Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LI/1

Aesthetic Strategies in Western Religious Thought

David Chidester
s soon as we say, "Religion and Aesthetics," we are caught in a problem It would seem that we are bringing together two relatively separate and independent entities two separate dimensions of human consciousness, two separate areas of human activity, two separate subject fields We may get the impression that these are two distinct spheres of influence, which we are bringing into some arbitrary juxtaposition What a study of religion and aesthetics reveals, however, is that in the lived reality of our experience we are caught up in an intricate network of judgments that are simultaneously religious and aesthetic When we start talking about our ultimate predispositions toward the world of experience, the shape and contours of our realities and our deepest sense of personal identity, we may find that the religious and the aesthetic are mutually implied Religion and aesthetics are intimately intertwined in a number of important and interesting ways They are already related to the extent that we can identify religious dimensions within works of art and aesthetic structures implicit in religion It is the purpose of this brief paper to clarifyon a theoretical levelthe relationship between religion and aesthetics First of all, it is possible to identify religious dimensions within works of art The religious dimensions can be identified in two ways One way is in terms of diffusion There are instances where we can locate and describe certain historical influences of a religious community, text, or practice upon a work of art The influence of Aquinas's Summa upon Dante's Divine Comedy, the influence of the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola upon the metaphysical poets, the influence of Calvin upon Miltonthese would all be examples of religious dimensions in literature which can be empirically traced to a process of historical diffusion Examples from the visual arts could include the influence of the liturgy upon the development

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David Chidester (Ph D , Santa Barbara) is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and California State University, Northndge He is the author of "The Symbolism of Learning in St Augustine," Harvard Theological Review (in press) and "Symbolic Synesthesia in the History of Religions," Epoche Journal of the History of Religions at UCLA (Volume 10, 1982)

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of early Christian art or the influence of Neoplatonic programs upon the Pirmavera of Botticelli or the Stanza delta Segnatura of Raphael, and in the area of music we could discuss the influence of the Gospel of St Matthew on Bach, the influence of Masonic number symbolism on Mozart, or the influence of transcendental meditation on the Beatles and Evangelical Christianity on Bob Dylan Sometimes this diffusion of religious materials into works of art can be very complex, such as the intricate web of influences, from alchemical Neoplatonism to low-church Methodist hymnal piety, which seem to operate in Blake's poetry and art, or, we may be satisfied with a simple, straightforward act of classification, such as "T S Eliot was a highchurch Anglican poet " However this research is conducted, it is essentially a historical problem of locating, examining, and clarifying religious sources and resources which are appropriated by artists in their work The second way of talking about the religious dimensions of works of art is in terms of morphology This is a little more subtle Here we are interested in the ways that art can be analogous to religion Art may be analogous to religion in terms of its structure or its function With regard to structure, we often find in works of art thematic patterns of initiation, quest, symbolic death and resurrection, ascent, etc , or more formal patterns of symbohzation, myth, ritual, and liturgy, which are analogous to patterns in the history of religion This was something that particularly aroused the interest of Mircea Ehade He thought that it was necessary for scholars in the history of religions to analyze the archetypal patterns of archaic religiosity which often appear in vestigial form in works of art and literature For example, in his journal he recorded the following
I'm reading Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, and I'm fascinated by the boldness of the symbols, the precision and richness of the images The adventure is, properly speaking, an initiation, and, as in every adventure of this sort, one can find the wanderings through the labyrinth, the descent to the underworld, the crossing of the waters, trial by fire, meetings with monsters, trial by absolute solitude and darkness, and finally the triumphant ascension, which is nothing other than the apotheosis of the initiate (2)

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It may then be possible to identify deep structural analogies between religious and aesthetic symbolic forms Religion and art may also be analogous in terms of function In certain situations it may appear that religion and art are doing something very similar when it comes to giving shape to the world we live in If the function of myth is to orient the individual within a meaningful reality, then works of art that also perform this function, or contribute to this end, may be described as mythic It may then be possible to identify situations in which artists and art forms perform functions that are usually ascribed to religion Between diffusion and morphology we can locate the general range of

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possibilities for considering religious dimensions within works of art But how should we go about identifying aesthetic structures implicit in religion'' It is obvious that religious traditions make use of works of art in ritual, liturgy, and worship But is there a more fundamental way in which aesthetic patterns are a necessary part of basic religious orientations? Are there aesthetic conditions that in some basic way precondition religious stances in the world'1 Stephen Pepper, in his World Hypotheses, demonstrated how certain root metaphors determined the shape of philosophical positions, and Hayden White, in his Metahistory, has shown how certain aesthetic forms, such as the basic modes of emplotment (Tragedy, Comedy, Romance, and Irony) and the dominant rhetorical tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) determined the shape of history and historiography in the nineteenth century, but no real attempt has been made to identify and explore the kinds of metaphoric imagery and aesthetic judgments that underlie theological postures Is it possible to reduce theological positions to certain aesthetic orientations? One way to do this would be to talk about powerful root metaphors that condition and give shape to more systematic theological orientations Ian Barbour mentions four metaphoric images for symbolizing the relation between God and the world (1974) God's relation to the world may be seen as that of a king to a kingdom, a clockmaker to a clock, a person to another person, and an agent to his or her actions (155) The appropriation of one of these root metaphors will condition the range of religious concepts, beliefs, and doctrines that can be drawn from it Another way to do this would be to look at how both religion and aesthetics may be based in sense perception Elsewhere I have explored the ways in which visual and auditory perception provides the basic coordinates of religious and aesthetic orientations (Chidester:61-75) There is a primacy of perception in both areas With any given religious thinker, historical period, or tradition there may be a precritical disposition toward the visual coordinate, which will produce dramatically different religious and aesthetic orientations than a precritical disposition toward the auditory The center of gravity for both religion and aesthetics may be to some extent be determined by the dominant perceptual mode. To refer to very obvious examples, the Greeks were visual and the Hebrews were auditory the Middle Ages visual and the Reformation auditory A third way to do this would be to analyze theoretical strategies within a given religious tradition that are simultaneously theological and aesthetic One situation which should be explored in more detail is the way in which religious thinkers in the Western tradition have attempted to defend, justify, and reconcile artistic creativity within a theological context There is a limited number of options, or what I would like to call strategies, for doing this within the tradition There are basically four strategies for reconciling artistic creativity within a theological framework in Western religious thought the ecstatic, the mimetic, the heuristic, and the iconic To outline these

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strategies is to reveal the aesthetic predispositions and judgments that are implicit in religious orientations I would like to narrow the discussion of these interpretive strategies slightly by focusing on the ways theologians have defended poetry M H Abrams has pointed out that there are four constituent elements involved in every poetic creation the artist, the external world, the audience and the art work itself (3-29) These are the four terminals which define the horizon of every creative event But it is the appropriation of one of these constituents, as a critical center of gravity, which produces a distinctive interpretive strategy The primacy of the author in the creative process is defended in traditional Romantic poetics, where poetry is understood to express the sensitivity, insights, feelings, and the like, of the author, and its value is primarily as an index to the inner life of the poet We also find the primacy of the author asserted in the kind of straightforward hermeneutical method suggested by E D Hirsch, whose Validity in Interpretation insists that the author's intention is the court of first and last appeal in any question of meaning, and in the perhaps even less sophisticated fascination with the biographies of literary figures, which, in its extreme form, becomes a preoccupation with what J D Salinger called "those few or many details of a poet's life that may be defined here, loosely, operationally, as lurid " But, the inner life and expressive power of the author do not provide the only criteria by which we can analyze the creative process. There is the mimetic approach to the interpretation of literature, which, from Aristotle down to the neo-Aristotelian Chicago school, has attempted to evaluate art in terms of its ability to imitate the real world of ideas or things. Here the interpretive concern is with the capacity of the artistic process to engage not only the external world of our common environment, but also the inner worlds of human thought, and to replicate the form and movement of these worlds as in a mirror A third critical approach considers the impact of the artwork upon the observer. In the experience of literature, it is the dynamic interaction between reader and text that is the crucial locus of meaning. Earlier critical approaches in this vein, such as the moralist criticism popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have given way to the reader response theories promoted by Stanley Fish and others, and to the hermeneutical strategies represented by Heidegger and Gadamer Finally, it is possible to consider the text, or artwork, as an independent artifact with its own inherent patterns of consistency, order, and meaning On the strength of this principle, the New Critics built an empire in literary criticism, extending from the work of Brooks and Wimsatt to the Anatomy of Criticism of Northrop Frye. In this way, it is possible to categorize these conflicting aesthetic orientations in terms of the element of the creative process they have appropriated as their basic point of departure. In the process of reconciling poetry within a theological framework we can also isolate four distinctive interpretive postures that emerge from the

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concern with one or another of these four elements These four interpretive strategies for reconciling poetic creativity within a theological framework, corresponding to the artist, the external world, the audience, and the art work as their precntical centers of gravity, are the ecstatic strategy, which is concerned with the artist, the mimetic strategy, which is concerned with the external world, the heuristic strategy, which is concerned with the audience, and the iconic strategy, which is concerned with artwork itself This is not a classification of kinds of poetry Rather, it is a classification of the dominant aesthetic strategies, which, as I will suggest here, are integrally related to characteristic theological postures. By isolating these strategies, and briefly indicating their historical scope, it will be possible to suggest one way in which the interpenetration of aesthetic and religious materials is implicit in the history of Western thought The ecstatic strategy begins with the precritical concern with the agency of the artist in the creative process A divine or quasi-divine state of transport is presumed as the generative agency for poetic activity The poet attains a mediatorial position, between divine and human realms, through the ecstatic transport or the enthusiastic indwelling of inspiration The "patron saint" of this strategy is the Plato of the Ion, the Phaedrus, and the Symposium The justification of poetry within a theological framework revolves precisely around the role of the poet as "seer " In the Platonic context, the ecstatic imagination has access to universals beyond the sensible world In normal circumstances, Plato relegated the imagination to a subordinate level of cognition In the epistemology of the divided line, in the sixth book of the Republic, the imagination is the human faculty which relates to images of the sensible world and the phantasies of things unseen In terms of aesthetics, this defines the "deceptive imagination," and artists who demonstrate this are "makers of likenesses rather than contemplatives of eternal ideas" (Bundy 29) But in the "poetic furor" of the Phaedrus, the divine mania leading to the contemplation of ideas, the imaginative ascent "from the beauties of the earth, mounting upwards for the sake of that other beauty" of the Symposium, and the suggestion of divine inspiration in the poet of the Ion, there is outlined the perimeter within which the ecstatic strategy for reconciling poetic creativity within a theological framework will be assimilated into Christian thought However Plato may have intended this "ecstatic imagination" to be understood, it was obviously appropriated within the Platonic tradition as an authentic mode of divine inspiration and a genuine means of contemplative ascent In Cicero we discover the logic of poetic inspiration which will be repeated in the Renaissance by such proponents of the ecstatic strategy as Petrarch and Boccaccio "Poetry depends solely upon an inner faculty, is evoked by a purely mental activity and is infused with a strange supernal

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inspiration" (Smith and Parks 799-800) Here poetry is defined as a sui generis faculty, interior to the artist, as something continuous with a supernatural or divine influence The model of contemplative ascent, as an aesthetic strategy, was integral to the Neoplatonism of Plotinus "There are beauties more lofty than these, imperceptible to sense, that the soul without aid of sense perceives and proclaims To perceive them we must go higher, leaving sensation behind on its own level" (Plotinus I vi 4, O'Brien 37) This contemplative ascent of the "ecstatic imagination" finds expression in the modified Christian Platonism of Augustine in his theological justification of the visual arts. "All those beauties which pass through men's souls into their skillfull hands come from that Beauty which is above souls and for which my soul is sighing day and night" (Augustine X 34, Warner.244). Although there was a continuous tradition of this strategy throughout the Middle Ages, we witness a second major flowering of its influence in the Poetic Theology of the Renaissance Although Dante is the first to be called "Poeticus Theologicus," and referred to himself as "scribe dei," it is with Petrarch that we discover the most prominent theoretical formulation of the prophetic role of the poet In the Invectiva contra Medtcum, Petrarch quotes Cicero on the "holy" poet's innate faculty, inspired by divine breath, who precedes even the philosophers in attaining truth In fact, "the first theologians were poets" (Petrarch-674) Poetic creativity is justified by being assimilated into theology Further confirmation of this is evident in the process by which the "ancient poets"Orpheus, Musaeus, Lineusbecome the "ancient theologians" as we move from the writings of Petrarch in the fourteenth century to those of Ficino and Pico in the fifteenth century (Trinkhaus.683-721) The dominant characteristics of this mode of reconciliation can be summarized. The ecstatic strategy excludes the rhetorical concerns with effecting or influencing the audience to concentrate on the inherent genius of the poet It therefore sees poetry as not expressly designed to communicate The motifs of concealing and veiling are commonplaces in this strategy In the words of Petrarch, "it is the poet's endeavor to adorn the reality of truth with a beautiful garment, so that it may be hidden from the doltish rabble" (Petrarch 672) The ecstatic strategy, then, beginning with the mysterious, transcendental agency of the poet, comes to value the concealment of religious mysteries for a contemplative elite There is a radically different perspective which emerges when we shift to the mimetic strategy Here the "patron saint" is Aristotle and the precritical center of gravity resides in the concern with the relation between poetic activity and the external world The characteristic aesthetic posture which is articulated in the Poetics establishes the function of poetry as the imitation of universals in things Where the ecstatic strategy was concerned with the contemplative access of the inspired poetic imagination to universals, ante rem, the mimetic strategy shifts the frame of reference to the representation, or imitation, of universals, in re This process, which, in Susanne

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Langer's terms, is one of "abstractive seeing," is characteristic of Aristotelianism as an aesthetic strategy (Langer 72) The ecstatic and mimetic strategies are obviously integral to their respective Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysical frameworks. But, in the case of the mimetic strategy, the significance of the aesthetic strategy for religious thought emerges when Christianity is accommodated to Aristotelian metaphysics by Aquinas. In this context, poetry is defined in clearly mimetic terms as "representation " In the Summa theologiae, Aquinas suggests that metaphor is employed in poetry for the representation of the external world, while metaphor is used in sacra doctrina for the representation of truth. "Poetry employs metaphors for the sake of representation in which we are born to take delight Holy teaching, on the other hand, adopts them for indispensable usefulness" (Aquinas:la 1 9. Gilby57). There is a clear subordination of poetry, as the imitation of the external world, to theology Poetic creativity is reconciled within a theological framework by circumscribing its scope of activity with the mimetic representation of the external world The third precntical orientation finds its center of gravity in the concern with the audience to which a work of art is directed The "patron saint" of this general aesthetic strategy is Horace, whose "utilitarian theory of poetry," within the context of classical rhetoric, justified poetry in terms of its capacity "to teach and to please " This third orientation defines the heuristic strategy by which poetic acitivity becomes accommodated to theological purpose The didactic and pedagogical applications of poetry are emphasized in praising the poet, "who mixes the sweet with the useful," to positively effect the audience (Smith and Parks. 124) The ultimate expression of the utilitarian aesthetic occurs when Horace attributes the origin and development of civilization to poetry
It was the office of wisdom, in that former time, to set the bounds of public and private property, and the limits of the sacred and the secular, to prohibit promiscuous concubinage, and found the rite of marriage, to establish the civic order and record the laws it was in these performances that the honor and renown of the divine bards and poems came into being (Smith and Parks 126)

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It is the propensity of this poetry of instruction to direct itself toward its audience, informing the very order of society, that defines the heuristic aesthetic strategy The relation between poetry and theology, which is implicit in this heuristic strategy, becomes more apparent when we look at the uses to which the traditions of rhetorical humanism are put by a Reformational theologian such as Melanchthon In his Responsio ad Picum Mirandola, in defense of the art of eloquence, he almost literally quotes the passage from Horace concerning the relation between poetry and civilization "It has been

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said, with good reason, that when men were still dispersed and nomadic they were gathered together by eloquence, and that by it states were founded, by it rights, religions, legitimate marriage and the other bonds of human society were constituted" (56). As poetry is justified by Horace to the extent that it is useful in establishing moral order and effective in its ability "to teach and to please," Melanchthon justifies poetic activity to the extent that it is useful to theology and effective as a heuristic device: "I also interpret the symbols and the parables as having no intention of concealing their precepts, they should rather be looked upon as pictures of good conduct (morum picturae) which are useful for exciting the mind to admiration" (Melanchthon 63) In contrast to the ecstatic strategy, in which poetry is not designed principally to communicate (we have noted the emphasis on concealing and veiling), the heuristic strategy is primarily concerned with poetry's ability to communicate and effect an audience In braod terms this corresponds to the democratization of the mysteries for the masses, which takes sacred doctrine "out of academic obscurity and makes it practically useful in public afhars," which seems to characterize for Melanchthon the transition from Renaissance to Reformation (Melanchthon-58) The last of the four strategies may be designated as iconic. In this orientation, the precritical center of gravity is located in a concern for the artwork itself as a multidimensional configuration of different levels of meaning We could recognize St Paul as the "patron saint" of this strategy, in the distinction between the letter and the spirit of the text, if we recognize also that he is clearly harvesting a long tradition of Greek allegoresis He also prefigures the further sophistication of the hermeneutical principles by which the multidimensionahty of the text is made systematically intelligible The evolution of medieval polysemous exegesis, in the four dimensions of literal, allegorical, moral and anagogic, develops precisely this hermeneutical structure which attempts to locate different levels of significance which are inherent in the text itself The second stage of the development of this strategy reveals the way in which it operated in Christian terms to reconcile poetry within a theological framework Bonaventure's De reductione artium ad theologiam is an elaborate illustration of this strategy at work He finds that the medieval hermeneutical model provides the basic structure by which all the arts can be understood to replicate the fundamental pattern of theology In Dante's famous letter to Can Grande, the fourfold structure of interpretation is more specifically transferred from scripture to poetry Poetry and scripture are both multidimensional and can both be interpreted within similar exegetical structures In this sense, poetry is analogous to theology With this iconic concern for the intrinsic structure of the artwork, the levels of significance which are inherent within it, Dante was able to reconcile poetic creations with theological modes of interpretation These four strategies, therefore, represent precritical centers of gravity

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from which critical orientations arise in the concern for the artist, the external world, the audience or the artwork As they become more fully articulated, they assume the stature of ideal types of aesthetic postures These strategies, in actual practice, would lend themselves to different combinations, but could nevertheless be located as characteristic modes of reconciling poetic creativity within a theological framework The ecstatic strategy maintains that poetry is continuous with theology, because the artist is able to capture the divine inspiration and rise above ordinary experience. The poets and the prophets speak the same language and have access to the same truth The mimetic strategy contends that poetry is subordinate to theology, because, while they both us metaphoric imagery, the one imitates the external world, while the other imitates truth They both have their place, but the one is hierarchically subordinate to the other The heuristic strategy proposes that poetry is designed to be used by theology, because the primary objective is to affect the audience and exhort the listeners to moral action And, finally, the iconic strategy understands poetry to be analogous to theology, because both involve multivocal symbolic forms which disclose multiple layers of meaning Each strategy reveals a posture that is simultaneously religious and aesthetic. There has been a certain ambivalence in the discipline of the history of religions about how closely we should identify the aesthetic with the sacred It might be argued that part of the usefulness of Rudolf Otto's category of "the Holy" was its ability to distinguish religious from aesthetic experience, even though they may both share a similar emotive power The definition of the sacred as the ganz Andere sets religious experience apart from aesthetic judgments and dispositions as a pure encounter with transcendent power This radical dichotomy between the religious and the aesthetic spheres is somewhat muted in van der Leeuw's Sacred and Profane Beauty, The Holy in Art, where the various human art forms serve as vehicles for the evocative power of the sacred. In this way, van der Leeuw suggested that the sacred can express itself through various artistic media and, thereby, opened the door for all kinds of analyses of religious dimensions in works of art As I have suggested, these kinds of studies basically take two forms diffusionist and morphological The approach I wish to pursue in the study of religion and aesthetics, however, reverses the direction of both Otto's and van der Leeuw's arguments to suggest that there are aesthetic judgments and dispositions that are formative, and perhaps even determinative, of human thought and feeling in relation to what is held to be sacred The analysis of aesthetic strategies in Western religious thought suggests that we can talk about aesthetic judgments implicit in religion, and not simply limit ourselves to looking for expressions of the sacred, or dimensions of religion, in works of art There are fundamental aesthetic postures that play a constituent role in the relation between human beings and the sacred The discipline of the History of Religions is in an excellent position to clarify the mutual lnterpenetration of the religious and the aesthetic

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In order to accomplish this I am convinced that it will be necessary to abandon Otto's contention that religious experience is sut generis. If religious experience were of a qualitatively different order from other kinds of human experience, then it would be hard to see how it could possibly engage in the kinds of interactions with aesthetic experience that van der Leeuw, and even Otto himself, would allow. It seems more fruitful to consider human experience as a complex, multidimensional network of interrelated dimensions than to stratify different aspects of human experience in a hierarchy of value The insistence upon religious feeling as a qualitatively different experience from aesthetic feeling impoverishes our understanding of both This also suggests that it is important to avoid the opposite extreme of simply collapsing the aesthetic and the religious and assuming that they are really identical, that religion is simply a matter of taste, feeling and aesthetic disposition, or that aesthetic experience is a mode of religious engagement In recognizing the lines of connection between religion and aesthetics it is not necessary to subsume the one under the other In our analysis of aesthetic strategies in Western religious thought, it has been possible to observe how different theological positions have involved distinctively different aesthetic postures Augustine's defense of artistic creativity in terms of the divine influences that flow from above through the artist's hands is just as much an integral part of the fabric of his religious thought as Aquinas's insistence that poetic metaphor is subordinate to the use of metaphor in sacra doctrina is clearly representative of the basic structure of his religious universe Melanchthon's desire that the arts should contribute to the moral edification of the audience and Bonaventure's insight into the correspondence between human arts and divine revelation are a direct reflection of their most fundamental religious and aesthetic commitments But more than simply serving as an index to basic religious convictions, these aesthetic strategies reveal what I am calling the precritical center of gravity of religious thought Each strategy begins with a different point of departure We might ask the question, Why this point of departure and not another? Why begin with the artist, rather than the external world, the audience or the artwork itself? The answer to this question does not seem to reside in any rational explanation, but in the distinctive aesthetic predisposition toward one of the elements in the creative process The act of appropriation is not simply a random, irrational choice Because it is precritical, it reveals the religious thinker's most basic orientation The options are clearly limited, and the appropriation of one of these options inevitably leads to the development of the corresponding strategy It is almost as if the full articulation of the strategy is contained in embryo in the original point of departure It only takes the act of appropriation of one of the options to engage its corresponding strategy, and then, with some differences of nuance and elaboration, the strategy is played out within the clearly defined limits implicit in the chosen point of departure.

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This precritical dimension of religious thought is evident in the gravitation toward dominant perceptual metaphors, it is demonstrated in the religio-aesthetic preference for certain root-metaphors to symbolize the relation between humans and the sacred, and it emerges in the appropriation of one element of the creative process as a point of departure for a strategy that will justify poetic creativity in terms that simultaneously reveal the basic religious and aesthetic commitments of the religious thinker in question It would be possible to develop in more detail how certain doctrines and beliefs more easily constellate around one or another of these aesthetic strategies But it may simply be enough to acknowledge that aesthetic dispositions, orientations, and judgments are an important dimension of religion, just as religious influences, structures, and functions can be an important dimension of aesthetic forms
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