It may be that this sense only occurs if you tap into a profound truth and that the desire to do so is something of which artists, like almost everyone else, have become suspicious. Go to any of the temples of modern culture and you can see great crowds of people wandering around looking for something, but it is unclear what they are after. But then you can be reminded of something greater. I was once wandering, somewhat aimlessly and underwhelmed, through the Art Gallery of Ontario. I heard the strains of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium in the distance and made my way towards the sound. Suddenly I realised another reason why the earlier galleries had been so depopulated. Everybody had migrated towards the same “sound installation” by Janet Cardiff, consisting of 40 speakers arranged in an oval, each relaying a singer in the choir. In the centre people stood mesmerised. Couples held hands and one pair sat embraced. (This was before Spem in Alium featured in the sadomasochist novels of E.L. James. Who knows what might happen now?)

It was deeply moving, but also striking that people thought that the achievement was Janet Cardiff’s, rather than Thomas Tallis’s. But that was anagnorisis happening right there. I am not certain how many of the crowd knew either the piece that the “sound installation” was taken from, or the text which Tallis worked from. But something strange and out-of-time was occurring. One of the few contemporary works which have a comparable effect is the sculpture by Antony Gormley called Another Place, consisting of 100 cast-iron, life-size human figures looking out to sea on Crosby Beach, near Liverpool. The whole installation — which was made permanent at the request of local residents — is best appreciated at dawn or at sunset, when the tides are in or receding or when the figures are facing into the setting sun. I find this work more moving than almost any work of art since Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection, Cookham (1924-27). The reason is partly the same. Here is an image almost of the everyday, seen and experienced in the everyday, which brings the story of resurrection which lies at the heart of our culture to a tangible and experienced form.

Of course it may be that these works are no more than the artistic wing of Böckenförde’s problem. What resonates does so because of something that happened before, not in something intrinsically great about the work. But there is another way of looking at this, which it seems to me may be worth considering: it is that works like this speak to people because they seek to address the same needs that religion seeks to address. Their answers may be more blurred and their confidence more timid than what came before. That is no bad thing. But these are works which try to speak to the same needs and the same truths.

We are not going to find another culture or a better culture. But we are currently doing a very poor job of saying what it is in this culture which has nurtured believers and doubters of previous generations and may nurture believers and doubters in this generation too. There will be big upheavals in the years ahead and it is not enough to face them stripped entirely bare. If the culture which shaped the West has no part in the future then we know that there are others that will step into its place. To reinject our culture with some sense of a deeper purpose need not be a proselytising mission, but an aspiration of which we should be aware. But that aspiration will be impossible to fulfil if the religious think that those who have split off from the same tree are their greatest problem, while those on the secular branch try to saw themselves off from the tree as a whole. People can sense that and the resulting want of meaning which arises from such shallows. A split has occurred in our culture. It should be the work of this generation to mend it.