From the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright to the rock gardens of
Zen Buddhism, Coleman explores applied, fine, and folk arts in
order to uncover points of coalescence between art and religion.
Drawing from six living faiths (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism,
Islam, Judaism, and Taoism), this book philosophically analyzes
relations between art and religion in order to explain how the
concepts "art", "beauty", "creativity", and "aesthetic experience"
find their place or counterparts in religious discourse and
experience. Coleman repeatedly shows that aesthetic ideas can serve
as bridges to spiritual categories, as when he relates aesthetic
bliss to "the peace that passes all understanding".
The author follows a three-fold approach; first, he examines
ideas and motifs from religious classics in world literature, such
as Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching and The Interior Castle by Teresa of
Avila, in order to relate them to aesthetic phenomena. Second, he
turns to the statements of artists, such as Leo Tolstoy, Vincent
van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Shiht'ao, and Wassily Kandinsky, for themes
and practices that have religious significance. Third, he analyzes
and evaluates the writings of various theoreticians --
philosophers, theologians, art critics, sociologists, and
psychologists -- on the relations between art and religion. Coleman
demonstrates, for example, that Martin Buber's I-Thou relationship
captures much that is central to art, creativity, and aesthetic
experience as well as to religious life.
Among the themes that receive sustained treatment are: the
varieties of union in art and religion, the child as a paradigm for
artists and saints, and creativity as essential to religion.
Finally, theauthor critically weighs proposed distinctions between
art and religion and between the broader categories of the
aesthetic and the spiritual, rejecting some and showing how others
are compatible with his proposal that the aesthetic and the
spiritual are cognate categories.
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