Exploring the artwork-world: perichoretic rehearsals of the divine encounter

Abstract

Christian religion and art enjoy a persistent relationship. Trying to account for this, I investigate the possibility that an aesthetic experience might facilitate a religious experience. I look at different kinds of experiences which typically are called "religious", and review some theories of religious experience. Even though my concern is not to use religious experience as a justification for religious belief, I settle, temporarily, for William Alston's account, which characterises religious experience as mystical perceptual experience. Alston's theory, however, underemphasises the role played in religious perceptual experiences by the experiencer's background beliefs. Arguing that background beliefs always play a part in how religious presentations are interpreted, I develop a theory called Alston-B. Within the structure of Alston-B, which identifies two highly integrated phases of perception (presentation and interpretation), I explore how artworks might play a part in these activities. The most persuasive theories, however, point away from understanding aesthetic experiences as a matter of observation. They point, rather, towards understanding them as imaginative personal encounters, or whole-person explorations of "worlds". While the force of this paradigm shift is felt, I examine three central background beliefs from the Protestant theological tradition. Alston-B, with its proper understanding of the importance of background beliefs in religious experience, requires that particular beliefs be admitted into enquiries about the nature of particular religious experiences. My examination of the background beliefs turns up material that suggests, in a way paralleled in my exploration of art theories, that the religious encounter is not so much a perceptual event as much as it is a perichoretic exchange. My investigation, then moves its focus from how a perceptual experience of art might serve a perceptual experience of God, to how a perichoretic encounter with art might serve a perichoretic experience of God. Drawing on Nicholas Wolterstorff's concepts of action, artwork-world, and projection, I argue that an encounter with an artwork can act as a rehearsal for the experience of God, since a "good" artwork provides its audience with a high degree of structural similarity (with regard to personal interaction) to the human encounter with the divine.