Secular universities preserved a religious aura around art as Europe’s moral essence

Evidence

The Romantic view of art as autonomous, existing in and for itself, meant that it was ideally positioned to replace God as the transcendent repository of value. The secularization of the university in the nineteenth century ironically furthered the religious aura accumulating around art and literature, while the humanities took shape as a discipline emerging from philology and moral science. … In Asad’s view, art and literature became central in “imparting a moral essence of European civilization to students in higher education through the study of great literature and great art. Thus the idea of European civilization became fused with great aesthetic achievements[,] … and criticism accordingly became the disciplinary means to celebrate these achievements.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 92

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Asad’s secularism argument and to the Rushdie free-expression frame from earlier chapters; useful for reading Home Boy’s and The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s implicit canonizing of ‘great literature’ against Muslim texts.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — secularization of the university furthered art’s religious aura — is a dense, counterintuitive mechanism worth sitting with.