F. D. Martin and the Problem of Censorship in Religious Art

Abstract

F. David Martin, a professor of philosophy, in his book Art and the Religious Experience (Cranbury, N.J., U.S.A.: Bucknell University Press, 1972) is entirely unconcerned with the current controversy as to whether organized religions have rejected modern art or whether artists have rejected religion. Instead, he puts forward the view that religious artists hold the key to a return to meaningful existence in industrial society. The first chapter of his very well written book is devoted to an exposition of M. Heidegger's philosophy, extended by the author to certain present-day studies of theology. In a chapter on A. N. Whitehead's hypothesis of perception, he discusses participative experience. He then attempts to demonstrate in chapters on music, visual art, literature and architecture how the 'language of the sacred' is involved and with it participators. My critical comments are concerned principally with Martin's chapter on religion and visual art. In my view, his approach in this section is so dogmatic and so blinkered by his philosophy that it amounts to censorship. As a result, he deals with only a small fragment of religious experience as expressed in visual art, ancient or modern, and excludes all the rest on grounds unconnected with artistic merit. The author defines the nucleus of the religious experience as: (1) Uneasy awareness of the limitations of man's moral or theoretical powers, especially when reality is restricted to what can be known primarily by means of sensation; (2) awe-full awareness of a further reality-beyond or behind or within; (3) conviction that participation with this further reality is of supreme importance. He adds that 'without the participative experience the religious experience is impossible'. Following Heidegger, he calls sense data and objects 'beings' or 'things' and the world of beings or things 'ontical reality'. This is contrasted with 'ontological reality' composed of 'Being'. Martin goes beyond Heidegger in explicitly identifying this 'Being' with a god of monotheism. For him, 'Being' is the source or ground of objects but is not itself an object or sense datum. It is that intangible matrix and power that make possible the existence of any sense datum. 'Being gives beings their is', he writes. (This concept is perhaps more elegantly expressed in the Old Testament, according to which Moses heard the voice of God declare from the 'burning bush': 'I am that I AM' [1, Exodus, 3:14].) For Martin, 'Being' reveals itself, if at all, not as a thing but as a 'presence' in religious experience. So far, most believers would agree with him,