Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in Gutter: 0.6718in August 12, 2008 11:37
introduction
It is widely acknowledged that Paul Tillich’s 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
Tillich’s theological encounter with art that has been most profound,
creative and influential (albeit often indirectly). Moreover, Tillich’s
reflections on the relationship between theology and art were crucial,
indeed in many ways formative, for his wider project of a theology of cul-
ture, 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 Tillich’s life-
time. Among other factors, new movements (e.g. impressionism, expres-
sionism, modernism), new media (e.g. photography and film) and new
estimations of the role of the artist (e.g. art for art’s 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 Tillich’s 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 con-
sider Tillich’s 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 Gutter: 0.6718in August 12, 2008 11:37
Tillich’s admission that he found in this moment ‘keys’ for the inter-
pretation of human existence and his awareness of a feeling of joy that
he can only compare to ‘that which in religious language is normally
designated by the name revelation’ are crucial for an understanding
of the role that art plays in his subsequent theology. For Tillich, art
‘expresses meaning’ and ‘indicates what the character of a spiritual sit-
uation is’ (RS, 85). In other words, art is the clearest indicator of the
self-interpretation of a particular situation; if culture as a whole is the
expression of the totality of humanity’s creative self-interpretation, it is
in art that the character of this self-interpretative activity becomes most
clearly visible. Further, because human self-interpretation, for Tillich,
inevitably embodies a response to the existential predicament of fini-
tude, art expresses the meaning of its particular culture or situation.
Never ‘simply aesthetic’ nor ‘merely formal’, art, in this interpreta-
tion, is indeed revelatory of its era, and as such revelatory of that which
enables existential meaningfulness to be grasped, that which Tillich will
later designate as ‘ultimate concern’. Here the category of revelation is
already destabilized; no longer to be associated primarily with the dis-
crete (‘concrete’) contents of religious traditions, it is now principally
understood as a ‘fundamental revelation’ (Grundoffenbarung) that ‘is
altogether indifferent with regard to its content. Man has no knowledge,
no content to show. The divine is the ground and the abyss of meaning,
the beginning and the end of every possible content . . . This is the hour
of [the] birth of religion in every man’ (GW VII, 92). For Tillich, just
as all concrete religions are grounded in this immediate non-objective
and non-symbolic apprehension of the ground of meaning and being
(‘the Unconditional’ or ‘God’), so all art, inasmuch as it is genuine art,
expresses a particular moment of human self-interpretation because it
too is grounded in this ‘gift’ or ‘breakthrough’ of ultimacy and as such,
therefore, itself expresses something – formally and symbolically – of
that ‘presence of God prior to any knowledge of God’.4
The engagement between theology and art, therefore, is correla-
tional, but not in the simple sense of providing theological answers to
cultural questions, but in the more robust sense of the reciprocal rela-
tion of religious and cultural expressions of the fundamental revelation
of meaningfulness and ultimate concern. This Idealist metaphysics of
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in Gutter: 0.6718in August 12, 2008 11:37
where it has pushed Pierre Renoir’s dear little Girl with a Watering
Can into the mud as a runner-up. Declaiming before the Institute
of Contemporary Arts, Dr. Tillich deplored Dali’s 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 classifi-
cations 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 Tillich’s view, the religious character of an artwork is not nec-
essarily 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:
Tillich’s logic is correlational: ‘pure Form’ and ‘pure Gehalt’ are impossi-
ble, 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 Gutter: 0.6718in August 12, 2008 11:37
sees all that is between heaven and earth; but not in its essence. It
is present as a study of light, colour or movement, it is present as a
piece of the surface of nature. What is shown is a new impression
or momentary vision, interesting and striking, but fundamentally a
landscape, in which the form is captured anew . . . The form is
everything, the form, which is the high point of technique and
rationality has become light and cold, despite all the surface
fireworks of colour.
(GW II, 38–9)
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)
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)
That Tillich did not rise to this challenge is undeniable; that his theology
of art is incapable of such an expansion is far less clear.16 At the same
time, however, it is important to note that Tillich’s understanding of
culture is not necessarily as elitist as Cobb’s analysis indicates and may
provide for a critical alternative to the predominantly anthropological
models of culture that have dominated ‘cultural studies’ since Clifford
Geertz’s semiotic definition of culture.17 As is widely acknowledged,
the risk of such an approach is of an undifferentiating relativism, able
to include popular culture but unable to pass judgement upon it. More
work needs to be done here, but perhaps Tillich’s alternative model of
culture as the participatory ‘totality of man’s creative self-interpretation
in a special period’ may be a fruitful corrective to the relativistic tenden-
cies of contemporary cultural analysis without resorting to a mandarin
elitism.
The point here is not so much that Tillich’s 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.
Tillich’s error here is profound: rather than discerning the future of reli-
gious art in the expressionistic style, he has been taken in by Expression-
ism 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).
Notes
1 Ortiz (1997).
2 OITC.
3 For a fuller discussion of the theological and philosophical roots of Tillich’s
project of a theology of culture, see Re Manning (2005).
4 Schüßler (1987), 161.
5 See Kegley (1960) and Dixon, Jr (1963).
6 Nuovo (1987), 394.
P1: SJT
9780521859899c10 CUUK401/Manning ISBN: 978 0 521 85989 9Top: 0.45833in Gutter: 0.6718in August 12, 2008 11:37
Further reading
Adams, James Luther (1965). Paul Tillich’s 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 Tillich’s Philosophy of Art. Berlin/New York:
Walter de Gruyter.
Re Manning, Russell (2005). Theology at the End of Culture: Paul Tillich’s The-
ology of Culture and Art. Leuven: Peeters.
Thiessen, Gesa (1993). ‘Religious Art is Expressionistic. A Critical Appreciation
of Paul Tillich’s Theology of Art’. Irish Theological Quarterly 59:4, 301–11.