F. D. Martin and the Problem of Censorship in Religious Art

Leonordo, Vol. 9, pp. 38-40. Perganion Press 1976. Printed in Great Britain F. D. MARTIN AND THE PROBLEM OF CENSORSHIP IN RELIGIOUS ART Susan Glyn* F. David Martin, a professor of philosophy, in his book Art and the Religious Experience (Cranbury, N.J., U.S.A.: Bucknell University Press, 1972) is entirely unconcerned with the current controversy as to whether organized religions have rejected modern art or whether artists have rejected religion. Instead, he puts forward the view that religious artists hold the key to a return to meaningful existence in industrial society. The first chapter of his very well written book is devoted to an exposition of M. Heidegger’s philosophy, extended by the author to certain present-day studies of theology. In a chapter on A. N. Whitehead’s hypothesis of perception, he discusses participative experience. He then attempts to demonstrate in chapters on music, visual art, literature and architecture how the ‘language of the sacred’ is involved and with it participators. My critical comments are concerned principally with Martin’s chapter on religion and visual art. In my view, his approach in this section is so dogmatic and so blinkered by his philosophy that it amounts to censorship . As a result, he deals with only a small fragment of religious experience as expressed in visual art, ancient or modern, and excludes all the rest on grounds unconnected with artistic merit. The author defines the nucleus of the religious experience as: (1) Uneasy awareness of the limitations of man’s moral or theoretical powers, especially when reality is restricted to what can be known primarily by means of sensation; (2) awe-full awareness of a further reality-beyond or behind or within; (3) conviction that participation with this further reality is of supreme importance. He adds that ‘without the participative experience the religious experience is impossible’. Following Heidegger, he calls sense data and objects ‘beings’ or ‘things’ and the world of beings or things ‘ontical reality’. This is contrasted with ‘ontological reality’ composed of ‘Being’. Martin goes beyond Heidegger in explicitly identifying this ‘Being’ with a god of monotheism. For him, ‘Being’ is the source or ground of objects but is not itself an object or sense datum. It is that intangible matrix and power that make possible the existence of any sense datum. “‘Being” gives beings their “is”’, he writes. (This concept is perhaps more elegantly expressed in the Old Testament, according to which Moses heard the voice of God declare from the ‘burning bush’: ‘I am that I AM’ [l, Exodus, 3:14].) For Martin, ‘Being’ reveals itself, if at all, not as a thing but as a ‘presence’ in religious experience. So far, most believers would agree with him, *British artist living at 6 rue Saint Louis en I’IIe, 75004 Paris, France. (Received 20 Feb. 1975.) particularly in the appeal to inner experiencerather than sense data. I have defined religious art as art in which the artists express their sense of the presence of god [2]. However, at this point Heidegger and Martin dissent from traditional theologies and also from the ideas of Plato. For Martin, “‘Being” is nothing apart from beings, and so ‘‘Being” is not some “thing-initself ” or some kind of invisible world lurking behind beings. Thus “Being” is always embodied: “Being” as absolute-as “ab-solved” from all beings-is an empty negative concept.’ He dismisses contemptuously all idea of a spiritualrealm or of a god existing apart from the world as ‘purely illusory, a mist of make-believe, for there are no empirical grounds for this so-called further reality’. This appeal to empiricism may seem illogical after his earlier objections to it, even a little out-of-date, now that the logical positivist position seems to have been demolished by Karl R. Popper [3]. Martin goes on to reject the claims of the mystics to spiritual experience, although his own definition ‘awefull awareness of a further reality-beyond or behind or within’ seems to describe them aptly. However, for Martin, any belief in the spiritual, as distinct from its embodiment in physical beings, is ‘not religous in either the narrow or the broad sense’. Consequently, art that...