Art and Prayer

Abstract

This essay explores ways in which art and prayer can be said to share similar important characteristics since, it seems, both are at aimed ultimately at symbolic forms of transcendence as expressed through a metaphysical ek-stasis (Ancient Greek for outside-standing, έκστάσις). Also, both art and prayer appear to involve ”belief” in the unrepresentable invisibility of an aesthetic of the human spirit, which is expressed in making an appeal to something outside of ourselves. Other parallels exist too in the ways they existentialise certain convictions about the mystery of human experience in so far as their gestures symbolise meanings, or a longing for meaning, which cannot be quantified either in the materiality of the work of art itself or in the ethical transformations they bring about. As with art, so prayer is defined through cultural practices in what might be described as a teleological longing and faith in the possibility of transcendence, not away from the world as such, but from within the realms of silence. It co-opts aspects of from theories of metaphysics, phenomenology, ontology and deconstruction, and applies these in relation to ontological tropes in Christian mysticism and Zen Buddhism. Thus, what follows is an attempt to show a relation between art and prayer from the perspective of someone who has no affiliation with any particular theology.