[323] Now this gives you a first taste of the many problems connected with the relationship of religion and art^a. This is the first and fundamental distinction which we must keep in mind---in music, in visual arts, in poetry. Perfect poems rarely will be able to become sung in a congregation, even if they find good melody. Here again you have these dialectics. There ARE some--- I would say some of Paul Gerhardt ^band some of the English, "O God of Ages" [i.e. Rock of Ages? O God, our help in ages past? --Ed.] --- what is that?--- you know of that---[ from audience: "O God our help in ages past"? --- Whittier^c?] -- No --- I will find him before the end of the class---I will think of him ! There is a complete poetic expression combined with a religious power, but you will not find ten percent in our hymnbooks which have this quality. Now I come to another consideration which increases the dialectical situation between religion and art. Art^d always has three elements: 1) The subject matter, even if it is only different fields of color combined, in completely abstract art---even that is subject matter, although it is not subject matter in any sense of our natural worldview. 2) Secondly, art has that which makes it art, namely

the form. The form ist hedecisive [sic.] element, and what is lacking in poor melodies, in poor hymns, or in poor religious pictures, or in poor texts of hymns, is the form: they have no artistic form. Form is always that which makes a thing what it is. We have forgotten this meaning of the word "form" because we have fallen everywhere in[to] what you rightly call "formalism," namely form without meaning. But form is that which distinguishes the work of art from a failure to produce a work of art.