ABSTRACT
Art always has been a medium through which people have sought to express their religious belief or a vehicle through which societies sought to have their religion represented. Probably the majority of European artworks produced in the past thousand years have had an overtly religious content, celebrating or representing biblical narratives or seeking to express a human sense of the divine. Now the strong and the weak claims are significantly different. Slipping between these different claims, Steiner may well elicit in very different kinds of reader a vague sense that he must be right. Indeed, anyone who takes art at all seriously and who has ever asked themselves about the meaning of life, is bound to accord a hearing to someone who is as fervent as Steiner on behalf of the art-act and the aesthetic experience. Denis Donoghue does it in a book which parallels Steiner's, though in non-oracular style: The Arts without Mystery, where Donoghue distinguishes art and religion.
