Faith & Spirit Quote by Clive Bell

Bell is doing something both seductive and slightly mischievous: demoting religion from revealed truth to a psychological technology. By pairing it with art as a parallel “road,” he reframes faith not as doctrine but as an instrument for altered consciousness, a practiced exit from the daily press of “circumstance.” The punch is in that word choice. Circumstance suggests the petty tyranny of errands, class, money, war - the stuff modern life uses to pin you down. Ecstasy, by contrast, is not “happiness” but transport: being taken out of yourself.

The subtext is Bell’s modernist gambit. Writing in the wake of Victorian certainty and amid early-20th-century shocks, he wants to protect art’s seriousness without leaning on moral uplift or narrative realism. If religion once guaranteed transcendence, modernism needs a secular replacement that can still claim depth. So Bell invents a family resemblance: aesthetic rapture as a cousin to religious rapture. It’s a clever legitimizing move, especially for an avant-garde culture often accused of being decorative, elitist, or nihilistic.

Context matters: Bell’s formalist project (“significant form”) prizes the direct, almost mystical intensity of looking, not the social message of what’s depicted. That’s why “similar states of mind” is doing heavy lifting. He’s less interested in what you believe than what happens to you - attention sharpened into devotion, perception into awe. The irony is that this elevation of art depends on borrowing religion’s emotional authority even as it quietly empties religion of its metaphysical claims.