The Art of the Sacred

An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief

Graham Howes

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780857731340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Religious Art

The field of 'art and religion' is fast becoming one of the most dynamic areas of religious studies. Uniquely, "The Art of the Sacred" explores the relationship between religion and the visual arts - and vice versa - within Christianity and other major religious traditions. It identifies and describes the main historical, theological, sociological and aesthetic dimensions of 'religious' art, with particular attention to 'popular' as well as 'high' culture, and within societies of the developing world. It also attempts to locate, and predict, the forms and functions of such art in a changing contemporary context of obligation, modernity, secularism and fundamentalism. The author concentrates on four chief dimensions where religious art and religious belief converge: the iconographic; the didactic; the institutional; and the aesthetic. This clear, well-organised and imaginative treatment of the subject should prove especially attractive to students of religion and visual culture, as well as to artists and art historians.

1

four dimensions of religious art

the iconographic dimension

In religious art, as well as in everyday language, icons are images of saints or holy personages. The icon is not simply a useful adjunct to worship but a vital element in it. Within the Christian Orthodox tradition especially, an icon painter’s execution is not an assertion of his own individuality, but a magical act. He (rarely she!) is setting up a field within which powerful forces can operate. If he strays too far, then the magic will not happen. The icon (Figure 1) is a symbol which so participates in the reality it symbolises that it is itself worthy of reverence. It is an agent of the Real Presence. In this sense the icon is not a picture to be looked at, but a window through which the unseen world looks onto ours. As the eighth-century theologian John of Damascus put it, icons ‘contain a mystery and, like a sacrament, are vessels of divine energy and grace. ... Through the intermediary of sensible perception our minds receive a spiritual impression and are uplifted towards the invisible divine majesty.’¹ Today, the Orthodox Church regards icons as one form of revelation and knowledge of God and as one means of communication with Him. As channels of grace like the cross and the Gospels, icons are sacramental, different from ordinary material objects yet not in themselves holy. The icon both depicts and shares in the sanctity and glory of its prototype and is thus worthy to receive proskynesis, veneration, but not latreia, adoration, which is reserved for God alone.

Yet, as social anthropologists like Campbell² and Kenna³ have shown, when Orthodox theologians’ pronouncements and the sentiments and behaviour of many devout Greek peasants are taken together, discrepancies become apparent. The peasants do not seem to recognise the theologians’ injunction that the icon as a channel of grace is not powerful in itself and must not be treated as such. ‘Escalation’ occurs, and they certainly speak of and act towards the icons as if they were powerful in themselves. The tissues and pieces of cotton wool with which the church icons are dusted are kept for amulets and for use in the household cult of icons. Furthermore, neither Orthodox theologians nor social anthropologists can really tell us precisely why one icon is regarded as more powerful than another. Campbell, for example, tells us that the Saraktasani, transhumant shepherds of north-west Greece, insist that ‘with respect to the relation of one saint to the many icons of that saint ... one revelation is more efficient than another’, but the shepherds ‘do not explain how or why’. Campbell’s own comment goes a little further: ‘in these ideas we see the refraction which even divine energy suffers when it enters the material and sensible world’.⁴ But it is surely not enough in itself to say that divine power is refracted. Why is it focused in some material objects and not in others, and why concentrated more in some of these and not in others?

The second issue here is a theological – or rather a Christological – one, namely the idea of man as made in the image of God. The classic example of this is the iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries. The iconoclasts objected to any attempt to portray Christ on the grounds that to do so would be to presuppose that he was only a human being. His divine nature would be ignored (since representation of this was impossible) and this would be a most misleading way of representing the God-man. The opponents of the iconoclasts, the iconophiles, defended the practice of painting Christ on the grounds that this was the obvious way of taking the Incarnation seriously. For them, not to seek to embody Christ in a picture or sculpture betrayed a residual disbelief in the genuine historicity and humanity of Christ. In this sense the controversy was supra-aesthetic. It was about something crucial to Christian belief – the reality of the Incarnation. In the end the iconophiles won the day, and with them also triumphed the theology which they had developed. It was the Incarnation that legitimated Early Christian art, making possible the visualisation of God. Yet out of this clash came not only what Ladner has called ‘two normative approaches to the human body – the incarnational and the spiritualized’⁵ – which have been in tension throughout Christian history, but also two attitudes towards the arts which have played a dominant role in church – and art – history ever since.

The conflict re-emerged, and was re-enacted, early in the Protestant Reformation. Its outcome was in one sense a victory, albeit a pyrrhic one, of the verbal over the visual. If Catholicism had set up images as bridges between God and man, Protestantism burned them all, and there was no going back. Indeed, as Hans Belting has written, ‘the empty walls of the reformed churches were visible proof of the idolatrous images of the papists. They attested to a purified desensualised religion that now put its trust in the Word.’⁶ Protestantism reified language as the means of linking Man to God. Yet the historical reality was far more complex. For example, Luther himself promulgated what amounted to a cognitive and credal interdependence between word and image, while for Calvin the only visual symbolisation of the divine was the Eucharist. To make material images of the uncircumscribable, all-creating Creator, whose real images were already around us in the form of fellow creatures and also present at the Eucharist itself, was evident idolatry. Zwingli, in his turn, argued that ‘images are not to be endured, for all that God has forbidden, there can be no compromise.’⁷

The motives for, and the enactment of, iconoclastic acts within local communities was even more variegated. For example, as Wandel has so vividly documented, in Zurich the ‘idols’ were deemed voracious, ‘stealing food and heat from needy human beings, the “true images of God”’, while in Strasbourg most iconoclastic acts linked images to altars, attacking both for their role in a ritual context that evangelical preachers and citizens regarded as ‘idolatrous’ and ‘blasphemous’ and where the laity had – both literally and metaphorically – no place. In Basle, on the other hand, iconoclastic acts were directed at images that seemed to symbolise a formal division between the ‘spiritual’ clergy and the ‘carnal’ laity – a division that ‘denied the status of laity the same quality of piety it attributed to clergy’. In England, however, as Eamon Duffy has so meticulously documented, the ‘stripping of the altars’, especially between 1547 and 1553, was not merely perceived as a specifically Protestant religious act, but also as an institutionalised act of state. At its heart ‘was the necessity of destroying, of cutting, hammering, scraping or melting into a deserved oblivion the monuments of popery, so that the doctrines they embodied might be forgotten.’⁸ Such attempts at the physical erasure of collective memory are, of course, permanent features of political as well as religious history – from the refashioning of some churches into ‘temples of reason’ in post-revolutionary France, to the literal and symbolic toppling of statues of Josef Stalin and Saddam Hussein in our own time.

In any case, there is substantial historical evidence of a genuinely religious art which does not set out to be iconic; its function is different though not unrelated. ‘I want to paint man and woman’, wrote Van Gogh, ‘with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise, but which we now seek to confer through the actual radiance of our colour vibrations’.⁹ Even more self-evidently, the work of a Rembrandt (especially, perhaps, in his etchings), or nearly all of Rouault, may achieve something of what the icon achieves, but its function is still other. It may set out to enflesh and communicate a transfigured and transfiguring Christian vision, but it is not explicitly liturgical and ecclesiastical in character. Indeed it could even be argued that Western Christianity has largely abandoned formally iconic art since about 1300, since the intimate union of visual art with liturgy, which survives in the Eastern tradition, has never been entirely taken for granted in Western Europe – especially where Protestantism has predominated – and has lived on only in a very debased form, if at all. Hence the key question here is not only the perennial one about the nature of the liturgy itself, but also whether the partial divorce between visual art and liturgy has necessarily been an unmitigated disaster for the Christian (and secular) imagination of the West. Such a debate should itself proceed, as Rowan Williams once reminded us, beyond the simple fallacy which deduces the proposition ‘all art should be liturgical’ from the proposition ‘all liturgy should be artistic’.¹⁰

the didactic dimension

Both art and theology have been described as ‘raids on the inarticulate’ in their attempts to extend the basic experience of faith into new fields. In the Latin West, as opposed to the orthodox East, Ruskin’s leading question (cited at the outset of this book) as to ‘how far has Fine Art, in all or any ages of the world, been conducive to the religious life?’ remains a pertinent and perennial one. Ruskin’s own point of reference was, of course, European Gothic art and architecture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where both served as powerful didactic instruments. Indeed as early as 1005 a local synod at Arras had already proclaimed that ‘art teaches the unsettled what they cannot learn from books’. Two centuries later we find Bonaventure defining the visual not only as an open scripture made visible through painting, for those who were uneducated and could not read, but also as an aid to ‘the sluggishness of the affections ... for our emotion is aroused more by what is seen than by what is heard’,¹¹ and the transitory nature of human memory is such that ‘the things we have seen remain with us more than things we have heard’.

The aesthetic consequences of these assumptions are to be found in many decorative schemes – from the crudest Doom painting above the chancel arch of a remote rural church to the elaborate sculptural programmes of Chartres or Lincoln. Yet recent scholarship has increasingly underlined the degree to which the Gothic was designed to function as more than a mere visual aid. It also served as a medium for religious insight and spiritual awareness, with a specifically sacramental function in the worship of God. This was especially the case with the interior space of many French Gothic cathedrals. There, as the famous Abbot Suger of St Denis in Paris (Figure 2), described it:

I see myself dwelling in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of heaven; and that, by the Grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner ... transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial.¹²

In other words, the building itself had the capacity to lead the mind from the world of appearances to the contemplation of the divine order, and to render spiritual things visible. Yet we also know, especially from Suger himself, that French cathedral Gothic was also felt to be just as important for its technical excellence, as a feat of engineering and intellect, as it was for its spiritual and culturally reflexive qualities. Here God – the architect of the universe – was worshipped most highly in his attributes of light, measure and number. In this sense there is nothing mysterious about the unparalleled success of Gothic, for, as Heer describes it ‘a new technique and a new approach to art were yoked to a spiritual vision heavily preoccupied with “technology”, mathematics and geometry’.¹³ Yet it could be argued that, at the same time, the initially didactic functions of such religious art were, in a sense, being intellectualised, even secularised. Such art was in truth designed to instruct all believers, but how far was it made for the believer and how far for the God whom that believer worshipped? William Golding’s novel The Spire illuminates this issue – the unstable equilibrium between the didactic and the sacramental – with power and insight. How far was his Dean Jocelin’s cathedral to serve primarily as a sermon in stone or as a gratuitous act of faith? What mattered more in it, the worshipper or the worshipped?

Similar tensions are to be found elsewhere in the history of Christian art, and most notably perhaps in the relationship between Catholic doctrine and Baroque art and architecture during the Counter-Reformation and its colonial aftermath. The rationale for such a relationship was perhaps threefold. One was that art could serve as a means of reasserting orthodox Christian dogma to Catholic elites already overexposed to both the secular humanism and pagan mythologies that pervaded Renaissance life, art, and thought. The second was that, as St Basil had put it over twelve hundred years earlier, ‘artists do as much for religion with their pictures as the orators do with their eloquence’.¹⁴ Hence their role in responding to the specific injunction of the Council of Trent to reform and reinvigorate the Catholic Church using art as a vehicle – while also visually reaffirming Roman auctoritas – was perceived as a potentially important one. Finally, in direct opposition to Protestant teaching, and Protestantism’s whitewashed, minimalist aesthetic, Counter-Reformation Catholicism fostered the creation and veneration of images by formally proclaiming that the aim of art was to induce men to piety and bring them to God. Hence, while not suggesting that Counter-Reformation art is synonymous with Baroque art (indeed the former precedes the latter by over half a century), both were heavily committed – in a manner Suger would have found wholly familiar – to an overtly didactic visual theology.

This was expressed in a variety of ways. One was to use art to create or recover the lost or diminished sense of the holy. The means were to strive for what Argan has called ‘a sacred theatricality’, whereby the exterior or even more the interior of Baroque churches – whether in Venice or Vierzehnheiligen – became a glorious forecourt to Heaven. Indeed, as Argan perceptively comments,

the very fact that the declared aim of Baroque poetics was the ‘marvellous’, which implies the suspension of the intellectual faculty, demonstrates in what zones of the human mind propaganda was to act through the image – on the imagination in fact, considered as the source and the impulse of feelings, which in their turn were to be forced into action.¹⁵

In modern terminology such a cognitive strategy – familiar to Bernini and his contemporaries as ‘hearing through the eyes’ – could be described as aiming at a ‘subliminal’ level of communication, where visual images have an auxiliary, instrumental function. In the Gesu in Rome, for example, the intellectual unity of the iconography, spreading from chapel to chapel and nave to nave, and emulated in the spatial and spiritual unity of the architecture, attempted, in Howard Hibbard’s phrase, ‘to furnish a progressive religious experience for those who entered’.¹⁶ Once inside, especially when gazing upwards at Gaulli’s ‘The Adoration of the Holy Name of Jesus’ on the ceiling (Figure 3), one does not remain a passive observer, but becomes an active participant in the religious drama itself. At the same time, if two major transformations in the concept of religious art between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were from contemplation to excitation, and from narrative to propaganda, the third – epitomised in the Gesu itself – was a built form that fitted a new conception of piety. In the simplicity of a single nave the faithful could receive the full impact of the preacher’s words and easily follow the ceremonies in the short apse which replaced the long and complex choir of the Gothic cathedral. ‘For ‘even in our churches’ said Oliva, the Jesuit Vicar-General in 1664, ‘we do not go beyond certain limits of extent and height which put obstacles in the way of our preachers and interfere with the devotion of our visitors’.¹⁷ There were limits, too, on the form and subject matter of painting and sculpture within. As Howard Hibbard has clearly documented, it is certain that the Church authorities

had a firm and measurable hold on what they wanted to be represented in their churches. The lives and miracles of their saints as well as their dogmatic beliefs had to be illustrated and this task could not, of course, be handled by the artists without programmes prepared for them by learned clerics.¹⁸

The decorative schema of the Gesu’s own chapels exemplifies such a process at work. It proceeds like a sermon from anecdotal references to this world and its ills, goes on to invoke the joyous birth and triumphant sacrifice of the living Christ, and finally offers a meditation on heaven and its ineffable mysteries. The clear pattern and progressive development of the theme is unfolded and elaborated like a sermon, with parallels of Old ...