MEMOIR 6
ART
In the winter of 1966, I received a call in my Emory office from
a Time editor who was seeking assistance in the design for the cover of
their Easter issue that year, they had intended for it to be a contemporary
portrait of God but their research department had failed in its search
for such a portrait, and he wondered if I could be of assistance.
Fortuitously, and by a sheer coincidence, there happened to be in my office
the one whom I regarded as the best authority on this subject, B. J. Stiles,
and he was forced to tell the editor that he knew of no such portrait,
and doubted if one could be possible. One result of this conversation
is that the Easter issue of Time that year was designed in black, it did
include yet another discussion of the death of God, and it proved to be
the best selling issue which Time has ever published. While I have
never been able fully to enter contemporary painting, I have been deeply
affected by modern painting, and I have come to believe that the late painting
of both Van Gogh and Monet does center upon a uniquely modern portrait
of God, and while God is unnamable as God in this painting, we nevertheless
see God here, even if we thereby see a totality that is unnamable as God.
Van Gogh has always been my favorite modern painter, and I believe that
he has given us a unique icon of God, an absolutely alien God who is nevertheless
a totally present God, a presence demanding a truly new seeing, and doing
so by incorporating an icon dissolving every boundary between the sacred
and the profane, and every boundary between center and circumference, or
here and there.
While I have given a good deal of time to the study of art history
and art criticism, as reflected in History and Apocalypse, which devotes
its first chapter to Greek sculpture and a section of the Dante chapter
to Giotto, I have only rarely discovered an actual theological study of
art, and here I distinguish theological from iconographical analysis.
There is an important distinction between an iconographical study which
is an historical analysis, and a theological study seeking to unveil an
epiphany of the sacred in the work of art. The latter demands not only
a religious sensibility but a religious empathy, and this is rare in scholars
today. Art historians, of course, can find no assistance in the great
body of our theology which is indifferent to art; indeed, it is often if
not commonly deeply hostile to art, and above all so in the modern world,
where a truly sacred art has seemingly disappeared. However, there
are paradoxes here, for just as a Calvinistic and iconoclastic Holland
gave us our greatest modern portraiture, a seemingly religious America
has given us virtually no religious painting at all, just as a profoundly
secular modern France has given us a painting which is ever more fully
becoming manifest as a truly new sacred painting, and perhaps most so in
Cezanne. A deep coincidentia oppositorum of the sacred and the profane
is manifest for all to see in a uniquely modern literature, but it is perhaps
no less present in a uniquely modern art, and theology is now called upon
to apprehend this coincidentia, which in large measure occurs in Mark Taylors
Disfiguring.
Our theology, however, inherits a tradition in which seeing is subordinate
to hearing, and in our dominant modern theology authentic hearing is understood
as effecting an iconoclastic negation of seeing, and if therein it deeply
differs from the great body of ancient and medieval theology, this would
appear to be a genuine reflection of a deeply modern condition. Is
a uniquely modern condition one in which it is simply impossible to see
the sacred, and is deep seeing for us inevitably and necessarily a purely
profane seeing, or one in which the sacred can actually appear only as
chaos or abyss? There can be little doubt that abyss and chaos are
more fully manifest in our art than in any previous art, but can this be
a genuine epiphany of the sacred for us, one in which a deep disfiguring
or a deep dissolution is the inevitable vehicle of the sacred? Art
historians and critics are open to the sacred as a category, but are reluctant
to employ the word God, and for good reason, for God has very nearly
disappeared from our critical discourse, and the very evocation of that
word in critical circles is greeted with embarrassment or astonishment.
So it is that twentieth century philosophy differs most clearly from every
previous philosophy in the near absence of the very word God in our philosophy,
and so far from being the queen of the sciences, theology today is little
more than their plaything or toy, and above all so any theology which dares
to employ the word God.
William Hamilton published a collection of essays whose title
is On Taking God Out of the Dictionary, and this is a serious project,
many if not most theologians were once taught to regard all dictionary
or common definitions of God as being the very opposite of a genuine theological
meaning of God, and this can clearly be seen in the very usage of God
in our common language, and if analytic philosophy is devoted to decoding
the meaning of our common language, it is clear why it should have given
us such shallow and empty meanings of God. And this is true
not only of our common language but of our dominant academic language,
so that a theologian in our universities is inevitably a missionary (or
so I regarded myself), and a missionary not to a "pagan" religious world,
but to an areligious world, the first such world in history, and this
is commonly true even in scholarly investigations of explicitly religious
phenomena. I have come to regard the American Academy of Religion
as having become a deep enemy not only of theology but of religion itself,
for it is now far distant from the intention of its founders, and while
this is perhaps an inevitable evolution, it is revealing of our academic
world, even if there continues to remain a small body of scholars seeking
genuine religious and theological meaning.
To seek a theological meaning of art in such a world is certainly
a deep if not impossible challenge, and this challenge is compounded by
an arena dominated by formal and technical analysis, which is largely true
of art history today, this is something which I discovered at Williams
College, although their superb art department was the only one there in
which I found a home. Art history only entered the American university
at a late date, another witness to an iconoclastic America, yet it is also
in America that art museums have truly become sanctuaries, perhaps our
only truly sacred sites; we treat art museums as our cathedrals, and for
a very good reason, for only here can we discover today a truly holy ground.
How could this be? What is there in art which evokes such a response,
and does so in our seemingly most secular circles, the German theologian,
Moltmann, once remarked that when God is dead religion is everywhere, and
in some sense religion is everywhere today, but nowhere is such religion
understood. Perhaps the world of art is that world which is most
open to such an investigation, surely it is here that we moderns are most
open to the sacred, but are we here most open to God? Ever since
Barth's revolutionary commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, the theologian
has been deeply suspicious of , if not hostile towards religion, yet ironically
this book is the most deeply religious of modern theological works, and
most so in the very passages in which it assaults religion. That
is dialectical theology, indeed, and such a dialectical theology does offer
a way into the theological meaning of art, and one which concretely occurs
here in Barths analysis of Michelangelos Sistine Chapel painting, where
he perhaps most deeply draws forth the purely negative theological power
of religion.
This is not simply a deeply modern Calvinism, Calvin would no doubt be
horrified that Barth could take art so seriously, and this never occurs
again in Barths work, just as subsequent theological investigations of
art, such as those of Tillich and his followers, never approach the power
of the early Barth. But if dialectical theology can apprehend the
purely negative power of art, if it is a genuinely dialectical theology,
it can apprehends its positive or affirmative power, too; and this in the
very context in which it knows its negative power, a negative power which
dialectically must be a positive power, and one which we actually know
in genuinely responding to art. There are those who believe that
our modern museums of art are more truly holy than our classical museums,
and it would appear to be undeniable that a traditional iconography is
less powerful to us than is its modern parallel, with the exception of
that art which is truly exotic to us, such as Byzantine art and Far Eastern
painting, just as it also could be noted that the West only became open
to such art in that fully modern world which has so comprehensively known
the death of God.
Of course, the death of God is a primal icon of classical Christian
painting and sculpture, or is so with the advent of Gothic art, and while
the crucifixion only very gradually entered Western art, and not truly
so until after almost a thousand years of the evolution of that art, when
this fully occurs it finally brings to an end every Western image of the
Christ of Glory, or wholly overshadows every such image, so that in full
modernity a true image of the resurrection has simply become impossible,
or has become wholly inseparable from the image of crucifixion. Thereby
ancient Christian art is truly reversed, an art that could not or would
not envision the crucifixion, and this is just the point at which a classical
Christian iconography passes into its fully modern equivalent, for iconography
is truly universal, occurring as we now know in profoundly secular or profane
expressions. However, this is not to say that we can yet understand
such a profane iconography. Nevertheless, we must recognize it as iconography,
and so recognize it if only because of its sacred status in our world.
Modern painting has a sacred status for us going beyond any other art,
and why has modern music never attained such a status? Certainly
it is imaginatively as powerful as modern painting, and even if its very
complexity would seem to confine it to an elite, its radical innovations
are probably no greater than those of modern painting, and the sheer power
of many of its expressions is undeniable. Is this because seeing
for us is what hearing once was, or because we can now know a liberation
in seeing that we cannot know in hearing, or cannot know in hearing without
an enormous discipline and attention?
It is the mass popularity of modern art that is astounding,
a popularity which is now virtually universal throughout the world.
Here modern painting wholly transcends both modern music and modern poetry,
and yet no one could think that its artists are greater artists, although
perhaps its interpreters are far more effective priests or shamans, even
having succeeded in making modern art or its counterfeit a primary vehicle
of our advertising and mass media. Now it is simply not possible
to counterfeit modern music or modern poetry, and if it is possible to
counterfeit modern painting, and I often think that contemporary painting
is little more than that, this is revealing of modern painting. So,
too, art forgery abounds, and this is not only impossible in music and
poetry, but simply inconceivable, so that one is reminded of the forgery
of holy relics, and this calls attention to the deep importance of touch
in painting, one alien to both music and poetry, but truly integral in
painting, even if for the great majority of viewers this can only be a
vicarious touching. Yet we do touch painting in truly seeing it;
painting is the only art in which this faculty is primary, and perhaps
painting was always originally an icon, as we can see in the earliest painting
known to us, we can see an icon only by touching it, not only are sight
and touch here inseparable, but sight is touch, and perhaps that is what
it most deeply is in modern painting.
I know that I touch Van Goghs paintings when I fully see them,
and therein they truly are an icon to me; no classical or traditional Christian
painting has such an effect upon me, and if only here I know that I, too,
live in a sacred world. Perhaps it is sacred because it is only approachable
through touch, that faculty seemingly least affected by modernity, unless
in late modernity it has become so hollow as to be empty, and so empty
as only to be awakened by an icon. Already Blake, on the first plate
of Europe, could know our senses as now being so disordered that they are
wholly isolated from one another, and only touch can find a passageway
out of our fallen world. This was surely a fundamental reason why
painting and design are so important in Blakes engravings of his prophetic
poetry, and here for the first time in modernity a book is book and painting
at once, which is one reason why art historians cannot understand Blake.
Yet if finally we can only approach painting through touch, or through
a seeing that is seeing and touch at once, then we can see why deep painting
is inevitably a sacred painting, for it is inevitably an icon, and the
public response to modern art would seem to demonstrate that, and perhaps
the deeply non-mimetic ground of modern art makes this possible; here we
see as we cannot otherwise see, and yet we can know this seeing as pure
seeing itself, and a pure seeing liberating us from our fallen or inverted
senses.
Now it is true that there is an ultimate non-mimetic ground of
modern music and poetry, but if only thereby they are deeply alien to the
great body of humanity, whereas the non-mimetic ground of modern painting
may well be a decisive key to its overwhelming and universal impact.
It is precisely that world which we most openly and spontaneously see in
full modernity which is most alien to us, most distant from any primordial
or ancient vision, and certainly most distant from anything that we could
recognize as a sacred vision. Yes, sight is our primary sensory faculty,
and never more so than in modernity, when as Blake knew, our senses are
most isolated from each other, so that now sight is naked and alone as
it never was before, and hence if only because of its greater power more
in need of liberation than our other senses, and when the possibility of
that liberation arises, as it does in modern painting, we overwhelmingly
respond. But we could never so respond if we saw here what we see
elsewhere, or what we have seen before, only a truly new seeing could liberate
our sight, one which has never occurred before, yet when it does occur,
which Proust knew so deeply in responding to Impressionism, it occurs as
a renewal of a sight which we have lost, for the only true paradise is
always the paradise we have lost. Such a response is simply not possible
for modern music and poetry, or possible only for a few, whereas virtually
everyone can respond to modern painting, or could do so once it had been
established as a sacred art.
Our museums are sanctuaries as our concert halls and libraries
are not, books may well be more widely distributed than paintings, but
it is art books that are our sacred books, far more so than books of poetry
are, and even when they are only coffee-table books, those are the very
books that we are most eager to display, and it is original paintings and
not manuscripts which command astronomical prices in our marketplace, and
this despite the fact that only a few experts allied with our most advanced
scientific detection can distinguish an original painting from a forgery.
I shall never forget the deep impact which William Gaddis The Recognitions
had upon me, our richest theological novel since Moby Dick, for this is
not only the novel which is our fullest portrait of New York, but it is
a novel in which an art forger is a truly modern Christ figure, and whereas
this is a truly demonic world, and a demonic and holy world at once, the
forger is the only true innocent within it, and his innocence is inseparable
from his forgery, a forgery giving life in a universal world of death,
as here a forgery exactly faithful to the spirit and the letter of its
Flemish masters recreates the paintings of those masters so as to offer
a strange kind of redemption. Thereby we are awakened to the power
of a forgery which recalls the power of forged relics, yet all relics are
forged, or all of our most sacred relics. Here there is no real distinction
between the original and the copy, or the original and the fake, for
a true relic is wholly the product of the beholder, and its power resides
precisely in that. Could that be true of modern art?
No, certainly not, and yet there is a power in all art deriving
from its beholder. If we are awakened here as we are nowhere else,
that very awakening is an ultimate power, and it occurs in modern art as
it does nowhere else, or universally occurs here as it does nowhere else,
and that may well be true in every historical world, there are no atheists
in the presence of genuine art, or none who are unawakened to the sacred,
here is a real presence, indeed, and it can occur even in the midst of
the deepest spiritual darkness. Perhaps only that darkness makes
possible the power of modern art, just as only a seeing that is wholly
other than our common seeing makes possible the seeing of modern painting,
and just as there is a universal ritual throughout the world, a truly cosmic
mass, there is a universal art throughout the world, each conveys the sacred
to our most immediate actuality, and each only does so by isolating itself
from its own world, or its apparent world, or what Hegel knew as "the
given." The truth is that religion has never occurred apart from
art, and even Buddhism, the most iconoclastic of all religions, evolved
the most comprehensive of all iconographies, just as Islam evolved a truly
iconoclastic art, which is also true of Judaism, and even true of the purest
Calvinism, and if modern art is finally a truly sacred art, it is also
our most deeply iconoclastic art, and one whose dissolution or disfiguring
of every given sacred image, nevertheless evolved a truly sacred image
in that very disfiguring or dissolution, and a sacred image which for the
first time is open to all and everyone.
Is the theologian called upon to discover God in modern art,
a seemingly impossible calling, yet our truly modern poetry is unthinkable
apart from a profound wrestling with or defiance of God, and all of our
great modern composers have been deeply religious, perhaps the most deeply
religious body of artists who ever lived. So, too, there has never
been a more religious painter than Van Gogh, or a more holy one, and it
is Van Gogh who is the most popular of modern painters, and if ever there
was a God-obsessed painter, this is Van Gogh, and above all the final Van
Gogh of breakdown, insanity, and suicide. I believe that Wheatfield
with Crows is our purest modern image of God, this is the painting that
I would choose to be on that Time cover, and if this is an image of crucifixion,
it is simultaneously an image of resurrection; here resurrection is crucifixion,
and it is most deeply so in the very absence of all traditional iconography,
this makes possible its ultimate immediacy, and its ultimate immediacy
for us, an immediacy comprehending the whole horizon of this painting.
The pure absence of every traditional icon or image makes possible here
a truly new icon, one which we can actually touch, but only touch in a
touching that consumes us, and if this is a touch that is a way out of
our fallen world, it is just thereby a way into its deepest depths, as
here we are given a paradise that is certainly lost, and precisely thereby
a paradise for us.
But how could this possibly be an image of God? It will
not do simply to say with Tillich that this is so because it evokes an
ultimate response, this fails to say anything at all about the imagery
that here is so dazzlingly present, an imagery seemingly evoking the total
absence or emptiness of God; and yet its very darkness, and its overwhelming
darkness, evokes the total presence of God, a total presence in that very
darkness, and a total presence as that very darkness. Thereby that
darkness is a joyous darkness, and we can only say Yes in response to it,
even if that is saying Yes to the deepest and most ultimate No. Here,
the No is said only for the sake of the Yes, and if here we can only see
an absolute No, that very seeing is a joyous Yes, and a joyous Yes impossible
apart from the depths of this vision of darkness, or apart from the depths
of this absolute No. And we can know this Yes only because we can
taste this No, now we absorb a darkness which is totality itself, a darkness
here which is a dazzling light, but that light is the light of darkness
itself, not only a light impossible apart from darkness, but a light indistinguishable
from darkness, and if thereby we consume the dead or dying God, that consumption
is resurrection itself, a resurrection which is Yes and only Yes.
Is there no theology which can enter this painting, or finally no theology
which can enter any great painting, or can be open to a final and ecstatic
Yes?
Byzantine theology seemingly could, but that theology is vastly
distant from us, and a contemporary Byzantine theology is simply unknown;
moreover, not even Catholic theology can truly enter Giottos painting,
and yet Giotto gave us an imagery in which there is a true and actual union
of the humanity and the divinity of Christ, one which Christian theology
could affirm as its deepest dogma but could never conceptually or systematically
draw forth. If this is the deepest mystery of Christianity, it is
profoundly unveiled by Giotto, and unveiled even in our world by Van Gogh,
and, yes, unveiled in Wheatfield with Crows, for here the very
coalescence of crucifixion and resurrection is a coalescence of the humanity
and the divinity of Christ. Van Goghs own overt images of Christ
simply collapse in the horizon of this painting, but so, too, does every
traditional image of Christ, and every traditional image of God; and if
modern art is the first Western art to dissolve all images of God, this
is a dissolution making possible an ultimate rebirth, and even a rebirth
of images of God, which I believe deeply occurs in the late painting of
both Van Gogh and Monet, and perhaps of Cezanne, too, if we only had the
theological mind to comprehend it. Yes, here we can know the death
of God as the resurrection of God, but not the resurrection of the Lord
of Glory, not a resurrection which is an ascension into Heaven, but rather
a resurrection which is a descent into Hell, a resurrection which is an
ecstatic Yes to the depths of darkness, one wherein the deepest darkness
is not transfigured into the deepest light, but wherein that darkness is
the deepest light.
I have long been enchanted by Monets water lilies, and fascinated,
too, a fascination which I associate with Rudolf Ottos mysterium fascinans,
the positive or affirmative pole of the holy, and while for Otto this never
truly occurs apart from the mysterium tremendum, I think that in these
water lilies we are given a mysterium fascinans wholly apart from a mysterium
tremendum, this is just why we cannot say God in response to this vision
of paradise, nor even remember the God whom we have known, but if we are
here truly given a moment of grace, we cannot finally dissociate it from
God. Hence the very disappearance of God, or the pure invisibility
of God, could make possible a total presence of God, deep mystics have
long known this, but that mysticism at least in the West has been profoundly
aniconic, and if these water lilies are truly an image of God, that visibility
is only made possible by a pure invisibility, an invisibility in which
we lose every God whom we have been given, but precisely thereby we see
God, and see God in these water lilies. And this is a vision of God
not only made possible by the invisibility of God, but the paintings themselves
enact that invisibility, their very calling forth of the pure immediacy
of this pond and these lilies, is an enactment of that invisibility, we
can only see this water and these flowers by seeing them as totality itself,
here we actually see that totality, but we do so only when every trace
of God has vanished, and we can only see these paintings by actually seeing
the pure emptiness of God, for only that emptiness makes possible a seeing
of the invisibility of God.
Unlike Van Gogh, there is not a trace of any iconography in Monet,
Monet along with Cezanne is our most purely profane modern painter, nor
is there even an echo of a mysterium tremendum, now every mysterium tremendum
is absolutely silent and invisible, and only that invisibility and silence
makes possible such a pure mysterium fascinans, a mysterium fascinans which
here undergoes an epiphany as totality itself. If only for this reason
this epiphany is alien to everything that we can name as God, yet it is
clearly an epiphany, one simply undeniable to its viewer, and the theologian
must identify it as an epiphany of the sacred, and perhaps most so because
it is not an epiphany of God. Is this a genuine coincidentia oppositorum
of the sacred and the profane, and one in which both the sacred as sacred
and the profane as profane are dissolved, or in which each fully passes
into the other, and in which we are given a seeing in which we can see
the sacred only by seeing the profane and can see the profane only by seeing
the sacred.? Thereby we actually see a pure moment of incarnation,
and a moment which here and now is all in all, so that now earth itself
is actually paradise, and paradise in this absolutely joyous moment.
The Christian knows the death of God or the Crucifixion as the
one source of redemption, but theologically we have never known a total
death of God, or not known it in a purely theological language, yet such
a redemption seemingly appears in these water lilies, and we can see this
redemption only by losing every vision of God. Is this a movement
in some sense occurring in every genuine expression of modern art, and
could this be a fulfillment of an authentic Christian tradition, one wholly
obscured or reversed by our theologies, but nevertheless deeply present
in our fullest and purest painting? We could call upon the Christian
epic tradition as a way into what may well be an epic tradition of painting,
and if there is a genuine continuity between Dante and Joyce, there may
well be a genuine continuity between Giotto and Cezanne, Giotto was our
first epic painter, the first artist to give us a truly epic enactment
of the life of Christ, is that an enactment which is repeated in our deepest
modern painting, and repeated in a Kierkegaardian repetition which is a
forward rather than a backward movement to eternity, now eternity is the
very opposite of any possible primordial eternity or totality, and only
thereby is it absolutely and totally present.
It is my conviction that each of us is truly theological in deeply responding
to art, this is surely one crucial point at which theology is a universal
horizon, and even is so in our world; while we as yet have no real theological
understanding of this ground, and cannot do so insofar as we are not open
to a truly new theology, the necessity for a truly and even absolutely
new theology is now clearly manifest. But is an absolutely new theology
possible for us? Christian theologians often if not commonly believe
that an absolutely new theology is embodied in the purest writing of Paul,
which is one reason why it is so frequently believed that Paul created
Christianity, but a comparable revolutionary theology is embodied in Augustines
purest writing, and if it was Augustine who created our uniquely Western
theology, this very theology has undergone deep transformations in its
history, and perhaps most so in the modern world. So a truly new
theology would be in genuine continuity with this tradition, and while
truly alien to the ecclesiastical theologian, it is manifest for all to
see in the radical theological thinking of Hegel and Kierkegaard, and that
is the very theological thinking which has had the deepest impact upon
our world. Unless it is Nietzsches theological thinking which has
had that impact, and it is important to note that it is artists who first
became open to Nietzsches revolutionary thinking, and most clearly so
in their enactments of the death of God, no other symbol has been more
comprehensively powerful in twentieth century painting and poetry, and
perhaps nothing so fully turns us away from that poetry and painting than
does a refusal of the death of God.