The Spirit of the Times

If I had to choose between Marilynne Robinson’s view that “we have no current language for the culture of the mind, which another generation might have called the care of the soul,” and Adam Kirsch’s question, “Is the reign of human beings on Earth nearing its end?”—I know which condition I would rather contemplate.¹ And it’s not just a matter of temperament. The chasm between these spiritual positions, for that is what they are, is one of the reasons to offer this issue of PAJ whose focus is “Spiritualities,” though for more than two decades variations on this theme have been winding their way through the pages of the journal. The first iteration arrived soon after September 11, 2001, when we sponsored a public panel on “Art as Spiritual Practice” at the SoHo gallery Location One, which featured Linda Montano, Alison Knowles, Meredith Monk, Eleanor Heartney, and Erik Ehn. That was already sixty issues ago, with the edited version appearing the following year in PAJ 72. Since then, we have published many more pieces on art, religion, and spirituality, initially as a way of proposing more progressive voices to counter the religious fundamentalism influencing American politics, grown ever more sinister today in the rise of Christian nationalism.

Now, in our forty-seventh year of publishing, we find ourselves at an extraordinary moment of human history when the lingering Covid era, war in Europe, climate change, and skepticism toward democracy bump against the turmoil of American culture and social media to produce a heavy feeling in the air of grief and loss, fear and disorientation. In our time, there are many who are absorbed by the catastrophic imagination as a subject merged largely with climate urgency. Therefore, it is not surprising that the idea of the spiritual is linked so prominently with the natural world. Excluding any religious site, here is where people most often turn as a realm of quietude and freedom from material strife, at times transcendence, and where the most profound questions of life and experience can awaken in a magnificent privacy. “I’m spiritual but not religious” is a familiar refrain. Many are quick to resist when asked about any spiritual matter, immediately connecting it to organized religion. Or they find it acceptable to speak about the spiritual as long as the word “religion” is not evoked. What constitutes the spiritual has been so transformed in the contemporary world that no one definition will suffice. Human beings still strive to articulate a language for their most soulful complexities. “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar,” Nietzsche observed. Two Columbia University sociologists, who have recently created an Oral History, Narrative and Memory archive from interviews with two hundred or so New Yorkers, refer to this Covid era as one of “ontological insecurity.”²

I have always been moved by the change in timbres of language and rhetorical styles in times of life in extremis or national tragic events. My sense is that there is a growing new spiritual yearning in plain sight and below the surface as human beings are increasingly forced to acknowledge the transforming conditions of their very existence. One of the reasons to frame this issue around “Spiritualities” is to join the cultural dialogue evident in books and journals, radio, TV, and other modes of communication with alternative perspectives that the journal can uniquely contribute to the existing vocabularies that dominate arts commentary.

When I think about the artists and movements we’ve featured in the journal and published in our books over the decades, a long list of historical figures across genres and generations and geographies reveals deep roots in the idea of the spiritual, including in the modern period Baudelaire’s book as spiritual instrument, the symbolist mysteries of Maeterlinck’s drama, Kandinsky’s sublime “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” occult performances of Steiner and Gurdjieff, the Russian avant-garde, and from Ouspensky to Breton the infatuation with the idea of the “fourth dimension,” the Catholic imagery of Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto, Expressionism, modern dance, Bauhaus artists, the Dadaist Hugo Ball’s late religious writings, Artaud’s manifestoes that are best read alongside saints’ writings. In the post-war era, three of the most extraordinarily influential artists emerged from the same sources, namely Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Tadeusz Kantor.

Since any wider international listing is so extensive, I offer only a modest selection from American modern and contemporary performance to add to this historical framework: a century or so ago Thornton Wilder filled several plays with angels, saints, and biblical themes and Gertrude Stein wrote at least a half-dozen plays and poems circulating around the aura of saints. Her vision of a play as landscape is really a perspective on space as a field of revelation, inspiring generations of artists. Closer to our own time, the work and writings or interviews engaging theatre artists Judith Malina, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Lee Breuer, Meredith Monk, Bread and Puppet Theater, Peter Sellars, Maria Irene Fornés and Richard Maxwell, to name only a few, and so many musicians of different faiths that include Patti Smith, Philip Glass, John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, John Zorn, and John Adams have openly linked their work to spiritual consciousness. The world of Black culture, in a line extending from Duke Ellington to Alvin Ailey and Suzan-Lori Parks to Theaster Gates that encompasses spirituals, blues, gospel, jazz, classical, sacred music, dance, and the spoken word, is fundamental to this inventory.

The pervasive influence of spiritual thought is one of the distinguishing qualities of the avant-garde and modernism in text, ritual, image, and performance. No matter that the source is Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, theosophy, anthroposophy, or Buddhism, at different times for more than a century.

And yet, in the commentaries on art we are often missing any formulation of the meaningfulness and inner life of a work, its spiritual energy, by those who make it or write about it. Since there seems to be a discernible, yet largely unspoken, disenchantment with the constricted range of arts commentary that now dominates in print and online, notable for its predictability and ahistorical argumentation, new paths of inquiry are needed to explore creativity and process. What is the nature of spiritual style? How does an artist tap feelings of mystery and innermost troublings? What kind of language and imagery discloses visionary and cosmic themes? There could also be deep incursions into a work of art in terms of its manifestation of beauty, grace, friendship, mercy, love, charity. It’s a question of where one is looking. Perhaps now is a time to reach back into humanist achievement to reconnect with myth and epic themes of philosophical complexity in a more intimate, poetic range of expression.

With this issue, we take the opportunity to suggest new terms of engagement, here where one now finds such words and personages as passion play, crucifixion, sermon, ritual, gospel, heart sutra, psalm, oratorio, Daoist, Virgin Mary, Mass, bible. To the familiar theatrical forms we can add litany, confession, procession, call and response, liturgy, prayer, the old testament, and to dramatic characters there are the apostles, gods, Jesus, saints. Drawing on the Abrahamic religions and adding Buddhism, Yoruba, and Daoism, we invited writers, artists, and scholars of different faiths and orientations to explore artworks or present work of their own rooted in religious or non-denominational ideas and enactments, and to think about these works in larger contexts that draw on what might be considered their spiritual values. What would it be like to read in the journal about the role of faith, prayer, redemption? Of death and dying? Of contemplating the sacred and ineffable?

This inward consciousness is not a turn away from the world but an act of bringing the fullness of personhood to everyday life. At its most creative, it is an unresolved humbling and questioning. The great search for social justice that characterizes our social and political life is at its core a spiritual quest, impossible to conceive without its foundation in religious thought. There is more to be done in expressing the vastness of the human mind and human experience if we cannot find a place for the essential questions that make and unmake art and life. Otherwise, critical writing has little function left in the contemporary world unless it reinvents itself and reflects more than the noise out there. It’s about the silence.