Theology and the Arts after Seventy Years: Toward a Dialogical Approach
by Wilson Yates
Professor Emeritus of Religion, Society, and the Arts, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities; and Editor Emeritus of ARTS, Wilson Yates presented the keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies which met in San Diego November 21, 2014. This is an edited version of the speech. Alan Smith, John Shorb, and Deborah Sokolove offered responses.
Theologians’ interest in art has existed from the beginning of Christian history. They created art, called on art, and interpreted art. The poetry of the psalms, the narrative of the parables, the sounds and words of music, the architecture of the synagogue, the design of liturgical space, the dance of the prophets, the visual image on tiles—all of these art forms, at one point or another, have been significant actors in the biblical drama, a drama whose narrator begins not with the discursive reasoning of a philosopher but in the mythic and imagistic language of a poet: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said ‘Let there by light: and there was light’.”
And there was Christian worship which, from its inception, was dependent on art forms as necessary forms, if worshippers were to walk the uneven terrain of spiritual responses that called them into the presence of God. The arts were present and the church was dependent upon them. Theological interest, therefore, was foreordained and it followed that Origin, Plotinus, and Augustine would develop the church’s early theological responses through their treatises on the arts. And later, theologians in the byzantine, medieval, and renaissance, in the reformation, and counter-reformation periods would treat art forms and specific works of art in which they saw art as one means of expressing the depths of the Christian experience or, to the contrary, as visual means of expressing idolatry—violations of the Second Commandment that were destructive of the Christian life.
What interests me about this history is what followed after the periods of the Protestant and Catholic reformations, for theologians dealt in very limited fashion with the visual arts from the late seventeenth century into the twentieth century until a handful of thinkers began to write and lecture on the visual arts after World War II. What was begun by them led to a diversity and breadth of work in the decades that followed—work that has offered a vital conversation between theology and the arts. My historical judgment is that over the past seventy years, theologians have written about the visual arts more extensively and in greater depth than they have over the past 400 years. And while there are exceptions in this historical sweep, particularly in the late-seventeenth century—witness the theological responses to Rembrandt and Rubens—there remains a paucity of scholarly literature. It is this emergence of interest in the middle of the twentieth century that I want to pursue in the first part of this discussion, after which I want to move to a constructive case of what we need to address in our approaches to intepreting art. These are needs that we have often treated unevenly and, at points, dismissed altogether. I think that attention to these assumptions can contribute to our realizing the richness of spiritual meanings art has to offer.
For the moment, however, I want to bracket the question of what we need to do in the future and turn back to the past and those who created this conversation. I draw on four representative and influential figures—each working out of one of the four major Christian traditions. They, foremost, gave shape to the conversation; indeed, they forged the beginning of our modern theological interest in the arts. They were Nikolai Berdyaev, a Russian Orthodox; Paul Tillich, a mainline Protestant; Jacques Maritain, a Roman Catholic; and Hans R. Rookmaaker, an Evangelical Protestant.
I will consider each of the figures, but I first want to consider four factors that led all of them to treat art with deep and profound seriousness. The first factor was cultural—that of secularization and the power of secularism. There was an expansive reach to secularism that theologians sought to examine and understand against the backdrop of its well-perceived threat to both theology and the church. Secularization meant a relativizing of the importance of theology and the study of religion in the academy, and a disenchantment of both the church and traditional religious thought more broadly. The four theologians with whom I will deal all saw secularization as a power that had to be contended with intellectually and institutionally. And they saw art, one of the major cultural forms, to be a source of insight into the character and meaning of secularization. Their responses, however, differed. Tillich dived deeply into the heart of secularism; it was to be his conversation partner. Rookmaaker saw modern art as both a symptom and mirror of secularization that constituted a threat to Christianity. Berdyaev identified secularization with the objectification of culture and its denial of freedom and creativity. And Maritain saw Christian artists and their works as a powerful response to secular culture that otherwise had lost its moorings.
The second factor that informed theologians’ interest in the arts was epistemological: the peculiar form of knowledge that art provided. The arts invite the viewer to see into the interior life of the culture in contrast to the objective empirical data that the natural and social sciences provided. Objective data was needed in the study of secularism and, indeed, religion itself, but mythic insight—insight gained through the power of metaphor, image, sound, movement, and dramatic moment—offered beyond rational description the subjective experience of secular culture and life within it. Thus art, more than the sciences, offered an immediacy and interiority—an experience of secularism—that allowed us to participate as both subjects “grasped” by art and objects of a secular world.
The third factor was historical, and pertains to the historical relationship between the church and art, which had ranged from sacramental to iconoclastic. It also pertains to art’s power to be at different times stranger and prophet, as well as central participant in modern Christianity and Judaism. Churches accepted their own tradition’s history with the arts and worked out of that history albeit rewriting it in centuries leading up to the modern era.
The fourth factor was sociological, and involves the institutional support of the arts that flowed from both secular and religious institutions. Europe and America were recovering from the most destructive war in their history, and the arts, their institutions and most of all, artists, were entering a new age of creativity and acceptance that was publicly seen as healing or, at least, central to western culture’s renewal of itself. But there was an additional side to the institutional support of the arts, and that was Christianity’s response to the arts after World War II. Responding to old prejudices, the church turned to the arts in its own liturgical renewal—Vatican II for Catholics, the Christian Student Movement for mainline Protestants and, for both, publishing ventures, conferences, and foremost, work in theological seminaries. This alone is a fascinating history which I have dealt with in earlier essays on motive magazine, the mid-century Methodist student publication that was ecumenical in its approach and offered an ongoing voice to the theology and arts conversation. In both “Motive Magazine: The Student Movement and the Arts,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies [32:4 (Fall 1995)], and in “Theology and the Arts Legacy,” in Arts, Theology, and the Church: New Intersections (Pilgrim Press, 2005), I trace the church’s growing engagement with the arts. In both of these essays, I accent the importance of motive as a voice for academics and artists in the religion and arts dialogue. This institutional underwriting gave theologians not only an academic platform but pulpits and lecterns to make the case for the arts in the religious life.
These factors informed the work of theologians, including the four figures we will discuss, as they approached the arts—secularization and the power of secularism in modern culture, art as a new mode of knowing for theology, the churches’ historical roots that affirmed the arts or challenged it, and institutional support that underwrote the treatment of this work.
Nikolai Berdyaev
Orthodox theologians were supportive but less active in the conversation, given the essential importance of the icon which lies at the heart of Orthodox spirituality and liturgical life. Indeed, the image of the icon is considered co-equal with scripture, liturgy, and doctrine in its capacity to reveal the work of the Holy Spirit and, consequently, Tradition itself. But for the Russian Orthodox philosopher and theologian Nikolai Berdyaev, in his works The Destiny of Man and The Meaning of the Creative Act, went beyond the boundaries of icon theology. Informed by his own theological existentialism as well as by his Orthodox roots, he saw art as an important force standing against and calling into question the cultural powers of objectification. In part, this reflected his opposition to the totalitarian ideologies of Stalinism, Nazism, Fascism and “Kafkaesque” bureaucratization manifest in political powers that he argued sought to objectify all of reality in the interest of political and social control. But art also revealed a process that he considered an inevitable thrust, if not product, of modernization and secularization where the inner life of creativity, freedom, and personal authority were undercut as human beings and societies become more and more dependent on the products of the modern world at the expense of our own spirituality and creativity. For Berdyaev, objectification was a societal process permeating both our social and our personal lives. It denied us our authentic self by destroying our human freedom and undercutting our creativity and, by so doing, made us servants of a world that would categorize and regulate us. What, then, of the artist? For Berdyaev, the artist’s role in culture was critical in forging a response to this human situation. The artist, through the exercise of artistic creativity—through the process of making art—engages in an authentic act of freedom and, thereby, responds to and breaks through the powers that would deny such freedom. Furthermore, the artist creates a reality—the work of art—that testifies to the presence of an inner human authenticity and interiority, and calls us to consider its expression of freedom and creativity as an alternative world that points to possibility and hope. From there, Berdyaev turns to our own appropriation of the work and what it means for us; namely, that by participating in the vision of an alternative way of viewing reality that the work of art provides and by participating in the work’s images and symbols, we can participate in God’s own creation. We can be freed from our bondage to the processes and powers of objectification and participate in the beauty of the work itself that is a beauty that points to God.
Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich, the German theologian who became an American citizen, was quite open in his acceptance of art as a means through which the religious story could be told and spiritual meaning could be experienced. In his collection of essays, Paul Tillich on Art and Architecture, edited by John and Jane Daggett Dillenberger, Tillich sets forth his theory of art and its relationship to culture. Art, he observed, had two aspects: form and import or depth, which are revealed to the viewer through the style of the work. Tillich’s interest was with the religious import or dimension of depth that artistic styles could reveal. For him, the style of expressionism, or styles that had expressionistic elements, were the most powerful styles through which we might grasp the ultimate nature and condition of reality. Insofar as this happens, we gain insight into the ultimate concern of both the artist and the culture, whether that concern is the Ultimate Concern of Being Itself—God—or a concern given ultimate significance that is reflective of alienating or destructive expressions of being. Art, therefore, was a means of entering an interior world of spiritual meaning.
In his thinking about art as a cultural form, he held that no other such form could provide a reading of the religious situation with such immediacy and power. More than science or philosophy, art provided the window into the human condition that theology needed to look through. Art provided a different mode of knowing than the sciences, a knowledge that engaged us inevitably in the religious dimensions of life. Tillich found that artists were strongest in offering insight into the fallen condition of modern existence rather than the possibility of redemption or the redeemed life itself. In this approach, Tillich readily admitted the power of secularization, but his response was not theological flight but theological engagement, for the very conditions of secularism—the questioning of the religious foundation of civilization and the angst and alienation threaded through the modern psyche—defined what he wished to explore from the perspective of the Christian faith.
In his work, he developed various theoretical perspectives on art. One of the most important was his insistence that both secular as well as religious iconography could be of religious significance or import. And, in turn, art that offered religious imagery or iconography might not necessarily be religious in meaning and content. The most lasting effect of this typology was to free theologians to find in secular art religious import, and to be willing to acknowledge that some religious imagery was, in his words, “non-religious in meaning,” or, worse, kitsch.
Jacques Maritain
A French Roman Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain dealt with poetry and the visual arts in his works Art and Poetry, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, and Art and Scholasticism. Poetry was the primary aesthetic form that, for him, expressed the creative process that infused the visual arts. He focused on the artist’s capacity to create and provide that which was pleasing and beautiful. He did not focus on the artist’s capacity to reveal the anguish and despair of the human being—the darkness or brokenness of the world. Rather his interest lay in the power of the artist to offer us the obverse of that darkness through the experience of creative possibilities that we could all share—possibilities that in their fullest manifestations were those of love that flowed from the experience of the Holy. He spelled out the artist’s capacity to create through that artist’s own spiritual sensibilities, sensibilities that were expressed through what Maritain called an habitus of creative intuition, an intuition that lived with and expressed beauty. In turn, beauty, the experience of which was offered in the artwork, could touch our own spiritual capacity for knowing beauty and, through that experience, invite us to experience the Beauty of God. Art, therefore, has the potential of being sacramental, a means through which the experience of God becomes possible. Modern art, however, fails in large part to provide that imagery, though artists working out of Christian spirituality could potentially create, and at times do create, serious religious art.
Hans Rookmaaker
Hans Rookmaaker was a Dutch Reformed Evangelical working from a position of neo-reformed Calvinist theology. In his studies, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture and The Creative Gift: Essays on Art and the Christian Life, he focused primarily on the art of the nineteenth and twentieth century and the power of such art to be both “good” and “bad” art relative to the Christian vision and its doctrine of creation. Rookmaaker’s position had an extensive influence on the evangelical world’s work with the arts, though those who followed often differed with his perceptions of modern culture and tended to accent modern art’s possibilities for engaging in discussion with Christianity. His interest was in modern art’s own alienating and destructive imagery which he saw as a form expressive of a dying enlightenment-infused culture. Art reflected the end of an enlightenment world because it was, itself, a symptom of the destructiveness of late enlightenment thought that idolized reason and fled into a secularism void of religious faith. And modern art was a symbol of that culture reflected in works from such pivotal artists as Picasso and Dali who called us into participation in that destructive world. Modern art’s value, therefore, was primarily that of revealing in creative and powerful ways the modern world’s decline and death. It is important to recognize that Rookmaaker allowed room for modern art insofar as the artist offered a cry for a new world that might invite Christian values and sense of order. His was not an iconoclastic stance, but it shared the deep Calvinist suspicion of the idolatrous power of art in which our focus on our relationship to God, given to us through the Word of Scripture, was subverted. But he also saw the power of art in the life of culture and was open to the possibility of art to invite an understanding of creation and open itself to a Christian art aligned to Christian values—in some respects a parallel of interests with Maritain from whom, otherwise, he was so different.
Following from these figures’ works and, at certain points, in contradistinction to them, were a host of theologians who reflected upon and defined the religious significance of art out of their own theological interests, with some focusing primarily on theoretical questions regarding the relationship of religion and theology to art; others focusing on artworks as documents in understanding some aspect of religious history or doctrinal emphasis; and still others focusing on the importance of art in worship and the practice of ministry. These theologians also engaged the arts out of different theological perspectives and schools of thought. From orthodox to neo-orthodox, existentialist to liberal, humanist to process, evangelical to neo-Thomist, post-modern to post-colonial, political theology to natural theology, dialogical thought to work coming out of ethics, liturgics, spirituality studies, cultural studies, and biblical thought—all of these have been informing perspectives. Out of these perspectives, theologians have forged ways of looking at art and perceiving its spiritual power and significance in the life of the Christian community. We cannot treat, given the limits of space in this article, the individual approaches that these theologians developed in our seventy-year span. But in counterpoint to significant points they make, I want to lay out an approach—what I call a dialogical approach—that will consider both certain of the strengths and weaknesses in the work that has been done.
A Dialogical Approach
There is a primary judgment about our theological treatment of art of which many of us have been guilty. The judgment: there has been a tendency to simply treat art on our own terms and in light of what we want the work to provide us without, at the same time, recognizing that artworks are autonomous forms that have a presence of their own. They have an origin in the imagination and skill of an artist. The work of art and its artist, if invited to do so, will come to the table of conversation with a dynamic voice that manifests itself in both a receptivity and response in the act of interpretation.
What I wish to call for is a dialogical approach, or at least a recognition that a dialogue is needed rather than a monologue in which we assume art to be passive—to be an object waiting for the wisdom of theology to act upon it and give it meaning. A dialogue between the theologian and an artwork needs to take place. It involves three actors: the artist, the work of art, and the theological interpreter all bringing to the conversation the contexts out of which they have come. To engage in a dialogue means that we should treat the work of art as autonomous, as a reality sui generis, as a work, as George Steiner has said, with its own presence. We should engage the artist with a ready recognition that the work with which we are dealing belongs often to a continuity of works, and comes out of the history, cultural situation, talents, and creativity of the artist. In so doing, we begin to understand more fully the formal world of the work, the subject given to us, the style employed and, subsequently, the meaning of the brush strokes on the panel.
What, in the beginning, doI, as an interpreter, bring? Foremost, myself as a person marked by age and experience, gender and status, theological stance and intellectual inquiry all of which can act as doors that open me up to a work or doors that close me off. I bring my own understanding of the importance and place of art in the world, in my own theology, and in the church. But more. I bring—I must bring, if I am to be dialogical—a serious interest in art, not a peripheral one, not one there simply to satisfy the ums and ahs of the exhibition’s opening as I mingle with donors and curators, or to satisfy the need to have something visually speak to the subject of redemption which is the editor’s urgent message on a given morning. I must bring a passion-fueled need that drives me to the museum to look again at a Rembrandt or Rouault, with no friend, no class, no curator standing with me. Only me, silent and alone and waiting. I must, to state it simply, love art, be a lover of art, jealous and generous, giving and trusting. A theologian who does not love art should leave it alone.
And, in the beginning, I should bring a well-honed knowledge of art as well as a knowledge of the work with which I am engaging. I should bring visual literacy. Sometimes I have encountered the judgment that if we interpret from the heart, we can interpret any work insightfully without rational knowledge to clutter the heart’s pure response. But this is like saying that I can experience the beauty of Cantonese idioms without knowing Cantonese. Theologians who speak and write of art but do not own art history textbooks or read art criticism should be wary of working with a work of Max Beckmann, or Kiki Smith, or, for that matter, the geometric magic of Piero della Francesca. Art literacy is crucial. But, in response to what I would hope would be brought, I find that theologians can put up barriers to their entry into dialogue for they can often come to the conversation wanting to dismiss the artist as intrusive; wanting to rearrange the chairs with the theologian’s chair center stage; wanting to begin the conversation with prayer rather than information; and wanting to impose on the artwork and artist doctrinal judgments. Any of these are signs that should indicate that art is not a theologian’s cup of tea.
In response to the problems I see, I want to look at certain suppositions that are important to a dialogical approach to art. I have cast them in term of needs that we have as a field. You may well consider them routine, but I am speaking to the field as a whole. These suppositions lie at the crux of what needs to be addressed. I have touched on certain ones of these earlier, but now I wish to speak of them in a more organized fashion.
The first is the need for us to engage in interdisciplinary work. In theological education and religious studies, there has long been a tradition of such work. Indeed, the disciplines of philosophy, history, archeology, the social sciences, linguistics, jurisprudence, the natural sciences all grace our classrooms and our learned societies and papers. They are disciplines that have been necessarily integrated into various theological fields of study. The cost of our having not attempted such integration would be great. For example, Ethics and Pastoral Theology without both the theories and data of sociology, political science, and psychology would be in danger of losing both theoretical significance and an empirical base for their work. Rich conversations have developed between these fields and relevant secular disciplines. But in our treatment of art, there has been a limited conversation with art theory, art history, art criticism, and non-theological aesthetics, yet these are the primary sources of information about art theory, artists, arts institutions, particular works of art, artistic styles, art movements, and the way viewers respond. They deserve our attention. Wilhelm Pauck, Paul Tillich’s biographer, once told the story that Tillich’s wife,Hannah, said at a dinner party, “the problem with Paulus’ treatment of art lies in his failure to read art history.” She spoke for more theologians than her husband.
Why would we seek to discuss a work by Giotto or Botticelli, Rublev or Rembrandt, Chagall or Hepworth, or Damion Hirst, for heaven’s sake, much less Cindy Sherman unclothed, without consulting art historians and art criticism about the artist and his or her works? Why would we seek to discuss the spirituality of modern art without beginning with such art critics as Clement Greenberg’s writings in the 1950s on spirituality and abstract expressionism or David Sylvester’s interviews with major artists that in penetrating fashion considers the spirituality of artists and their works? Why would we generally ignore works on aesthetics since Immanuel Kant when we are constructing a view of theological aesthetics? Theologians who do interdisciplinary work invite an interesting observation. When, for example, Robin Jensen, Kim Vrudny, Deborah Haynes, Terry Dempsey, Deborah Sokolove, John Handley, Michael Morris treat particular artists or movements, they draw freely on the insights of art history and criticism as well as theology. But, it is also the case that they are all trained in art history. Many of us are not, but literacy is possible just as it was possible when we engaged history and philosophy, psychology and sociology, culture studies and the environmental sciences.
The second is the need for us to approach art as an invitation to what Bahktin called dialogue rather than monologue—for a monologue is where we impose our theological perspectives on the art work itself. We need to engage in a theologizing with art rather than falling into a theologizing about art. If we fail to do so, than there are no chairs in the room for the artist and the artwork to sit down and begin a conversation. We have predetermined what we wished to find. Paul Tillich focused his search on twentieth-century works that he thought would provide insights into the human condition. He turned to modern art as a means of understanding religious questions and expressions of prophetic judgment. At one level, this was very productive, but by drawing a circle around what modern art could provide—which became should provide—he foreclosed on the question of whether such art might also do more—might offer sacramental or visionary possibilities, might speak as profoundly about redemption as it does prophetic judgment. And he had little or no interest in reading about what artists thought they were doing, for his own approach had determined that an artist and a work, to be authentic to the modern age, necessarily spoke of the darkness of the human condition.
To take a more recent example, we can look at Alejandro García-Rivera’s comments on Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial. In his study, Wounded Innocence, he sets out a series of chapters on pivotal theological doctrines and artistic expressions of them. When he comes to the chapter on the doctrine of justification, he turns to Maya Lin’s work. He ignores what the artist thought about her work, much less her intention. He acknowledges that the work is rich theologically at which point, however, his reflections turn to Dante, not to Lin, to appreciate why the work is significant, insisting that Dante’s steps are actually what can unlock the religious meaning of Lin’s art. My concern is this: García-Rivera came to a work, dismissed the artist, ignored why the work was created (including the historical moment it memorialized), ignored in large part the formal aspects of the work. And, one would have to add, he then used the whole introduction to her work as a way of debating Protestant and Roman Catholic views about justification.
My judgment, then, is that we fail the work and ourselves when we fail to consider the artist, when we fail to approach the work on its own terms, and when we fail to see the possibility of meaning emerging out of the conversation, a conversation that invites our theological questions to have their moment. The word “emerge” is important, for meaning comes through my movement into the work, the work’s movement into me, and the play of ideas, emotions, intuitions that the emerging experience invites. In making that judgment, I want to quickly acknowledge that all of us bring a full cloth of theological interests—theological ideas that we hope a work of art will speak to, that we hope will come into play in the emergence of the dialogue. We do not eliminate that set of interests. They are a given, for they are what we as theologians carry inside ourselves. But I am asking that we begin with a conversation that is dialogical in character and allow the theological questions to come forth as a consequence of the dialogue’s unfolding.
The third need we have, as theologians, is to take seriously the artist in our dialogue. I want quickly to add here that there are theologians who have written wonderful works on artists and their art. We need only note William Dyrness’ work on George Rouault, Doug Adams’ treatment of Stephen De Staebler, or Jane Dillenberger’s work on Andy Warhol and now Picasso as well as a body of other essays and books. John Dillenberger’s and John Cook’s studies on abstract expressionism, Cliff Edwards study of Van Gogh; Kim Vrudny’s essay on Ricardo Cinalli, John Handley’s treatment of Robert Graves, and Inge Linder-Gaillard’s study of Le Corbusier and his chapels and Amy Levin Weiss and her treatment of Louise Nevelson and the Beker Chapel in Manhattan.
These theologians take the artist seriously. On balance, however, these types of extended studies on specific artists are exceptions in theological writings and, for our purposes, the danger is that we give only passing attention to the artist in our own interpretive process. Yet it is the artist who made the art, and the artwork we are interpreting has a prior intention and significance in the mind of its creator. The task, then, is to listen to the artists place their work in context, to speak of their intentions, to consider the relationship of a particular work with other of their works, to listen to them discuss the subject being treated, the style being used, the colors that they depend upon. If we are to treat Michelangelo’s Rondini Piéta or his Deposition we must understand something of Michelangelo’s art of sculpture, perhaps his political battles with Rome, and certainly his spirituality and his spiritual struggles, and with the Deposition, perhaps, certain spiritual resolutions.
The fourth need we have is to analyze works of art in light of their own artistic elements—in light of their own form. This, for me, is a critical need in our approach to interpretation. The primary elements, that Panofsky called the pre-iconographic motifs of a work—the elements of color, line, shape, volume, tonality, texture, movement, gesture—must be considered in our engagement with a work, if we are to move inside the work itself. Let’s take the matter of color. It is important to say, if I am looking at a work of Marc Chagall, that his use of cobalt blue and dark red are primary acts on his part. These colors mean something pofound in his work. They mean something about balance and emotion, memory and story, fallenness and redemption, and they carry significant symbolism on their own. If we are treating Chagall and a work with a field of cobalt blue, we must seek to understand what the color meant to him foremost rather than jump first to what it means to us as the interpreters.
What I am asking is that we take formal elements with great seriousness; that with a given painting we are willing to first see that it is filled with geometric shapes and that these patterns of triangles and squares, rectangles and circles all carry imagistic and symbolic importance and, at an even more primal level, give the work balance and harmony, chaos and order. Or let us consider the element of line. Lines made on a canvas or sheet of rice paper demarcate boldly or diffusely the subject of the work and once those lines, as Hans Hofmann has insisted, are put on paper, they take on a life of their own and provide us a world that did not exist before. With a focus on the line, we readily see that lines determine chaos and order. Lines define the planes on the canvas that create or eliminate space. And it would be in order for us to sense the emotional impact that line has on depth of field, perspective, proportion or the lack thereof or our own feelings of well-being. But to the point, and it is a simple but still primal one of interpretation: we should allow the formal elements of a work to engage us, play with us, anger us, transform our way of seeing, and in so doing, pull us into the whole amazing experience of the work itself.
The fifth need is for us to take seriously the style of a work. This is a need that is crucial to interpretation but one that seldom is the subject of explicit theological conversation or referred to in the theological interpretation of particular works. Let us return to Tillich. Style was important to him and he introduced it into theological conversations about art, observing that the interpretive act must understand and engage the style of the artist though many who followed Tillich have ignored the question of style. But Tillich went further. He insisted that certain styles open us up to religious import and meaning more than other styles, and, for him it was the style of expressionism or those styles that offered expressionistic elements that were crucial. Tillich cast the die. Was expressionism the foremost religious style? For him, expressionism referred to the power of art to reveal religious import—import that is given through formal elements but not overcome by form, given through what is done to formal elements by way of the expressionistic stroke rather than naturalistic ones. Critics responded that his dependence on expressionism was too narrow and other styles held their own power to engage the viewer in a spiritual moment of “import.” The debate continues today.
My argument is that we should look to the style of a work as a primary entry point for interpretation. It will give us a general set of intentions and ends that the artist is committed to and frame how we begin to discover and construct in an interpretive dialectic the work’s meaning. Let us take cubism, the child of Braque, Gris, and Picasso. It was a revolutionary style that altered the direction of painting in the West. The cubists were attempting to alter nature by creating, paradoxically, an anti-naturalistic image of nature. Representation was present—a still life, a chair, a mandolin, a nude—but the natural subject became not what the eye would normally see but multi-dimensional and, consequently, an object with an interior as well as an exterior reality. The profile of a face where we would normally see only the side of one eye gave us a frontal image of its two full eyes. The objects often took on a sculpted form. The demands of the work had more to do with the intellect than the emotions. We are thrown into an exploration of a world of objects, but more, into the reshaping of the objects and their world so that we see them beyond or beneath what we would “normally” see. We are called into a world of form that has been transformed through style into a sense of order that offers a new way of comprehending the natural object itself. My invitation, then, is for us to enter the process of interpretation with an appreciation of the work’s stylistic treatment of its subject.
The sixth need is for us, as theologians, to understand—to imaginatively enter into—the subject of a work. This would appear obvious, but it is not quite so simple. The artist’s style provides the image of the subject that we see and, in so doing, determines among other things what happens to the natural form of the subject. In Cezanne, trees do not look like natural portrayals of trees. (James Luther Adams once said that Cezanne is not interested in painting a tree as the eye would see in naturalistic detail, but “in the treeness of trees.”) Cezanne’s representations vary from what the eye sees naturally and often dramatically so as a consequence of his post-impressionist style. Further, the image, as subject, can be a symbol or a vessel of symbols—perhaps of religious significance, perhaps not. The symbolic power of a work begins with our taking in and taking seriously the subject. The subject—Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Rouault’s Crucifixion, Rembrandt’s St. Paul, Rublev’s Holy Trinity, Michelangelo’s Deposition. The subject—O’Keefe’s skull on red, white, and blue; Bearden’s Harlem Street; Hepworth’s abstract sculpture, Composition II; Kollwitz’s The Call of Death; Chagall’s Lovers; a Kiki Smith room—all subjects that the artist has given us that can offer rich symbolic meanings. Let us, then, in entering the work, allow a moment of meditative reflection on the subject as image and the subject as symbol, all as prelude to the possibility of religious meaning.
When we engage in a dialogue with art, meaning will be born, perhaps, ever so slowly, yet born again and again, deeply and more deeply all through a conversation in which the interpreter listens and responds to the work, to the artist, and to the questions that emerge. When this takes place we are changed. That is the creative and imaginative power of art. Hans Hofmann knew this well when he said that the line within the work creates a world. A work of art provides a world of magic, of emotion, of mystery. A world that can, if we enter into it, make us laugh and cry, condemn us and redeem us, create in us bewilderment and despair, and invite us to love with greater humility and humanity. And, in so doing, call forth our spirit and touch our soul. That is enough. That is all that we can hope for. That is all we should hope for.
Professor Emeritus of Religion, Society, and the Arts, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities; and Editor Emeritus of ARTS, Wilson Yates presented the keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies which met in San Diego November 21, 2014. This is an edited version of the speech. Alan Smith, John Shorb, and Deborah Sokolove offered responses.
Theologians’ interest in art has existed from the beginning of Christian history. They created art, called on art, and interpreted art. The poetry of the psalms, the narrative of the parables, the sounds and words of music, the architecture of the synagogue, the design of liturgical space, the dance of the prophets, the visual image on tiles—all of these art forms, at one point or another, have been significant actors in the biblical drama, a drama whose narrator begins not with the discursive reasoning of a philosopher but in the mythic and imagistic language of a poet: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said ‘Let there by light: and there was light’.”
And there was Christian worship which, from its inception, was dependent on art forms as necessary forms, if worshippers were to walk the uneven terrain of spiritual responses that called them into the presence of God. The arts were present and the church was dependent upon them. Theological interest, therefore, was foreordained and it followed that Origin, Plotinus, and Augustine would develop the church’s early theological responses through their treatises on the arts. And later, theologians in the byzantine, medieval, and renaissance, in the reformation, and counter-reformation periods would treat art forms and specific works of art in which they saw art as one means of expressing the depths of the Christian experience or, to the contrary, as visual means of expressing idolatry—violations of the Second Commandment that were destructive of the Christian life.
What interests me about this history is what followed after the periods of the Protestant and Catholic reformations, for theologians dealt in very limited fashion with the visual arts from the late seventeenth century into the twentieth century until a handful of thinkers began to write and lecture on the visual arts after World War II. What was begun by them led to a diversity and breadth of work in the decades that followed—work that has offered a vital conversation between theology and the arts. My historical judgment is that over the past seventy years, theologians have written about the visual arts more extensively and in greater depth than they have over the past 400 years. And while there are exceptions in this historical sweep, particularly in the late-seventeenth century—witness the theological responses to Rembrandt and Rubens—there remains a paucity of scholarly literature. It is this emergence of interest in the middle of the twentieth century that I want to pursue in the first part of this discussion, after which I want to move to a constructive case of what we need to address in our approaches to intepreting art. These are needs that we have often treated unevenly and, at points, dismissed altogether. I think that attention to these assumptions can contribute to our realizing the richness of spiritual meanings art has to offer.
For the moment, however, I want to bracket the question of what we need to do in the future and turn back to the past and those who created this conversation. I draw on four representative and influential figures—each working out of one of the four major Christian traditions. They, foremost, gave shape to the conversation; indeed, they forged the beginning of our modern theological interest in the arts. They were Nikolai Berdyaev, a Russian Orthodox; Paul Tillich, a mainline Protestant; Jacques Maritain, a Roman Catholic; and Hans R. Rookmaaker, an Evangelical Protestant.
I will consider each of the figures, but I first want to consider four factors that led all of them to treat art with deep and profound seriousness. The first factor was cultural—that of secularization and the power of secularism. There was an expansive reach to secularism that theologians sought to examine and understand against the backdrop of its well-perceived threat to both theology and the church. Secularization meant a relativizing of the importance of theology and the study of religion in the academy, and a disenchantment of both the church and traditional religious thought more broadly. The four theologians with whom I will deal all saw secularization as a power that had to be contended with intellectually and institutionally. And they saw art, one of the major cultural forms, to be a source of insight into the character and meaning of secularization. Their responses, however, differed. Tillich dived deeply into the heart of secularism; it was to be his conversation partner. Rookmaaker saw modern art as both a symptom and mirror of secularization that constituted a threat to Christianity. Berdyaev identified secularization with the objectification of culture and its denial of freedom and creativity. And Maritain saw Christian artists and their works as a powerful response to secular culture that otherwise had lost its moorings.
The second factor that informed theologians’ interest in the arts was epistemological: the peculiar form of knowledge that art provided. The arts invite the viewer to see into the interior life of the culture in contrast to the objective empirical data that the natural and social sciences provided. Objective data was needed in the study of secularism and, indeed, religion itself, but mythic insight—insight gained through the power of metaphor, image, sound, movement, and dramatic moment—offered beyond rational description the subjective experience of secular culture and life within it. Thus art, more than the sciences, offered an immediacy and interiority—an experience of secularism—that allowed us to participate as both subjects “grasped” by art and objects of a secular world.
The third factor was historical, and pertains to the historical relationship between the church and art, which had ranged from sacramental to iconoclastic. It also pertains to art’s power to be at different times stranger and prophet, as well as central participant in modern Christianity and Judaism. Churches accepted their own tradition’s history with the arts and worked out of that history albeit rewriting it in centuries leading up to the modern era.
The fourth factor was sociological, and involves the institutional support of the arts that flowed from both secular and religious institutions. Europe and America were recovering from the most destructive war in their history, and the arts, their institutions and most of all, artists, were entering a new age of creativity and acceptance that was publicly seen as healing or, at least, central to western culture’s renewal of itself. But there was an additional side to the institutional support of the arts, and that was Christianity’s response to the arts after World War II. Responding to old prejudices, the church turned to the arts in its own liturgical renewal—Vatican II for Catholics, the Christian Student Movement for mainline Protestants and, for both, publishing ventures, conferences, and foremost, work in theological seminaries. This alone is a fascinating history which I have dealt with in earlier essays on motive magazine, the mid-century Methodist student publication that was ecumenical in its approach and offered an ongoing voice to the theology and arts conversation. In both “Motive Magazine: The Student Movement and the Arts,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies [32:4 (Fall 1995)], and in “Theology and the Arts Legacy,” in Arts, Theology, and the Church: New Intersections (Pilgrim Press, 2005), I trace the church’s growing engagement with the arts. In both of these essays, I accent the importance of motive as a voice for academics and artists in the religion and arts dialogue. This institutional underwriting gave theologians not only an academic platform but pulpits and lecterns to make the case for the arts in the religious life.
These factors informed the work of theologians, including the four figures we will discuss, as they approached the arts—secularization and the power of secularism in modern culture, art as a new mode of knowing for theology, the churches’ historical roots that affirmed the arts or challenged it, and institutional support that underwrote the treatment of this work.
Nikolai Berdyaev
Orthodox theologians were supportive but less active in the conversation, given the essential importance of the icon which lies at the heart of Orthodox spirituality and liturgical life. Indeed, the image of the icon is considered co-equal with scripture, liturgy, and doctrine in its capacity to reveal the work of the Holy Spirit and, consequently, Tradition itself. But for the Russian Orthodox philosopher and theologian Nikolai Berdyaev, in his works The Destiny of Man and The Meaning of the Creative Act, went beyond the boundaries of icon theology. Informed by his own theological existentialism as well as by his Orthodox roots, he saw art as an important force standing against and calling into question the cultural powers of objectification. In part, this reflected his opposition to the totalitarian ideologies of Stalinism, Nazism, Fascism and “Kafkaesque” bureaucratization manifest in political powers that he argued sought to objectify all of reality in the interest of political and social control. But art also revealed a process that he considered an inevitable thrust, if not product, of modernization and secularization where the inner life of creativity, freedom, and personal authority were undercut as human beings and societies become more and more dependent on the products of the modern world at the expense of our own spirituality and creativity. For Berdyaev, objectification was a societal process permeating both our social and our personal lives. It denied us our authentic self by destroying our human freedom and undercutting our creativity and, by so doing, made us servants of a world that would categorize and regulate us. What, then, of the artist? For Berdyaev, the artist’s role in culture was critical in forging a response to this human situation. The artist, through the exercise of artistic creativity—through the process of making art—engages in an authentic act of freedom and, thereby, responds to and breaks through the powers that would deny such freedom. Furthermore, the artist creates a reality—the work of art—that testifies to the presence of an inner human authenticity and interiority, and calls us to consider its expression of freedom and creativity as an alternative world that points to possibility and hope. From there, Berdyaev turns to our own appropriation of the work and what it means for us; namely, that by participating in the vision of an alternative way of viewing reality that the work of art provides and by participating in the work’s images and symbols, we can participate in God’s own creation. We can be freed from our bondage to the processes and powers of objectification and participate in the beauty of the work itself that is a beauty that points to God.
Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich, the German theologian who became an American citizen, was quite open in his acceptance of art as a means through which the religious story could be told and spiritual meaning could be experienced. In his collection of essays, Paul Tillich on Art and Architecture, edited by John and Jane Daggett Dillenberger, Tillich sets forth his theory of art and its relationship to culture. Art, he observed, had two aspects: form and import or depth, which are revealed to the viewer through the style of the work. Tillich’s interest was with the religious import or dimension of depth that artistic styles could reveal. For him, the style of expressionism, or styles that had expressionistic elements, were the most powerful styles through which we might grasp the ultimate nature and condition of reality. Insofar as this happens, we gain insight into the ultimate concern of both the artist and the culture, whether that concern is the Ultimate Concern of Being Itself—God—or a concern given ultimate significance that is reflective of alienating or destructive expressions of being. Art, therefore, was a means of entering an interior world of spiritual meaning.
In his thinking about art as a cultural form, he held that no other such form could provide a reading of the religious situation with such immediacy and power. More than science or philosophy, art provided the window into the human condition that theology needed to look through. Art provided a different mode of knowing than the sciences, a knowledge that engaged us inevitably in the religious dimensions of life. Tillich found that artists were strongest in offering insight into the fallen condition of modern existence rather than the possibility of redemption or the redeemed life itself. In this approach, Tillich readily admitted the power of secularization, but his response was not theological flight but theological engagement, for the very conditions of secularism—the questioning of the religious foundation of civilization and the angst and alienation threaded through the modern psyche—defined what he wished to explore from the perspective of the Christian faith.
In his work, he developed various theoretical perspectives on art. One of the most important was his insistence that both secular as well as religious iconography could be of religious significance or import. And, in turn, art that offered religious imagery or iconography might not necessarily be religious in meaning and content. The most lasting effect of this typology was to free theologians to find in secular art religious import, and to be willing to acknowledge that some religious imagery was, in his words, “non-religious in meaning,” or, worse, kitsch.
Jacques Maritain
A French Roman Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain dealt with poetry and the visual arts in his works Art and Poetry, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, and Art and Scholasticism. Poetry was the primary aesthetic form that, for him, expressed the creative process that infused the visual arts. He focused on the artist’s capacity to create and provide that which was pleasing and beautiful. He did not focus on the artist’s capacity to reveal the anguish and despair of the human being—the darkness or brokenness of the world. Rather his interest lay in the power of the artist to offer us the obverse of that darkness through the experience of creative possibilities that we could all share—possibilities that in their fullest manifestations were those of love that flowed from the experience of the Holy. He spelled out the artist’s capacity to create through that artist’s own spiritual sensibilities, sensibilities that were expressed through what Maritain called an habitus of creative intuition, an intuition that lived with and expressed beauty. In turn, beauty, the experience of which was offered in the artwork, could touch our own spiritual capacity for knowing beauty and, through that experience, invite us to experience the Beauty of God. Art, therefore, has the potential of being sacramental, a means through which the experience of God becomes possible. Modern art, however, fails in large part to provide that imagery, though artists working out of Christian spirituality could potentially create, and at times do create, serious religious art.
Hans Rookmaaker
Hans Rookmaaker was a Dutch Reformed Evangelical working from a position of neo-reformed Calvinist theology. In his studies, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture and The Creative Gift: Essays on Art and the Christian Life, he focused primarily on the art of the nineteenth and twentieth century and the power of such art to be both “good” and “bad” art relative to the Christian vision and its doctrine of creation. Rookmaaker’s position had an extensive influence on the evangelical world’s work with the arts, though those who followed often differed with his perceptions of modern culture and tended to accent modern art’s possibilities for engaging in discussion with Christianity. His interest was in modern art’s own alienating and destructive imagery which he saw as a form expressive of a dying enlightenment-infused culture. Art reflected the end of an enlightenment world because it was, itself, a symptom of the destructiveness of late enlightenment thought that idolized reason and fled into a secularism void of religious faith. And modern art was a symbol of that culture reflected in works from such pivotal artists as Picasso and Dali who called us into participation in that destructive world. Modern art’s value, therefore, was primarily that of revealing in creative and powerful ways the modern world’s decline and death. It is important to recognize that Rookmaaker allowed room for modern art insofar as the artist offered a cry for a new world that might invite Christian values and sense of order. His was not an iconoclastic stance, but it shared the deep Calvinist suspicion of the idolatrous power of art in which our focus on our relationship to God, given to us through the Word of Scripture, was subverted. But he also saw the power of art in the life of culture and was open to the possibility of art to invite an understanding of creation and open itself to a Christian art aligned to Christian values—in some respects a parallel of interests with Maritain from whom, otherwise, he was so different.
Following from these figures’ works and, at certain points, in contradistinction to them, were a host of theologians who reflected upon and defined the religious significance of art out of their own theological interests, with some focusing primarily on theoretical questions regarding the relationship of religion and theology to art; others focusing on artworks as documents in understanding some aspect of religious history or doctrinal emphasis; and still others focusing on the importance of art in worship and the practice of ministry. These theologians also engaged the arts out of different theological perspectives and schools of thought. From orthodox to neo-orthodox, existentialist to liberal, humanist to process, evangelical to neo-Thomist, post-modern to post-colonial, political theology to natural theology, dialogical thought to work coming out of ethics, liturgics, spirituality studies, cultural studies, and biblical thought—all of these have been informing perspectives. Out of these perspectives, theologians have forged ways of looking at art and perceiving its spiritual power and significance in the life of the Christian community. We cannot treat, given the limits of space in this article, the individual approaches that these theologians developed in our seventy-year span. But in counterpoint to significant points they make, I want to lay out an approach—what I call a dialogical approach—that will consider both certain of the strengths and weaknesses in the work that has been done.
A Dialogical Approach
There is a primary judgment about our theological treatment of art of which many of us have been guilty. The judgment: there has been a tendency to simply treat art on our own terms and in light of what we want the work to provide us without, at the same time, recognizing that artworks are autonomous forms that have a presence of their own. They have an origin in the imagination and skill of an artist. The work of art and its artist, if invited to do so, will come to the table of conversation with a dynamic voice that manifests itself in both a receptivity and response in the act of interpretation.
What I wish to call for is a dialogical approach, or at least a recognition that a dialogue is needed rather than a monologue in which we assume art to be passive—to be an object waiting for the wisdom of theology to act upon it and give it meaning. A dialogue between the theologian and an artwork needs to take place. It involves three actors: the artist, the work of art, and the theological interpreter all bringing to the conversation the contexts out of which they have come. To engage in a dialogue means that we should treat the work of art as autonomous, as a reality sui generis, as a work, as George Steiner has said, with its own presence. We should engage the artist with a ready recognition that the work with which we are dealing belongs often to a continuity of works, and comes out of the history, cultural situation, talents, and creativity of the artist. In so doing, we begin to understand more fully the formal world of the work, the subject given to us, the style employed and, subsequently, the meaning of the brush strokes on the panel.
What, in the beginning, doI, as an interpreter, bring? Foremost, myself as a person marked by age and experience, gender and status, theological stance and intellectual inquiry all of which can act as doors that open me up to a work or doors that close me off. I bring my own understanding of the importance and place of art in the world, in my own theology, and in the church. But more. I bring—I must bring, if I am to be dialogical—a serious interest in art, not a peripheral one, not one there simply to satisfy the ums and ahs of the exhibition’s opening as I mingle with donors and curators, or to satisfy the need to have something visually speak to the subject of redemption which is the editor’s urgent message on a given morning. I must bring a passion-fueled need that drives me to the museum to look again at a Rembrandt or Rouault, with no friend, no class, no curator standing with me. Only me, silent and alone and waiting. I must, to state it simply, love art, be a lover of art, jealous and generous, giving and trusting. A theologian who does not love art should leave it alone.
And, in the beginning, I should bring a well-honed knowledge of art as well as a knowledge of the work with which I am engaging. I should bring visual literacy. Sometimes I have encountered the judgment that if we interpret from the heart, we can interpret any work insightfully without rational knowledge to clutter the heart’s pure response. But this is like saying that I can experience the beauty of Cantonese idioms without knowing Cantonese. Theologians who speak and write of art but do not own art history textbooks or read art criticism should be wary of working with a work of Max Beckmann, or Kiki Smith, or, for that matter, the geometric magic of Piero della Francesca. Art literacy is crucial. But, in response to what I would hope would be brought, I find that theologians can put up barriers to their entry into dialogue for they can often come to the conversation wanting to dismiss the artist as intrusive; wanting to rearrange the chairs with the theologian’s chair center stage; wanting to begin the conversation with prayer rather than information; and wanting to impose on the artwork and artist doctrinal judgments. Any of these are signs that should indicate that art is not a theologian’s cup of tea.
In response to the problems I see, I want to look at certain suppositions that are important to a dialogical approach to art. I have cast them in term of needs that we have as a field. You may well consider them routine, but I am speaking to the field as a whole. These suppositions lie at the crux of what needs to be addressed. I have touched on certain ones of these earlier, but now I wish to speak of them in a more organized fashion.
The first is the need for us to engage in interdisciplinary work. In theological education and religious studies, there has long been a tradition of such work. Indeed, the disciplines of philosophy, history, archeology, the social sciences, linguistics, jurisprudence, the natural sciences all grace our classrooms and our learned societies and papers. They are disciplines that have been necessarily integrated into various theological fields of study. The cost of our having not attempted such integration would be great. For example, Ethics and Pastoral Theology without both the theories and data of sociology, political science, and psychology would be in danger of losing both theoretical significance and an empirical base for their work. Rich conversations have developed between these fields and relevant secular disciplines. But in our treatment of art, there has been a limited conversation with art theory, art history, art criticism, and non-theological aesthetics, yet these are the primary sources of information about art theory, artists, arts institutions, particular works of art, artistic styles, art movements, and the way viewers respond. They deserve our attention. Wilhelm Pauck, Paul Tillich’s biographer, once told the story that Tillich’s wife,Hannah, said at a dinner party, “the problem with Paulus’ treatment of art lies in his failure to read art history.” She spoke for more theologians than her husband.
Why would we seek to discuss a work by Giotto or Botticelli, Rublev or Rembrandt, Chagall or Hepworth, or Damion Hirst, for heaven’s sake, much less Cindy Sherman unclothed, without consulting art historians and art criticism about the artist and his or her works? Why would we seek to discuss the spirituality of modern art without beginning with such art critics as Clement Greenberg’s writings in the 1950s on spirituality and abstract expressionism or David Sylvester’s interviews with major artists that in penetrating fashion considers the spirituality of artists and their works? Why would we generally ignore works on aesthetics since Immanuel Kant when we are constructing a view of theological aesthetics? Theologians who do interdisciplinary work invite an interesting observation. When, for example, Robin Jensen, Kim Vrudny, Deborah Haynes, Terry Dempsey, Deborah Sokolove, John Handley, Michael Morris treat particular artists or movements, they draw freely on the insights of art history and criticism as well as theology. But, it is also the case that they are all trained in art history. Many of us are not, but literacy is possible just as it was possible when we engaged history and philosophy, psychology and sociology, culture studies and the environmental sciences.
The second is the need for us to approach art as an invitation to what Bahktin called dialogue rather than monologue—for a monologue is where we impose our theological perspectives on the art work itself. We need to engage in a theologizing with art rather than falling into a theologizing about art. If we fail to do so, than there are no chairs in the room for the artist and the artwork to sit down and begin a conversation. We have predetermined what we wished to find. Paul Tillich focused his search on twentieth-century works that he thought would provide insights into the human condition. He turned to modern art as a means of understanding religious questions and expressions of prophetic judgment. At one level, this was very productive, but by drawing a circle around what modern art could provide—which became should provide—he foreclosed on the question of whether such art might also do more—might offer sacramental or visionary possibilities, might speak as profoundly about redemption as it does prophetic judgment. And he had little or no interest in reading about what artists thought they were doing, for his own approach had determined that an artist and a work, to be authentic to the modern age, necessarily spoke of the darkness of the human condition.
To take a more recent example, we can look at Alejandro García-Rivera’s comments on Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial. In his study, Wounded Innocence, he sets out a series of chapters on pivotal theological doctrines and artistic expressions of them. When he comes to the chapter on the doctrine of justification, he turns to Maya Lin’s work. He ignores what the artist thought about her work, much less her intention. He acknowledges that the work is rich theologically at which point, however, his reflections turn to Dante, not to Lin, to appreciate why the work is significant, insisting that Dante’s steps are actually what can unlock the religious meaning of Lin’s art. My concern is this: García-Rivera came to a work, dismissed the artist, ignored why the work was created (including the historical moment it memorialized), ignored in large part the formal aspects of the work. And, one would have to add, he then used the whole introduction to her work as a way of debating Protestant and Roman Catholic views about justification.
My judgment, then, is that we fail the work and ourselves when we fail to consider the artist, when we fail to approach the work on its own terms, and when we fail to see the possibility of meaning emerging out of the conversation, a conversation that invites our theological questions to have their moment. The word “emerge” is important, for meaning comes through my movement into the work, the work’s movement into me, and the play of ideas, emotions, intuitions that the emerging experience invites. In making that judgment, I want to quickly acknowledge that all of us bring a full cloth of theological interests—theological ideas that we hope a work of art will speak to, that we hope will come into play in the emergence of the dialogue. We do not eliminate that set of interests. They are a given, for they are what we as theologians carry inside ourselves. But I am asking that we begin with a conversation that is dialogical in character and allow the theological questions to come forth as a consequence of the dialogue’s unfolding.
The third need we have, as theologians, is to take seriously the artist in our dialogue. I want quickly to add here that there are theologians who have written wonderful works on artists and their art. We need only note William Dyrness’ work on George Rouault, Doug Adams’ treatment of Stephen De Staebler, or Jane Dillenberger’s work on Andy Warhol and now Picasso as well as a body of other essays and books. John Dillenberger’s and John Cook’s studies on abstract expressionism, Cliff Edwards study of Van Gogh; Kim Vrudny’s essay on Ricardo Cinalli, John Handley’s treatment of Robert Graves, and Inge Linder-Gaillard’s study of Le Corbusier and his chapels and Amy Levin Weiss and her treatment of Louise Nevelson and the Beker Chapel in Manhattan.
These theologians take the artist seriously. On balance, however, these types of extended studies on specific artists are exceptions in theological writings and, for our purposes, the danger is that we give only passing attention to the artist in our own interpretive process. Yet it is the artist who made the art, and the artwork we are interpreting has a prior intention and significance in the mind of its creator. The task, then, is to listen to the artists place their work in context, to speak of their intentions, to consider the relationship of a particular work with other of their works, to listen to them discuss the subject being treated, the style being used, the colors that they depend upon. If we are to treat Michelangelo’s Rondini Piéta or his Deposition we must understand something of Michelangelo’s art of sculpture, perhaps his political battles with Rome, and certainly his spirituality and his spiritual struggles, and with the Deposition, perhaps, certain spiritual resolutions.
The fourth need we have is to analyze works of art in light of their own artistic elements—in light of their own form. This, for me, is a critical need in our approach to interpretation. The primary elements, that Panofsky called the pre-iconographic motifs of a work—the elements of color, line, shape, volume, tonality, texture, movement, gesture—must be considered in our engagement with a work, if we are to move inside the work itself. Let’s take the matter of color. It is important to say, if I am looking at a work of Marc Chagall, that his use of cobalt blue and dark red are primary acts on his part. These colors mean something pofound in his work. They mean something about balance and emotion, memory and story, fallenness and redemption, and they carry significant symbolism on their own. If we are treating Chagall and a work with a field of cobalt blue, we must seek to understand what the color meant to him foremost rather than jump first to what it means to us as the interpreters.
What I am asking is that we take formal elements with great seriousness; that with a given painting we are willing to first see that it is filled with geometric shapes and that these patterns of triangles and squares, rectangles and circles all carry imagistic and symbolic importance and, at an even more primal level, give the work balance and harmony, chaos and order. Or let us consider the element of line. Lines made on a canvas or sheet of rice paper demarcate boldly or diffusely the subject of the work and once those lines, as Hans Hofmann has insisted, are put on paper, they take on a life of their own and provide us a world that did not exist before. With a focus on the line, we readily see that lines determine chaos and order. Lines define the planes on the canvas that create or eliminate space. And it would be in order for us to sense the emotional impact that line has on depth of field, perspective, proportion or the lack thereof or our own feelings of well-being. But to the point, and it is a simple but still primal one of interpretation: we should allow the formal elements of a work to engage us, play with us, anger us, transform our way of seeing, and in so doing, pull us into the whole amazing experience of the work itself.
The fifth need is for us to take seriously the style of a work. This is a need that is crucial to interpretation but one that seldom is the subject of explicit theological conversation or referred to in the theological interpretation of particular works. Let us return to Tillich. Style was important to him and he introduced it into theological conversations about art, observing that the interpretive act must understand and engage the style of the artist though many who followed Tillich have ignored the question of style. But Tillich went further. He insisted that certain styles open us up to religious import and meaning more than other styles, and, for him it was the style of expressionism or those styles that offered expressionistic elements that were crucial. Tillich cast the die. Was expressionism the foremost religious style? For him, expressionism referred to the power of art to reveal religious import—import that is given through formal elements but not overcome by form, given through what is done to formal elements by way of the expressionistic stroke rather than naturalistic ones. Critics responded that his dependence on expressionism was too narrow and other styles held their own power to engage the viewer in a spiritual moment of “import.” The debate continues today.
My argument is that we should look to the style of a work as a primary entry point for interpretation. It will give us a general set of intentions and ends that the artist is committed to and frame how we begin to discover and construct in an interpretive dialectic the work’s meaning. Let us take cubism, the child of Braque, Gris, and Picasso. It was a revolutionary style that altered the direction of painting in the West. The cubists were attempting to alter nature by creating, paradoxically, an anti-naturalistic image of nature. Representation was present—a still life, a chair, a mandolin, a nude—but the natural subject became not what the eye would normally see but multi-dimensional and, consequently, an object with an interior as well as an exterior reality. The profile of a face where we would normally see only the side of one eye gave us a frontal image of its two full eyes. The objects often took on a sculpted form. The demands of the work had more to do with the intellect than the emotions. We are thrown into an exploration of a world of objects, but more, into the reshaping of the objects and their world so that we see them beyond or beneath what we would “normally” see. We are called into a world of form that has been transformed through style into a sense of order that offers a new way of comprehending the natural object itself. My invitation, then, is for us to enter the process of interpretation with an appreciation of the work’s stylistic treatment of its subject.
The sixth need is for us, as theologians, to understand—to imaginatively enter into—the subject of a work. This would appear obvious, but it is not quite so simple. The artist’s style provides the image of the subject that we see and, in so doing, determines among other things what happens to the natural form of the subject. In Cezanne, trees do not look like natural portrayals of trees. (James Luther Adams once said that Cezanne is not interested in painting a tree as the eye would see in naturalistic detail, but “in the treeness of trees.”) Cezanne’s representations vary from what the eye sees naturally and often dramatically so as a consequence of his post-impressionist style. Further, the image, as subject, can be a symbol or a vessel of symbols—perhaps of religious significance, perhaps not. The symbolic power of a work begins with our taking in and taking seriously the subject. The subject—Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Rouault’s Crucifixion, Rembrandt’s St. Paul, Rublev’s Holy Trinity, Michelangelo’s Deposition. The subject—O’Keefe’s skull on red, white, and blue; Bearden’s Harlem Street; Hepworth’s abstract sculpture, Composition II; Kollwitz’s The Call of Death; Chagall’s Lovers; a Kiki Smith room—all subjects that the artist has given us that can offer rich symbolic meanings. Let us, then, in entering the work, allow a moment of meditative reflection on the subject as image and the subject as symbol, all as prelude to the possibility of religious meaning.
When we engage in a dialogue with art, meaning will be born, perhaps, ever so slowly, yet born again and again, deeply and more deeply all through a conversation in which the interpreter listens and responds to the work, to the artist, and to the questions that emerge. When this takes place we are changed. That is the creative and imaginative power of art. Hans Hofmann knew this well when he said that the line within the work creates a world. A work of art provides a world of magic, of emotion, of mystery. A world that can, if we enter into it, make us laugh and cry, condemn us and redeem us, create in us bewilderment and despair, and invite us to love with greater humility and humanity. And, in so doing, call forth our spirit and touch our soul. That is enough. That is all that we can hope for. That is all we should hope for.
