| | Just look at the preety pictures, Gottfried, and tell me what religion really had to do with them. You're not going to get any serious effort out of me otherwise. Well, most of these were likely early Roman, before the fall of the Republic. I would guess Laocoon and His Sons to be somewhat later.
Of course, Rome, throughout the history of its empire, was permeated by the pagan religion. Virtue was thought to be inextricably bound up with piety toward both the gods of the state and the gods of the household. Perceived irreligion was thought to go hand-in-hand with immoral conduct. Augustus, arguably the greatest emperor of the Empire, was both a patron of the arts and a moral reformist. It was probably not an accident that his call for a return to piety toward the gods went along with an effort to rejuvenate and support the arts.
In short, religion had a lot to do with the sculptures you've posted, especially in light of the fact that all of the sculptures (with the exception of Caracalla) have their origin in Roman myth (adapted from Greek antecedents, of course).
You attribute belief to Mozart without any real evidence. If ample private testimony of religiosity is not sufficient evidence, I'm not sure what could be. And I've provided you with ample private testimony. There's an adage: If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is one. Mozart looked and quacked like a believer. There is no reason to believe he wasn't one.
I assert that most artistic geniuses on the level of Michelangelo were probably freethinkers, meaning that they did not accept arguments from authority. The assertion is wholly unsupported and seems arbitrary.
This music is not stemmed from a belief in God. It is from God itself. And Mozart is the God. And that's what I believe. ;-) He is divine.
Composers usually know that the music doesn't come from them. They're not sure where it comes from, but they know it doesn't come from them. The same was the case for classical poets, who attributed their inspiration to the muses.
Do you know that Verdi also wrote a Requiem, which is also quite divine. Verdi's Requiem is a distasteful piece. It contains many moments which are quite painful to the ear.
One might be able to attribute the work's lack of refinement to Verdi's disbelief in the afterlife and general hatred for the Church. Had he believed in immortality, his Requiem would likely have been considerably improved, as he wouldn't have needed to express such bitterness and anger over death.
What it [i.e., inspiration] evidently does require is idealism. But that idealism needn't be mystical. It can and "ideally" should be directed towards secular values, not religious ones -- toward the values of human life, human glorification and human achievement, as exemplified in Greek art, not towards such things as "The Mass of the Dead," human sacrifice and human suffering.
Mystical idealism is the only kind that produces. Secular idealism has produced nothing, absolutely nothing, of comparable artistic merit.
Moreover, it is a bit of an irony that so-called "secular values," such as human life, human glorification, and human achievement, which you cite, have historically been upheld by deeply religious people, rather than secular humanists, while secular humanism, by bringing about the French Revolution and Communism, has advanced the so-called 'religious values' of human sacrifice and suffering.
Consider the humanists and artists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Hildegard of Bingen, Brunelleschi, Giotto, Llull, Cimabue, Raphael, Villani, Chaucer,Vasari, Leone Battista Alberti, Spenser, Michelangelo, Donatello, Correggio, etc. And, during the Baroque period: Kircher, Durer, Cervantes, Barocci, Rubens, Bernini, Allegri, Vivaldi, Bach, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Donne, Handel, etc. All of them were deeply religious Christians, and together produced the greatest artistic and literary achievements in the history of mankind.
By contrast, the secular humanists of the Enlightenment produced almost no literary or artistic works of comparable merit, though they did, however, manage to produce communism and the French Revolution.
And no, Voltaire does not represent secular humanistic achievement. The only thing of note he did was write Candide, which lambasted the philosophy of Leibniz, who had more intelligence in his pinky than Voltaire had in his whole body.
A Mass for the Dead, by the way, is a celebration of life, viz. eternal life, and the hope that that gives humanity in the face of loss.
The latter sense of life is accurately depicted in the chilling lyrics from the motet "Ave Verum Corpus," as quoted by Leibniz in Post 11:
Hail the true body,
Born of the Virgin Mary,
Truly suffered, sacrificed
On the Cross for mankind,
Whose pierced side
Flowed with water and blood,
Let it be for us, in consideration,
A foretaste of death.
It is the value of life and its exaltation that Objectivists uphold as inspirational -- as a moral and esthetic ideal -- not the value of death.
Death is not a value for Christianity. On the contrary, for Christians, death is considered in itself an evil. It is only valued insofar as it is the means by which to enter eternal life.
Johannes Brahms' German Requiem is the work of a freethinker. A freethinker, perhaps, but not an atheist. And he was certainly religious. He often wrote that he believed God inspired his music, and the marginalia he wrote in his Lutheran Bible indicate that he did believe in some tenets of Lutheranism.
Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem is the work of an atheist.
Which probably explains why it is so unrefined and painful to listen to.
In music, as in physics, the stream cannot rise higher than its source. Christianity raises men from earth, for it comes from heaven; but secular music creeps, struts, or frets upon the earth's level, without wings to rise.*
*(modified quote from Cardinal Newman, who originally referred to morality, not music.)
The answer is not that "religion inspired Mozart" but that Mozart found inspiration in religion. Millions of people -- billions, really -- believe but few of them are Mozart. You missed the point of my original post entirely, which was not that atheists cannot make good musicians, nor that Mozart's religion was a sufficient condition for producing his Requiem, but rather that a piece such as Mozart's Requiem could never be written by an atheist composer, regardless of that composer's talent. I was, in other words, claiming that belief in God is a necessary condition for producing a piece of such sublimity as Mozart's Requiem.
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