Submitted by Waleed Aly on 22 November 2007 - 9:44pm.
Nestled in the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, London, is Poets' Corner: the resting place of Chaucer, Dickens, Kipling and Tennyson. There stands a sizable memorial to William Shakespeare, who gazes upon a floor slab – a more modest memorial to Laurence Olivier.
Why should such an extraordinary congregation be gathered in this famous church? Not purely for doctrinal reasons, surely. The writers and actors remembered here are not uniformly ambassadors of the Church of England. Rather, this expresses a tendency in the great religions of the world to value art, to celebrate it, and even to appropriate it.
And what would religion be without its art? What is the Vatican without Michelangelo? Andalucia without the breathtaking intricacy of the Alhambra? Islam without Rumi? To survey the great art, and the great artists of world civilisation is inevitably to survey the triumphs of religious art. The relationship between the two in human history has been richly symbiotic.
Recent decades has seen this relationship erode with increasing rapidity. Much of the art that captures the popular imagination both in the West and the East, is thoroughly secular. Several religious movements have come to disparage artistic expression as vain, perhaps even necessarily decadent. Such religious austerity can be deleterious. As the prophet Muhammad disclosed: "God is beautiful and loves beauty". While secular art is valuable, art must not be surrendered to that realm if religion is to flourish.
Yet art, like religious thought, does not stand still. In St Paul's cathedral stands a modern sculpture of the mother and child, an abstract rendering that would have been incomprehensible to classicists past, but that contributes to the self-renewing dynamism of this medieval edifice. Today, theists may relevantly embrace digital and transient media, and in this festival, they do. These explorations are embryonic in a sense, but in an artistic age dominated by the secular, they are importantly pioneering. We cannot yet know what will come to endure. But we do know that in the absence of such initiatives as these, the answer will surely be "nothing".
Of faith and art
Nestled in the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, London, is Poets' Corner: the resting place of Chaucer, Dickens, Kipling and Tennyson. There stands a sizable memorial to William Shakespeare, who gazes upon a floor slab – a more modest memorial to Laurence Olivier.
Why should such an extraordinary congregation be gathered in this famous church? Not purely for doctrinal reasons, surely. The writers and actors remembered here are not uniformly ambassadors of the Church of England. Rather, this expresses a tendency in the great religions of the world to value art, to celebrate it, and even to appropriate it.
And what would religion be without its art? What is the Vatican without Michelangelo? Andalucia without the breathtaking intricacy of the Alhambra? Islam without Rumi? To survey the great art, and the great artists of world civilisation is inevitably to survey the triumphs of religious art. The relationship between the two in human history has been richly symbiotic.
Recent decades has seen this relationship erode with increasing rapidity. Much of the art that captures the popular imagination both in the West and the East, is thoroughly secular. Several religious movements have come to disparage artistic expression as vain, perhaps even necessarily decadent. Such religious austerity can be deleterious. As the prophet Muhammad disclosed: "God is beautiful and loves beauty". While secular art is valuable, art must not be surrendered to that realm if religion is to flourish.
Yet art, like religious thought, does not stand still. In St Paul's cathedral stands a modern sculpture of the mother and child, an abstract rendering that would have been incomprehensible to classicists past, but that contributes to the self-renewing dynamism of this medieval edifice. Today, theists may relevantly embrace digital and transient media, and in this festival, they do. These explorations are embryonic in a sense, but in an artistic age dominated by the secular, they are importantly pioneering. We cannot yet know what will come to endure. But we do know that in the absence of such initiatives as these, the answer will surely be "nothing".