When German theologian and forerunner of radical theology Dorothee Sölle met the Jewish religious thinker Martin Buber in Israel in the wake of the Second World War, she is said to have introduced herself as a theologian, to which Buber responded: “Theology—how do you do that?” At that moment of postwar devastation, when the very notion of speaking (logos) of God was rent to pieces, Buber’s question cut to the heart of Sölle’s struggle. She then spent her entire academic career exploring a theology that was operational and socially brave, only seldom using the term theologian to describe herself.1 “I need to ground heaven on earth”, Sölle wrote in 1993.2 To her, theology was about analysing real-life circumstances. As theologians we should look deep into lived reality, she argued, until we “reach a point where theological reflection becomes necessary”.3 Theologians must “read the context until it cries out for theology”.4
The field of “theology and art” is growing while the world is burning. Is that a sign of escapism on the part of theology—is theology hiding out in art museums and galleries? Or is the escapism on the part of art—is the art world seeking comfort in the chapel? Neither, in my view; escapism is not the reason for the trend on either side. Rather, on the contrary, the growing interest in art and theology today is related to the issue addressed by Buber and Sölle: How do we actually do theology? How does theology become materially and politically active, relevant and concrete? How do we ground heaven on earth? Rather than being a sign of escapism, I am persuaded that theology’s turn to art is responding to the fact that it is concrete and bears political import without diminishing the enigmatic aspects of reality. The following discussion introduces only a fraction of the rich field of theology and art, but one indicating the sources and the direction of the current contribution: We move from Tillich’s theology of art to Eastern iconographic theology and then to Russian political art. Tillich’s focus on the meaning of existence, which may have been key in his time, is not necessarily in ours, which is why the current project turns to other more contemporary sources. And yet we begin with Tillich because his notion of God as ultimate concern—even beyond the revelation of Christian dogma—paved the way for the reconstruction and deconstruction still characterising the field. We then move to Clemena Antonova and Andrew Spira’s views on the theological dimensions of the Russian pictorial space. Finally, we turn to Popova’s politically oriented yet spiritually informed constructivism. Against the backdrop of Tillich, Taylor and Russian iconographic theology, I indicate why Popova’s constructivist approach is an apt source for radical material theology to be explored in the chapters to come.
Tillich’s concrete concern
Paul Tillich offered the most ambitious attempt of the twentieth century to bridge the Western divide between art as a secular enterprise and theology. His theological engagement with art exceeds that of any other theologian of his generation and reaches beyond his engagement with art in his writing, lecturing and as curator.5 Without Tillich’s theory of correlation, as Russell Re Manning observes, we might not have seen the now established area of study denoted as “theology and the arts” in countless undergraduate courses in theology.6 Without Tillich, in consequence, it is likely this book would never have been written. Through his theological, philosophical and cultural analyses he introduced a language that enabled a genuine dialogue with the arts, both in terms of theology’s interpretation of art and in terms of art’s impact on theological development.7
To what extent did Tillich’s art analyses truly enter into the artistic domain of thought, however, and into a genuine dialogue with the arts? Or, to frame it differently, to what extent did he manage to bridge the divide between the material and the spiritual? To many, Tillich is the ontotheologian par excellence, hence his search for meaning in artworks necessarily strives beyond, and finally disregards, the material composition as such. Rather than bridging the material-versus-spiritual divide, Tillich appears to detach art from its material aspects and extract only its “spiritual” content when relating it to theology. When art meets theology in Tillich’s thinking, it has already turned immaterial. Extending Buber’s question, noted above, one may ask: Is Tillich’s theology of art, despite its concrete object, a theology that is rather than a theology that does—a theology of being rather than of doing?
According to Tillich’s general understanding of culture, it consists of three elements: Form (form), Inhalt (content) and Gehalt (substance). While Tillich emphasises that all three are related, dependent on and intertwined with each other, he also formulates a general principle according to which “the more Form, the more autonomy; the more Gehalt, the more theonomy”.8 In other words, Tillich locates the theologically relevant aspects of cultural expressions (“the theonomy”) to their substance understood as their meaning or import, not to their form nor even to their content as such. An artwork’s substance—its inner nucleus or character, not its material form—may disclose a matter of ultimate concern, may direct its viewers towards “the ultimate reality beyond everything that seems to be real”, towards “being-itself” as “the power of being in everything that is”.9 The very materiality of art, art materialised as form, on the other hand, leads to autonomy which according to Tillich’s general rule, is the opposite of theonomy or even the opposite of a correlation between religion and culture. Hence the relevance of my question; to what extent did Tillich enter into an artistic domain of thought? If finally disregarding the form, and separating form from substance of meaning to focus primarily on the latter, what becomes of the actual objects of art? Has art not, in Tillich’s systematic theological thinking, turned into an immaterial or even spiritual essence—a spiritual, cultural essence that is understood as opposed to a material, natural object?
In his essay “Changing Ontotheology: Paul Tillich, Catherine Malabou, and the Plastic God”, Jeffrey Robbins uses the passage quoted above to show how much of an ontotheologian Tillich really is.10 Robbins argues that for Tillich the final reality, the really real, is not the material level of life—not the surface of appearances—but the ground of all levels, being-itself. Or, as in another passage by Tillich:
In our search for the ‘really real’ we are driven from one level to another to the point where we cannot speak of level anymore, where we must ask for that which is the ground of all levels, giving them their structure and their power of being. The search for ultimate reality beyond everything that seems to be real is the search for being-itself, for the power of being in everything that is.11
The ontotheological account appears presupposed in the very idea of a theory of correlation and the way it analyses the dialectic of Form-Inhalt-Gehalt using the notions of cultural form versus religious content.12 The idea of detecting religious content or substance in secular-cultural form presupposes a separation between form and content, hence a separation between matter and spirit—a distinguishability between an object’s appearance and its inner substance. In this perspective, the current project stands forth as Tillich’s theological opposite. Contrary to Tillich, the current project attempts to ground a radical theology in artistic material techniques and actions—and in form. The form versus matter distinction shall be further discussed by way of Popova in the chapters to come but let us not leave Tillich just yet because there is reason to revisit Tillich on this point.
In an unpublished paper, architecture and philosophy scholar David Capener argues that there is an often overlooked and more material Tillich that the notion of the ontotheologian overshadows, and I owe the following nuanced view of Tillich to Capener. Because, as John Clayton observes, when approaching the dialectic of Form-Inhalt-Gehalt in Tillich’s thinking “we plunge into those dark depths of Tillich’s thought where, if not all, certainly most of the cows are black”.13 The distinctions Tillich proposes are, on a closer look, not in fact distinctions at all but fractions, elements of a unity that is not necessarily a singular unity but may just as well be understood as a multiple whole. John Thatamanil argues that the description of Tillich as ontotheologian obscures the complexity of Tillich’s notion of being. He reads Tillich as a theologian of finitude, matter and potentiality.14 Even if Tillich does describe being-itself as the ground of all levels, that ground—being—remains shrouded in mystery. Being for Tillich is at once Grund and Ungrund, ground as well as abyss, which is why Tillich’s God as being-itself somewhat dialectically includes both being and nonbeing.15 As foundation, Tillich’s being destabilises every foundation. Donald F. Dreisbach even underlines that the dialectic between being and nonbeing, and between essence and existence, is essential to Tillich’s notion of the possibilities of life. In Tillich’s view to be is to actualise potentialities, Dreisbach argues, hence, to be is necessarily also to become a distortion of one’s essential nature. One’s essence and thus one’s potentialities remain, but as existing one manifests them in an incomplete and distorted way. In other words, to affirm existence is unavoidably also to affirm nonexistence, it is to affirm finitude as the very condition of life. Life as such is always situated and always limited or else it is not living. In Tillich’s own words:
An expression of man’s finitude is his necessity to dwell, to have a place. He is excluded from the infinite space and, even if he pushes into it without a definite limit to the farthest stars, he must start in a definite place and return to another definite place.16
Similarly, for Tillich God as the ultimate concern, as being itself, is concrete: “The ultimate concern is a concrete concern; otherwise it could not be a concern at all”.17 It is expressed in an actual religion and is in that sense material, not idealistic.
In a 1948 sermon entitled “Nature, Also, Mourns for a Lost Good”, Tillich expresses what may be regarded as an ecotheological argument based on the materiality of Christian sacramentality and the incarnational thought structure. Artists, Tillich suggests, have often understood the religious significance of nature better than theologians who more often tend to assume a bodiless spirituality. And yet, he continues, the sacramental is the union of the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the material, why nature—not just creation as a Christian concept, but the actual “stars and the clouds, the winds and the oceans, the stones and the plants, the animals and our own bodies”—is pivotal to Christian faith.18 “Therefore”, Tillich finally exclaims, “commune with nature! Become reconciled with nature after your est...
