Ruskin: Beauty: Justice

A student walks into my office and asks "What is beauty?"  I reached for Roger Scruton, but better perhaps to have reached for John Ruskin's Modern Painters.  

[Beauty] is either the record of conscience, printed in things external, or it is a symbolizing of Divine attributes in matter, or it is the felicity of living things, or the perfect fulfillment of their duties and functions.  In all cases it is something Divine, either the approving voice of God, the glorious symbol of him, the evidence of his kind presence, or the obedience to his will by him induced and supported (MP 2:378).

The typical objection to such exalted, theological takes on beauty is that they (presumably) neglect justice, and this critique has legitimate targets.  "Whatever the surrounding evil, for the artist the sun is always at the zenith," wrote the abolitionist Unitarian minister Moncure Conway.  "The reformer's zeal, much less his discontent, admirable elsewhere, is inconsistent with the repose of the spirit which wins beauty to the side of the artist."  So much for artistic justice.

But Ruskin was different, and to think his aesthetic ambitious were out of touch with the spirit of reform requires no knowledge of his writings whatsoever.  On the contrary, it was just this Ruskinian take on beauty that was used to attack frivolity.  As the unjustly forgotten Yale art historian and minister James Mason Hoppin put it.

Since [Ruskin’s] prophetic voice has been heard art has risen from its degraded position as the slave of luxury, as a bourgeois conventionality, as a mere decoration of life however brilliant, and its true nature is seen that it has a vital and eternal beauty belonging to divine things (The Early Renaissance, p. iv.)

Yes, this scrambles tired dichotomies.  Phil Ochs' admirable suggestion that "protest is your diamond duty...  ah, but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty," is not some wisp of 60's inspiration, but a return to indigenous American Protestant aesthetic theory (whether Ochs realized this or not), and boy do we need it now.  American art history, fortunately, is far more deeply rooted in the other bearded London economic theorist than in that Jewish prophet who lost religion (to borrow Mackay's formulation), Karl Marx.  But don't tell that to anyone who cherishes the myth that things only got serious with Meyer Schapiro.

Week of prayer for Christian unity slips by largely unnoticed, but at least I got two posts out of the deal (one and two).  Strangely, despite my blogging prowess, the churches still appear to be divided.

The Image Strikes Back

One of the curiosities of having been born towards the end of the twentieth century is the parallel - artistically speaking - to having born towards the beginning of the ninth.  Just as those approaching middle-age today have grown up with the end of modernism and the reassertion of the image in both painting (Pop art) and architecture (postmodernism), so would Eastern Christians have seen the end of iconoclasm and the reassertion of images of Christ, the saints, and Mary after the final lifting of the imperial ban in 843. 

This is the subject of an essay I wrote (alongside many superior writers) in the journal Image about the word "image."  I'll leave the details (such as the Chicago mascaroni and its raging acroteria) to those who subscribe (my earlier essay in those pages can be found yonder).  But I'll post here an excerpt from the theoretical side of things, where I try to put Hans Belting and German image theory in conversation with "the Damascene," as I like to call him:

Not to be outdone by the artists whom they study, art historians have taken this return of the image as an occasion for intensive labors of their own.  Ambitious tomes have attempted to widen the stylistically driven history of art to accommodate the far-flung history of images. Islands of “fine art” are becoming less interesting to many art historians than the ocean of general visual culture that surrounds them.  “An image,” writes Hans Belting, a chief navigator of this bewildering sea, “often fluctuates between physical and mental existence. It may live in a work of art but does not coincide with it.”  One senses almost a spiritual aspiration in this level of art historical reflection, which is becoming more and more difficult to ignore.  Image theory is like the calculus of art history – frustratingly complicated, but worth struggling with for being true.

But even the most daring of these new perspectives, in their most advanced Teutonic manifestations, are not nearly daring enough.  The traditional religious response to this disciplinary direction should be not confusion but relief, not “Where are you going?” but “Welcome back.”  For among our more recent image theorists, none are as irreducibly wild as the image theorist par excellence, John of Damascus. Rarely do those who cite this eighth-century defender of images communicate the breadth of his full-orbed justification.  John lived in a time, not unlike Modernism, when images were banned – a ban backed by the authority of an Emperor, not just fashion.  And unlike many modern image theorists, John knew that if one attempts to answer the question, “What is an image?” without getting metaphysical, the question never actually gets asked.

How does John do it?  First, like a roller coaster operator strapping in a terrified ten year old, John defines his terms:  “An image is a likeness and pattern and impression of something, showing in itself what is depicted.”  And then he pulls the brake release.  When, John wonders, did images begin?  Did they start with the earliest artists?  Had John known of the first of cave paintings at Altamira, Lascaux or Chauvet, might he have referred to them?  This would be far too tame.  “The first natural and undeviating image of the invisible God is the Son of the Father, showing in himself the Father.”  Which is to say that for this John, in the beginning was the Image. 

Before the inauguration of time and matter as we know them (as if a word like “before” can even function at this level of discourse!), the Trinity itself was swimming in exquisitely accurate images – the Son imaging the Father, and the Spirit imaging the Son.  This teeming wellspring then overflowed  - no, it burst - into a glistening cataract of additional images. First, for John, came the images in God’s mind of everything that would ever come to be ever – everything from electrons to elephant trunks (including, we could add, those swirling pillars of interstellar gas that astrophysicists call “elephant trunks” as well).  All of these, before they were made, were initially images in their artist’s divine mind. And when there were made – here is a tricky part – they continued to be images, for creation itself is an infinite network of images, each of them “intimating to us dimly reflections of the divine…” 

In John’s great chain of images, humans came next. Genesis, after all, begins with reverse idolatry, not humans making images of false gods, but the true God making images of humans.  “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” goes the famous verse, which Paul Ricouer considered so inexhaustibly rich that it had to be freshly interpreted each century.  John drew upon the best of those interpreters – the early church fathers who preceded him.  They pointed out that according to this famous passage, “image” is one thing and “likeness” another. “Man received the honor of God’s image in his first creation,” writes Origen, “whereas the perfection of God’s likeness was reserved for him at the consummation.”

That consummation, it will come as no surprise, is offered in Christ – the original image - the true likeness of God in our midst, perfect without remainder. But this is no static perfection! The image of Christ is so attractive that it endlessly replicates itself, steadily summoning we lesser images to contribute a hitherto unknown coloration to its ever widening spectrum.  The human journey is therefore from image unto image.  “Just as we have born the image of the man of dust,” writes Paul, “we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:4).  Or, more famously, “For those whom he foreknew he predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29).

It is only after all this – after the metaphysical work that climbs to the highest heavens and back again – that John gets around to making his case for images that are made with human hands.  But because that justification for human made images – art – is freighted with such metaphysical force, it succeeds.  Although he did not live to see his cause vindicated, John’s arguments  - providentially made possible by Muslim political asylum - carried the day.  Icons reasserted themselves in the life of the Eastern Christian Empire, just as images have recently emerged from a time of modernist censure as well.

It's all in the current issue of Image along with other explorations of the faith/art lexicon, including one on freedom by a painter who has long been creating his own chain of meticulous and absorbing images, Joel Sheesley.

Notes Towards a Visual Ecumenism

The following is an excerpt from an essay of mine entitled "A Curse Reversed: Towards a Visual Ecumenism" in the current issue of CIVA's journal, Seen:

The year was 1858.  The place was Turin, Italy.  The person was John Ruskin, the great evangelical art historian and social reformer – but he was not to be evangelical for long.  Ruskin’s evangelical formation is what causes to the Bible to be referenced in almost every page of his voluminous works.  But exposure to higher biblical criticism and studies in geology threatened that youthful faith.  The most effective threat, however, came from his aesthetic education. Ruskin’s travel with his family to Europe, especially Venice, inaugurated what we might call (riffing on Mark Noll’s publication) the scandal of the evangelical eye.  

To be sure, Ruskin translated the glory of Venice into a language evangelicals could understand.  “Never had a city a more glorious Bible,” he told his British readers, describing Saint Mark’s Cathedral.  “The skill and the treasure of the East had gilded every letter, and illumined every page, till the Book-Temple shone from afar off like the star of the Magi.”  But then came the showdown in Turin, and it happened before Paolo Veronese’s sprawling canvas, The Queen of Sheba before Solomon. Here is how Ruskin related the experience:

I was sill in the bonds of my old Evangelical faith; and, in 1858, it was with me, Protestantism or nothing:  The crisis of the whole turn of my thoughts being one Sunday morning, at Turin, when, from before Paul Veronese’s Queen of Sheba, and under a quite overwhelmed sense of his God-given power, I went away to a Waldensian chapel, and there a squeaking idiot was preaching to an audience of seventeen old women and three louts that they were the only children of God in Turin… 

Imagine the scene for a moment:  Ruskin bathes in aesthetic glory on a Sunday morning before Veronese’s cataract of color. He is amazed at the artist’s God given power.  But, it being Sunday morning, he reluctantly extracts himself to fulfill his Sabbath obligation, which – of course – means attending a Protestant church.  However, the Waldensians (a proto-Protestant sect was the best Ruskin could do) were so aesthetically barren, and the sermon so hopelessly narrow, that the contrast between Ruskin’s art experience and his formally “religious” one is unbearable.  The only way that Ruskin could protest that soul-crushing disjunction is to renounce evangelicalism.  He called it his “unconversion.”  Which is to say, his eyes outgrew his soul. 

To be sure, as Michael Wheeler’s Ruskin’s God persuasively argues, it was too late for Ruskin.  He could not neatly “unconvert” because his evangelicalism was too deeply rooted.  Wheeler sees too many references to faith in the later Ruskin, and the leitmotif of Ruskin’s lifelong faith, furthermore, is the Biblical glory of Solomon, as reflected by Veronese.   We might also add that Turin is an ironic place for an aesthetic unconversion, it being the city that hosts the ultimate warrant for aesthetic practice:  The Shroud of Turin, a proto-photographic replica of the face of infinitude itself.  But for Ruskin, the Shroud must have been too Catholic.  “Whoever loves beauty,” lamented the Protestant theologian Gerhard Nebel, “will, like Winckelmann, freeze in the barns of the Reformation and go over to Rome.”  But Ruskin’s evangelicalism had instilled in him a virulent strain of anti-Catholicism.  Love of beauty therefore doomed Ruskin to theological and aesthetic limbo:  Too visually sophisticated to be evangelical, and too suspicious of Popery to be Catholic.

The part I'm leaving out features a reversal of Ruskin's curse through the career of the evangelical art historian John Walford, and a critique of Reformed and Orthodox aesthetic hubris, all of which leads to the thrilling conclusion....

New directions of research emerge when one goes to the art historical record not to defect because of a perceived inadequacy (as with John Ruskin), or to artificially prove the differences among the traditions (as with Pavel Florensky), but to lovingly respect one’s own tradition, to abide within it (as with John Walford), but also to joyfully indicate commonalities when they appear.  Just as there is, according to our Bibles, “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” so perhaps there is also one variegated yet unified Christian aesthetic, to which the different traditions, at their utter best, ascend.  Full maturity (which for evangelicals has been a long time coming!) is not to see with Protestant, Orthodox or Catholic eyes - but with the eyes of Christ.

Good news for me is you can't effectively disagree until you hear my entire case by reading the whole thing.

More Secrets of Art History Revealed!

Hugo Ball at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, 1916

If Preziosi only takes us to the frontier of post-secular art history, what would it mean for a younger generation to enter in?  Consider that supposed stronghold of religionless resistance, that well-defended fortress of secular subversion, forever issuing impious phalanxes of the atheistic avant-garde, the Dada.  Certainly they can be trusted to keep the cult out of culturati.  But in Leonard Aldea's hands (The Implicit Apophaticism of Dada Zurich: A Spiritual Quest by Means of Nihilist Procedures), Dada is less a vehicle for nihilism than a chapter in the history of apophatic theology. 

Just like apophatic theology, the apophatic art of the Dadaists defines its object of knowledge exclusively by saying what the object is not, never by stating what the object is. In doing so, each negative definition is a step forward toward that final affirmative statement, although it never carries positive information about it.

This is not a case of theology retreating to the tame suburbs of critical theory, instead it is the elevation of theory to a highrise loft in the City of God.  For theology is evidently the origin (paging Holsinger) and destination of theory's restless striving.  Dada's apophatic art, however, needs be nestled within a cataphatic, declarative moment (an essential lesson for theologians and artists alike).  Even Marcel Duchamp, suggests Aldea, was an inconsistent nihilist, for "he never actually stopped explaining that nothingness... never stopped using this very nothingness to create with."  To say nothing of the founder of Dada, Hugo Ball, whose diary for July 31, 1920 insists that “the great, universal blow against rationalism and dialectics, against the cult of knowledge and abstractions, is: the incarnation.”  Aldea sees Dadaism as not an attack on meaning, but "the bastion of human dignity in an age when humanity was extremely devalued and reduced to the empty carcasses of the many theoretical systems that saw their failure in the reality of the First World War." 

Once the nihilist stamp is removed from our perception of Dadaists, and their techniques are looked at and assessed from an apophatic perspective, future research into the intrinsic theology of this most prolific artistic movement can address a number of other, more in-depth questions. 

Aldea's article is just a beginning, and his thesis is confirmed - as he alludes but does not explore - with Ball's conversion with his wife Emmy (let's not forget her!) to Catholicism (a bit more on that from me here).  Aldea points to the need for further research, and indeed the most immediate necessity is for someone to increase the accessibility of Ball's writings on Byzantine saints (the original avant-garde) by translating Byzantinisches Christentum: Drei Heiligenleben (1923). Furthermore, if religion necessarily muffles resistance (as Preziosi assumes), then why does Ball's attack on German nationalism only increase after his conversion, as evidenced by his 1924 Die Folgen der Reformation (reminiscent, incidentally, of Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation). 

Some German theologians have made these connections already. Notably, however, Aldea concludes his exploration of Dada not by exposing art history's limitations, but theology's.

Almost a century after Dada appeared, modern scholarship has failed to investigate these intriguing connections between the art, theology and philosophy of the beginning of the twentieth century. Even more frustrating is that, outside the world of art historians, the theological and philosophical ideas behind Modern Art are still being read with the interpreting tools used for representational art, although we quite clearly deal with an entirely new phenomenon. Art is still expected to be, and interpreted as if it were, merely the visual reproduction of previously formulated theological or philosophical thought, and not a source of original thought in its own right. The Avant-garde brought to the foreground the discrimination between two theological methodologies, the written and the visual, and also the idea of a theology developed and expressed through the arts. The risk of such discrimination against Modern Art, especially among theologians, is that by our refusal to at least consider art as a proper methodology for original theological investigation, we may in fact reject an authentic source of revelation.

Which returns us to that previous question:  If (according to Preziosi) "Art [is] the very esperanto of European hegemony," then why perpetuate the odious oppression of art history?  Because while Preziosi is right to have exposed art history as a hegemonic tool of the West - it is not only that. Should the discipline reach back to its repressed origins far before the Enlightenment or Renaissance, the icon's role in resisting such a narrative emerges.  Art reveals itself as theology (paging Andreopoulos).  And while this may long have been so,  only recent developments in the (not hopelessly hegemonic) discipline of art history have permitted such ocular epistemology to unfurl.  Only with the grinding of this particular lens of investigation has art's theological dimensions to come more fully into focus.

This is where the "theology and art" genre - a laudable venture to be sure - goes wrong, with its chiefly philosophical, as oppose to art historical, conversation partners.  It frequently fails to familiarize itself (as do many visual theology enthusiasts) with the disciplinary vehicle that most privileges the noblest of the senses. How many theologians, for example, have even heard of Alois Riegl?

That said, the visual cannot remain disjoined from the verbal anymore than can apophatic from cataphatic theology. “The word and the image are one," wrote Hugo Ball, who knew his New Testament and ecumenical councils well enough to percieve Christ as both logos and eikon.  "Painting and composing poetry belong together. Christ is image and word. The word and the image are crucified.”  For this reason, as awkward as neologisms can be, we might call the territory being described here as theography, because in Byzantine Greek, the verb graphein encapsulates both writing and drawing.   Art history, an admittedly verbal discipline that nevertheless serves the visual, exploits this symbiotic insight.  There are innumerable theological questions that would be recast - if not resolved - through a rigorous, up to date art historical investigation alongside more routine verbal ventures. 

Theography, for lack of a better term, is not the only future of art history, but it is one of them - and to foreclose this possibility would be to artificially limit the interpretive dilation that critical theory and the visual culture debate of the nineties allowed.  If it can be done with Dada, it can be done with myriad artistic movements more.  Make no mistake, art's theological potentialities also mean that art has, does and will operate as very bad theology too.  But the grander point is that the secret of art history, or at least another of them, is that the discipline does not take its place under the queen of the sciences, but participates in her reign.

The Secret of Art History

Oh how that brief list of theologically inclined, post-secular art history could be expanded.  The second edition of the standard grad student intro to the discipline, now ends - you may be surprised to discover - on a decidedly religious note. "What has continually haunted the discourse of art history is its foundation role, beginning most forcefully in the Romantic era, as a secular theology or coy religiosity..."  Donald Preziosi (we assume the editor to be the author of the book's unattributed coda) concludes half a thousand pages of historiography by identifying:

[The] (re-)emergence of the problem of religion in art and art history...  There is a differential intricacy of and an obverse complementarity between artistry and religiosity, art and religion, which, pursued in all its implications, would necessarily lead to a fundamental recasting of our entire understanding of both art and religion: a recasting wherein both these nominally and institutionally distanced practices are more importantly understood as different perspective upon a common concern - the nature of representation or signification as such. 

This is evident enough.  Hence the inadequacy of art historical genealogies (like the one here being quoted!) that begin with Giorgio Vasari, or (even worse) Johann Joachim Winckelmann, instead of the iconoclastic controversy, not to mention the book of Exodus.  What is far less evident is the truth of Preziosi's metaphysical claim casually embedded in said coda in the form of an insistence that religion is pure construction without remainder.  "Religion," proclaims - no, preaches Preziosi, "is a mode of artistry which is in denial of (or is duplicitous regarding) the fabricatedness of its own inventions, commonly attributing that artifice to the 'design' of an immaterial, and (for sectarian believers) a pre-existent and originating force of being."  Faced with such a colonialist caricaturization, why not let the subaltern (a "religious" person like David Bentley Hart, for example) speak? 

Religion in the abstract does not actually exist, and almost no one (apart from politicians) would profess any allegiance to it.  Rather, there are a very great number of systems of belief and practice that, for the sake of convenience, we call 'religions,' though they could scarcely differ more from one another, and very few of them depend upon some fanciful notion [as Preziosi seems to assume] that religion itself is a miraculous exception to the rule of nature.  Christians, for instance, are not, properly speaking, believers in religion; rather, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his church as its Lord.  This is a claim that is at once historical and spiritual, and it has given rise to an incalculable diversity of natural expressions: moral, artistic, philosophical, social, legal, and religious.

So no, there is no necessary conflict between acknowledging fabrications and having faith, between, for example, knowing that the gospels were actually written (how could they not have been?) and believing that God speaks through them truthfully, or between acknowledging an icon was actually painted and that the dead saint that said icon refers to lives.  God, of course, is not a cause, not even a big cause - he is instead the premise of all causality, and his mysterious influence within the infinite network of causality that he inaugurated (even to the point of choosing a nation and donning human flesh) is called providence.  "He is in essence outside everything," writes Athanasius, "but inside everything by his own power." So until Preziosi can produce a satisfying explanation for why there is something rather than nothing (he is welcome to try), his instinctual assumption against the possibility of immateriality will be no different in kind that an assumption for it. 

This is not to dismiss Preziosi as much as to point out an unfortunate inconsistency.  He is, you see, one of the discipline's most deft deconstructors - a veritable suicide bomber embedded in one of art history's privileged professorial perches.  In what is surely one of the better sentences of art historical writing in the last two decades, he writes that "Art [is] the very esperanto of European hegemony."  Preziosi admits that "the brilliance of this colonization is quite breathtaking: there is no 'artistic tradition' anywhere in the world which today is not fabricated through historicism and essentialism of European museology and museography...."  Yes, art is hegemonic, and the world's teeming international network of monolithic museums prove it so.  "Art history makes colonial subjects of us all."

Why then continue to perform art history?  That's a good question for another post.  The point here is the unintentionally humorous one that an author who has (brilliantly, in my opinion) exposed art history's shallow roots in the stripped soil of the European Enlightenment, is tethered to that same Enlightenment's assumptions about "religion."  "The essential 'secret' of religion," writes Preziosi (wait for it... drum roll please...) "is that there really is no secret at all that is separate from its alleged 'expression.'"  But all this statement tells us, a statement so blithely broadbrush that the paint gets very thin indeed, is the essential secret of art history.  This being that that the discipline's colonialist, European (and yes, white male) Enlightenment secularity has gone so blissfully unquestioned that it has survived two decades of deconstruction without so much as a scratch.

Until now.  Hence the recent publication string that questions such secularism; and hence Preziosi's need to (grudgingly?) acknowledge religion in the sweetspot of the discipline's chief initiatory document (the grad school reader).  Donald Preziosi, then, is like a Moses of sorts.  He has traced art history's repressed consanguinity with religion, and has traveled far enough to see the mountains of post-secular art historical research.  The future (or at least one of them), he tells us, is in those hills.  And yet, Preziosi is sufficiently hindered with his discipline's secular presumptions to be able to enter that land himself.  As a result, even as he emblazons we religious people with a scarlet "R"...  we still thank him.