We were having a discussion over dinner tonight, initially about religion when we found ourselves asking the question, “What is it for?” I suggested (and I’m sure that this is not original) that religion and art both have something essential in common. They both affirm that things do not have to be as they are. (I suppose that, putting it more technically, they both have a “transcendental” character.)
Afterwards, I fell to thinking more about art than about religion. Int is certainly (or perhaps I should say, “to my mind”) the case that an image which merely records the way things are falls short of being properly “art”. A picture of a vase of flowers which is simply a statement of the fact that it looked like this can’t really claim to be “art”. It might as well be an illustration in a seedsman’s catalogue.
My numerous (indeed, obsessional) depictions of Almscliff Crag I always intended to be more than mere topographical diagrams of the kind one sees in climbing handbooks. I always tried to communicate something of the awe with which I viewed Almscliff. At the moment I have a keen awareness in my succession of studies of the old oaks in Bradgate Park that these are more than mere trees. There is in them something which essentially challenges us, much in the way that Almscliff does.
Along the same lines, if our religious beliefs do no more than state that the world is as it is, then it fails in its purpose. I think that we should perhaps always be, to some extent, uncomfortable within the context of faith.