A Message to My Visitors

Hello Friends!
On this blog I will be posting writings of mine and others that tell what I have learned from the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, founded by the American educator and poet Eli Siegel in 1941, about the relation of religion and aesthetics. What I learned has revolutionized not only my way of seeing religion, but my entire life as well. I am pleased and very excited to share it with you all.

Aesthetic Realism is based on this principle, stated by Mr. Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

I'll begin with part of a paper I wrote in 1979 describing one of the first lectures I heard Eli Siegel give on religion.

I Learned Something New About Religion!

I remember when I learned for the first time that which I now see as the very heart of religion: its basis in aesthetics. It was in an Aesthetic Realism lecture given by Eli Siegel on November 25, 1973.

Mr. Siegel stated: "We have an attitude to the world and towards the first power in the world. The history of religion backs up the idea that there is a tremendous, deep thing in mind working to like the world. So far, it has taken a religious form. It will take an aesthetic form also. All of aesthetics can be used to make more logical, credible, scientific what religion has gone for."

Before I met Aesthetic Realism aesthetics hadn't meant very much to me. But in my Aesthetic Realism consultations during 1971 and 1972, I began to see that what made art beautiful--opposites as one--is what I was also trying to do in my own life. Now, I was hearing Eli Siegel say: "Aesthetic Realism sees the making one of opposites as the beginning of meaning in religious fact. There are many passages in the Bible showing that. God is to be feared and loved. He is in your heart and he made the mountains."

Then Mr. Siegel said this very large thing: "If people can accept the idea that Christ has been seen as the visible representation of the unseen God and therefore, since the relation of visible to invisible is an aesthetic matter, that Christ is in the aesthetic field, I think Christ will be seen better. Aesthetic Realism says Christ is the physical embodiment of a general idea called God. He is like Tennyson's flower in a crannied wall, for all art is the physical presentation of the invisible."

I was learning why Christ has moved people for centuries, why he has made for emotion as large as any that has ever been in the world. In his very nature Christ put together the opposites we are trying to have one in ourselves. What does it mean to be able to see criticism and kindness, toughness and gentleness, truth and imagination, humility and pride together beautifully as one in a human life? How much hope can that give us for ourselves?

I thought about my parishioners. Did this have any relation to the emotion they were hoping to have about Christ? Yes! I began to see that what brings a person to church each Sunday, though he doesn't consciously know it perhaps, is his need to put opposites together in himself and his feeling that Christ provides the key. What, after all, does it mean to become more "Christlike?" Is this an aesthetic as well as an ethical process?

"What was on people's minds about the time of Christ?" asked Eli Siegel. "Never was there such a desire to feel God and the world could be one. There is no religion that is not aesthetically impelled. Religion can be shown to be in man's mind powerfully and, in the deepest sense, truly. The need for man to feel he is in relation to all things is very great."

This lecture stirred me and I felt privileged to be hearing it. I had all my life felt that Christianity was beautiful. But as my study of religion progressed (along with my experience of the world) I became skeptical about its truth. Through lectures like the one I am describing it is not too much to say that my religious emotion was reborn. Seeing the logic of religion, its aesthetics, enabled me to feel something I thought I never would: that I could love God on a basis that is honest and wide.

Aesthetic Realism and Religion

By Class Chairman Ellen Reiss
From her commentary in The Right Of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known
Issue #1332

Eli Siegel is the philosopher who has explained what the deepest desire of every person is. “Man’s deepest desire,” he wrote, “his largest desire, is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.” This desire is the most beautiful thing in self…To like the world is to feel reality has meaning—and people have sought that meaning in religion. To like the world is to feel reality has bigness, a friendly boundlessness—and also that there is something giving the world order. Boundlessness and order are opposites, and people have hoped (without stating it to themselves) to feel both through religion…

We come to one of the largest matters in history and now—a matter which Aesthetic Realism alone has been able to explain. On the one hand, religion has had in it and with it some of the greatest kindness in the world, and some of the largest, truest, and most courageous emotion. It has made for great art. It has had some of the finest logic and reasoning associated with it-for instance, that of St. Thomas Aquinas. On the other hand, people, in the name of religion, have been cruel and cold. People of every major religion have invoked God as a reason for warring against and murdering other people. Ministers used religion to preach the rightness of slavery, and also the rightness of having children work in mines and factories; they have used the Bible to say it was right to keep people poor. What makes for the difference between a beautiful use of religion and an ugly use of it?’ between religious feeling that is large, kind—and narrow, mean?

…In the following principle, Mr. Siegel described the source of all cruelty, in any field—whether economics, domestic life, religion: “The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is Contempt.” He showed that we will either use religion to be fair to all reality; or we will use it to glorify ourselves and lessen other things.

A big question having to do with whether we use religion to like the world or to have contempt for it, is this: do we use religion to feel we should criticize ourselves, question ourselves? Or do we use religion to feel we’re superior because we’ve got an in with God?

Related to that question is this burning question: Do we use religion to feel every person and thing deserves justice, including from ourselves…Justice takes in every person’s having enough money, owning as much of this earth as anyone else; and it also takes in thought about who that person is and what he feels. Or do we use religion to feel we’ve got a personal relation with God and therefore what we want and what we think are holy—so (though we wouldn’t put it this way), we don’t have to be fair to a damned thing or care what people deserve and whether they get it?…

Eli Siegel, in all the centuries of thought, was the person to say and show that religion is aesthetic: it is, like beauty itself, the oneness of opposites…He said, “There is no religion that is not aesthetically impelled…God has been described in terms of opposites: for example, God should be feared and loved; he is in your heart, and he has made mountains.” ...And he spoke of the biggest opposites in life—our intimate self and the wide world. The religious desire is the desire to make these one: “The need for man to feel that he is in a relation he can accept to the cause of all things and all time—that can be shown to be real.”