Aquinas gave in his Summa a synthesis of all science; Dante gave in his Divina Comedia a synthesis of man’s life and destiny; the Gothic cathedral of the same age gave a synthesis of all the arts in one structure, exemplifying in fullness and excellence the mutual interaction of art and religion in the middle ages, where manifestly religion held sway as never before or since. The Morgan “Collection” in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York exhibits the dusty wreckage of that wonderful union of religion and art. No poet’s imagination is needed to rebuild those fragments into that marvelous structure, under whose myriad statuary of serious saints and grotesque gargoyles, you pass through carved portals into the spacious aisles over which arches leap aspiringly. The painter fascinates you with the story of many colors in the windows. The weaver hangs other pictures on the rich tapestry curtaining the walls. The wood-carver is everywhere evoking beauty with cunning fingers. Music and song in the dramatic and antiphonal liturgy, the sublime eloquence of the pulpit in turn charm and rest the ears.
The minutest detail is as artistic as the rich magnificence. The missal on the altar will be a “Book of Kells,” a reflection on illuminated parchment of the religious and monastic life which produced it, by its patience, learning, devotion, silent application, and scrupulous exactness; “examined with a microscope for hours,” says an authority, “without detecting a false line or irregular interlacement.” Near the missal of the Gothic cathedral would be found a jeweled chalice, like that of Ardagh, with three hundred and fifty-four distinct pieces, classic and rich in all kinds of ornament. Baldwin Brown was surely right in declaring: “It is probable that nothing more artistically beautiful has ever been seen than the Gothic cathedral,” and the Gothic cathedral is the crowning glory of a deeply religious age.
VI
ART AND THE DIVINE
2. THE KINSHIP OF ART AND RELIGION
The history of art from its lowest manifestations to its highest gives evidence of its union and intimacy with religion. The fact is admitted, and might easily be confirmed by the very way in which religious movements violently reacted against art. Hebraism knew the power of art over its followers, and Hebraic antagonism to sculpture and painting served to give religious impulse freer outlet in Hebrew poetry and oratory and other literature. The Bible is the supreme illustration of the influence of religion upon literary art. Islamism opposed art, but gradually succumbed to its influence at least in architecture. That Islam has not yielded more to art is an evidence of arrested civilization, as well as of baser and more sensual religious feelings. Puritanism, the intensest form of Protestantism, opposed art in all its manifestations, but Puritanism either diverted art energy to poetry and literature or provoked excesses by its attempt to check the natural impulses of art, and Puritanism finally yielded to art. It is clear then that religious opposition to art serves but to show more strikingly the union of religion and art. The religion that opposes art must direct the art impulse into other channels or the religion degenerates. By their nature religion and art are congenial.
What now is the explanation of this close and continuous union of art and religion, found everywhere and in all ages? Taine and his school, led astray by some details in the artist’s subject matter, have tried to explain art by environment; but environment is an explanation absurd in itself, and cannon be adequate for an ubiquitous fact which transcends all environment. The theorists who ascribe the origin of art to play and the deploying of superfluous energies liken, with Herbert Spencer, the art impulse to the acts of a kitten playing with a ball. Play may be partly an excess of energy, but not all energy is artistic, and animal play is the stirring of appetite, bearing but a slight, superficial resemblance to man’s early strivings for artistic expression. How many games are imitative and made more attractive by art! From the very first, mind enters into early and even child art, and at the last the devotion of the artists to their ideals in the higher manifestations of art, a devotion quite unlike play, shows that the art impulse is essentially different from the instinctive impulse of the kitten, which pounces on a rat as it pounced on a ball of wool.[1]
Another school, striving to explain the connection between art and religion, takes a directly opposite view to the play theory. Fear and magic are, according to these authors, the controlling factors. The difficulty in this theory is the utterly selfish element in the fear and magic impulse, whereas the art impulse is disinterested and unselfish. Besides, religious belief precedes the fear and magic propitiation of offended powers. The voodoo and the hoodoo mark degradations of religious impulses. Impulses in harmony with man’s nature may go down as well as up, and even should we suppose that the unselfish impulse of art, which finally becomes the evidence and glory of man’s highest civilization, could be traced back to the sordid details of selfish superstition, why should such an ugly duckling evolve into a fair swan? Devolution and degradation are easier than evolution. Why did the art impulse take the narrow, upward path and shun the broad way down to perdition?
The perfection of the oak must have been in the potency of the acorn. The oak could not come from a peanut, nor can all the powers of sun, rain and soil or any other factor of the environment evolve the fruit of the peanut vine into the majesty of the oak. We can explain by an extrinsic cause the stunting of an oak or the rotting of an oak, but we cannot account for the existence of the oak—except by an acorn. We may find perhaps a thwarted or corrupted art tendency in superstitious fear and its products, but that element of fear could not write a poem or compose a sonata or rear a Gothic cathedral. The perfection reached by the art product must have been in the potency of the first artistic impulse in germ.
Religion and art were then united potentially in the original art impulse just as the strength and lofty beauty of the oak were latent in the acorn. The art impulse is natural to man; it is intellectual. It requires brains to be artistic, as it requires brains to laugh, and no animal has done either or will ever do either. The bird in building its nest displays an intelligence not its own; its nest building is inherited just as its song is. Jean Fabre’s observations have shown conclusively the wonders of instinct, coupled with the stupidity of the creature possessing the instinct. But the earliest scrawl or daub of the child displays the mind working on matter and the deliberate shaping of means to an end. All intellectual testers from Simon-Binet to the latest have found the making or interpreting of pictures a measure of intellectual power. They are right. Art is rationalized pigments or sounds or words with their images or some other rationalized material. Dr. James Harvey Robinson in Mind in the Making says that we are wrong in rationalizing the past to make up our minds, and how does he show it? By rationalizing another past for us. The truth is we must rationalize the past, and Dr. Robinson should induce us, not to stop rationalizing, but to rationalize correctly and should give us something better than universal skepticism with which to rationalize. The art tendency is one with the religious tendency in being rational and intellectual.
Art and religion strive for high ideals; they are disinterested and unselfish. LaFarge says to Saint Gaudens: “That work is not worthy of you,” and Saint Gaudens picks up a hammer and smashes the sculpture. That is an instance paralleling the heroic following of religious ideals with like sacrifices. Was it fear of bogies or love of their dead which filled so many tombs with precious articles? Believing in immortality, Egyptians and Myceneans gave to the dead what was most precious, and what was most precious was the finest art in the costliest material. Love keeps graves green: fear erects a crematory.