The Divine In The Aesthetic

Shintoism, as I understand it, is in many ways a religion of the aesthetic. THE BOOK OF TEA, perhaps unique among all of religious scripture, certainly presents it that way. Shintoism sees equates religious and aesthetic experience. The encounter with beauty comes to us as something magical and mystical, and from that experience it is reasonable to assume that one is, in fact, encountering a divine spirit. Anything that can reflect beauty is believed to have such a spirit, called a KAMI. Since the aesthetic experience can be bound up with almost any object or act, almost any object or act can be reasonably worshipped.

The problem is, of course, that such a religion is in many ways morally neutral. It is the same old problem I've spoken of before, the problem brought up in the film THE INCREDIBLES: if everyone is super, than no one is. If every act is divine, then no act is divine. Of course one CAN be good, and that goodness can be divine so long as it is a goodness that is lived beautifully. Certainly Japanese people would acknowledge that there is beauty in the doing of the good. But doing evil, if also done with an artistic flavor, can also be divine, and therefore meaningful. In the end, I guess, Shintoism, like all Pantheism, suffers from the same problem as dualism: evil and good are made equally divine, and equally meaningful. But if they are equally divine, then neither is divine. If all are super, then none are.

But just as it shares in dualism's failings, I am attracted to Shintoism for about the same reasons. It makes sense of our experience of spiritual realities in both light and darkness, and Shintoism can easily be made consistent with modern science. Beyond that, I find the idea that there is something divine in the aesthetic, very attractive indeed. Beauty does indeed come to us as something divine. The aesthetic experience is one of the 'mundane religious experiences' I spoke of in my reflection upon rational grounding for religious belief. There is some connection between the divine and the beautiful, and beauty is, I think, one of the ways the Divine impinges upon our world.

I experienced this over the weekend at the local comic book convention, Space City Con. Like most conventions, it had a variety of very talented artists selling both prints and original arts. And like most of the conventions I attend, I bought a lot of both. I commissioned several pieces. Walking around, surrounded by so much beauty really pulls me away from the riggumroll of every day life. I feel a new sense of time and a disconnectedness from the evils of the world. Coming back to the normal routine of life is not unlike the experience one has coming back from a mission trip. The sense of time change, the change in what is important, and the general sense of being visited by Something Great, are all there, though mission trips are far more intense in terms of the experience and the dissonance with normal life lasts longer when you return.

But one cannot deny the similarities. In the end, the aesthetic can clothe one in a divine aura that brings one the sense of some salvific element in the world. And because one can organize around art, because art can be the center of extended activity, as it is at the conventions, it has the ability to mimic religious experience in ways that things like sex or humor (also transcendent experiences) cannot. However, it must be remembered always that, contra Shintoism, art cannot save. In the end, its moral neutrality betrays its inability to be a complete divine experience unto itself. Since one can reach out and touch God through art, it carries with it the danger of idolatry. But if one remembers that God cannot reach out and touch us through art, if one can remember that art is a reflection of the Divine and not Divinity itself (as, say, Jesus is), then one can fully enter into the aesthetic experience without falling into that idolatry.

I suppose that every religious encounter in this life is a double edged sword. It holds the potential to genuinely deepen one's sense of God's presence, but also holds the danger of causing us to worship the Aura of God as God itself. In the end, we cannot worship even religious experience as an end in itself, for God is not the experience but the Reality behind the experience. If we can remember this, if we can seek that which is the ground of all that is good and wonderful, and not mistake any particular instantiation of the good and wonderful as the Ground itself, we can see all deep moments in life as what they are: roads to the divine.