Since the publication of the book that made her a celebrity intellectual, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), Camille Paglia has been focusing attention on connections within the fabric of Western culture that are often ignored or denied. This has earned her a bundle of suspicion from across the political and ideological spectrum. So, for example, when she writes that “the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion,” she will no doubt frighten leaders in the arts while flummoxing many American religious leaders, who can’t imagine why we ought to bother reviving the fine arts.
Paglia”s assertion launched an article entitled “Religion and the Arts in America” in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of the journal Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics (published at Boston University). The bulk of the article is a whirlwind survey of the history of the contentious if sometimes fertile relationship between religion (mostly Christianity) and the arts in America since the Puritans, with sections on literature, the visual arts, and music. Noting that the art world and the Church world virtually ignored each other for most of the twentieth century, she then discusses the “culture wars” episodes of conflict in the 1980s and 90s (the Mapplethorpe controversy, etc.), most of which were about morality, not art or religion. Looking ahead, Paglia writes (in the final three paragraphs):
For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people’s faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s’ multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts. The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas’ six-film Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the Force. But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts.
To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.
Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school — which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art — whether in marriage or divorce — can reinvigorate American culture.
Related reading and listening
- The powerful presence of the body — FROM VOL. 9 Painter Ed Knippers discusses how he attempts to capture the reality and mystery of the human body without reducing it to a wooden object or exalting it to the status of an idol. (7 minutes)
- The Body Worlds exhibit and Western art — FROM VOL. 88 Michael J. Lewis explores the effects of the Body Worlds exhibits on the moral imagination of the viewer, who encounters human cadavers in a mechanistic way erased of all moral context. (26 minutes)
- Human nature through the eyes of Lucian Freud — FROM VOL. 7 Art critic and sculptor Ted Prescott discusses the work of British realist painter Lucian Freud (notably, the grandson of Sigmund Freud). (8 minutes)
- Depicting the human form — FROM VOL. 6 Ted Prescott explains the history of portraying the nude human body in art and contrasts it with the way the naked human form is often used in advertising. (9 minutes)
- The abolition of the fine arts — In this lecture, R. V. Young examines why people are increasingly unable to discriminate between base and fine art, arguing why this issue is of particular concern to Christians. (41 minutes)
- Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
- The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism” that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
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- Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
- From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
- The Cross in artistic expression — Richard Viladesau examines how the Passion of the Christ has been depicted artistically and aesthetically throughout Church history. (21 minutes)
- Roger Scruton: Music as an Art — Philosopher Roger Scruton explains why there are some things — music in particular and art in general — which one can’t rightly or fully perceive without making judgments. (32 minutes)
- Fujimura, Hibbs, & Siedell: Abstraction, immanence, & the cultural landscape — Artist, philosopher, and art historian discuss the tension between self-expression, transcendence, and the material world.
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 109 — FEATURED GUESTS: Douglas Coupland, Charles Mathewes, William T. Cavanaugh, William Dyrness, Steven Guthrie, and Susannah Clements
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- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 96 — FEATURED GUESTS: David A. Smith, Kiku Adatto, Elvin T. Lim, David Naugle, Richard Stivers, and John Betz
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
- Art and whateverism — Jed Perl on why great art is triumphantly intolerant
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 20 — FEATURED GUESTS: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Roger Lundin, Wilfred McClay, Andrew A. Tadie, Robert Jenson, Ted Prescott, and Ted Libbey
