In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

; .' SHORTER NOTICES Aesthetic Experience in Religion. By GEDDES MAcGREGOR. .London1 Eng.: Macmillan & Co. lToronto: Macmillan Co. of Can~da]. 194t'. Pp. 264. ($3.75) . ' . Dr. ·. MacGregnr's .w.ork raises the most important iss~es regarding the natur~ of aestheti'c and of religious experience, and particularly the baffling problem of ·their relation. In origin all but indistinguishable, art and. religio~ · have no.w reached a point of severance where the small remaining ' ·· fraction of the total still termed ''religious art," seems to consist mainly I . . . -of aesthetically contemptible pictures and statues)' hymn-tunes which might have been expressly in vented by the· devil, and sentimenral or lugubrious ~orks of a'rchitecture; while for 'its part religion has repulsed the services ~f, art t.ill, i·n· great areas of practice, it seems to ma1~ifest a supreme and deli berate .u nloveliness. -· ' · Th~ relation is in fact curiously mixed of hostility and· dependence, trust and mistrust, and 1 in both direction's. . Why have grea~ men like Plotinu's and St. Augustine-without,- as well as within, Chr'istianityalternated between approval and disapproval 0f art? Does God, as the Puritan beli~ves, r~quire the unadorned beauty of holiness in worship and ~eject in anger the spurious holiness of beauty; or is the most perfect offering .that in which .effective holiness is adorned 1n effective beauty? Is the rapture of great .music already virtually a religious ecstasy, or is it a t~umpery s~bstitute, <1: state of exalted emotion which leaves the hearer's will as self-centred and godless as e-~er ~ . · Dr. Ma_cGregor trusts more than he ·mistrusts. He ado 1 pts Croce's theory of- aesth~tic experience (rather improbably combined, Croce would.' object, with the once-fashionable.theory of "Empathy,".and with elements of Thomist realism, plus an analysis of Catholic mystJcism along lin.es provided by Maritain and Dom Cuthbert Butler); and regards beauty, the "expression of intuitions," a:s the basic, rudimentary, primiri~e awareness ,·not ye't involving the distinction of real and unreal, presupposed by all the more elaborate developments of thinking and acting. Such aesthesis "when all is said and .done, we feel sure, is the ground of religion.'' The author lays special emphasis upon the second-level aesthesis jn Croce's t!1eory where, having made the round from primiti.ve intuition to c;;onceptual thought, to "economic,'' and finally to moral activity, the spirit of man plunges again with all it has acquired m .'route, into the vivifying 'if dark, waters 'of intui.tion; emerging transformed with a new set of problems, to . ' start on a new round of the spiral; this secon d.:.level aesthesis he seems ·to equate with mystical experience, the religious flower, as the .first is the· aesthetic root, of iifc. Thus he can write: "God. initiates what is to be ultimately 'mystical union with himself, by a definite commission· to us . to · .have aesthetic experience of a certain kind." And he regards the aesthetic ."dimming out" of the higher activities of concept1on, economic interest, 443 t 1. t ~ t • ' I : . 444 THE UNIVERSITY. OF TORO).;TO ·QUARTERLY -and morality as the counterpart of the· mysti.c's "dark night," which i_s a dimming ou_t of the lower forms of activity~ particularly .a rejection of aes,t~esls, i.e. of all imagery whatever. -· Leaving out th~ metaphysical awkwardness of trying to reconcile Croce and St. Thomas....::._..yhich, ~o say the least, seem·s to m'e insuperable_:_it should be remarked that t'he grounds of mistrust are more serious than _ Dr. MacGregor seems to s_ee. Aesthetic e~perience, exalted as it widely is today_ -to the supreme status.. of "the last ench_artment of ~u; kind," issues in· a .religion of _art which is a dangerous rival to 'Christianity-in effect a relapse into a form of pagan worship at the temple of the Muses. "No sane -artist" he says, "would claim qua artist that he produced works that were the lively oracles ·o'f God"-but this is precisely what artist-s, and _ artists as-great as Dante and Milton,·luve claimed; furthc:,-, and even more disconcertingly, the claims made by a Mallarme seem to be esse-ntially of the same order. . , -I , I I , But if the thesis of root and flower must have the effect of encouraging the ae-sthete's confusion of religion w~th aesthetic ~apture,- its second ~nd graver consequence is to suggest -_that religious experience is simply a I higher form of aesthesis. It is a ~rue (and profound) remark that" "the extent to which we ca_n use unpromising situ-ations to our spi ritual advantage depends. ·on our-. ... attainment in the mystical direction of·our will,. just· as· the extent to which we can s'ee beauty in a· frying-pan depends on the.·· maturity of our aesthetic experience"; but when w'e· have extracted its truth, we m-ust reject it -as a misleading analogy, because it suggests that religion is just a pigher art.- There is nothing- more dangerous to talk about,· ' the author admits, than mysticism, and he ·has run the danger at length, and not with impunity. [n spite of all pr'ecautions, mystical states are presented as induced "by an extremely complex .technique," that is, by us; in spite of all,good mystics to the co.ntrary, the purpose of these exercises. is presented as the enjoyment of Divine "favours." It is a picture which·might well lead the plain man to say, "Mysticism is indeed a merely aesthetic state, ?-nd I think I prefer Christian~ty.)) Surely the most half-hearted consideration of the Imitatio Christi reveals the model of a thoroughly _ active life; a life, that is, where all ~on templati6n .issues directly in action~ ·· rather than all action being absorbed and ~rawn _up in to" con tern plative enjoyment. .An I-ntroduction to Linguistic Science. By EDGAR H. STURTEVANT. ·New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press [Toronto: Ryerson]. 19-47. Pp. ix, 173. '($3.50) The study of linguistics now embraces such a wide variety of methods that the publication of a 'new in traduction to the· science requires no·' ...

pdf

Share