And here Michelangelo reminds us that there is a third way
to approach iconoclasm—besides historical case studies and allegorical representa-
tions—and that is through the life of objects. “That which remains,” the relic-like
remnants of the broken icon in the broader sense, leaves us with the aporetic object—
the work that calls forth the doubts and structural weaknesses of representation—
and suggests where the study of iconoclasm can lead in the future.
We can look to the kinds of objects that predated attack. There are the dramatic, muti-
lated objects, like a small relief of St. Veronica with the Sudarium (last quarter of the fifteenth
century, Haarlem, Great or St. Bavo Church) with raw, hacked-away splinters of stone
where faces once animated figures. The evidence for the validity of the devotional image
was recalibrated into a visceral sign of its attempted negation and destruction, maimed sur-
vivors revealing as much about representation as their construction. Other objects were
rescued: a statue placed just out of arm’s reach or an altarpiece moved to a local collection,
like Maarten van Heemskerck’s St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child (1532, Haarlem, Frans
Halsmuseum), actions suggesting that devotional worth cannot be artificially isolated
from aesthetic and monetary scales. And still others are now lost, gone, but not forgotten.
Archival evidence—an account book, a contract, a diary, a dispute—attests to their exis-
tence. These Proustian shades of images past persuasively articulate the creative effects of
destruction on the imagination as new paradigms for artistic production.
Other objects owe their existence to iconoclasm and the rejection of their immedi-
ate predecessors. When the hue and cry were over, these were the unlikely, permis-
sible options that arose to fill the vacuum. They could be anonymous representations
of image-breaking or chronicles of cleansed church interiors, like those of Pieter
Saenredam, that made a complex claim for visual authority. Part documentary, part
meta-complaint, these were images that refute their very subject matter in their own cre-
ation. Some objects may be considered an intensified version of those that came before
the advent of “applied criticism.” Here the classic example would be the enhanced veri-
similitude of Baroque art—mouths open mid-scream, translucent tears, and squeezable
marble thighs adding supple support to Georges Didi-Huberman’s theory of the pictorial
rend as the ineffable ambiguity inherent to Christian visual discernment.29 As mentioned,
there were also objects that represented differing degrees of departure from troublesome
pre-iconoclasm art, bravely positing visual substitutions from the same bare bones mate-
rials for an iconophobic public. Protestant Reformation art insisted the old standbys of
oil and panel be chaperoned by floating words that heightened the schism between illu-
sion and reality or safeguarded by dispensing with the fallible tools of representation alto-
gether. Thinking about the image in the context of its material and sensory redemption
could facilitate an appreciation for the flexibility of religious art yet to be fully explored.
But for every object that precedes or postdates iconoclasm, there is another that
seemingly has nothing to do with iconoclasm. Here we return not only to Michelangelo’s

ICONOCLASM 461
St. Matthew, but we could equally look to his highly charged Atlas Slave (c. 1530–1534,
Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia), who carries the world on his shoulders as he emerges
from it, or even the disturbing obsession that fueled the emaciation of the Rondanini
Pietà (unfinished 1564, Milan, Castello Sforzesco). I would like to suggest that these
objects too may be well-served by considering them through the lens of dearth and
desire. The destruction of the block of stone needed to create the statue is perfectly
encapsulated in the finished product as neither no more nor no less of the image’s struc-
ture and ancestry. We can understand St. Matthew through his stasis and presence, or
we can follow Michelangelo’s remarkable interpretation of the Apostle in terms of his
struggles, ambivalence, and the dark night of the soul before the Beatitudes. Iconoclasm
can thus be used as a method, a way by which to apprehend the process of change in the
life of every work of art, drawing on the premium placed on objecthood. If we allow for
Bruno Latour’s cyclical approach to iconoclasm as an alternative to reductive paradigms
of worlds with and without images, as our quick glance over historical examples would
seem to sustain, there is no reason why the destruction of an object should be seen as
any less of a point of departure than its initial creation.30 We are left in art-historical
terms with Michelangelo’s prematurely worn, striated Rondanini Madonna and Son, the
canonical portrait evoked as if acid were thrown on its surface with every glance. If we
understand all objects as partial images of iconoclasm, we can engage the absence, the
Good Friday, the Entombment for inspiration. Looking in the matrix of lack, fragility,
and mystery is the proposition iconoclasm tenders whenever art and religion intersect.
34.4 The Aporetic Object
In conclusion, Pieter Aertsen’s Destruction of the Altar of Baal—illuminated by torches

in a singular divergence from his later engraving—opens a rare, prescient glimpse into
the cycle of iconoclasms at large (Figure 34.1).31 Iconoclasm, or the power of religious art
apprehended through its destruction, can be charted chronologically, thematically, and
typologically.32 Poignantly, for our story, when Aertsen sat in his studio, imagining the
play of imbued absence on substance, the dusty, mote-filled shafts of ever-changing light
on and through colored glass, he would have had little idea of the bitter fate that awaited
his mature oeuvre less than twenty years later. Not long after this drawing was com-
pleted, his many remarkable altarpieces for the churches of Amsterdam, Delft, Louvain,
Diest, and Warmenhuijsen were “chopped to pieces with axes” and “destroyed by defil-
ing hands through savage stupidity.”33 Today not a single glass window by his hand or
after his designs remains.34 In fact, Karel van Mander’s biographical sketch of Aertsen is
one of his most personal reflections on the toll exacted by violent iconoclasm. He tells
us, “Pieter was disgruntled that his works, which he intended to leave as a memorial to
the world, were destroyed in this way, and he spoke out rudely against such enemies of
art—at risk and peril to himself.”35 In art, as in life, it seems the hammer has as much to
tell us as the brush.

FIGURE 34.5 Caravaggio, Narcissus, 1598–1599. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica.
Alinari / Art Resource, NY.
For from negation too comes the articulation of method, a fresh approach to look-
ing for the forgotten subject, the object sacrificed in the human desire to be known.
Here we have not strayed far from Leon Battista Alberti’s telling pseudo-syllogism: if
painting is the flower of the arts, and Narcissus was turned into a flower, Narcissus must
therefore be the real inventor of painting.36 Alberti concludes: “What is painting but the
act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?” At stake in iconoclasm is

ICONOCLASM 463
not simply the power of naturalistic illusion. We cannot forget the second half of the
Narcissan equation so hauntingly presented in Caravaggio’s Narcissus: mankind’s ego
and id, Narcissus and his metaphorical Medusa, or the reflection that disintegrates and
disappears as even the gentlest fingertip dips in the water (Figure 34.5). Beyond mimetic
likeness a halting intimation abruptly jerks us “face to face with the abyss of Infinity,
[that] can become a path towards the transcendent, towards the ultimate mystery,
towards God.”37 Iconoclasm and fertile absence remind viewers not to discount the rhet-
oric of doubt that objects perform in the umbrage of pictorial illusion, the less charted
underbelly of positivist realism, quite so quickly. In the raising of fist to object, human
hesitation—a recyclable palimpsest between the fixing of forms, whether Gheeraerts’s
iconoclasts and monk or Wittgenstein’s rabbit and duck—is made tangible, audible,
almost visible (Figure 34.2). After all, the shards of iconoclasm channel a vital function
of art and that is social criticism. In the words of the Cubist Georges Braque, another
unapologetic deconstructionist-creator, “Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.”38
Notes
1. Adam Mickiewicz, “Oda do mlodosci, v. 69,” Wybór poezyj, vol. 1, p. 63, as quoted in Pope
John Paul II, “Letter to Artists,” April 4, 1999, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_
paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html[http://www.vatican.
va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html]
(accessed December 1, 2010), 12.
2. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, 459;
Belden C. Lane, “Fierce Landscapes and the Indifference of God,” The Christian Century
106 (October 11, 1989): 907.
3. Joseph Gutmann, ed., No Graven Images: Studies in Art and the Hebrew Bible; Midrash
Rabba Genesis 37:13, as quoted in Tobie Nathan, “Breaking Idols . . . A Genuine Request
for Initiation,” in Exh. cat. Karlsruhe 2002: Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science,
Religion, and Art, 470.
4. Jás Elsner, “Iconoclasm and the Preservation of Memory,” in Robert S. Nelson and
Margaret Olin, eds., Monuments and Memory. Made and Unmade, 209–231; Eric R. Varner,
Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture.
5. Nathan, “Breaking Idols,” 470–473.
6. Bruno Pinchard, “On a Suspended Iconoclastic Gesture,” in Exh. cat. Karlsruhe 2002,
Iconoclash, 456–457.
7. Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” On Creativity and the Unconscious, 11–41.
8. Dario Gamboni, “Preservation and Destruction, Oblivion and Memory,” in Anne
McClanan and Jeffrey Johnson, eds., Negating the Image: Case Studies in Iconoclasm,
163–177.
9. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.
10. Augustine, The Trinity, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 45, VIII, XII, XV, passim; St. Basil
of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., A Select Library
of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd ser., vol. 8, XII, XIII,
XVIII, passim; John of Damascus, On the Divine Images. Three Apologies Against Those
Who Attack Divine Images; Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy. The Byzantine

Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, 18–66; Daniel J. Sahas, ed., Icon and Logos: Sources
in Eighth-Century Iconoclasm; Tertullian, “Against Marcion,” in Alexander Roberts,
James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Latin Christianity, vol. 3; Tertullian,
“Against Praxeas,” in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Latin
Christianity, vol. 3; Tertullian, De idolatria.
11. Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm;
Ernst Kitzinger, “The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm,” Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 8 (1954): 85–150; Gerhart B. Ladner, “The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers
and the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 7 (1953): 3–34.
12. Oleg Grabar, “Islam and Iconoclasm,” in Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin, eds., Iconoclasm.
Papers from the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies at the Centre for Byzantine
Studies, 46; Gerald R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From
Polemic to History.
13. Belting, Likeness and Presence; Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in
German Renaissance Art, 80–126.
14. Aristotle, Topics, 100b21–23, in J. Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle; Marie-José
Mondzain, “The Holy Shroud. How Invisible Hands Weave the Undecidable,” in Exh. cat.
Karlsruhe 2002, Iconoclash, 333.
15. Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to
Calvin; Margarete Stirm, Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation.
16. Martin Luther, “Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments,
1525,” in Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann, et. al., eds., Luther’s Works, vol. 40, 73–223;
Bryan D. Mangrum and Giuseppe Scavizzi, eds., A Reformation Debate. Karlstadt, Emser,
and Eck on Sacred Images: Three Treatises in Translation.
17. Carl C. Christensen, Art and the Reformation in Germany; John Dillenberger, Images
and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth-century Europe; Exh.
cat. Hamburg 1983, Luther und die Folgen für die Kunst; Joseph Leo Koerner, “The Icon
as Iconoclash,” in Exh. cat. Karlsruhe 2002, Iconoclash, 164–213; Joseph Leo Koerner, The
Reformation of the Image.
18. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion; Eire, War Against the Idols; Desiderius
Erasmus, Collected Works; Charles Garside, Jr., Zwingli and the Arts; Mia M. Mochizuki, The
Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age;
Stirm, Bilderfrage in der Reformation; C.A. van Swigchem, T. Brouwer, and W. van Os, Een
huis voor het Woord. Het Protestantse kerkinterieur in Nederland tot 1900; Ilja M. Veldman,
“Protestantism and the Arts: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Netherlands,” in Paul
Corby Finney, ed., Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, 397–425;
Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich,
Strasbourg, and Basel; Huldreich Zwingli, “Eine Antwort, Valentin Compar gegeben, 1525,”
Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 91, 35–159.
19. Pierre Centlivres, “Life, Death, and Eternity of the Buddhas in Afghanistan,” in Exh.
cat. Karlsruhe 2002, Iconoclash, 75–77; Finbarr Barry Flood, “Between Cult and
Culture: Bāmiyān, Islamic Iconoclasm and the Museum,” Art Bulletin 42 (2002): 641–659;
Jean-Michel Frodon, “The War of Images: Or the Bāmiyān Paradox,” in Exh. cat. Karlsruhe
2002, Iconoclash, 221–223.
20. Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay
Reconsidered,” October 62 (Fall 1992): 3–41.
21. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, 236.

ICONOCLASM 465
22. Julia Kristeva, “Holbein’s Dead Christ,” Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, 105–138.
23. Benedict XVI, “Meeting with Artists. Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI,”
November 21, 2009, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2009/
november/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20091121_artisti_en.html[http://www.
vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2009/november/documents/
hf_ben-xvi_spe_20091121_artisti_en.html] (accessed December 1, 2010), 3.
24. Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts, 169–194; Mondzain, Image, Icon,
Economy, 31–34, 56; Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and
Liturgy.
25. Elsner, “Iconoclasm and the Preservation of Memory;” Finbarr Barry Flood, “Refiguring
Iconoclasm in the Early Indian Mosque,” in McClanan and Johnson, eds., Negating the
Image, 15–40.
26. Avery Dulles, The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System, 53–68; Miguel de Unamuno,
El Cristo de Velázquez.
27. Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation, 305.
28. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, vol. 2, 738.
29. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of
Art, 139–228.
30. Bruno Latour, “What is Iconoclash?,” in Exh. cat. Karlsruhe 2002, Iconoclash, 14–37.
31. Pieter Aertsen after Maarten van Heemskerck, The History of Gideon, a set of six engravings,
1561. Zsuzsanna van Ruyven-Zeman, “Pieter Aertsen als ontwerper voor gebrandschilderd
glas,” Delineavit et sculpsit 31 (December 2007): 29, 36, n. 21; Ilja M. Veldman and Ger
Luijten, eds., The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts,
1450–1700, vol. 1—Maarten van Heemskerck, H. 78–83.
32. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response.
33. Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, vol. 1,
234–237.
34. Van Ruyven-Zeman, “Pieter Aertsen als ontwerper,” 23.
35. Van Mander, Lives, vol. 1, 236–237.
36. Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura, 2.26, in Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On
Sculpture, 60–63; Christopher Braider, “The Fountain of Narcissus: The Ontology of St
Paul in Caravaggio and Rembrandt,” Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules
at the Crossroads, 91.
37. Benedict XVI, “Meeting with Artists,” 4.
38. “L’art est fait pour troubler, la science rassure.” Georges Braque, Illustrated Notebooks, 1917–
1955, 10, as quoted in Ibid., 3.
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Augustine. The Trinity. Tr. Stephen McKenna. In The Fathers of the Church, vol. 45. Washington,
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of Byzantine Studies at the Centre for Byzantine Studies. Birmingham, UK: University of
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Buck-Morss, Susan. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay
Reconsidered.” October 62 (Fall 1992): 3–41.
Buonarroti, Michelangelo. The Poetry of Michelangelo. Tr. James M. Saslow. New Haven,
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MI: Eerdmans, 1989.
Christensen, Carl C. Art and the Reformation in Germany. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979.
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Dillenberger, John. Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in
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Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
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Hawting, Gerald R. The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History.
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C HA P T E R 35
G E N D E R , I M AG E RY, A N D
R E L I G I O U S I M AG I NAT I O N
M A RG A R E T R . M I L E S
Within the field of Religion and Art, the examination of gender plays an important part
in developing methods in which artworks are analyzed, not exclusively as moments in
a history of style or in terms of their formal presentation, but in relation to the cultures
and societies in which they were created and had their first viewers.1
35.1 Imagery and Imagination
Images provide a critical correction to a pervasive contemporary misrepresentation of

Western Christianity as focused on ideas, doctrines, and theology—in short, on lan-
guage.2 Imagery and religious imagination are closely interwoven in the testimony
of many historical people such as Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena, who were
converted to Christianity through their eyes, through gazing at an image, rather than
through their ears. In the religion of the Word made flesh, images focus the recogni-
tion that bodies and practices are at the core, not the periphery, of Christianity. Until
the twentieth century, Christian art focused on increasingly realistic bodies. For his-
torical viewers, painted and sculpted bodies communicated a complex language of com-
mitment and devotion. A language of size, placement of the figures in relation to one
another, gesture, facial expression, and stance communicated the religious subjectiv-
ity of the saints and sacred figures depicted.3 Moreover, images evoke emotions, spon-
taneously creating a viewer’s identification with the figures in paintings. Viewers were
trained, by sermons and artworks, to imagine what a body that looked like this, felt like.
Bodies in all societies are not only sexed male or female, but are also gendered by
socialization to particular gender assumptions, expectations, and roles. Painted bodies
are no exception. Hundreds of crucifixion scenes contrast Mary Magdalene’s hysteri-
cal grief with the Virgin Mary’s dignified “stabat mater,” defining the range of emotion

suitable for women. In many paintings, such as Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, St.
John, standing at the foot of the cross, calmly points to a scriptural text, specifying for
men a more intellectual understanding of Christ’s death.4 The gendered reactions of
these sacred figures inform viewers’ imaginations in complex ways. Clearly, a critical
and informed eye is needed to identify the messages communicated in religious art in
relation to gender arrangements in particular societies. Messages that seem to cross
temporal and geographical boundaries must also be noticed.
It is crucial to develop methods for analyzing complex and irreducibly intertwined
social, religious, and gendered communications. While, in the recent past, scholars of
religion saw only religious messages in religious paintings, many art historians tended
to reduce religious meanings to social or political meanings. These reductions, from
whichever perspective, create distortion, oversimplifying the task of responsible inter-
pretation. Indeed, even within the same community, it is most likely that all members
did not “read” a religious image in the same way, even though they were directed to cer-
tain meanings by scripture and sermons, and by other visual resources. Scholars work-
ing in the nexus of art, religion, and gender face significant challenges in learning how to
effectively interlace attention to the power, gender, and religious messages of artworks.
35.2 Gender, Imagery, and Religious

Imagination
While many studies deal with art and religion, feminism and art history, gender and
religion, and women and art, it is difficult to find studies that explore all these catego-
ries. Recent approaches to examining gender in relation to artworks have taken several
foci: the publications of art historians like Whitney Chadwick, Mary Garrard, Jeffrey
Hamburger, Linda Nochlin, Ann Sutherland, Griselda Pollack and Rozsika Parker, and
others have studied the work of women artists, their training, and their contributions to
cultural conversations.5 While the study of women is different from the exploration of
gender assumptions and expectations in particular societies, studies of women’s social
experience provide important insights into the operation of gender. In each of the fields
discussed here, studies of historical women have emerged before studies of gender rela-
tions. A third category, Feminist Studies, the most politicized of the three approaches,
contributes, in historian Judith Bennett’s words, “to the understanding of (and hence
final eradication of) women’s oppression.”6
Feminist art historians have studied men’s artworks for the assumptions and expecta-
tions of women they reveal, but they have largely neglected the role of religion both as
complicit in women’s oppression and in authorizing women’s agency.7 In the past twenty
years, Religious Studies scholars have recognized the centrality of artworks as a medium
for communicating religious ideas and values. Most, however, have paid little attention
to issues of gender. An exception to this generalization is the discipline of Religion and

GENDER, IMAGERY, AND RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION 471
Film in which gender analysis is recognized as a central part of considerations relat-

ing to the values communicated in films.8 As a relatively new sub-field of the Study of
Religion, Film Studies developed simultaneously with Gender Studies and thus found
it easier to incorporate gender as an important category of analysis than did more tradi-
tional fields whose methods and perspectives were more established.9
A further difficulty with identifying studies in which religion, gender, and art are
taken into consideration is that academic fields have developed in a way that contrib-
utes to their isolation from other fields; consequently, “field blinders” have appeared.
Interdisciplinary work is not, as yet, fully refined and realized in the Humanities. A lack
of protocols surrounding interdisciplinary training and methodology too often pro-
duces work in which a scholar, trained in one field, raids another for information and
conclusions without understanding the protocols of that field. This awkwardness can
be resolved only by scholars in different fields working together, listening to criticism,
and collaborating to question field assumptions and refine methods. But collabora-
tion across fields goes against the grain of the existing model of academic work. Plato’s
Socratic dialogues offer a model that would be more fruitful for academic collaboration,
in which the goal of exploratory scholarly conversation is increased mutual understand-
ing, not victory over an opponent. But Aristotle’s model, in which a thesis is argued, has
carried the day in academic discourse and will not be replaced easily.
An apparent contradiction further complicates the study of gender in art and reli-
gion: both art and religion have been preoccupied with defining “Woman” and women’s
place in society while dismissively rejecting women’s capacity for rational thought and
the public exercise of power. The enormous amount of attention to women, their dress,
their roles, and their “nature” reveals recognition of women’s power and the neces-
sity, from the masculinist perspective, of controlling and subordinating that power.10
Although women figure enormously in religious literature and in art history, they have
usually appeared as objects, not as subjects. However, starting in the 1990s and continu-
ing to the present, attention to patronage has led art historians to examine “the cultural
agency, subjectivity, and aesthetic preferences of female patrons.”11 Present interest
in the reception of artworks also examines women (and men) as viewers formed and
informed by cultural and religious perspectives.
Identifying works that examine the nexus of religion, art, and gender is rendered
complex by the recognition that gender cannot be studied in isolation from complex
social constructions of identity, such as race, social location, sexual orientation, and age,
to name only a few of the relevant variables. The umbrella category of “women’s expe-
rience,” evoked by early feminists, has been criticized for its obfuscation of particular
women and particular experiences. Historian Denise Riley writes:
[A] simple appeal to “women’s experience” closes down inquiry into the ways female
subjectivity is produced, the ways in which agency is made possible, the ways in
which race and sexuality intersect with gender, the ways in which politics organize
and interpret experience—in sum, the ways in which identity is a contested terrain,
the site of multiple and conflicting claims.12

Moreover, even the assumption that a work of art can be placed within a context that
reveals its significance has been vigorously challenged. Broude and Garrard write: “If
the ‘text’ (work of art) cannot offer a stable meaning, it cannot be assumed that what
makes up the ‘context’. . . is any clearer or more legible than the visual text.”13 In order
to examine the confluence of religion, art, and gender it is necessary to conceptualize
each of these fields within the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies, rather than as
separate fields that can be shown to relate mutually. Understanding each as irreducibly
interwoven and intimately responsive to social and cultural adjustments begins to over-
come the arbitrary isolation of separate fields of inquiry. Within Cultural Studies, the
scholarly task is redefined as identifying and explicating connections, rather than as cre-
ating bridges across chasms.
35.3 Gender and Art
Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard pioneered the field of Gender and Art, mapping
the development of “the expanding discourse” in the Introductions to their edited
volumes in 1981, 1992, and 2005. They describe the interface of philosophical, psycho-
analytic, and hermeneutic approaches with art history during the past thirty years, con-
verging in the 1970s and 1980s in postmodern theory. Broude and Garrard’s description
of the tenets of postmodernism as they affected gender and art cannot be better stated.
In 1992 they wrote:
About a decade ago, under the powerful influence of French poststructuralist

writers—Foucault and Derrida, especially—and of semiotic and psychoanalytic
theory, a critique of the tenets and practices of art history was mounted from
both inside and outside the discipline. Foucault’s analysis of the role of power in
the construction of knowledge, and his identification of the body as the site of the
operations of power; Derrida’s characterization of history and culture as not fixed
unchanging realities but texts, unstable and subject to an infinite variety of readings,
and his description of our understanding of all reality as mediated by language, itself
polyvalent; Lancan’s thesis that even the unconscious is shaped by language—all
these ideas and more converged to fuel the deconstructive enterprise of the 1980s,
led by, but not limited to, practitioners of literary criticism. To be deconstructed
were the patterns and edifices of power, predicated linguistically and socially upon
binary oppositions and their implied hierarchies of value. To replace them came
non-hierarchical structures, the questioning of “totalizing” theories and other
agendas of mastery, “difference,” the emphasis on the role of the interpreter in the
creation of meaning, the “death of the author,” and the problematizing of the very
concepts of “representation” and “interpretation.”14
Religion is excluded from most art historical critical analysis, except when religious
scriptures and texts are called upon to explain iconographical elements. In fact, a focus
on the examination of structures of power has effectively marginalized attention to the

role of religion in the lives of historical people. If, for example, subjects such as David
or Judith are interpreted as political statements about power relations, their specifi-
cally religious meanings are elided.15 For example, rather than subjects that embody and
exemplify figures whose courage and strength depended on God’s support of the weak
(due to youth, in David’s case, or sex, in Judith’s), a negotiation of power is highlighted.
Yet political and religious motivations are far from incompatible; indeed, both exist
simultaneously.16
35.4 Religion and Art
The long history of collaboration between art and religion is too ubiquitously docu-
mented to reiterate here. Historically, images have shaped religious imagination
for most of the people, most of the time. Before about 1500 in dominantly Christian
Western Europe, “art” served religion, both articulating and guiding religious sensibili-
ties. Images directed both literate and illiterate worshippers to recognize and emulate
the sacred figures depicted in churches. Churches were the primary patrons of paint-
ers and sculptors, and clergymen determined both the subjects and style of artworks.
It took a major social movement called “the Renaissance” even to create a distinc-
tion between “religion” and “art.” Hans Belting and others have argued that before the
Renaissance professionalization of artists, an entirely different viewing experience was
common. Worshippers expected to experience the emotions depicted in artworks, not
to appreciate the artist’s skill or analyze the painting’s formal qualities. Belting urges that
religious artworks before the Renaissance should not be called “art,” but “images.”17 He
writes: “The image became an object of reflection as soon as it invited the beholder not
to take its subject matter literally but to look for the artistic idea behind the work.”18
The reluctance of many Religious Studies scholars to acknowledge the importance
of images to the communication of religious sensibilities is at least partly based on
Christianity’s self-identification with texts, beliefs, and philosophy. From the second
century of the Common Era—from Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165) forward—Christian
authors have sought to relate their beliefs to the dominant philosophies contemporary
with them in order to establish the legitimacy and credibility of Christian beliefs and
values. Thus, the modern academic discipline of Religious Studies defined its sphere of
authority in a way that placed religious images outside that sphere. In the twentieth cen-
tury, Western Christian churches and theologians—even those, like the Roman Catholic
Church in which images are ubiquitous—(largely) declined to acknowledge the specifi-
cally religious power of images.19 Art history inherited religious images, and art histo-
rians often researched the subjects of religious artworks and their scriptural sources in
order to explain their iconographical details, but were usually uninterested in the role of
images in religious practice, whether liturgical or devotional.20
Although images accompanied Christian worship and devotion from the early
centuries of the Common Era, the role of images in focusing devotional practice and

representing the historical events and persons that form the basis of belief and doctrines
has been largely ignored within Religious Studies. 21 In the last thirty-five years, how-
ever, some scholars have paid attention to the religious use of mosaics, paintings, and
sculptures, both in early Christian churches and throughout the centuries.22 However,
their concern to highlight the importance of images in studying Christian communities
has largely taken their attention away from the role of images in both constructing and
reflecting gender assumptions and expectations in Christian communities.23
35.5 Gender and Religion
Elizabeth A. Clark’s essay, “Women, Gender, and the Study of Christian History,”
explores the effects of the different approaches of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies.24
In brief, she writes, Women’s Studies explores the activities of historical women, while
Gender Studies examines “the interplay between men and women” in particular societ-
ies. 25 Clark characterizes practitioners of “women’s history” as adopting a social history
model in which written evidence is approached as “documents” rather than as literary
texts. Gender Studies, Clark writes, “has [also] begun to adopt the hermeneutical para-
digm of historical studies.” Clark argues that both study of written evidence as docu-
ments and as texts needs to be kept in play.26 Although several essays, like Clark’s, offer
overviews of the study of gender in relation to Christian and Jewish history, they do not
address the role of art.27
Multiple books and essays examine the lives and work of unusual historical women.
Religious Studies scholars, like art historians, have tended to focus on historical women
they perceive as exercising the same independence and range of activities that contem-
porary feminists—rightly or wrongly—imagine themselves to exercise. Gender Studies
developed out of recognition of the problems inherent in examining the most unusual
women of their times/places in isolation from “the interplay between men and women.”
In “Not Nameless but Unnamed: The Woman Torn from Augustine’s Side,” I advocated
the necessity of placing historical women in the social, cultural, legal, and institutional
settings that directed their opportunities and constraints. 28 Only then can the agency
of unusual women be accurately understood. And for many historical women, like
Augustine’s partner of fifteen years, the social world in which they lived, including class
structure, gender assumptions and practices, and sexual arrangements is both all we can
know of them, and a great deal to know about them.
35.6 Gender, Art, and Religion
While reasons may be surmised for the neglect of religion by art historians, the neglect
of images by religion scholars, and the neglect of gender by many art historians and

Religious Studies scholars, it is more difficult to envision how the blind spots in these
fields might be overcome. In their introduction to The Expanding Discourse, Broude
and Garrard make a helpful suggestion. “The best way to change art history,” they write,
“is simply to practice it in a new way.”29 Rather than polemical rants, or even analyses
of the inadequacies of academic fields, scholars who understand the intimate interde-
pendence of religion, art history, and gender can simply work in new ways to demon-
strate and illustrate this interdependence. But admittedly, that is easier said than done.
Nothing short of a paradigm shift will be needed if this is to occur. Traditional academic
polemics, in which one scholar demolishes another’s proposals in order to establish
the greater accuracy and beauty of his own proposal, has maintained academic fields
as at once defensive and aggressive, rather than as responsive to, and building on, the
insights of scholars in other fields. Although scientists collaborate routinely, scholars
in the Humanities usually lack training in the protocols and methods of collaborative
work. Thus, interdisciplinary approaches are still in the process of demonstrating that it
is possible to work with the methods and insights of more than one field without distor-
tion of either.
The future of gender, imagery, and religious imagination lies in integrating the fem-
inist project of reclaiming women’s agency and eliminating women’s oppression with
the Religious Studies’ agenda of critical understanding and appropriation of religious
images. Historians’ projects, both Women’s Studies and Gender Studies approaches,
contribute to the necessary detailed knowledge of women’s agency in historical soci-
eties. These projects must also be understood in relation to art historians’ concern to
balance attention to artworks’ formal qualities with attention to the cumulative effects
of repeatedly produced subjects and styles in communities and societies. It is likely that
we will not see, in the near future, publications that bring together all of the methods
and foci outlined here. Rather, we must learn to recognize the valuable contribution of
scholars who illuminate pieces of the complex puzzle of gender, imagery, and religious
imagination.
Notes
1. I am indebted to Vanessa Lyon for invaluable research assistance and conversation on the
subject of this chapter.
2. Although I focus in this chapter on Western Christian images, others examine the nexus
of gender, imagery, and imagination in other world religions. See, for example, Liz Wilson,
Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographical
Literature, and M. E. Combs-Schilling, Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice.
3. Before the Renaissance, landscape and architectural settings played very peripheral roles
in Italian paintings. For example, in Giotto di Bondone’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel
in Padua, architectural settings are abbreviated to facades, stairs, and partial buildings in
order to direct attention to the actions of the human figures in his paintings. This is not
true, however, of Northern art, in which—Vanessa Lyon, personal communication: “an
illuminated manuscript tradition . . . valued the careful depiction of ‘nature’ and

cityscapes. . . in which landscape and architecture often played an important formal,

conceptual (indeed, theological) role.”
4. Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece can be seen at the Art Resource website www.artres.
com.
5. Mary D. Garrard, Artemesia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque
Art; Artemesia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity;
Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent; The Visual
and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany; Whitney
Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society.
6. Judith M. Bennett, “Feminism and History,” 256; quoted in Elizabeth A. Clark, “Woman,
Gender, and the Study of Christian History,” 396.
7. See authors in Feminism and Art History; The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art
History; and Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, Norma
Broude and Mary Garrard, eds.
8. See Teaching Religion and Film, ed. Greg Watkins, in which essays by Gaye Williams Ortiz
and Ellen Ott Marshall focus on films’ treatment of women, while several essays on other
topics take gender assumptions and relationships into consideration.
9. See Margaret R. Miles, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies, passim.
10. Broude and Garrard suggest that women’s repression is a masculinist “reaction to a power
threat,” a response whose goal is “to preserve masculine power by imposing negativizing
gender stereotypes on the Other and putting it/her at a safe distance, in a lesser category,”
Reclaiming Female Agency, 21.
11. Vanessa Lyon, personal communication. See Beth L. Holman, “Exemplum and
Imitatio: Countess Matilda and Lucrezia Pico della Mirandola at Poirone,” The Art Bulletin
81, no. 4 (1999): 637–664; Carolyn Valone, “Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in
Rome, 1560–1630, The Art Bulletin 76, no. 1 (1994): 129–146.
12. Scott’s summary of Riley’s argument in “Am I that Name?” in Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence
of Experience,” 777.
13. Broude and Garrard, Expanding Discourse, 2.
14. Ibid., Expanding Discourse, 1–2.
15. I am grateful to Vanessa Lyon for her observation that when art historians politicize
religious subjects, they usually do not analyze their religious import.
16. My book, A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750, explores the
social, religious, and political changes by which the female (lactating) breast changed in
public significance from a religious symbol to medical and erotic meanings
17. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image in the Era before Art; see also
David Freedberg, The Power of Images; Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the
Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe; Francis
Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist.
18. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 472.
19. In Eastern Orthodoxy, icons continue to play a central role in worship and devotion.
20. There are exceptions to this generalization, such as Paul Vandenbroeck, Le jardin clos de
l’ame: Imaginaire des religieuses dans les Pys-Bas du Sud, depuis le 13e siecle, which provides
a catalogue of convent art from the Low Countries (thirteenth–eighteenth centuries) with
essays dealing with gender, art, and piety. See also Charlene Villasenor Black, Creating
the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire; Andrea Pearson, Envisioning

Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350–1530; Marilyn Dunn, “Piety and Patronage in
Seicento Rome: Two Noblewomen and Their Convents.”
21. Sister Mary Charles Murray, “Art and the Early Church”; Journal of Theological Studies
(October 1977): 303–345; Aiden Nichols, O. P. The Art of God Incarnate.
22. But see Sally Promey, “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art.”
23. Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art; André
Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins.
24. Elizabeth A. Clark, “Women, Gender, and the Study of Christian History.”
25. Ibid., 396. The essays in Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval
and Early Modern Europe are an exception; Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart, eds.
26. Ursula King, “Introduction: Gender and Religion,” Religion and Gender, 2–3; Clark,
“Women, Gender,” 396–7; see Clark’s footnotes for extensive bibliography on the study of
historical women in the history of Christianity.
27. Susan Ackerman. “Digging up Deborah: Recent Hebrew Bible Scholarship on Gender and
the Contribution of Archeology,” Near Eastern Archeology 66 (December 2003): 172–184.
28. Margaret R. Miles, “Not Nameless but Unnamed: The Woman Torn from Augustine’s
Side,” Feminist Interpretations of Augustine, ed. Judith Stark.
29. Broude and Garrard, Expanding Discourse, 7. Richard Rorty says something similar: “[T]he
only thing that can displace an intellectual world is another intellectual world—a new
alternative, rather than an argument against the old alternative. . . . I do not think that
demonstration of ‘internal incoherence’ or of ‘presuppositional relationships’ ever do
much to disabuse us of bad old ideas or institutions. Disabusing gets done, instead, by
offering us sparkling new ideas or utopian visions of glorious new institutions. The result
of genuinely original thought . . . is not so much to refute or subvert our previous beliefs
as to help us forget them by giving us a substitute for them;” “Is Derrida a Transcendental
Philosopher?” 208–9.
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C HA P T E R 36
A RT, M AT E R IA L C U LT U R E ,
AND LIVED RELIGION
DAV I D MORG A N
In recent years, scholars of art, material culture, and religion have become very inter-
ested in the intersection of these three fields of study as a way of understanding reli-
gion as it is lived by people in the home, street, and temple. The rubrics “lived religion”
and “material culture of religion” are indebted to ethnographic approaches to religion,
which define religion in terms of rituals and practices, and accord special attention to
objects and spaces such as cult statuary, symbols, amulets, temples, shrines, and relics.
Formal worship spaces are by no means the singular focus of study. The home, com-
merce, pilgrimage, and private devotion are of equal, if not greater interest, as it is these
spaces and practices that represent the sites of much lived religion. Moreover, informed
by the anthropology and sociology of religion, studies of the material culture of religion
have moved from non-industrial societies to modern mass culture, applying concepts
such as the icon and gift to present-day cultural practices. To make sense of what these
recent approaches mean and to measure what they have sought to accomplish, it will be
helpful to begin with an examination of key concepts and their history.
36.1 Popular Culture
Although the term no longer commands the focus that it once did, “popular culture” has
exerted an enormous influence in the humanities and the humanistic study of religion
in the last several decades. Understanding its lineage and legacy is very instructive for
the study of lived religion, nomenclature that has emerged over the last ten years as the
new focus for the study of religion in everyday life. “Popular culture” is one of those
terms that seem impossible to do without, but also impossible to explain in a way likely
to please those who are confident they know what the word means. The meaning is espe-
cially difficult to resolve because it has a long and intricate history of use. Often popular

ART, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND LIVED RELIGION 481
culture is defined as an intellectual interest that emerged in the 1960s, a great water-
shed in academic culture, when the lives of anonymous, common people, especially the
overlooked—women, ethnic groups, laborers, immigrants, the poor, in other words, the
“people”—came under scrutiny by scholars whose ideological interest in the marginal-
ized led them away from the more traditionally sanctioned subjects of study, such as
political and military history. In fact, that trend preceded the 1960s, and the shift away
from the historiography of political institutions and the careers of military or political
leaders had been underway since the early decades of the twentieth century.
In the arts—such as literature and the visual arts—leading writers and painters had
been making use of common subject matter since the nineteenth century, whether it
was Emile Zola writing about the struggles of the working classes or Gustave Courbet
making use of popular prints and paintings in his progressive, even revolutionary paint-
ings. At the same time, Honoré Daumier blurred the line between fine art and journal-
ism, not only creating provocative lithographs that ran in French newspapers, but also
raising political commentary to a level of visual mastery. France remained the center of
creative activity on this front in the experimental work of Picasso in Cubist art in early
twentieth-century Paris when he integrated the “popular” inspiration of tribal art as well
as the new technique of collage, affixing newspaper text, wallpaper, and other manufac-
tured images to his canvases.
Already at least two fundamental notions of “popular” are apparent. Popular
denotes the use of cultural artifacts created by the people, that is, by untrained or
non-professionally trained artists for uses other than aesthetic contemplation; and pop-
ular also has been used to refer to the use of non-artistic artifacts such as newspapers or
commercial photographs. Popular culture means, therefore, objects and practices that
originate among either the folkways of non-professional artists or in modern mass cul-
ture. In either sense, popular means cultural artifacts, ideas, and practices that are or
once were common to virtually an entire society. Indeed, to be a member of that society
means to share in common the stock of cultural and social items that allow for commu-
nication and membership.
But on this score, we must introduce another distinction. There is “common” in the
sense of the ordinary things available to anyone within a culture, and there is common
in the sense of a shared identity deposited in the birthright of a people. And there is a
third sense of common to be considered when elite and popular intermingle, as they
almost always do in modern industrial societies where museums offer access to the most
elite art and inexpensive reproductions cross all kinds of social boundaries, from under-
graduate art history classes to album covers and art posters. In fact, this third notion of
the common threatens to erase the distinction between popular and elite, which would
probably happen if artists and literati did not reinforce the distinction by virtue of their
subcultures and the inaccessibility or difficulty of their work.1
The second sense of common mentioned here, the birthright of the people, derives
from a genealogy of European Romanticism, in particular, the work of Gottfried Herder,
who championed the poetry and vernacular languages of European peoples in contrast
to the learned tradition of ranking the classical languages and cultures of ancient Greece

and Rome above their modern counterparts. Once again, however, the idea is older than
Herder, originating in the seventeenth-century controversy over the ancients versus the
moderns, the so-called “battle of the books.” But in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries the debate shifted from ancient versus modern to a singularly contem-
porary nationalistic rivalry such as German versus French, American versus British, or
Scottish versus English.
As a strategy of cultural self-discovery, Romanticism is a product of modern
nationhood, an aesthetic dedicated to the assertion of the nation as a natural or an
ethnic expression, a way of imagining a discrete family, an inborn or native sensi-
bility, a birthright transmitted both genetically and culturally. In the nationalist
ideology of Romanticism, vernacular or “folk” language, art, song, food, dress, and
landscape all idiomatically “express” (rather than more abstractly “represent”) an
ethos that constitutes the organic root of nationhood, and is therefore to be preferred
to the alien ethos of a foreign ideal. Popular in the Romantic sense means “of the
people” or folk. Accordingly, the study of national folk art became a standard feature
on the intellectual map of modern humanistic studies. Anthologist/inventors such
as the Brothers Grimm in Germany or the Goncourts in France focused their ener-
gies on gathering (and suitably enhancing) collections of folk tales, poetry, songs,
and other cultural documents of the national or ethnic past. The very identity of folk
culture is inseparable from the national (and commonly nationalistic) project that
emerged in the eighteenth century across Europe and North America. The search for
a useable past in which to locate the origins of a people was only intensified by the
national revolutions in France and America, issuing in the formation of the first pub-
lic museums, such as the Louvre, which were designated repositories of the cultural
possessions or patrimony of a people.
Some will argue that Romanticism is inclined toward national chauvinism, whose
most perverse manifestation may be the chauvinistic nativist ideology of German
nationalism during the Nazi years. The sense that “popular” came to acquire in
the context of twentieth-century American mass culture was also vilified by leftist
cultural critics. Clement Greenberg’s 1939 screed against mass-produced imagery,
which he denounced as “kitsch” and defined in stark contrast to “avant-garde” art,
portrayed the likes of Norman Rockwell as pabulum for the thoughtless masses,
as no more than capitalist propaganda.2 But if we define culture as the symbolic
repository of ideas and practices from which a more or less discrete group of people
constructs their sense of reality, we need to take one step back and recognize that
popular and elite are actually two conflicting but interdependent strategies for the
social construction of reality. Their definitions are interwoven. “Professional art”
signifies the art of a professional sub-culture, as defined by gatekeeping institutions
that establish and maintain value and status: art schools and academies, museums,
and art criticism working more or less in tandem with the commercial interests
of auction houses, dealers, and collectors. Two broad ranges of the meaning of
the term popular seem reasonably clear. In the Romantic or ethnic sense, popular
means vernacular in contrast to the official, professional, and avant-garde cultures

of the offices of the state, the art establishment, and the cultural elite or intelligen-
tsia. In the sense of mass culture, popular designates artifacts that are common or
widely shared by virtue of their use in commerce, entertainment, and mass persua-
sion. In the first sense, popular defines an alternative, indigenous, or marginalized
culture; in the second, it applies to mass communication. In sum, then, folk art is
distinguished from mass culture or commercial culture, which is its mechanized,
industrial replacement. Both constitute the domain of popular or common culture,
which is distinguished from fine art; the latter consists of three varieties: official art,
professional art, and avant-garde art.
36.2 Fine Art and Popular Art
The distinction I have made between popular and fine art is strongly sociological in
nature. The determination of aesthetic value relies as much on the sociology of knowl-
edge as on aesthetic experience. Often what we know or believe we know acts as a rigid
template that we fit over the effervescent nature of aesthetic experience. The two—expe-
rience and knowledge—are not synonymous. Experience certainly shapes language and
systems of classification, but it also exceeds and resists them, sometimes demanding
new taxonomies for interpreting or evaluating it. Even then, there is no exact parity of
experience and epistemology. The power of art in fact may rely on this irreducible ele-
ment of otherness. I do not mean to posit a realm of pure experience, unmediated by
culture, but to suggest that experience is protean, propelled by unconscious drives, ran-
dom circumstances, and the idiomatic features of artistic medium and form. Experience
arises as effervescence, generating its parameters to the viewer as if it were a living thing
in its own right. What the experience is subsequently taken to mean involves a different
set of factors, however informed by previous experience and tested against the present
experience these factors may be.
Aesthetic experience has often been characterized as “disinterested,” that is, as free
from any purpose but the enjoyment it provides. This idea has been seriously ques-
tioned by aestheticians and other scholars.3 If there is any validity to the claim, aesthetic
experience may be said to be disinterested only insofar as it seeks freedom for the imagi-
nation to indulge itself. Such experience unfolds within a frame of mind in which we
seem to forget ourselves and become absorbed in what one analyst has called the “flow”
of perception and activity.4 When anything—cartoon or painting—is apprehended in
this “disinterested” manner, the content of experience consists of what one French art
historian called the “life of forms.”
This phrase comes from Henri Focillon, who contended whatever images or signs
humans may see in works of art, the aesthetic experience of a painting or sculpture con-
sists of beholding the evolution of form as an energy invested in the career of a discrete
style. Form, Focillon wrote, “is primarily a mobile life in a changing world. Its meta-
morphoses endlessly begin anew, and it is by the principle of style that they are above all

coordinated and stabilized.”5 Deep within the “geometric combinations of Islamic orna-
ment,” for instance, “a sort of fever seems to goad on and to multiply the shapes; some
mysterious genius of complication interlocks, enfolds, disorganizes and reorganizes
the entire labyrinth. Their very immobility sparkles with metamorphoses.”6 Form is the
transformation of idea into matter and matter into idea. And the life of form is worked
out in a style, a characteristic treatment of matter that develops according to an idiom
or logic that emerges, flourishes, and eventually dies. The life of forms is what engages
viewers of art, enthralling their imagination in the material investment of energy that
takes the particular form of a visual style.
Formalist art history enjoyed its vogue in the first half of the twentieth century and
began to be replaced by more socially minded ways of interpreting art during the 1960s.
I do not wish to reconstitute it here, but to recognize the persistent ability of form to
engage the imagination in play. Human beings have a strong inclination to animate what
they perceive, to anthropomorphize, to see in things a life or personality or emotion that
corresponds to themselves. This process of projection infuses the world with personal
meaning and belonging for human beings. Whatever else it may be, aesthetic experi-
ence entails the subjectification of material forms and sounds. Defined as disinterested
contemplation, aesthetic experience relies on a concept of form that Focillon conveyed
particularly well. The concept of style was, and remains, a central device for the interpre-
tation of fine art when style is regarded as the manifestation of an internal force or drive,
a working out of an energy that enjoys a life of its own that expresses itself in forms of
all kinds.
Yet this is only half the story. In fact, people don’t just see a neutral life of forms.
They are struck or moved by a particular gesture of life—a drama that is liberating or
oppressive, violent or gentle, dominant or submissive, as the case may be. Why we see
or feel what we do is something of a mystery because no matter how conditioned our
experience may be by knowledge, previous experience, or social circumstances, aes-
thetic feeling seems spontaneous and compelling, rather like a dream, as if it comes
from somewhere unknown and reveals itself to us. There are many ways of explain-
ing this, including a psychoanalytic framework, which argues that aesthetic experi-
ence is deeply rooted in the unconscious. This suggests that aesthetic experience is
not purged of interest, but grounded in the emotional life of the psyche. Art per-
forms a powerful psychological or spiritual work. Far from disinterested or impar-
tial, aesthetic experience serves the needs of the human psyche, which is steeped in
primordial battles with chaos, darkness, and terror. Nevertheless, to be able to invest
aesthetic experience with this drama, viewers must be freed from the distractions of
daily life. Art’s life of forms is the key that opens the gate of the mind for access to the
suppressed realm of feeling. Aesthetic experience gives free reign to the imagination
for this work.
The freedom or play expressed in the life of forms amounts to a particular way
of seeing, what may be called the disinterested gaze. One can be absorbed in arti-
facts as different as the intricate structure of a plant, a Mickey Mouse cartoon, an
Islamic ornament, a drawing by Michelangelo, or the nuanced tones of a magazine

advertisement. In each case, the viewer is transported from one sense of time to
another temporal framework. One may leave the rumble of the subway or the store
aisle and enter the playground or drawing room of the mind, as the case may be. In
more specific terms, the viewer may move from a visual field of glancing about at
one’s neighbors or gawking at a spectacular edifice or leering at an attractive woman
or man or glaring at a loud passerby to gazing upon an intricate pattern that induces a
sort of transport. According to this ocular mapping of human experience, conscious-
ness is a shifting terrain of overlapping and intersecting visual fields that structure
what we see and how we see it.
It should be clear by now that I am proposing a social distinction of fine art and
popular, on the one hand, and a psycho-perceptual distinction between ways of see-
ing, on the other. The two correspond in particular instances, but are not simply
reducible to one another. Humans employ many ways of seeing, shifting from one
instant to the next, now gazing on something in a disinterested fashion, but in the
next moment drawing from what they behold some moral lesson or lurid pleasure,
neither of which is disinterested. The experience of fine art itself is never immune to
entertainment, relaxation, propaganda, desire, or commerce because disinterested
vision usually occurs for only brief durations of time. Consider that Henri Matisse
once remarked that his art was intended to serve as “a good armchair in which to rest
from physical fatigue.”7 Moreover, much art now occupying museums was intended
by its makers and patrons as state or religious propaganda. In no small way, one
might argue, artifacts are viewed disinterestedly when the original apparatus govern-
ing their visual consumption has been forgotten, lost, or is deliberately ignored for
the sake of the contemplative experience of strolling through an art museum. It is
also difficult to say whether the large numbers of people who frequent art museums
are engaging in popular distraction or refining their taste to a form of aesthetic con-
templation. No doubt both are happening.
A gaze allows the viewer to dwell singularly on an image, enjoying its presence
with a degree of self-forgetting. In effect, the disinterested gaze serves as a platform
for deploying a variety of ways of seeing when regarding something for the pleasure
its contemplation affords. This platform opens a space for the free play of visual sen-
sations. A squint allows viewers at a distance to eliminate distracting visual matter
from the object they scrutinize. Scanning enables viewers to move across a broad
range of objects in search of one or another. A glance provides a surreptitious view.
A glare shoots a viewer’s discountenance at an object or person. Ignoring, or turning
a blind eye, is yet another visual form of engagement with an image that we fear or
resent. The list might go on to enumerate a much fuller taxonomy of visual fields.
None is without interest, though the gaze may very well indulge the free play of vision
that is most characteristic of aesthetic experience. But one should not overlook the
way in which people regard works of art: they gaze, but they also glimpse, blink, leer,
and glare. Seeing is never as simple as immersion in a single way of looking. The
sophisticated connoisseur who is engrossed in a contemplative gaze may also snatch
a lurid glimpse at a nude figure.8

36.3 Material Culture
The study of religion in Europe and North America has long been grounded in the study
of sacred texts. Christianity and Judaism are religions of the book and have nurtured
highly learned subcultures of theological discourse and erudition. According to these
traditions, God revealed himself in words. Eventually, schools and universities were
formed to provide advanced learning in theology and philosophy. Belief itself has tra-
ditionally been understood by Christianity as, in part, the affirmation of creeds, which
consist of formulae or propositions that one must avow in order to be considered ortho-
dox, to subscribe to “right teaching.”9 Yet it remains the case that Christianity, like other
religions, is deeply invested in a range of material forms and practices that characterize
the faith no less than creeds. And when one turns to popular forms of religion, material
culture is even more prominent.
Material culture is a term used in a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, his-
tory, museology, archaeology, and art history. On most occasions it refers to the material
components of a culture, its furniture, utensils, art, architecture, and clothing, but can
also mean the material remains of bodies. Often, the objects of material culture possess
little or no subject matter. They do not depict stories or events, and they are commonly
functional objects, servicing needs such as shelter, eating, protection, or decoration.
Shorn of words and narratives, these sorts of objects require different forms of inter-
rogation in order to yield up their evidential value. If they have stories to tell, and they
do, the analyst must be able to scrutinize them in a way that will decode the information
they bear in their physical form.
The value of material culture for the study of religion begins to become clear only
when objects are regarded as more than mere illustrations of anterior texts. Religion
happens materially no less than textually. In fact, belief is a complex phenomenon that
usually happens in intermingled ways. Not only propositional affirmation, belief is
something believers do. The practices of belief are even more common measures than
what people say they believe. And the practices frequently involve material forms that
engage the bodies, sensations, and feelings of believers in social relations and the experi-
ence of place and community. The body is the underlying and universal register of belief
and it is trained and formed from childhood to old age by rites that apply material forms
to it and the bodies that constitute religious communities. Broadly speaking, therefore,
the material culture of religion is the total range of objects and practices that engage the
human body in acts of belief. Just as art (popular or fine art) was defined above in terms
of ways of seeing that engage the imagination, material culture should be defined not
merely as this or that object, but as what people do with the objects on which they rely.
Material culture may be understood as the scaffolding that links the human body to the
surrounding world. It is the physical means of interaction with the physical environ-
ment, adapting it to the sphere of human life, rendering the body responsive to dwelling,
landscape, human society, and the internal life of imagination, memory, and dreams.

This is no less true in religious subcultures where the body is rigidly controlled or
suppressed. As the film Babette’s Feast suggests so well, plain clothing and food train the
body to behave in a particular manner just as comely dress and robust cuisine encourage
a dramatically different range of attitudes and practices of the body. Each serves a dif-
ferent religious ethos and helps embody a corresponding life-world. Material culture is
not an afterthought, as if theologians tried to select a manner of dress that illustrates the
character or letter of their theology. Material objects and the practices that deploy them
are no less constitutive of religious belief than creed or theology. For example, in my
study of a widely admired devotional image of Jesus, Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ,
I found that people who displayed the image in their homes fondly spoke of the image
as the “portrait,” even “photograph”(!) of their “best friend.” The expression was more
than mere sentimentalism, because when asked to elaborate people indicated that this
picture of Jesus corresponded to their intimate relationship with their savior. When they
looked at the image, many Protestants responded, they saw the Jesus who consoled and
comforted them, to whom they addressed their deepest wishes, to whom they prayed,
indeed, the very face of the person they expected to see one day when entering heaven.
I found that the visual piety that takes an image of Christ as the portrait of a personal
friend constituted what amounts to a Christology of friendship, a practical theology of
a powerful devotion to Jesus grounded in feelings of affection, reliance, and comfort.10
Thus, in the realm of popular religion, material culture is no doubt more significant
than intellectual discourse. If by material culture we mean objects, practices, and the
attitudes, feelings, and ideas that are enacted in objects and practices, it is indispens-
able to recognize the centrality of material culture in lived religion. By “lived religion”
is meant the things people feel compelled to do in daily life in order to organize their
worlds as a stage whose ultimate audience is the divine.11 This world-ordering is accom-
plished in the theological systems of seminary professors and ecclesiasts, but also in the
pictures, diet, clothing, buildings, devotional items, and reading practices of common
believers, or “the people.”
36.4 Popular Religion
We return to popular culture with the notion of the people as the practitioners of lived
religion. Popular religion used to be ignored by theologians and scholars of religion,
for whom textual learning and the achievements of great thinkers marked the finest
moments of religion as a human activity. Only those religions that were pre-literate were
studied in terms of their material culture, which was often necessary because they left
behind no texts for the scholar. But scholars of religion over the past few decades have
learned that even the most literate religion includes a vast range of popular items and
practices that are often more active in shaping the life-worlds of believers than the theo-
logical visions of seminary professors. And yet, as we saw with popular and fine art, the
relation between popular and elite religion is best approached as interwoven in modern

society. Popular religion is rarely divorced from texts and institutions. It may possess its
own or it may draw from the authoritative texts of a religious tradition such as the Bible,
Qur’an, or Buddhist sutras. Pentecostal and Evangelical revivalists read the same book
as academic theologians, but they read it to much different effect.
Religion is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to define. Its most consistent features
are perhaps rituals and stories that conduct ongoing relations with divine beings in
order to benefit humans in this world or the next. Yet a definition that fixes singularly
on relations with supernatural forces overlooks the fact that some religions do not focus
on divinities. Certain versions of Buddhism, for instance, are non-theistic. Civil reli-
gions need not posit a personal or anthropomorphic deity in order to make the state or
nation the summum bonum. Nor does the humanism that regards natural history as a
progressive evolution require a divine force to propel that advance. So we might deter-
mine as a working definition of religion any attempt to describe the world of natural and
human events as operating under the influence of powers or forces larger than human
beings, but amenable to benefiting those who conduct the appropriate rites. In contrast
to modern science, which would learn and apply nature’s laws to human benefit, religion
always maintains the possibility of changing the prevailing order through the interven-
ing power of rituals involving such devices as images, sacred words, or sacrifice.
What then is popular religion? It is important first of all to distinguish popular reli-
gion from several rival conceptions of religion, which often succeed in ignoring it or
worse. The rivals are the official, usually hegemonic religion of the state or temple; the
religion of the colonizer, missionary, or imperial occupier; and the intellectual religion
of literati, most influentially informing scholarly approaches to the study of religion. In
pre-modern, non-industrialized societies, “popular” means the religion of the village,
or, more likely, of the forest, sea, or rice paddy—the way of belief that does not enjoy the
privileged status that a ruling elite commands, and typically invests within a particular
cult and priesthood. The gods of the pharaoh or emperor may not have much to do with
the ordinary lives of the peasantry. But it is perhaps more commonly the case, especially
in industrialized society, that popular religion is the same religion as that practiced by
the elite, in which case “popular” refers not to a different religion, but to what scholar
Peter Williams has called “extra-ecclesiastical” religious phenomena.12 This term refers
to practices and beliefs that lie outside the bounds of a religion’s officially endorsed insti-
tutions, without necessarily undermining or contradicting them, though that frequently
occurs.
For example, an early French observer of Hindu practices in southeastern India noted
that Brahmin priests never participated in the ritual of swinging on iron hooks in honor
of the goddess Mariatale, whose protection against smallpox was widely sought, because
they held “the ceremony in contempt, the worship of this Goddess being confined to the
lowest Castes.”13 Christian observers regarded the practice with great horror and dis-
dain, as a sign of the barbarous depths to which idolatry could sink human beings. The
Missionary Register, an Anglican publication, reported in 1819 that the rich who wished
to thank or secure the blessing of Mariatale, but did not wish to have iron hooks sunk
into their backs and be swung around a pole in agony, would pay a poor person to act

FIGURE 36.1 “Hook-Swinging,” in Missionary Register, July 1819, p. 327. Image courtesy of the
Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
as their proxy: “The poor wretch will let out his sufferings to hire in order thereby to
procure, as it is imagined, some benefit to an opulent neighbour, who would rather part
with his money than his ease.”14 If the practice of hook-swinging was a “popular” ritual,
that is, something practiced by the poor in great number (whether they were swinging
or participating in the event by watching others swing, as Figure 36.1 suggests), the term
popular will be nuanced differently according to the perspective of the Brahmin, the
Christian missionary, and the scholar.
In Bengal, the practice of hook-swinging was associated with Śiva, who was said
to be moved by those who submitted to it to the point of granting them some bless-
ing. How different this rite portrays the religion of Śiva in comparison to something
as grand as the early fourteenth-century poem, Kuñcitānghristava, which extols the
magnificent dance of Śiva Nataraja as the sublime origin and rhythm of the universe.15
Compare, for instance, a woodcut illustration of the hook-swinging, which appeared
in a nineteenth-century Christian missionary magazine (Figure 36.1), with a medieval
bronze portrayal of Śiva Nataraja from Tamil Nadu, which envisions the king of the
dance gracefully performing his cosmic ballet (Figure 36.2). The Chola dynasty figure
of Śiva represents a canonical tradition that inspired the poem and, as one scholar has
remarked, “is often said to be the supreme statement of Hindu art.”16 The missionary
illustration, by contrast, was intended to display a ghastly spectacle, one that draws a

FIGURE 36.2 Shiva Nataraja, tenth/eleventh century, bronze, 27¼ inches high. Kate
S. Buckingham Collection, 1965.1130. The Art Institute of Chicago.
large crowd seen encircling the contraption and the person it swings about. Text accom-
panying the illustration assures the reader of the authenticity of the engraving, which
was based on a drawing “taken from an actual scene of this nature by a Native Artist,
and brought from India by the Rev. Daniel Corrie. The native character and costume
are accurately preserved. The indifference manifested by many of the spectators of this
cruel superstition, and the amusements and gratifications which others associate with
it, are representations of what actually takes place on these occasions.”17 Christian mis-
sionary societies during the nineteenth century were much more likely to reproduce
scenes like this in their literature than the stark beauty of Śiva seen in Figure 36.2. When
they did illustrate sculptures of non-Christian deities, as in Figure 36.4, it was with an
artifactual candor that surrounded the object with a barrenness, which seems to evacu-
ate the figures of life and grace and reduce them to the dead idols that Christian theol-
ogy proclaimed they were. If Figure 36.1 presents a way of seeing espoused by Christian
missionaries, who regarded popular Indian religion as superstitious and repugnantly
spectacular, Figure 36.2 unveils the splendid majesty of the Hindu deity, suggesting that
the worship of Śiva was to be conducted with an eye to beauty, grace, poetry, and refine-
ment. This is at least how one academic Western admirer of Hindu art responded in the

early twentieth century, writing that the best versions of the bronze portrayal of Śiva
Nataraja display a “sensuously ripe corporeality full of plastic movement [that is] fused
with a geometrically abstract generality.”18
At the same time that aesthetic experience came to be characterized as disinterested-
ness or freedom for play in the eighteenth century, the absorptive gaze associated with
it bore a more sober religious or spiritual quality that derived from Pietist Christianity.
Karl Philipp Moritz, an important German writer on aesthetics in the late eighteenth
century, who came from a pious Protestant family, described the perception of beauty as
a “forgetting” of the self. Moritz believed that the loss of the self was “the highest degree
of the pure and selfless enjoyment that the beautiful provides us. In that moment we
offer up our individual, circumscribed existence for a kind of higher existence.”19 Arthur
Schopenhauer, a younger contemporary of Moritz, likewise considered aesthetic expe-
rience a spiritual act of self-transcendence and looked to Hindu philosophy to explain
it. When we lose ourselves, he wrote, “in contemplation of the infinite greatness of the
universe in time and space . . . we feel ourselves reduced to nothing. But against such a
ghost of our own nothingness . . . there arises the immediate consciousness that all these
worlds [perceived in the night sky] exist only in our representation, only as modifica-
tions of the eternal subject of pure knowing. This we find ourselves to be as soon as we
forget individuality.” The result is what Schopenhauer characterized as “the felt con-
sciousness of what the Upanishads of the Vedas express repeatedly in so many different
ways, but most admirably in the saying already quoted: ‘I am all this creation collectively,
and besides me there exists no other being’. It is an exaltation beyond our own individu-
ality, a feeling of the sublime.”20 The aesthetic of the sublime appealed to Schopenhauer
and his contemporaries (and continues to appeal to art lovers) for the spiritual experi-
ence of transcendence that it provided. The disinterested gaze of fine art is itself part of
the history of modern religion, and should therefore be regarded alongside the study of
other religious ways of seeing.
36.5 Interpreting the Material

Culture of Religion
Comparing several images of Buddha will help clarify the foregoing remarks about art,
material culture, popular practice, and religion. Figures 36.3, 36.4, and 36.5 come from
different parts of the Buddhist world—India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, and date from
the twelfth century to the present. The reproductions were produced by art historians
(Figure 36.3), missionaries (Figure 36.4), and a tourist (Figure 36.5), and are constructed
to serve different ways of seeing. Examining them will show that fine art and popular art,
official religion and popular belief, are not discrete things as much as they are more or
less discrete ways of seeing and interacting with images. Indeed, the very same artifact
can be deployed in elite and popular circles.

FIGURE 36.3 Buddha, Nagapattinam, India, Chola dynasty, twelfth century, granite, 63 inches
high. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrew Brown, 1964.556. The Art Institute of Chicago.
FIGURE 36.4 Representations of Boodhoo,” Missionary Sketches, no. 22, July 1823, p. 1. Special
Collections, Princeton Theology Seminary Library.

FIGURE 36.5 Mother and child before Buddha, Wat Prathadpanomvora Mahaviharn,
Northeast Thailand, 2002. Photo: Siriwan Santisakultarm.
Although art historians do much more when they interpret works of art than ana-
lyze style, they almost invariably attend to an object’s stylistic features, since a work’s
style is a primary way in which it shapes the viewer’s experience. At a purely visual
level, an object of art is its style, as style is the form that emerges in the creation
of the object. Consideration of style is therefore indispensable in interpretation,
though it by no means exhausts the task of interpretation. Because style is important
to art-historical investigation and to the viewing practices that art museums are in
the business of promoting, museums and art historians rely on representations of
art objects that facilitate the scrutiny of style. This is evident in Figure 36.3, a gran-
ite sculpture of Buddha from Nagapattinam, produced in the twelfth century. The
photograph shows the sculpture uniformly illuminated in front and above the fig-
ure, at a level and angle that aligns the camera with the eye of a human observer.
The entire figure is bathed in a soft light that brings out subtle details in the surface,
such as the gossamer appointments and diaphanous fabric clinging to the surface
of the body. The image sets the figure against a neutral background, seated atop a

plain, flat surface. Nothing is allowed to conflict with the free sweep of the viewer’s
eye. The result is a reproduction that foregrounds consideration of the object’s style,
“the life of form,” as Focillon’s panegyric described it. By presenting the object with-
out context or historical reference, freed from any indication of ritual use, images
like Figure 36.3 are obviously conducive to the playful roaming of the disinterested
gaze. The organization of the art museum virtually requires this. Visitors are invited
to amble by long rows of such objects, moving from one to the other along an axis
whose only practice of viewing is the uninhibited caress, the long dwelling that is
uninterested in any purpose but its own enjoyment. Art museums encourage this
quiet encounter. Other institutions install such objects in reconstructed temples,
surround them with altars or ceremonial instruments, pose costumed figures before
them, and supply ritualistic music. These are not art museums, but ethnographic
exhibits, natural history museums, or Madame Toussaud’s Wax Museum. Fine art
museums are not about lessons in ethnic history or sensational entertainment. They
are about aesthetic experience as modern Western society has come to define it: the
life of forms and the pleasureful dreams which that life nurtures.
The twelfth-century figure of Buddha meditating is the very thing that the artist
who produced the engraving shown in Figure 36.4 used as a model. The figure on the
left in Figure 36.4 is the same image of Buddha in the lotus position, with the flame
of wisdom on his head and the identical details of clothing. Yet Figure 36.4 places
the figure in the setting of two other sculptures of Buddha, one standing and the
other reclining. All three reproductions were based on metal figures brought from
Ceylon (Sri Lanka) by a British visitor back to London, where they were loaned to
the London Missionary Society for the purpose of reproduction in the society’s jour-
nal.21 Each figure is rendered with a rigidity and starkness that confirms their ster-
ile assembly: these are the dead idols of spiritually debauched people benighted by
superstition and bound to the delusion of a strange god named “Boodhoo,” about
whom contemporary Europeans knew next to nothing. The three figures seem to
sleep as the darkness falls on their world and the star of Christian Britain rises over
an empire that included India and Ceylon. The article illustrated by the image ends
by quoting residents of the island who acknowledged the supremacy of the British as
“masters of the country.”
Whereas Figure 36.3 presents the figure of Buddha from the perspective of a dis-
interested gaze in order to evoke a sense of awe or fascination, Figure 36.4 invites the
viewer to stare, gape, or gawk with the aim of provoking pity, and possibly contempt.
Whereas we would likely bestow upon the stone figure reproduced in Figure 36.3
the status of fine art, Figure 36.4, as an image itself, certainly represents popular
Christian visual culture. It is not about Buddhism so much as it is about Evangelical
Christians from Britain looking at Buddhism in colonial South Asia. A final image,
Figure 36.5, is not about Buddhist fine art or about Buddhism as a false religion pop-
ularly understood, but about the popular visual piety of Buddhism in Thailand. In
this photograph, taken by a Thai visitor to a temple complex in Northern Thailand a
few years ago, a mother and her son stand before a large bronze figure of the seated

Buddha. The mother prays while her son practices applying bits of gold leaf to the
surface of the sculpture, a common practice of Thai pilgrims to statues of Buddha.
The practice may derive from the ancient story that at his funeral Buddha’s flesh
converted to grains of gold. By applying gold to the surface of the figure, the devout
participate in Buddha’s reconstitution. The body of Buddha, whose remains were
deposited in funerary mounds, or stupas, throughout the region, was associated by
early Buddhists with his teachings. To see the Buddha was to see his dharma (teach-
ing), and vice-versa. Covering his body with gold is therefore an act of popular piety
that honors Buddha’s teachings and procures merit for the devotee by transforming
one’s vision of the figure into the heightened value of gold. Moreover, a golden com-
plexion was said to be one of the thirty-two marks of a great man that were evident
in Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, from his birth.22 Applying gold to the
figure of Buddha affirms his historical uniqueness and authority.
The material culture of religion, whether elite or popular, is an essential part of
how people imagine their worlds. By imagination I mean not mere fiction-making,
but the vital construction of a sense of one’s place in the physical or temporal uni-
verse. British Protestants imagined “pagan” others and the millennial mission of
Britain in their pictures of Hindu “idolatry” and “superstition.” Figures 36.1 and 36.4
consist of one form of popular culture critiquing another, summoning for popular
British imagination a view of Hindu and Buddhist popular practice that suited the
Evangelical notion of a national purpose. In Figure 36.5, a Thai mother introduces her
son into a world of Buddhist practice by taking him with her to a temple and includ-
ing him in prayer and devotion. Parents and schoolteachers in North American cities
take children to museums to view images like Figures 36.2 and 36.3, not to engage
in religious convictions, but to behold the life of forms, to launch an imaginative
journey in aesthetic experience. They see “art,” not objects of belief, “sculpture,” not
devotional figures or cult objects.
The importance of material culture for the study of popular religion is at least
threefold. First, popular practices often leave nothing behind but material objects,
which means that the objects are the only way of accessing the beliefs that consti-
tuted the religious life of ordinary people. Second, what people do with objects
reveals the life of the body, of feelings, practices, and ideas that form the basis of
lived religion. Texts may not capture this domain of experience even if the popular
culture in question is literate. Third, objects and images operate within visual fields
or ways of seeing that tell us a great deal about the imaginative universe in which
people practice their beliefs. The disinterested gaze that is commonly associated
in modern, Western societies with the refined objects of fine art is not the visual
regime that operates in many instances of popular religion, where beauty is adored
for its appeal to all manner of interests—passion, affection, protection, maternal
love, and so forth. In addition to gazing, we learn much from the way people gawk,
glare, glance, or squint. There are many ways of seeing to be excavated from the
visual and material cultures of religion. Doing so will reveal vital insights into how
people put their worlds together.

Notes
1. On the interrelation of fine art and popular imagery see Varnedoe and Gopnick,
High & Low.
2. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.”
3. See, for example, Bohls, “Disinterestedness and Denial of the Particular,” Pinney, Photos of
the Gods, 193, and Morgan, ed., Religion and Material Culture, 68–70.
4. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow.
5. Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, 44.
6. Ibid, 41–2.
7. Matisse, “Notes of a Painter,” 135.
8. For a consideration of the gaze in religious visual culture, see Morgan, Sacred Gaze, 2–6,
and Morgan, The Embodied Eye, 55–83; for a good general discussion of gaze see Olin,
“Gaze.”
9. On belief and the study of the materiality of religions, see Morgan, ed., Religion and
Material Culture, 1–12.
10. Morgan, ed., Icons of American Protestantism, 193–96.
11. On lived religion see Hall, ed., Lived Religion.
12. Williams, Popular Religion in America, 3–5.
13. “Hook-Swinging,” 326.
14. Ibid.
15. See Smith, The Dance of Śiva: Religion, Art and Poetry in South India.
16. Ibid, 9.
17. “Hook-Swinging,” 326.
18. Stella Kramrisch, quoted in Coomaraswamy, History of Indian and Indonesian Art,
127: “sinnliche reifste Körperlichkeit voll plastischer Bewegung mit geometrischen
Allgemeingültigkeit verschmolzen.”
19. Moritz, Schriften zur Aesthetik und Poetik, 5.
20. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1: 205–06.
21. “Boodhoo,” 2.
22. McArthur, Reading Buddhist Art, 95. A compelling and highly instructive study of Thai
Buddhist visual piety is Swearer, Becoming the Buddha.
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Subject of Aesthetics,” in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art, edited
by Paul Mattick, Jr., 16–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
“Boodhoo, the Principal Idol worshipped in the Island of Ceylon, and in Other Regions of the
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C HA P T E R 37
S AC R E D A N D S E C U L A R I N
AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC
C H E RY L A . K I R K - DU G G A N
Music is incredibly important in diverse lives of African Americans, who have used a
variety of music to do many things. Music acts as a catalyst of creativity, empowerment,
inspiration, and celebration. Some use music for motivation, well-being, or for enter-
tainment. Many persons of faith in the first African diaspora to the Western Hemisphere
experienced God via music. Over time, parents sang religious music to their children,
youth sang in a children’s choir, or they listened to Gospels and Spirituals on 78s, 45s,
LPs, or CDs (if over fifty); and the Internet, downloading, and iPods (if under thirty).
Recently, many African Americans have begun a reverse migration back to the South
and Southeast, retiring to warmer climates, to renew family ties, and for less expensive
economic environments. Just as music soothed concerns of the enslaved and twenti-
eth century immigrants, and moved the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, today, music is a
quintessential element within W. E. B. Du Bois’s souls of Black folk. Music is a life force
in the so-called secular and sacred contexts of African Americans. In African traditions,
however, there is no clear-cut separation between sacred and secular. Some musical
genres are more fluid, and exist in both categories.
In some African American musical genres, there is tension between how people label
and use music, what acceptable practice is, and what may be viewed in poor taste. There
have been disputes over what is appropriate or not for music in worship. Some practices
regarding use of instruments, appropriate performance style, and particular genres that
were once banned are now incorporated in some church traditions. This chapter inten-
tionally includes genres of music usually classified as secular, which may seem odd in a
volume on religion and the arts. The substantive intersections and cross-fertilizations of
the different genres of African American music require this inclusion; that is, demand
this approach based upon the evolution of the music. A classic case in point is the con-
nection between the blues and Gospel music via Thomas A. Dorsey, discussed later in
this chapter.

SACRED AND SECULAR IN AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC 499
Regardless of the particular musical genre, African American music shares vari-
ous attributes in common, from contextual ramifications and audience to impact.
From an old One Hundredth hymn to a hip-hop Praise song, African American
sacred music honors God, offers thanksgiving, teaches virtue, recalls history
and doctrine, celebrates special days, and honors the practices of Christian life.
So-called secular music entertains and often provides commentary on life, includ-
ing spirituality and transformation. Sometimes musicians use secular music in
sacred settings. By changing words, tempos, or style, music can reveal numerous
aspects and experiences of society. Sometimes church musicians will take a popular
song and redact it to be church music, so that “You Are the Best Thing That Ever
Happened to Me,” popularized by Gladys Knight and the Pips, becomes “Jesus Is
the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me.” Along with belief systems, music may
indicate a church’s socio-economic class, referencing music typologies, number of
choirs, role of the minister of music, sense of community outreach, and the immedi-
ate accessibility of recordings of worship services. From a so-called secular space,
musical taste can indicate levels of education and access. One way to reflect on both
types of music involves thematic development.
Poetry, praise, power, protest, philosophy, and politics create a tapestry for sig-
nifying major themes and trajectories within African American sacred and secular
music. Poetry bespeaks a profound cornucopia of rhyme, texts, subjects, history,
emotions, meter, artistry, contexts, content, theology, ethics, spirituality, and mel-
ody. Praise honors the connectivity of all life, all creation in traditional African
cosmologies: no separation exists between the sacred and profane/secular, the liv-
ing, unborn, or dead/ancestors. Power serves as an umbrella that holds categories
of authority, authenticity, access, community, and justice in tension with systemic
and personal evil, oppression, and injustice. Protest frames the genesis and catalyst
for most African diasporan cultural productions that celebrate life and advocate in
favor of the marginalized, those never forsaken by God. Philosophy concerns the
complex thought and double entendres that emerge in the language and thought of,
within, and behind the music. Politics references interpersonal, intrapersonal, and
communal dynamics regarding identity, story, interpretation, performance prac-
tice, and music traditions.
This analysis of sacred and secular in African American music begins by briefly intro-
ducing the socio-historical, cultural, and cosmological origins and terminology of this
music. Second, thematic, chronological examination of selected musical typologies,
from antebellum Spirituals to hip-hop and contemporary classical African American
foregrounds tenets of so-called sacred and secular music. The forms of expression
include instrumental and vocal, solo, and collaborative. Third, a summary examines the
religious/spiritual impact of these cultural artifacts. Fourth, the chapter concludes with
a literature review of significant scholarship regarding African American sacred and
secular music.

37.1 Origins and Primary

Characteristics
African American sacred and secular music arises out of a lived experienced of people
transported like chattel, in inhumane conditions from one continent to another under
duress, without choice, as they related to their understandings of the divine, themselves,
and their surroundings. As captives considered unintelligent brutes, Africans brought
with them a worldview, historical encounters, and their cultural legacy. African enslaved
persons used music to bolster their morale, as well as to praise and protest. In the Du
Boisian sense of an exponential double consciousness, persons of African descent, new
to what later became the United States, have to wrestle and reckon with realities of being
African, and American, and African American.
Black enslaved persons stolen from Africa brought with them a legacy of music,
culture, politics, social organization, pedagogy, and ways of being and learning,
which included religion, government, and social structures. According to Herodotus
and other early historians, much of what has been attributed to Greece and Rome
germinated in Africa. Music-making was part of everyday African life. Despite the
horrific conditions of antebellum enslavement and later Jim and Jane Crow and its
twenty-first-century resurgence, diasporan Africans in the United States have cre-
ated a variety of music to name and signify their lived realities, joys, and sorrows,
and to expose oppressive persons and systems. The term African Diaspora pertains to
the people whose ancestors came from Africa, and who now live in other parts of the
world due to antebellum slavery, legitimated by Pope Nicholas V’s 1452/4 papal bull,
Dum diversas, which sanctioned and authorized Portugal’s invasion and the monop-
oly of slave trade in Africa. Within the United States, people often think of a Second
Diaspora, where persons migrated from the South to the North and West (1940s,
1950s) for better economic opportunities and less blatant racism. Recently, many
African Americans have begun a reverse migration back to the South and Southeast,
as mentioned earlier.
Antebellum music by Black folks included Spirituals, blues, work songs and hol-
lers. The songs have been tools of survival and overcoming, from experiences of the
Underground Railroad through concerns regarding twenty-first-century economic
downturns, street violence, and political disenfranchisement. African American music
weaves together and depends on drama and dance amid complex, diverse improvisation
shaping melody, harmony, rhythm, meter, textures, and instrumentation grounded in a
rich culture of oral traditions, sacred and secular alike.
Black sacred music or hymnody involves music of praise or adoration of God, reli-
gious poetry as pronouncement and affirmation, appropriate for corporate expression.
This music proclaims theological, doctrinal beliefs that define how particular groups
understand God’s presence and work in the world. Traditionally, hymns express the
truth claims that capture the Christian religious experience of believers for over two

thousand years. African American hymnody arises from African socio-cultural, reli-
gious, aesthetic, and musical traditions of enslaved Africans mixed with European reli-
gious dogmas and musical styles within the United States. African qualities, myths,
and hermeneutical strategies vital to African American musical development create
continuity between African American hymnody and oral African cultural memories.
Central to African American Christian hymnody are experiential issues that materi-
alize from the horrific experiences of enslavement and ongoing oppression. Richard
Allen (1760–1831), founder and a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
published the first hymnal designed for African Americans, A Collection of Hymns and
Spiritual Songs from Various Authors (two editions) in Philadelphia, 1801.
The music of the church helps to attract members and supports spiritual growth. This
creative, inspiring, dynamic music often stands in tension between generational tastes,
and boundaries between sacred and secular realities. Part of the challenge of engaging the
diverse song in Black churches concerns the musicians themselves. Some musicians are
trained in the Euro-American classical tradition, where the musical score is most impor-
tant, and one is trained to honor that score to the letter. Some musicians play by ear; that is,
many of them cannot read music, but can replicate the sound after hearing music played
and/or sung. Some musicians read music and play by ear. Music in African American
church performance practice often rests on oral tradition. Choirs and musicians may learn
music by rote and expect to take a great deal of liberty with interpretation. The perfor-
mance practice, couched in fluidity, involves timbre or sound quality, handling musical
variables or techniques of delivery, and physical and visual dimensions of performance.
African American hymnody, notably music for congregational-style singing in an
African American church setting, includes soulful, holistic, participatory, spiritual, cel-
ebratory, life-giving exclamations and experiences, reflecting theological, ethical, bibli-
cal, doctrinal, and socio-cultural history and consciousness of varied Black churches.
Sacred songs are varied, transformative, and engaging: Spirituals (folk, jubilee, arranged,
jubilee quartet, protest songs/freedom songs); Gospel music (folk, gospel-hymn, gospel
quartets, choral, modern/contemporary, holy hip-hop, Christian hip-hop); Anthems
(antiphonal, choral music with organ accompaniment); Revival songs (music with
an evangelistic fervor); Hymns (standards by composers like Fanny Crosby, Charles
Wesley, Isaac Watts, Charles A. Tindley); and Praise songs (toe-tapping music of deep
adoration), performed either a cappella or with a vast array of instrumentation, from
upright pianos to electronic keyboards, percussion, and guitar. Central to this African
American music tradition is the ring shout, an expressive, cultural ritual combining the
secular and sacred, where dance and holy music coalesce. Rooted in the African circle
dance, the ring shout involves stamping, clapping instead of drumming, and feet shuf-
fling, involving a shuffle step where one did not cross legs, a no-no for those Baptists
who were against dance; and a hidden protest of counterclockwise movement in opposi-
tion to the sun’s movement. The movement symbolized the singers’ long, grueling days
of arduous work during enslavement.
In addition to the ring shout, African Americans remembered and included many
African practices and customs including cries, calls, and hollers; call and response;

heterophony, multiple rhythms and polyrhythms; blue notes, bent notes, pendu-
lar thirds, hums, elisions; glides, grunts, moans, vocables, and other rhythmic-oral
expressions, punctuations, and interpolations. Body movement, syncopation, paral-
lel chords and intervals, melodic and rhythmic repetitions, and distinctive tonal reso-
nances connected enslaved songsters and wordsmiths to their African traditions. These
music-makers brought fragments of songs, rites, cultures, and doctrines with them to
these shores. Many enslaved persons were familiar with the Christian God, because
some practiced monotheism in West Africa as early as 500 CE. Some Africans followed
Islam; others followed indigenous religions. Although separated from family and oth-
ers with similar cultural backgrounds, some enslaved used music to make sense of the
English language, White slave Christianity, and their oppression. In response, they
created and sang Spirituals: the first Black hymnody in the United States, the founda-
tional imprimatur for most African American music. Black religious music transmitted
African American faith through song.
African American ethnomusicologist, Portia K. Maultsby, sees a three-pronged tra-
jectory within African American musical roots: African American sacred traditions,
African American secular traditions (non-jazz), and African American secular tradi-
tions (jazz). These traditions have multiple tentacles, reflecting a continuous connec-
tion, influence, and fluidity between the so-called sacred and secular.
Secular music sometimes drawing from sacred tunes with regard to performance
practice, style, context, and themes, also engages, articulates, and responds to culture,
life, philosophy, ontological and existential realities—a rich, complex, sometimes fluid
legacy. Secular traditions include game songs, play songs, work songs, field/street calls
and protest songs; the blues traditions of rural blues, vaudeville blues, boogie-woogie;
urban blues, rhythm & blues, rock ‘n’ roll, rock, soul, disco, house, techno, rap/hip-hop,
funk, electro-funk, go-go, and neo-soul; and jazz secular traditions, including synco-
pated dance music, syncopated brass bands, ragtime, New Orleans style jazz, stride
piano, big bands, swing bands, bebop, hard bop, soul jazz, jazz fusion, new jazz swing,
cool, and avant-garde/free jazz.
Some scholars will argue for a stringent line separating sacred from secular. Other
scholars will see more fluidity. With some songs, only by listening to the lyrics can one
discern whether they are sacred or secular because the melodies could go either way. The
context of the particular church/denominational context can dictate the type of music,
how one classifies the genre, and the amount of fluidity between sacred and secular.
Where one stands on the assessment of the depths and breath of the tensions between
sacred and secular music is often a matter of personal taste, socio-cultural and educa-
tional experience, religious context regarding performance styles as to the nature of the
particular music, along with denominational dogma and practice. The chart shown in
Figure 37.1 reflects a historical trajectory of the development of African American sacred
and secular music.
See http://www.carnegiehall.org/honor/history/index.aspx[http://www.carnegiehall.
org/honor/history/index.aspx]]

Source: Courtesy Portia K. Maultsby.
Figure 37.1
37.2 Selected Thematic Typologies
37.2.1 Spirituals
The body of materials included under the rubric of Spirituals includes minstrels, jubi-
lees, work songs, slave or folk songs, and religious antebellum songs. These sponta-
neously generated songs emerge out of ambiguity, regarding origins, functions, and
designs. They operated at the physical and emotional levels, with multiple meanings.
With major, minor, and mixtures of scales, Spirituals from the early eras were usually
vocal, sometimes a cappella and other times with instrumental accompaniment. The
Spirituals’ words and melody use many traditional African musical elements, particu-
larly: ornamentation; rich tonality, often using a five-tone or pentatonic scale and flat-
ted notes; a distinct blending of voices, creating a polyphonic sound; falsetto; moaning;
humming; and gliding from note to note. This music uses hands and feet to create per-
cussion, syncopation, call and response, spontaneity, improvisation, and building on
drum rhythms, set in four-line stanzas with chorus. Spirituals become art songs during
eighteenth-century reconstruction, notably with the concert performances of univer-
sity choirs like the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
Spirituals, which are songs of expectation and justice and “chants of collective exor-
cism” helped an oppressed people deal with social, oppressive evils of racism and hege-
mony. Poetically, the Spirituals express an eschatological hope despite real threats of
death through lynching, beatings, and inhumane treatment. The Spirituals exercised and
exorcised a similar intensity and healing reality during the 1960s civil rights eras. They
exercised this intensity in that the Spirituals affected such feelings and transformation.
The Spirituals exorcised, that is aesthetically exposed and called out the evils of oppres-
sion and denied their veracity, toward healing the enslaved persons’ wounded spirits,
scarred bodies, and bringing a sense of peace to their homes slave owners could legally
breach. These inspiring, introspective songs are living, oral testimonies that offer confes-
sion, supplication, poetry, questions, and reflections. The Spirituals helped enslaved per-
sons affirm God, and cope with their harsh lived realities. As praise songs, the Spirituals
used biblical texts and religious imagery to signify a God who never abandons or fails.
The Spirituals allow for healing and wholeness amidst struggle. They evolved in the
womb of legalized slavery, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Human
traffickers kidnapped Africans against their will, as church and state legally objectified
their bodies and personhood. Surviving the middle passage, enslaved persons surrep-
titiously hid their precious gifts of song and an indefatigable relationship with God.
Spirituals engage power, as the trickster element in many Spirituals engages a double
entendre and irony, a subtlety lost on outsiders who do not understand metaphors and
irony amidst a sense of double consciousness, double voicing, double bind, and double
philosophical thought. That is, one needs to have multiple levels of awareness, commu-
nicating a variety of different messages depending upon the context, framed by paradox

and tension, as one posits belief and thought masqueraded beneath a play on words set
to music. Believing they were created in God’s image, enslaved women and men cre-
ated these songs communally. Together they incubated this music until singing these
songs helped to liberate them, sheltering them from utter hopelessness. Philosophically,
these songs tell stories of life and death, of oppression and freedom, of faith and hope, of
salvation and transformation, of a determination to survive: creative, enigmatic stories
of endurance and hope. Politically, the Spirituals reflect communal strategizing toward
gaining freedom and accessing a better life. Using the technique of signifying, Black folk
could hide their identity politics in an alleged mundane ballad, while plotting to escape
and warn others of danger—through the power of song.
An energetic, powerful life force, Spirituals embody a collective folk aesthetic, blend-
ing African, American, and African American music and elements as they name and
expose the dilemma of living amid good, evil, and injustice in a complex world. A Black
aesthetic involves the quest for freedom and literacy, within socio-cultural, politi-
cal realities of spiritual, embodied beauty. Spirituals embody an aesthetic of Black folk
and formal traditions, as well as White traditions, that create the language of praises,
reflections, and supplications. Spirituals signify figurative language, poetry, stories, and
songs: shared communal wisdom. The songs signify and encode justice and humor.
Derived communally, there are no particular individual composers. The graceful melo-
dies and repetitive words insured that these songs passed orally from generation to gen-
eration. According to John Lovell Jr., enslaved African Diasporan peoples created some
six thousand extant Spirituals. Popularized by the singing of the Fisk Jubilee singers,
from the Emancipation years through today, some composers arrange the Spirituals,
for congregational, solo, four-part harmony, and orchestral arrangements. These com-
posers include R. Nathaniel Dett, Rachel Eubanks, Margaret Bonds, Edward Boatner,
Undine Moore, Lena Johnson McLin, Hall Johnson, and brothers James Weldon and
J. Rosamond Johnson. While the Spirituals include work songs, most would categorize
the Spirituals as sacred music, whether or not the song explicitly mentions God. The
focus on transformation, community, and well-being, as opposed to being victims, sig-
nifies the sacred.
37.2.2 Blues
Some call the blues secular spirituals. A key staple for urban Blacks, these songs poeti-
cally bemoaned the difficulties, destitution, depression, and despair African Americans
experienced pre- and post-enslavement. The birth of minstrelsy produced ballads and
blues. Ballads were romantic songs that signified a story of people, places, things, and
love. Blues offered commentaries on similar realities regarding hard times. Minstrel
composers included Thomas (Blind Tom) Bethune and James Bland in the late eigh-
teenth century. Composers in the 1900s, like Will Marion Cook, J. Rosamond Johnson,
and J. Hubert (Eubie) Blake created more sophisticated music, incorporating idi-
oms from jazz, ragtime, and traditional European classical music. Later minstrelsy

composers, too many to name, affected early jazz, vaudeville, tin pan alley type musi-
cals, and burlesque.
Philosophically, the blues provided commentaries on Black life, displaying a vast array
of emotion. Surfacing in the early 1900s and heard from tenderloin districts to street
vendors, the blues relayed one’s personal response to a particular event, which presented
opportunities for protest and political engagement. As a catalyst for power, singing the
blues provides one a catharsis regarding her or his misery, making life bearable again.
Blues originate out of sorrowful songs of roustabouts and stevedores, the enslaved’s
field hollers, and from those Spirituals known as sorrow songs. Like the Spirituals, the
blues engage a call-and-response technique, instrumental improvisation, syncopations,
duple meter, and a poetic structure with AA’B in eight to sixteen measures. The blues
have a unique harmony, with a chord structure of tonic, subdominant, tonic, dominant,
tonic [I-IV-I-V-I]. Many scholars categorize the blues in three ways: rural or country
blues, the earliest type, with solo male singers and guitar accompaniment, expanding
to strings and jug bands; classic or city blues, involving women singers accompanied
by orchestra or piano in 1920s and 1930s; urban blues, concerning blues from 1940s and
later, using electric guitars, drums, basses, and brass instruments. Early anonymous
blues singers were sometimes blind. They usually wandered from one black community
to another, singing sorrowful songs. Blues singers sang in diners, honky-tonk night-
spots, trains, and for community social events. Often associated with the poor, blues
were well-received in saloons and brothels, usually dismissed by the middle and upper
class. As praise songs, some blues include humor, jubilation, and spirituality. Most deem
William Christopher (“W.C.”) Handy the father of the blues—the first person to both
write a blues composition and to popularize the blues. Ma Rainey (Gertrude Malissa
Nix Pridgett Rainey) toured, singing the blues. The context of performance, dynamics,
and the meaning of the lyrics place blues in the secular category. At the same time, some
of the vitality and freedom that emanates from the blues do have a spiritual or sacred
quality.
37.2.3 Ragtime
Ragtime, an immediate predecessor of jazz and influence on the political factors
of identity and interpretation of jazz, became popular during several worlds’ fairs,
between 1893 and 1904. The term first appears in print in 1897. Scott Joplin and Tom
Turpin created piano rags that contained multi-theme structures, simple syncopation,
key change, and two strong beats per measure. Ragtime, Black dance music, poetically
uses a two-step or cakewalk rhythm, simultaneously with an unsyncopated and synco-
pated beat. The right hand plays embellishments on the chord system established by the
left hand; the left hand plays simple harmonies, philosophically reflecting the thought
behind the music. The sections of this music follow three- or four-part form, with design
of AABBACCDD, reflecting strong march influence. The rhythmic complexity of rag-
time reflects power, a capacity of creativity as rags moved geographically, across the U.S.,

from a slow two-beat style (Joplin), to one of vigor and zest (James Scott), to romantic,
strongly accented intertwined melodies (Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton), to the Harlem
style of fervor rooted in classic praise and protest of ring shouts (Thomas “Fats” Waller
and Eubie Blake). Ragtime faded from importance until its resurrection by Gunther
Schuller in the 1970s. Because of its failure to develop further and because of Tin Pan
Alley’s commercialism, ragtime was changed and consumed by jazz. With its dance-like
acrobatics on the keyboard, scholars locate ragtime within secular music.
37.2.4 Jazz
Jazz as noun is a hybrid comprised of elements of jubilee songs, blues, jigs, shouts, clogs,
and coon songs, with sacred and secular, popular and classic forms. As verb, jazz engages
collective improvisation, correlating speech and dance, as instruments speak melody,
inspiring listeners to engage through responsive motion in an experience of politics
and electricity, which fuses player and instrument. Jazz engages surprise, signaling the
challenge of unpredictability. Poetically, jazz is an art form and business, popular and
relaxed, like a kaleidoscope, in perpetual motion of becoming; it is passionate and per-
sonal, inviting the listener to engage emotionally. As praise music, this evolved hybrid
form engages spontaneity without pretense as it weaves a real, complex communion of
souls. The beat is powerful, with syncopated rhythms, unique tone colors, and perfor-
mance practices. Historically, jazz genres developed via a series of actions and reactions.
These styles include New Orleans style (mass ensemble collective improvisation), swing
(featuring solo improvisation, mid-1930s), Bebop (fiery, frenetic style, 1940s), Cool
Jazz (relaxed, somber sound, 1940s-50s), Hard Bop (hybrid of blues and modern gos-
pel), which commercialized to become soul jazz, losing some appeal. Free-Form Jazz
emerged, involving strict thematic improvisation with structural unity, allowing jazz
more freedom (mid-1960s). In the 1960s, jazz/rock fusion or electric jazz emerged, with
wide use of electric instruments. Fusion morphed into rock ’n’ roll during the mid-1950s
and ’60s.
The powerful thematic references of jazz emerge philosophically in major players: the
bold brilliance of Louis Armstrong and his understanding of the jazz solo; the singing
improvisatory genius of Lady Billie Holiday; the daring conceptions of Thelonius Monk,
Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell; the magisterial virtuoso pianist Art Tatum; the aggres-
sive emotional music of Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Sam Rivers,
Anthony Braxton, and jazz theosophist John Coltrane, as well as the jazz constrictions
that predated him; the sardonic, dramatic Miles Davis; the protean force of Charlie
Mingus; the daring, astonishing, revolutionary flight of Charlie Parker and the obso-
lescence of harmonic and rhythmic language preceding him; and the state of becoming
embodied in Duke Ellington and his concept of the jazz orchestra. While others previ-
ously used jazz in the church, Ellington created three sacred concerts, which premiered
respectively at New York’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (1965); the Cathedral of St.
John the Divine in New York (1968); and at Westminster Abbey, London, England (1973).

The original Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ) members—John Lewis (piano and
director), Milt Jackson (vibraphone), Ray Brown (double bass), and Kenny Clarke
(drums)—first performed together in 1946 in Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. Later, Percy
Heath replaced Brown and Connie Kay replaced Clarke. Their Cool Jazz wedded jazz
and European-derived classical music. Some critiques find Cool or Smooth jazz absent
some historical African American music traits. The acceptance of MJQ, other popu-
lar 1950s and 1960s jazz ensembles, and African American jazz pianist virtuosos like
Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum reflected a rapprochement between various jazz aficio-
nados. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Jazz at Lincoln Center, with Artistic
Director Wynton Marsalis, inspire and introduce new audiences to jazz. They produce
year-round performances, education and broadcast events; they have a jazz apprecia-
tion curriculum, a band director academy, music publishing, and interactive websites,
producing thousands of events in New York City and taking jazz around the world.
Jazz as genre, performance style, and historical artifact is at once secular or sacred, and
sometimes a blend, depending upon the particular composer, the setting, and the intent
of the music. Even at its most secular, the elegance and improvisatory nature of jazz
embodies a life-force that invokes spirit. As with all music, the listener must differentiate
between the genre and the lived experience of the artist.
37.2.5 Gospel Music

Historically, the word “gospel” defines the first four New Testament books. Gospel
music, connected to these texts, is both an African American music performance style
and genre, one that focuses on the Christian message and life, centering on Jesus’ teach-
ing and ministry, especially salvation by grace. While most twenty-first-century Black
churches have Gospel choirs, this was not normative fifty years ago. Many churches,
especially so-called “mainline” African American Baptist and Methodist churches,
looked askance at Gospel music replacing the traditional Spirituals and hymns, in the
same way as their parents had viewed the blues, as the devil’s music. Many saw Gospel
music, which derives some of its piano and vocal technique from the blues, as too
worldly, and thus initially rejected the music. Similarly, some congregants no longer
wished to hear the Spirituals, wanting to forget the shame of slavery and Jim Crow.
Poetically, in the uses of its language and message, Gospel music ultimately left
its Pentecostal origins to become mainstream in Black Churches across the United
States. First, Southern, rural Blacks migrated by the hundreds to the urban North and
Far West during World War II, taking Gospel music with them. Second, The National
Baptist Convention publically endorsed the Gospel singing of major Gospel musi-
cians at the Annual Convention in 1930, in Chicago. Third, the work, strategizing,
and publishing enterprises of Thomas Dorsey (who played blues to pay the mortgage
during the week and played keyboard at church on Sundays) and his friends pushed
Gospel music front and center, especially through the National Convention of Gospel
Choirs and Choruses.

Politically, Gospel singers moved into the secular world from the church, as many
asked whether Gospel was religious or entertainment music as early as 1938, when
Rosetta Tharpe debuted at the Apollo Theatre, Harlem. Conversely, Mahalia Jackson
vowed to never sing Gospel music in a nightclub. During the mid-1940s, Roberta
Martin was the first to organize a mixed Gospel choir by bringing female voices into
her all-male group. Previously, Gospel choirs involved female singers and quartets,
with four or five male members. With radio Gospel, programming audiences grew as
Savoy Records began to record Gospel music in 1942. Philosophically, Gospel received
its sanction and legitimation when Mahalia Jackson and Theodore Fry organized the
National Baptist Music Convention as an auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention.
The first big all-Gospel concert in history debuted at Carnegie Hall in New York
with Mahalia Jackson as the star attraction in 1950, and at Madison Square Garden,
in 1959. Subsequently, Gospel singers appeared on television, at jazz festivals, coffee-
houses, and in a few nightclubs. Gospel musicals, television programs, and Gospel
singing in films became very popular. In 1968, Rev. James Cleveland organized the
Gospel Music Workshop of America. Like Dorsey’s earlier organization, this one
brought together thousands of singers and songwriters each year for training in the
Black Gospel tradition. Since the 1960s and 1970s, Gospel songs have involved ensem-
bles with electronic instruments, synthesizers, strings, and horns, performing in con-
cert halls. By the 1970s, one could hear Gospel as praise and protest, across the nation,
within all denominations; on college campuses, in concert halls, theaters, movie
houses; on radio and television. The Gospel recording industry and literature about
Gospel music flourished.
In 1980, Chicago celebrated the Golden Jubilee of Gospel Music, climaxing with
the televised “The Roots of Gospel,” featuring performers to discuss its history: pio-
neers Dorsey and Sallie Martin; leading singers Jessy Dixon and Albertina Walker; and
Clayton Laverne Hannah, official historian of the Gospel Academy of Recording Arts
and Sciences. In 1981, the landmark publication Songs of Zion occurred sixty years after
an earlier landmark, Gospel Pearls, first made the songs of the pioneer black gospel com-
poser accessible. Songs of Zion contains Spirituals and jubilees, early Gospel hymns of
Tindley, Campbell, and Dorsey; contemporary Gospel songs of Bradford, Cleveland,
Crouch, Hawkins, Martin, and Morris, along with standard and Gospel hymns by White
writers. With the dawn of the twenty-first century, many African American churches
experience power and transformation via their Gospel and/or praise choirs, sanctuary
or senior choirs that sing Gospel music. The newest Gospel genre of “Praise music” has
one to two verses, repetitive choruses, with electronic accompaniment, to offer praise
and prepare congregations for worship.
Gospel music, a hybrid like jazz, emerges within the sacred tradition, with stylistic
traits born in secular music, particularly the blues and R&B. Sometimes it is not clear
whether a song is a Gospel or R&B tune. In the Mary Mary song “Yesterday,” the first
three verses focus on the protagonist saying she cried her last tears yesterday, because
yesterday she decided to trust you. The music and the words do not automatically indi-
cate that the “you” pertains to God, until the fourth verse, where the text explicitly

names God as the object of trust. In another case, Gladys Knight and the Pips popular-
ized “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me,” naming a difficult life and celebrating the
love of another person. Rev. James Cleveland redacted the song and, as noted earlier, it
became “Jesus Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me,” using the same music and
style. Such an example reflects the fluidity of the genre and begs the question as to how a
significant root for a particular genre circumscribes or informs how one categorizes the
synthesized form.
With contemporary Gospel music known as Praise Music, one hears similar percus-
sion, instrumentation, and tonality as in R&B. In many church settings, there is a great
deal of physical activity: swaying, clapping, and stepping. Some posit that if one dances
and celebrates in nightclubs, when one gives one’s life to Christ, then one can dance and
clap with exuberance to praise God. An issue for further research, beyond this chapter,
is an assessment of the types of physicality in worship services, and how such movement
expresses human sensuality and sexuality, as conscious and unconscious activity, and
how such non-liturgical dance movement shapes the worship experience.
37.2.6 Rhythm & Blues and Rock ‘n’ Roll

Rock ‘n’ Roll and rhythm and blues (R&B) both emerged during early 1954, with the
recording of a song, Sh-Boom, performed by The Chords, a group of young African
American singers. This song made top ten on the national Billboard chart after only
three weeks. Sh-Boom is paradigmatic for popular music development: big rhythmic
beat, featuring teenage angst, composed in a studio, and originally recorded by Black
artists for a segregated African American market. The songs often have the most success
in cover versions by Euro-American singers. Singers and record labels made rock ‘n’ roll
and R&B popular. One of the earliest influential African American performers of early
rock ‘n’ roll was Charles “Chuck” Berry, who composed his lyrics and melodies. His use
of electric guitar and voice, with a White rock ‘n’ roll vocal quality, strongly influenced
English groups like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. The powerful urbanization of
African American folk music changed classic and country blues into rhythm and blues;
the latter incorporated African American swing band beats. By the mid-1950s, the off-
beat rhythmic beats of boogie-woogie emerged in rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’
roll just as the stomp or shuffle style apparent in artists like “Little Richard” Penniman,
Fats Domino, and Chuck Berry appeared, shifting the politics of performance. The
development of the electric bass guitar became more prominent. Poetically and phil-
osophically, the African American music tradition influenced rock ‘n’ roll stylisti-
cally with Gospel chord sequences; blues notes; vocal aspects (falsetto, growl, shout),
call-and-response pattern; emphasis on percussive sound qualities; and rhythmic
dynamics. As rock ‘n’ roll developed, the distinctions between pop, country western,
and rhythm and blues became more fluid. Between 1958 and 1963, popular folk music
flourished, and embraced the social justice causes of African Americans, supporting the
movement for equality and freedom irrespective of race.

Had it not been for the music, the 1960s Civil Rights Movement could not have
happened. Civil Rights activists used traditional Protestant hymns like “Leaning on
the Everlasting Arms,” adapted popular songs and changed the words, wrote original
songs, and redacted antebellum spirituals. The singing protestors included soloists like
Fannie Lou Hamer and quartets, like the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee), Freedom Singers, Nashville Quartet, Selma Freedom Choir, Guy Carawan,
Carlton Reese Gospel Choir, and Montgomery Gospel Trio. Other activist groups using
music included SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference], CORE (Congress
of Racial Equality), and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People). Politically, music helped to break the ice, bolster courage, and
served as a response mechanism. Poetically, in terms of language and rhetoric, songs
provided a means for community empowerment, self-assertion, defense, and offense.
Philosophically, because of racism and hatred, death was a familiar companion to those
who fought for freedom. Freedom songs proclaimed liberation was an aspect of God.
From the time of slavery, hundreds were lynched, harassed, and brutalized. Singing and
music-making were survival techniques, constructing vehicles of power, praise, and
protest. When the rhetoric of Black Power resounds loudly and the music ceases, a dis-
sonance of silence remains. The pinnacle of the movement parallels the peak of singing.
During this same time period, Pope John XXIII called for aggiornamento, a new wind
blowing in the Vatican, resulting in the changes toward the vernacular mass, where
communities would hear the mass in their own language, which led to Gospel masses
for African American Catholics. Socially, this era reenergized the feminist movement
begun in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, and birthed gay liberation, AARP, migrant
worker movements, and other interests regarding societal change. The music reflected
the times, and nationally, African American soul music became popular and commer-
cially lucrative.
African American soul music generally fell into two categories. The sound popular-
ized by Motown Records, under the leadership of Berry Gordy Jr., poetically mixed
pop and rhythm and blues, as a crossover sound that hinted at Blackness, with a beat
suitable for dance music. Significant performers of this genre included the Four Tops,
Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson
and the Miracles, the Jackson Five, and Marvin Gaye. The second category, with a
more raucous, earthy sound, most represented by Stax Records and its subsidiary Volt
Records, an integrated enterprise, had a style largely shaped by Otis Redding. Other
performers in this genre on the Stax label include Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Albert
King, Sam and Dave, The Emotions, Eddie Floyd, and Johnnie Taylor. Atlantic Records
replaced Stax Records as significant promoter of this sound, the first studio to use writ-
ten arrangements, studio musicians, and violins for rhythm-and-blues selections.
Aretha Franklin was a major influence in changing Atlantic’s image, with an earthier,
Gospel-like, Black characteristic. Other Atlantic label artists included Archie Bell and
the Drells, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Joe Tex, and Barbara Lewis.
With praise and power, Little Richard introduced the Gospel frenzy, incorporating fast
tempo, boogie shuffle tunes, and sermonic shouts, steeped in Gospel rather than blues.

Most major R&B and soul singers began their singing in church, adapting the liturgi-
cal, emotional qualities to their popular singing. Philosophically, other factors shaping
rock ‘n’ roll were dance fads where partners casually faced one another and engaged
in unrestricted interpretation with distinctive movements. Politically, commercialism
provided an impetus for artists inventing dances through their lyrics to sell records,
and produced scandal through “payola,” where record companies paid DJs to play the
companies’ own music. Rhythm and Blues and rock ‘n’ roll fall into the category of
secular music. Simultaneously, there is a type of fluidity between sacred Gospel and
R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, particularly when we consider an artist like Aretha Franklin, who
sings R&B and Gospel, with similar stylistic artistry. As stated earlier, sometimes one
knows whether the music is sacred or not by listening attentively to words of the music
and being cognizant of the venue.
37.2.7 Hip-Hop
Hip-hop is a contemporary music that fluidly moves between sacred and secular cat-
egories. Birthed in the 1970s, hip-hop has three trajectories: poetically, from the initial
music generated at block parties and on street corners, to Top 40s, through gangsta rap,
and the moves of the 1990s with N.W.A., Ice-T, Snoop-Dog, and others. The second tra-
jectory involved music of Hip Pop with risqué lyrics at one time no Black radio station
would air. The third trajectory brings a type of historical awareness, with political revo-
lutionary aspirations. Hip-hop is an international phenomenon of expressiveness that
brings people together from across varied ethnic, class, gendered experiences of a living
culture. Amid tensions, oppression, and violence of urban and ghetto communities, the
genius of DJs created this matrix of performance power known as hip-hop to announce
truth and freedom, juxtaposed against poverty and death. Amid urban renewal, reseg-
regation, white flight, interstate highways that demolished many communities, philo-
sophically, hip-hop emerged as a worldview or cultural context for diverse expressions,
including music. Hip-hop, with a global influence, affects music, fashion, style, and
purpose, across generations and geography. The language of hip-hop involves con-
temporary socio-political issues and those of religious faith. In its inception, hip-hop’s
creators set out to encourage young people, provide them hope, toward experiencing
transformed lives. Groups like Public Enemy began as a subculture group protesting
disenfranchisement, history, racism, violence, generational disconnects, miseduca-
tion, and media misrepresentation. When hip-hop became hip-pop, and music became
more about the market than the message of the disenfranchised, the language of gang-
sta, misogyny, and hypercapitalism came to fore as media moguls made hip-pop their
newest source of income. Many Christian outreach ministries provide a space for youth
to sing, praise, connect, and engage Christian thought and hip-hop music. Grasping
hip-hop requires extensive study of the culture, music, physicality, sexuality/sexism,
economics, and politics. Christian hip-hop provides a genre and venue for integrity,
honesty, and truth-telling.

African American hip-hop embraces African philosophy that finds fluidity between
sacred and secular, and engages irony and paradox. Hip-hop artists involve numerous
faiths, multiple types of expressions, and diverse types of cultural production, from sam-
pling, beatboxing, and scratching, to fashion, double-dutch jump roping, and graffiti
art. Hip-hop involves a rich legacy of improvisation, sometimes framed by contradic-
tion. Many adults hear the words and are ready to discount the music, forgetting some
of the raunchy blues lyrics they heard as children. Hip-hop creates a space of spirituality
and God consciousness. Hip-hop has forged a space where young people have returned
to writing poetry, often speaking their truths if adults care to listen. Christian hip-hop
raps the message of sin, salvation, beauty, community, and the prophetic. Hip-hop
affords a conversation that inspires communication between people in pain and a God
who loves and heals. Using biblical and religious language, Christian hip-hop witnesses
to the lost and seeks to empower, to help youth make sense out of their world. While
there are numerous challenges to working intergenerationally, some would argue that
there is greater need for education in hip-hop’s rich heritage and discernment regarding
the possibilities of Christian hip-hop. The phenomenon affords opportunities for trans-
formation and for the diverse Black Church to fulfill its mission of ministry to sinners,
as it must be shrewd in helping youth recognize right from wrong, discern the best of
what hip-hop offers, own up to its sometimes detrimental characteristics, and recognize
the complexities of hip-hop, of life.
37.2.8 Classical, Integrated Tradition

Black churches also incorporate music from European classical traditions, including
anthems, oratorios, revival songs, and contemporary praise songs. This music arises
as engaging, spirit-filled, glorious, holistic, life-giving expressions and experiences,
as it codifies the theological, doctrinal, and socio-cultural history and consciousness
of African American religiosity. Some of the musical performances occur in the con-
cert hall from the creative genius of African American composers, sometimes under
Black batons. Such music usually involves training in the academy and conservatories,
growing out of an elite, European-based musical tradition. In the nineteenth century,
African Americans did not produce a great many major concert-hall works, because
racism banned them from majority-cultural sites of training and performance, so they
were not exposed to the different world view of concert-hall traditions. Some African
American composers did not or could not engage their own culture, and thus could
not connect their traditional realities with those of the concert hall. That great music
exists and needs to be perpetuated for societal greater good is the myth that frames the
concert-hall tradition. In 1903, the Negro Music Journal and its constituents engaged the
concert-hall mythic tradition and disavowed African American popular music, a music
fueled by African and African diasporan cultural memory. Black “classical” composers
had to negotiate both realms. African American composers who worked between the
avant-garde, American (U.S.) musical nationalism and the Harlem Renaissance include

the likes of William Grant Still, William Dawson, Howard Swanson, Ulysses Kay,
Camille Nickerson, and Margaret Bonds. Other composers, too numerous to name,
have used the tropes and styles of the classical tradition, framed and shaped by beautiful
African sensibilities to celebrate life in sacred and secular venues, as composers, con-
ductors, singers, and instrumentalists.
37.3 Impact
Having reflected on selected genres within African American sacred and secular music,
there is fluidity, yet boundaries and expectations, and a continuing tension in African
American churches regarding style, taste, and function of music in their services. Along
with such aesthetic tensions are the issues around the balance between inspiring wor-
ship and the use of secular entertainment motifs to attract worshippers who would
otherwise forgo attendance at formal church services, that is, drawing the line between
encouragement to worship and the worship itself. The job of music is to enhance the
worship event, not to overwhelm the service and anesthetize the audience toward their
faith. When the music unfolds for music’s sake, the integrity and the meaning of worship
is lost. This tension is not unique to Black worship: consider the use of trained choirs to
edify passive worshippers by the beauty of their performances through the use of the
Gregorian Chant in Latin, Handel’s Messiah as an integral part of many Christmas ser-
vices, or the use of popular sing-along Messiahs. The integrity and meaning of worship
are to praise God, to gather as community, to share the sacraments, and to embrace the
preached word toward daily praxis. Such issues, relating to the use of music, are per-
tinent to those concerned with worship and liturgy that meaningfully engage congre-
gants. While the vernacular Mass remains central in the Roman Catholic liturgy, those
Roman churches geared to an African American ministry pride themselves in having a
vital Gospel choir to engage the congregation and make worship relevant to the cultural
realities of the parish. Similarly, most Protestant churches make music a priority. Music,
within the communal worship service, is vital for helping congregations feel the pres-
ence of God and for honoring the great commission of Matthew 28, the call to disciple.
Sacred music influences secular African American music and the reverse is also true.
37.4 Significant Scholarship
37.4.1 Anthologies, Surveys, Introductory Texts

Scholars and poets have provided commentary on African American life since they
arrived on these shores to the present. Music has played a significant part in their writ-
ings. Several writers provide an overview of the topic, analyzing genres, geographical

impact, socio-cultural realities, and historical moments, from the sixteenth century to
the present. Musicologist, professor, scholar, the late Eileen Southern, in The Music of
Black Americans: A History (1971, 3rd edition, 1997) provides an in-depth analysis of the
music and narrates information about genres and concepts, and about the composers,
singers, and instrumentalists who created this phenomenal body of music. She reflects
on the attributes that characterize this music, from enslavement to hip-hop music of
the late twentieth century. With her husband, Joseph Southern, Eileen Southern also
founded The Black Perspective in Music in 1973, the first musicological journal on the
study of black music. She edited this journal until it stopped publication (1990).
Hildred Roach authored Black Music: Past and Present, (1973, 1994), revised and
expanded, which introduces those new to various types of Pan-African music, from
Africa to the Americas, focusing on African American composers, using musical exam-
ples and illustrations to highlight early influences, the antebellum era, the emergence
of the black professional, and contemporary trends. Her work unfolds the incredible
moving and creative power of this music. The style, content, themes, and performance
practices of early Black music, provided a foundation for African American music and
for other music of the United States as well.
Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Director of the Center for Black Music Research, Columbia
College, Chicago, celebrates the power of African cultural memory in his stellar volume,
The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History From Africa to the United States (1995).
Floyd breaks through boundaries between high and low art and shows the connections
between African rituals, myths, and music and the ongoing evolution and enduring
vitality of African American music, from the ring shout and music and dance of the
antebellum era, to blues and beboppers of the 1940s, to jazz, rock, concert hall compos-
ers, and other African American music through the twenty-first century.
Tilford Brooks, a former music educator at Washington University, St. Louis, compre-
hensively explores Black music and how it influences the entire U.S. musical scene, with
the intent to dialogue with performers, teachers, researchers, composers, and a general
audience, in his America’s Black Musical Heritage (1984). Working through history and
typologies of Black music, Brooks foregrounds seminal personalities and contributors
for each genre, along with specific composers and musicians, in American society and
in those incorporating European tradition.
37.4.2 The Spirituals

Several works examine the Spirituals from an anthropological and literary perspec-
tive: Slave Songs of the United States by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware,
and Lucy McKim Garrison (1867, 1951) is a compendium of Spirituals with general
socio-historical and stylistic commentary. Thomas P. Fenner’s Religious Folk Songs of
the Negro (1909) documents those Spirituals popularized by Hampton Institute. The
Book of American Negro Spirituals by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson
(1925) and The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals (1926) are two anthologies of

Spirituals and include a general introduction. The Negro Folk-songs (1918) by Natalie
Curtis Burlin is a compilation of nineteen traditional spirituals, works songs, and play
songs. Each song has complete words and music, with an essay outlining the milieu
and social impact of each category of song. Ethnomusicologist and concert pianist
Burlin also analyzed, collected, and popularized the music of American Indians in the
Southwest and African Americans at the Hampton Institute, believing that the music of
these groups had the potential to help forge a distinctive American identity during an
era of dramatic social change. Her field work includes the shifting dynamics of women
in public life, marriage, and work, along with groundbreaking ideas about culture
and race.
Miles Mark Fisher received the American Historical Association’s prize for the out-
standing historical volume for his 1953 Negro Slave Songs in the United States. Fisher
viewed these songs as oral historical documents, one of the first scholars to make this
claim. He demonstrated that the Spirituals recorded the enslaved persons’ deepest views
on slavery, religion, relations with their masters, desires for the future, and the complex,
innumerable problems enslaved persons experienced. Black Song: The Forge and Flame;
The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out (1972), by English
literature professor John Lovell Jr. is the premier definitive work on the Spirituals. He
surveys the cultural, socio-historical, religious experience of the enslaved and provides
an international bibliography. All works since Lovell must reference his remarkable
research. The only shortcoming of his volume is that he does not analyze the music; but
then, he was not a musician. The progenitor of Black Theology, James H. Cone, wrote
The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (1972), which examines terms, theological
concepts, and cultural meaning.
Christa K. Dixon’s Negro Spirituals: From Bible to Folk Song (1976) explores
twenty-three spirituals and reflects on the sources of the texts, writing with a homi-
letic flair. Her work on the spirituals and her hobby of collecting broken stained glass
from church windows in war-torn Germany reflect her interest in a ministry of heal-
ing. Howard Thurman, mystic, philosopher, poet, and theologian wrote Deep River and
The Negro Spirituals Speaks of Life and Death (1975). These two volumes, reprinted as
one, celebrate the Spirituals as fonts of inspiration, hope, and self-respect. These deeply
personal essays honor divine creativity that transcends deep personal tragedy experi-
enced by oppressed people and Thurman, himself. Dena Epstein’s Sinful Tunes and
Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (1977, 2003) explores sacred and secular
music of Black folk up through the Civil War—the music’s development, instrumenta-
tion, function, along with sacred and secular uses of this music. Arthur C. Jones’s Wade
in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals (1993, 2005) explores the cultural and psycho-
logical meaning of the Spirituals. He explores African retentions, suffering, transforma-
tion, struggle, resistance, accountability, health, and healing in the Spirituals. My own
volume, Exorcizing Evil: A Womanist Perspective on the Spirituals is an interdisciplin-
ary analysis of the redacted Spirituals of the 1960s Civil Rights movement in dialogue
with African traditional philosophy, Western thought, and the problem of theodicy,
focusing on lyrical and melodic texts. Using womanist methodology, the analysis exams

oppressions due to classism, racism, and sexism; explores double voicing, double bind,
double consciousness, and double thought; and features women who lived, arranged,
and performed the Spirituals.
37.4.3 Blues
In Blues, Ideology, and Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1987), Houston Baker Jr. con-
nects blues to social, literary history and African American dramatic culture, at the
level of language or vernacular. His work explicates the “blues voice,” with its economic
undercurrents, critical to narrative in the United States, reflecting the African American
manner of expression.
Urban Blues, by Charles Keil (1966, 1992), explores the power of blues perform-
ers and blues bands, and sees the powerful interaction between performers and audi-
ence. In the 1992 edition, viewing blues performers as signifying larger political culture,
Keil examines blues amid black music and culture framed by diversity, capitalism, and
globalization.
37.4.4 Gospel
Michael W. Harris’s The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the
Urban Church (1992) chronicles the trajectory and rise of Gospel blues through the life
of its progenitor, Thomas A. Dorsey. Harris shows the context of this new musical form
amid its socioreligious, cultural history, particularly via urban, traditional Protestant
churches during migration and after World War I. Dorsey’s life epitomizes the polarities,
tensions, and dichotomies within African American music, culture, and life. Dorsey’s
secular musical experience informed the sacred.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the Black female a cappella group, “Sweet Honey
in the Rock,” edited We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American
Gospel Composers. This volume begins with an overview of the pioneers and an essay
on the impact of Gospel music on the secular music industry. The text then engages
in-depth analysis of Gospel pioneers Charles Albert Tindley, Lucie Eddie Campbell
Williams, Thomas Andrew Dorsey, William Herbert Brewster Sr., Roberta Martin, and
Kenneth Morris.
37.4.5 Worship and Theomusicology

Melva Wilson Costen, with precision, vision, sensitivity, and passion, in her African
American Christian Worship explores the holistic theology of African American
Worship; African religious heritage; various expressions of worship, rituals, sacraments,
ordinances, denominational and congregational trends; the impact of music, preaching,

and prayer; and worship as empowerment. Her work contextualizes the worship experi-
ence and helps one to frame the discussion of Black sacred music.
James Abbington, organist, author, conductor, and arranger, compiled Readings
in African American Church Music and Worship (2001), and wrote Let Mt. Zion
Rejoice!: Music in the African American Church (2001). The former work contains arti-
cles, essays, and other twentieth-century works previously unpublished. The materials
cover historical perspectives, provide an overview of hymnody and hymnals used in the
African American church, examine liturgical hymnody, and include essays on worship,
Black composers, and the organ and organist in the Black church. The volume concludes
with contemporary perspectives on envisioning the future, conflicts, problems, and ten-
sions in sacred music and worship, amid influences of culture. Let Mt. Zion Rejoice pro-
vides a praxis-based resource for all people who lead or work with music ministry in
churches, from pastors, music directors, and church musicians to congregants, profes-
sors, and students of church music. This text reviews the state of Black church music,
provides commentary on church musicians and the requirements one needs to meet to
be successful; it also covers relationships between pastor and church musicians, the role
of choirs, the planning of church worship, particular types of music used in the Black
church, and the African American Christian liturgical year.
Jon Michael Spencer’s groundbreaking work juxtaposes and places in dialogue sacred
and secular musics. Spencer coined the term “theomusicology” to explore musicol-
ogy informed by theology, to theorize about the sacred, the secular, and the profane.
He defines sacred as the churched or religious; secular as the unchurched or theistic
unreligious; and profane, as irreligious or atheistic. He includes in this process “theo-
musicotherapy” in both the community and the church, using interdisciplinary prac-
tices. Spencer edited Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology during the late
1980s and early 1990s. These journals explored topics including “Sacred Music of the
Secular City” (essays on blues, jazz, soul, rock, and rap), “The Theology of American
Popular Music” (articles on the philosophy of theomusicology thematizing the nonsa-
cred, God in secular music culture, and particular artists, including Thelonius Monk,
James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Al Green, Michael Jackson, Prince, and
Run DMC). Spencer’s volume on sacred music, Protest & Praise: Sacred Music of Black
Religion (1990), examines Spirituals, antislavery hymnody, social Gospel hymnody, civil
rights song, and the blues under songs of protest. Under praise song, he examines the
ring shout, tongue-song, Holiness-Pentecostal music, Gospel music, and the chanted
sermon.
The scholarship of these selected authors provides insight into the complexities,
brilliance, and power of African American music across the board. This music is con-
textual as it emerges out of the lived realities of the souls of Black folk. The music is
profound and profane; it has at times a spiritual ethos and at other times a cutting, sen-
sual familiarity; sometimes both. The music is real and signifies upon the lives of those
stolen from Africa, as well as their heritage and the legacy others have created. Some of
the music falls into specific categories of sacred and secular; other genres of music are
more fluid. Together, the music in the sacred and secular African American traditions

historically and contemporaneously affects lives and cultures globally. The interweaving
of its endowments of poetry, praise, power, protest, philosophy, and politics has touched
every system from expressions of faith to freedom fighting. This music affects matters
of the heart and the pocketbook, education and sports, entertainment and liturgy; it
ushers in life and death. Our world would not be the same without the contribution of
the fluid, complex, aesthetically moving gifts of African American sacred and secular
music—our world is a better place because of these contributions.
Bibliography
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——. In Spirit and in Truth: The Music of African American Worship. Louisville, KY: Westminster/
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1993, 2005.
Jones, Leroi. Black Music. New York: William Morrow, 1968.
——. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Harper Perennial, 1963, 1999.
Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, 1992.
Kirk-Duggan, Cheryl. Exorcizing Evil: A Womanist Perspective on the Spirituals. Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Press, 1997.
Kirk-Duggan, Cheryl, and Marlon Hall. Wake Up!: Hip-Hop, Christianity, and the Black Church.
Nashville: Abingdon, 2011.
Kyllonen, Tommy. Un.Orthodox: Church-Hip Hop-Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007.
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Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Lift Every Voice and Sing II: An African American Hymnal. New York: Church Publishing
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——. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1971.
——, ed. Readings in Black American Music, 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983.
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——. Blues and Evil. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1993.
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——. Sing A New Song: Liberating Black Hymnody. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.
——, ed. The Theology of American Popular Music: A Special Edition of Black Sacred
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Walker, Wyatt Tee. The Soul of Black Worship: A Trilogy—Preaching, Praying, Singing.
New York: Martin Luther King Fellows Press, 1984.

Index
Note: Diacritical marks are not used with transliterated terms and proper names in this index,
although they are used in some chapters of this Handbook. The spellings are ones commonly
accepted when diacritical marks are not used. Italic page numbers refer to figures.
Abbington, James, 518 and politics, 500, 505, 506, 510–11, 517
Abd al-Hamid al-Katib, 302 sacred and secular not sharply
Abe, Stanley K., 375–76, 381 distinguished in, 499, 502
Abhinavagupta, 118, 330, 332, 335, 336, 337, 339, scholarship on, 514–19
340, 341, 345 n. 18, 346 n. 27, 347 n. 31, Alberti, Leon Battista, 213, 462
351 Aleichem, Sholem, 259
Abrams, M. H., 59, 62, 138 Ali, Kazim, 154, 156
Abu Zayd, Nasr Hamid, 305 Allen, Richard, 501
Adab, 306 Alter, Robert, 132–34, 144 n. 65, 148, 261
Adams, Doug, 19 n. 15, 85, 407 Amaterasu, 166, 190, 398
Adams, Henry, 433–34, 440, 441 Ambrose, 79, 289
Adams, John (composer), 3 Amichai, Yehuda, 157
Adorno, Theodor, 239, 274, 427 Amida Buddha, 397
Aertsen, Pieter, 450, 451, 460, 461 Angelico, Fra, 17
Aeschylus, 166 Anski, Solomon, 170
aesthetics Antonioni, Michelangelo, 243
carnivalesque, 338–40 Apollo, 110, 168, 187
concepts and definitions of, 9, 11, 14, 25–26, Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane, 20 n. 15, 85, 225
81, 418–23 Aquinas, Thomas, 8, 9, 31, 46, 50–51, 53, 79–80
and the environment, 38 Arcand, Denys, 165
and ethics, 418–30 architecture, 203–218
“great tradition” of, 10 aniconic decoration of, 211–12
Indian, 330, 335–42 approaches to studying sacred, 18
liturgical, 404–413 assembly places, contrasted with temples,
postmodern, 12–13, 73, 406–407 203–206
practical, 26–28 Buddhist, 99, 191, 205, 368, 371, 375
religious, 1, 2, 5–18, 27–34, 330, 335–42, Christian, 10, 28, 204, 205–206, 207,
97–100 208–210, 212–13, 214–16, 217, 312
transgressive, 340–42 Confucian, 391–92
theological, 1, 4, 11, 14, 29–38, 44–54, 77–87 Gothic, 6, 10, 28, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 422
See also art; beauty; imagination; rasa; harmony and proportion in, 213
sublime; taste Hindu, 6, 204, 210, 352–54
African American music, 112, 124, 498–519 Islamic, 209, 211, 310, 311–12, 313–15
characteristics of, 500–503 Jewish, 207–208, 275–77
and Civil Rights Movement, 498 modern, 215–16
BurchBrown_Index.indd 523 10/21/2013 1:55:56 PM

524 INDEX
architecture (Cont.) asceticism, 32, 33, 249, 336

monumentality in, 207–209 Ashkenazic Jews, 212, 260, 263, 264, 265, 266,
preaching within, 205 267, 271, 272, 404
postmodern, 12 Auden, W. H., 154, 279
revival styles, 214, 215, 217, 273 Auerbach, Eric, 131–32
Romanesque, 28, 210, 215, 217, 273 Augustine of Hippo, 8, 30–32, 46, 79, 80, 86,
sacred geometry in, 6 110, 112, 114, 167, 279, 289, 404, 419, 474
Shinto, 353, 396, 397, 399 Austin, J. L., 173
symbolism in, 210–211 Avison, Margaret, 154
Taoist, 381, 383–84
See also mosque; museum; synagogue; Baal Shem Tov, 118
temple Bach, J. S., 115, 124, 287, 291
Aristophanes, 167 Baker, Houston, Jr., 517
Aristotle, 30–31, 53, 79, 92, 131, 165, 166–67, 169, Baker, Patricia, 317
175, 280, 471 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 96, 100, 175, 439
Arkoun, Mohammed, 305 Bal, Mieke, 133, 134
Arnheim, Rudolf, 224 Baldwin, James, 445
Arnold, Matthew, 11, 12, 151, 279 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 11, 35, 46–47, 48, 50,
art 86, 174, 177 n. 39, 282–84, 419, 426, 442
and creative imagination, 2, 7, 11, 13, 77–87 Barca, Pedro Calderón de la, 174
definitions and concepts of, 5–6, 8, 9, Barth, Karl, 11, 35, 115, 122, 282, 284, 287, 442–43
12, 26 Basil the Great, 33, 113
ethical and moral aspects of, 12, 36, 37, 38, Baudelaire, Charles, 151
418–30, 469–75 Baudrillard, Jean, 65, 452
folk, 482–83 Bauman, Zygmunt, 73, 441
gender critique of, 469–72 Baumgaertner, Jill, 155
and incarnation, 33, 47, 79, 121, 122, 123, 155, Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 25–26, 81
211, 351, 355, 454, 457 bayan, 302, 303
and politics, 413, 418, 419, 424, 425, 427–30, Beaudoin, Tom, 240
455, 470, 473 beauty
popular in comparison with fine or elite, 85, in architecture, 209, 213
298, 372, 429, 490–95 biblical ideas of, 35, 45, 49, 50
problems in applying term, 8, 310–11, 367, concepts and definitions of, 4, 8–9, 11, 16,
372–76, 389–90 25–26, 45–48, 50
as proclamation and manifestation, 86 of Christ, 35, 49, 79, 80, 438
and social transformation, 11, 38, 86, of the Cross, 32, 35
428–30, 463, 511, 512 and/of God, 10, 21, 30, 32, 35, 44–54, 79, 80,
in South African anti-apartheid movement, 86, 338
428–30 and goodness (moral and ethical), 9, 10,
and the study of religion, 1–18 31–32, 36, 37–38, 419, 420, 422, 424–26
theology and, 30–38, 350–52 in Hinduism, 48, 335, 338
See also aesthetics; visual arts; and names of and holiness, 12, 49, 51, 221, 287
specific art forms incongruity of, with suffering, 433
Artaud, Antonin, 172 in Islam, 48, 409
Artemis, 187 in Jewish mysticism, 47–48
artistry as spiritual vocation, 15, 31, 34, 44, 46, and justice, 425–26
51, 59, 77–97, 91–102 of Krishna, 48

INDEX 525
ladder of, 45 and Hindu aesthetics, 335–37

and liberation, 37 in Hindu music, 359
in liturgy, 405, 406, 408, 414 Bharata Muni, 360, 363
of music, 111, 112, 115, 123, 287, 288 Bharata Natyam dance style, 183, 195–96,
moral and spiritual, privileged over artistic, 347–48 n. 35, 335
8–9, 46, 49 Bhoja, 330, 337
multicultural, 38 Bible
of nature, 44, 46, 48–49, 433 and art, 37, 270–72, 296
of poetry in scripture, 147–48 cantillation of, 264
in popular religion, 495 and literature, 11, 130–41, 282, 436, 440
redemptive, 426 midrash and, 123, 134, 135
religious worries about, 44 and modern dance, 196
sacramental, 33, 51, 84 and movies, 165, 173, 243, 246
of Shiva Nataraja, 490 and music, 263–64, 288–89
of spirituals, 505 parables and, 86, 122, 134, 135, 136, 139, 242
in the Talmud, 47 poetry of, 148
in theological or religious aesthetics, 4, 6, strangeness of God in, 132
9–10, 12, 15, 26, 34, 44–54, 335–38 See also psalms
as a transcendental, 10, 31, 32, 35, 79 Blackwell, Albert, 115, 121
in worship, 54 Blake, Eubie, 505, 507
See also aesthetics; art; iconoclasm; sublime; Blake, William, 11, 59, 61, 67, 69, 82, 96, 98, 150
taste Bland, Kalman, 277
Beauvais, Vincent of, 31 Bloch, Ernest, 266
Beck, Guy L., 359, 361, 362 Blondel, François, 214
Becker, Judith, 116, 117, 118, 120 Bloom, Harold, 59, 142 n. 22, 261
Becket, Thomas, 169, 173 blues, 112, 171, 498, 505–506, 508, 513, 516, 517
Beckett, Samuel, 171, 172 Blunt, Anthony, 297
Beckett, Wendy, 19–20 n. 15 Boehme, Jakob, 52
Beckwith, Sarah, 167–68 Boethius, 57, 114
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 83, 120, 291 Bohlman, Philip Vilas, 267
Begbie, Jeremy, 85, 123 Bonaventure, 31
Bellow, Saul, 447 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 442
Belting, Hans, 6, 452, 473 Boonma, Montien, 374
Benedict XVI, Pope, 11, 283 Brahman, 62, 63, 66–72, 147, 359
Berdyaev, Nicholas, 93, 96 Brahms, Johannes, 121, 291
Bergman, Ingmar, 238, 241, 243 Brancusi, Constantin, 99
Bernard of Clairvaux, 33, 209–210, 283 Brandon, S. G. F., 225
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 454 Braque, Georges, 463
Bernstein, Leonard, 264, 266 Brecht, Bertolt, 169, 170
Beuys, Joseph, 98 Britten, Benjamin, 119
Bezalel, 46, 47, 270 Brook, Peter, 172, 175
Bhagavad Gita, 7, 48, 59, 67, 120, 147, 331 Brooks, Tilford, 515
and the sublime, 68–73 Broude, Norma, 472
Bhajan, 28, 362, 363, 364 Brown, David, 19 n. 15, 35, 37, 122, 123
bhakti, 7, 71, 72, 194, 343 n. 5 Brown, Frank Burch, 19 n. 6, 21 n. 28, 36, 37, 77,
in Hindu devotional poetry, 61, 68, 70 85, 86, 148
in Indian dance, 194 Brown, Robert McAfee, 241

526 INDEX
Browne, Sir Thomas, 114 Catherine of Siena, 469

Bruckner, Anton, 122 Celan, Paul, 259
Buckley, Vincent, 152 censorship, 418, 424
Buddha, 84, 167, 205, 228, 336, 367, 368, 369, Ceppede, Jean de la, 149
370, 371, 491, 494 Chadwick, Owen, 19 n. 15
Buddhism, 5, 29, 69, 190, 328, 339, 488 Chadwick, Whitney, 470
aniconic aspects of, 7, 39 n. 12, 368–69 Chagall, Marc, 274, 298
art and visual culture in, 8, 33, 39 n. 12, 99, chant, 113, 147, 148, 191, 263, 264, 265, 289, 322,
228, 367–76, 380 323, 358, 359, 360, 363, 409, 411, 414,
Buddha image in, 8, 84, 369, 370–72, 374, 415, 504
375, 413, 455, 458, 491, 492, 493, 494–95 chazzan. See cantor
challenges to art history posed by, 223, 224, Chekhov, Anton, 279
374–76 Christ. See Jesus (Christ)
Christian missionaries and, 494 Christianity and the arts
dance in, 183, 191 architecture, 10, 28, 204, 205–206, 207,
devotional practices of, 403 208–210, 212–13, 214–16, 217, 312
and drama, 166 dance, 183, 184, 187–89, 197
Mahayana, 28, 39 n. 12 drama, 35, 167–68, 169
mandala in, 94 film, 241–45, 246, 247, 249
music and, 358 literature, 130–41, 148, 149, 155, 279–84
rock gardens in, 13 music, 31, 110, 111–13, 114–15, 119, 120–24,
and Shinto, 396, 397, 399 216, 286–91
stupa in, 368, 495 visual and material, 80, 221, 225, 227, 228,
Tantric/Vajrayana, 28, 97, 183, 413 229, 232, 294–99, 452–54, 456–57, 459–
and Taoism, 380–81 61, 469–70, 473–74, 487, 488–89
thangka art in, 97, 99, 100, 101 See also under aesthetics; art; icon;
Zen, 13, 28, 38, 101, 166, 224, 228, 374, 413 iconoclasm
Bulgakov, Sergei, 35 Church, Frederic Edwin, 60
Bultmann, Rudolf, 442 Churches. See Architecture, Christian
Bunuel, Luis, 238, 243 Churchill, Caryl, 170
Bunyan, John, 279 Clark, Elizabeth A., 474
Burch Brown, Frank. See Brown, Frank Burch Clement of Alexandria, 46, 114, 189
Burckhardt, Titus, 225 Cleveland, James, 509, 510
Burke, Edmund, 57, 60, 81–82, 187 Clifton, Lucille, 158
Burnet, Thomas, 60 clown, 250 n. 2, 327, 329, 334, 339, 340, 341–42,
Bychkov, Oleg, 20 n. 17 343 n. 10, 344 n. 12, 345 n. 22, 348 n. 38
Clunas, Craig, 392
Cairns, Scott, 154, 155, 158 Cohen, Israel, 208
calligraphy, 28, 101, 212, 313, 379, 392, 408 Cohen, Richard I., 277
Calvin, John, 31, 34, 80, 111, 112, 189, 289–90 Cole, Thomas, 60
cantata, 115, 291 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 59, 92, 279, 436
cantillation, 263, 264, 322, 323 Cone, James H., 112, 516
cantor, 264, 265, 267, 406, 411, 412, 414, 415 Confucianism
Caravaggio, 294, 462, 463 and architecture, 389, 391, 392, 393
Carnatic music, 331, 361, 363 and arts, 388–93
carnivalesque, the, 338–40 confusing concepts about, 388–89
Carson, Anne, 159 images and iconoclasm in, 393

INDEX 527
and music, 390 See also Natya Shastra; and Shiva, as dancer
and ritual performance, 389, 390 in India, 191–96
sculpture in, 391, 392 and Islam, 117, 183, 189–90, 322
studies of, 389–93 and Judaism, 184, 188, 197
Confucius, 190, 388, 389, 390, 393 modern, 196
Congar, Yves, 37 pantomime, 185
Cook, John W., 85 prehistoric, 186
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 225, 369, 370 in processions, 184–85
Costen, Melva Wilson, 517–18 in the Ramayana, 196
Courbet, Gustave, 481 ritual aspects of, 182, 183, 185, 186, 190–91,
Couturier, Marie-Alain, 298 193, 195–96, 198
Cowley, Malcolm, 442 and sacred dance movement, 197
Cram, Ralph Adams, 217 Shaker, 290
Crane, Stephen, 441 Shinto, 190–91
Crawford, Richard, 288 studies of religion and, 197–98
creativity, 11, 91–102 Sufi, 117, 183, 189–90, 322, 324–25
in anti-apartheid resistance, 429, 430 suspicion and rejection of, in religion, 183,
in art and religion, 93–94, 97–102 189, 197
bisociation and, 332 televised, 198
and freedom, 423, 424, 427 trance in, 116
divine, 48, 79 tribal, 186–87, 481
and imagination, 84 Danielou, Alain, 363
in liturgy, 406 Dante Alighieri, 10, 124, 142 n. 22, 148, 149,
model for understanding process of, 97–100 249, 279, 280, 283, 440
suppressed by religion, 226 Daoism. See Taoism
See also art; imagination Davis, Miles, 507
Crumlin, Rosemary, 225, 299 Davis, Todd, 156
Cruz, Juana Ines de la, 149 darshan, 6, 8, 354
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 95 Darwin, Charles, 296, 434, 437, 440
Cummin, Thomas, 225 Daumier, Honoré, 481–82
Curran, Kathleen, 217 Davies, J. G., 188, 218
Cutler, Norman, 351 Debuyst, Frédéric, 216
Dehejia, Vidya, 351, 368
Dali, Salvador, 297 Delaroche, Paul, 296
dance, 18 n. 3, 101, 109, 111, 116, 111, 166, 169, Demeter, 187
182–98 Dennis, John, 57
Bharata Natyam style of, 183, 195–96, Derrida, Jacques, 59, 63, 64, 65, 134, 172, 472
347–48 n.35 dervishes, 117, 183, 189, 325
funerals using, 184 Detweiler, Craig, 241, 245
and Buddhism, 183, 191 devadasis, 185, 193, 194, 196, 340, 342
and Christianity, 183, 184, 187–89, 197, 198, Devi, 360
346 n. 26 Dewey, John, 96
connected with drama, 162–63, 166, 169, 183 dhikr, 189, 324, 325
erotic aspects of, 186, 194, 335, 337 Diaghilev, Sergey, 196
Greek and Roman, 187–88 Dickens, Charles, 279
and Hinduism, 27–28, 185, 186, 191–96, Dickinson, Emily, 279, 438–39, 440, 445,
333–35, 337, 340, 341–342, 346 n. 26 446, 447

528 INDEX
Diderot, Denis, 425 Duffy, Eamon, 20 n. 15

Didi-Huberman, Georges, 460 Dulles, Avery, 458
Dillenberger, Jane Dagget, 19 n. 15, 20 n. 21, 36, Dura Europus, 39 n. 11, 78
85, 225 Durandus, William, 211
Dillenberger, John, 19 n. 15, 20 n. 21, 36, 85, 225 Durkheim, Emile, 172
Dillistone, F. W., 139 Dwyer, Rachel, 351
Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, 32, 46 Dyrness, William, 19 n. 15, 298
Dionysus, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168, 172, 173, 187,
343 n. 8 Eastern Orthodox Christianity, 406
Dix, Otto, 297 and Hesychastic mysticism, 119
Dixon, Christa K., 516 and icons, 6, 7, 8, 14, 33, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101,
Dixon, John W., 19 n. 15 122, 184, 212, 228, 245, 294
Dome of the Rock, 312, 313, 316 and music, 3, 122, 411
Donne, John, 149, 152, 155, 279 Eaton, Richard, 351
Donoghue, Denis, 441 Ebert, Roger, 240
Dorsey, Thomas A., 498, 508, 517 Eck, Diana, 19 n. 13
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 279, 437, 438, 439, 440, Eckhart, Meister, 62
445, 446, 456 Edwards, Jonathan, 9, 32, 34, 46, 49, 53,
doubt and belief in modern literature, 11, 115
150–59, 433–47 Einboden, Jeffrey, 149
Douglass, Frederick, 445–46 Einstein, Albert, 54
drama Elgood, Heather, 19 n. 13, 351, 353–54
African American, 171 Eliade, Mircea, 61, 62, 65, 67, 69, 72, 218, 224,
ancient Greek, 162–64 225, 245
avant-garde, 171–74 Eliot, Charles, 440, 441, 442
Buddhism and, 166 Eliot, George, 439, 440
early Christian opposition to, 167 Eliot, T. S., 151, 154, 168, 170, 279
and cinema, 165 Elkins, James, 225
Corpus Christi cycle of, 167–68 Ellington, Duke, 507
ethical aspects of, 165, 167 Ellison, Ralph, 445
Hindu, 327–42 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 279, 436
Kenosis and, 174–75 Empson, William, 152
liturgical, 166–67 Enlightenment, European, 18, 67, 82, 409
“method” acting in, 169 concepts of art and aesthetics in, 5–6, 9, 11,
mystery plays, 169 14, 25–26, 33, 81, 221, 419, 425
performance in, 173 ethical ideas from, 425, 434
and religion, 162–75 Judaism and its arts affected by, 258, 259, 260,
and ritual, 164, 166, 168–69, 172–73 263
sacramental aspects of, 168, 170 supremacy of reason in, 82, 136, 150,
shamanism and, 166 422, 435
Shinto and, 166 Epstein, Dena, 516
tragedy, 162, 166, 167, 172 Epstein, Heidi, 115
and theology, 174–75 Erasmus, Desiderius, 168
Dreiser, Theodore, 441 Euripides, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 170, 173
Driver, Tom F., 171 Esslin, Martin, 171
Drury, John, 20 n. 15 Ettinghausen, Richard, 317
Du Bois, W. E. B., 498, 500 Evdokimov, Paul, 46

INDEX 529
Faith Friedrich, Caspar David, 98, 299

and art, 77–87 Frost, Robert, 151, 152, 279, 443
and doubt, in literature, 11, 150–59, 433–47 Frye, Northrop, 59, 67
Farley, Edward, 34
Faulkner, William, 139, 279, 281–82, 284 n. 4 Gallie, W. B., 140
Fellini, Federico, 238, 243 Gandhi, Mahatma, 70
Fenellosa, Ernest, 372 Ganesha, 348 n. 38, 354, 360
film García-Rivera , Alejandro, 20 n. 15, 85
Catholic and Protestant interpretations Gardner, Howard, 94
contrasted, 244 Garrard, Mary D., 470, 472, 475, 477
compared with drama, 165 Gaston, Anne-Marie, 197, 198, 362
diverse church responses to, 242–45 Gauguin, Paul, 297
Hindu uses of, 351, 355 Geertz, Clifford, 168–69, 172–73
Jesus in, 165, 173, 243 Gelineau, Joseph, 289, 414
Jewish directors of, 261 gender, critical attention to in art and religion,
methods of studying religion and, 241, 94, 198, 222, 223, 226, 243, 277, 338–40,
248–50 421, 424, 469–74
moral questions regarding, 239, 242–43 Gentz, William H., 188
music in, 248 geometry, sacred, 6
narrative in, 247, 248 Gerow, Edwin, 337
parable-like, 242 Ghazzali, Mohammad al-, 48, 117
and popular culture, 247 Gheeraerts, Marcus, 452, 453, 463
religion and, 3, 238–50 Gibson, Mel, 173, 298
sacramental aspects of, 244, 245 Gilkey, Langdon, 84
sense of divine presence mediated by, Gilson, Etienne, 50
244–45, 351 Girard, René, 172
sexuality and, 247, 248 Glass, Philip, 3, 119, 120
spirituality and, 246 globalization, 86, 196, 198, 226, 232, 260, 297, 517
theological criticism and, 241–42 God
video and, 239 as artist and poet, 31, 32, 34, 46, 148
Finney, Paul Corbey, 19 n. 15 beautiful names of, in Islam, 48
Fisher, Miles Mark, 516 and beauty, 10, 21, 30, 32, 35, 44–54, 338
Fisher, Robert E., 375 as ultimate Connoisseur, in Indian
Fiske Jubilee Singers, 504 aesthetics, 341
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 442 doubt and belief concerning, in modern
Florenskii, Pavel, 98 literature, 150–59, 433–47
Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 515 glory of, 34, 35, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 79, 207,
Focillon, Henri, 483–84, 494 214, 426
Fokine, Michel, 196 and modern Islamic literature, 308
Foley, Edward, 289 and movie experience, 241, 244–45
Forster, E. M., 131 and music, 11–12, 47, 117–20, 121–22, 324–25
Foucault, Michel, 172, 472 and mystery in fictional narrative, 135–36
Foucher, Alfred, 369 rabbinical view of, 134
Frances of Assisi, 469 and the sublime, 32, 66–73
Franklin, Aretha, 511 transcendence and immanence of, in
Freedberg, David, 225 Hinduism, 69–70
Freud, Sigmund, 59, 136, 163, 172, 283, 452 See also mysticism; and names of deities

530 INDEX
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 118, 150, Hart, David Bentley, 11

308, 422 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 279, 438
Gogh, Vincent van, 296–97 Haynes, Deborah, 427, 428
Goldsworthy, Andy, 99 Hazelton, Roger, 19 n. 15, 225
Gordimer, Nadine, 428 Heaney, Seamus, 155, 158
Gorringe, Timothy, 19 n. 15 Heemskerck, Maarten van, 460
gospel music, 14, 112, 508–10, 511, 517 Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 11, 12, 34, 36, 65–68, 72, 73,
Gothic architecture, 6, 10, 28, 211, 213, 214, 215, 82, 421, 422, 423
217, 422 Heidegger, Martin, 20 n. 23, 64, 224
Gottlieb, Jack, 266 Herbert, George, 149, 279
Gottlieb, Mauricy, 273 Herder, Gottfried, 481
Grabar, André, 224 hermeneutics, 29, 218, 305, 330, 350
Grabar, Oleg, 224, 317, 454 Higgins, Gareth, 241
Graham, Martha, 196 Hildegard von Bingen, 404
Great Mosque of Damascus, 312, 316, 454 Hill, Geoffrey, 152, 158
Greco, El, 294–95 Hinduism, 7, 63, 66, 68
Greeley, Andrew, 241, 244 aesthetics and poetics in, 7, 68–73, 327–42
Greenberg, Clement, 482 humor and transgressive qualities in
Gregory, Andre, 173 artistry of, 331–33, 338–42
Gregory of Nyssa, 32, 52, 79 aniconic forms of, 7, 39 n. 12
Grotowski, Jerzy, 173 dance (or dance-drama) in, 27–28, 185, 186,
Grunewald, Matthias, 470 191–96, 335, 337, 340, 341–42, 346 n. 26
Guanyin, 381 epic literature in, 331–33
Guardini, Romano, 215 and film, 342, 348 n. 37, 355
Guevara, Miguel de, 149 images in, 8, 27, 39 n. 12, 33, 354–55, 491
Gutt, Christine, 399 music in, 28, 358–64, 501
popular arts in, 2, 350–52, 354–55
Hadith, 39 n. 11, 48, 307, 311, 315, 322, 323, 324 sacred and profane in arts of, 327–342
Hafiz of Shiraz, 149, 317 temples in, 204, 210, 352–54
Haggadah, 261, 272, 452, 455 and theology of the Bhagavad Gita, 67–73
Hagia Sophia, 208–209, 454 visual theology in, 350–55
Halevi, Judah, 149, 258 worship in, 6, 27, 353–55
Haley, Arthur, 173 bhakti, 7, 61, 70, 71, 72, 194, 335–37, 343 n.5,
Hamburger, Jeffrey, 470 359, 361, 362
Hammond, Peter, 217 darshan, 6, 8, 354
Ha-Naguid, Samuel, 258 prasada, 353
Handel, George Frideric, 110, 290, 291, 514 puja, 403
Hanna, Judith, 182 See also names of specific Hindu deities
Hanslick, Eduard, 115 and scriptures
Hardy, Thomas, 438, 440 Hindustani music, 110, 119, 361, 362, 363
Harrán, Don, 265 hip-hop, 499, 501, 512–13
Harries, Richard, 19 n. 15, 85 Hirn, Yrjö, 19 n. 12, 14–15
Harris, Max, 168, 175 Hirsch, Edward, 157, 158
Harris, Michael W., 517 Hirshfield, Jane, 147, 154, 156
Hassidism, 265 Hisamatsu, Shin’ichi, 101, 224
hasya, 327, 352, 360 Hoffman, Lawrence, 404, 405–406
Hart, Alexander, 273 Holbein, Hans, the Younger, 456

INDEX 531
Holiday, Billie, 507 Daoist, 380

Homer, 92, 130, 131, 188, 279, 440 Eastern Orthodox, 6, 7, 8, 14, 33, 97, 98,
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 49, 51, 52, 152, 279 99, 100, 101, 122, 184, 212, 228, 245,
Hovda, Robert, 414 294, 454
Howard, Wayne, 359 “living,” 371–72, 373
Howes, Graham, 19 n. 6, 19 n. 15 as marketable objects, 97, 100
Hudgins, Andrew, 153 musical, 122
Hudson, Dennis, 351 not made with human hands, 454
Hume, David, 25, 49 wonder-working, 33
humor, 332–33, 338–42 Idelsohn, A. Z., 264, 405
Hunt, William Holman, 296 idolatry in art, 92, 122, 283, 289, 372
Huntington, Susan L., 368 iconoclastic fears of, 231
Hutcheson, Francis, 25 Jewish fears of, 270, 271, 272
hymns, 28, 48, 124, 137, 147, 189, 216, 279, 286, missionary fears of, 488–90
287, 289, 290, 359, 361, 362, 363, 408, Protestant fears of, 403
409, 500–501, 511 images
See film and video; icon; iconoclasm; visual
Ibn al-Bawwab, 313 arts
Ibn abi’l-Dunya, 324, 325 imagination, 27, 49, 54, 58, 59, 81, 82, 93, 421
Ibn al-Jawzi, 324 and art, 2, 7, 11, 13, 14, 59, 77–87, 92, 133, 150,
Ib al-Muqaffa, 303 295, 383, 422, 423, 425, 469–72
Ibn Gabirol, Shlomo, 258 and Christian faith, 83–87, 133, 137, 295, 403,
Ibn Khaldun, 322 455
Ibn Muqla, 313 divine, 84
Ibn Qutayba, 306, 307 ethical role of, 84
Ibsen, Henrik, 169, 170 feminist critique regarding, in art and
iconostasis, 205, 208 religion, 469–75
iconoclasm, 226, 227, 231, 450–63 freedom of, 14
and Buddhism, 39 n. 12, 228, 455, 458 and hope, 428
and Christianity, 32–33, 78, 403 and liberation, 86
and Confucian images, 393 poetic, in Islam, 149, 303, 305
defined, 451 and prayer, 158
and embodiment, 456–58 and symbol, 66
in a gaze, 154 theological and religious, 93, 455, 298–99
and intimations of ultimate mystery, 463 See also aesthetics; art; creativity;
and Islam, 39 n. 11, 454 Romanticism
and Judaism, 38 n. 11, 78, 271, 277, 452 Impastato, David, 153
and material culture, 451–52 incarnation, 28, 30, 35, 39 n. 25, 47, 49, 84,
modern, 455 280, 452
objects of, and their “life history,” 460–61 and art, 33, 47, 79, 121, 122, 123, 155, 211,
and Protestantism, 33, 39 n. 11, 212, 403, 454 351, 355, 454, 457
iconography, 222, 224, 225, 227, 230, 233, 298, Internet, 455
315, 316, 370, 372, 375, 380, 381, 391 iPods, 498
iconology, 222, 233 Irenaeus, 46, 79
icons, 6, 7, 8, 14, 33, 98, 212, 228, 294 Islam and the arts
and “art,” 8, 372–74 aniconic and representational, 39 n. 11,
Buddhist, 370–73 315–16

532 INDEX
Islam and the arts (Cont.) plays about life and Passion of, 165, 167–68,
art and architecture, 310–18 169
calligraphy, 313 Joby, Christopher, 296
cantillation of Qur’an, 323 John XXIII, Pope, 511
classifying and studying, 310–11 John of Damascus, 32, 98, 212, 404, 454
dance, 117, 183, 189, 190, 324–25 John Paul II, Pope, 37–38
dhikr, 324–25 Johnson, James Weldon, 505
literature in relation to the Qur’an, 302–308 Johnson, J. Rosamond, 505
in Mughal empire, 310, 317, 350, 362 Johnston, Robert K., 241, 243, 246
Muhammad as depicted in, 316 Jones, Everett LeRoi, 171
music, 109, 113, 116, 117, 118, 190, 321–25, 335, Jones, Lindsay, 1, 218
363, 412 Josephus, 258
poetry, 118, 149 Josipovici, Gabriel, 133
sama’, 116, 117, 322, 325 Joyce, James, 279, 441
Sufi, 109, 113, 117, 118, 149, 190, 315, 317, Judaism
324–25, 363, 409–410, 412 and literature, 257–61
See also iconoclasm; mosque and museums, 275–77
Israëls, Jozef, 273 and music, 113, 118, 263–69, 288–89,
403–404
Jabès, Edmond, 134 and visual and architectural art, 270–77
Jackson, Mahalia, 509 See also iconoclasm; synagogue; temple;
Jackson, Michael, 118, 518 and specific forms of art and music
Jacobsen, Douglas, 19 n. 15 Justinian, 208
Jacobson, Israel, 215 Justin Martyr, 473
Jahiz, 303, 304, 307
Jain, Kajri, 354 Ka’ba, 316
Jainism, 191, 328, 337, 363 Kabuki, 191
James, William, 62, 117, 445 Kafka, Franz, 134, 135, 139, 259
Jameson, Anna Brownell Murphy, 223 Kageyama Haruki, 399
Janson, H. W., 297 Kali, 184
Jarman, Mark, 155, 158 Kalidasa, 329, 330, 337, 346 n. 31, 348
Jasper, David, 18n.4 Kandinsky, Wassily, 299
jazz, 507–508 Kant, Immanuel, 11, 14, 26, 32, 33, 35, 36, 58, 60,
Jeffrey, Peter, 264 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 72, 73, 79, 80, 81, 82,
Jenson, Robert, 288 92, 421–23
Jensen, Robin, 18 n. 3, 19 n. 15 Karlstadt, Andreas, 80
Jeremias, Joachim, 148 Karr, Mary, 154
Jesus (Christ) Katz, Paul, 381
beauty of, 35, 49, 79, 80, 438 Kaufman, Gordon D., 93, 96
in divine drama, 174–75 Kavanagh, Aidan, 405
film depictions of, 165, 173, 243 Keach, Benjamin, 290
historical questions regarding, and Kearney, Richard, 80
literature, 136–37, 435 Keil, Charles, 517
and icons, 6 Keller, Catherine, 11, 20 n. 23
music about the Passion of, 291 Kermode, Frank, 131, 135, 139–40, 443, 444,
and narratives of the Passion of, 136, 139 445
painting of the Passion of, 295 Khalafallah, Muhammad Ahmad, 305

INDEX 533
Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali, 118 literature

Khuli, Amin al-, 305 African American, 445–46
Khyal, 362 and the Bible, 130–41, 134, 140
Kieckhefer, Richard, 19 n. 15 Christianity and, 130–41, 148, 149, 155,
Kierkegaard, Søren, 14, 33, 82, 136, 421, 423 279–84
Kim, Atta, 374 doubt and belief expressed in modern,
Kirk-Duggan, Cheryl A., 516–17 433–47
Kirtan, 363 drama, 162–75
klezmer, 109, 266 folk, 482
Kligman, Mark L., 267 Hindu epic and dance-drama, 70, 327–42
Knapp, Jeffrey, 168 Islam and the Qur’an, in relation to,
Koch, Kenneth, 147 302–308
Kohn, Livia, 379, 380, 383 Judaism and, 257–61
Kol Nidre, 406 parables, 86, 122, 134, 135, 136, 139, 305
Kramrisch, Stella, 224, 351, 353 poetry, 146–59
Krishna, 48, 69–72, 120, 192–93, 210, 358, 359, and politics, 330, 445
362, 363 and race, 424, 445–46
Kristeller, Paul, 19 n. 11 Little, Stephen, 379–80, 381–82
Kumin, Maxine, 158 liturgy. See worship
Kushner, Tony, 3, 170, 259 Locke, John, 81
Kuspit, Donald, 426–27 Lollards, 167, 168
Kuyper, Abraham, 34–35, 36 London, Jack, 441
Lonergan, Bernard, 35
Lacan, Jacques, 472 Long, Richard, 99
Landow, George, 296 Longinus, 57
Lane, Belden, 452 Loughlin, Gerald, 245
Lao Tsu (Laozi), 147, 380 Lowell, James Russell, 440
Lara, Jaime, 217 Lowrie, Walter, 225
Lash, Nicholas, 175 Lucian, 187
Latour, Bruno, 461 Luria, Isaac, 174
Lawrence, D. H., 130, 137, 140, 279 Lutgendorf, Philip, 351
LeCompte, Elizabeth, 173 Luther, Martin, 111, 114, 132, 134, 212, 289, 404
Lee, Li-Young, 153 Lyotard, Jean-François, 139, 409
Leeuw, Gerardus van der, 12, 15–16, 35–36, 61,
65, 69, 227, 405 Macarius, 50
Leidy, Denise Patry, 375 MacGregor, Neil, 3
Leonardo da Vinci, 221 Mackey, James, 86
Levertov, Denise, 154, 158, 447 MacLeish, Archibald, 170
Levi, Primo, 259 MacMillan, James, 3
Levinas, Emmanuel, 175 Madonna (in Christianity), 461
Levine, Lee, 217 Black, 228, 229
Lewis, C. S., 250 as Theotokos (God-bearer), 229, 452
Lidova, Natalie, 360 Maeterlink, Maurice, 171
Liebermann, Max, 273 Mahabharata, 172, 173, 185, 194, 331, 333
Lindsey, Alfred Lord, 223 Mahler, Gustav, 118, 119, 122
Lipchitz, Jacques, 274, 298 Maimon, Moses ibn (Maimonides), 258
Lissitzky, El, 274 Mâle, Émile, 19 n. 12, 37, 224

534 INDEX
Malick, Terrence, 3, 298 Mickiewicz, Adam, 450

Malraux, André, 225 Miles, Margaret, 11, 19 n. 15, 20 n. 23, 225, 239,
mandalas, 94, 210, 228, 353 243
Mandelstam, Osip, 147 Miller, Arthur, 170
Mander, Karel van, 461 Mills, Kenneth, 225
Man, Paul de, 58 Milosz, Czeslaw, 155, 157, 447
Mann, Vivian B., 277 Milton, John, 150, 279, 435–36
Manning, Russell Re, 20 n. 21, n. 26 Ming, Gao, 166
Marcus, Ivan G., 277 Mirabai, 362
Marcuse, Herbert, 87, 427 Mithen, Steven, 2
Marini, Stephen, 116 Mitter, Partha, 351
Maritain, Jacques, 36, 225 Mnyele, Thamsanqa, 429
Marsh, Clive, 241, 243, 244 Mochizuki, Mia, 19 n. 15
Martin, Joel, 243 Moltmann, Jurgen, 54
Marx, Karl, 93 Mondzain, Marie-José, 452
Mary Magdalene, 469 Monk, Samuel, 57, 64
Mary, mother of Jesus, 469 Moore, Albert C., 225
See also Madonna Morey, Charles R., 225
Mass (liturgy and music), 6, 28, 109, 123, 204, Morgan, David, 19 n. 15, 225
286, 291 Mori, Mariko, 374
Masson Jeffrey, 337 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 491
Matisse, Henri, 297–98, 485 Morris, David B., 57
material culture, 480–95 Morris, William, 425
and fine art, 483–85 Morrison, Toni, 447
and “kitsch,” 482 mosque, 203, 214, 216, 311, 312, 316
and popular art, 480–83 arts within, 211, 212, 227
and popular religion, 487–95 as assembly place, 204, 209, 311
and religious studies, 486–95 and design of world, 210–11
Maultsby, Portia K., 502 mihrab and imagery of, 204, 310, 315
McCallum, Donald, 373 minaret of, 206
McCarthy, Mary, 446–47 minbar within, 204, 314
McClain, Carl, 242 Qibla of, 313
McDannell, Colleen, 19 n. 15, 245 Moynahan, Michael E., 407
McFeely, William, 446 Muhammad (Prophet), 39 n. 11, 48, 148, 189, 303,
McIntyre, John, 77, 84 307, 311, 312, 313, 315, 316, 322, 323, 409
McKay, David P., 288 Murdoch, Iris, 36, 130, 140, 141
Medved, Michael, 243 Murray, Les, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 157, 159
Meenakshi Sundareshwar Temple, 352–55 Murray, Mary Charles, 20 n. 15
megachurches, 205–206 museums, 222, 372, 374, 481, 482, 493, 494
Melville, Herman, 139, 279, 437–38 as decontextualizing, 226, 232, 375, 379, 390
Mencius, 390 Jewish, 275–77
Mendelsohn, Eric, 216 music
Mendelssohn, Felix, 287, 291 African American, 112, 124, 498–519
Merwin, W. S., 153 Augustine on, 31, 110
Messiaen, Olivier, 119, 122 biblical views of, 110, 287, 289
Milbank, John, 11, 20 n. 24 Buddhism and, 113
Michelangelo Buonarroti, 8, 96, 98, 294, 452, cantors in, 264, 267
458, 459, 460–61, 484 as Divine gift, 11–12

INDEX 535
Calvin on, 31, 111, 112, 289, 290 Natya Shastra, 183, 185, 191, 192, 194, 334, 343 n.
Christianity and, 111–12, 119, 286–91 11, 360
Civil Rights Movement and, 511 Neo-Platonism, 30, 32, 48, 53, 59, 79, 323
Council of Trent on, 290 Nichols, Aidan, 20 n. 15, 39 n. 25
emotion and, 110–113 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 437
Hinduism and, 48, 358–64 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 150, 154, 168, 172, 421, 423,
Islam and, 113, 118, 321–25 438, 439, 445, 446
Judaism and, 113, 118, 263–67, 403–404 Niggunim, 118
Liberation and, 511, 512 Nochlin, Linda, 470
Luther on, 111–12, 289 Noh, 191
mathematics and, 114–16 Noon, William T., 152
mystical aspects of, 47, 117–20, 324–25 Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 217
Orpheus and powers of, 110 Norris, Kathleen, 153, 158
Pentecostal, 109, 113, 116 Northrop, F. S. C., 225
political aspects of, 499 Nouwen, Henri, 16
Pope Pius XII on, 111 Novak, Barbara, 59, 60
and rasa theory, 118, 119 Nusach, 264, 265
rejection of, or disputes over, 112, 290, 321, Nye, Naomi Shihab, 146, 153
324, 498
religious and spiritual aspects of, 3, 109–124 O’Connor, Flannery, 249, 283, 284, 446–47
sacrament and, 121–22 Ofili, Chris, 232
sacred sound (Nada-Brahman) and, 359 Olin, Margaret, 277
and sama’, 117, 190, 321, 322, 324, 325 Oliver, Mary, 155, 158
Second Vatican Council on, 216 Oppenheim, Moritz Daniel, 273
secular styles, in relation to sacred, 124, oratorio, 28, 110, 115, 286, 291, 514
498–519 Orpheus, 110, 188,
and sonic theology, 359 Oswalt, Conrad, 243
of the spheres, 17, 32, 114 Otto, Rudolph, 61–65, 67, 68, 69, 72, 221, 223,
and theomusicology, 518 224, 405
and time, 123 Overstreet, Jeffrey, 240–41
and trance, 116–18
Wesley, John and Charles, attitudes toward, Page, Christopher, 288
124, 290–91 Palladio, Andrea, 213
See also specific genres of music; and under Pambo, 289
specific religions Panofsky, Erwin, 217, 224, 233
mysticism, 52, 275 Parini, Jay, 159
and aesthetic experience, 335–38 Parker, Rozsika, 470
and music, 47, 117–20, 265, 324–25 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 171
Pärt, Arvo, 3, 119, 120, 124
Nada-Brahman, 359 Pater, Walter, 12
Narcissus, 374, 462, 463 Patocka, Jan, 63, 64
narrative Pattison, George, 19 n. 15, 85
in the Bible, 130–41 Patwardhan, M. V., 337
in the Gospels, 133 Paul (Apostle), 50, 241, 243
in midrash, 135 Péguy, Charles, 152
in the novel, 131, 135, 137–41 Pentecostal Christianity, 406, 409, 410, 488
Naryayanan, Vasudha, 361 and music, 109, 113, 116, 412, 508, 518
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, 113 and film, 245, 249

536 INDEX
Percy, Walker, 447 and creative process, 231

Persephone, 187 and dance, 197
Picasso, Pablo, 84, 297 devotion with icons, and, 99
Pickstock, Catherine, 11 direction of, 204, 313
Pinney, Christopher, 351 Hindu, 353, 358, 403
Pirandello, Luigi, 165 Jewish, 172, 207, 215, 216, 263, 264, 272, 405,
Pissarro, Camille, 273 406
Pitts, Leonard, 118 leading of, 414
Pius XII, Pope, 111 and meditation, 101, 413
piyyutim, 266 monastic, and art, 295
Plate, Brent, 246 and music, 117, 265, 289, 358, 415
Plato, 8, 44, 45, 47, 51, 53, 78–79, 92, 112, 114, 167, Muslim, 109, 206, 209, 311, 312, 314, 316
183, 188, 418–20, 456, 471 and poetry, 152, 158
Plotinus, 8, 59, 79 postures for, 412
poetry rug for, 315
of absence, 156–57 Shinto, 396
of Christian Gospels, 148 See also worship
of Divine Comedy (Dante), 148, 149 Prez, Josquin des, 111
of Hebrew Bible, 148 Prickett, Stephen, 137
of Hindu scriptures, 147 Procopius, 208
and incarnation, 155 profane art
of Qur’an, 148 in relation to sacred or holy, 12, 130, 210,
and religion/spirituality, 146–59 227–28, 405, 499, 518
secularization and, 150–52 in Hindu aesthetics and poetics, 61, 210, 327,
of spirituality renewed, 153–59 328, 329, 330, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 341
Sufi, 149 Promey, Sally, 19 n. 15
of Tao Te Ching, 147–48 Protestant Christianity
politics and art, 413, 418, 419, 424, 425, 427–30, and church architecture, 205–206
455, 470, 473, 481, 500, 505, 506, 510, and dance, 183
511, 517 and drama, 168
Pollack, Griselda, 470 and films, 242, 243, 244, 245
Pollock, Sheldon, 337, 344 n. 14, 347 n. 31 and literature, 7, 155, 281–82, 440, 441, 442
polyphony, 11, 290 and music, 7, 111, 112, 121, 511, 514, 517
polytheism, 64, 65, 71, 72, 324 and visual arts, 7, 19 n. 15, 39 n. 11, 220, 227,
Popular arts 281, 295, 296, 372, 403, 454, 460, 487,
in comparison with elite or “fine,” 85, 372, 491, 495
418, 429, 482, 490–95 and worship style, 406, 409
Postman, Neil, 239 psalms, 45, 113
Pound, Ezra, 302, 303, 441 on beauty of God, 47, 49, 54
Power, Martin, 391 in Christian worship, 112, 289, 290
Prado, Adélia, 154, 155 dance evoked by, 188
praise songs, 501, 504, 506, 507, 509, 510, 518 in Jewish worship, 264, 288
prayer, 86, 229, 407, 408 music of, 112, 264, 287, 288
Buddhist, 403, 413, 495 poetry of, 45, 148, 149
call to, 109, 412 Pugin, A. W. N., 214, 217
Christian, 99, 286, 288, 289, 290, 411–13 puja, 132, 185, 193, 360, 363, 403
and contemplation, 101, 230 Pythagoras, 114

INDEX 537
Quasten, Johannes, 405 and imagination, 84

Qawwali, 109, 118 and literature, 279, 280, 282, 306,
Qur’an, 48, 67, 70, 113, 148, 190, 211 and poetic/literary excellence of the Qur’an,
calligraphy for, 212 302, 303, 304, 308
cantillation of, 323 and poetry of the Bible, 148
on dance, 189 and sublimity, 61
literary qualities and influence of, 148, and visual art, 298
302–308 Rice, Anne, 140–41
and music, 322 Richards, I. A., 152
Ricoeur, Paul, 175
Rabinovitch, Celia, 225 Riefenstahl, Leni, 424
race and ethnicity, critical attention to, Riley, Denise, 471
445–46, 512 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 151, 281
See also art, ethical aspects of ring shouts, 501, 507
Racine, Jean, 173, 308 Rio, Alexis-François, 223
ragas, 28, 110, 119, 360, 363 ritual. See drama; worship
ragtime, 506–507 Roach, Hildred, 515
Rahman, Fazulr, 305 Robinson, Marilynne, 2
Rahner, Karl, 35, 77, 281–82 Robson, James, 384
Rainey, Ma, 506 rock music, 3, 124, 266
Rama, 61, 68, 355 Rockwell, Norman, 482
Ramanuja, 72 Rogers, Pattiann, 156, 158
Ramayana, 132, 185, 194, 196, 343 n. 5, 344 n. 17 Rohe, Mies van der, 215
rap and hip-hop, 109, 499, 501, 502, 512–13 Romanticism
Rappaport, Roy A., 405 ideas of art in, 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 60, 64, 92, 98,
rasa 118–19, 332, 335, 341, 345 n. 18, 352, 355 299, 422–23, 426, 444, 482
Abhinavagupta’s theories of, 335–38 ideas of artist in, 8, 60, 82, 98
bliss of the supreme, related to all, 336 and literature, 137, 138, 139, 150, 151, 436, 437,
in dance, 194–95 444, 481
in music, 18–19, 335, 359, 360, 362 and music, 265, 290, 482
in theater, 334 religion and theology of, 32, 51, 121, 138, 150,
Rashi, 263 151, 423
Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 517 See also imagination; sublime, the
religion Rorty, Richard, 444–45
art mapped onto the study of, 1–18 Rose, Michael, 217
and art in mutual transformation, 13, 16–18 Rossi, Solomone, 265
lived, 380, 487–91 Roth, Philip, 259
study of art and, 1–2, 18, 18 n. 3, 77–87 Rothko, Mark, 16–17
See also aesthetics, religious; aesthetics, Rouault, Georges, 298
theological: spirituality; and names of Rouget, Gilbert, 116, 117, 118, 120
specific religions Rowell, Lewis, 360
Rembrandt van Rijn, 16, 17, 96, 275, 295–96, 457 Rubens, Peter Paul, 454
revelation, 30–31, 47, 80, 122, 241, 307, 308 Rubenstein, Jeffrey L., 261
and the arts, 11, 12, 27, 28, 29, 30, 86, 87, 122, Rublev, Andrei, 94
123, 158 Rumi, Jalal ad-Din, ar-, 118, 149, 189–90
beauty of, 35, 47 Runge, Philipp Otto, 82, 96, 98
in the Bhagavad Gita, 71 Rushdie, Salman, 65

538 INDEX
Ruskin, John, 425, 440 shamans, 73, 97, 333

Rust, E. Gardner, 18 n. 3, 364 East Asian, 166
Ryback, Issachar, 274 and dance, 182, 186, 190
and musical trance, 166–17
sacrament, 280, 281, 406, 408, 411, 514, 517 North American, 73, 186
and art, 8, 11, 33, 35, 99, 220, 221, 230, 457 South Asian, 343 n. 6
and beauty, 33, 51, 84 Shapiro, Karl, 146
and drama, 168, 170, 177 n. 39 Sharf, Robert H., 370, 374
and film, 244, 245 Shawn, Ted, 196, 197
and literature, 148, 155, 281, 282 Shelton, Ron, 238
and music, 121–22, 123 Shinto, 5, 166, 190, 191, 353, 396–99
and nature, 99 Buddhist influence on, 397
sacred arts, and profane, 12, 61, 62, 130, 210, kami in, 397–99
227, 327–42, 329, 330, 334, 335, 336, problematical as a concept, 396
337, 338 ritual arts, 396–99
Sallman, Warner, 487 shrines, 399
sama’, 117, 190, 321, 322, 324, 325 Shiva, 71, 228, 238, 334, 347 n. 35, 348 n. 38,
Sama-Gana, 359–60 354, 360
Sandberg, Carl, 240 as dancer, 27–28, 184, 187, 192, 195, 331,
Santayana, George, 442 335, 351, 358, 490
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 83, 170 Siddhartha Gautama, 367, 495
Scarry, Elaine, 426 See also Buddha
Schama, Simon, 16–17, 21 n. 34 Sikhism, 191, 362, 363
Schechner, Richard, 173 Silverman, Debora, 297
Scheider, Laurel, 20 n. 23 Simon, Paul, 121
Schelling, Friedrich, 80, 82 Simson, Otto von, 224
Schiller, Friedrich, 26 Slobin, Mark, 265
Schlegel, Friedrich von, 422 Smith, David, 351
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 63, 82, 121 Solomon (King), 207, 208, 211, 214, 270–71
Schloeder, Steven, 217 Solotorevsky, Myrna, 134
Schneidau, Herbert, 132, 133 Sommer, Deborah, 393
Schoenberg, Arnold, 115, 266 Sophocles, 147, 162, 164, 166, 187
Schön, Erhard, 457 sorrow songs, 506
Schopen, Gregory, 372 South African art of resistance, 428–31
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 422, 491 Southern, Eileen, 515
Schrader, Paul, 245 Sövik, Edward, 216
Schwarz, Rudolf, 215 Soyinka, Wole, 168
Schwebel, Horst, 77, 85 Spencer, Jon Michael, 112, 518
Schweitzer, Albert, 137 Spielberg, Stephen, 240
Scott, Nathan, Jr., 20 n. 21 spirituality. See aesthetics; mysticism; prayer;
Seasoltz, Kevin, 20 n. 15 religion; worship
secularization, 34, 35, 61, 168, 297, 298–99, 327, spirituals, 112, 291, 498, 504, 505, 515–17
329, 341, 435–39 Splain, Tom, 413
Sed-Rajna, Gabrielle, 277 Stace, Walter T., 52
Sendak, Maurice, 261 Stanislavski, Constantin, 169–70
Sephardic Jews, 260, 263, 266, 267, 271, 272 Stapert, Calvin, 289
Shakespeare, William, 53, 130, 142 n. 22, 168, Steiner, George, 121
169, 174, 175, 185, 279, 308, 329, 440 Steinhardt, Nancy, 391

INDEX 539
Stephens, Mitchell, 240 at Dura Europus, 39 n. 11, 78

Stern, David, 135 music in, 263, 264, 265, 266, 288, 289
Stevens, Keith, 380 new media in, 239
Stevens, Wallace, 151, 152, 279, 443, 444 Tabernacle in, 272
Stoltzfus, Philip, 115 Synge John, 170
Stone, Bryan, 242
Storer, Robert, 197 Tagore, Rabindranath, 362
story. See narrative tajwid, 323
Strauss, David Friedrich, 136 tala 361
Strindberg, August, 169, 171 Talmud, 47, 258, 271, 272
Stroup, George, 138 Taoism, 28, 190, 379
stupa, 368 architecture and, 383–84
sublime, the arts and, 379–85
in art, 11, 15 mountain sites of, 384
in the Bhagavad Gita 68–73 problems with terms and concepts for,
Burke on, 57, 60, 81, 82 379–81, 385
concepts and definitions of, 57–60, 81 studies of arts and, 379–85
and dance of Shiva Nataraja, 489 Tao Te Ching, 148
Hegel on, 65, 66–67, 68, 69, 72 tarab, 321–22
Kant on, 58, 62, 64, 65, 72, 81, 82 Tarantino, Quentin, 241
in music, 115 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 245
Otto on, 61, 62, 63 Tarlekar, G. H., 359, 360
and the Qur’an, 303 taste, 25, 26, 27, 37, 86, 214, 277, 305, 351, 485,
and religious experience, 15, 32, 60–73, 82, 501, 502
115, 150 aesthetic and spiritual, 50, 336, 337
Schleiermacher on, 82 and class, 499
Schopenhauer on, 491 ecumenical, 37
Sufism, 307, 315, 317, 335, 409–10 good and bad, 36, 223, 419, 424, 426, 498
and dance, 117, 183, 189, 190, 322, 324–25 for the infinite, in religion, 82
and music, 109, 113, 116, 117, 118, 324–25, 335, Kant’s theories of, 11, 421–22
363, 412 and moral judgment, 425
and poetry, 149 and worship, 412, 514
Suger of St. Denis, 10, 209, 211 Tatarkiewcz, Wladyslaw, 20 n. 17
Sulzer, Solomon, 265 Tavener, John, 3, 120, 122, 123
Sunday, Billy, 441 Taylor, Edward, 150
Sun Dazhang, 391 Taylor, Mark C., 12
Sur Das, 362 Taylor, Woodman, 351
Sutherland, Ann, 470 television, 3, 165, 174, 198, 243, 261,
Suyui, Jalal al-din al-, 304 351, 509
Suzuki, D. T., 224 Temperley, Nicholas, 287
Sweet Honey in the Rock, 517 temple art and architecture, 203–204, 205, 213,
synagogue, 206, 207, 243, 353, 409 217, 230, 488, 494
Ark of, 204, 272 Buddhist, 99, 100, 205, 367, 371, 389, 411, 413,
art and architecture of, 203, 204, 208, 209, 495
212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 271, 272–73, 275, Christian adaptations of, 208
276, 277 Confucian, 393
bimah in, 204, 215, 272 Hindu, 6, 8, 184, 203, 206, 210, 213, 216, 327,
decoration of, 272 330, 343 n. 5, 350, 352–55, 403

540 INDEX
temple art and architecture (Cont.) transcendentals, 10, 31, 32, 35, 79
and Indic dance, 186, 191, 192, 193–94, transgressive sacrality, 337, 341, 347 n. 32
195–96, 335, 346 n. 26 Tranströmer, Tomas, 152, 157
and Indic music, 358, 361, 362, 363, 364, 412 Turner, Harold, 218
Jewish, 113, 207, 208, 209, 211, 214, 258, 260, Turner, Victor, 173, 405
263, 264, 265, 270, 271–72, 274, 275, Turrell, James, 99, 100
288–89 Tutu, Desmond, 413
Taoist, 380, 381, 383, 384 Twain, Mark, 279, 441
Tennant, Frederick Robert, 51 Tyler, Royall, 399
Tharpe, Rosetta, 509 Tyler, Susan, 399
Theodora, 212
theology Unamuno, Miguel de, 458
and aesthetics 1, 4, 11, 14, 30–38 Underhill, Evelyn, 117
apophatic, 13, 39 n. 12 Upanishads, 67, 70, 71, 72, 147, 354, 359, 491
and eschatology in art and faith, 15, 50, 77, Updike, John, 447
85, 86–87, 170 U2 (rock band), 3, 124
feminist, 11, 115, 340
and film criticism, 241–42 Valmiki, 331
Hindu polytheistic monism of the Gita, Valpey, Kenneth, 351
70, 72 Varma, Raja Ravi, 354
Hindu sonic, 359 Vasari, Giorgio, 98, 459
Hindu visual, 350–52 Vatsyayan, Kapila, 197
liberation, 11, 20 n. 23, 37, 115, 340 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 287
and literary criticism, 280–84 Vedanta, 68, 227, 363
and music, 31, 111, 112, 114–15, 287–90, Vedas, 9, 330, 338, 339, 343 n. 11, 358, 359, 491
121–22, 123, 359, 517, 518 Velázquez, Diego, 458
narrative, 138 Verdi, Giuseppi, 291
natural, 20 n. 23, 52 Verellen, Franciscus, 380
pantheistic, 68 video, 17, 351
process, 11 Viladesau, Richard, 10, 20 n. 15, 37, 85
Radical Orthodoxy in, 11 Virgil, 188, 279, 280
Transcendental Thomist, 35 Virgin of Guadalupe, 228
See also God; aesthetics: theological; and Vishnu, 48, 68, 71, 120, 187, 192, 358, 359, 360
names of theologians visual arts
Thieseen, Gesa Elsbeth, 20 n. 22 and Buddhism, 8, 33, 228, 367–76, 380
Thite, G. U., 359 and Christianity, 294–99
Thomas, R. S., 156, 158 and Confucianism, 388–93
Thurman, Howard, 516 and Hinduism, 350–55
Tillich, Paul, 11, 19 n. 15, 21 n. 31, 36, 77, 85, 87, and Islam, 310–18
245, 281, 284, 442 and Judaism, 270–77
Tolkien, J. R. R., 65, 73, 279 and material culture, 480–95
Tolstoy, Leo, 36, 279 and Navajo practices, 97, 98, 99, 101
Torah, 78, 143, 188, 204, 257, 258, 260, 271, 272, and religion, 97–100, 220–33, 480–95
275 and Shinto, 396–99
Tornatore, Giuseppe, 238 in South Africa, 428–30
Tracy, David, 37, 86–87, 244 study of, and religion, 220–21, 222–33,
trance, 116–18 374–76, 483–85

INDEX 541
and Taoism, 379–85 worship

See also aesthetics; architecture; film and aesthetics of, 28, 404–13
video; imagination architecture and liturgical reform in, 215–16
Vitruvius, 213 artistry in, 77, 403–16
Vivekananda, Swami, 63, 68 improvisation in, 415
Vodou, 404 and the Mass, 6, 109, 166, 514
Vogt, Von Ogden, 19 n. 15 modern and postmodern, 215–16, 403–15
Volp, Rainer, 19 n. 6 performance as verbal and non-verbal in,
Vrudy, Kimberly, 18 n. 4 411–14
post-Holocaust, 409
Waghorne, Joanne, 351 ritual actions in, 404
Wagner, Richard, 422 studies of, 405–406, 407, 473–73
Walker, Jeanne Murray, 158 See also prayer
Walker, Keith, 19 n. 15 Wren, Christopher, 214
Ward, Graham, 20 n. 24 Wright, Charles, 155–56, 157–58
Warhol, Andy, 232 Wright, Elaine, 317
Watts, Isaac, 290–91 Wright, Franz, 148, 154, 156
Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 170 Wright, Richard, 445
Weil, Simone, 47, 52, 54 Wu Hung, 391
Werner, Eric, 264 Wulff, Donna, 337
Wesley, Charles, 124, 136, 290–91, 501 Wuthnow, Robert, 2, 94, 111
Wesley, John, 124, 290 Wycliff, John, 167
Wesley, Samuel Sebastian, 291 Wyschogrod, Edith, 409
Wharton, Edith, 441
Whitehead, Alfred North, 11 Xuanzang, 371
Whitman, Walt, 150 Xunzi, 388, 390
Wilbur, Richard, 152, 155, 447
Wilder, Amos Niven, 20 n. 21 Yates, Wilson, 18 nn. 3–4, 19 n. 15, 298
Wilder, Thornton, 165 Yeats, William Butler, 154, 441
Williams, Peter, 488 YouTube, 18 n. 1, 331, 342
Williamson, Sue, 428–29, 430 Yuval, 263
Wilson, August, 171
Wiman, Christian, 154, 155, 158 Zadkine, Ossip, 274
Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott, 261 Zaehner, R. C., 62, 65, 69
Wisse, Ruth R., 261 Zagajewski, Adam, 153, 157
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 53, 115, 375, 463 Zeami, 166
Witvliet, John, 405 Zen Buddhism, 13, 28, 38, 101, 166, 224, 228,
Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 51, 225, 427 374, 413
Wonder, Stevie, 511, 518 Zimmerman, Mary, 174
Wordsworth, William, 59, 60, 61, 150, Zola, Emile, 169, 481
279, 436 Zwingli, Ulrich, 80, 289, 290, 455


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T H E OX F OR D HA N DB O OK OF

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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1. Introduction: Mapping the Terrain of Religion and the Arts 1

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10. Dramatic Ways of Being Religious 162

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24. Hinduism—Aesthetics, Drama, and Poetics 327

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Diane Apostolos-Cappadona is Visiting Professor of Religious Art and Cultural History

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in Religion, which is being developed as an ongoing, online scholarly resource. He is also

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wide range of subjects, such as anthropology (acculturation models of Indian religions)

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aspects of religion—sometimes previously unnoticed—can be found in areas such as art

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1.2 Art on the Map of Religion:

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1.3 Considering Beauty

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1.4 Artistic Ways of Being Religious

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play of self-referential images and figures, or a self-reflexive mirroring of metaphor for

1.5 Religion and Art as Mutually

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AESTHETICS AND RELIGION

2.1 Religious and Theological

The history and phenomenology of religions in general and of Christianity in particular

2.2 The Theoretical Concept of

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2.3 Religious and Theological