The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson Read Free Book Online Page B

matter. During that time, he says, art has moved from mimesis to abstraction, and in doing so has lost its language. With the added impact of science and technology, literacy has been replaced by numeracy; a passion for words has been undone by an obsession with numbers.
    For Steiner this is a major break, a fall, and a catastrophe. Our world is impoverished because we have lost the ability to “respond responsibly” to art, the task having been taken over by secondary critics, so that the narrative of one art responding to another has been lost—“The best readings of art are art.” 10 The process of artistic insight is not cumulative and self-corrective as the sciences are; art does not supersede art the waylater science supersedes earlier science, and as such it is unsuited to the academy. Art is “immediate” and “free” in a way that science is not, one artwork does not necessarily “verify” another; as William Blake put it, “it is of the minute particular,” its purpose is often intuitively self-evident but difficult—even impossible—to articulate. Art cannot be paraphrased, and there is no boundary to language. 11
    For this reason Steiner proposes that poiesis , the act and experienced act of creation, is the fundamental aspect of being and of meaning. Moreover, the concept of transcendence brings us up against the even more fundamental concept of the “other,” and this is what God is, above everything else. It is this radical difference of God, and the uncertainty surrounding “him,” that inclines us to make intuitive leaps, to search for forms of words that can nevertheless only approximate the “other,” that make indeterminacy “pivotal”: part of the point of poiesis is mystery.
    Steiner’s point is that, rather than criticism, whether academic or journalistic, the spiritual in art can best—and perhaps only—be had from studying the chain of artworks; that watching the response of one great figure in the modern world to another in the ancient (that is, the religious world) is the closest we can come to the spiritual and the sacred: Nietzsche on and “against” Wagner, Proust face-to-face with Vermeer, Mandelstam reading Dante, Karl Barth laboring after Mozart. These transformations as between successive figures—secular artists responding to religious ones—are the greatest opportunity we have to see how a secular world can flourish. The bond between the former and the latter is what we should seek to identify, describe and understand. It is the best way to assimilate what has been lost and to see how it might be recovered.
    For Steiner, the problem with science is that it is not disinterested; as Heidegger said, it aims at mastery, whereas art does not. There may be eternal truths in science; but though we ourselves will not live forever, an aesthetic truth that quickens “into lit presence the continuum between temporality and eternity” has a metaphysical resonance even if it isn’t purely religious. An aesthetic observation that will be good for all time gives us a warm feeling of completion that science, for all its strength, does not.
    Despite this, and perhaps a little regretfully, Steiner notes that, althoughreligion may have informed art in the past with what was felt to be a “real presence,” this can no longer suffice. Not just because God is dead, but also because, throughout history, art has been a form of dialogue , a much more practical and immediate and even productive form of dialogue than, say, prayer is. He shows, by his many references to the ways in which different artists pay homage to one another in their work, by his assertion that no work of art is autonomous and that that realization is one of the secrets—perhaps the secret—of art appreciation, that the conversation of mankind through its major works of art is the path to truth and beauty. And the way later works of art build on earlier works—with courtesy, hospitality and even love—is a