men and women are born, and live, and work, and suffer, and die, without any sense of a fundamental reason for it all…
the almighty is not interested in creating paintings | Madame Pickwick Art Blog.
Derek Allan:The result today is an agnostic culture—a culture lacking any fundamental value. The claim is not, one should stress, that belief in God has necessarily become an impossibility, or that no-one in any previous culture ever doubted the prevailing beliefs of their times. ‘Agnosticism is no new thing,’ Malraux writes, ‘what is new is an agnostic culture’. The unprecedented development, which is our present reality, is a culture lacking any fundamental value, any absolute in the sense defined earlier—unlike Ancient Egypt, unlike Greece, unlike Byzantium or the Middle Ages, unlike post-Renaissance Europe, unlike even the nineteenth century despite the fragility of its faith in Man—in short,
unlike so many other cultures that have preceded ours or that have existed in other parts of the world. We can look back across the millennia of human history, Malraux is saying, and see culture after culture in which a shared sense of the numinous, or of the sacred, has given man an assurance of his place in the scheme of things—an assurance that there is something other than the ephemeral realm of appearances. Modern Western culture, by contrast, has only a series of unanswered questions. Having taken to heart Nietzsche’s pronouncement (issued somewhat late in the day) that God is dead, and having recognised, willingly or not, that, in Malraux words, ‘Man is dead after God’, we are the first ‘agnostic culture’—the first civilisation in human history in which men and women are born, and live, and work, and suffer, and die, without any sense of a fundamental reason for it all. The consequences in the field of art, Malraux argues, have been dramatic….
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