This may be more along the lines of depicting the spirit of the behavioral practices of the Khlysts, a sect or division no longer supported by mainstream Catholicism, in which believers who wanted to know God’s grace, had to first sin in order to be forgiven. Orgies were the normal business of the day, being the favored method of sinning.

Rasputin was said to have been influenced by this group, and was reportedly all to happy to help young maidens reach divine ecstacy. He believed in the interdependency of sin and repentance, making sin therefore necessary for salvation. Khlysts believed that the Holy Spirit was embodied in living humans, and could be communicated with directly, hence possibly the reason for the descending dove image (which was commonly used to depict the Holy Spirit). Or… Perhaps it is used here merely to show that God approves of or endorses the sex act, even among the most devout members of the church. After all, “be fruitful and multiply” was aledgedly one of God’s earliest instructions or commandments in the Catholic faith, and the sex act is generally accepted as having been created to be quite pleasurable (what with women having clitorises which have no other function and the capacity for multiple orgasms before and/or after the semen has been delivered…).

Many early religions were based in sex, (some say the very cause or root of all religion) because man realizing that he could not control his erections, believed therefore that woodies must be due to some very powerful outside source, or god.

There seems to me to have always been a commingling of sex and religion, which is quite ironic considering the sexual snob-goblins who cling to and hide behind (artfully chosen) rote dogma to make their case against all things sexual.

As far as this particular piece goes, it is simply divine … yes, pun intended. There is a spirituality (much different than religiosity) about it that speaks to me, conjuring perhaps a true “spiritual experience” which might lead to speaking in tongues, stigmata, etc. Again an irony, but a delicious one.

I’d seen pictures of Rodin sculpture before the day I wandered innocently into the Rodin room of the Hermitage in (then) Leningrad. I had no idea. I was completely derailed from my whirlwind student tour and spent about twenty minutes I could ill afford just staring, gaping, maybe even drooling a little bit.

Sculpture at that level is sculpture for a reason. Nothing else will do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_of_St_Theresa

Also the google image search for Ecstasy of Saint Theresa for more images. What the scuptor captured is truly devine. The online images I found with a quick search don’t do it justice.

I think (and the Gods know I am no art critic, see supra my studious avoidance of art classes when I had the chance to take ‘em) that what’s going on is that there is/was a whole genre of quite brutal and ugly porn, especially in Europe/Britain, dating from roughly the invention of the printing press to about 1920, which had as a central theme a hostility to religion and especially to the Catholic church as represented by priests, nuns, friars, and so forth. Such porn tended to show religiously-identified people engaging in every sort of perversion, not excluding the participation of children and farm animals. (Come to think of it I’m not sure college art classes would have helped prep me to discuss this genre.) Anyway, that sort of porn (of which the “dirty nun / dirty priest” sex etchings were just the mildest portion) provides a sort of memetic baseline or, you might say, establishes genre expectations. Typically, the priests and nuns shown were shown, drawn, and understood to be bad or evil, with their depicted sexual excesses being only an aspect of their general low character, and their features (faces etc.) tended to be harsh or unattractive to reinforce that point.

What you are noticing, and what I lazily just gestured at when I spoke of “mixing symbol sets”, is that here the artist has done an image very much in the style of the old anticlerical porn genre, but the nun is shown with an attractive face in an attitude of awe or ecstasy or transport (religious or sexual or both), with her face raised to heaven and the heavenly light shining down, dove checking in, the whole nine religious yards. I think — and this is wild-eyed arm-waving interpretive speculation for which I am utterly unqualified — that the artist was very deliberately conflating anti-clerical porn memes and religious art memes, to make a point about the ancient war between sex and religion.