It was deeply moving, though also striking that people thought the achievement was Janet Cardiff’s rather than Thomas Tallis’s. But that was anagnorisis happening right there. One could not be certain how many of the crowd knew either the words or meaning of the piece that the ‘sound installation’ was taken from. But something strange and out-of-time was occurring. One of the few contemporary works that 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 when the tides are receding or when the figures are facing into the setting sun. The reason is partly the same. Here is an image experienced in the everyday that reignites the memory of a story (in this case resurrection) from the heart of our culture. It may not answer it, but it remembers it.

Such works are, however, no more than the artistic wing of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde’s problem. What resonates does so because of something that happened before, not because of anything intrinsically great about the work. Indeed when such works succeed they arguably do so because they are parasitic works of art. They get what meaning they have from a tradition they themselves cannot profess or sustain. Yet works like this do at least seek to address the big issues that religion seeks to address. Their answers may be more blurred and their confidence more timid than what came before, but they do at least try to speak to the same needs and the same truths. The more original strain in European art is the one that deals with the continent’s underlying trauma. This is part of an ongoing tradition, but it is also one that constitutes a full stop.

Even before the First World War there was a strain in European art and music – in Germany more than anywhere – that was turning from ripeness to over-ripeness and then into something else. The last strains of the Austro-German Romantic tradition – exemplified by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Gustav Klimt – seemed almost to have destroyed itself by reaching a pitch of ripeness from which nothing could follow other than complete breakdown. It was not just that their subject matter was so death-obsessed, but that the tradition felt as though it could not be stretched any further or innovated any more without snapping. And so it snapped: in modernism and then post-modernism. There is a sense that ever since then successful European art, and German art in particular, has only been possible by existing in the debris that are the result of that explosion. Other than that no one has found a way out.