What is the truth? What connection has art with religion?
I do not think the answer is difficult. The connection depends upon what you define religion and art respectively to be. With the old definitions no answer is forthcoming. But when you see religion as it really is, when you understand its genesis and its growth, the answer is clear.
Religion, as I have tried to show, arises from instincts. The instincts of the savage are few, the emotions he is capable of feeling are limited. As his civilisation progresses his instinctive desires increase, his emotions are more numerous. And as the greater attracts the less, the older and more established attract the newer, so religion attracts to itself and incorporates all it can. Religions have varied in this matter; but of all, Catholicism has been the most wide-armed, it has always justified its name. Where a new emotion arose and became strong the Roman Church always if possible attracted it into the fold. I have already shown how this was done. There is hardly an emotion of the human heart that Roman Catholicism has not made its own.
Now what is Art?
Art, as Tolstoi explains, is also an expression of the emotions, and therefore the difference between religion and art lies in the emotions expressed and the method of expression.
Different peoples express in their religions different emotions. What some of these emotions are I explain in Chapter XXX. Different people are also more or less susceptible to art, and express in their art different emotions. Where a great religion has absorbed certain emotions, and a great art subsequently arises and wishes to express in art some of the same emotions, then the art becomes religious art. The two domains have overlapped. But there is no distinction between secular and religious art. Nor is there any necessary connection between Art and Religion. Neither is dependent on the other. They are quite distinct domains, each existing to fulfil the necessities and desires of man.
How they came frequently to overlap is easily enough seen.
Consider the religion of Rome. It came, as I have said, out of the necessity for expressing and cultivating certain emotions. It is a very catholic religion, the product of a highly emotional people who had many and strong feelings. As much as possible these were accepted into the religion.
Therefore, when there came the great outbreak of art in the fourteenth century, when there were great painters and sculptors desiring to paint pictures that appealed to the heart, all the ground was occupied.
Did they want to depict feminine beauty, there was the Madonna accepted as the ideal. Did they want to awaken the emotion of maternity, there was the Madonna again; of pity, there were the martyrs; of sacrifice, there was the Christ. Long before these emotions had been crystallised by the Church round religious ideals, and a change would not be understood.