Art and religion are personal and emotional. Each has its own proper expression. Of religion the expression is worship and of art it is concrete embodiment of the ideal, and in both cases the expression is intimately personal and permeated with feeling. Art is more sensible and so more emotional because its expression must be presented to the senses or at least to the imagination. Religion whose primary expression is an act of the will, need not of its nature be attended with emotion or external display but it usually is, and feeling and expression commonly help to the fuller expression of religion. The rapture of art and the ecstasy of religion, though differing in much, have also much in common.
In their social appeal art and religion are akin. The artist and the saint have their hours of solitary contemplation. St. Peter at Pentecost, describing the religious ecstasy of the inspired apostles, cried out: “These are not drunk as you suppose,” and, continuing, he quoted the prophet Joel: “Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.” In the forming of their visions and dreams saint and artist are alike, though the substance of their visions differ. They are alike also in their impulse to give their visions expression and to influence men with them. Religion is apostolic and art is social, and that is why in history they have gone forth so often hand in hand to subdue the world. Whole nations had to conspire to erect the Egyptian pyramids, the tower of Babel, the temples of Israel, of Rome, of Greece and of the Orient, and the Gothic cathedrals. Only a union of art and religion could produce such stupendous results. Patriotism and the state have at times come near to these great effects, when patriotism or love of country assumed the nature of religion. To produce these national monuments a lasting cause as well as a cause of wide appeal was necessary. Here again art and religion are akin. Art is long, and religion is immortal.
Art reaches its highest and most perfect expression in the sublime. Here religion does not walk hand in hand with art, but bears art on high and gives to art some of its own divinity by endowing the artistic expression with sublimity. The literature of the Bible attained to heights which writers of other nations could not dream of nor ambition. Genesis sets poets and all artists upon a lofty eminence. By the revelation of creation, the imagination and the vision of the artist became coterminous almost with that of the Creator. Newton’s theory of gravitation which shepherded the starry hosts of the universe into one obedient flock, gives us a realization of the effect of Genesis upon the world’s imagination. The creation motif in literature emancipating man’s imagination, enlarging the boundaries of vision, and dowering the artist with sublimity, deserves a treatise by itself and a history worthy of its greatness.
Art and religion are united in fact, so history teaches; art and religion are akin, so the study of their attributes reveals. What then is the only and full explanation of that fact and of that harmony? Philosophers hold that the only and the full explanation of the harmony subsisting between the mind and reality, which is called truth, is found in the fact that both mind and reality are reproductions in creation of God’s truthful knowledge of Himself. Ethicists hold that the only and full explanation of the harmony subsisting between the will and law, which is called moral good, is found in the fact that both will and law are reproductions in the finite of God’s love of Himself. So philosophers must hold that the full and only explanation of the harmony subsisting between the soul and art, which is called the expression of the beautiful, is found in the fact that like the innate tendency to truth and good, the tendency to beauty is a reproduction of God’s contemplation of Himself. Creation, as has often been declared, is a manifestation of the art of God, a mimetic presentation in finite matter and spirit of the infinite ideal. All advance in truth and virtue is an approach to divine truth and goodness, and all true progress in art is an approach to divine beauty. “Filled with enthusiasm,” says De Wulf in L’Œuvre d’Art et la Beauté, “before the greatness of the artist’s power, Dante Alighieri compares it to that of Omnipotence:
“‘Your art like the grand-child of God’
(Inferno, XI, 103).
“Art is the grand-child of God because it is the offspring of man’s creative power as man himself has come from the hands of God.”
VII
ART AND THE DIVINE
3. ART IN ITS RELATION TO VIRTUE
The fact that religion and art are connected is abundantly established by history. The naturalness of that connection is made clear by the many traits art and religion possess in common. As philosophers have argued to the existence of God from the fact that the universal belief in His existence can be accounted for satisfactorily on no other supposition; as philosophers also argue to the immortality of the soul from man’s universal and inevitable tendency to unending existence, so in like manner, it may be argued that since always and everywhere the art impulse is connected in its origin and growth with religion, that impulse too, like belief in God and desire of immortality and conscience for law and tendency to truth, is a projection of the divine upon humanity, not the anthropomorphism of God but the theomorphism of man. The structure of our eye, made to respond to light, justifies us in concluding there is light. The nature of the soul, which can respond to infinite beauty, justifies us in concluding there is infinite beauty. He who said, “Let there be light,” said also, “Let us make man after our own image and likeness.”