I encountered an interesting discussion on the radio the other day in which it was mentioned (in passing) that during the “Reformation” English churches underwent a radical change in their appearance. Whereas, typically, the walls of churches had been covered with pictures depicting Biblical themes, the dominance of Protestantism had resulted in the whitewashing over of these. Just how general this phenomenon was I am not sure, but it did set my mind running. There would appear to have been a significant shift away from imagination as the foundation of faith to the centrality of belief. The latter, I assume, is defined in terms of assent to verbal propositions …. creeds.
In our own day and age “religion” has come to mean assent to a set of “beliefs”, understood to be statements to which one gives one’s assent. I do wonder whether, in a previous age, people were far freer to allow their imaginations to work upon the visual images which surrounded them, and to respond to these, without having to give an exact verbal formulation to what these meant.
This would be understandable, of course, given the relatively low rates of literacy which prevailed in this country before the nineteenth century.
This might possibly strike the reader as at least mildly heretical, but I do wonder whether this historic shift has entailed a definite impoverishment of our religious life. It might also be partly responsible for the decline of formal religious allegiance and practise. My own, long-held-belief is that religion is essentially poetic and mythological in character, so that imagery rather than logical consistency is what forms the core of any sense of religious identity. Let’s redstart art to the centre of religion!