Aesthetics of recognition in contemporary religious art

Abstract

This paper presents the aesthetics of recognition as the most appropriate approach for discerning the religious potentiality (of a Christian nature) in a significant part of contemporary art. To do so, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms, functions, and forms of recognition, to distinguish between profane, sacred, and religious art, to critically analyze the aesthetic model of the Catholic Church rooted in the concept of Neoplatonic beauty, and to propose an alternative procedure. The alternative procedure serves two purposes: first, to reveal the religious aspect of a substantial segment of contemporary culture that has been largely overlooked; and second, to prevent the confusion that arises from the inclusion of religious works in churches and liturgies, giving the impression that they are sacred. Such confusion is widespread and detrimental to the sacramental experience of faith.

Keywords:

• Aesthetics
• religious art
• sacred art
• beauty
• recognition
• contemporary art

1. Introduction

Since the end of the 19th century, with the irruption of artistic modernity through the avant-garde, a gradual distancing between artists and the Catholic Church has been taking place (Alexandre 2010; Borghesi 2007). This has led to the consideration that there is currently no genuinely Catholic art that is recognized as valid by the institutions related to artistic taste (museums, critics, galleries, collectors), nor a specific style that is identified by the Church as suitable for the representation of the sacred in its churches. This discrepancy, compounded by the difficulty of finding religious value in proposals conceived in a profane key, has its origin in a contrasting view: while contemporary art moves in categories of aesthetic experience and recognition, the Catholic Church finds that only beauty is a guarantee for true art (Benedict 2009; Francis 2020; Harries 1993; John Paul II 1999).

Therefore, the Catholic Church faces a fourfold problem that can be summarized as follows:

• Lack of interest in many contemporary cultural productions – not only artistic, but also musical, cinematographic, performances and even video games – because it does not recognize any religious value in them.

• Using, however, some such contemporary cultural works of (a paradigmatic case is music, but also sculpture and painting) as if they were sacred, thus impoverishing and aesthetically degrading churches and celebrations.

• Neglecting creative work in contemporary sacred art aside from merely imitating past forms and styles.

• Missing out on contemporary religious art, which can be accessed through recognition, as the paradigmatic way of highlighting the great questions of our time and from these works to travel the path of the search for and experience of God.

To unravel this complex path, which has as its horizon in the proposal of an aesthetics of recognition of contemporary religious art, we must conceptually break down the concept of ‘aesthetics of recognition in contemporary religious art’ in its main terms. On this basis, we will then be able to better understand the difference between sacred and religious art and start the path of reconstruction and application of recognition, as a particularly useful tool for Catholicism in its relationship with today's culture.

2. Aesthetics of recognition

Recognition is a broad and ambiguous concept. It is a term used, in its common meaning, as a realization, a kind of intuition or flash of awareness. However, its meaning is much broader and more complex. It is used in epistemology to refer to a way of knowing based on previous experiences,¹ in morality to indicate the granting of identity to the other (Taylor 1993; Ricoeur 2005), in theology to define one of the functions of faith (Francis 2013);² and in aesthetics – which is the case that concerns us here – in two ways: as the unveiling of a narrative truth (Aristóteles 1974) and as a mechanism of reception (Mayoral 2015; Warning 1989).

Although, as we said, the concept of recognition in aesthetics has been understood as unveiling, when it is something internal to the work, anagnorisis as understood by Aristotle in the Poetics³ is also a mechanism of identification and interpretation in the receiver. This is the way it is understood in this paper. However, it should be specified also that when recognition refers to interpretation in the receiver there are two ways of understanding it: in the way of Honneth and followers (Hernández and Herzog 2015; Honneth 2006)⁴ who defined it as a social critique of the arts; and as we conceive it (Martín Lloris and Gómez-Ferrer 2019): as a branch of cultural analysis from the aesthetics of reception in which the accent is placed on the spectator's encounter with the work.

The aesthetics of reception emerged from Gadamer's hermeneutics (Gadamer 2012) in the 1960s, mainly in the field of literature, and are based on the consideration of the cultural work as a communicative element open to the interpretation of the receiver.

2.1. Consideration of the artistic work from the aesthetics of recognition

The aesthetics of recognition understands the work of art as a reality with not only aesthetic but also communicative qualities that produce effects on the receiver who relates to it from his own history and reality. As a communicative element it functions as a linguistic act; that is, as a system of signs, but with an aesthetic function and not so much with a practical function (representative, expressive, appellative). The sign has an open meaning, not a closed one (Saussure 2020), in which the spectator carries out an interpretative process.⁵ This will be extremely relevant, since modernity is defined, in artistic terms, precisely by its indeterminate and open character.

2.2. The inconcreteness of the work and its consideration as an open sign

Every work, for the aesthetics of recognition, is indeterminate, an open sign to some extent. It always has a space of inconcreteness. There is never a work so closed that there is no possibility for it to be experienced by the receiver. However, there are epochs with very closed styles and others, like the present, that are much more open (Berger 2016; Gombrich 1995). The lack of concreteness happens because creation escapes the creator at some point. Because, otherwise, we would not speak of a work of art, but of a copy of reality. This is something that Jauss and Iser (Warning 1989)⁶ had already suggested when they stated their hypothesis that the fictional text (in our case, a work of art) does not represent a reproduction of reality, but an intervention in the system of senses. The work of art, thus considered, is not a mimetic representation. It is an action with the capacity to create meaning for the receiver and for the world.

The range of interpretative possibilities, for the aesthetics of recognition, will vary according to the suggestive capacity of the indeterminacy of the work and the value sensitivity of the receiver. In the act of interpretation, the interpretative link can be ‘stretched’ up to certain limits, but not indefinitely.

Exceeding the limits will mean a distortion of the meaning of the sign, no matter how much the receiver claims that it suggests it to him.

2.3. Giving true meanings

Giving true meanings is a process that requires subsequent validation. The aesthetics of recognition is not an open bar of random interpretations of a cultural action. Because what aesthetics of recognition defends is that what is recognized is not the work itself, but what it means to the receiver. An experience of recognition can never conclude with the affirmation that the artist's intention was something specific or that the work affirms a specific issue. That is, it neither appropriates what is represented nor makes it say something it does not say. Recognition focuses on the effect the work has on the receiver and the capacity it has to evoke in him an experience of truth. Recognition functions as a mechanism that does not affirm the meaning of the sign itself, but of what it awakens in the consciousness of the receiver. This avoids the risk of ontological and narrative modification of the work. For the affirmation of what it suggests to the spectator is always true. What will be necessary afterwards is to validate the universality of such experience, as well as the interpretative coherence in relation to the first-order reality of the sign itself.

2.4. The shared horizon

This idea is like Gadamer's shared horizon proposal. What happens in the exercise of recognition is a triple understanding: of the potentiality of the work, of what the receiver is or discovers himself to be; and also, of the historical effects that operate (in the author and in the receiver) whether he is aware of them or not.

Fundamentally, recognition reveals who the recipient is and what the world is for him. The work is rather a catalyst for one's own experiences. And these experiences can be affirmed if there is some kind of link with the work; and veracity in what has been lived. And since what is lived and what is affirmed is the fruit in the reality, it is also, in turn, a manifestation of the spirit and the concerns of the time in which what has been recognized is expressed. Therefore, there may be different experiences of recognition for the same receiver throughout time and the same work throughout history.

Gadamer will pose this hermeneutic exercise as ‘the attainment of the adequate horizon for the questions that are posed to us in the face of tradition’ (Warning 1989, 83). For this reason, the recognition of the religious requires a horizon of possibilities; an openness that allows us to transcend the gaze to the concrete fact; and the ability to value the work as a sign of a reality that goes beyond the object itself.

2.5. The risks of interpretation

What is certain is that not all interpretations with a claim to validity are possible, because in addition to recognizing, it is necessary to judge what is recognized. What is the basis of a valid interpretation that does not make the work say what it does not say and that does not evoke realities that, because they are so distant, we do not consider accurate? What is the basis of an interpretation that does not grant diverse meanings so subjective that it is impossible to find in them a value that can be affirmed as true?

Recognition, as we will expand upon later, functions as a mechanism of reminiscence in which the capacity for subsequent analysis is required. A key to evidence the validity of what is recognized is the community dimension of the experience. It is true that every communitarian experience has a first moment – the original recognition – in which the receiver, thanks to his sensibility, discovers the religious aspect of a work, not because of what the work manifests, but because of what it awakens in him. His affirmation, as truth inserted in his human experience, will then be corroborated by others who will also recognize that meaning. The communitarian experience can only be authentic if it is possible to judge it through the four ways that we are going to present: experiential, iconographic, sentimental, and theological.

Universality, shared recognition, experience of truth, and ratification in one's own life will become keys to the judgment of whether what is recognized has a religious character or not.

3. Contemporary art

The road to contemporary art has been a long process, in which two tensions have coexisted throughout history. One is focused on the contemplation of beauty, based on objective properties of validity: proportion, harmony, virtuosity in execution. The other is based on the expressive capacity of the artist and its foundations are rather the imagination, the ability to shock, strength, provocation, novelty, and ideation. Historically, this distinction was already present in Ancient Greece between Ionians and Dorians (Tatarkiewicz 2002).⁷ The two sides of this tension were baptized by Nietzsche as Apollonian and Dionysian (Nietzsche 1973). Understanding the dual nature of art allows us to understand the aesthetic categories that claim their presence. A brief tour, taking religious representations as an example, will help us to understand the need for recognition in today's culture, which fundamentally subscribes to the second type of art; art that also corresponds to a conception open to interpretation. This will also make evident the necessity for only positioning oneself from the presuppositions of beauty, which is the preferred way of the Catholic Church to dialogue with the works and judge them (Bozal 2015).

3.1. The classical world

We have already pointed out how in the origin of Greek culture there was a tension between two ways of understanding art: that of beauty and that of expression. Beauty finally triumphed and was endowed not only with canonical objectivity, but also with a metaphysical ideal as an evocation of the superior idea that it represented. However, it cannot be forgotten that, in its origins, religious art was profoundly expressive, insofar as the human being manifested his relationship with the divine through the performativity of dance, music and theater (Choza 2013; Eliade 1967; Girard 2012; Otto 2016).

The triumph of Platonic-Pythagorean idealism generated an almost canonical model for many centuries, especially in the Christian world, which was able to transcend the Hebrew restrictions of representation to embrace fundamentally iconographic works.

3.2. Romanesque and Gothic

In the beginnings of Christianity, both in architecture and in painting and sculpture, profane works were taken and given a new religious meaning. Art was representation and participation in the ideal of that which was represented. This is summed up in the statement made by Juan Escoto Eriúgena, a few centuries later, in the Carolingian period, which exemplifies the Neoplatonic medieval thinking: all visible beauty is the image of an invisible beauty (Sánchez-Valdepeñas 2004). The Middle Ages will be characterized by a symbolic, non-naturalistic ideal of beauty, of artisanal conception in execution, but determined by the Christian worldview. An art with the capacity to influence and generate a piety in accordance with the theological and religious sentiment of the time.

Above all, it sought to represent a spiritual truth rather than to point out a physical reality. This will give birth to an anti-classical language, with great symbolic and expressive meaning, but at the same time, easily understandable for the faithful. A combination that solves masterfully the tension between expression and beauty. In Romanesque art everything that had no significance was discarded. Gombrich says that ‘Medieval artists learned to express what they felt’, rather than to represent what they naturally perceived.

However, this situation changed again at the end of the Middle Ages. The Gothic represents an art that is the fruit of the evolution of theological and philosophical thought. In the 12th century, Aristotle was translated and rediscovered and his ideas spread throughout Europe. St. Francis of Assisi, in the 13th century, transmitted a new conception of the human being. From now on, the body will not be a miserable support for the soul, but a marvelous work of God to be valued. In the artistic language, the human representations gain naturalism in place of the Romanesque abstraction and expressiveness appears in the faces. The representations become more delicate, and the backgrounds are no longer neutral. Nature is also a creation and representations of it are a hymn to the One who created it. Giotto is the most representative artist of this new artistic language that will give way to the Renaissance. In his works he breaks with the symbolic style of golden backgrounds. On the other hand, the aesthetics of light will offer new experiences where the architectural work acquires a symbolic dimension of the Heavenly Jerusalem (Merizalde 2016).

3.3. The Modern Age

In the Modern Age, the periods that preceded it are seen as dark times (although they were not), which modern man came to remedy. It is necessary to recover the classical ideal of beauty as proportion, harmony, virtuosity in execution; to flee from medieval sentimentalism and to do it according to the new optical and technical advances and discoveries.

The elevation of the social status of artists to the pinnacle of the new humanism contributed to the emphasis on technical perfection. Drawing and line took precedence over the use of color. However, this concept of Renaissance beauty, understood as a technical quality that would drink from what was understood as classical, would break down again in the Baroque. The new art will move away from this ideal and idealized conception of man. It will be replaced by visual games. Realism will be sought, reflecting painful aspects, old age, sadness, decrepitude, and ugliness. Also, the play of mirrors, grace, and wit with explosions of color and chiaroscuro of rapturous force (Pochat 2008).

3.4. The 19th century

In the 19th century, once again, we see this fragmentation between the classical ideals of beauty and expression in two artistic movements. On the one hand, there is Neoclassical art that follows the dictates of the Academy where the guidelines set by classical culture are affirmed and for whom balance, serenity, harmony and mastery of drawing are central. And on the other hand, Romanticism flees the academic canon and strives to make art an expression of sublime emotions, feelings, and imagination. It abandons drawing and proportion so that works gain passion using loose brushstrokes and the strength of color. It is the classic Ingres-Delacroix conflict.

3.5. Contemporary art: the anthropological expression of human desire

During the rest of the 19th century, the tension between the beauty of form and the expression of emotion was maintained. The styles and, above all, the themes of interest were modified. In French Realism, only two prestigious painters, Millet, and Daumier, treated the religious theme in their works, although without any sacred purpose. Years later, Impressionism will focus on the cliché of reflecting a happy and carefree life. Only a few authors such as Manet tried to introduce a theme more committed to reality, but from a social point of view rather than a religious one. In post-impressionism, Gauguin and Van Gogh represented some religious works, but without liturgical or catechetical intentionality. Thus, with the advent of post-enlightenment culture, the bifurcation between religious art and sacred art that we will develop later will be consummated, so that we will no longer find ourselves with a religious-profane duality, but with an environment in which three different categories will operate: sacred-religious-profane.

What in principle was a break with tradition was soon seen as a bourgeois manifestation that had to be overcome. For the avant-gardists, impressionist art had sold out to the market and the bourgeoisie; it no longer provoked, but delighted, decorated, and pleased the society that bought it. The avant-garde wanted to break with the art of politically indifferent dilettantes; it wanted to put an end to those artists centered on their own art, that artistic caste that only sought to please the bourgeoisie. In the avant-gardes converge the anti-bourgeois attitude, the commitment to cultural revolution, political activism and the will of social transformation and artistic regeneration. With the revolutions, urban development, technical advances and economic improvement, an atmosphere of optimism is generated, where man feels autonomous and liberated from moral and aesthetic impositions. He will believe that art can transform and improve the world. The avant-garde questioned the very concept of art, which became more of an idea than an object. For the first time the question about the ontology of art becomes the protagonist.

Art ceases to be an imitation or interpretation of reality. It becomes an autonomous object that speaks of itself, as well as a political tool. From the death of Cézanne in 1906 to the birth of Dadaism in 1916, the most significant artistic events and innovations that marked and served as a reference for the following generations took place. In 1907 Cubism introduced the spectator as a fundamental element to give meaning to the work – canvas and sculpture are no longer a reliable representation of reality but require the participation of the receiver to recompose the fragments. Kandinsky, in 1910, produced his first abstract works, eliminating all figurative elements. In 1912 Mondrian introduced neoplasticism and in 1913 Malevich painted his famous Black Square. Aestheticism and the object without reference were imposed. Fascinated by this novelty, artists abandoned religious painting. Only Matisse, with the Chapel of the Rosary, Chagall with his imaginary religious universe, Rouault, and Kandinsky, who began the process of transforming the religious into the spiritual, could identify something with religious interests.

With the First World War (1914-1918), pessimism and nihilism took possession of the artists who conceived their works based on a society wounded by the war. The first avant-garde movements, which had promised to bring about a better world, were shattered. While the USA was experiencing ‘the Roaring Twenties’ in Europe, Dadaism and Surrealism appeared as artistic movements. Art became Dada (nothingness) and absurdity was defended as an aesthetic experience, denying cultural progress. In 1913 Duchamp exhibited a bicycle wheel on a stool, and a year later the ‘Bottle Holder’. In 1917 he presented at the Armory Show the ‘Fontaine’, the urinal. Art as such seems to be killed and the belief in art as something that gives meaning disappears. Everything is nothing. Art had not been able to cope with the catastrophes generated by this rational and cultured European man. From this moment on, art also becomes a gesture, a concept, an idea. The maxim: every choice is art, whether by the artist's decision or by the spectator's gaze or by the institutions of taste that validate it. The works become performative and expressions of the creative universes of the authors.

However, capitalism, in its eagerness to assimilate, transforms these contesting positions into a consumer product, one more cultural product that integrates the critics into the system. This situation means that sacred art remains on the margin because it is outside the market, in the same way that it had remained on the margin of the political, social, and cultural avant-garde revolution. It does not participate in cultural production and, therefore, its presence ceases to be art because it is not recognized as such. And it is not recognized as art because it is the market that recognizes art. The market is the only institution capable of putting a cultural production in an artistic category. In this consumer society there is no longer avant-garde art because everything is avant-garde. Everything is a succession of novelties that seek to be different. With the disappearance of metaphysical restlessness, as Ignacy Witkiewicz wrote in 1919, there is no longer a true source of art. Everything becomes aestheticism and there is no concrete artistic position that inquires into the ontology of existence.

With the irruption of the consumerist model and mass culture after World War II, art is divided into two major trends: American and European pop and abstract expressionism. Again, technique versus expression. In this case it is the aseptic pop technique versus American abstract expressionism. Religious art survives thanks to the spirituality of artists like Rothko and in a few formal uses. During the 80's and 90's, in postmodernism, the artistic language becomes self-referential and difficult to understand most of the time because there is no clear purpose of beauty or social criticism in it. It is a plural, eclectic, varied, multiple, irregular, and saturated art. The art of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century becomes a fragile and confusing expression for the public; and at the same time, it is shown in museums and cultural centers as an object to be venerated, which will cause great misunderstandings between spectators and artists.

The scope of the questions, which are fragmented and focused on small discourses and conquests is reduced (Borghesi 1997). Through wanting to rescue minorities, the great collective project of life is forgotten. At the same time, wrong methods of interpretation are used, without taking into consideration that religion requires an intelligence that is proper to it (Gómez-Ferrer 2019) so that the misunderstanding between religion and culture seems ever greater. The creative capacity of man is then rediscovered and is extolled as an attribute of the new economy. Art also becomes decoration and goes from being a medium opening up to reality, to instead offering a reduced reality. In this space, God is left out as a subject. Modern man is incapable of recognizing that there could be an origin different from himself or from nature, although at the same time he is besieged by the questions that he will show in his works, given the insufficiency of alternatives that he himself has given himself. And in time these questions will be the key that will show his anthropological religious condition from which he will not be able to flee, and the source from which will emanate the religious consideration – involuntary – of many of the works made in this postmodernity.

Religious art is not going to disappear (Alexandre 2017; Chillida 2013; Elkins 2004; Valdier 2017) because what will happen is that it will be transformed. It will go unnoticed for a while, but it will emerge thanks to recognition.

It is in the anxieties and intuitions reflected in art that it will have its field of action. It will be present in the questions more than in the answers. That is where the intrinsically religious nature of the human being will be revealed. His condition of being unfinished, free, in search of the fullness that modern life fails to satisfy. That will be the true religious art of our time. The one that needs the paths of recognition to reveal its true face.

4. Definition of ‘religious’

What do we mean by ‘religious’? The question is not simple. We could understand any manifestation linked to a religion as something religious. Thus, for example, in the case of art, we could speak of Catholic, Islamic, Buddhist or Calvinist art (Elkins 2004). What is certain is that, on many occasions, we find references to art that has been produced at the behest of, or commissioned by, some religion: art used in its temples and liturgies or for devotion.

This problem is not new. The philosopher Gustavo Bueno already brought this question to the table in his essay ‘¿Qué significa cine religioso’ [What does ‘religious cinema’ mean?] (Bueno 1993) when he pointed out that ‘when we abstract all convention and stick to the analysis of the expression “religious cinema”, according to its external structure, if it has one, the difficulties in assigning to the expression of reference a precise meaning are little less than insurmountable: it is enough to keep in mind the multiple dimensions that correspond to the adjective “religious”’. Bueno pointed out that, when the term ‘religious’ functions as an adjective, it somehow concatenates different implicit and explicit premises that act at the moment of using the expression of reference. This is, in our opinion, the main problem we encounter when using the term ‘religious’ applied to art and specifically to contemporary art: there are no longer valid shared premises that are assumed by all those who use the term ‘religious art’.

In this sense, the fragmentation of experiences, including ecclesial forms and theological presuppositions and experiences of faith that have multiple manifestations, means that the idea of religious as an adjective is not perceived in the same way by all those who use it.⁸

In the pre-modern world this was not the case, and thus it facilitated the conception of the religious in a unified form and as an alternative to the profane. When we observe a Renaissance self-portrait, a Mannerist mythological painting, a Baroque still life, a Neoclassical war or historical scene or a romantic landscape, nobody understands that they are religious works, because they are representations of the profane world – in environments, as we have seen, more closed than today's – where the margin for the interpretation of the sign is much more limited. But with the arrival of modernity and the complete opening of artistic manifestations to entirely new fields, how can we affirm that the representation of a self-portrait of an anguished man does not carry with it the implicit question of the meaning of existence and, with it, the most elementary religious question of all, which is the reason for living?

The division in this postmodernity will no longer be between religious art and profane art as in the past – where religious art was everything that was not manifestly profane; that is, everything that implied the field of shared faith experience – but between profane art and sacred art, leaving the religious on an undetermined plane, whose designation will require a personal look based on recognition. The novelty is that within the manifestation of the profane there are elements that allow us to discover an incalculable religious value, not in the work itself, but in the receiver who carries out an exercise of recognition on it. What gives it a religious value not universally recognized by society, but by the group of believers who discover that value, is precisely this mechanism of recognition.

We will develop this question in the following section when distinguishing between sacred and religious, but this essential distinction is already intuited here. While all sacred art is religious – insofar as it implicitly manifests an almost closed sign that does not allow judgments far from the religious condition – not all religious art is sacred, because it can be found in works that have no religious intentionality in their creation but are discovered thanks to the mechanism of recognition.

The adjective ‘religious’ can no longer be pronounced with clear premises that identify it with an orthodox canon, as can be found in Fra Angelico or Caravaggio. We can expect a certain iconography – such as a cross, a pantocrator or a bearded man – and a narrative – the Passion, the Gospels, etc. – but this is not enough either. From what perspective could we affirm that a work with a Christ, just because it represents Jesus, is a Catholic or evangelical or even pagan representation? And what would happen then with that which lacks iconography? Are not the works of the Rothko Chapel or the paintings of Sean Scully in the church of Santa Cecilia de Montserrat religious, even when what is represented in their abstraction does not differ at all from other works of the same authors sold in the market as profane? And still more, is only the affirmation of the existence of God religious, or does even asking oneself about his existence deserve this same appellative? Aren't the questions that man asks himself religious? Don't they reflect that man is made for a fullness that the world does not satisfy?

The forms of religion have been changing. Where there is no God there is culture, where there is no culture there is consumption and where there is no consumption there is the self. There are three attempts, through consumption, culture, and the self to give meaning to life. For, as Ratzinger will affirm ‘every human being must “believe” in some way’ (Ratzinger 2001, 65). That is why the questions that recognize the insufficiency of one's own beliefs, the manifestations that reflect their contradictions, the works that show their emptiness, do nothing but allow those who have found other answers to endow them with religious meaning.

Joseph Ratzinger in his essential book Introduction to Christianity already pointed out the religious condition of every man when he manifests his truth in something, something that occurs on many occasions in contemporary art: ‘Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being’ (Ratzinger 2001, 45). These religious forms are not ecclesial, nor are they Catholic, nor could we say proper to an organized form of any kind, but rather respond to what Luigi Giussani defined as essential premises of the human being, his religious sense. Something that he will affirm in his central book that bears the same title of The Religious Sense and that embodies his basic course of Christianity: ‘In fact, there is no human activity more widespread than that which can be identified under the title of “religious experience or sense”’ (Giussani 2008, 19). Hence, for Giussani the same questions – and contemporary art is a great, constant question this author has in mind, sometimes in a conscious way and sometimes unconscious – are a factor of religiosity. ‘The religious factor represents the nature of our self insofar as it is expressed in certain questions: What is the ultimate meaning of existence? Why does pain, death exist? Why is life worth living? Or from another point of view: What is reality made of and for? The religious sense is situated, then, within the reality of our I’ (Giussani 2008, 71).

This is something that Pope St. John Paul II will also point out in his letter to artists: ‘How then can we fail to see what a great source of inspiration is offered by that kind of homeland of the soul that is religion? Is it not perhaps within the realm of religion that the most vital personal questions are posed, and answers both concrete and definitive are sought?’ (John Paul II 1999, 13).

The adjective ‘religious’ applied here no longer means that art responds to an exclusive way of representing the human and the divine in the tradition of what the Catholic religion – which is the case here – has understood for centuries. Its meaning is that it shares the intimate questions that nestle in every human being, or that awaken in them or that contribute to recognizing in what is represented the experience lived by the receiver. The religious dimension of the work is not in the work itself, but in its capacity to awaken the religious sense in the receiver who participates in some way in the experience narrated by the author or recognizes in it – in the work – the beginning of the same path that led him, although perhaps not the author of the work, to God.

But before analyzing the mechanism, there remains one last step, which is to clarify the distinction between sacred and religious art.

5. The distinction between sacred and religious art: beauty and recognition

For centuries, religious art and sacred art have been understood indistinctly. Among other things, because the religious dimension of life was much broader than it is today. Then, the sacred-profane distinctions were clear, and somehow the religious question was more a response from a theology already given in the worldview than a search for something not found.

And this confusion persists. There are many authors who understand as religious any manifestation of a religion (Argullol 1985; Elkins 2004).⁹ Those who think this way give sacredness only a formal and utilitarian value. However, this way of conceiving the religious, as we have already pointed out, leaves out many cultural manifestations. It also leads to the error of using – only because of an irrelevant formality such as an iconographic element or a musical lyric – as sacred, (and with liturgical purposes fundamentally), works that should be understood and used only from a broad religious perspective and, therefore, in spheres and experiences outside the liturgical celebrations.

However, on the contrary, the documents of the Church and the magisterium are quite clear in this regard, although it seems that they are not considered. Thus, we can read in the Catechism: ‘Sacred art is true and beautiful when its form corresponds to its particular vocation: evoking and glorifying, in faith and adoration, the transcendent mystery of God – the surpassing invisible beauty of truth and love visible in Christ, who ‘reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature,’ in whom ‘the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.’ This spiritual beauty of God is reflected in the most holy Virgin Mother of God, the angels, and saints. Genuine sacred art draws man to adoration, to prayer, and to the love of God, Creator and Savior, the Holy One and Sanctifier’ (Catechism 1997, n. 2502).¹⁰

The Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium on the Sacred Liturgy will insist on the specific and superior value of sacred art as opposed to religious art: ‘Very rightly the fine arts are considered to rank among the noblest activities of man's genius, and this applies especially to religious art and to its highest achievement, which is sacred art’ (Vatican 1963, n. 122). It will also recommend that ‘Ordinaries, by the encouragement and favor they show to art which is truly sacred, should strive after noble beauty rather than mere sumptuous display […] and carefully remove from the house of God and from other sacred places those works of artists which are repugnant to faith, morals, and Christian piety, and which offend true religious sense either by depraved forms or by lack of artistic worth, mediocrity and pretense’ (Vatican 1963, n. 124). This rightly implies the exclusion of religious art from temples. The function of sacred art is recognized, since its works ‘are destined for Catholic worship, for the edification of the faithful and for their religious instruction’. However, the ontology of religious art is not really specified.

One of the arts where the distinction made by the Catholic Church between sacred and religious is most clearly understood is music. There is music which the Catholic Church specifically refers to as sacred and in which it recognizes attributes that it does not recognize in religious music, no matter how much it speaks of God or Jesus Christ as happens in so-called Christian rock and its substitutes – let alone in more or less successful adaptations of radio songs into which the words of the Our Father or any other prayer are inserted. And the fact is that ‘sacred song united to the words […] forms a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy’ (Vatican 1963, n. 112). All the signs in the liturgical celebrations are related to Christ as are sacred images of the holy Mother of God and of the saints as well. They truly signify Christ, who is glorified in them (Catechism 1997, n. 1161), Something that many religious manifestations do not fulfill, since what they show is the reality of the man who seeks God and not so much the way in which God has met man.

In relation to the sacred, some ideas are noted in a very interesting text elaborated by the Archbishop of Portland based on the magisterium of the Church (Sample 2019) that are important to note here: first of all, its link with the liturgy – something that the religious does not have – since the sacred is not mere adornment but an element that helps prayer and celebration, so that it contributes to giving glory to God and sanctifying the faithful. And to this must be added the verification of its objective qualities. And this is what will mark the ultimate and essential difference with respect to religious art, which does not always fulfill them.

Sacred art is based on three inalienable principles: holiness, beauty, and universality. The condition of holiness will imply – as Pope St. Pius X (1903) pointed out more than a century ago – ‘the exclusion of all profanity’, through a beauty that – Pope Francis will affirm – ‘gives people a glimpse of the beauty of heaven’ (Francis 2020), which must be easily recognizable as something sacred.

As we have seen, none of the three points is present in the works that we understand as religious from a premise of recognition. They always use profane language, are not always beautiful and are not always easily recognizable as sacred. The consequence is that they will generate a much freer art, not determined by preferred forms, since they lack a concrete intention – being mere expression – and are too plural in their expressive languages. This freedom cannot be found in sacred art – especially in the plastic arts – since it has a much more narrative and contemplative component, traditionally figurative, although without forgetting the metaphysical possibility offered by Abbot Suger's aesthetics of light, which has mutated in modernity into a certain abstraction and volumetric play of spaces in some contemporary temples.

Religious art will therefore have another ontology and another way of manifesting itself. In today's art there is a potential for the religious in art because every man, even if he does not want to be, is religious. The questions of the person who defines himself as religious are not very different from the questions of the one who does not. What varies will be their answers. In both there is a search for being/being in the world; a truth that one wishes to reach; the astonishment of existence and its meaning; the meaning or meaninglessness of life; why and the how the human condition and its infinite complexity come about… Above all, this does not cease to be questioned and sought, whether one is a believer or not; unless the question is drowned in the emptiness of consumption. Therefore, the work becomes religious when the receiver, in the face of its vagueness and openness, performs an interpretative exercise that endows it with religious meaning for himself – and later, after the trial – for a significant community of people who recognize it as such.

If we look at a work by Francis Bacon, we will find through his fast and violent brushstrokes, his colors and hurtful tonalities, the anguish of contemporary man, the desperation, the suffering, the incomprehension. The same happens when we face the works of such provocative artists as Damien Hirst, Marina Abramovich or even Jeff Koons. In such works the profound question remains, the ultimate question: Who am I? What do I identify with? What corresponds to me? It will be the spectator who will have the last word; it will be he who, being the protagonist of the aesthetic experience, will give meaning to the work.

In fact, the Second Vatican Council already focused on dialogue with the other and on concern for mankind. This was affirmed in Gaudium et Spes: ‘Literature and the arts are also, in their own way, of great importance to the life of the Church. They strive to make known the proper nature of man, his problems and his experiences in trying to know and perfect both himself and the world. They have much to do with revealing mans place in history and in the world; with illustrating the miseries and joys, the needs and strengths of man and with foreshadowing a better life for him. Thus they are able to elevate human life, expressed in multifold forms according to various times and regions’ (Vatican 1965, n. 62).

Of course, there will continue to exist a whole theology of beauty (Von Balthasar 1992) and it will be more necessary than ever to find sacred forms that are able to be recognized from the cultural presuppositions of modernity, but this is a matter that transcends the objective of the present work.

5.1. Beauty as an aesthetic criterion for sacred art, and its insufficiency for religious art

The idea that art should be beautiful has been the main idea – with a multitude of variants – in Christian thought throughout history, as we have been pointing out. We must not forget that its origin is in the conception of Plotinus developed in his Enneads.¹¹ Plotinus rereads Plato's Banquet and the Phaedrus, which affirm that the work of art participates in the creative good or, in Plato’s non-Christian language, in the First Beauty, the One, the Good. From him emanates the light that illuminates form and matter in sufficient quantity for this substance to be apprehended by the soul and, from the intelligence, we can deduce the raison d'être of that created beauty.

The tradition of beauty holds a fundamental significance and permeates all of the Church's artistic texts. Art is considered sacred not only because of its inherent beauty but also because it serves as a reflection of the divine Beauty of God. And if it does not, it will be considered aestheticizing, provocative, or vacuous, thus leaving out all the potential of the religious.

Thus, we can read, for example, in the declarations of the last three Popes this same underlying idea. ‘May the beauty that you transmit to the generations of tomorrow provoke amazement in them’, said St. John Paul II in his ‘Letter to Artists’. Benedict XVI will also stress this in his meeting with artists: ‘Authentic beauty, however, unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond. If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence, the Mystery of which we are part; from this Mystery we can draw fullness, happiness, the passion to engage with it every day’ (Benedict 2009). Pope Francis will affirm the same in his homily to artists: ‘Contact with beauty always lifts us up and helps us go beyond. Enlivening and sustaining faith, art is a pathway to go to the Lord’ (Francis 2020).

But this poses a problem. For if the religious is only identified with beauty, then all art that does not participate in beauty, even if it is religious, is excluded. However, it is the truth of the human being that this art represents, even if the truth cannot be identified based on categories that we could recognize as beautiful. This problem is concretized in the assumption that only and exclusively works that are beautiful are truly valid. Benedict XVI contrasts authentic beauty with beauty closed in on itself. But if we stop there, there is no room to recognize that there are also works that we could not classify as beautiful, which contain a profound path towards the discovery of beauty that saves, just as pain is also a path towards the recognition of goodness and truth.

5.2. The religious in secular art, the road to recognition in the Church

However, Benedict XVI himself will dare to formulate the key question in his meeting with artists in the Sistine Chapel when he will say ‘ Art, in all its forms, at the point where it encounters the great questions of our existence, the fundamental themes that give life its meaning, can take on a religious quality, thereby turning into a path of profound inner reflection and spirituality’ (Benedict XVI 2019).

His statement already anticipates the existence of a religious art that emerges from profane creativity. It already points to a reality that we are developing: that of the religious condition that emerges in the receiver before the essential questions posed by contemporary art. What was missing was the adequate aesthetic mechanism to be able to recognize its value: the aesthetics of recognition that we can now, at last, present.

6. Recognition

The way in which the recognition of a work as religious – a work which is not based on categories of beauty and does not have a liturgical purpose – comes from the encounter with the work, free of prejudices that condition the spectator. It is a phenomenology that could be inscribed in the mechanisms developed by Buber that seek to overcome the consideration of the object as a mere ‘object of my thought’ to give autonomy to what we relate to (Buber 2017). This uninvolved gaze, our own, almost naked, is necessary in order not to make the work say what it does not say, and to free us from the way of judging it in which we try to check whether it corresponds to what we have been told or have read about it.

Once the encounter is produced, the act of recognition is triggered, which allows us to see beyond the formal. It is not a matter of interested contemplation, nor of judging the difficulty of the realization, its provocation, its novelty, or subjective taste. The aim is to search for the truth – in me. To be open to what the work triggers in me as a recipient. It works almost in the manner of the Greek alètheia. It functions in the manner of a revelation. The truth of recognition is only possible by accepting the condition of the self that meets the work. A self into which the conditions of our time are inserted, but also previous experiences, my being in history, my horizons of search, my openness to reality, my capacity for astonishment and my sensitivity to the totality of what exists. In the way the encounter with the work takes place, I cannot forget that what I am looking for is not an empirical truth, but a relational one. That is to say, in order to know if the work is religious, I have to check if it expands my humanity or not; if it expands my knowledge of reality in its totality of factors, if it expands my vision of what exists. This truth, that what is revealed to us is only valuable if it leads us to action, in the sense that it raises us to the transcendent, awakens in us our anthropological structure, which recognizes that it is not satisfied with the diminishing supply of the world. A new state of mind that allows us to connect with the divine makes us go beyond the object and beyond ourselves, and then it fulfills its religious mission. I recognize – in different ways – the religious in the work because it serves to make me question myself about my own condition as a creature and about the Creator. The work thus reveals itself as a sign of something greater. It is a tool that allows us to go beyond the limits of the object.

6.1. Forms of recognition

In a previous article (Martin and Gómez-Ferrer 2019) we developed the four forms of recognition that allow us to reveal whether a work can be religious for the one who contemplates it.

The contemplated work will reveal a truth for us if at least one of the following four forms of recognition (which can occur individually or in some cases combined) is produced: Formal recognition (as a symbol); Experiential recognition (because of what has already been experienced by the receiver); Theological recognition (coinciding in the interpretation of what or who is sacred); Sentimental recognition (because the art works produce calm, interiorization, encounter with oneself).

6.1.1. Formal recognition (as a symbol)

A profane work is recognized as religious when it reproduces symbolic forms of Christianity. It is, therefore, a cultural recognition, based on tradition. In the use of the profane image as a religious work, a transmutation of reality takes place. The work is being used as a second order reality. It is the spectator who, from his visual culture, formally recognizes the evocation. It is the viewer who makes it religious, as when he recognizes the Virgin at the manger in the photo of a refugee camp, or the pity in a man holding his son killed by a gunshot in any war.

6.1.2. Experiential recognition (from what has already been experienced by the recipient)

Experiential recognition is based on the identification between the narrated experience and the lived experience, when the latter is the source for the emergence of faith. The work evokes the experience (a wound, the inadequacy of the world, the love of another) and serves to answer the question of who was behind it. It does not matter that the artist does not agree with the answer, what the receiver does is to recognize the same human experience and, in the case of the believer, the reasons that have made it possible to overcome that situation or have been a source for the encounter with God. This is what happens when an artist presents, for example, the pain of a loss, the incompleteness of human love, etc.

6.1.3. Theological recognition (coinciding in the interpretation of what or who is sacred)

Recognition is also produced when, faced with a work that is not iconographically religious, one discovers in it the artist's desire to reflect the sacred, or at least his relationship to the sacred. This interpretation coincides theologically with the interpretation of the one who contemplates it. In this case, it's not a strictly profane work – let's say formally profane – because it contains the potentiality of the religious, showing, for example, the fruitful silence, the mystery of the divine in the object.

6.1.4. Sentimental recognition (calmness, internalization, encounter with oneself)

Many people recognize in spiritual works a religious sense because it connects them with the transcendent. The religious sense is a recognition that man is made for something more than mere living; or, if one prefers, that mere living is insufficient for their lives. It is, let us say, a recognition of the religious condition of man understood as spiritual. This spiritual path does not become religious if it is not accompanied by the recognition that it is the way to affirm the existence of a God who has also become incarnate.

This mechanism of recognition concludes with a judgment on the truth that has been discovered. Is it shared at some point? Is there any link that allows us to assert what has been recognized? Has it allowed me to create meaning in my life? Does it modify my understanding of reality? Does it make me more human, to the point of building a self that modifies its acts with time and with the increasing number of such recognitions? It will be in the subsequent judgment in which we will be able to verify the truth of the experience: depending on whether the recognition leads us towards the mystery that transcends us, or rather encloses us in ourselves.

7. Conclusion

The indeterminate works of profane postmodernity are places where religious works can be recognized insofar as, in many cases, they raise the same questions that the believer asks himself. The aesthetic category of recognition is the valid form for the encounter with such works. The mechanisms of judgment and experience of beauty that are proper to sacred works do not serve for this purpose. It is precisely the capacity to recognize a profane work as a catalyst of one's own experience that reveals its religious condition extending to a group of receivers who determine it to be so based on the appropriate forms for doing so. This idea of religiosity does not modify the ontology of the work, but rather affirms its capacity to become so in the receiver. Being open to this possibility stimulates one to enter contemporary culture not from the value prejudice of considering it as aestheticism or expression lacking in interest, but from the same, naked truth that the human being longs for in his heart. Likewise, it allows us to delimit the type of work suitable for each function.

Recognition will be the key that awakens our humanity. And it will be beauty that will allow us to participate in the beautiful, fundamentally through sacred works. Then, a greater and better approach of the Catholic Church to today's world and its questions will be possible. And an adequate choice of works according to their nature and uses.

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Notes on contributors

Guillermo Gómez-Ferrer

Guillermo Gómez-Ferrer. Accredited Doctor, Vice-Dean of the Degree in Multimedia and Digital Arts and Coordinator of the Degree in Design and Narration in Animation and Video Games at the UCV. PhD in Philosophy. Degree in Philosophy. Degree in Art History. PI of the research group Recognition in contemporary visual culture. Member of the research group Arte i Riconoscimento of the Universitá Degli Studi de Perugia.

Catalina Martín Lloris

Catalina Martín Lloris has a Master’s and PhD in Art History from the University of Valencia. She has also been a cultural manager, responsible for communication and art didactics for public institutions and author of publications on art and history. Her main lines of research have been related to the function of art from the Middle Ages to the present. She is part of the research group of Culture and Postmodernity of the UCV and is responsible for the permanent seminar on visual culture dependent on the Degree in Multimedia and Digital Arts at the UCV. Member of the research group Arte i Riconoscimento of the Universitá Degli Studi de Perugia.

Notes

1 In this process of visual perception, recognition is understood as the process by which a person assigns a stimulus to a particular class or category. It is a term also used by Piaget from the perspective of psychology and education.

2 Thus, for example, in the encyclical Lumen Fidei, signed by Pope Francis but written for the most part by his predecessor, Benedict XVI, we find the following affirmation: ‘In the love of God revealed in Jesus, faith perceives the foundation on which all reality and its final destiny rest’ (Francis 2013, 15).

3 Internal recognition is what Aristotle called anagnorisis. It is really a narrative device – Aristotle presents it in relation to tragedy – in which a character discovers his identity or that of others, by himself or with the help of others, and in doing so, the mystery of the plot is revealed to the spectator. Aristotle will define it in Chapter IX of the Poetics in relation to Oedipus Rex as: ‘A change from ignorance to knowledge, and thus leads to love or hatred in characters marked by good or bad fortune’.

4 Honneth's works are today a reference in the idea of recognition as a social critique of the arts, as proposed by Marxist thought in the Hegelian tradition of the Frankfurt School. In addition to his main works, a compendium of his thought and in general of the various authors who are part of this tradition from Adorno to Nancy, through Habermas, can be read in the compendium compiled by Hernández and Herzog (2015).

5 Although Saussure considered the sign immutable, but with the capacity of mutation in time, he did not grant a potential of variability that would imply changes of meaning as we understand. In the model now proposed, the sign, in this case the work of art, functions in a similar way to what the Palo Alto School understood, in which a double significance was recognized: the first-order reality shared by all speakers – insofar as what the object is as it is: what is seen in the work, in our case – and a second-order reality which is its significance, and which may vary in each spectator.

6 For Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfang Iser, the reading of a literary work produces the fusion of the horizon of expectations of the author of the work with the horizon of experiences of the reader. This had already been anticipated by the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden and the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. A compendium of Gadamer writings can be found in the Warning anthology cited in the bibliography.

7 This distinction was developed by Tatarkiewicz in History of Aesthetics I. Ancient Aesthetics. However, other authors of reference such as Götz Pochat in his History of Aesthetics and the Theory of Art will qualify this – not so much the distinction of two currents of understanding art, which he does appreciate – as the fact that it was clearly the result of the differences between Dorians and Ionians.

8 It happens in other fields as well. What do Catholic education, Catholic university, Catholic intellectual, Catholic writer mean? There is no universally shared answer that is a defining presupposition. In fact, today it is also the subject of debate.

9 The identification of religious art as that which is proper to a religion is very common and widespread. We cite only two authors who have worked specifically on the issue, but the number is much greater, obviously. With regard to Rafael Argullol specific works on the subject are included in the bibliography.

10 Article 2503 is even more explicit: ‘Therefore bishops should personally or by delegation watch over and promote sacred art old and new in all its forms and set aside with the same religious attention from the liturgy and buildings of worship all that is not in accord with the truth of the faith and the authentic beauty of sacred art’ (Catechism 1997, n. 2503).

11 Especially in the ‘Treatise on the Beautiful’, the ‘Treatise on Intelligible Beauty’ and the ‘Treatise on the Multiplicity of Ideas and the Good’.