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c h ap t e r 1 2 The Metaphysics of Religious Art: Reflections on a Text of Saint Thomas This title may seem at first to be a strange one. Granted, the making or appreciating of a work of art is not itself a work of metaphysics, nor of any philosophical discipline at all. Yet it seems to me that there is a remarkable parallel between the way the religious artist achieves the objective of symbolizing the transcendent and the way the metaphysician, at least a Thomistic metaphysician, achieves the goal of a strictly intellectual ascent of the mind to God. Not that Saint Thomas himself, in the text I am going to examine or anywhere else, as far as I know, ever speaks of religious art, let alone its relation to metaphysics. Nor have I read it anywhere; the comparison is strictly my own. So I would like to present it to you, my readers, many of whom undoubtedly know more about religious art than I do, not as any kind of authoritative teaching of Saint Thomas himself or of the Thomistic tradition, but for your own critical reflection to help me to test out the validity and fruitfulness of my hypothesis. Do I think my hypothesis holds for all religious art? I am convinced—and many artists and philosophers with me—that it is illuminating for a significant proportion of religious art. I would like to think it holds for all. But let’s see what you think. The idea of drawing this comparison came to me suddenly as the result of an experience. I was traveling in India, at the end of a tour for college professors, sponsored by the State Department in 1968, and my mind had Revised and expanded from an article first published in Graceful Reason: Essays in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy Presented to Joseph Owens on the Occasion of His Seventy -Fifth Birthday and the Fiftieth Anniversary of his Ordination, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983). 152 The Metaphysics of Religious Art 153 been deeply stimulated and challenged by contact with the many different religious conceptions of God, or Ultimate Reality, that I found there, together with their varying expressions in art, principally Hindu and Buddhist . I had also taught during the previous semester a course in the metaphysics of Saint Thomas at Fordham University, with particular stress on how Saint Thomas explained the structure of the human mind’s intellectual ascent to affirming the existence of God. The experience was this: I was looking at a splendid bronze statue of the dancing Shiva with its six arms, a classic symbol for Hindus of God as Creator and Destroyer, holding in one hand a bell to summon the universe into being, in another a lighted torch, to symbolize its destruction. Despite its strangeness to our ordinary Western artistic sensibilities, it spoke to me powerfully. I was trying to figure out exactly why, when all of a sudden the affinity between the hidden structure at work in the sculpture and that at work in Saint Thomas’s metaphysical ascent of the mind to God burst upon me. This is what I would like to present for your consideration, as one more example of what seems to me the ever-fresh fecundity of the philosophical thought of Saint Thomas as applied to areas outside of philosophy. My point of contact with Saint Thomas in this matter will be a single brief but very dense text in his Summa Theologiae.1 The rest of this essay will be devoted to drawing out the implications of this text for understanding the metaphysical and epistemological structures which I think are latent in religious art. A brief preliminary clarification as to what I mean by ‘‘religious art.’’ I am taking the position—controversial, perhaps—that there is a distinctively religious character to certain works of art that is somehow intrinsic to them and not merely due to the extrinsic accident that they are inserted in a religious setting or even illustrating some religious subject matter. Thus the mere fact that a painting—let us grant a good one in itself— depicts a mother lovingly holding a child and carries the title ‘‘Madonna’’ does not make it automatically a piece of religious art. There must be something within the painting itself which gives expression to the religious dimension. Perhaps the simplest way to define or identify...

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