Once again, I have been detoured from the post I began a few weeks ago, but I will get back to it. Instead, I am following my “strike while the iron’s hot” philosophy. As in this case, it usually means responding quickly to something I read or heard that sparked a reaction in me.

On Sunday, I read a fascinating NYT Guest Essay titled “Can a Painting Make a Skeptic Believe?” by the young American writer and culture critic, Cody Delistraty. The painter he has in mind is the early Renaissance Italian, Fra Angelico. He is known primarily for his stunning frescoes, mostly painted in the 1400s on the walls of his friary in Florence.

Delistraty tells of the reaction of various notable moderns to encountering Angelico’s work, but the most fascinating is that of the 20th century abstract painter, Mark Rothko. As Delistraty writes, while an icon of nonrepresentational painting, Rothko was nonetheless deeply moved and inspired by Angelico’s figurative work.

Following the death of his mother, the artist Mark Rothko set off on a five-month trip across Europe in 1950, visiting the continent’s great museums. It wasn’t until he visited a former Dominican convent in Florence, Italy, that he found what he was looking for. Each “cell” — where the convent’s friars lived — was adorned with a fresco painted by the 15th-century friar Fra Angelico that captured, Rothko said, what no other art he’d seen could.

“I traveled all over Europe and looked at hundreds of Madonnas,” Rothko wrote to a friend, “but all I saw was the symbol, never the concrete expression of motherhood.” With Angelico, though, Rothko recognized an artist of the highest order: Angelico’s paintings transcended representation to transmit deep emotional, spiritual experience.

Recently encountering Angelico’s work at a major art exhibition in Florence, Delistraty was also moved in ways that surprised him.

A major influence on Abstract Expressionists like Rothko, wherein emotional evocation trumped figuration, Angelico’s great gift was his ability to convey a sense of the divine. Centuries later, his work invites a skeptic to belief. Angelico’s art has pushed me to find within myself a desire for belief I’d thought had been extinguished long ago.

So strong is Angelico’s own vision, so capable is he of showing it that while his foreign, 15th-century world of asceticism, magic and unconditional faith is at first discombobulating, it is a testament to his artistic ability that even more than half a millennium later, I find myself transported into his way of seeing the world, as though I were a friar in one of his cells.

Remarkable words for a 21^st century Western intellectual. What Delistraty, Rothko, and countless others experienced in Angelico’s paintings is the emotion inherent in the depths of reality itself. He doesn’t point to them but elicits them in a way that hadn’t been done before and few have done since.

It is this ability to emotionally spellbind the viewer that most sets Angelico apart — imparting belief through art…. Angelico did not just depict; he evoked. Before Angelico, one largely found ideas in art, but not necessarily feeling….

Angelico, by contrast, elicits these emotions — through his depictions of eyes, hands, the use of light and so much else — so that upon looking at his art one is immediately struck by the love and intimacy flowing between his depictions of Virgin and Child or the awe and befuddlement between her and Gabriel in “The Annunciation.”

Delistraty does not answer directly the article’s title question. Actually, he would probably say “no.” The connection isn’t that direct. Formal religious belief is not the point, but art, he implies, can open us to a spiritual dimension of the world and of life that will leave us in wonderment.

[T]hough it would have mattered a great deal to Angelico, it matters not to contemporary eyes whether the viewer believes this [Annunciation] scene to have ever occurred. It will capture you regardless. “You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one,” the novelist Henry James wrote after visiting the former convent, “you yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on you.”

While I thought this essay was excellent, what moved me to write about it were the surprising number of hostile reactions in the comments—a majority from what I could tell. I was amazed both by the number of negative reactions but also the vehemence of many of them. Some were nit-picky and others read into Delistraty things he did not say. Together it seemed the reactions were out of proportion to what was said, so it seemed Delistraty had hit a nerve for many of these readers.

That nerve was religion and God. Many responders made clear their hostility to religion and disbelief in God. The notion that seeing a painting could somehow change their views was outrageous. Yet that isn’t what I heard in Delistraty’s reflections. As quoted above, he explicitly says that one will be “captured” by Agelico’s Annunciation regardless of whether one believes the biblical story or not.

Of Rothko, one commentator complained that he had only been moved because he was already “in favor of Christianity.” Yet Rothko was a Jewish agnostic and humanist, which didn’t change after his Angelico experience or at any other time. But Rothko’s intention for his famous color field paintings was, like Angelico’s work, to evoke a transcendent emotional experience, and many believe he succeeded spectacularly. The stories are common of people standing in front of his oversized paintings in tears. (And as with most art, one has to experience the real thing, rather than a reproduction in a book or wall print.)

What saddened me about these comments was being confronted with another instance of how shallow and confused our conversation about religion and spirituality has become. In this case, a moving and insightful essay on the spirituality of art is shot down in flames by those who are furious at the notion of such a topic being taken seriously. On the other hand, the ever-evolving nonsense of fundamentalism continues to be taken as “God’s truth” by millions, the harsher and more divisive the better.

Unfortunately, and as I have written about many times, institutional religion—churches—are doing little or nothing to help our situation. Apart from the megachurches and their wannabe imitators, denominations across the theological spectrum continue in decline because they continue to try to prop up Christianity’s expired premodern identity.

As I wrote earlier this year, some mainline churches are trying to “celebrate” this year’s 1700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Yet that council, and the Nicene Creed which came from it, epitomizes the church’s capture by an obsession with doctrine and mandatary compliance with church teaching, which ought to be lamented, not celebrated. But even more basic is the need to abandon the ancient and medieval worldview which still has the church in its grips, including ideas like heaven and hell and the notions of salvation and damnation that go with them.

One commentator complained that religious art simply serves to prop up religious beliefs. I think that is exactly wrong. Art has often been viewed with suspicion by religious authorities because, rather than promoting orthodox beliefs, religious art invoked religious feeling and spiritual experience. Today, rather than trying to sell ideas, churches should be providing means by which people can experience and know the spiritual dimension of life. Artists as diverse as Fra Angelico and Mark Rothko, as well as the whole range of the world’s painters, sculptors, musicians, authors, poets, and architects point to the reality of this dimension and of people’s longing to know it.

They, along with the church’s own long-neglected spiritual poets, the mystics, could provide all the resources needed for a genuine revival of the faith, hope and love Paul declared to be the essence of the Christian life. And all that would be needed for that to occur are, as Jesus said, open eyes to see and open ears to listen.

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