Aesthetics and the Divine
Rabbi Dr Shimon Cowen is the Director of the Institute for Judaism and Civilization. Combining his distinct backgrounds in secular and religious studies, he established the Institute to create an interface or communication between the arts, sciences and values of general society, on the one hand, and traditional world of religious experience, values and learning, on the other. This book documents one aspect of this interface – in the realm of the fine arts. The work of the Institute has taken the author also to the study of the common root and values of the great world religions, known as the Noahide laws. Their content and application to society are the subject of his books, Politics and Universal Ethics and The Theory and Practice of Universal Ethics – the Noahide Laws. The son of a former Governor-General of Australia, Sir Zelman Cowen, he resides with his wife and family in Melbourne. He may be contacted at
The printing of this book has been kindly supported by
The Institute for Judaism and Civilization Inc
Ian Rogers Fine Art
An anonymous supporter
Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
© S. D. Cowen 2017
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First published 2017
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication
entry: (paperback)
Creator: Cowen, Shimon Dovid, author.
Title: Aesthetics and the Divine : engaging artists, fostering
religious art / Rabbi Dr Shimon Cowen.
ISBN: 9781925272697 (paperback)
9781925736649 (ebook)
Subjects: Judaism and art.
Aesthetics – Religious aspects – Judaism.
Jewish artists – Australia.
Cover image: Victor Majzner, “Images of Tanya”, Image 5 (Chapters 6-7) watercolour.
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The creative fine arts (for which the generic term “art” is used in this book) are a profound, potent and fundamental realm of higher human expression and activity. For this reason, religion also needs to express itself artistically, to inhabit the aesthetic dimension of human experience. Yet, especially in modernity, artists and art institutions have often been hostile or at best indifferent to religion. This reflects the marginalization of religion in many societies, even though religion continues to provide the reference point and reminder of the basic human values historically underlying these societies.
Under an imperious secularism in the universities, academies, media and institutions of high culture, the contemporary arts show minimal or no traditional religious content or understanding, where they do not actually ridicule religion. There is little religious art and very little great religious art. The modern standoff between religion and the arts means that high art is religiously uninformed and religious art is little trained. Bluntly and largely, the artistic are not religious and the religious are not artistic. This book is about facilitating the encounter between art and religion. It deals with the concept of the authentically religious artwork; it documents contemporary engagements of artists with religion – in painting, literature and music – which have produced “high” religious artworks; and, based on these engagements, reflects on methodologies of education to religious art. This book is not a book of aesthetic theory – of what makes art great. Though I have drawn on concepts from aesthetic theory, my purpose is not to discuss pure aesthetics. Rather, it is to probe what makes high art religious and how high religious art may be fostered.
This book is unambiguous as to what “religious” means. Whilst all the artists dealt with in this book happen to be Jewish artists, I have given the book a general or “universal” title, Aesthetics and the Divine, suggesting that the ideas in it will apply also to non-Jewish religious art. “Religious” thus signifies general religious tradition, but it is religion with a pedigree: with an orthodox and objective root. This is a tradition which goes back to Mount Sinai, where a Divine revelation occurred, of which the Ten Commandments are the core. What some may not know is that the universal religious tradition in fact precedes Sinai, going back to Abraham, and ten generations before him, to Noah, the survivor of the biblical Flood and ancestor of all humanity. With him, there was completed a universal moral and religious covenant between G-d and humanity, known as the “Noahide laws”. It is the root of the great world religions – Eastern and Western – and was reiterated definitively at Sinai. I have discussed the religious teaching and ethical precepts of this universal code in The Theory and Practice of Universal Ethics – the Noahide laws.1 The shared values and religious beliefs of the Noahide laws constitute the objective core of the religious tradition. They resonate with the equally objective “Divine image” within the human soul. Personal, subjective and “new-age” spiritualities are foreign to it.
Indeed, the religious content in the works of the Jewish artists (painter, writer and composer) presented in this book, is in fact within the general purview of this universal tradition. The unity of G-d as reflected in the Creation (in Majzner’s “Images of Tanya”), the endemic human conflict of body and mind with soul (in Freadman’s book, Shadow of Doubt) and the human cleaving to G-d (in Werder’s From the Straits) are themes pertinent to all major world religions. Moreover, from the secular standpoint, the religious works discussed in this book should be comprehensible to those without religious backgrounds. This is because each of these artists, for most of their careers, worked in the milieux and “spoke” the artistic “form-languages” of secular art. They reworked those form-languages to express religious content. Finally, the religious artworks discussed should be more accessible and “moveable” across cultural boundaries, since they are all modern “free-standing” artworks (in the sense discussed in the second section of the first chapter). That is to say, they are detached from immediate religious ritual practice and context and so can come before and speak to any audience in any context. They are accessible not only to a particular religious community, but can be understood by anyone with the effort required to understand any work of high art.
I hope that the fact that I have chosen to speak about artists whose works, discussed here, came about through encounters (with myself), will not upset those religious artists of stature who work on their own. The choice of artworks which came about through religious encounter and engagement was important for me. For it serves to show and document how we can educate to high religious art in a culture, and with artists, not necessarily wholly religiously disposed. As stated, that is the point of this book: not only to say what high religious art is, but how we might bring about more of it.
An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published as “Judaism and Aesthetics” in the Journal of Judaism and Civilization, Vol. 3 (2001); of Chapter 2 as a Postscript to L. Astbury, Earth to Sky – The Art of Victor Majzner, Melbourne: Macmillan, 2002 (reprinted with kind permission of Macmillan Australia); of Chapter 3 as “Ambivalence in Jewish Writing: a discussion of Richard