Socrates or Buddha?that allows the viewer to be in the picture. ‘It isn’t something you
command,’ he once commented on his art, adding: ‘The people
who weep before my pictures are having the same religious expe-
rience I had when I painted them. And if you ... are moved only
by their color relationship, then you miss the point.’
Similar observations are made by writers of religious music. The
composer Howard Goodall once found himself unable to write
a mass setting, though the deadline was looming. Then, in the
depth of the crisis, the music emerged, not unlike a dream, from
an imaginative part of himself over which he had little control. It
was like a revelation. In his book, The Big Bangs, he writes:
Music, because it is by and large mysterious and inexplicable
itself, seems to edge back to the heart of it, to step cautiously
towards the feeling of a spiritual dimension ... It is not really
under our control, it has a chemistry all its own that com-
posers tinker and dabble with. Composers are merely carri-
ers, drawing water from a gigantic well to some parched and
needy tribe, stranded far away from their natural homeland.Goodall references the mysterious. What’s absent from Comte’s
religion, and must be part of any spirituality that is to be lib-
erating not oppressive, is Schleiermacher’s ‘sense and taste for
the infi nite’ or Tillich’s commitment that warrants ‘ultimate
concern’. The human creature is one for whom his or her
own existence is too small. We need to be able to expand into
regions beyond our own concerns. If Man is made into God,
as Comte seeks to do, then Man will disappoint at best, and at
worst become a tyrant. As the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, we
need to hear ‘a tune beyond us, and yet ourselves’. We need
something more than ourselves to be ourselves.
Jung wrote of the two parts of the individual – the ego, which
makes our particular place in the world; and the Self, which is our
connection to what is traditionally called the divine. The story
of our lives is, fi rst, the establishment of the ego, an ability to
function, perhaps succeed, in the ways of the world. It’s a secular