Can Secular Art be Profound?

There are two very different modes of thought vying for global supremacy: belief and reason.
Reason is a line of enquiry by which we understand the world around us. It is a process, a series of questions through which we build a picture: the reason why the window is broken is because Tommy kicked the football through it. Belief is the opposite of this, it is not an evidence-based process but a faith-based process which starts with a conclusion and works back from there. So irrespective of what situation is presented the explanation has already been decided: “because of God’s design.” So reason searches for answers, whilst belief has answers but cannot demonstrate them to be true. A common criticism of religion therefore is that it it makes enormous claims for itself which it can’t substantiate, to which the religious counter that reason may substantiate things, but only belief can provide ultimate meaning, but is this fair?

Possibly the most successful children’s book ever written is The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. It is a description of very mundane biological events: an egg is laid, a caterpillar emerges, eats a lot, makes a cocoon for itself and emerges as a butterfly. I’ve read it to my son several times and despite my familiarity with the story, it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed with tears when we turn the last page and see the butterfly. The genius of the book is that whoever we are and whatever our cultural backgrounds we all feel something very profound has happened, because it really has. ‘Aha‘ say the religious, ‘this is because the story is an allegory for redemption, salvation and being born again‘. This reveals a determination to superimpose religious interpretations onto natural phenomena. I will resist using the word ‘miraculous‘ and simply say that the caterpillar’s story is  wonderful anyway without each of us sticking on our own preferred symbolism. It’s very common for the religious to conflate the profound with the spiritual, but The Very Hungry Caterpillar needs no theological metaphor to hold us in awe. The natural world does not require the supernatural to captivate us.

Another example, sometimes when DJing, I wait till the dance is as good as it’s going to get and then I play ‘Thinking of You’ by Sister Sledge. I love the way the first word of the song isn’t ‘you‘ or ‘him‘ or ‘them‘ or ‘us‘ …the first word of the song is ‘Everybody‘ and it’s about one person having another person in their heart which is the best thing that can ever be. And although everyone in the bar is drinking and dancing and generally acting differently to how they would in church, it is an overwhelmingly profound experience for me and I am often deeply moved thinking of people I love who are not there with me, especially at the line ‘without love, there’s no reason to live‘. Is it a piece of religious music masquerading as humanism? No. But does it have a Christian subtext? Well no, not unless you are determined to stick one on – but here we have a problem because it’s possible to imagine there is a subtext wherever we feel like seeing one, and sometimes there genuinely is one. For example in Coney Island Baby, Lou Reed keeps saying he wants to play football for the coach, but it’s hard not to sense that this is really an allegory and that actually he is saying that he wants to do good for Jesus, and we could say the same of any number of Beatles or Beach Boys songs or Robert Frost poems. But again these are (for the most part) not explicitly spiritual works – they only become spiritual if we chose to interoperate them in such a way; and if I have already decided that God exists, then it’s possible to see God in every Ansel Adams photograph or Mark Rothko painting.

Let’s look at  the Beatles again as it is an example we are all familiar with. Right into my 40s I would have described the Beatles as a band that started out doing Rock ‘n’ Roll music but who ended up doing religious music; and that whilst it was a very gradual and involved transition, with various twists and turns on the way, essentially over a ten year period they went from making the Devil’s music to making God’s music. But then in my 40s, just when most people become more religious I rethought this – why not take art on its face value? What makes ‘Here Comes The Sun‘ Christian rather than Pagan? To take numerous works of art which make no specific reference to religion and blithely lump them together under the heading ‘Christian’ is to submerge the art beneath whatever baggage we choose to project on it. It is the victory of the critic over the artist, and of interpretation over expression. As our minds gradually set into fixed opinions, instead of us being affected by art, we do the opposite and will the art to be like us. I had conflated the metaphysical with the religious and lazily filed everything I thought was good into the box marked ‘Jesus’.

Because it’s impossible to prove that art doesn’t have a subtext, the religious can make the unfalsifiable claim that every great work of secular art is really about God; not because of its actual composition but by the manner in which they interoperate it. So the religious claim that art must be religious to have profound meaning, and if it’s not religious but it’s still profound then it must have some religious subtext only they can see, and if the art is indisputably secular, they can always claim it doesn’t count anyway because it’s 2nd-rate art. I admit it’s an unbeatable argument, but only because it claims objective truth on the basis of subjective opinion: “I’m right because I believe I’m right….Art about my religion is more profound because I like it more…” Well gosh Mr. Theologian, I don’t seem to have an argument for that!

Admittedly though secularists can make equally idiotic claims: they can look at Caravaggio paintings and simply see humans doing stuff; they can claim that Michelangelo is basically just about homo-eroticism or that The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa masquerades as religious art despite being about very, um, basic sensations. This is the problem when discussing subtexts, we find ourselves trying to draw conclusions from hidden messages, and like a Rorschach ink blot test, it’s easiest to spot what confirms our assumptions. The crucial difference though is that when secularists make idiotic interpretations of art, they are not claiming it validates an entire philosophical system.

Ok so interpretation is very complex and we could debate it forever, but what we cant dispute is that it is possible to be deeply moved by something that makes absolutely no reference to the spiritual. The clearest example I can think of off the top of my head is Why Did You Leave Me? By Sonya Spence. It’s about the relationship between two people, I can discern no subtext, and it simply, brutally asks what is surely the ultimate question. Let me think of a few more: the Importance of Being Earnest, Guernica, the Forth Bridge, Rashomon, Citizen Kane, the Villa Savoye, the songs of Gershwin, Porter and Berlin, the comedy of Peter Cook, the writings of Tom Paine. See? When we get going we find that great art didn’t suddenly stop once religious bodies stopped being the principle commissioners of art, in fact we could be here all day…

Let me try to demonstrate my argument another way…
When were you most happy?
When were you most sad?
The chances are the most significant moments of your life were about your relationship with another human being – someone smiled, a hand reached out, waving on a platform, someone whispering a word, a figure disappeared into a crowd, you noticed a picture was gone, an empty chair, a door closed…These are superficially mundane events, but which are significant because they are about the beginning or end of love. The Devil doesn’t have the best tunes, neither does God, the most profound feelings you ever felt were about another human being.

So no, it’s not correct to say that great art must be religious or that or that secular art can’t be great, or that profound feelings must be spiritual. We do not require religion to be brought to tears by life’s twists and turns and for events to overwhelm our senses. And we don’t need to believe in God to fall in love – we simply need to believe in another person. I’m not insulting the religious, and I am definitely not saying that religious art can’t be profound, I am simply observing that the profound and the spiritual are not necessarily one and the same, and it is quite wrong for religions to claim a monopoly on beauty or meaning or profundity. The notion therefore that unless we submit ourselves to irrational conjecture our lives will be void of meaning is not just incorrect – it is a dangerous alibi for those who want to act unreasonably.

But to be fair to the religious, most of us fantasise to a greater or a lesser extent about things that are not real. Many of us watch Superhero, Ghost, Magic or Sci-Fi films, read horoscopes, follow superstition or adopt curious good luck habits. This shows how even supposedly rational people dream of exception from hum-drum reality. Conversely religious people imagine their deities to have all sorts of human characteristics and suppose them to be preoccupied with every manor of vengeful score settling and favouritism – this reveals a tendency the religious have to project worldly characteristics onto their vision of Heaven. We all dream of a world better than this one, and we imagine it using imagery we are familiar with from our own lives, but whether we dream about people and places that are real or people and places that aren’t, what is common is our yearning for a ‘super reality’ that is like this world, but good. So we live in dreams, imagining that people are gods and that gods are people; that profound things are supernatural and that supernatural things are profound; and we suppose that belief and reason are similar when they’re not.

When we reason we project reality on belief, when we pray we project belief on reality.
When we reason we discuss, when we pray we repeat.
When we reason we walk or sit, when we pray we bow or kneel.
When we reason we open our eyes, when we pray we close them.
When we reason we rationalise, when we pray we de-rationalise.
When we reason our brains are working, when we pray they are at rest.

There is no super reality, superman or supernatural – heaven is in the mind of the person next to you, and regarding the composition of art, the only magic ingresients are work and thought. There are 26 letters, there are 12 notes and there are 3 colours. It’s so simple I can say it in a haiku:

Profound art is the
Thoughtful assemblage of
Mundane elements.