Religion for Atheists

VIII

Art

1.

For some atheists, one of the most difficult aspects of renouncing religion is having to give up on ecclesiastical art and all the beauty and emotion therein. However, to voice regret over this in the presence of many non-believers is to run the risk of being rebuked for sentimental nostalgia and then, perhaps, brusquely reminded that secular societies have in any case developed their own, highly effective means of satisfying the artistic appetites once fed by the faiths.

These non-believers are likely to point out that even where we no longer put up churches, we are still drawn to construct grand buildings that celebrate our visual ideals. The best architects vie for the chance to design these structures; they dominate our cities; they attract pilgrims from all over the world and our voices instinctively drop to a whisper the moment we enter their awe-inspiring galleries. Hence the analogy so often drawn: our museums of art have become our new churches.

The argument has an immediate and seductive plausibility to it. The similarities seem incontrovertible. Like churches, museums enjoy an unparalleled status: they are where we might take a group of visiting aliens to show them what we most delight in and revere. Like churches, they are also the institutions to which the wealthy most readily donate their surplus capital — in the hope of cleansing themselves of whatever sins they may have racked up in the course of accumulating it. Moreover, time spent in museums seems to confer some of the same psychological benefits as attendance at church services; we experience comparable feelings of communing with something greater than ourselves and of being separated from the compromised and profane world beyond. We may even get a little bored sometimes, as we would in churches, but we emerge with a sense that we have, in a variety of indeterminate ways, become slightly better people.

Like universities, museums promise to fill the gaps left by the ebbing of faith; they too stand to give us meaning without superstition. Just as secular books hold out a hope that they can replace the Gospels, so museums may be able to take over the aesthetic responsibilities of churches.

2.

However beguiling this thesis sounds, it suffers from some of the same flaws that bedevil the corresponding argument about the teaching of culture within universities. Museums may in theory be well equipped to satisfy needs formerly catered to by religion, but, rather like universities, in practice they abdicate much of their potential through the way they handle the precious material entrusted to them. While exposing us to objects of genuine importance, they nevertheless seem incapable of adequately linking these to the needs of our souls. We are too often looking at the right pictures through the wrong frames. Yet if there is cause for optimism, it relates to another similarity between museums and universities: both institutions are open to having some of their more uncertain assumptions illuminated through the insights of religion.

The fundamental question which the modern museum has unusual but telling difficulty in answering is why art should matter. It vociferously insists on art’s significance and rallies governments, donors and visitors accordingly. But it subsequently retreats into a curious, institutional silence about what this importance might actually be based on. We are left feeling as though we must have missed out on crucial stages of an argument which the museum has in reality never made, beyond trailing a tautological contention that art should matter to us because it is so important.

As a result, we tend to enter galleries with grave, though by necessity discreet, doubts about what we are meant to do in them. What we must of course never do is treat works of art religiously, especially if (as is often the case) they happen to be religious in origin. The modern museum is no place for visitors to get on their knees before once-sacred objects, weep and beg for reassurance and guidance. In many countries museums were explicitly founded as new, secular environments in which religious art could (in contravention of the wishes of its makers) be seen stripped of its theological context. It was no coincidence that during the period of revolutionary government in France in 1792, only three days separated the declaration of the state’s official severance from the Catholic Church and the inauguration of the Palais du Louvre as the country’s first national museum. The Louvre’s galleries were quickly filled with items looted from French Catholic churches, and subsequently, thanks to Napoleon’s campaigns, from monasteries and chapels across Europe.

What we can no longer pray to, we are now generally invited to garner facts about. Being an art ‘expert’ is associated primarily with knowing a great deal: about where a work was made, who paid for it, where its artist’s parents came from and what his or her artistic influences may have been.

What should we do with her when we can’t pray to her? Virgin and Child, c. 1324, confiscated from the Abbey of Saint-Denis, Paris, in 1789. (illustration credit 8.1)

It can be so hard not to think of the cafeteria: Thomas Struth, National Gallery I, London 1989. (illustration credit 8.2)

In a cabinet in one of the medieval galleries of the Louvre we find a statuette identified as Virgin and Child, stolen from the Abbey of Saint-Denis in 1789. For centuries before its relegation to the museum, people regularly knelt before it and drew strength from Mary’s compassion and serenity. However, to judge by its caption and catalogue entry, in the view of the modern Louvre, what we really need to do with it is understand it — understand that it is made of gilded silver, that in her free hand Mary holds a crystal fleur-de-lis, that the piece is typical of Parisian metalwork fabricated in the first half of the fourteenth century, that the figure’s overall shape derives from that of a Byzantine model called the Virgin of Tenderness and that this is the earliest dated French example of the translucent basse-taille enamelwork first developed by Tuscan craftsmen in the late thirteenth century.

Unfortunately, when it is presented to us principally as a storehouse of concrete information, art soon starts to lose its interest for all but a determined few. A measure of this indifference emerges from a series of images by the German photographer Thomas Struth which shows us tourists making their way around some of the world’s great museums. Patently unable to draw much sustenance from their surroundings, they stand bemused in front of Annunciations and Crucifixions, dutifully consulting their catalogues, perhaps taking in the date of a work or an artist’s name, while before them a line of crimson blood trickles down the muscular leg of the son of God or a dove hovers in a cerulean sky. They appear to want to be transformed by art, but the lightning bolts they are waiting for seem never to strike. They resemble the disappointed participants in a failed seance.

What might we do in front of this? Fiona Banner, Every Word Unmade, 2007. (illustration credit 8.3)

The puzzlement shared by museum-goers only increases when we turn to the art of our own era. We look at a giant neon version of the alphabet. We take in a vat of gelatinous water in which a sheet of aluminium fixed to a motor is swaying back and forth to the amplified sound of a human heartbeat. We watch a grainy film of an elderly woman slicing an apple, intercut with footage of a lion running across a savannah. And we think to ourselves that only an idiot or a reactionary would dare to ask what all this could mean. The only certainty is that neither the artist nor the museum is going to help us: wall texts are kept to a minimum; catalogues are enigmatically written. It would take a brave soul to raise a hand.

3.

Christianity, by contrast, never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane, good people in possession of well-ordered souls. It is a mechanism whereby our memories are forcibly jogged about what we have to love and to be grateful for, as well as what we should draw away from and be afraid of.

The German philosopher Hegel defined art as ‘the sensuous presentation of ideas’. It is, he indicated, in the business of conveying concepts, just like ordinary language, except that it engages us through both our senses and our reason, and is uniquely effective for its dual modes of address.

Audrey Bardou, grandparents with their grandchildren, 2008. (illustration credit 8.4)

Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas crucial to the health of our souls.

Here, a reminder of love. Top: Filippino Lippi, The Adoration of the Child, early 1480s. (illustration credit 8.5)

To return to one of the familiar themes of this book, we need art because we are so forgetful. We are creatures of the body as well as of the mind, and so require art to stir our languid imaginations and motivate us in ways that mere philosophical expositions cannot. Many of our most important ideas get flattened and overlooked in everyday life, their truth rubbed off through casual use. We know intellectually that we should be kind and forgiving and empathetic, but such adjectives have a tendency to lose all their meaning until we meet with a work of art that grabs us through our senses and won’t let us go until we have properly remembered why these qualities matter and how badly society needs them for its balance and its sanity. Even the word love has a habit of growing sterile and banal in the abstract, until the moment when we glimpse a contemporary photograph of two grandparents patiently feeding their grandchildren an apple purée for supper, or a fifteenth-century rendering of Mary and her son at nap-time — and remember why love lies at the core of our humanity.

We might modify Hegel’s definition to bring it more fully into line with Christianity’s insights: good art is the sensuous presentation of those ideas which matter most to the proper functioning of our souls — and yet which we are most inclined to forget, even though they are the basis for our capacity for contentment and virtue.

A role for art at key moments of life: tavolette. (illustration credit 8.6)

Christianity was never troubled by the notion of charging art with an educative, therapeutic mission. Its own art willingly aspired to the status of propaganda. Although the noun has become one of the more frightening in our lexicon, coloured by the sinister ends towards which certain historical regimes have put it to work, propaganda is a neutral concept in its essence, suggesting merely influence rather than any particular direction for it. We may associate propaganda with corruption and tasteless posters, but Christianity took it to be synonymous with the artistic enhancement of our receptivity to such qualities as modesty, friendship and courage.

From the fourteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, a brotherhood in Rome was renowned for tracking down prisoners on their way to the gallows and placing before their eyes tavolette, or small boards bearing images from the Christian story — usually of Christ on the Cross or the Virgin and Child — in the hope that these representations would bring the condemned solace in their final minutes. It is difficult to conceive of a more extreme example of a belief in the redemptive capacity of images, and yet the brotherhood was only carrying out a mission to which Christian art has always been committed: that of putting examples of the most important ideas in front of us at difficult moments, to help us to live and to die.

4.

Among these important ideas, none has been more significant to Christianity than the notion of suffering. We are all, in the religion’s eyes, inherently vulnerable beings who will not get through life without meeting with atrocious griefs of mind and body. Christianity also knows that any pain is aggravated by a sense that we are alone in experiencing it. However, we are as a rule not very skilled at communicating the texture of our troubles to others, or at sensing the sorrows they themselves are hiding behind stoic façades. We are therefore in need of art to help us to understand our own neglected hurt, to grasp everything that does not come up in casual conversation and to coax us out of an unproductively isolated relationship with our most despised and awkward qualities.

So that we should all know what suffering is like, realize that none of us will escape it and grow kinder through this recognition: Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, 1516. (illustration credit 8.7)

For a thousand years and more, Christian artists have been directing their energies towards making us feel what it would be like to have large, rusty nails hammered into our palms, to bleed from weeping wounds in our sides and to climb a steep hill on legs already broken by the weight of the cross we are carrying. The depiction of such pain is not meant to be ghoulish; rather, it is intended to be a route to moral and psychological development, a way to increase our feelings of solidarity as well as our capacities for compassion.

In the spring of 1512, Matthias Grünewald began work on an altarpiece for the Monastery of St Anthony in Isenheim, in north-eastern France. The monks of this order specialized in tending to the sick, and most particularly to those afflicted with ergotism, or St Anthony’s fire, a usually fatal disease which causes seizures, hallucinations and gangrene. Once the work was ready, it became customary for patients, on their arrival at the monastery, to be taken to the chapel to see it, so that they might understand that in the suffering they were now enduring, they had once been equalled, and perhaps exceeded, by God’s own son.

It is fundamental to the power of the Christian story that Jesus died in more or less the greatest agony ever experienced by anyone. He thus offers all human beings, however racked by illness and grief, evidence that they are not alone in their condition — sparing them, if not suffering itself, then at least the defeated feeling that they have been singled out for unusual punishment.

Jesus’s story is a register of pain — betrayal, loneliness, self-doubt, torture — through which our own anguish can be mirrored and contextualized, and our impressions of its rarity corrected. Such impressions are of course not hard to form, given how vigorously society waves away our difficulties and surrounds us with sentimental commercial images which menace us by seeming so far removed from our reality in their promises.

Christianity recognizes the capacity of the best art to give shape to pain and thereby to attenuate the worst of our feelings of paranoia and isolation. Catholic artists have long been in the habit of producing cycles of paintings known as the Seven Sorrows of Mary, renderings of the most painful episodes in the life of the Virgin, from the prophecy of Simeon to Jesus’s death and burial. Tradition dictates that the faithful should meditate on these works and endeavour through them to better understand not only Mary’s trials but also those endured by mothers more generally. The underlying intention of these Marian cycles, although they were defined by the particularities of Catholicism, could nevertheless be a source of inspiration for atheists. We might consider setting contemporary artists the task of depicting a Seven Sorrows of Parenthood, a Twelve Sorrows of Adolescence or a Twenty-one Sorrows of Divorce.

Bernard van Orley and Pedro Campana, The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin (detail), c. 1520–35. (illustration credit 8.8)

Art attenuates the feeling of being beyond understanding: an image by François Coquerel, from an imagined cycle of the Twelve Sorrows of Adolescence. (illustration credit 8.9)

The most famous of all Catholic cycles of suffering is the Fourteen Stations of the Cross, whose elements illustrate the tragic final chapter of Jesus’s life, beginning with the Condemnation and ending with the Laying in the Tomb. Hung in order around the niches or columns of a church, the Stations are meant to be toured in an anticlockwise itinerary, with each stage throwing light on a different aspect of agony.

While Jesus’s end may have been exceptionally barbarous, the strategy of organizing a cycle of representative images of difficulty, of enriching these with commentaries and hanging them in an ambulatory circuit around a contemplative space could be as effective in the lay as in the Christian realm. By its very nature, life inflicts on us universal pains based on timeless psychological and social realities; we all wrestle with the dilemmas of childhood, education, family, work, love, ageing and death — many of which now bear semi-official labels (‘adolescent angst’, ‘postpartum depression’, ‘midlife crisis’). New secular cycles of representative sorrows could anchor themselves around these stages and so articulate the true nature of their camouflaged dimensions. They could teach us lessons about the real course of life in the safety and quiet of a gallery, before events themselves found a way of doing the same with their characteristic violence and surprise.

Station 9: Jesus Falls a Third Time, from Eric Gill’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross, Westminster Cathedral, 1918. (illustration credit 8.10)

Station 9: The Station of Disability, from an imaginary secular Twelve Stations of Old Age. (illustration credit 8.11)

5.

Christian art understands that images are important partly because they can generate compassion, the fragile quality which enables the boundaries of our egos to dissolve, helps us to recognize ourselves in the experiences of strangers and can make their pain matter to us as much as our own.

Art has a role to play in this manoeuvre of the mind upon which, not coincidentally, civilization itself is founded, because the unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

As if to reinforce the idea that to be human is, above all else, to partake in a common vulnerability to misfortune, disease and violence, Christian art returns us relentlessly to the flesh, whether in the form of the infant Jesus’s plump cheeks or of the taut, broken skin over his ribcage in his final hours. The message is clear: even if we do not bleed to death on a cross, simply by virtue of being human we will each of us suffer our share of agony and indignity, each face appalling, intractable realities which may nevertheless kindle in us feelings of mutuality. Christianity hints that if our bodies were immune to pain or decay, we would be monsters.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pietà, 1499. (illustration credit 8.12)

A cancer patient after chemotherapy, by Preston Gannaway, 2008. (illustration credit 8.13)

Picturing others as children can prompt similar moments of identification. It is no coincidence that, next to scenes of the Crucifixion, Jesus’s babyhood is the most frequent theme in Christian art, his infant innocence and sweetness contrasting poignantly with the way we know his story will end. Images of Jesus sleeping in his mother’s arms subliminally reinforce his counsel that we should learn to regard all our fellow human beings as if they were children. Our enemies too were once infants, in need of attention (rather than bad), fifty centimetres long, breathing softly on their stomachs, smelling of milk and talcum powder.

Though our destructive powers increase with age, though we shed the ability to elicit others’ sympathy even as we acquire a greater store of things to be pitied for, we always retain some of the artlessness and lack of guile with which we began. In recounting one man’s journey from the manger to the cross, Christianity tells a quasi-universal story about the fate of innocence and gentleness in a turbulent world. We are most of us lambs in need of good shepherds and a merciful flock.

6.

The unreliability of our native imaginative powers magnifies our need for art. We depend on artists to orchestrate moments of compassion to excite our sympathies on a regular basis; to create artificial conditions under which we can experience, in relation to the figures we see in works of art, some of what we might one day feel towards flesh-and-blood people in our own lives.

Francisco de Zurbarán, The Bound Lamb, c. 1635. (illustration credit 8.14)

What separates compassion from indifference is the angle of vision: Helen Levitt, New York 1940. (illustration credit 8.15)

The possibility of responding compassionately to others is crucially linked to our angle of vision. According to our perspective, we may see either a self-righteous husband lecturing his wife or two wounded and humiliated individuals equally unable properly to articulate their distress; a proud battalion of soldiers in a village street or a frightened girl hiding from invaders in a doorway; an old man walking home with a bag of groceries or a former gold medallist in free-style swimming transformed into a stooped, sallow figure unrecognizable even to himself.

Looking at a photograph by Helen Levitt of four boys in a New York street, we are likely to find ourselves longing to comfort the grim-faced, stoic young man in the corner, whose mother perhaps only half an hour ago did up the many buttons of his handsome coat, and whose distressed expression evokes a pure form of agony. But how very different the same scene would have looked from just a metre away and another viewpoint. To the boy at the far right, what appears to matter most is a chance to take a closer look at his friend’s toy. He has already lost any interest in the overdressed crybaby by the wall, whom he and his classmates have just slapped hard for a bit of fun, on this day as on most others.

Similarly, a compassionate response to Mantegna’s hilltop panorama depends on how we are guided to look at Calvary. The sunny early afternoon, with its wispy clouds floating across a pale blue horizon, might have seemed exceptionally pleasant and trouble-free to the soldier walking home with his pike resting on his shoulder, and looking forward to a supper of an omelette or a chicken leg. Gazing at the valley before him, with its vineyards and rivers, he would hardly have registered the usual moans emanating from the low-lifes up on the crosses. For his fellow soldiers seated on the ground, meanwhile, the most pressing question on the day of the death of the son of God might have been who was going to win five denarii in the game they were playing on the face of a shield.

Andrea Mantegna, Crucifixion, 1459. (illustration credit 8.16)

The range of possible perspectives in any scene — and the range, therefore, of responses available to the viewer — reveals the responsibilities which fall to the makers of images: to direct us to those who deserve but often do not win our sympathy, to stand as witnesses to all that it would be easier for us to turn away from. The gravity of the task explains the privileged place accorded in the Christian tradition to St Luke, the patron saint of artists, who, legend tells us, was the first to depict the Crucifixion, and who is frequently represented in Christian art with brushes and paints in hand, taking in what the Roman soldiers pretended not to see.

7.

While bitter debate must always surround the larger question of what makes a good artist, in the context of religion the criteria are narrower and more straightforward: a good artist by Christian standards is one who successfully animates the important moral and psychological truths which are in danger of losing their hold on us amid the distracted conditions of daily existence. Christian artists know that their technical talents — their command of light, composition and colour, their mastery of their materials and media — find their ultimate purpose in calling forth appropriate ethical responses from us, so that our eyes can train our hearts.

A reminder of what courage is actually like: Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633. (illustration credit 8.17)

Militating against this mission are all manner of visual clichés. The real difficulty with the ideas which underlie compassion is not that they seem surprising or peculiar, but rather that they seem far too obvious: their very reasonableness and ubiquity strip them of their power. To cite a verbal parallel, we have heard a thousand times that we should love our neighbour, but the prescription loses any of its meaning when it is merely repeated by rote.

So too with art: the most dramatic scenes, painted without talent or imagination, generate only indifference and boredom. The task for artists is therefore to find new ways of prising open our eyes to tiresomely familiar yet critical ideas. The history of Christian art comprises waves of assaults on the great old truths by geniuses who tried to ensure that viewers would be astonished anew and provoked to inner amendment by the humility of the Virgin, the fidelity of Joseph, the courage of Jesus or the sadism of the Jewish authorities.

All such efforts ultimately have a twofold purpose, in accordance with the basic precepts of Christianity: to encourage a revulsion towards evil and to excite a love of goodness. In both cases, inferior art is problematic, not for strictly aesthetic reasons, but because it fails to promote appropriate emotion and action. It is no easy thing to keep making hell vivid: the attempt can easily yield just another vat of burning flesh, one more in a redundant series which, in its formulaic horror, ends up touching no one. It takes more than bloodthirstiness to revive our disgust at cruelty. We can grow bored of seeing yet another painting of the seventh circle of hell or another photograph of the killing fields of Gaza — until a skilful artist stops us in our tracks with an image that finally brings home to us what is truly at stake.

If we’re not careful, even hell gets boring. We need talented artists to evoke the moral commitment we otherwise lose touch with. Top: Fra Angelico, Last Judgement (detail), 1435. (illustration credit 8.18)

Above: Abid Katib, Shifa Hospital, Gaza, 2008. (illustration credit 8.19)

Just as evil must continually be made new to help us sense its power, so too must goodness. Accordingly, Christian artists have tirelessly striven to render virtue vivid, to pierce through our cynicism and world-weariness and to lay before us depictions of individuals whom we should all wish to be a little bit more like.

8.

Naturally, Christian art does not treat all of the themes that we should bear in mind for the health of our souls. There is no shortage of topics it ignores: the role of self-discipline, the need for playfulness, the importance of honouring the fragility of the natural world … But completeness isn’t the point. For our purposes, Christianity is more interested in defining an overarching mission for art: to depict virtues and vices and remind us of what is important though prone to be forgotten.

Intriguingly, Christianity never expected its artists to decide what their works would be about; it was left to theologians and doctors of divinity to formulate the important themes, which were only then passed on to painters and sculptors and turned into convincing aesthetic phenomena. The Church implicitly wondered why a mastery of the technical aspects of art — a talent for making a dab of paint look like an elbow, or a patch of stone like hair — should be thought to be compatible with the ability to work out the meaning of life. The religion did not, on top of everything else, expect that Titian could be a gifted philosopher. It may be that we are asking too much of our own secular artists, requiring them not only to impress our senses but also to be the originators of profound psychological and moral insights. Our artistic scene might benefit from greater collaborations between thinkers and makers of images, a marriage of the best ideas with their highest expressions.

Christianity suggests that we might stick to certain key themes and allow artists to achieve greatness principally through their interpretations. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Rest during the Flight to Egypt, 1750. (illustration credit 8.20)

Titian, The Flight into Egypt, c. 1504. (illustration credit 8.21)

Christianity was also wise in not insisting that the concepts behind works of art should change all the time. There have been few more harmful doctrines for art than the Romantic belief that greatness must involve constant originality at a thematic level. Christian artists were able amply to express their unique skills, but had to stick to a set roster of topics, from the Annunciation to the Deposition. Their individual inclinations were subsumed within an overarching brief which spared them the relentless Romantic pressure to be original.

To specify that images must focus on the same ideas is not to demand that they should all look identical. Just as Titian’s and Fragonard’s versions of the holy family’s Flight into Egypt look entirely different, so too a putative ‘Sorrows of Infidelity’ depicted by a contemporary photographer like Jeff Wall would not need to look anything like the same theme as handled by his colleagues Philip-Lorca diCorcia or Alec Soth.

9.

Although we have up to this point considered modern secular art only incidentally, and through the prism of photography, the model wherein art serves as a mechanism for reminding us of important ideas extends comfortably beyond the representational realm to include abstract works.

Though it can sometimes be hard to say quite what abstract pieces are about, we can sense their broad themes well enough and, when it is a question of great works, we welcome them into our lives for the same reasons as figurative images: because they put us back in touch with themes we need to keep close to us but are in danger of losing sight of. We sense virtues like courage and strength emanating from the stern steel slabs of Richard Serra. There are ever-necessary evocations of calm in the formal geometries of paintings by Agnes Martin, while poems on the role of tension in a good life lurk within the wood and string sculptures of Barbara Hepworth.

Buddhism has been provocative in suggesting that our response to abstract creations could be enhanced if we were given specific suggestions as to what we should be thinking about while we contemplate them. When faced with the complex patterns of mandalas, for instance, we are encouraged to narrow down their range of possible meanings and focus on them as sensuous representations of the harmony of the cosmos described in Buddhist theology. The religion additionally gives us mantras to repeat as we look, most often ‘Om mani padme hum’ (translated from the Sanskrit as ‘Generosity-ethics-patience-diligence-renunciation-wisdom’), which sets up a virtuous cycle whereby our eyes enrich our ideas while our ideas guide our vision.

What separates the work of a contemporary abstract artist like Richard Long (above) from the tradition of the Buddhist mandala (top) is that Long’s piece carries no liturgy, it does not tell us what we might think about as we look at it, and hence, regardless of its great formal beauty, it risks provoking reactions of bewilderment or tedium. Despite the powerful elite prejudice against guidance, works of art are not diminished by being accompanied by instruction manuals. (illustration credit 8.22)

Inspired by Buddhism’s heavy-handed and yet productive curatorial directions, we might ask of many works of art that they tell us more explicitly what important notions they are trying sensually to remind us of, so as to rescue us from the hesitation and puzzlement that they may otherwise provoke. Despite a powerful elite prejudice against guidance, works of art are rarely diminished by being accompanied by instruction manuals.

10.

Aside from directing us to rethink the themes and purpose of art, religions also ask us to reconsider the categories under which works are arranged. Modern museums typically lead us into galleries arranged under headings such as ‘The Nineteenth Century’ and ‘The Northern Italian School’, which reflect the academic traditions in which their curators have been educated. However, this arrangement is no more responsive to the inner needs of museum-goers than is — to readers — the scholarly division of literature into such categories as ‘The American Novel of the Nineteenth Century’ or ‘Carolingian Poetry’.

A more fertile indexing system would group together artworks from across genres and eras according to the concerns of our souls. Gallery tours would take us through spaces which would each try to remind us in a sensory way — with the help of unapologetic labels and catalogues — of important ideas related to a variety of problematic areas of our lives. There would be galleries devoted to evoking the beauty of simplicity (featuring works by Chardin and Choe Seok-Hwan), the curative powers of nature (Corot, Hobbema, Bierstadt, Yuan Jiang), the dignity of the outsider (Friedrich, Hopper, Starkey) or the comfort of maternal nurture (Hepworth, Cassatt). A walk through a museum would amount to a structured encounter with a few of the things which are easiest for us to forget and most essential and life-enhancing to remember.

In this revamping we might look for inspiration to the Venetian parish church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Proudly indifferent to the indexing methodology of the academic system, the Frari is committed to the mission of rebalancing our souls with a highly eclectic range of works, including a fresco by Paolo Veneziano (c. 1339), a statue of John the Baptist by Donatello (1438), Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child with Saints (1488) and a large altarpiece by Titian (1516–18). The building throws together sculptures, paintings, metalwork and window traceries from across centuries and regions because it is more interested in the coherence of art’s impact on our souls than in the coherence of the origins and stylistic inclinations of the people who produced it.

By contrast, in terms of honouring the purpose of art, the apparent order of the modern museum is at heart a profound dis order. Scholastic traditions such as sorting works according to where or when they were created, grouping them by categories such as ‘School of Venice’ and ‘School of Rome’, or ‘landscapes’ and ‘portraits’, or separating them by genre — photography, sculpture, painting — prevent secular museums from achieving any real coherence at an emotional level, and therefore from laying claim to the true transformative power of the art arranged in churches and temples.

11.

The challenge is to rewrite the agendas for our museums so that art can begin to serve the needs of psychology as effectively as, for centuries, it has served those of theology. Curators should dare to reinvent their spaces so that they can be more than dead libraries for the creations of the past. These curators should co-opt works of art to the direct task of helping us to live: to achieve self-knowledge, to remember forgiveness and love and to stay sensitive to the pains suffered by our ever troubled species and its urgently imperilled planet. Museums must be more than places for displaying beautiful objects. They should be places that use beautiful objects in order to try to make us good and wise. Only then will museums be able to claim that they have properly fulfilled the noble but still elusive ambition of becoming our new churches.

A new Tate Modern, London. If museums really were to be our new churches, the art wouldn’t need to change, only the way it was arranged and presented. Each gallery would focus on bringing a set of important, rebalancing emotions to life. (illustration credit 8.23)