"Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers"
About this Quote
Hawthorne is drawing a family tree with a knife. In his world, religion and art aren’t just compatible; they’re cousins raised in the same haunted house: the human need to turn dread, desire, guilt, and wonder into a story you can live inside. The “same root” is less about doctrine than about ritual and imagination. Both religion and art build symbols that ask you to feel your way toward meaning. They deal in invisibles, in the unseen machinery of conscience and transcendence, and they demand a kind of surrender: to mystery, to metaphor, to the possibility that life isn’t reducible to what can be counted.
Putting “economics” outside the family isn’t naïve so much as tactical. Hawthorne is warning that market logic treats experience as a unit, not a revelation. Economics measures; art transforms. One operates by equivalence (this is worth that), the other by irreducibility (this image can’t be paraphrased without loss). Calling them “strangers” also hints at social estrangement: when art is forced to justify itself in the language of utility, it gets mistranslated into entertainment, product, “content.”
Context matters. Hawthorne wrote in a young, commercializing America that was congratulating itself on industry while still carrying Puritan moral residue. His fiction lives exactly at that crossroads: the Puritan obsession with sin and the artist’s obsession with ambiguity. So the line doubles as self-defense. He’s staking a claim for the novelist as a spiritual worker, not a vendor, insisting that art’s deepest allegiance is to the sacred questions money can’t answer.
Putting “economics” outside the family isn’t naïve so much as tactical. Hawthorne is warning that market logic treats experience as a unit, not a revelation. Economics measures; art transforms. One operates by equivalence (this is worth that), the other by irreducibility (this image can’t be paraphrased without loss). Calling them “strangers” also hints at social estrangement: when art is forced to justify itself in the language of utility, it gets mistranslated into entertainment, product, “content.”
Context matters. Hawthorne wrote in a young, commercializing America that was congratulating itself on industry while still carrying Puritan moral residue. His fiction lives exactly at that crossroads: the Puritan obsession with sin and the artist’s obsession with ambiguity. So the line doubles as self-defense. He’s staking a claim for the novelist as a spiritual worker, not a vendor, insisting that art’s deepest allegiance is to the sacred questions money can’t answer.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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