Also it’s amazing how un-religious some of the earliest European vernacular literature is – Provencal romances, Parzifal, Tristan, and all the Arthurian stuff.

Indeed it is. Although the Arthurian mythos especially has become entwined with Christianity (through the associated of Sangraal with the Holy Grail, knights constantly attending mass, etc.). However, I wouldn’t necessarily classify these as un-religious so much as they’re un-Christian. They hearken back to the idea of the mystery religion in which we learn spiritual truth through by retelling old stories in new forms, which is exactly what the Bible does through its retelling of the Moses myth through the character of Jesus (and if more Christians realized this, they’d have a much better religion IMO). The stories have such timeless wonder specifically because they’re so accommodating: an author can add a new element of interest and base an entire new version of the story on how that element interacts with the canon (for Arthur, the introduction of Christianity being the medieval example and feminism being a major modern example). Of course, this doesn’t jive exactly with the modern definition of religion.

Un, Tolkein was rather strongly Catholic. I don’t think you get to claim The Lord of the Rings for your own, much as I might want to let you have it.

I’m more interested in the content than the authorship. I’m not going to go into all the details now, but if you look at the history of Tolkien’s writing of LotR, you’ll see he actually struggled with this issue quite a bit: he ended up putting Iluvatar at the head of the gods in a weak attempt to recapture the idea of monotheism, but he really couldn’t tell the story he wanted to tell if the gods were having a strong influence on the peoples. It all stems from the fact that he saw LotR as a sort of English epic in the tradition of pre-Christian works such as Beowulf: you need a strong sense of the mythopoetic, but the gods themselves don’t really fit in to the framework.

The idea that religious artists create religious art and that atheistic artists create atheistic art is a ridiculous oversimplification. I used to work as a composer and have done my fair share of arrangements/text-settings for weddings, etc., which means that I’ve written a large amount of religious music. Art is exclusively about conveying ideas inexpressible by other means; whether the artist holds that idea or not is irrelevant.

Un, Tolkein was rather strongly Catholic. I don’t think you get to claim The Lord of the Rings for your own, much as I might want to let you have it.

Artists are, unfortunately, pragmatists; they’ll do what they want but name it after what their employers want.

Totally. I didn’t mean that the patrons were completely calling the tune.

Also it’s amazing how un-religious some of the earliest European vernacular literature is – Provencal romances, Parzifal, Tristan, and all the Arthurian stuff.

How can you say Lord of the Rings is not religious? Have you not read it? It is full of gods and angels and such.

(Technical stuff follows; ignore this paragraph if you don’t know your LotR.) There are some gods, but they come up more in the Silmarillion, etc. Then we have Gandalf, who’s Istari. And our main villain is Sauron, a Maia and henchman of the Ainu Melkor. So: we have our head god Illuvatar creating the Ainu, one of whom gets a Maia as a henchman, who becomes a villain who has one scene in which he actually appears. On the good guy’s side, we have an Istari who supposedly wields enormous power but almost never utilizes it. The gods are there (hypothetically), but they don’t seem to be doing much. Notice the conspicuous lack of prayer throughout the book. Note also that Tom Bombadil seems to get around these paranormal phenomena simply through being skeptical of their power. Similarly, a major theme of the Children of Hurin is the expectation that the Valar will return to solve everything, but them never returning. The overall message is one of self- and group-reliance; the gods may be there, but they certainly aren’t doing anything worthwhile as far as the Middle-earthers are concerned. And to answer your other question: yes, I’ve read it.

Or for that matter, Paradise Lost? I think Milton was a deeply pious writer, he just couldn’t help it that Satan turned out to be the most interesting character!:-)

I didn’t say it wasn’t religious; just that it’s atheistic as well. In any case, having Satan be the most interesting character is no guarantee of an atheistic outlook; compare it to Lewis’ Screwtape Letters.

If you think about it, the reason there are so many great works of religious art in the Western canon is because the patrons of art were religious, if not actually the Church itself. As soon as there was an audience (market) for other kinds of art, other kinds of art appeared.

And you have to look behind the name as well. In the 1400′s, there were quite a few continental masses that were actually based on pop songs of the period (often of a romantic or militaristic nature), often advertising that fact in the name of the mass until such masses were forbidden by the Council of Florence, after which time composers continued to write them but started called them “missa sine nomine” (“mass without a name”). Similarly, who would guess that Michaelangelo’s David was religious if it weren’t for the name? Artists are, unfortunately, pragmatists; they’ll do what they want but name it after what their employers want.

Miko, are you secretly a theatre geek too?

Oh, I dabble all over. It makes life so much more interesting.

Hmm, I recently saw The Crucible (having read it before, but not having seen it) and I thought it made a strong case against organized religion, but promoting (or at least approving of) individual faith. Doesn’t John have a long speach at the end about how he know’s he’s sinned, blah blah blah, but God loves him? I think it was the Crucible. At the very least, I know I was chilled by the ending- three people being hung, and one by one, their Lord’s Prayer being cut off as they died. It was chilling, though I didn’t walk out praising Jesus.

Yes, that’s correct. But we also get sentiments like “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!” Since it’s really an allegory about oppression in general, it doesn’t reach any completely conclusive moral about faith. (The reciting of the Lord’s Prayer should also be understood in the context of the beliefs of the time, which stated that a witch could not recite it. While it’s potentially a final statement of faith, it’s at least equally a demonstration of the absurdity of the whole situation.)

Most theater people I knew may not have been religious, but they sure were superstitious, which in my mind amounts to the same basic way of thinking.

True. But I’ve always seen it as more of a cultural superstition, kind of like an in-joke rather than as a phenomenon arising from actual fears.

Hmm, I recently saw The Crucible (having read it before, but not having seen it) and I thought it made a strong case against organized religion, but promoting (or at least approving of) individual faith. Doesn’t John have a long speach at the end about how he know’s he’s sinned, blah blah blah, but God loves him? I think it was the Crucible. At the very least, I know I was chilled by the ending- three people being hung, and one by one, their Lord’s Prayer being cut off as they died. It was chilling, though I didn’t walk out praising Jesus.

Now that I am thinking about it, its true, there is lots of theatre that atheistic in nature (well, after the 1500s).

Most theatre people I know (and I was a theatre major, so I knew a bunch) were atheists, or religious in a very distant way. There were a few who were really and truely into Jesus, but most would rather make art than worship, or…. almost considered their art to be a type of worship of the creative spirit.