The Arts Leading Theology: The Case of Anselm Kiefer
by Russell Re Manning
Lord Gifford Fellow, University of Aberdeen, UK
Lord Gifford Fellow, University of Aberdeen, UK
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all
—T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
It is an honor and a privilege to be part of this conversation, initiated by Frank Burch Brown about whether and how the arts might lead theology. My own contribution focuses on one specific instance in which I think we do see the arts leading theology—namely, the work of the German contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer.
My own engagement with Kiefer’s work grew out of a course I taught on cultural-aesthetic reflections on Jewish-Christian relations, as part of which we looked at the presentation of themes in Jewish-Christian relations in the works of Marc Chagall and Anselm Kiefer. Interestingly, both, in their very different ways, engage profoundly not just with themes in Judaism and Christianity, but rather both “enact” aspects of the Jewish-Christian encounters of the twentieth century in many of their works. This point is, I think, a crucial one: Kiefer’s artwork does not just represent or depict religious themes; it is rather properly speaking, I suggest, itself constructively theological. It is an artistic theology, but nonetheless assuredly a theology.
I should note here that in interpreting Kiefer in this way, I dispute the dominant standard readings of his work that whilst acknowledging his preoccupations with profound metaphysical and spiritual questions, equally affirm that he offers no constructive answers, simply the emptiness of a pointless and endless Beckettian waiting.
Before getting to Kiefer directly, however, I want to make a brief digression to say a few things about natural theology. As the Lord Gifford Fellow at Aberdeen, I am contractually obliged, in accordance with Lord Adam Gifford’s will, to “promote, advance, teach, and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of that term.” More substantively, I want to suggest that one fruitful way to develop reflections on the arts leading theology is to frame such an endeavor in terms of an aesthetic natural theology, or to use a more Tillichian formulation, as a “natural theology of culture.” Doing so enables us to affirm the importance of experience for theology and the arts. It acknowledges that the experiencing subject is, as we unavoidably inherit from Descartes and Kant, the indispensible agent of any discourse of claim to knowledge, whilst simultaneously insisting with Husserl and Heidegger that what the subject experiences is given to her in the depths of her being beyond her subjectivity. Natural theology is, I suggest, once taken beyond narrow caricature, best characterized as the search for a means of expression adequate to the thick theological reality of experience—the conviction, in other words, that our experience of the world we inhabit (both the natural and the cultural) reveals to us something, however elusive and ambiguous, of that which exceeds and sustains the world. Natural theology, in this sense, is thus the enterprise, or perhaps better the attempt, to bring this experience to expression. But, and this is absolutely crucial, this expression is itself conditioned by the experience. Lindbeck is, I think, wrong to affirm that the liberal paradigm is committed to the priority of a pre-cultural and pre-linguistic pure experience that is brought to expression through a series of arbitrary and interchangeable signs. Rather, with Paul Tillich, I suggest that this expression is symbolic and, in Tillich’s phrase, “symbols participate in the reality to which they point.”1
Interestingly, in light of the title of this session, there is something decidedly Orphic about this conception of natural theology. As the French philosopher Pierre Hadot puts it in his wonderful book, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, two attitudes can be traced that describe the relations between humanity and nature. He writes:
I shall place the first attitude—the one that wishes to discover the secrets of nature, or the secrets of God, by means of tricks and violence—under the patronage of Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetos, who, according to Hesiod, stole the secret of fire from the gods in order to improve the life of mankind, and who, according to Aeschyluss and Plato, brought man the benefits of technology and civilization. . . . Promethean man demands the right of dominion over nature. . . . I dedicate the other attitude towards nature to Orpheus . . . allud[ing] to the seductive power which, according to legend, singing and playing the lyre gave Orpheus over living and nonliving beings. Opheus thus penetrates the secrets of nature, or the secrets of God, not through violence but through melody, rhythm, and harmony. Whereas the Promethean attitude is inspired by audacity, boundless curiosity, the will to power, and the search for utility, the Orphic attitude, by contrast, is inspired by respect in the face of mystery and disinterestedness.2
Hadot’s Orphic attitude might well, I suggest, apply to Anselm Kiefer, who realizes, more than his interpreters credit him with not just the need for symbols but their givenness and the need to coax them artistically to become sites of mysterious revelation.
For Kiefer, whose work is always driven by the deepest impulse to make sense of experience—as a German born in 1945, raised a Christian, and traumatized by what he calls “the spiritual crater” of Naziism—the means to express himself are given to him by and within that situation. In the same way that he inhabits or re-enacts Germany’s past in his monumental collages of “Germany’s Spiritual Heroes” and by photographing himself performing the Hitler salute, or by defacing the ruined interior landscapes of Speer’s New Reich Chancellery, so equally, Kiefer dwells within the eclectic spiritual discourse of German religious mysticism. This is the mysticism of Meister Ekchart and Jacob Böhme that brings together aboriginal Germanic mythology, esoteric kabbalah, and Christian spirituality. It is also, interestingly, the mysticism of Martin Heidegger. However, unlike Heidegger, whose presence looms large over much interpretation of Kiefer’s work and whose own spiritual journey seems to have been away from his original Catholicism towards a form of neo-paganism, Kiefer has in recent years become increasingly more concerned with explicitly Christian imagery and symbolism.3
What makes Kiefer’s work so interesting to me is the ways in which he uses these symbols—theological ready mades, if you will—as the base material for his art. A good example of this is his 2006 work Palmsonntag. In this piece, Kiefer, like a natural theologian, has taken a found object, at once mundane and yet already rich with symbolic significance onto which he has overlaid both material and text to interpret and hence to enact the meaning at hand. As he said in an interview in 2007, “the starting point for me is always a shock, a real experience.” In this case, the experience was of palm trees in Morocco, transplanted supine on the gallery floor accompanied by 18 panels, each of which contains a leaf, looking for all the world like a parade of medieval saints. On one of the panels, Kiefer has inscribed the Latin text of Isaiah 45.8, “aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem et iustitia oriatur simul” (“Let the earth be opened and bud forth a savior and let justice spring up at the same time”). It is these richly ambiguous words that are key to the natural theology in this work. Palmsonntag is profoundly ambivalent: full of promise and yet foreboding. In Kiefer’s hands it is recast as a monument to hope—hope that the disfigured and uprooted tree and the seemingly fossilized martyrs’ palms might nevertheless provoke anew the anticipation of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.
In the same interview Kiefer chided those critics who try to fix his works unambiguously. He claimed “I would never say I am pessimist or optimist. I think I would say I am [pause] desperate; because I don’t know why I am here. . . . So in this desperate situation I create . . . to survive the illusion of sense.” What intrigues me here is where it is that Kiefer almost instinctively turns to to construct his sense; his expression of his experience. Again and again he turns to already existing symbols which he transforms and interprets. Kiefer does not struggle autonomously to create meaning ex nihilo or to pull himself out of his predicament alone; instead, he re-enacts. And this retrieval is not limited to his re-collection of cultural memories, for he is not simply a German artist, but he also embraces the re-expression of the central symbols of Christianity. He is thus a theological artist.
In conclusion, Kiefer is frequently likened to an alchemist, but I am not so sure. Far from transforming base metal into the universal solvent, what Kiefer does in a work like Palmsonntag is rather to discern the symbolic; to see through to and to bring to expression those givens that participate in the reality to which they point. Kiefer is thus in this sense a natural theologian of culture.4
NOTES
My own engagement with Kiefer’s work grew out of a course I taught on cultural-aesthetic reflections on Jewish-Christian relations, as part of which we looked at the presentation of themes in Jewish-Christian relations in the works of Marc Chagall and Anselm Kiefer. Interestingly, both, in their very different ways, engage profoundly not just with themes in Judaism and Christianity, but rather both “enact” aspects of the Jewish-Christian encounters of the twentieth century in many of their works. This point is, I think, a crucial one: Kiefer’s artwork does not just represent or depict religious themes; it is rather properly speaking, I suggest, itself constructively theological. It is an artistic theology, but nonetheless assuredly a theology.
I should note here that in interpreting Kiefer in this way, I dispute the dominant standard readings of his work that whilst acknowledging his preoccupations with profound metaphysical and spiritual questions, equally affirm that he offers no constructive answers, simply the emptiness of a pointless and endless Beckettian waiting.
Before getting to Kiefer directly, however, I want to make a brief digression to say a few things about natural theology. As the Lord Gifford Fellow at Aberdeen, I am contractually obliged, in accordance with Lord Adam Gifford’s will, to “promote, advance, teach, and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of that term.” More substantively, I want to suggest that one fruitful way to develop reflections on the arts leading theology is to frame such an endeavor in terms of an aesthetic natural theology, or to use a more Tillichian formulation, as a “natural theology of culture.” Doing so enables us to affirm the importance of experience for theology and the arts. It acknowledges that the experiencing subject is, as we unavoidably inherit from Descartes and Kant, the indispensible agent of any discourse of claim to knowledge, whilst simultaneously insisting with Husserl and Heidegger that what the subject experiences is given to her in the depths of her being beyond her subjectivity. Natural theology is, I suggest, once taken beyond narrow caricature, best characterized as the search for a means of expression adequate to the thick theological reality of experience—the conviction, in other words, that our experience of the world we inhabit (both the natural and the cultural) reveals to us something, however elusive and ambiguous, of that which exceeds and sustains the world. Natural theology, in this sense, is thus the enterprise, or perhaps better the attempt, to bring this experience to expression. But, and this is absolutely crucial, this expression is itself conditioned by the experience. Lindbeck is, I think, wrong to affirm that the liberal paradigm is committed to the priority of a pre-cultural and pre-linguistic pure experience that is brought to expression through a series of arbitrary and interchangeable signs. Rather, with Paul Tillich, I suggest that this expression is symbolic and, in Tillich’s phrase, “symbols participate in the reality to which they point.”1
Interestingly, in light of the title of this session, there is something decidedly Orphic about this conception of natural theology. As the French philosopher Pierre Hadot puts it in his wonderful book, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, two attitudes can be traced that describe the relations between humanity and nature. He writes:
I shall place the first attitude—the one that wishes to discover the secrets of nature, or the secrets of God, by means of tricks and violence—under the patronage of Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetos, who, according to Hesiod, stole the secret of fire from the gods in order to improve the life of mankind, and who, according to Aeschyluss and Plato, brought man the benefits of technology and civilization. . . . Promethean man demands the right of dominion over nature. . . . I dedicate the other attitude towards nature to Orpheus . . . allud[ing] to the seductive power which, according to legend, singing and playing the lyre gave Orpheus over living and nonliving beings. Opheus thus penetrates the secrets of nature, or the secrets of God, not through violence but through melody, rhythm, and harmony. Whereas the Promethean attitude is inspired by audacity, boundless curiosity, the will to power, and the search for utility, the Orphic attitude, by contrast, is inspired by respect in the face of mystery and disinterestedness.2
Hadot’s Orphic attitude might well, I suggest, apply to Anselm Kiefer, who realizes, more than his interpreters credit him with not just the need for symbols but their givenness and the need to coax them artistically to become sites of mysterious revelation.
For Kiefer, whose work is always driven by the deepest impulse to make sense of experience—as a German born in 1945, raised a Christian, and traumatized by what he calls “the spiritual crater” of Naziism—the means to express himself are given to him by and within that situation. In the same way that he inhabits or re-enacts Germany’s past in his monumental collages of “Germany’s Spiritual Heroes” and by photographing himself performing the Hitler salute, or by defacing the ruined interior landscapes of Speer’s New Reich Chancellery, so equally, Kiefer dwells within the eclectic spiritual discourse of German religious mysticism. This is the mysticism of Meister Ekchart and Jacob Böhme that brings together aboriginal Germanic mythology, esoteric kabbalah, and Christian spirituality. It is also, interestingly, the mysticism of Martin Heidegger. However, unlike Heidegger, whose presence looms large over much interpretation of Kiefer’s work and whose own spiritual journey seems to have been away from his original Catholicism towards a form of neo-paganism, Kiefer has in recent years become increasingly more concerned with explicitly Christian imagery and symbolism.3
What makes Kiefer’s work so interesting to me is the ways in which he uses these symbols—theological ready mades, if you will—as the base material for his art. A good example of this is his 2006 work Palmsonntag. In this piece, Kiefer, like a natural theologian, has taken a found object, at once mundane and yet already rich with symbolic significance onto which he has overlaid both material and text to interpret and hence to enact the meaning at hand. As he said in an interview in 2007, “the starting point for me is always a shock, a real experience.” In this case, the experience was of palm trees in Morocco, transplanted supine on the gallery floor accompanied by 18 panels, each of which contains a leaf, looking for all the world like a parade of medieval saints. On one of the panels, Kiefer has inscribed the Latin text of Isaiah 45.8, “aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem et iustitia oriatur simul” (“Let the earth be opened and bud forth a savior and let justice spring up at the same time”). It is these richly ambiguous words that are key to the natural theology in this work. Palmsonntag is profoundly ambivalent: full of promise and yet foreboding. In Kiefer’s hands it is recast as a monument to hope—hope that the disfigured and uprooted tree and the seemingly fossilized martyrs’ palms might nevertheless provoke anew the anticipation of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.
In the same interview Kiefer chided those critics who try to fix his works unambiguously. He claimed “I would never say I am pessimist or optimist. I think I would say I am [pause] desperate; because I don’t know why I am here. . . . So in this desperate situation I create . . . to survive the illusion of sense.” What intrigues me here is where it is that Kiefer almost instinctively turns to to construct his sense; his expression of his experience. Again and again he turns to already existing symbols which he transforms and interprets. Kiefer does not struggle autonomously to create meaning ex nihilo or to pull himself out of his predicament alone; instead, he re-enacts. And this retrieval is not limited to his re-collection of cultural memories, for he is not simply a German artist, but he also embraces the re-expression of the central symbols of Christianity. He is thus a theological artist.
In conclusion, Kiefer is frequently likened to an alchemist, but I am not so sure. Far from transforming base metal into the universal solvent, what Kiefer does in a work like Palmsonntag is rather to discern the symbolic; to see through to and to bring to expression those givens that participate in the reality to which they point. Kiefer is thus in this sense a natural theologian of culture.4
NOTES
- Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 60.
- Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 95-96.
- See Matthew Biro, Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Laurence Paul Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
- For further reading, see also Russell Re Manning, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
