Faith, Art & Culture

Can art exist in any seriousness without a religious context?

Annunciation by John William Waterhouse, 1914

For most of human history art, culture and religion have been synonymous. While some might celebrate the abandoning of religion as long as it constitutes metaphysics we don’t accept, moral restrictions we would rather not be beholden to, or because its own hypocrisy is too much to justify it, its absence leaves us with a severing of these categories that has many consequences.

In the English tradition, literature begins with a surviving poem called Cædmon’s Hymn, a fragment reproduced by the Anglo-Saxon scholar Bede in his ecclesiastical history who tells a story of an illiterate cow-herder at Whitby monastery who used to sneak away when the harp was passed around and songs were composed because he was unable to put anything into verse. An angel then appears to him and tells him to sing of creation, and Cædmon returns with the song known as Cædmon’s Hymn, and from that point becomes a monk and a celebrated song crafter.