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The idea that societies can be secular and survive is a myth. Even the great ancient civilizations, such as Assyria, the Alexandrian Empire, Greece, Rome, China under the emperor, Japan under the emperors, etc., had religion as the cohesive bond of the people.
All civilizations have art, as both an expression of nationalism or empire and as an expression of religious belief.
The civilizations to which I refer had a center of power and money, an army and a religion which bond the people together in a common vision.
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Art comes from vision. Although the artist is the prophet is an society, but only if he is religious, he must speak to a people, a community, who can understand his language, whether that of poetry or painting or sculpture or drama.
Greek drama is still some of the most sublime in the world, revealing the depth of human psychology, growth and death more than perhaps any drama in world history. That we still watch and learn from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and others is the triumph of a civilization which because it was tied to religion was tied to universal truths.
Only universal truths, the shared natural law and shared dreams of humans are worthy of art.
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Some individualists want to destroy the vision of what it means to be human. We are not merely animals, but animals with immortal souls.
The role of the artist is to hinge the inspiration involving that immortality with the universal experience of all men and women.
Why are some plays "eternal"? I can watch Seven Against Thebes or the Oresteia, or the Oedipus Cycle endless times, learning something about myself and others each time.
The artist who is in touch with the universal is in touch with his soul.
David Jones wrote of the great break, which he claimed was the First World War, which split the West not only nationally or internationally, but caused the great schisms of imagery and metaphor.
We no longer understand each others language. Why study Gawain if the Chalice of Christ is not important and if purity is no longer a desired virtue?
The artists who want to ignore the universal do so at their own peril. Art, like all work, life anything "techne" has a purpose. The purpose is not merely entertainment but the revealing of the human soul for the purpose of exhilaration and growth.
To see art as merely a means of personal healing or personal engagement with the world is like taking a newborn baby and putting him in a dark room, denying him the experience of others and the world God created. The universal experience of life is not all negative and those who are wounded can decide to break out of the dark room in to the light by looking at their brother and sister artists.
Read, watch, learn, study, pray, make...........create something other than yourself.
That is what Satan does, create things in his own image and likeness and that is death.
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By the way, the Genesius Guild in Illinois in the Quad Cities is the only drama group which uses the traditional masks yearly in the summer stock. My own son has played in Aeschylus. Sometimes one must celebrate the honor of the human experience in both tragedy and comedy.
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