Die erediens as ’n omvattende kunswerk - as Gesamtkunstwerk

Abstract

In the course of history the focus regarding the senses has shift constantly. The liturgy in the early church was a spontaneous event where all the senses played an integrated role. During the Middle Ages the visual of the sacrament became over-emphasised at the cost of the sonic event, where choirs performed but the congregation did not take part in the singing. The visual, sacramental aspect was also over-emphasised at the cost of the cognitive aspect. During the Reformation the sonic event of singing and the cognitive aspect of understanding were rediscovered, but in the post-Reformation period the cognitive aspect became over- emphasised at the cost of the visual, as well as sonic aspects. In this article an appeal is made for an imaginative church service where all aspects of human experience and all dimensions of art are creatively integrated into a Gesamtkunstwerk – an encompassing experience through which a totally new universe is opened up.
Human beings require both “sound” and “sense” to complete their understanding of reality. We are neither pure mathematical intellects nor pure “sense” or “sound” users; having transformed the brain’s pure mathematical logic into scripts that “say” and scores that “sound”, we then seek to unite the two into fully satisfying rituals celebrative of the whole human experience (Hoffman 1988:265).