Closing in on Divinity

by Charles Goetz

Religious art inevitably cues reflection about the indispensability of art itself in our humanity. Almost everything we do, in common with all other living creatures, is connected to survival: acquisition of food, clothing, shelter. Our animal brethren don't usually have to worry about clothing, but you get the point.
Even our games, be they on a playground or in a stadium, because of their competitive, win/lose nature, are rehearsals for the survival struggle. And the estate as surely as the one-bedroom apartment is simply a version of the cave in which our ancestors took their first shelter. We're pretty sophisticated about getting our food but eventually it's all about some sort of hunting and grazing, isn't it?

Only when we turn our attention to creating and/or appreciating art do we lay aside what we have in common with everything else that walks, creeps, flies, slithers or swims, and enter into a unique exercise that, for the most part, our fellow creatures do not and probably cannot share. For the time that we engage in art we declare our freedom from whatever rat race we run to survive physically. The term "play" for theater art is singularly appropriate.

Happy indeed is the artist who combines humanity and the survival mission by offering aesthetic creations for sale. But it is significant that, especially in this most capitalist (competitive) of countries, being an artist is probably the most difficult vocation one can essay in terms of sustaining remuneration. It has been pointed out that, for the first half of the twentieth century, only two poets (Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg) managed to make a living doing nothing else but writing poetry. Things have not improved much since then; for most artists, "day jobs"--frequently in the academe--are essential.

The French philosopher, Jacques Maritain, in his book Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry compares the artist to God because, like God, s/he creates in his/her own image and likeness. Maritain points out that the artist is a poor God because, unlike the Deity's, artistic creation is not something from nothing but dependent upon at-hand reality for both materials and models. But, working within those limitations, the artist does bring new reality into being. And that is as close to being divine as we're going to get.