Everyone knows there are two things you never bring up in conversation—politics and religion. In this secular age chock full of wars fought over one faith or another, many never want to hear about the role of religion in the world, unable to see any good within all that bad. But if you turn the conversation towards the safer topic of the arts, quite often you’ll hear someone long for the good old days, when great artists made great art rather than the poor efforts of contemporary art’s lesser talents. Is it possible that such Old Masters as Michelangelo were great because they lived in more religious times? Is the connection between great art and religious influence a correlation or just coincidence? Does art need religion?
I recently read for the first time pioneering psychoanalyst Otto Rank’s 1932 book Art and Artist. Once one of Sigmund Freud’s star pupils and later closest colleagues, Rank (like another favored Freud disciple, Carl Jung) came to see Freud’s system’s fixation on sex as the central motivating drive as limited and broke ranks with the orthodox Freudians. Rank came to identify an individual’s drive for immortality as the key to understanding the human psyche. We all want to cheat death in some way in Rank’s system, whether it be by having children, performing a memorable, maybe even heroic act, or creating something that will last, perhaps in the role of an artist. (Ernest Becker’s 1974 book The Denial of Death more fully and elegantly explains Rank’s ideas [and inspired me to find Rank’s writings].)
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