“Of the Times, Yet Timeless”: A Sketch on the Subject of Art and Religion in the Work of F.X. Šalda

Abstract

A religious experiencing of the world, a search for some stance on matters of spiritual integrity, permeated the entire critical oeuvre of the founder of modern Czech art criticism, F.X. Šalda, though in many different, and often surprising, ways. Many later interpreters of his work have pointed to the key role played by his belief in an absolute spiritual principle that gave order to his ideas about art and culture, or to the role of religious thought as the pivot of his convictions, indeed his entire personality. During the almost fifty years of Šalda's creative life, this “desire for integration”, or spiritual synthesis, evinced many different, often contradictory, forms, yet invariably directed towards encapsulating that unity of variables, the entirety of life and one's role within it. His relationship to religious discourse in literature and art, an issue which he raised time and again with both trepidation and a determination to arrive at some rational, systematic resolution, permits us an insight into how he approached the problem of inner unity and thus into the overall moulding of his attitude to life, the world and art. Hence I shall focus here on three particular stages in Šalda's career as critic and poet where – with a different variable each time – he broaches this troublesome relationship.