Such prophecies have largely been realized. In twentieth-century Western culture, artworks have become the closest thing we have to sacred texts, and art almost seems a form of religion with its prophetic breed of creative artists perennially purveying new gospels and its priestly class of interpretive critics who explain them to a devotional public. Despite wide recognition that art has an important commercial aspect, art sustains its cultural image as an essentially sanctified domain of higher spiritual values, beyond the realm of material life and praxis. Its adored relics (however profane they strive to be) are sacredly enshrined in temple-like museums that we dutifully visit for spiritual edification, just as religious devotees have long frequented churches, mosques, synagogues, and other shrines of worship.

In advocating a pragmatist aesthetics I have criticized this otherworldly religion of art because of the way it has been shaped by more than two centuries of modern philosophical ideology aimed at disempowering art by consigning it to an unreal, purposeless world of imagination. Such religion, I have argued, is the enemy of pragmatism’s quest to integrate art and life, a quest exemplified both in the classical Western notion of the art of living and some Asian artistic traditions, where art is less importantly the creation of objects than the process of refining the artist who creates and the audience who absorbs that creative expression.[4]

There is good reason, however, why this sacralization of art should remain so powerfully appealing despite the widespread recognition of art’s mercantile dimensions and worldly concerns. The reason, I believe, is that art expresses very deep meanings and spiritual insights that religion and philosophy once most powerfully provided but that they now no longer convey in a convincing way to most of today’s secular populations throughout the world. So, in this essay I would like to reconsider the art and religion nexus from a different angle. I wish to explore the idea that art provides a useful, even superior, substitute for religion, one that is free from the latter’s many disadvantages and that should be vigorously championed as an alternative that could eventually free our transcultural world from the hostile divisiveness and backward-looking attitudes that religions have inspired and instead lead us toward greater understanding, peace, and harmony.

But a contrary yet equally interesting hypothesis likewise demands consideration: that art cannot be separated from religion, that rather than a real alternative, art is simply another mode or expression of religion. Or, to put it in a provocatively suggestive paraphrase, art is simply the continuation of religion by other means. If this hypothesis has merit—indeed, even if there is simply some deeply indissoluble link between art and religion— then we cannot simply look progressively past religion toward art. For our philosophy of art will be seen to express the metaphysics and ideologies generated by a religious worldview, which thus indirectly (if not also directly) shapes our aesthetic philosophy, even if we are unaware of this religious influence or deny real credence to the religion in question. To make this point more concretely I will later take up two examples that show how different metaphysics of religion engender different philosophies of aesthetic experience and the relationship of art to life.

II.

Before turning our focus more narrowly to the spiritual promise and paths of religion and art, let me briefly dispose of philosophy. Through its modern professionalization and consequent desire to be scientific, philosophy has largely foregone the pursuit of the fuzzy realm of wisdom and emotionally tinged spirituality. It prefers, at least in its dominant form, to maintain the status of objective, rigorous knowledge explored through a cool attitude of critical analysis characterized by deadly “dryness” (as Iris Murdoch and others have so described it).[5] Though wisdom and spiritual feelings still find powerful expression in religion, its intimate connection with the supernatural and with dogmatic theological faith in truths about the world’s creation that have been decisively discredited by modern science has made religion an unconvincing option for most intellectuals in the West. Moreover, the long and appallingly painful history of religious discrimination, intolerance, persecution, and even crusades of vicious warfare makes it hard for many minds to embrace religion as their source of spiritual edification and salvation.

This should remind us of a further problem with religion in an ever more tightly knit and explosively globalized world. Religion (whose Latin etymology, religare, highlights the role of gathering, tying, and binding together) has long been recognized by sociologists as providing the essential glue of social unity in traditional societies. But there can be little doubt that its fractious pluralities and sects have also generated enormous division and disunity, combined with fanatical zealotry and intolerance that threaten to blow the world apart instead of bringing it together. The so-called clash of civilizations that is today so ominously trumpeted is largely a euphemism for a clash rooted in different religious outlooks, roughly that of the Judæo-Christian West and that of Islam, the last of the three great Abrahamic religions to emerge from the spiritually fertile Middle East. Even within the same religious civilization, region, and time, religion is just as likely to generate angry dissension as it is to insure harmonious cohesion. I witnessed such internal religious wars as a student in Jerusalem, where I was frequently reviled and stoned by fanatical orthodox Jews. But that is nothing in comparison to today’s tragic bloodshed between Suni and Shia Muslims in Iraq. Finally, the distinctly dour and ascetically demanding dimensions of most religions, with their strict and restrictive commandments often accompanied by dire threats of severe (even eternal) punishments for disobedience, can hardly attract contemporary sensibilities that seem much more inclined to open-minded freedom in the pursuit of happiness, including the pursuit of sensory pleasures.

Art, in contrast, seems to be free of these disadvantages, thus promising a more fruitful and satisfying way for the expression of wisdom and spiritual meaning, replete with abundant sensory, emotional, and intellectual pleasures. It provides the joys of mystery and myth without committing our faith to superstitions and thus inducing the bitter aftertaste of shame that our scientific conscience is likely to experience upon attempts to swallow discredited otherworldly beliefs. As Arnold therefore argues, art is where our intellectually evolving human race

Not only poets but philosophers have similarly advocated art’s subsuming the role of religion. G. E. Moore, one of analytic philosophy’s founding fathers and the philosophical inspiration of the Bloomsbury aesthetic circle, wrote in 1902 that “Religion [is] merely a subdivision of Art” since “every valuable purpose which religion serves is also served by Art,” while “Art perhaps serves more” since “its range of good objects and emotions is wider.”[7] The idea that art provides a broader and more convincing alternative to religion has been reaffirmed in recent times by outspoken secular philosophers like the pragmatist Richard Rorty. In rejecting religion as a “conversation stopper,” Rorty champions the “inspirational value of great works of literature,” proclaiming “the hope for a religion of literature, in which works of the secular imagination replace Scripture as the principal source of inspiration and hope for each new generation.” This artistic religion he calls an “atheist’s religion.” Pluralistically liberal, it makes no claim to coerce behavior in the public sphere but only to console us individuals “in our aloneness” by connecting us with something far greater and inspiring beyond us—the marvelous world of great art—while guiding our efforts toward realizing both private perfection and more loving kindness to our fellow humans.[8]

Of course, we should also realize that the realm of art is not without its fractious divisions, fanaticisms, and intolerance. Besides the conflicts between proponents of elite and popular arts (that occasionally, as in the New York As-tor Square riots, have even erupted into real bloodshed), there is often fierce rivalry and bitter critique between different artistic styles—the schisms of “isms.” Such contention, however, rarely generates physical violence or cultural harm. In fact, one might argue that it provides a competitive spur to creativity. A more damaging and comprehensive, but sometimes less visible, form of art’s oppressive divisions is when the historically dominant concept of art disenfranchises the many forms of art that do not seem paradigmatic of that concept. From my Japanese colleagues I have learned that this is what happened in the Meiji period, when the Western conception of art was so coercively self-imposed on Japanese culture that its traditional arts (such as tea ceremony and calligraphy) were declassed from the category of art—geijutsu—and demoted to mere cultural practice, or what is called geidoh—literally ways of culture.[12] Clearly, in this case a particular hegemonic concept of art has done very painful cultural damage, which is now, fortunately, being rectified. But just as clearly the damages of artistic bigotry and enmity are infinitesimal when compared to the ravages wrought by religion.

There are many wonderful things about religion. Without its positive workings in the past, it is hard to believe that humankind would have developed the level of morality, rationality, love, community coherence, emotional richness, imaginative grandeur, and artistic creation that we have achieved. The argument for art replacing religion is that art sustains the valuable features of religion while minimizing or refining out the bad. John Dewey, for instance, who falls short of proposing art as a substitute for religion, nonetheless makes the argument that religion needs a process of purification through which its “ethical and ideal content” is separated from its unhealthy connection with belief in a “Supernatural Being” and with the often unsavory and outmoded ideologies, social practices, and ritual forms of worship that are simply the “irrelevant” accretion of “the conditions of social culture in which” the various traditional religions emerged. (For he recognizes that “there is no such thing as religion in the singular.”[13]) Dewey therefore recommends that we distinguish and preserve what he calls “the religious,” in contrast to religion in the concrete traditional sense. He defines the religious as an experience or attitude “having the force of bringing a better, deeper and enduring adjustment in life” that is “more outgoing, more ready and glad” than stoicism and “more active” than mere submission (CF 11-13). Moreover, in affirming that “any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality” (CF 19), Dewey notes that the artist (along with other types of committed inquirers) displays such activity.

Indeed, in making his case for the religious as a commitment to the ideals and purposes of life, Dewey appeals to Santayana’s identification of the religious imagination with the artistic. “Religion and poetry,” writes Santayana, “are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry.”[14] The conclusion that Dewey wants to draw from this, however, is that poetic imagination, with its “moral function . . . for . . . the ideals and purposes of life” (CF 13), should not be a mere playful, compartmentalized supervenience of art for art’s sake but rather a formative force in making social and public life, as well as private experience, more artistically beautiful and rewarding. In short, Dewey holds the pragmatist ideal that the highest art is the art of living with the goal of salvation in this world rather than the heaven of an afterlife.

III.

So far so good, we secular progressives would like to believe. But, in the questioning words of Shakespeare, “hath not this rose a canker?” Is art really so free of religion and those contingent societal ideologies and institutional practices that turn the ideal religious into objectionable religion? Could art have emerged and flourished, and could it continue to survive, without the beliefs, practices, and institutions of the cultures that gave birth to it and continue to sustain it, however contingent, imperfect, and questionable those impure societal dimensions of culture are? It is hard to see how it could, and how art could find meaningful content without these cultural beliefs, values, and practices deemed to be contingent, gratuitous, and impure. But even if it could exist in this purified ideal state, could art then be what Dewey desires—a formative influence for aesthetically reconstructing the world in better ways? How could it, if its imaginative ideals were not solidly connected with the webs of beliefs, practices, and institutions that structure society and thus are the necessary means for introducing positive changes to it? Dewey seems strangely unpragmatic here in advocating ideal ends while regarding the concrete cultural means—our institutional practices—as irrelevant.

If art is an emergent product of culture that cannot be meaningfully separated from it in the full-blown concrete sense of culture—including superstitions, silliness, prejudices, evils, and all—then one could make the following argument for art being essentially inseparable from religion. Art is indissolubly linked to culture. But culture, construed in the broad anthropological sense, is indissolubly linked to religion. In that important sense (influentially elaborated by Franz Boas and a host of other anthropologists and ethnographers) culture is “the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning.”[15] In that sense, it would seem that throughout history “no culture has appeared or developed except together with a religion”; and, as T. S. Eliot further remarks, “according to the point of view of the observer, the culture will appear to be the product of the religion, or the religion the product of the culture.”[16] In more primitive societies, the different aspects of cultural or religious life are more intimately enmeshed so that they are hard to distinguish, and it is only through the process Max Weber describes as “rationalizing modernization” that what we now regard as the distinct fields of science, politics, religion, and art came to be conceived abstractly as separate from each other. But in reality, even in the modern, secular West, the separation cannot hold, as the manifold mixings and tumultuous frictions between these fields so often demonstrates. Consider the issue of abortion or stem cell research, or that of the public funding (or simply display) of religiously controversial art.

Now, if art is inseparable from culture, and culture is inseparable from religion, then it seems likely that art is also indissolubly linked to religion in a significant way. Certainly there is an essential and intimate historical linkage, as I mentioned at the outset. We would like to think that modern rationalization in the last two centuries has gradually severed the link. But history is not so easily undone in such short time, and perhaps our religious traditions, more than we think, remain vibrantly formative beneath the surface of the secular field of aesthetics and autonomous art—for instance, in our notions of artistic genius and creation, of art’s lofty spiritual values, of its elevation from worldly interests and mere real things, and in our models (and terms) for interpreting art’s mysteries. I cannot explore this question thoroughly in this short article, but let me make a start by considering one notion that has been rather influential in recent philosophy of art. Though repeatedly deployed by nonreligious philosophers of art in the analytic tradition, it seems hard to appreciate without taking seriously its religious meaning and aura. I refer to the notion of “transfiguration.”

Arthur Danto, the most influential of contemporary analytic aestheticians, has made the concept of transfiguration the keystone of his philosophy of art. An artwork may be an object visually identical with another quite ordinary thing that is not art. Therefore, Danto concludes that art requires the artist’s interpretation of the object as art (and that this interpretation must also be rendered possible by the state of art history and theory). Such interpretation is required to transfigure ordinary objects (what Danto calls “mere real things”) into works of art—which for Danto are things of an altogether different category and ontological status. Even before his famous 1981 book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (whose influence has been so significant that the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication was recently celebrated by the first online aesthetics conference), Danto deployed the idea of transfiguration to explain his crucial concept of the artworld, a concept that inspired the institutional theories of art that have also been very influential.[17] Already in his 1964 essay on “The Artworld” (where Danto defines the artworld as “stand[ing] to the real world . . . [as] the City of God stands to the Earthly City” [AT 582]), we find his key notion of transfiguration: that artworks are somehow transfigured into a higher, sacred, ontological realm wholly different from the real things of this world from which they may be visually or sensorily indiscernible or, as in readymades, with which they may even be physically identical. Already in this early essay we find Danto alluding to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes—his inspirational icon of miraculous artistic transfiguration—in terms of the Catholic mystery of transubstantiation, as symbolizing a whole world “of latent artworks waiting, like the bread and wine of reality, to be transfigured, through some dark mystery, into the indiscernible flesh and blood of the sacrament” (AT 580-81).

Though Danto describes his philosophy of art as inspired by Hegel, he distinguishes himself from Hegel in denying “that art has been superseded by philosophy” (AB 137). Indeed, in some ways he regards art as having taken over not only philosophy’s role of theorizing about art but also philosophy’s traditional concern with wisdom about life’s deep questions; for he insists: “Philosophy is simply hopeless in dealing with the large human issues” (AB 137). Danto, moreover, certainly concurs with the dominant modern trend to see art as superseding religion by conveying (in his words) “the kind of meaning that religion was capable of providing”: the highest spiritual truths and meanings, including the “supernatural meanings” of “metaphysics or theology.”[18]

I have repeatedly pointed to Danto’s very Catholic religious rhetoric, but he always replies that he is a wholly secular person.[19] Though, as a student in Israel, I had first assumed that Danto was an aristocratic Italian Catholic transplanted to New York City, he later told me he was actually a non-observant Jew from Detroit, the son of a Jewish Freemason. All the Catholic rhetoric of transfiguration in his theory, he insists, does not reflect his personal religious beliefs but is merely a facon de parler, a manner of speaking. But does the religious dimension really disappear by calling it a mere manner of speaking? I don’t think so. First, manners of speaking cannot be easily separated from manners of living: real matters of belief, practice, and fact. Otherwise, those ways of speaking lose their efficacy. If the religious tenor of transfiguration did not still somehow resonate with our religious sensibility, with our religious experience, faith, or imagination (however displaced and disguised it may be), then this manner of speaking would not be as captivating and influential as it has proven to be.

This brings up a second point. Why did a secular Jewish philosopher choose this particular way of speaking about art, and why has it been so successful and influential? The reason, I think, is that the religious other-worldliness of the Christian tradition is deeply embedded in our Western artistic tradition itself and in the Western tradition of philosophy of art. It therefore has significantly shaped both of these traditions, even for artists, critics, and philosophers who do not consciously ascribe to Christian beliefs and attitudes. We should not think that we secular, or even anti-Christian, theorists of the Western artworld are entirely free of our culture’s religion in our theorizing; and in the globalized contemporary artworld shaped by the West, perhaps no one is completely free of it.

I am not claiming that art’s transfigurative power is a narrowly Christian idea. If there is anything that all our different cultures ascribe to art, it could be the transfigurative, transformative power of its creative expression and aesthetic experience. My key claim, rather, is that if we wish to understand art’s experience in terms of transfiguration, we should insist on recognizing at least two distinct underlying religious ontologies and ideologies of transfiguration, which I shall outline in the rest of this article. First, there is the dominant, familiarly Christian style of otherworldly elevation—based on a transcendental theology with an eternal, unchanging, disembodied God existing apart from the world he created (though miraculously embodying himself in his Son to save the human creatures of that world). Central to this theology is the corresponding notion of an immaterial, eternal human essence (the soul) that can be saved and elevated to God’s otherworldliness. In such religion of the transcendental gap, spirituality (be it in art or elsewhere) means an elevated distance from the ordinary material world, an ascent to a radically other world, whether the artworld or heaven. Here transfiguration typically implies a radical shift of metaphysical status, from the realm of mere spatiotemporal entities to a different, spiritually transcendent existence; so works of art must be distinguished (in Danto’s terms) from “mere real things.”

In contrast, Zen Buddhist–style notions of art and religious practice offer a religion of immanence with no transcendental, personal God existing outside the world of creation; no eternal, personal, immaterial soul existing apart from its embodied manifestations; and no sacred world (an artworld or heaven) existing beyond the world of experienced flux. The essential distinction between the sacred and the profane (or between art and nonart) no longer marks a rigid ontological divide between radically different worlds of things but rather a difference of how the same world of things is perceived, experienced, and lived—whether artistically, with an inspiring spirit of presence and an absorbing sense of profound significance or sanctity, or instead as merely insignificant, routine banalities. Transfiguration, in such religions of immanence, does not entail a change of ontological status through elevation to a higher metaphysical realm but is rather a transformation of perception, meaning, use, and attitude. Not a matter of vertical transposition to an elevated ethereal realm, it is rather a vividness and immediacy of being in this world, of feeling the full power and life of its presence and rhythms, of seeing its objects with a wondrous clarity and freshness of vision. Consider this description of the path to transfigured insight provided by the Chinese Zen master Ch’ing Yuan of the Tang Dynasty: “Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got the very substance I am at rest. For it is just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.”[20]

IV.

Hegel deploys this painting to argue for art’s transfigurative elevation and capacity to sensuously convey the highest spiritual truths, even when they depart from the visual truth, since no normal view could, in truth, simultaneously include both the picture’s scenes. Yet Hegel writes, “Christ’s visible Transfiguration is precisely his elevation above the earth, and his departure from the Disciples, and this must be made visible too as a separation and a departure.”[22] If we go by the Gospel narratives, Raphael’s painting of the transfigured Jesus in complete “elevation” and “separation” from the earth lacks not only visual truth but also scriptural truth. But it wonderfully conveys the alleged truth of classical Christian transcendentalism (just as Hegel’s philosophical idealism does) while just as superbly implying its artistic analogue—that art’s transfiguration is an “elevation and separation” into some higher otherworldliness.

Photo 1. The drum cans of Shorinkutzu-Dojo.

minutes of effective meditation, I lost my grip of concentration and decided to end the session. Turning my glance toward the closest of the two barrels, my perception grew more penetrating and I found this object suddenly transfigured into a vision of breathtaking beauty—just as beautiful as the sea, indeed even more so. I felt I was really seeing that drum can for the first time, savoring the subtle sumptuousness of its coloring, the shades of orange, the tints of blue and green that highlighted its earthy browns. I thrilled to the richness of its irregular texture, its tissue of flaking and peeling crusts embellishing the hard iron shell—a symphony of soft and firm surfaces that suggested a delicious feuilleté.

However we address these issues, one question must be faced forthwith: Were those transfigured drum cans art? Though clearly not part of the institutional artworld, they were just as obviously part of an installation work of deliberate design aimed at providing experiences that could be described as meaningful, thought-provoking, and aesthetically evocative.[25] And the deliberative design of this installation suggests that it was obviously “about something” (a condition of meaning generally deemed necessary for art). But what, exactly, the drum cans were about is a question that has many possible answers: the powers and possibilities of meditation, the surprising uses of industrial detritus, the contrast yet continuity of nature and artifact, the question of beauty (difficult and hidden versus easy and conventional), even the meaning I eventually found in it—the immanent transfiguration of ordinary objects that could make them art without taking them out of the real world and into a compartmentalized, transcendent artworld whose objects have an entirely different metaphysical status. Such immanent transfiguration, whose meaning of enriched presence is to fuse art and life rather than suggest their essential contrast and discontinuity, is where Zen converges with pragmatist aesthetics.

V.

Must we choose irrevocably between these two forms of transfiguration and their respective religious ideologies of art?[26] One reason for resisting this choice is that these options do not seem to exhaust the forms or interpretations of art’s transfigurative experience. I have not considered here the meaning of aesthetic transfiguration for the Confucian religious tradition, whose emphasis on aesthetic ritual and art over supernatural creeds have made it, for millennia, so attractive and influential for East Asian minds. It proved immensely more attractive than the religion of Mozi (an early rival of Confucius), whose more Christian doctrine of universal love came with the belief in a supreme supernatural deity (and lesser spirits and ghosts) but also with a bleak anti-aesthetic asceticism (that is dourly Protestant in character). Part of the genius of the ancient Confucians was to accept the growing force of the theological skepticism of their time by essentially eschewing supernatural religious metaphysics and confining their focus to the rescue and revitalization of the positive ideals and values embedded in traditional religious ritual and art. By expressing these ideals and values through more intellectually convincing interpretations that were focused on the aesthetic and ethical cultivation of both individual and society, Confucianism could thus offer an elaborately harmonious redemption of this-worldly life. Indeed, our own contemporary moment, with its growing skepticism in the supernatural and its pervasively aesthetic turn that tends to emphasize ostentation, richness, and complexity rather than Daoist or Zen simplicity, may make Confucianism the most appealing religion for the twenty-first century, at least for secular minds. I confess to be touched by its attractions, as I am touched by Zen and pragmatist meliorism.

But rather than trying to pick a winner here, I want to close by briefly raising another option since my survey of art’s religious traditions has been so sketchy and limited, neglecting the rich artistic traditions of other religious cultures such as Islam, Judaism, and the indigenous religions of Africa and America. Might we not adopt a more pluralistic approach to the religious ontology of art and perhaps let the context of the artwork and its cultural tradition determine for us which approach is best for appreciating its transfigurative meaning and spiritual truth? Can we be pluralist syncretists in our “religions” of art, even if we lack such flexibility in our traditional theologies, metaphysics, and religiously shaped ethics?

A pragmatist aesthetic pluralism would like to admit this possibility. If it were indeed possible, aesthetics could really be a wonderful bridge between cultures, even warring ones. But if aesthetics cannot be ultimately separated from a culture’s underlying religious attitudes, then it may not be feasible to realize this possibility in our imperfect world until we also work not only through but beyond aesthetics to transform our cultures and religious attitudes in the direction of deeper, more open-minded understanding. This does not mean a spineless, anything-goes tolerance of evident evil and flagrant falsehood. Nor should this involve the quest to abolish all real difference and the role of disharmony and dissent, without which we could never appreciate the agreeable harmonies of art.

NOTES

[3] Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in The Portable Matthew Arnold, ed. L. Trilling (New York: Viking, 1949), 300.

[6] Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” 299.

[8] Richard Rorty, “Religion as Conversation Stopper,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 118-24; Achieving Our Country, 125, 132, 136.