An Ethology of Religion and Art

Belief as Behavior

Bryan Rennie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000046793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Religious Art

Drawing from sources including the ethology of art and the cognitive science of religion this book proposes an improved understanding of both art and religion as behaviors developed in the process of human evolution. Looking at both art and religion as closely related, but not identical, behaviors a more coherent definition of religion can be formed that avoids pitfalls such as the Eurocentric characterization of religion as belief or the dismissal of the category as nothing more than false belief or the product of scholarly invention.

The book integrates highly relevant insights from the ethology and anthropology of art, particularly the identification of "the special" by Ellen Dissanayake and art as agency by Alfred Gell, with insights from, among others, Ann Taves, who similarly identified "specialness" as characteristic of religion. It integrates these insights into a useful and accurate understanding and explanation of the relationship of art and religion and of religion as a human behavior. This in turn is used to suggest how art can contribute to the development and maintenance of religions.

The innovative combination of art, science, and religion in this book makes it a vital resource for scholars of Religion and the Arts, Aesthetics, Religious Studies, Religion and Science and Religious Anthropology.

1 General introduction¹

Good sense is the most evenly shared thing in the world, for each of us thinks he is so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in other respects are not in the habit of wanting more than they have.

(Descartes, Discourse on Method, 27)

Religion as a content area rivals good sense as a faculty. Even those who are the hardest to please in other respects are not in the habit of wanting to know more than we already know about it, but readily come to firm conclusions and set behaviors concerning religion … and thereby hangs a tale. The initial thesis of this work is simple enough. It is that the history and philosophy of religion and the history and philosophy of art are critically in need of integration and mutual consideration. This is not to state that religion and art are “the same thing” (or “things” at all). Clearly, they are not. They are two discrete abstract nouns, and there are sustainable distinctions to be made between them. There can be art objects and events that are unconnected with institutional religion, and there may be religious activities that lack all artistry. On the other hand, the objects and activities of the material culture to which these two abstract nouns refer, both past and present, are so inextricably interconnected that it is imperative to our understanding of each that we cease the futile and damaging attempt to tell their stories as if they were entirely distinct. Since the Renaissance, and particularly since the Protestant Reformation, the insistence in the modern, Western, European, Christian, or post-Christian world on conceiving religion and art as fundamentally dissimilar has been carried forward with remarkable tenacity. However, with the recent and increasing emphasis on the material culture of religion and with cognitive and evolutionary insights into both religion and art (and with the introduction of some long-overdue humility and self-awareness in the West), it is increasingly apparent that this distinction and the conceptions of art and religion associated with it are fatally flawed. An Ethology of Religion and Art: Beauty, Belief, and Behavior clarifies and justifies these claims and draws out some of their implications and entailments, resulting in an understanding of art and religion and their relationship that is detailed, accurate, and, I hope, extremely useful.

What’s the problem?

I first started thinking seriously about the problematic relationship of religion and art when I began teaching an undergraduate course of that name in 2005. Not that I hadn’t thought about it before—I had thought about it enough to know that it worried me. Religion alone is a deeply problematic concept and the many attempts to define it have never proven satisfactory. Combined with the equally ill-defined concept of art it constitutes a “two-body” problem in which the behavior of one imprecise variable is unpredictably influenced by the dynamics of another that is equally elusive. It is common knowledge that religion and art are inextricably bound up with one another so as to be almost inseparable prior to the Renaissance and across the world. A huge proportion of everything that is identified as “art,” culturally from Angkor Wat to the Ziggurats, and chronologically from Göbekli Tepe to the Crystal Cathedral, has overtly religious themes. As Barbara DeConcini, one-time president of the American Academy of Religion, put it:

there are important connections between religion and art: both are oriented toward meaning, and both deal in universal human values—both are fundamental to being human. What is more, religion and art share remarkably similar discourses. Each works primarily through story, image, symbol and performance.

(1991, 2)

The German theologian, philosopher, and biblical scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) insisted in 1799 that “religion and art stand beside one another like to friendly souls whose inner affinity, whether or not they equally surmise it, is nevertheless still unknown to them” (1958, 158). In the 19th century, the Danish philosopher and author Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) felt that art had only recently achieved integrity and autonomy from religion. He also believed that art had gone too far and was beginning to become a substitute for religion. Sacred and profane inspiration were for him fundamentally incomparable, and he thought that if the Christian tradition were seen as an aesthetic phenomenon, then it was in danger of being explained away (1940). In The Sacred Shrine: A Study of the Poetry and Art of the Catholic Church (1912) the Finnish philosopher Yrjö Hirn (1870–1952) argued that the early equivalents of religion and art existed seamlessly blended together in the earliest stages of their development. In Sacred and Profane Beauty (Vom Heiligen in der Kunst, 1957), the Dutch phenomenologist of religion Gerardus Van der Leeuw (1890–1950) argued that the arts and religion began in a state of original unity, each art, and religion itself, only later achieving its own integrity and autonomy (2006). More recently, Marcia Brennan, in a fascinating work, Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum (2010), has indicated the continuing, if concealed, consanguinity of art and religion by arguing that art museums remain places of mystical experience, suggesting that even modern art never really separated itself from the complex mystical traditions that preceded it.

Figure 1.1 La Trahison des Images by René Magritte (1928–1929). Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © C. Herscovici/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © [2019] Museum Associates/LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY. © ARS, NY, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, USA.

The Biblical Second Commandment orders that

you shall not make for yourself a graven image, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.

(Exodus 20.1–17)

This has often been taken as driving a wedge between art and religion, making them undeniably distinct. Yet, as David and Linda Altshuler convincingly point out (1984), early Jewish synagogues were by no means bereft of art. Their conclusion is that the Commandment is an organic unity composed of two halves. It is not a prohibition of art per se, but a prohibition of “bowing down and worshipping” our own representations—a warning, I would argue, against “the treachery of images”—that is, against mistaking the representation for the thing represented.

It would be a mistake to assume that such a caveat would be too sophisticated for early Hebrew authors. They were equally, if differently, sophisticated as any anatomically modern humans. David Lewis-Williams, a scholar of both the contemporary San art of South Africa and Paleolithic cave painting, warns us that even the artists of Paleolithic images may have had no intention to represent physical, empirical items but specifically to represent “spirit beings” (2002, 194). While the visions were real as visions, they were not real in the sense of representing “a real bison,” that is, a physical, flesh and blood being. If Paleolithic artists could exercise such sophistication, it is no stretch of the imagination to argue that the writers of the Second Commandment did, too. The essence of the idolatry they sought to avoid is taking the representation to be the thing it represents, treating the pointing finger as the moon.

How, then, are art and religion related? As one walks into the bizarrely folded and convoluted edifice that has grown up on the foundation that is the confluence of religion and art (I can’t help but think of the edifice as a Frank Gehry marvel), the entrance is littered with crumpled handbills. Pick them up, unfold them, smooth out the creases, and they turn out to be warnings: John Dixon counsels us that “[n]early every attempt that has been made to incorporate art into the study of religion or to account for art theologically has to some degree done violence to one or the other, either by distortion or impoverishment” (1983, 78). David Chidester says that

as 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 areas of human activity, two separate subject fields … into some arbitrary juxtaposition.

(1983, 55)

James Elkins has said, “I can’t think of a subject that is harder to get right, more challenging to speak about in a way that will be acceptable to the many viewpoints people bring to bear” (2004, ix), and Elkins observes that, for some people, the word “religion” can no longer be associated with the ideas of art. “Talk about art and talk about religion have become alienated one from the other, and it would be artificial and misguided to bring them together” (x). Yet there is, arguably, a “field” of the study of religion and art. In 1991 DeConcini told us that “Religion and art has been a ‘field’ in the sense that one can study it in graduate school and find positions teaching it in colleges only since the 1950s” (1991, 323), but 13 years later, David Morgan was still asking, “is there, in fact, a history of art and religion as a field of study? … has ‘art and religion’ been a discreet and circumspect topic of enquiry?” He concludes that it is “presumptuous” to see the study of art and religion as a distinct field (2004, 17).

Trying to teach the subject(s) seemed a nightmare of haunting, ill-defined behemoths lurking just out of sight, eternally vanishing into the mists of ignorance. When I first taught the course, I took Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, in which the Bellman, who captained the hunt, had a map that was “a perfect and absolute blank,” as the leitmotiv. In Carroll’s immortal words:

… beware of the day,

If your Snark be a Boojum! For then

You will softly and suddenly vanish away,

And never be met with again!

… and each Snark threatened to be a Boojum. The whole complex threatened to be so far from anything that could be dealt with reliably and rationally, especially by a single individual, that it seemed inevitably to lead to such pretentious nonsense that one’s every opinion could evaporate (or sublime) before the righteous scorn of one’s colleagues. I soldiered on, buoyed up by the indefatigable enthusiasm of my students and their apparently unshakeable conviction that I knew what I was talking about. The best single book I could find on the subject, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona’s anthology, Art, Creativity and the Sacred: An Anthology in Religion and Art, was first published in 1984 and contains articles that, albeit extremely valuable, date from the 1930s and 1940s and are thus ignorant of developments that are more recent. It is also a graduate-level text. I supported my students as best I could and helped them...