The aesthetic experience and the religious experience, through the medium of art, are paralleled. The label one gives the experience, whether aesthetic or divine, is in direct relation to where their faith lies. If one believes in God and has faith, they receive sacred art as a means to further their understanding of the divine. If one does not believe in God and does not have faith, they may receive sacred art as the elevation of their irrational understanding alone. The irrational and the divine are paralleled. Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy explores sacred art and its purpose. In this essay we will explore the parallels between sacred art and aesthetic art based on Schopenhauer’s aesthetic philosophy in The World as Will and Representation.
For Schopenhauer there are two worlds, the world as will and the world as representation. The world as representation is the world of our sensorial experience ruled by an endless cycle of desires, of willing. We only become aware of this willing in the world of representation after we are subject to it, therefore we are unable to fully understand what the will is. Ideas communicated through aesthetic art help elevate people out of the endless cycle of willing in the world of representation and closer to the world as will.
Firstly, in Christianity, art is possible as the representation of God because God became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. However, even after Jesus spent many years with the disciples, they did not at first recognize him as the risen Lord.
“They then detain their mysterious companion and give him their hospitality, and at the breaking of the bread they experience in reverse fashion what happened to Adam and Eve when they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: their eyes are opened. Now they no longer see just the externals but the reality that is not apparent to their senses yet shines through their senses: it is the Lord, now alive in a new way.”[1]
The disciples are lifted out of the world of representation and experience the “reality that is not apparent to their senses.” This reality, in the context of this passage, is the Lord. This opening of the eyes, however, may be correlated to the elevation that one experiences in the aesthetic experience when they, through ideas communicated in aesthetic works of art, are brought closer to the world as will.
For Schopenhauer, western Christian culture invented the idea of God as the ultimate cause. As a result of the two worlds for Schopenhauer, the world as will and the world as representation, knowledge of God is insensible because the will goes beyond space and time, and cannot be seen with rationality. Knowledge relies heavily on rationality. Much of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is influenced by eastern tradition. His idea of the ideal state of being is a state of nirvana, ultimate suspension from the will, nothingness.
Nirvana is suspension from the will, but not knowledge of its essence. Intuition, as stated, is the first form of attaining knowledge of the will. Aesthetics is the second. This is where the question of faith lies, within the aesthetic or sublime experience.
Schopenhauer uses the example of becoming lost in contemplation of the vastness of the universe. “…And so impress on our consciousness the immensity of the universe, we feel ourselves reduced to nothing; we feel ourselves as individuals, as living bodies, as transcendent phenomena of the will, like drops in the ocean, dwindling and dissolving into nothing.” [2] From this, he quotes the Upanishads of the Vedas, “I am all this creation collectively, and besides me there exists no other being.”[3]
Here, Schopenhauer is describing the sublime and the pure knowing in contemplation that stems from the subliminal experience. However, from this experience he comes to the conclusion that ones’ being is all there is, that “one is a knower” rather “than a sufferer.”[4] Schopenhauer, at the time he wrote this, does not have faith and therefore cannot recognize divine revelation as a revelation of God. Schopenhauer only sees this experience as knowledge of the world of the will.
Ratzinger speaks of sacred art elevating one “beyond the surface of the empirical.” He is describing a very similar experience as Schopenhauer when he speaks of rising out of the world as representation. The surface of the empirical and the world as representation are all measured with out senses and our ability to reason. We are able to see cause and affect and are able to calculate and measure space and time.
“The whole problem of knowledge in the modern world is present. If an interior opening-up does not occur in man that enables him to see more that what can be measured and weighed, to perceive the reflection of divine glory in creation, then God remains excluded from our field of vision.”[5]
What man is able to elevate himself in order to create aesthetic or sacred art?
“Icon painters, he says, must learn how to fast with their eyes and prepare themselves by a long path of prayerful asceticism. This is what marks the transition from art to sacred art.”[6]
This preparation of prayerful asceticism, “abstention from all forms of indulgences”,[7] is again, correlated with Schopenhauer’s aesthetic philosophy. A genius, for Schopenhauer, is like the mad man. He is able to free himself of the will in the world of representation and think beyond the world of space and time. When one is free from the will, they are elevated out of the endless cycle of desires that is the will taking hold on them in the world of representation. Prayerful asceticism is this elevation in practice.
The aesthetic experience cannot be measured, nor can the world of will or ideas. According to Schopenhauer, reason and rationality are made for the world as representation alone; they do not work in the world as will. The same dilemma is present with the divine; it cannot be measured or fully understood with rationality. Because it cannot be understood with rationality, it is irrational.
If the divine is irrational and the aesthetic experience is irrational, then there must be parallels, for they are both irrational. Firstly, aesthetic art and sacred art must both have a purpose. Ratzinger explores this idea.
“Now we see the development of the ‘aesthetic’ in the modern sense, the vision of a beauty that no longer points beyond itself but is content in the end with itself, the beauty of the appearing thing.” [8]
Here, Ratzinger erases the distinction between sacred art and aesthetic art and opens them for people of all faiths. One does not need to be Christian to experience the beauty of Christian art. The same is applied to the Christian, for they can experience beauty in non-Christian art.
“At the most fundamental level, what we are dealing with here is nothing other than the transcendence of faith…”[9]
In Kantian philosophy, this “transcendence” that Ratzinger describes as the “transcendence of faith,” is not realizable in experience alone, it is similar to the knowledge gathered from an aesthetic experience. However, in order to experience the “transcendence of faith” one must firstly have faith. But all, as we have explored, have the capability to have an aesthetic experience. Faith, it can be concluded, plays a large role in the experience of the divine within aesthetics.
For Ratzinger, faith is a gift: Logos over Ethos. We receive grace and our initial desire to believe from God. If one does not have faith, then, one will not see the invisible within the visible images of Christ and the Word. Faith is what essential to draw this connection. Without faith, then, sacred art may simply be aesthetic.
Bibliography:
"asceticism." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2010. http://www.merriam-webster.com (13 Nov 2010).
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.
Ratzinger, Joseph. Introduction to Christianity.
Ratzinger, Joseph. The Spirit of the Liturgy.
Schopenhauer, Author. The World of Will and Representation.
[6] Merriam-Webster
