Art and Religion in the Time of Plague
Pierart dou Tielt, Burying Plague Victims
In my search for quarantine reading, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which depicts the collapse of civilization after a flu pandemic, fit the bill. Following the Traveling Symphony, a ragtag group that performs Shakespeare for scattered settlements of survivors, the novel celebrates the power of art to maintain human connection and historical memory amid disaster. Their motto: Survival is insufficient. Though the characters’ commitment to preserve culture under apparently hopeless conditions is inspiring, another, more troubling theme emerged as I read: an opposition between art and religion as rival sources of consolation in disaster. Mandel sets “the Prophet” and his followers—who kidnap, rape, and murder, confident of God’s blessing—in stark opposition to the Traveling Symphony. In the novel, art is subtle and playful, religion simple-minded and dogmatic. Art offers its gifts freely, while religion seizes control and demands unconditional obedience.
This vision of the world might seem plausible to twenty-first-century readers, but it betrays a profound misunderstanding of the historical relationship between religion and art. Mandel imagines religion and art as rivals addressing the same problems—cultural dislocation, loss of a coherent worldview, grief—but with diametrically opposed solutions: fanatical certainty that denies others’ humanity, or lovely unrealities that draw us together.
When we trace art back to its origin, we find religion. Walk through any museum exhibit of primitive or medieval art, and you will find many things beautiful and skillfully made but nothing meant solely to be looked at. Most artifacts will almost certainly be religious: the ritual mask, apotropaic amulet, saint’s reliquary, painted altarpiece. Such objects fit uneasily into the art museum, an Enlightenment institution that imposes modern aesthetic concepts on its collections. Kant, who holds that the beautiful has purposiveness but no definite purpose, or the nineteenth-century advocates of “l’art pour l’art,” could hardly respect utilitarian objects made for practical purposes like magical healing, cultic ceremony, or moral instruction. But people in material poverty are unlikely to spend scarce resources on matters less important than survival. For them, the tools used to make peace with supernatural powers mattered as much as those used to find food or fight enemies.
During the Renaissance, we begin to see substantial bodies of artwork alienated from practical religious or political purposes. Such works were commissioned by the elite to display their wealth and taste. Later, the rise of the museum solidified the idea that art should be purely aesthetic, turning practical tools and sacred icons into objects of visual contemplation. Today, this secularization is so complete that it’s possible to forget art’s history of sacred purpose.
Drama, so central to Station Eleven, has especially clear religious origins. In ancient Greece, theater grew out of the worship of Dionysius. Hymns of praise came to contain narrative passages; gradually, actors were separated from the chorus to represent characters. After theater was lost in the fall of Rome, drama reemerged in the same way. Medieval theater was born from the performance of the liturgy, when tenth-century monks acted out scriptural stories during Easter services. Such plays eventually expanded and moved from the church to the public square. Shakespeare’s secular drama was made possible by previous performers who fused sacred liturgy with popular entertainment.
Historically, then, religion and art—far from being opposed—have been complementary enterprises, frequently overlapping, but standing in decidedly non-reciprocal relation. Tracing art’s genealogy, we find that she is not the sister of religion, an equal rival, but a daughter. The aesthetic impulse derives from our sense of the sacred and transcendent. The earliest artistic objects were means to establish relations with a beautiful and terrifying universe. All the traditional arts have been developed within religious institutions. If Religion’s daughter has grown up, declared her independence, and set up house with Elite Society (some know him as Wealth), her present status cannot erase her origin.
Religion’s entanglement with pandemic is just as old as its ties to art. Historically, pandemics have fueled religious movements in the societies they disrupt. The pandemic closest to my heart, as a medieval scholar, is the Black Death of 1347-1351. While the aftermath included artistic masterpieces—most famously, Boccaccio’s Decameron—religious responses were far more profound. The possibility of sudden death, seared into collective memory by pandemic, made religion everyone’s business. The decades that followed saw new forms of lay devotion, vernacular translations of the Bible, and enthusiasm for a “mixed life” that brought monastic practices into the household and workshop. Some of the best aspects of the Protestant Reformation—its determination to bring the gospel to every ploughboy, its insistence that each person go to God with no mediator but Christ—were extensions of this movement.
While Mandel is right to depict religious fervor in the wake of pandemic, the cults she imagines have little basis in history. Like Mandel’s Prophet, past Christians interpreted plagues through the words of Scripture. Yet the explanation Christianity provided in its moments of crisis was not the caricature Mandel offers, that plague punishes the wicked and spares the righteous, allowing survivors to consider themselves justified. Instead, Christianity has offered a way to understand oneself as a sinner whose suffering gains meaning and dignity by being shared with Christ. Third-century Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria demonstrates this logic as he describes the response to plague so influential for Christianity’s early growth. While pagans fled to save themselves, Christians “without regard to their own peril visited those who fell sick, diligently looking after and ministering to them and cheerfully shared their fate with them.” Far from regarding health as proof of God’s favor, Christians rejoiced to run the risks of a death “not . . . far removed from martyrdom,” counting it a duty to serve Christ in the guise of the sick and a privilege to share in his sufferings.
Mandel is right to imagine art as a source of solace in a time of pandemic. In response to COVID-19, the Metropolitan Opera offers nightly streaming of past performances; countless museums open free virtual tours; classical music is newly available in livestreams, free releases of archives, and events like Piano Day and Music Never Sleeps.
Make no mistake: offerings like these represent an astonishing outpouring of generosity and goodwill. For those of us trapped at home, scrolling endlessly through the attention-hungry internet, art is a remedy for anxiety and distraction, its beauty an antidote to our bleak surroundings. But can they console more severe suffering? Some exceptional souls may retain a critical eye for form even when dizzy with fever, an appreciation for literary indirection even when dulled by depression, but most of us need more straightforward assurances. We want not sophisticated and suggestive fictions, but simple and certain truths.
Meanwhile, churches have also expanded their online offerings. They too stream live music and ask attendees to gaze at beautiful, challenging images rather than outrage porn or the pablum of advertisement. In prayer meetings, strangers not only comfort one another in loneliness and anxiety, but turn their attention from personal woes to the world’s needs. Churches organize volunteers, redistribute money, urge their members to check on neighbors; chaplains sit with the sick when their own friends and family are barred.
They may have scrambled to learn Zoom, but otherwise, religious groups haven’t changed much. There was never an entrance fee for them to waive. They have always been supporting people in trouble, even when a crisis felt like the end of the world for only one person. Unlike high culture, religion does not exclude by education, intellect, or class; it provides the same benefits at all times; it not only offers consolation to suffering selves, but demands action in service of suffering others.
Raimondo de Dominici St. Carlos Boromeo Giving Communion to Plague Victims
These reflections lead me back to Station Eleven’s final chapters, which unwittingly demonstrate the practical superiority of religion over art. At the novel’s climax, protagonist Kirsten is held at gunpoint, trying to distract the Prophet and his followers from friends hidden nearby. As she stalls, she and the Prophet exchange quotations from a comic book they have both read. As the Prophet hesitates, one of his followers allows the victims to escape. This pivotal role for the comic book is a satisfying payoff for Mandel’s intricate backstory. But this idiosyncratic connection is the novel’s greatest leap of fantasy. If Kirsten wanted to appeal to the prophet’s humanity, she should have quoted the book she already knows he is obsessed with. She could say, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy”; “Do as you would be done by”; “What does the Lord require but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?” The religious book is more accessible, more authoritative, and more explicit in its moral teaching than the artistic. It has actually brought sinners to repentance for millennia, while the transformative power of fiction occurs primarily in, well, fiction.
As Station Eleven concludes, members of the Traveling Symphony reunite at the Museum of Civilization they have sought throughout the novel, but its contents are disappointing: iPhones, credit cards, stiletto heels, snow globes, reminders of the old world’s astounding superfluity of resources. The scene reminds us that museums detach cultural works from their original purposes to become purely aesthetic. These objects are beautiful precisely because they are useless.
This melancholy praise for the superfluous conceals an obverse truth: art for art’s sake is an ideal supported only by enormous wealth, by the excess resources that Renaissance princes, robber barons, and today’s educated elite convert into social status. If we really become poor, subjected to disease, hunger, and violence, nothing beautiful will survive unless it is also useful. If we are willing to cart cellos across a post-apocalyptic landscape, it will be to glorify God—soli Deo gloria, as Bach signed his manuscripts. If we cherish Shakespeare, we will remember not only Lear’s broken majesty, but the lines from the Sonnets about the insufficiency of survival:
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
Kathryn Mogk Wagner is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University. She studies late medieval religious writing and liturgical theology.