Is atheist art intrinsically worse than that which is religiously informed? The conversation is probably not even worth having. I do not wish to contribute one more voice to an argument that will not be settled anytime soon, and certainly not by a middling critic.
In framing this article, let’s just say that often I am personally bored by what I perceive as a one-dimensionality inherent to a materialist view of the world. Having removed the possibility of the spiritual or anything properly transcendent, I cannot see how an atheist can honestly tap into the depth of artistic creativity accessible to a believer (regardless of what exactly is believed).
To be fair, having access to the history, images, idioms, and themes of religion and spirit does not mean an artist will make use of them. One-dimensionality is free for the taking by any and all. There is so much of what would be classed under “Christian Art” that strikes me as utterly unimaginative and entirely unmoving. And many of those pieces are favored by a critical mass of loving and earnest Christians, else those songs, poems, and paintings would not be a part of the popular culture that I tend to shirk.
I say all this only to make it clear that attempts at art can read to me as horrendously trite and tedious if they do not make use of the depths of metaphor and image available via transcendence and spirit. In saying so much, I am also suggesting that atheist artists are hobbled in art by their disbelief. From my humble and limited perspective, this seems almost a truism.
And so when I encounter an atheist artist who engages my senses and spirit, it occurs to me that something exceptional has been created by someone who warrants consideration and respect. The Irish musician Hozier has been on the scene for about 10 years, having patiently released only 3 full albums over that time. For all 10 of those years, he has commanded my curiosity, my interest, and plenty of hours listening to his music in spite of the materialist centrality to his themes. With the release of his B-side EP Unheard paired with the LP Unreal Unearth, I am now fascinated to find he is commanding my artistic respect, albeit one fraught with spiritual and intellectual unease. I will unpack the appreciation before returning briefly to the discomfort.
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The fastest way for a person to lose my respect is by being intellectually disingenuous. One might be intellectually dishonest with himself by accident or unknowingly, and this still is an issue, though easily forgivable if open to correction. And regardless of one’s shortcomings, love will cover over a multitude of wrongs, be it my love or more likely the love of another. Working backward up that ladder, someone without humility, grace, and love would do well to be as consistent, thoughtful, and honest as possible.
Here is the place where I categorize Nietzsche. From reading just a bit of his primary work, I imagine Nietzsche to be proud, unforgiving, hard. I will let the biographers tell you one way or another. Either way, I cannot imagine him as a friend, but I can respect him as a thinker. As thorough a materialist as he was, his brave consistency led his thinking and writing to a meaningless universal darkness, to his own madness and death. The end of scientific materialism is oblivion, and he followed the ramifications of his atheist philosophy to the very end. A tragic life, no doubt, but an intellectual honesty and consistency deserving of respect; or if not respect, at least wonder.
Though I have no reason to suppose that Hozier is proud, unforgiving, and cold, he occupies a similar space in my mind. There are definitive hints, if not bald-faced statements, of the individualistic hedonism that accompanies his atheist beliefs, and following these thoughts, there is not too much distance to very ugly ramifications. I will not impute to Hozier anything he does not say, but these insinuations do worry me. Neither his atheism, nor anyone’s really, has been purified of the ethical issues he thought he may have done away with his old religion (be it the Quakerism of his parents or Catholicism of his education).
Morals aside, like Nietzsche, Hozier follows the practical implications of his materialist beliefs to their obvious conclusion, which is darkness and death. Nowhere does the singer-songwriter make this more clear than in the song ‘No Plan’:
There’s no plan, there’s no race to be run
…
There’s no plan, there’s no kingdom to come
In contrast to these biblical references and other comments on divine providence in the song, we see Hozier strongly assert the blind and randomized character of a quantum, material world. Instead of the fulfillment of eternal promises, we see the heat death of the universe and everything returning to the darkness from which creation must have come.
But even in this song, as we will find in the balance of Hozier’s discography, there is hope. We see a phoenix rise from the ashes, or more aptly, a seed rise from the soil:
Keep my body from the fire, hire a gardener for my grave
Your secret is safe with me and if secrets were like seeds
When I’m lying under marble, marvel at flowers you’ll have made
Before universal oblivion, death always manifests as darkness. Death is decay. The decay of animal and plant life is decomposition. But from the organic rot, new life rises. Death is not quite as final as we hear flourished in ‘No Plan’; not yet. Overwhelmingly, Hozier’s lyrics occupy this intermediary image. Death and decay acting as the seedbed of new life. Insofar as the Irishman engages this theme, he does so with a puzzling expectation of personally enduring hope, love, and some unexplicit form of reincarnation.
To catalogue and explain every instance of a reference to death, decay, rot, and dirt in Hozier’s discography would be entirely unnecessary (though I’m sorely tempted) and would quadruple the length of this review. Rest assured, I will spare you. Instead, I will quickly run through some of the more explicit, evocative, and interesting examples. They are easily found throughout all of his music.
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On his lead single, the first track of his first album, Hozier depicts the “madness and soil of that sad earthly scene.” The following songs have similar lines, “fresh from the fields, all fetor and fertile” and “every version of me dead and buried in the yard outside.”
We quickly come to the song ‘In a Week’, which is the clearest example of the decay and dirt imagery we are considering. The song is sonically beautiful, a duet between two lovers who die in an unknown location. They rot into the earth, feeding the scavengers and worrying the livestock. Still, they sing exclusively from a perspective after death. An imaginative trick of artistic license, this is the primary source of hope in Hozier’s lyrics, contra an atheist literalism.
He will not shy away from death. Atheist as he is, his intellectual honesty compels him to confront the darkness. Still, romantic artist that he is, he allows his speakers, their spirits, or at least their voices to live on. Here is a hint of hope with a source too intellectually inconsistent not to be noted. The image and inconsistency live on in each album, as we will see. The first album, Hozier, continues with comments on death and how it is depicted by the dirt, along with a hope he will not relinquish:
Some whiff of this, death and guts, we are deaf, we are numb
—
When my time comes around
Lay me gently in the cold, dark earth
No grave can hold my body down
I’ll crawl home to her—
I had a thought, dear, however scary
About that night, the bugs and the dirt
Why were you digging? What did you bury
Before those hands pulled me from the earth?
Why is his love and hope always grounded in the soil, superceding death? Well, where else might he find hope? If he is convinced of no existence of anything transcendent, if the material is all the reality the world has or will ever know, what hope might we find but in our inevitable end?
It is a confusing position, difficult to hold onto too tightly. Job offers a helpful critique:
If I say to corruption, ‘You are my father,’
and to the worm, ‘My mother’ or ‘My sister,’
where then is my hope—
who can see any hope for me? (17:14-15 NIV)
What is Hozier’s hope? Well, who could say? He does not make that too clear, and it is certainly far from a literal belief.
He asserts a more common-sense position in his first album’s penultimate song, ‘In the Woods Somewhere’. Here, the speaker occupies the perspective of a man near death, who is saved by the troubled generosity of a young grieving mother. With fevered disregard for his life, he runs into the woods to determine from whence he hears awful screaming. There he finds only death and danger. Turning round, he flees, desperate to save the life he almost recklessly threw away. He flew with abandon because he found life itself is worth clinging to.
Life is good. He bristles at, but clearly affirms, Isaiah 5:20:
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (ESV)
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On his second album, Hozier takes a slight step away from images of organic decay, but death is still the primary dramatic theme. The images he engages seem to broaden a bit, offering an interesting view for those seeking to understand his artistic and philosophical impulse (his album covers offer a fun case study).
In ‘From Eden’ on Hozier, we witnessed an engagement with biblical imagery, albeit in the negative form of the serpent in the garden. On Wasteland, Baby! references to biblical and classical religious sources continue. We hear an early throw-away mention of Jonah in ‘Movement’, the obvious biblical quotes above from ‘No Plan’, and the stark comment to his lover that “I’d be appalled if I saw you ever try to be a saint. I wouldn’t fall for someone I thought couldn’t misbehave.” In ‘Talk’, Hozier pushes the buried/earth imagery to its greatest extent, following Orpheus underground into Hades to save Eurydice with hope and love doomed in the travail against death.
But the album is not all classical and biblical. The song ‘Shrike’ is one of the most graphic ways anyone could sing to a lover, past or otherwise. Hozier returns to death and decay with imagery to make your stomach turn.
If you’d like, search some videos or just descriptions of shrikes, a.k.a. the butcherbird. These small birds catch insects, lizards, mice, and other birds, but because they have no talons to tear the meat from their prey, they instead impale their food on thorns to help tear the flesh. The shrike and its thorn represent the lovers in Hozier’s song, the singer imagining himself reincarnated as the bird. Death is literally on display, pelts and carcasses scattered impaled throughout the hedgerow.
The balance of Hozier’s second album, like ‘In the Woods Somewhere’, deals with the life man has been “given” and how he is “called” to make use of it (not literally of course, but eerily agential). Our singer cherishes life, not because of the sanctity of it, but precisely and only because it is fleeting. One might ask why a transient thing is automatically qualified as precious, but here it is assumed. Most people agree that life indeed is precious, regardless of the veracity of their reasoning.
‘Be’ asks a lover to consistently show up, to value being itself (which I would happily endorse), referencing Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, Saint Peter’s role at the pearly gates, Atlas’ responsibility to support the earth, and Adam and Eve’s happiness in enjoying a new creation. ‘Sunlight’ rolls over the theme of the good newness of Eden, a new love bursting like dawn in the life of one who had succumbed to the dark. The album ends with ‘Wasteland, Baby!’ and one final reference to romantic love compared to divine creation and a final, fiery judgment. For someone who uses his lyrics to endorse atheism, it is interesting to see so much metaphor and imagery used (more positively than anything) from religious sources.
It is as if the privations of death and darkness do not provide enough metaphorical material for someone with something to say. Hozier remains consistent in his belief; he rejects transcendence (generally, but allows a creative pass for love, hope, and reincarnation to transcend death). He certainly rejects God. Yet, as we will see, his darkness, death, and decay are thoroughly informed by a transcendent idealism or value system that would be rejected by Nitzshean philosophy. The tension holds, and only in the tension will we understand and appreciate the profundity of Hozier’s latest releases.
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Unreal Unearth begins with ‘De Selby’ (Parts 1 and 2), both of which engage images of dark and light from such a Judeo-Christian understanding of creation that I am compelled to share the first song’s (English) lyrics in full. This is truly astounding to hear from Hozier:
At last, when all of the world is asleep
You take in the blackness of air
The likes of a darkness so deep
That God, at the start, couldn’t bearAnd sit unseen with only the inner upheld
Your reflection can’t offer a word
To the bliss of not knowin’ yourself
With all mirrorin’ gone from the worldBut, still, the mind, rejectin’ this new empty space
Fills it with somethin’ or someone
No closer could I be to God
Or why he would do what he’s done
The philosophical and theological underpinnings of the emotional thrust in this song are nuanced, fairly well-informed, and outright beautiful. The second 4 lines engage with an eastern understanding of nirvanic, blissful oneness, a complete abandonment of self. The first and third stanzas, however, make a forceful argument against, conceding that mind rages against the absence of the light. True personhood is driven to fill the emptiness.
The second half of Part 1 (sung in Irish Gaelic) and Part 2 return to Hozier’s insistent preference for the dark, but he has already betrayed a knowledge of some divine necessities. Life itself belies the dark and will not easily succumb to death.
Hozier’s dizzying engagement with a more classical reasoning continues in the next song, ‘First Time’, where he engages the imagery of a bouquet of flowers, life prematurely ripped from the ground. On an album titled Unreal Unearth followed by an EP titled Unheard, listeners do well to attend to all words beginning with “un-”. A platonic idea of the human soul is evoked with, “The soul, if that’s what you’d call it, uneasy ally of the body, it felt nameless as a river, undiscovered underground…This life lived mostly underground, unknowin’ either sight nor sound, till reachin’ up for sunlight just to be ripped out by the stem.”
For an atheist who seems to have rejected all ideas of transcendence, Hozier occupies a very interesting philosophical space here. He engages a Platonist idea of the soul more properly belonging in eternal bliss as opposed to an earthly life, an odd thing to hear from someone who focuses so much on inextricably embodied rot and decay. He echoes this in ‘I, Carrion (Icarian)’ with, “All our weight is just a burden offered to us by the world.”
Again and again, in spite of the inevitability of death, life is what is left standing in the end. Again and again, we are told that life is worth the living, that there is something intrinsic to life that is good, in contrast with the oblivion of death. The words and meaning are readily available for anyone to analyze in ‘Francesca’, ‘Who We Are’, ‘All Things End’, ‘Abstract (Psychopomp)’, ‘Unknown / Nth’, and ‘First Light’.
Life came bursting out of darkness in the beginning, and it was good. Life issues forth recurrently out of the dirt and decay, and it is good. In spite of the brokenness of it all, the tension, contrast, and bittersweet love are as refreshing as a warm bed in winter or a cool stream in summer. In ‘To Someone From a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)’, Hozier translates the Gaelic:
Uiscefhuaraithe
The feel of coolness only water brings
There are some things that no-one teaches you, love
That God in his awful wisdom first programs in
In the back half of the album we return to the point made at first: God, in his powerful and terrible wisdom, created life out of nothing, filling creation with a light that works against evil, allowing us mortals to find enjoyment in the simplest and most broken things. Death can never deny the goodness of life. God’s predestined intentions foreclose the absolutizing effects of death, regardless of how low we may sink.
Finally on Unheard, we hear this affirmed once more. Hozier ensures that he will maintain his atheist standards, low as he may set them: “I aim low, I aim true, and the ground’s where I go.” But on ‘Wildflower and Barley’, we are reminded again that it is not so much about what sinks into the ground as what sprouts out of it:
The diggers are diggin’ the earth
Some close to the surface, some close to the casket
I feel as useful as dirt, put my body to work
…
Would all things God allows remain above ground
Like grief and sweet memory, wildflower and barley
Perhaps in frustration at the un-reality of darkness, perhaps in deference to the positive images, themes, and metaphors that make good art, perhaps accepting the only honest option after realizing the hollowness of death, we hear Hozier concede that even if he must die to fertilize the future, all that will live on will live in the sovereignty of God. Grief and sweet memory, wildflower and barley, joy, disaster, all things above ground. We do well to make use of the goodness we have as long as we can. Unheard’s last words leave us here:
Joy, disaster, come unbound here
I’ll deny me none while I’m allowed
With all things above the ground
Say what you will about Hozier’s lyrics, where you think the theme of his next album may lead, how far afield you think his moral aims are. For his sake, I say this: Hozier has unfalteringly faced death, decay, and darkness head on. He has followed his convictions to their end. And in finding an unsatisfying finale, he has turned, not abandoning the death he has found, but seeing its redemption in life.
There is a natural tension throughout Hozier’s discography. He sings of hope and love even though he begins by only affirming darkness, manifest in the rot of death. He then turns to religious and classical sources of transcendence, an emotional ideal that outlives and grows out of earth. Finally on Unreal Unearth and Unheard, he concedes the logical necessity of a personal and divine agent, a will not his own, even if it is only necessary for engaging rich and fecund metaphor. God is unavoidable for this artist.
But listening to his music still makes me uncomfortable, even with this hopeful turn. Is there any victory to be had in seeing someone admit that his course led him to defeat? No, certainly. Without love of God and love of neighbor, evinced in faith, it may all tragically be for naught.
After all, even the demons believe, and shudder!