Aesthetics and Judaism, Art and Revelation

Abstract

Aesthetic sensation (sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch) and aesthetic creation (architecture, music, poetry, painting) are at the base of religious thought and culture. In rabbinic memory, the Temple in Jerusalem was once the adornment (noyo) of the world (Zebahim 54b), its altar compared to a wolf (53b), its sanctuary to a lion, narrow behind and broad in front (Middot 4:7). Religious environments build upon a mass of physical stuff: objects and texts, stories and sound, organized and reorganized by acts of custom and law. Empirically, the co-relation between aesthetics and religion is the self-evident subject of art history and the history of religions, its existence, if not its significance, a matter of fact. At a second order of analysis, the relationship proves cryptic. The religious culture of Judaism depends upon the presupposition that the presence of God, the glory of God, is made manifest to human consciousness through visual, aural, and tactile media. Such a theoretically fraught claim and the counterclaims against it are of unique concern to theological speculation and philosophical analysis. They relay human consciousness past the limits of reason into the dim vagaries of aesthetic judgment and religious intuition, into Plato's cave, the holy of holies.