ABSTRACT

Lost in the labyrinths of recent debate about the global “resurgence” of (or the “return” to) religion in contemporary life – addressed periodically in the first three Passages – have been the essential roles and functions of art and artifice in the fabrication, fostering, and dissemination of religiosities and the politics claimed by some to espouse. The following considers some of the fundamental relationships between what are conventionally distinguished as art and religion, distilled into a series of theses and corollaries and consequences. Focusing upon their structural and semiological processes, functions, and effects, it argues for the inextricability of artistry and religiosity; their mutual entailment as obversely codependent perspectives on the nature and social functions of representation. In particular, it addresses the conundrums endemic to theist religiosities regarding the nature, social functions, and dangers of representation. Such questions are themselves of very great antiquity in the Western intellectual tradition, problematizing claims that the current simultaneous resurgence and critique of religion is a recent or modern phenomenon.