Professional Documents
Culture Documents
introduction
It is widely acknowledged that Paul Tillichs engagement with the
arts was the most sustained of any theologian of his generation. Indeed,
more than that of any other theologian of the twentieth century, it is
Tillichs theological encounter with art that has been most profound,
creative and influential (albeit often indirectly). Moreover, Tillichs
reflections on the relationship between theology and art were crucial,
indeed in many ways formative, for his wider project of a theology of culture, itself fundamental to his reformulation of theology as correlative to
the concerns of his contemporaries. From our perspective, it is perhaps
all too easy to overlook the dramatic and profoundly unsettling
transformations that took place in the artistic spheres in Tillichs lifetime. Among other factors, new movements (e.g. impressionism, expressionism, modernism), new media (e.g. photography and film) and new
estimations of the role of the artist (e.g. art for arts sake, ready-mades
and popular art) all led to a need for a new theological engagement, one
deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, inspired by the German Idealist
tradition of art theory and immersed within the new art of the avant
garde. It is to Tillichs great credit that he took up this challenge, and it
is his great achievement that he gave to theologians and religious people
a means of engaging with the new artistic situation of the twentieth
century. Drawing on theological, philosophical and cultural analyses,
Tillich gave his contemporaries a language with which they could enter
into a genuine dialogue with the arts, both in terms of theological
interpretation of art and of theological development through art.
This chapter has four sections. In an opening section I will consider Tillichs formative place within the now widely established field
of theology and the arts, emphasizing the extent to which Tillich can
be considered the unacknowledged theoretician of the mainstream of
this significant development in theological studies. Secondly, I will
152
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
153
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
154
Russell Re Manning
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
155
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
156
Russell Re Manning
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
157
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
158
Russell Re Manning
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
159
where it has pushed Pierre Renoirs dear little Girl with a Watering
Can into the mud as a runner-up. Declaiming before the Institute
of Contemporary Arts, Dr. Tillich deplored Dalis work as a sample
of the very worst in what is called the religious revival of today.
The depiction of Jesus did not fool Tillich: A sentimental but very
good athlete on an American baseball team . . . The technique is
beautifying naturalism of the worst kind. I am horrified by it!
Theologian Tillich added it all up: Simply junk! In Spain, Artist
Dali seethed under the misimpression that Tillich had said
drunk. Retorted he, with mustaches atremble: I have been
drinking mineral water exclusively for more than ten years!7
The second conclusion has the important consequence that the styles
employed by theologian of art in his or her discernment of the religious
character of artworks will not necessarily correspond to those used by
art theorists or historians of art, whose judgement is made under the
sovereignty of Form (GW IX, 318). Of course, this is not to say that
these categories may not coincide, and indeed the aesthetic classifications may well be of use to the theologian, but they should not be
identified. Hence, the range of the expressionistic religious style, for
example, extends well beyond those works identified by the aesthetic
style Expressionism. Equally, this consideration should make it clear
that, on Tillichs view, the religious character of an artwork is not necessarily a reflection of its aesthetic value. However defined (in terms of
beauty, its place within a tradition, its formal qualities, its emotional
expressiveness etc.), aesthetic value must never be identified with the
religious value of a work of art.
It is on the basis of his analysis of the constituent elements of art that
Tillich proceeds to a typology of religious styles that is itself determined
by the organization of these elements. Accordingly:
three fundamental types of style are revealed: the Form-dominated
style (impressionism-realism), the Gehalt-dominated style
(romanticism-expressionism), the balanced style (idealismclassicism).
(319)
Tillichs logic is correlational: pure Form and pure Gehalt are impossible, just as culture and religion stand in a necessarily reciprocal relation
to each other. As a result, Tillich is adamant that the most religious style
is that in which Gehalt predominates, but without wholly subverting
Form. Tillich names this style expressionistic and characterizes it by
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
160
Russell Re Manning
Form-dominated,
subjective
Form-dominated,
objective
Balanced, subjective
Balanced, objective
Gehalt-dominated,
subjective
Gehalt-dominated,
objective
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
161
and the orthodoxies of determinate theological traditions. Once, however, his classification is understood, his interpretations become more
explicable, indeed even predictable. Take, for example, his contrasting
interpretations of Cezanne
and van Gogh, Starry Night:
With Cezanne,
landscape is all important; everything less than
almost half his pictures just that. On the other hand, his groups
and portraits too become landscapes. His great self-portraits are
views of the fullness of being, not of a formed personality. And
furthermore, the pictures are beautiful, and that is the main thing.
(MTD, 107 (19 June 1936))
Or, consider another artist, Van Gogh, and, for instance, his Starry
Night. Here . . . we have the character of going below the surface. It
is a description of the creative powers of nature. It goes into the
depths of reality where the forms are dynamically created. He does
not accept the surface alone. Therefore he goes into those depths in
which the tension of the forces creates nature.
(OAA, 95)
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
162
Russell Re Manning
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
163
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
164
Russell Re Manning
mean a negation of God but it does mean: God who has withdrawn
in order to show us that our religious forms in all dimensions were
largely lacking both in honesty and consecration.
(OAA, 228)
In his numerous typological surveys of the 1950s and 1960s, most of
which consist of short lectures, Tillich applies his analysis of the religious styles of art in a variety of different ways.10 While these addresses
invariably contain some startling observations on particular artworks
and are consistent with Tillichs wider project of theology of culture,
they lack the penetration and, dare I say, vision, of his earlier writings on art. One has the impression here that Tillich is struggling to
express himself in this changed situation. His analysis was born out of
his close engagement with the art and artists of German Expressionism,
and its theonomous potency comes from Tillichs theological participation within the cultural life of the Weimar Republic; it seems stretched
even heteronomous when taken out of context and reformulated (again
and again) for an American audience. John Dillenberger reports that
while Tillich knew Willem de Kooning and praised the fullness of reality without a concrete subject matter of Jackson Pollocks Number 1,
1948, he makes no reference that I know of to Mark Rothko or Barnett
Newman, though Hannah Tillich informed me that he was fascinated by
Rothkos paintings (OAA, xx). This is disappointing, not simply because
of Tillichs failure to engage with his situation, but also because this is
a style of art crying out for precisely the kind of theological engagement
that Tillich could, but does not, provide!
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
165
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
166
Russell Re Manning
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
167
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
168
Russell Re Manning
The point here is not so much that Tillichs interpretation does not
coincide with that of the artists, it is rather that the artworks themselves
simply cannot support the theological weight that Tillich gives to them.
Tillichs error here is profound: rather than discerning the future of religious art in the expressionistic style, he has been taken in by Expressionism as the Trojan Horse of a secular and nihilistic aesthetic alternative
to religion. Tillich is justified in his later equivocation: expressionism
cannot reinvigorate traditional Christian symbols. The best he can hope
for is a waiting for the return of the hidden God who has withdrawn
and for whom we must wait again (OAA, 228).
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
169
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
170
Russell Re Manning
radical theologies, such as that of Mark C. Taylor.29 Like Tillichs theology of culture, Taylors project of a/theology is an attempt to think
about religion and after God; to articulate the displaced presence of
the religious other within and through culture.30 Through his critical
reception of postmodern philosophy, Taylor provides the possibilities
for a contemporary Tillichian theology of art. Tillichs sacred void can
thus serve as the dis-figuring of the unconditioned not of the experience or knowledge of the absence of God, but of the absence of the
experience and knowledge of God that is the characteristic of all true
Christian philosophical mysticism and that Tillich himself refers to as
the Grundoffenbarung.31 Similar to Marcs understanding of vision as a
Weltdurchschauung or looking-through-the-world, such a theological
seeing of art transcends the mystical enchantment of the aesthetic in its
endless deferral and refusal to settle for what Tillich called the whole
cemetery of dead categories that are the legacy of the nineteenth century (OAA, 182).
Tillich consistently closed his late surveys of the relations between
art and religion with the pressing question of the future of religious art.
While he remained committed to the priority of the expressive style,
he nonetheless realized that the future of religious art lay elsewhere.
When he admonished his audience at the end of his last ever lecture in
the theology of art, Religious Dimensions of Contemporary Art (1965),
not to look back to the wonderful fixed world of the years before 1900
in which everything felt familiar, he no doubt included himself and
his own Romantic-Idealist embrace of the Expressionistic avant garde.
Instead he points forward to a situation of nonart, theology without
God, psychology without soul, philosophy without philia and music
without the muses:
And this certainly is a situation which makes us dizzy: A kind of
metaphysical dizziness grasps us. Yet we must encounter it.
(182)
Notes
1 Ortiz (1997).
2 OITC.
3 For a fuller discussion of the theological and philosophical roots of Tillichs
project of a theology of culture, see Re Manning (2005).
4 Schuler
(1987), 161.
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
171
7 Time, 19 November 1956. For an interesting consideration of Tillichs misinterpretation of the painting, see Novak (2007).
8 See Peter Steinacker (1989) for a defence of the claim that inhaltlich stimmt
Tillich mit dem expressionistischen Verstandnis
der Geschichte und Kultur
uberein
(in terms of content, Tillich belongs in the Expressionistic inter
pretation of history and culture).
9 Rex Crawford (1953), 139.
10 Scharlemann identifies four different typologies, with three, four, five and
six types respectively. All are, however, fundamentally consistent with the
basic typology outlined above. See Scharlemann (1985), 173.
11 Dillenberger (1987), 221. This criticism is also echoed in Begbie (1987), 103f.,
Nuovo (1987), 4002 and Baumgarten (1994), 214. See also Henel (1981), 59.
12 Nuovo (1987), 398.
13 Cobb (1995), 723.
14 Ibid., 73. All of which make his failure to engage with mid-century developments even more frustrating.
15 Ibid., 78. For Dillenbergers comment, see OAA, xxiii.
16 Cobb (2005).
17 Geertz (1973).
18 Thomas Matthews remarks that styles which disrupt the naturally given
appearance of things cannot be grouped together and interpreted as expressionist, for within different styles the so-called distortions have widely
different meanings. The elongated figures and exaggerated curves of Art
Nouveau, for example, do not betray a concern for the ground of being itself
but rather a concern for a never-never land of sensual fantasy. Moreover, even
when we are sure that the artist is profoundly interested in the religious,
as in Byzantine art (to use Tillichs example), the so-called distortions are
often conventional rather than expressionist in intention. Thus the awkward poses, the angular patterning of lights and shadows, the irrational perspective Byzantine traits which might be mistaken for expressionistic
these are characteristics of a thousand-year tradition of learning to draw
from copying manuscripts instead of from copying live models. Matthews
(1967), 17.
19 See, for example, OAA, 989.
20 Palmer (1990), 23.
21 Nietzsche (1984), 105.
22 For example, Monk by the Sea (1819).
23 Morgan (1996), 324.
24 Ibid., 326f., 352 citing Marc (1978), 112.
25 Marc (1978), 102, 108 in Morgan (1996), 327, 329.
26 Marc (1978), 112 (brackets enclose original text which Marc crossed out;
emphasis in original) in Morgan (1996), 327.
27 Marc (1978), 169 in Morgan (1996), 332.
28 Morgan (1996), 341.
29 Stoker (2006).
30 M. C. Taylor (1987) and (1992).
31 M. C. Taylor (1992). The contrast between experiential and ecstatic mysticism is drawn from Turner (1995).
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in
172
Russell Re Manning
Further reading
Adams, James Luther (1965). Paul Tillichs Philosophy of Culture, Science, and
Religion. New York: Harper & Row.
Baumgarten, Barbara Dee (1994). Visual Art as Theology. New York: Peter Lang.
Dillenberger, John (1987). A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities: The Visual Arts
and the Church. London: SCM.
Palmer, Michael (1984). Paul Tillichs Philosophy of Art. Berlin/New York:
Walter de Gruyter.
Re Manning, Russell (2005). Theology at the End of Culture: Paul Tillichs Theology of Culture and Art. Leuven: Peeters.
Thiessen, Gesa (1993). Religious Art is Expressionistic. A Critical Appreciation
of Paul Tillichs Theology of Art. Irish Theological Quarterly 59:4, 30111.