Title: Aesthetic Experience and the Nature of Religious Perception
Abstract: For many years some of us who teach degree courses in art and design, human movement studies, literature, and theology and who are colleagues and friends have become increasingly aware that the controlling concepts of our various disciplines are remarkably alike in their capacity to raise similar epistemological, ontological, and practical questions in our and our students' minds. The purpose of this essay is to explore superficially one such area of apparent kinship and to ask again why it is that those who claim to have aesthetic experience and those who claim to have religious experience so often speak of their experiences in remarkably similar ways. I suggest that the relationship between art and religion is far closer than either the theorists of aesthetics or the students of theology commonly suppose and that it is such that the one may easily be confused with the other.? Indeed, a case can be made for the at least partial identity of areas of experience commonly reserved to art and to religion. I consider this relationship under three rubrics: firstly, in terms of knowing, asking the question, Are aesthetic and religious knowledge the same thing or are they at least analogous?; secondly, in terms of being, asking the question, Do art and religion provide the same, or at least similar, routes to personal integration or salvation?; and thirdly, in terms of doing,
Publication Year: 1980
Publication Date: 1980-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 5
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot