From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Art: Beauty

Jenson, again in the Song of Songs commentary, arrestingly described beauty as “realized eschatology.”

He begins, of all places, with Kant.  For Kant beauty is “the unlaborious coincidence of the actual and the ideal, the way in which some things show forth what they ought to be by what they serendipitously are, and insofar do not need to be improved by our moral efforts.”  Translated to theology, this means that beauty is “realized eschatology, the present glow of the sheer goodness that will be at the end.”

Natural beauty is, on this view, anticipation of fulfilled creation.  But what about art?  How can that be a “present glow of sheer goodness,” given that artists put a lot of labor to get things right?  Jenson answers: Works of art are products of labor, “but their beauty is not.  The artifacts have indeed been labored upon – or should have been – but those artists whose work is in fact beautiful all testify that the beauty of what they have made is a sort of extra gift from they know not where; by no accident, theorists in the Romantic movement called it ‘inspiration.’”  In fact, “the coincidence of a present thing with its end cannot be the direct object of our labor, since we have no vision of the end except what is granted precisely in that same labor.”  We don’t have a pre-existing vision of the ideal, to which we conform our objects; that vision is given in the labor over the object, precisely given, precisely a gift.

Art: Questioning Kitsch

“Kitsch” has become a key category in critical evaluations of the aesthetics of “mass society.”  Thomas Kincaid, Hummels, sentimental novels and manipulative Hallmark movies are all branded with the label.  I think it’s a useful label, but a student paper on the subject left me with some suspicious.

1) The student, David Dalbey, noted how paranoid people become when confronted with the question of kitsch: “Did I get something kitschy for my mother for Christmas last year?” they ask, anxiously.  That’s a revealing response, I think.  It indicates how much we take our aesthetic cues from others, and how much taste is a matter of liking the things that people who know what to like like.  And it also raises questions about the category of kitsch: How much of kitsch-criticism is just a power-play, cultural bullying by elites against their “lessers”?  To put it somewhat differently, is the rise of interest in kitsch directly linked with the rise of aestheticism?

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Art: Kantian aesthetics

Adorno neatly sums up the intention and result of Kant’s aesthetics in a cople of lines: “the significance of Kantian subjectivism as a whole lies in its objective intention, its attempt to salvage objectivity by means of an analysis of subjective moments.”

And, noting that Kant “posits something as form as aesthetic satisfaction as the defining characteristic of art,” concludes that Kant offers “a castrated hedonism . . . a theory of pleasure without pleasure.”

For all Kant’s formalism, though, he may be onto something.  He describes the aesthetic experience in terms of the play of faculties, of understanding and imagination.  That’s a pretty bloodless, bodiless way of describing our experience of beauty.  Still, we shouldn’t simply dismiss this: Aesthetic experience is not simply the free play of imagination (”romanticism”), nor the result of intellectual rigor (”modernism”?) or formal clarity (”classicism”).  Aesthetic experience is a response both to the import/content and form.  Insofar as Kant was reaching for that kind of synthesis, he got something basically right.

Art: Disinterestedness

Adorno sees disinterestedness as a necessary stage in the development of aesthetic experience, but says that it has to be transcended by a recognition of the “interest inherent in disinterestedness.”

Disinterestedness applies only to certain kinds of works, he says.  Try reading Kafka and remaining in disinterested contemplation: Kafka’s novels “call forth in us responses like real anxiety, a violent drawing back, an almost physical revulsion.  They seem to be the opposite of desire.  Yet these phenomena of psychic defence and rejection have more in common with desire than with the old Kantian disinterestednes.”  In short, “Kafka and the literature that followed his example have swept away the notion of disinterestedness.”

Art: Aesthetic enjoyment

Adorno writes that enjoyment is not the be-all of art.  Certainly it isn’t for the producers of art: “If you ask a musician if he enjoys playing his instrument, he will probably reply: ‘I hate it’ . . . People who have a genuine relation to art would rather immerse themselves in art than reduce art to an object.  They cannot live without art, but its individual manifestations are not so many sources of pleasure for them.”

Adorno sees a social dimension to this: “The bourgeois wants his art luxurious, his life ascetic.  It would make more sense if it were the other way around.”

Art: Christian art

Greek art, Hegel says, brings art to its summit.  This presents a difficulty: The greatest sensuous artistic form occurs within a polytheistic, inadequate religion.

In Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s summary, Hegel resolves this by pointing to the very brokenness of the bodily form of Christ in Christian art: “in Christian art, Christ is not represented with an ideal body, as the Greek gods are; his body is no longer the adequate expression of interiority but merely his mortal shell (it can thus be shown tortured by pain, just as it can be represented as a cadaver).  This does not mean that Christian theology must be identified with the abstract universalism characteristic of the hebrew God; on the contrary, Hegel accords a capital philosophical and historical importance to the fact that the Christian God was made flesh, and thus incarnated himself in a particular sensuous reality.  In fact, whereas the religions of the Orient fall short of the Greeks’ religion of Art, Christianity surpasses the latter, since it takes the sensuous incarnation of God to its dialectical resolution, to its truth, to its self-transcendence in the passion, death, and  resurrection of Christ.”

Thus, “Romantic” or Christian art “moves away from the point of perfect equilibrium” found in Greek art and in an art “characterized by the hegemony of the spiritual element over the sensuous element.”  Thus too Romantic art’s emphasis on painting, poetry and music rather than sculpture.

Art: Art and Idealism

A few selections from Hegel, “Oldest System Programme of German Idealism” (1796; name given by Franz Rosenzweig in 1913); from Simon Critchley, Very Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy (Oxford, 2001)

“I should like to give wings again to our physics which is progressing slowly and laboriously via experiments. Thus – if philosophy gives the Ideas and experience the data we can finally achieve the grand physics which I expect from later epochs. It does not appear that our present physics could satisfy a creative spirit which is like ours, or like ours should be.”

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Art: Anxiety of influence

RG Collingwood has a whale of a time excoriating individualistic conceptions of art.  He recognizes a theological motif behind the post-romantic notion of the isolated artistic genius: “Individualism conceives a man as if he were God, a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power whose only task is to be himself and exhibit his nature in whatever works are appropriate to it.”

He also notes that such an individualistic notion of art is profoundly ahistorical.  Many artists have borrowed quite directly from their predecessors:

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Art: Art and faith

Toward the end of “On Seeking God,” Nicholas of Cusa has this to say: “when an artists seeks the face of a king in a block of wood, the artists rejects everything else that is limited except the face itself.  For the artist sees in the wood, through the concept of faith, the face that the artist is seeking to observe as visibly present to the eye.  For the face is future to the eye but present by faith to the mind in an intellectual concept.”  I don’t think the last bit is phrased as well as it could be, but the notion that art is prospective, an act of faith, is arresting.

Art: Kantradictions

Jean-Marie Schaeffer (Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (New French Thought Series) has a blast pointing out the contradictions in Kant’s aesthetics.  Most of them arise from Kant’s insistence that the judgment of taste is founded on “the form of a finality” that excludes any specific end.  That is, aesthetic judgment responds to the sheer form of finality, not to any particular purpose of the object judged.  This is in a sense just a teleological way of stating the principle of “disinterestedness” that Kant inherited from earlier writers on aesthetics: If we judge a table for its usefulness as a platform for food and drink, we are not making an aesthetic judgment.  We have to evaluate without any notion of end.

Combined with this is Kant’s recognition that any artistic object is, inherently, purposive.  That is because the artist at least intended to evoke pleasure, satisfaction, or provocation from his viewers.  Natural beauty, by contrast, is not purposive, since, in Kant’s view, it is not an artistic product with a definite end.  As a result, Schaeffer writes, “artificial beauty is aesthetically less central than natural beauty it never elicits are pure aesthetic judgment,” that is, a judgment purified of interest and intent.

This has some disagreeable consequences.

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Art: Gnostikant

Evidence that Hamann had Kant right: In explaining taste as a common sense, he notes that this common sense of beauty can be arrived at by a process of stripping off whatever belongs to our perception and prejudice.  That is, we put “ourselves in the position of every one else, as a result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own estimate.”  How can we abstract our judgment from our own limitations?  This is “effected by so far as possible letting go of the element of matter, i.e., sensation, in our general state of representative activity, and confining attention to the formal peculiarities of our representation or general state of representative activity.”  When contemplating nature, we contemplate “the beautiful forms of nature” and have “to put to one side the charms which she is wont so lavishly to combine with them.”

Art: Mechanical arts

Steven A. Walton provides an illuminating summary of the scholastic incorporation of mechanical arts into philosophy and theology.

John the Scot first used the term artes mechanicae in the ninth century, and monasteries preserved and improved upon ancient technologies, but  ”they did not warrant inclusion in the philosophical canon.”   Most Christian thinkers retained the ancient denigration of material arts: “Archimedes repudiated engineering because of its ‘mere utility and profit,’ and Aristotle treats mechanics as a branch of mathematics, but only in a theoretical sense, not the practical sense which is the essence of the medieval concept.”  Augustine, Boethius, and Isidore followed suit.

Only with the twelfth-century “Renaissance” are the mechanical arts fully recognized as forms of knowledge that are worth the time of philosophers.  Hugh of St Victor is a key figure:

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Art: What Rough Beast?

Milbank notes that “science and art have always first mimed the horrors to come.”  Darwinian evolution and avant-garde prepared the way, for foreshadowed, twentieth-century horrors.  He asks, “what may the far more shocking interventions of 1990s art and science . . . betoken for the present century?’

Art: Art and love

Kenneth Clark: “Facts become art through love, which unifies them and lifts them to a higher plane of reality.”

Almost right, that.

Right on the link between artifice (poetry, courtesy, ornamentation) and love.  Right too on the unifying metaphoricity of art.  Right too on the link of fact and art.

Not quite right, it seems, on two points.  First, on the (perhaps) implied positivism of the use of “facts,” for we never encounter bare facts (facts barren of love and artifice) , facts are themselves God’s poesis, and art itself is supremely factual (factum, made).  Second, on the “elevation” to a “higher plane.”  That’s too allegorical, whereas I’d want to say art is typological.

Art: Clash of Gods

Thomas Mathews (The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton Paperbacks)) claims that since the work of Kantorowicz, Andreas Alfoldi, and Andre Grabar, interpretations of early Christian art have been dominated by the “emperor mystique.”  As summarized by Grabar, the theory is that the history of Christian art is divided by the conversion of Constantine.  Prior to Constantine, “Christian images consisted of one or two figures referring to some biblical event.”  After, in Grabar’s terms, “All the ‘vocabulary’ of a triumphal or Imperial iconographical language was poured into the ‘dictionary’ which served Christian iconography.”

Mathews just doesn’t see it, and he thinks that each of these scholars is influenced by his own nostalgia for empire.

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Art: Modern Art

A few quick takes from Daniel Siedell’s excellent God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Cultural Exegesis):

After pointing out that Eastern Christians prefer the flatness of icons to the realistic perspective of Western art, Siedell concludes that this should “remind us that flatness [in Eastern Christian or modern art] is not by itself nihilistic, atheistic, or otherwise anti-Christian. . . . Modernist art is often dismissed by Christian commentators because it looks like it is doing violence to traditional figurative art and thus by (dubious) extension doing violence to traditional (Christian) concepts of humanity and divnity.”

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Art: Everyday Aesthetics

David Cooper reviews Yuriko Saito’s recent Everyday Aesthetics in the February 20 issue of the TLS.  He suggests that “Saito exposes to main dimensions of the embedded character of everyday aesthetic reactions”:

“First, they are highly context-dependent, in a way that responses to ark works – which are normally meant to be experienced as discrete, ‘framed’ objects, relatively isolated from a wider environment – generally are not.  The smell that entices when wafting from the oven may disgust when used as a perfume; the decorations that look just right at Christmas seem vulgar at another time of year.  Contexts as various as customs and traditions, surrounding physical environments, and culturally shared expectations can all shape, even determine, people’s aesthetic responses to everyday things and happenings. . . .

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Art: Glorified utility

Gothic architecture, Augustus Pugin argued, operated on the principles that “there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety” and that “all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building.”  Classical architecture, he thought, failed to achieve this, because useful structures were submerged and hidden; by contrast, the flying buttress is a structural element turned into a beautiful ornament.

John Hughes (End of Work) says, “Precisely because the Gothic spirit is unconcerned with artificial uniformity and symmetry, it can adapt itself unashamedly to real situations and needs, making them into occasions of beauty.”

Art: Reverse perspective

In his history of iconoclasm (The Forbidden Image), Alain Besancon describes some of the artistic features of Russian iconography: “Nature is stylized in such a way that trees, rocks, and houses defy gravity.  The buildings are not represented within a unified space: each floats in its own perspective.  The colors have a symbolic value.  Light casts no shadows. The perspective is generally reverse: the line of force extends from the icon toward the beholder’s eye.  Through the icon, the truths of faith radiate toward the person contemplating it.  The vanishing point thus moves toward him.”

Art: Impressionism and Urban Renewal

In 1859, Baron George-Eugene Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine, began overhauling Paris.  The ultimate result was a masterpiece of urban rationality – straight streets, buildings of the same height, squares, a mappable city.

On the way to clarity, though, the city was “rendered illegible,” according to art historian T. J. Clark.  He adds that Paris was depicted in the media as “parade, phantasmagoria, dream, dumbshow, mirage, masquerade.  Traditional ironies at the expense of the metropolis mingled with new metaphors of specifically visual untruth.  They were intended to stress the sheer ostentation and flimsiness of the new streets and apartment blocks, and beyond that to indicate the more and more intrusive machinery of illusion built into the city and determining its use.”

Margin Jay suggests that this urban reconstruction “was soon registered in the Impressionist demolition of three-dimensional space.”

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