Art and Mysticism

Interfaces in the Medieval and Modern Periods

Louise Nelstrop, Helen Appleton, Louise Nelstrop, Helen Appleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351765145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

From the visual and textual art of Anglo-Saxon England onwards, images held a surprising power in the Western Christian tradition. Not only did these artistic representations provide images through which to find God, they also held mystical potential, and likewise mystical writing, from the early medieval period onwards, is also filled with images of God that likewise refracts and reflects His glory. This collection of essays introduces the currents of thought and practice that underpin this artistic engagement with Western Christian mysticism, and explores the continued link between art and theology.

The book features contributions from an international panel of leading academics, and is divided into four sections. The first section offers theoretical and philosophical considerations of mystical aesthetics and the interplay between mysticism and art. The final three sections investigate this interplay between the arts and mysticism from three key vantage points.

The purpose of the volume is to explore this rarely considered yet crucial interface between art and mysticism. It is therefore an important and illuminating collection of scholarship that will appeal to scholars of theology and Christian mysticism as much as those who study literature, the arts and art history.

Part I
Art, aesthetics and mysticism in theory and practice

1
Beneath the surface

Whose phenomenology? Which art?¹

Kate Kirkpatrick

Introduction

In its first iteration, this chapter’s title was ‘A Phenomenology of Art’. As I went about writing, however, I began by attempting to define my terms in the context of others’ uses of them, so I read theological and philosophical works on aesthetics and the phenomenology of art in order to clarify what my working definition of ‘art’ would be. As I read, I became increasingly dissatisfied. As someone who sketches and paints, it was striking to me that most philosophical and theological accounts of visual art focus exclusively on consuming art made by others.

It is intuitive to me that where mysticism and art are concerned, making art has been, and still may be experienced by many as, a spiritual – if not mystical – practice. Indeed, whether we want to call such things ‘mystical’ or ‘art’, the contemporary popularity of art therapy, mindfulness colouring books, and indeed neurological investigations of how art-making affect the brain, suggest that making art (broadly construed) can restore human beings in ways art-makers (broadly construed) feel unable fully to articulate or understand. Much like mysticism, art-making is a lived experience that some artists describe as revealing that there is more to the world than the eye can see, mouth can say, or paint can portray. The first aim of this essay, therefore, is to argue that philosophical and theological discussions of art need to get ‘beneath the surface’ of consuming images and artefacts made by others (what I will call art as product) to consider the process of art-making.

I propose that a Jamesian phenomenology may help us make this shift.² There are several obstacles to achieving it, however. For even if we concede that ‘phenomenologies of art’ need to include more phenomenologies of making art, what we find ‘beneath the surface’ raises several methodological questions. Indeed, this essay arguably raises more of them than it answers. In particular, after introducing what I take to be the dominant view of aesthetics as spectator sport and juxtaposing it with art as a vulnerable and variable process, I argue that focusing on art as process raises problems of polyphony and epistemic access. Even so, I suggest, attending to phenomenologies of art-making is a rich resource for both theological anthropology and the philosophy of art.

(i) Aesthetics as spectator sport

In Theodor Adorno’s draft introduction to Aesthetic Theory, he writes that ‘As a phenomenology of art, phenomenology would like to develop art neither by deducing it from its philosophical concept nor by rising to it through comparative abstraction; rather, phenomenology wants to say what art is’.³ Doing a phenomenology of art, on Adorno’s account, is difficult (if not impossible) because phenomenology is supposed to be presuppositionless and ‘Art does not exist as the putative lived experience of the subject who encounters it as a tabula rasa but only within an already developed language of art. Lived experiences’, Adorno continues, ‘are indispensable, but they are no final court of aesthetic knowledge. […] Art awaits its own explanation’.⁴

One might wish to argue that Adorno’s demand for presuppositionlessness renders phenomenology of anything impossible. But for the purposes of this essay, this methodological question will be left aside in order to pursue others that lie beneath Adorno’s demand, namely, ‘whose phenomenology?’ and ‘which art?’ In The Man without Content, Giorgio Agamben begins his work with Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s aesthetics in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals – in particular, Kant’s definition of the beautiful as impersonal and universal. Nietzsche did not consider his own book to be the place to inquire whether ‘this was essentially a mistake’.⁵ Rather, Nietzsche writes, ‘all I want to underline is that Kant, like all philosophers, just considered art and beauty from the position of “spectator”, instead of viewing the aesthetic problem through the experiences of the artist (the creator), and thus inadvertently introduced the “spectator” himself into the concept “beautiful”’.⁶ Philosophers, Nietzsche and Agamben charge, have offered definitions of beauty which fail to live up to the experience of beauty. Comparing Kant’s own definition of beauty as that ‘which gives us pleasure without interest’ with Stendhal’s, who called the beautiful ‘a promise of happiness’ – that is to say, something about which we are unlikely to be disinterested – Agamben follows Nietzsche in suggesting that we need to differentiate the experience of artists from aesthetics.⁷ This essay argues that in addition to differentiating between the experience of artists and aesthetics, we need to redress the imbalance between spectator-approaches to art (which we might call theory, or aesthetics) and art-making (which we might call praxis, or process).⁸

Consider Hegel’s aesthetics, where art is seen as no longer capable of satisfying the soul’s spiritual needs, as it did in earlier civilizations.⁹ On Agamben’s reading, Hegel correctly diagnoses the problem that ‘our tendency toward reflection and toward a critical stance’ has become overpowering. Agamben continues: ‘when we are before a work of art we no longer attempt to penetrate its innermost vitality, identifying ourselves with it, but rather attempt to represent it to ourselves according to the critical framework furnished by the aesthetic judgment’.¹⁰ Whether or not it is true that, to paraphrase Lautréament, judgements about art have greater value than art itself, contemporary debates about how art should be defined reflect the prevalence of ‘institutional’ definitions of art – i.e., that for art to be art it must be, as James Elkin observes, ‘exhibited in galleries and bought by museums’.¹¹ On this view the ‘art world’ holds the keys to these sacred spaces, guarding their boundaries to keep out profane impostors.

Hegel’s optimism about ‘knowing philosophically what art is’ may seem unwarranted to readers of aesthetics and viewers of art today, but his description, too, places the value of art in the experience and judgment of spectators:

What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just our immediate enjoyment but our judgement also, since we subject to our intellectual consideration (i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation, and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of both to one another. The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is [. . .] Art [. . .] acquires its real ratification only in philosophy.¹²

Although the sources I have cited thus far have been philosophical rather than theological, in much of Western theology, too, thinking about ‘art’ concerns consumption, not creation. In fact, many Christian writers have warned of the dangers of visual arts. In Augustine (heavily influenced by Platonism) we find a close association of Truth and Beauty as cognates of the divine.¹³ And, as George Pattison writes, since ‘the aim of the Christian life is to come to know this Truth, this Beauty, and to contemplate it in and for itself […] the visible world has a double character’.¹⁴ For on the one hand, things in the material world (in Augustine’s words) ‘offer their forms to the perception of our senses, those forms which give loveliness to the structure of the visible world’; but this loveliness can distract the soul from its search for God, tempting it away from Truth into the sin of the ‘gratification of the eye’.¹⁵ Augustine’s mistrust of the visual sense reverberated in the Middle Ages, Reformation and beyond: beauty can become an idol, distracting us from cultivating the interior life as we ought.¹⁶

But for some art-makers the very process of making is part of cultivating the interior life, of dismantling idols or disillusioning the ego of its pretensions to centrality. Hegel’s words, like Kant’s, prioritize the universal: through philosophy – through universal rationality – on Hegel’s view, art is ratified. To reiterate my opening statements, I sketch and paint. The products of my practices would not be likely to qualify as ‘art’ by any institutional definition of the term. However, my own lived experience of engaging in these practices has led to dissatisfaction with the theoretical offerings of philosophical aesthetics – a dissatisfaction shared, as we shall soon see, by other artists.¹⁷

Before turning to consider those artists, however, I will introduce a critic of Hegelianism whose theoretical framework will inform the rest of my discussion: William James. In A Pluralistic Universe James argues against neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophies of the absolute, suggesting in their stead radical empiricism. But as David Lamberth writes, the work’s ‘overarching and enduring philosophical argument’ is against the trend in philosophy that James calls ‘vicious intellectualism’.¹⁸ As Lamberth expounds it, vicious intellectualism is ‘the reigning philosophic sin of [James’s] day’.¹⁹ It is to be distinguished from ‘intellectualism’, which is ‘a valuation of or habitual preference for concepts as products of the intellect as opposed to percepts, sensation, or experience’, a preference for what James would call “knowledge-about” over modes of “direct acquaintance”’.²⁰ Intellectualism per se is not problematic – after all, concepts are demonstrably helpful. But the vice appears when concepts end up silencing percepts and experience. For James, as Lamberth writes, ‘thinking is not generally best understood along the traditional lines of contemplation or theoria. Rather, thinking is a form of adaptive behaviour oriented most basically to action in and on a relatively stable but also continuously evolving environment’.²¹ Vicious intellectualism refuses to admit that life sometimes ‘exceeds conceptual l...