The Aesthetics of Religion

Religion as An Aspect of Aesthetics, Imagination and Experience. The interesting aspect of religious beliefs has been represented in Durkheimian Sociology as a web of institutional expectation or codes of behaviour, or as modes of thought. In this are integrated questions of ritual and liturgy, which are performative and artistic in energy. It compels believers to come together and to worship, where questions of alertness to transformation of feelings or emotions are underlined. Effervescence becomes the spiritual space of a continuing incandescence. Identification with the sentiments of an association of believers allows people to communicate how essential it is to live and share an ideology pertaining to faith and the after life. The spirit roams free in sleep and in dreaming, so what then in death and the after life? It is this pre-occupation with the after life that give religion its pre-dominance. People must prepare for death, for which there is no explanation, as the dead do not return to tell a story, unless the mind of the perceiver is disturbed, as in the case of Hamlet after his father’s death. What the stories tell us is that is there is mortification, purging and revival ((Vickery 1973:63). Along with this, is the reintegration of time, seasons and calendar rituals. If a comparative exercise is to be utilized then the key themes of the animal world (as in totemism) the vegetative aspect of Nature ( where plants, flowers and fruits give us sustenance) and fire rituals define the ever present splendour of the sun through imitative and symbolic ways. Not surprisingly, literature, art forms and theatre become the point of departure, where the manifestation of the spirit is externalized or represented as the production of the tangible. What is felt or experienced can now be touched, seen, smelt and tasted. This is an extremely important aspect of that which cannot be explained or understood is suddenly through the magical aspect of the religious brought into the radius of the collective. The uniqueness of individual perception can be crystallised into a collective phenomenon, historically recorded. The authorship of those who create narratives describing the origin of the world, the existence of superior powers who define our normative ideals in culturally specific ways are sometimes lost in time. We do not know their names, and yet, tradition inscribes how these are transmitted across time, in writing, symbolic motifs or oral histories. That authorship is denied makes its collective value even more precious, there might even be deification of the source, or atleast the defining of it as “sacred”. This attribution of sacred might be given by the society concerned to even those aspects which are not religious. This is the moment when values are given high credibility, and identified with lineages of thought and knowledge. Masculinist values promote the notion of power, authority, sacredness and immutability to men. Religious hegemonies then describe women as polluting, not worthy of priestly performative power, or even in secular sense the right to vote. Being a woman then becomes a hazard, though some women who promote a particular cause are capable of being deified because of their closeness to men in power. The stability of ideological systems rests on the aquiescence of women, and they are then represented as having power because they are consorts, or pliant. Not surprisingly Hitler and Pol Pot, tyrants to the extreme always had women who agreed to be their companions or bear their children. This aspect of malevolence which dictatorship presumes as a natural right, then allows predators in the system to use religious functions and ceremonies to legitimize their right to violence or subjugation of the majority in order to legitimize their oligarchic rule. Once this is acknowledged by the people as well as the master race, a wedge is put into the system. However, people become used to subterfuge, and accept the controlling mechanism of the master race to impose their will imposed on them. They do not need to think, they only have to follow instructions. This is the final moment of conquering passive people. The latter enjoy the redistribution of food or money, among them as anonymous receivers in food queues, with the substantial role of the conquering caste in over seeing the display of this ability as access to “bread and circus”. ``In seeking to understand crises, war, death societal disintegration, Mumford takes the insights of the 1930s to argue that work is an anodyne. Human beings have a fear of an unknown future, but by seeking to control this innate anxiety, they produce worlds which are diverse, cultural universes where thought if represented through material forms. The search for order is paramount. Religion provides the axis of those metaphors which allow people to legitimize their course of action. In Lewis Mumford: The Condition of Man (1944) Mumford suggests that the idolam is an abstraction, a web of ideas, representations and symbols which through its aesthetic motifs allows for generative and comprehensive possibilities of mutual understanding and exchange across a variety of genres. Language and aesthetic symbols, through art, music, theatre, sculpture, stone carvings and inscriptions transcend time and place (Mumford pg 8). Through translation the spiritual and the mental are made available to others, there is a “unification of the human mind” as Levi Strauss described it. Do hierarchies disappear? It is that which we are concerned with, how unification into one system may actually involve questions of assimilation and transcendence not necessarily invoking peaceful social relations. Mumford suggests that through inscription, cultures leave behind a trail which then can be analysed in terms of continuities (ibid pg 9). How then can we understand architectural vandalism in pursuit of a cohesive interest in planning for the future where efficiency is prioritized and one world (the conqueror’s view) is implemented? The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford and The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt have to be understood together. We know from Arendt’s work that servile human labour and the conditions of women and animal are usually lumped together. With the acceptance of religious domination by any single cult (Christianity, Islam or Hinduism, each vying with Judaism for world conquest, collaboration or in antagonism with Communism). The boats are ready, extinction is at hand. Can experience of annihilation in any of these ideologies be mitigated by ceremony or verse? Mumford writes, “Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion, are accordingly all as essential to humans as his daily bread: man’s true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations. There is no poverty worse than that of being excluded, by ignorance, by insensibility, by a failure to master language, from the meaningful symbols of one’s culture; those forms of social deafness or blindness are truly death to the human personality. For it is through the effort to achieve meaning, form and value that the potentialities of man are realized, and his actual life in turn is raised to a higher potential (9,10)” Mumford sees communication, communion and co operation as the three essential functions of human society. Symbols generate the possibility of interpreting reality, and by leaving them open for interpretation human choices are infinitely varied, which is the meaning of culture itself. Through the dissemination of symbols cultures are transformed, meanings made experiential and more varied. Rock music and the Hare Rama cult permeating secretly into USSR in the 1980s brought the Soviet Republic down to its present form, leading to the revival of Orthodox Christianity. Currently, the search for oil leads Trump and Putin to similar excursions globally, and the matter cannot be resolved, as Palestine is also about hegemony over natural resources. The support Europe gives to Ukraine and to Israel, compounded by their fear over American suzerainity leads India onwards to complicity with Russia and Israel simultaneously. These contradictions over our relations with our neighbours is compounded by the fact that our markets are flooded with Chinese goods, while they are our enemies; and that the UN supports Pakistan is an embarrasment to us, as India sees the latter as a terrorist country. How can we get past this complex map of social and political relations all deeply imbued with religious inflexions? Let us now look at law and order as the specific concentration of modalities whose aesthetics are so complex that we see no symmetry in its functioning when law becomes synchronized with religious bias. Law and Order provides for freedom, because there is regulation of conduct and honour. Where these are missing, there is anarchy, and no possibility of justice. If freedom is absent, and tradition endorses it over the historical roots of legal systems and human rights, then everyone is in danger, because enemies are ideologically pivoted against one another. Wisdom, courage, temperance and justice brought all the ideal aspects of human life together (Mumford, 29,30). Could women be included? Niko Slade shows us in his biography of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya that the Freedom Movement which took almost hundred years, allowed women to participate only in the 1920s and 1930s, and the salt satyagraha was the catalytic moment. Chattopadhyaya was an eminent theatre personality, and also set up craft councils and was a freedom fighter who went to jail, vehemently arguing for the participation of women in the freedom struggle. She was involved in the empowerment of women in independent India and the struggle for justice through the work of the AIWC (All India Women’s Congress (Slate 2025). For those of us who are trained to be sitters on the fence, let us return to Mumford, who asks did not Christ say Render unto Ceaser what is Ceasers? For Mumford this is problematic, because it takes away the possibility of revolutionary activism. And here, we may turn to the text of Epictetus, a Roman slave who had been sold into the household of one of the bureaucratic administrators of Nero. When he, the slave, was exiled, he started an academy, where he had many loyal students, one of whom transcribed his lectures, which were then translated by Sharon Lebell (1994). Here Epictetus argues that to live in the world, we must accept that there is only so much we can do. We must remain true to ourselves. We must accept with grace the suffering that we are dealt. We must have the etiquette by which we understand from where tyranny originates. Was this compassion a sign of slave mentality? The passivity enjoined upon those who have no alternative in order to exist? Some of the most interesting ideas on this subject come from P.Sanal Mohan, whose books on artisanal slavery in Kerala became a focussed analyses of cathartic music among the suppressed in the hierarchichal structure of dominanant castes, where power and inequality worked in a consensual fashion, where the downtrodden could only reflect upon their condition in lamentations to a God who understood their plight. References Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition University of Chicago Press, Chicago:1958 Das, Veena, Structure and Cognition, OUP Delhi: 1977 Lebell, Sharon, The Art of Living: The Classic Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness Harper Collins and India Today, Delhi:1994 Mohan, Sanal P. The Modernity of Slavery, OUP:Delhi 2015 Mumford, Lewis, The Condition of Man, Martin Secker and Warburg, London:1944 Singh, Ravi Nandan Death in Benaras Phd Thesis Submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University 2010. Slate, Nico Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya Fourth Estate: New Delhi 2024 Tarabout, Gilles. Magical Violence and NonViolence: Witchcraft in Kerala, in Ed. Vidal, Denis, Gilles Tarabout, Eric Mayer, Violence Non-Violence, Manohar and Centre De Sciences Humaines, New Delhi: 2003. Thulaseedharan, Sindhu. Inheritance Practices of Syrian Christians of Kerala in in ed. Susan Visvanathan and Vineetha Menon Chronology and Event, Winshield Press: Delhi 2019 Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1973 Visvanathan, Susan. Marriage, Birth and Death: Property Rights and Domestic Relations among the Orthodox/Jacobite Syrian Christians of Kerala, Volume 24, No 24, June 17th 1989, pp 1341-1346 (accessed on 6.10.15, jstor) Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1973