Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (22 page)

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.

1.
Given how ugly huge stretches of the modern world have become, one might wonder whether it really matters what things around us look like, whether the design of office towers, factories, depots and docks truly merits the consideration of anyone beyond those who directly own or use these structures. The implicit answer must be no. It is surely foolish, precious and ultimately dangerous to be overly receptive to whatever is in front of our eyes; otherwise, we would end up unhappy most of the time.

So far as the law is concerned,
property development is just another branch of private enterprise. What counts is who owns a piece of land, not who is forced to stare at, and then suffer from, what has been built on it. The legal system is not geared to recognize the sensitivities of passers-by. To complain that a tower or motel offends the eye is not a category of distress that contemporary planners are skilful at honouring or addressing. In its tolerance of landscapes which generally leave us no option but to look at our feet, the modern world is resolutely, and in a secular sense,
Protestant
.

When
Protestantism took hold in northern Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, it manifested an extreme hostility towards the visual arts, attacking Catholics for their complicated and richly decorated buildings. ‘For anyone to arrive at God the Creator, he needs only Scripture as his Guide and Teacher,' insisted
John Calvin, giving voice to the anti-aesthetic sentiment of many in the new denomination. What mattered to Protestants was the written word. This, rather than elaborate architecture, would be enough to lead us to God. Devotion could be fostered by a Bible in a bare room just as well as it could in the nave of a jewel-encrusted cathedral. Indeed, there was a risk that through their sensory richness, sumptuous buildings could distract us, making us prefer beauty over holiness. It was no coincidence that Protestant reformers presided over repeated incidents of aesthetic desecration, during which statues were smashed, paintings burnt and alabaster angels brutally separated from their wings.

These same reformers meanwhile constrained their own architects to the design of sober and plain hangars which could shelter the members of a congregation from the rain while they read the
Bible, but would leave them undistracted by any thoughts of the building they were in.

It was not long before Catholicism was goaded into a response. Following the Council of Trent in 1563, the papacy issued a decree insisting that, contrary to the impious suggestions of the Protestants, cathedrals, sculptures and paintings were in fact integral to the task of ensuring that ‘the people could be instructed and confirmed in the habit of remembering, and continually revolving in mind the articles of faith'. Far from being a diversion, sacred architecture was a reminder of the sacramental truths: it was a devotional poem written in stone, wood and fragments of coloured glass. To drive home the argument, the Catholic Church inaugurated a massive programme of construction and decoration. Alongside the pale, featureless halls of the
Reformation, there now arose a new generation of ecclesiastical buildings intended to breathe passionate emotion back into a threatened faith. Ceilings were overlaid with images of heaven, niches were crowded with saints and walls were affixed with heavy stucco mouldings, above frescoes depicting miraculous incidents in Jesus's ministry.

To derive a sense of the aesthetic gulf that had opened up between the two branches of Christianity, we need only compare the sobriety of the earliest extant Protestant chapel, at Schloss Hartenfels, in Torgau, Germany (1544), with the ecstasies of the nave vault (‘the triumph of the name of Jesus') of Rome's Chiesa del Gesù (1584).

2.
In arguing for the importance of architecture, Catholicism was making a point, half touching, half alarming, about the way we function. It was suggesting that we suffer from a heightened sensitivity to what is around us, that we will notice and be affected by everything our eyes light upon, a vulnerability to which Protestantism has frequently preferred to remain blind or indifferent. Catholicism was making the remarkable allegation that we need to have good architecture around us in order to grow into, and remain, good people.

The foundations of Catholicism's respect for beauty can be traced back to the work of the Neoplatonic philosopher
Plotinus, who in the third century AD made an explicit connection between beauty and goodness. For Plotinus, the quality of our surroundings counts because what is beautiful is far from being idly, immorally or self-indulgently ‘attractive'. Beauty alludes to, and can remind us about, virtues like love,
trust, intelligence, kindness and justice; it is a material version of goodness. If we study beautiful flowers, columns or chairs, Plotinus's philosophy proposed, we will detect in them properties that carry direct analogies with moral qualities and will serve to reinforce these in our hearts via our eyes.

Along the way, Plotinus's argument served to emphasize how seriously one would have to consider ugliness. Far from being merely unfortunate, ugliness was recategorized as a subset of evil. Ugly buildings were shown to contain equivalents of the very flaws that revolt us at an ethical level. No less than people, ugly buildings can be described using terms like brutal, cynical, self-satisfied or sentimental. Furthermore, we are no less vulnerable to their suggestions than we are to the behaviour of ill-intentioned acquaintances. Both give licence to our most sinister sides; both can subtly encourage us to be bad.