With Cold Foreign Eyes? Existential Meaning in Truth vs. Mystery in Religion and Art

Sammanfattning: This essay explores two approaches to finding existential meaning in religion: either by an approach advocating feelings of mystery and sensuous immediacy, thus justifying an ineffability of mysterious experiences, or by an approach which advocates truth and objectivity. Although the latter approach views truth in existential terms (“existential truth”) it can be criticised for diminishing the “magic” of religion much in the same way science does in its pursuit of material truth. In order to find answers as to whether this is the case and as to whether we can justify “effability” in theory, religion is compared to art: the two approaches are applied to the field of art in a continuous dialogue with the religious field. By discussing not only the ideas of philosophers like Eberhard Herrmann, Hilary Putnam, Peder Thalén and Arthur Schopenhauer, but also by contemplating the output of artists like Shakespeare, Hjalmar Söderberg and David Lynch, the so-called Truth approach is found to have the ability to more accurately (than the Mystery approach) connect artistic and religious expressions to our emotions. The possibility of recreating a sensuous experience of those expressions is also considered.