Or, How Art Styles Dictate Religious Piety
A while ago a book by the art historian Elizabeth Lev called How Catholic Art Saved the Faith: The Triumph of Beauty and Truth in Counter-Reformation Art was released to much acclaim in our corners of the internet. The title implies a lofty goal, one which I am hesitant to say she succeeded at but is also evident of a deeper problem in the activities of Christian art historians. Yet the goal of this article is to dissect her theological implications by reviewing her art historical argument in the light of aesthetic analysis. Or, to search out the spiritual implications of this counter-reformation art and to see if it was indeed a pinnacle retort to our reformation heritage.
Many Catholics set forth the book as a great answer to Protestants and our “degradation” of art. I don’t recall her ever dealing in detail with any of the artists of the reformation and so the feeling I had while reading it was not so triumphalist. I thought she merely showed that Roman Catholic artists made Roman Catholic art and did not prove that their art was integral to the triumph of Roman, or Tridentine, theology. Originally the word I used to describe the feeling was this; fake. I didn’t mean fake in a sense of pure fabrication but a sense of not being given the complete story. It was a glossary overview that presupposed many things that it set out to prove. But to give some grace I think the best term is rather; triumphalist.
I am not accusing Lev because she is a Roman Catholic, my critique of her is my same critique of many Christian art historians, especially those who think in worldview frameworks. Francis Schaeffer or Hans Rookmaaker come to mind. The triumphalist sentiment is based in this; Christians will look at a historical Christian movement and assume that the movement had one thing on their mind, concern for souls, and any power grabs were done by a Judas in their midst. And any success or beauty is an obvious proof of the blessing of God. And so it seems that this sentiment is woven throughout her book with the usual moral caveats against immoral artists and clerics that so easily come to those who defend what they believe to be all around good. Her appraisal of the Baroque is one of almost unqualified praise and the movement as a whole is cast as a manifestation of piety. It is this piety which is the focus of the whole book, in essence. The faithful, by way of art, were encouraged towards not just some piety but extreme piety.
Extreme piety is, however, a hallmark of someone who has no peace in their spiritual standing. An obsession with testing their personal fruit. If the twenty fifth session of the Council of Trent meant to invoke piety among the faithful, extreme piety was the result of such aesthetic rapture which the artists of the time were capable of. It is not so much the fault of intention as it is the fault of a beauty which the common man may have no way or reason to feel control over. The words of Trent cannot negate the effect of beauty on the unsuspecting, leading them to act of extreme piety as well as sedation.
“And the bishops shall carefully teach this,-that, by means of the histories of the mysteries of our Redemption, portrayed by paintings or other representations, the people is instructed, and confirmed in (the habit of) remembering, and continually revolving in mind the articles of faith; as also that great profit is derived from all sacred images, not only because the people are thereby admonished of the benefits and gifts bestowed upon them by Christ, but also because the miracles which God has performed by means of the saints, and their salutary examples, are set before the eyes of the faithful; that so they may give God thanks for those things; may order their own lives and manners in imitation of the saints; and may be excited to adore and love God, and to cultivate piety. But if any one shall teach, or entertain sentiments, contrary to these decrees; let him be anathema.”
Protestant piety was molded around a life of standing in the midst of something hostile. Encapsulated by Luther’s statement “here I stand, I can do no other”. Roman piety, on the whole, took on an air of spectacle. Decisions were made by declaration and majesty. Opulence and Council decree. Similarly, Baroque paintings declared things by overwhelming the viewer with splendor. This is the sedation I referred to. So Romanist piety became that of majesty. And majesty exemplified in ideal forms, intense light, etc. when presented to a person turns into “rapture”. But this piety of rapture and sedation is the result of the contemplation of overwhelming images. It is a total engagement of the senses rather than their dismissal. Because this type of piety requires a lot of energy, the Baroque movement naturally ran out of steam but not before it thoroughly transformed the public image of the Roman church. United now not in theology as much as in visual culture. The modern desire for the revival of beauty in the churches is based on this paradigm of pietism in action. A bustling culture of production that indicates revival. But by the late Baroque many paintings, which tried to contain images of splendor, ended up being energy-less and all the splendor became gaudiness and then eventually became kitsch.
Even those living and working at that time could sense or prove that the Roman piety was far more of a visual culture than it was a legitimate change of internal character. First, the whole theological framework of regulated worship within the reformation world was directly counter to the aesthetic framework of worship that Rome had maintained and then reaffirmed with Trent’s pronouncements. Calvin called this feverish degree of dedication to images and its impact on the psyche of the viewer idolomania. He says “It is certain that the idolomania, as the minds of men are now enthralled with it, can be cured in no other way than by removing the matter that is causing the madness,” as well as “To be sure, it cannot be denied without foolishness that the world was seized by this blindness more than ever when our men stepped forward. Therefore, it was necessary to urge people with these prophetic rebukes and to drag them away forcefully as it were from that madness, in order that they might no longer believe that God is satisfied with mere ceremonies like childish theatrical shows”. (Calvin, p29) And “Moreover, those fabricated forms of worship are often disposed to a certain appearance of wisdom, as Paul also confesses. Furthermore, since they have very much external splendor that falls before the eyes, they smile at us more-at our fleshly nature-than those things alone that God requires and approves, since the latter are less ostentatious”.
Second, the protestant artists themselves were aware of the aesthetic rapture which took hold of the faithful and concluded that it was far more detrimental than salvific. In 1614 artist Adriaen van de Venne painted Fishing for Souls, in which there are many boats on the water fishing for humans to save. The reformed boats are afloat and gathering up many men to safety with nets with the virtues faith, hope and charity inscribed on them. The Catholic boats are sinking due to their weighty incense burners, their music books and instruments. One boat isn’t even throwing their net to any men but to gather up things and objects. Perhaps relics and decorations. In the foreground there is a couple, a man and a woman both swimming in different directions. I would associate them with Adam and Eve, with Eve being again tempted to the delights of the flesh on the Catholic shores and Adam trying to get back to a boat of faith and virtue with the protestants.
The lynchpin of Catholic art, for both its power and its subversion of virtue, was the doctrine of transubstantiation and its effect of materializing the spiritual world and state of being. Trent could try to assuage the effect by prioritizing the thing behind the images and not the images themselves, but the cause of conflating essence and existence in the eucharist had consequences. This is not a theory I am pulling out of thin air. First Lev implies it when she says, “Brandishing brushes, girded with personal faith, and flanked by theologians, artists labored to ignite the imagination and deepen devotion to the Eucharist in their increasingly empirical age.” But more importantly it is a theme which other art historians of the past have noticed. Wylie Sypher in his book Four Stages of Renaissance Art goes on at length to explain the collapse of the spiritual into the material. “The Council, in effect, gave the pious a confidence in sensory experience and offered a means of reducing the anxiety in mannerist consciousness, relaxing the tension between body and soul. For baroque piety and art are able to consolidate and fulfill experience at the level of the flesh, and they do so ardently, triumphantly, unthinkingly. If the image is sufficiently powerful, if the physical sensation is adequately enriched, the crisis in mannerist conscience can be resolved in the external, material world, and by the visible signs of religion and piety. The act of faith can be performed and terminated, literally, in the senses.” The act of consecration of the host for the eucharist was a similar issue. During the ceremony the spiritual experience could be represented and consummated in the flesh. Whatever the intentions of Trent the effect was this move down. It was not the flesh that was elevated into a spiritual experience, but the spiritual was brought down into the flesh. This whole ordeal was the “secularizing of the transcendental.”
There are a few key points he makes but the one which should be focused on is not just the secularizing of heaven into temporal experience for the faithful but the amount of pure energy which is required by the faithful to maintain this piety. “If the two realms of baroque art-the world below and the world above-are separated, they are not, however, differentiated, since both are realized at the level of the senses. Again, baroque consolidates its experience in the material. Baroque piety simply performs a substitution, or a direct transference, using the world below to represent the world above; it affirms the glory of the eternal by overstating the temporal. This is one reason for the excessive magniloquence of baroque in its upper stories and celestial registers. The baroque artist is constantly trying to over actualize his sublimities; and when he does so, he is in danger of being ridiculously literal rather than imaginative…It demands a superhuman energy and vision to sustain the magnificence of this upper world; if itis not overpoweringly realized, it looks merely gaudy.” A good percentage of this aesthetic rapture is just the expenditure of energy coupled with the splendor and overstimulation of the senses. Together they create a sentiment of awe and in piety they lead the faithful to more rituals which are echoes of this aesthetic dimension. Brown scapulars, prayer cards, personal art and home statues of saints. As well as audible practices such as the priority of Latin prayers or the invocation of the saints. These are done with the primary factor being a Catholic aesthetic rather than a genuine relationship with God.
This is why when trying to seduce average believers, each tradition does not focus on the relationship with God as much as how it looks and feels. In the end a relationship with God will look very similar across traditions but the traditional aesthetic is more marketable to evangelicals whose idea of liturgical prayer ends with the Lord’s Prayer. This aesthetic piety and rapture is seen today as well. Not in a system of splendor but in the system of so called “vibes”. The new piety of the right was curated by meme war edits and silly cartoon editorials on social media. Highly charged reels of crusaders and holy people overwhelm the amount of sensory experience we are capable of having on these platforms and instill a particular piety that is curated by these images and slogans. These images and slogans are made in such a way that the energy required to uphold them is minimal compared to a majestic cathedral and hence it takes a different approach to remove the energy and show the kitsch nature of the underlying images and slogans. Meme war piety is based on a prior catechesis in the terminology and aesthetics of the imagery. It is a self perpetuating mythos. One meme could contain five years of evolution of a character, a slogan twelve layers deep and a soundtrack that originated with some obscure artist who is now big and posted by an anon account whose profile picture is a frog. There is no literalism or plainness of understanding to a man flexing while saying he will not eat the bugs. It makes no sense except to those trapped within the energy of the meme war and are reinforcing it by their perpetual involvement.
It is an energy trap primarily because it does not demand good works all while enticing those within to post about the good works that are considered components of this new right. To complain about not being able to build cathedrals is a catharsis to forgive themselves for not being able to build real cathedrals, because cathedrals have become a symbol of this new right, of a renewed beauty and sense of belonging to a history. But due to expense, and laws and, let’s be honest, an actual lack of will, most churches will remain pragmatic and cathedrals will remain in dreams. This baroque piety is outward facing. It is boisterous. It tries to bring the world’s condemnation by its so-called joviality. It sets itself up against the alternative piety of introspection and seclusion. This they call pietism.
In history the art of this introspective piety was the Mannerist movement. Whose entire sensatory experience has famously been summarized by Aldious Huxley in Meditation on El Greco as being “stuck in a whale”. This piety turns the gaze inward to the twisting of the death of Jonah in the fish. Escape from which can only be expected by God doing some great work of intervention rather than God waiting for your own personal intervention in your life to bring on the shimmering spectacle of a healthy life of order and harmony. Mannerism portrays the life of faith as the traditionalists talk about it. Misery, penance, fasting and other soft ascetic practices. While the baroque offers visually what they expect to get from those practices. Heroic living, social martyrdom, ideal beauty and a glistening vision of angels while at the Mass. In the meme world the mannerist, contorted forms are juxtaposed with the idealist, baroque forms indicating a disconnect and a holy opposition. The mangled and mangy man is not primarily a repenting sinner and sufferer, but a man cast out by God Himself for following too long in the ways of his flesh and passion. An attempted visual reproduction of the idea that evil leads to the degeneration of not just the soul but the body as well, since body and soul are connected. To show how evil is nothing and to nothing the evil doer goes. “Conveys in the hideous staring head of the slain calf a sense of primal guilt and primal pathos…of El Greco’s Lacoon, who seems destined to his serpent beneath a torn sky that is like a wound in the mind…Mannerist art holds everything in a state of dissonance, dissociation and doubt.”
The mannerist piety, which is now associated with the modern left or the “evanjellyfish” sentimentality, is the piety of fiat. Baroque has layers of qualitative explanation to the health of its piety, natural law, natural order, human flourishing, civilizational trajectory, health of the body leading towards the beautiful body and more. Mannerism is arbitrary, “You must obey this God, and reason about Him, but His laws operate unpredictably. The renaissance Logos-God revealed His nature and His dispensation by the regularity of a platonic Order; the mannerist God of Donne and Calvin and the Jesuits impose His will by fiat, and His justice is despotic, inexplicable, perhaps equivocal. Really what is happening here is the attempted reaction to a world without disciplinarian order towards spiritual life. There is no method for growth. No novenas that bring answers, no rituals that infuse grace, continually building upon the God given natural grace, and most importantly, no blessing for simply being a believer. In the mannerist world the Jesuit practices rose to prominence again insinuating an extreme personal spirituality that revolved around subjectivism. The Jesuits developed an approach of looseness, the casuist could extract penance from his subject by adapting the laws to his particular case and by treating the sinner as an exceptional case. This applies more to the evangelical world than it does to the modern left, who regularly diagnose and penalize within categories. The evangelical attempts to judge every divorce on its own terms, every purity failure in light of personal problems rather than a collective issue, and profanity as a litmus of personal spiritual freedom. Baroque increasingly revolts at this idea of judging based on discernable instances. All divorce is evil, perversion is societal control which you must fight or else resign your crusader card, and profanity is correspondent to the level of righteous anger coursing through your veins. Mannerist piety is bookended by approximations. Its motto is “good enough”. With this as its motto is it any wonder why the dialectic has come to be that this new cathedral of a new Christendom is nowhere to be seen? On one hand the mannerist looks at the churches already here, and knowing that all of life is under the will of God, those churches must be a part of His will. The sinner is safe within His will. Going outside of His will to do something majestic is unnecessary. What we have now is sufficient for the salvation of souls, it is good enough. On the other end is the baroque which sees such discretion as an insult to the triumphant news of God unto whom we should wish to return that majesty in some way. As well as the sense that all things can be set right if we just listen to His revealed will within nature. His will is ordered and patterned. It results in patterns as well. We do that which Adam and Eve didn’t. The answer to their problem was to just listen to God’s word and what He explained as the pattern.
Aesthetically speaking the mannerist and the baroque can be separated by their need to accumulate. The baroque fills its literal and mental space with art objects, liturgical objects, collected prayers and so forth. The goodness of creation and the health of the created order for the spiritual life is visualized externally. Homes become full of the good things of life and are mirrors of their churches which decorate every corner and ornament the space of heaven itself. Mannerist is, of course, far more plain. It revels in the disproportion since it is that which reminds us of our need for God rather than allowing beauty to lull us into a false sense of security of knowing God. Ornament is simply an afterthought. A strange attempt to integrate meditative spirituality with the fact that we still live on earth and find ourselves naturally decorating things. It holds little theological significance apart from a theology of handicraft and our natural need to imitate God in His creative act. It is unnecessary for salvation and unnecessary for proper human living. An act of niceness to fellow believers.
The decline in ornament is the practical result of protestant liturgical ethics. Regulating worship thinned out the stuff that was thought necessary for the church service. As much as modern protestants with cathedral dreams would like to imagine, their heritage is one of minimization as beauty. It is not so compatible with the baroque piety revival we see happening among those longing for the new days of Christendom. An analysis of protestant piety would not conclude that it is necessarily mannerist, but any honest look would conclude that it was and is not baroque. In similar spirit those who wish to reestablish a baroque piety are quick to judge the protestant piety as mannerist simply because they wish to associate the decrepit and deformed with iconoclasm. Of course, their entire system would be nothing but kitsch and manufactured sentiment as we observed already had a few groups of iconoclasts not snuffed out the beauty of the baroque art at its height. Baroque fame is due in part to iconoclasts. Enhanced in beauty by its own martyrdom. Iconoresistance is the reason baroque piety works and is the reason for its perpetuation. Once all traditions become baroque as they desire, then no piety will remain because the energy to maintain it will have been lost. All Christian things, objects and trinkets will become Christian ornaments.
The protestant disornamentation is the move by which they wished to steer away from the dread of mannerism and the gaudiness of the baroque. Their goal was to continue on in the path of a revealing of a religion of spiritual truth and spiritual worship. The antithesis was the old Jewish customs which, though instituted by God Himself, did not please Him when done in vain. How much less would He consider the rites and traditions of the church, those not instituted by God but man? For whom the draw is so indescribable in the face of a beautyless world and ugly living that to follow them feels like following God’s own divine commands. It is an unfortunate pattern that Israel of old fell into and has been fought against in the times of our fathers in the faith. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to the Abbot of St. Thierry saying “I say naught of the vast height of your churches, their immoderate length, their superfluous breadth, the costly polishings, the curious carvings and the paintings which attract the worshipper’s gaze and hinder his attention, and seem to me in some sort a revival of the ancient Jewish rites”.
St. Jerome in a letter to Nepotian elaborated on the connection between Jews and ornament. “Then rejecting the superstition of the Jews, we must also reject the gold; or approving the gold we must approve the Jews as well. For we must either accept them with the gold or condemn them with it.”
Just as well, Abraham Kuyper called the ornamental and symbolic religion a lower level of religion. One superimposed by political authority to command homogeneity in spiritual practice, so that all spiritual activity could be terminated in the physical and material. “Religion also rises to that higher plain where it graduates from the symbolical into the clearly-conscious life, and thereby necessitates both the division of worship into many forms, and the emancipation of matured religion from all sacerdotal and political guardianship…As a result of this, it [Calvinism] abandoned the symbolical form of worship, and refused, at the demand of art, to embody its religious spirit in monuments of splendor”. In his Stone Lecture on Calvinism and Art he clearly lays out his belief in the higher nature of Calvinist theology as it was able to reach a level of spiritual worship yet unseen in the annals of history. What concerns me about that is not his argument for a higher or lower level of religion but that he could not find this spiritual worship in purity in any meaningful way before Calvinism. Calvin himself would have denied this, pointing to the histories as proof that he was a simple follower of spiritual truth that is often lost among the liturgy of the ornaments. Overall he pins the sentiment of baroque piety “religion, when fully matured, will rather entirely abstain from the stimulant by which aesthetic pseudo-emotion intoxicated it”. Would the baroque pietists heed his warnings against going back to the intoxication of the old religions? I think obviously not. The use of ornament and splendor to fulfill a spiritual inclination and to signal a spiritual elevation has only served to weaken the spirit though it strengthens the resolve, as we have discussed already. A strange convergence is noted here. It is not just orthodox Christian thinkers that argue for this diminishing of ornament and focus of simplicity. We find it also in the writings of early twentieth century modernist German architects such as Adolf Loos, arguing that ornament is a degradation to a lower, more primitive culture. Beauty was to be found in proportion, material and form. Beauty was inherent in things and ornament was a wasteful way to try to express something beyond necessity. Especially for the person ornament was temporary and changed as quickly as fashion has always changed. To decorate with ornament was to prevent progress and tattoos were seen by him as the primary instance of primitivism. The modern man who tattoos himself is at the same stage of development as the earliest man. This comes to a strange intersection. The baroque man has a natural disdain for tattoos and ornaments on the human body aside from traditional customs. The baroque man attempts to connect himself not to the earliest man but with the early cultural man of his ethnic heritage. The evangelical, whether of the introspective stripe or not, is practically obsessed with tattoos and piercings and the personality they seem to invent on their bodies. It is strange the paradox that exists here. Lacking ornament in church leads to decorating of the body while those obsessed with decorating the church are more inclined to the beauty of proportion, material and form, that is the human as perfectly conceptualized.
There is also agreement with a more liberal leaning neo orthodoxy as found in Paul Tillich. Not only did Tillich express an interest in the use of abstraction rather than figurative arts he argued in his essay Protestantism and Church Architecture that protruding decorations such as a crucifix should be reinterpreted to have Christ blended in with the cross rather than hanging on it in three dimensional space. This he desires to maintain a symbolic distance as too much naturalism would confuse the congregant into an aesthetic experience rather than point them to the Word. He also advocated for the natural end of non decorative spaces, empty space. Not a merely empty space as most protestant churches have as those are spaces where the decorations were simply removed but a purposeful space that evokes the presence of a distance between the infinite and the finite as well as to emphasize the importance of the Word.
The presence of the Word should not be confused with the presence of Christ. The reformed confessions still maintain that Christ is bodily in heaven while being spiritually present in the sacrament. There are two points to dissect here. First is that the protestant theology was based on the circumscribability of the body. This is called a linear art by Heinrich Wolfflin, where the priority of line and borders is upheld. Even the garments of a lady’s dress could be mastered by lines rather than forms as is the case with a painterly art. It is this independent existence which the protestant world was holding up for the time being. While the figures in a baroque painting melted together into a sort of mass and conglomerate, the figures in a protestant art should be independent from the other figures and from the background. The painterly subsumes all forms within the work into its total image allowing for no break to happen between setting, subject and object. The second point is the concern with the absence of the body. Christ maintained a human body which means that His human body is both circumscribable and off world. Since omnipresence is not a part of the nature of humanity Christ cannot have omnipresence in his human nature. He is made everywhere present by the Holy Spirit. Nowhere is this belief to local bodies and absence from earth more apparent than in Dutch paintings of church interiors. The interior of Saint Bavo or Buurkerk as painted by Saenredam is profoundly empty. One could go looking for the body of Christ and never find it. It is devoid of the presence of Christ’s human body. It is not, however, devoid of the ability to pronounce the good news. The vast space would echo with the sounds of gospel readings and congregational singing. There is room for the Holy Spirit to move around and penetrate the hearts of those present. This is that sacred space which Tillich referred to. When the Dutch do attempt to portray Jesus in His earthly life it is very clumsy. The Raising of Lazarus by Jan Lievens is just one example of the frumpiness and tactile historically focused painting of human individuals, for, following Zwingli, their images were an extension of the history genre, where a split was created between the form in the image and the prototype in terms of metaphysical participation but not historical trajectory. The corresponding likeness of the image to the prototype was necessary for accurate history but not for accurate direction of prayers.
The various strands of protestant art from the Northern Renaissance are not a poor place to begin a response to the Baroque and Mannerist movements, as both movements and as modern modes of piety. I do not have a pure and laid out answer, I have only assessments of this protestant piety which is exemplified best in Pieta paintings. For that I suppose it shall be called Pieta piety even if it doesn’t demand constant sorrow from the practitioner.
Pieta piety stirs the emotions. Lucas Cranach the Elder was intentional that his depiction of Christ on the cross be less suitable for devotion than it was for education and prodding to emotional piety. His use of perspective was antithetical to the invocation of prayers through the images since Christ’s face is practically hidden and the viewer is placed in the scene for maximum impact. The original focus on justification by faith compared to the coming reformation’s focus on proper order and worship was justification enough to allow artworks that probed the intellect and the emotions of the individual in order to solidify their confidence in their salvation and their appreciation for the Passion.
Overlap and perspective in the Pieta art was not for the sake of realistic observation but a return to hierarchy in the image. The important and marginal found their punctuation not in size as a measure of scale but in size as a measure of location on the plane of action. In the south, in Italy, hierarchy was established by location to a central point, the vanishing point. Perhaps mentally the protestant north with their duplicity of grounding points and churches would favor an art of duplicity compared to the Papal south which desired to adhere to the centrality of the Pope. It is almost impossible to not see this when works are compared. Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden displays the northern duplicity in most of his work, particularly his Descent from the Cross or his Crucifixion Diptych. In both of those works the figures conform to perspective and spatial arraignment in order to accumulate all the narratives surrounding the crucifixion into one image while also allowing them to stand for themselves. For the culmination of the papal mind in art and the centrality of a singular point we can find no better example than Pietro Perugino’s The Delivery of the Keys to Saint Peter. Nothing else matters in the painting except the implied throne and centralization of authority. The centralization of authority is symbolized by the reliance on parallel, vertical lines. While perceived to be parallel, every vertical line, finding its base on the earth, converges to a central point because of the spherical nature of earth. The rising columns in Venusti’s Purification of the Temple find their termination together at a central point.
Restoration of nature is the third point. This because the Protestant adherence is not to an infused righteousness and an elevation of nature but an imputed righteousness and a restoration of the original faculties and created order. The Christian does not display the ideal form of human but the perfected form of themselves after an encounter with God personally. Protestant art maintains a quality of rendering the individual in accordance with its exemplary form while also advocating the primacy of the individual over the universal. Personal identity is both important to protestant theology and it is the logical development of the theology of ‘likeness’ which was the foundation of religious art in the first centuries. This makes protestant art far less collective than baroque. For the Pieta is not primarily about the moral formation of the group identity as is the Baroque, though it can hold the individual and the collective together as we will soon see. “The Reformation broke away from the semi-collectivism of the Middle Ages. Luther’s courage of confidence is personal confidence, derived from a person-to-person encounter with God. Neither popes nor councils could give him this confidence. Therefore he had to reject them just because they relied on a doctrine which blocked off the courage of confidence. They sanctioned a system in which the anxiety of death and guilt was never completely conquered. There were many assurances but no certainty, many supports for the courage of confidence but no unquestionable foundation. The collective offered different ways of resisting anxiety but no way in which the individual could take his anxiety upon himself. He was never certain; he could never affirm his being with unconditional confidence. For he never could encounter the unconditional directly with his total being, in an immediate personal relation. There was, except in mysticism, always a mediation through the Church, an indirect and partial meeting between God and the soul. When the reformation removed the mediation and opened up a direct, total, and personal approach to God, a new non-mystical courage to be was possible. It is manifest in the heroic representatives of fighting Protestantism”.
The application of these points on Pieta piety and art are points necessary for the proper identity of a protestant piety and art. The baroque cannot fit with the protestant outlook being that it was invented to counteract it. This does not mean that all topics the baroque touches on are off limits to the Pieta but that they are held differently. The preceding points of emotional stimulation via thematic elements, overlapping persons situated around independent forms and the restoration of nature experienced in individuals sets up for us the piety of contemplation mixed with reason, decentralized authority allowing for overarching conformity to be minimized and differentiation of worldly orders such as gender, race and class. All this to show that Pieta piety is inward but expressed outwardly by means of pragmatism and virtue ethics. It is not expressed in acts of splendor but in mild modes of life, but these are done with the inward intention of the experience of God’s restoration of the real, rather than an imagination of what could be. As seen in Quinten Massy’s Pieta as well as in Hugo van der Goes Pieta there is such clear delineation between the peoples. Rich and poor, man and woman, Jew and Gentile. When compared to Ruben’s Bearing of the Cross they are a pinnacle of piety that is informed, individual and balanced between the interior and exterior. The figures in Ruben’s painting are a moving mass of flesh. The clothes are also one large flowing canvas subsuming men and women into the same cloth. Emotions are triggered into uncontrollable passions, meditation is prohibited and the only thing an observer could do is to light a candle to indicate that he is worshiping. And he does this in a line of other faithful Christians who have similarly been enraptured by the spectacle and can think of nothing else but to perform a signal to themselves and to others.
The protestant should be both exceedingly cautious and aware that the minor individualism of their system, even with those collective elements, could lead to a new and disembodied mysticism of spiritual piety. Such seemed to be the case of the anabaptists as they grew from their origins. Often compatriots with the more magisterial reformers they would read past the theologians of antiquity and pick up the works of the Christian mystics. The mystics provided a renewed investment into the soul’s relation to God directly. The individualism that the reformation was interested in exporting for the sake of destabilizing baroque piety and Rome through that, was folded onto itself to expose the entire system of religion institutionalized. They provided direct and immediate access and comfort and union with the divine through personal knowledge of God, while the baroque extends external elements, the mannerist through personal suffering and the pieta through what becomes intellectual meditation. The mystic vision is a continuation of the mannerist piety moved away from any papist ideas of mediated spiritual reality. For the mystic the true expression of piety when coming into contact with God was not an external show of ordered living but a type of undoing and unforming. This was the ground for knowing God, dissolving yourself so as to become more one with Him. The anabaptists and the Pietists were at once reading the most obscure and spiritualizing authors as well as being quite fundamentalist in their applications. Literal interpretation of the scripture was held as the most accurate and faithful and second commandment was as plain as the light of the sun. And yet it is this small faction of Christians that have continued the visual language of medieval iconography and through it, along with their mystical intrigue, led the way to the invention of abstract art in the modern world.
In short the lineage of abstract art from the anabaptists and the Pietists is a lineage of spiritual authors influencing those who read them and passing on core ideas embedded at the start of abstract art. As a movement abstract art is a newer artistic expression but the virtues of abstract art are found throughout time and it is these virtues that are a part of its nature and the nature of a spirituality associated with it. The full inward expression of the anabaptists and the Pietists is best summed up in the terminology of Quietism. In Quietist Piety the goal is contemplation and abandonment of the will, and sometimes of nature, in order to be in union with God. For Quietists as well as for abstract art the virtues of contemplation, passivity, individualism, informality and anti-institutionalism are seen as a way of transcendence of the natural and fallen order. Nature is corrupted in such a way that it does not reflect God’s will in any meaningful way. It shares these concerns with the mystical traditions of theosophy which was directly influential on the birth of abstract art as a recognizable force in the art world.
A Quietist Piety is reflected in what is called insular art, a style existing in the British Isles around the sixth to ninth centuries Ano Domini, the Book of Kells being a notable example, and its features can still be seen today in the living tradition of German Fraktur. The two common features of this style are interlacing of patterns and abstract ornamentation. That is, the relationship of God and man symbolized by the interlacing of eternal patterns with imbalance and the visualization of the essence of things via abstraction aware from three dimensional realism. The decline of the excessive ornamentation is again noticed and explained by the ideas of a progress away from that which seems to give personality and towards a pure relation of essences. The purpose of insular art for the eyes of the beholder was to direct the eyes. Line and pattern would prompt the viewer to move around the image and contain the eyes to the image presented. Sharp boundaries were maintained, which sounds antithetical to contemplative actions but actually help in keeping the viewer’s focus off of the material world. According to Loos, ornament was subtracted from art over time as purity of form and subject was elevated, abstract art followed suit and disowned as much ornament and pattern as each piece could in order to produce a purity of experience. The author will now make an assessment all his own. Mark Rothko was the purist abstract artist to work. Lacking a complex pattern it still establishes a relation between the eternal and the temporal and it does this by fields of simple color but the colors are abstracted in themselves for they mimic the images that come to mind when, eyes closed, the participant is told to think of a color. The vibrating colors trick the eyes into thinking they are closed and thus in meditation. And Rothko maintains simple, real yet porous boundaries to the works.
Protestants would do well to recover a healthy mysticism. But as an act of piety, it falls short because mysticism is an encounter with God Himself and not a method of living. Those in the reformed world often confuse mysticism with repetition, because many have sought to use repetition in order to produce something. While we cannot escape the fact that Jesus says we need the Holy Spirit to understand scripture and thus commune with God we also cannot ignore that He specifically condemns vain repetition. This is because the patterns and repetitions have a form of the divine but do not actually. Pattern is another type of sedative visualization which lulls the viewer into a false sense of spiritual impact. Like the baroque splendor, the insular patterns of clothes on the man, which are also symmetrical throughout, allow the viewer to remain within the patterns. And like the vain repetition of certain prayer habits it yields a sense of encounter. The theosophists of the twentieth century were deliberate about this. All of them had the sense that the patterns found within their works came from another dimension and so to view them was to view something eternal.
The basis for mysticism is simple. We must talk to God. All pieties are in the long run nothing worth more than the direct and real life of God in the Christian. Systematizing the pieties only further separates the Christian from His God as he gets caught up in a rapture of things to do and say. The very reason piety is seen as necessary is the very trap that it lays out, to be a Christian one must practice piety in this way and then he will meet and please God. The truth is that we must reverse this. We must meet with God first and following that will come a piety that does not gather itself up into any one category. A man is not a Christian just because he loves the crusaders, tries to be a public intellectual, finds ways to suffer or memorizes the newest most ancient prayer everyone else is praying.
What started as a simple book review from a few years ago has blossomed into what I consider to be a very important topic to cover. The piety of the new Christian ethos must not be fake as so many can see but based on a real and powerful encounter with God. I would here like to call to the reader to take what I say, however elegantly or crudely, and to weigh it properly. Fake pieties produce fake people and fake Christians. Upon an encounter with beauty I was so enraptured for a week that I lost my appetite and it was the common grace which God used to startle me to the blandness of being a baroque Christian. Like so many others, I felt the need to be interested in the gaudy and the splendor and triumph of the faith. What most people call being based. But grace showed me that it was a serious problem that I tried to make my spiritual life into a system of piety such as the baroque requires. Learn the Latin, pray the Book of Common Prayer, reference the Winged Hussars and be jovial. It all came crashing down when I realized that God truly does love the normie and many normies truly do love God. Based is a boring personality. Someone interested in soccer can go play the sport, someone interested in being based has to go online because to do it in real life would tire every person around out. No wife wants to hear about this or that demographic or ancient prayer you found when you can’t be bothered to cook your family a decent meal when it is your turn to do so.
These extreme pieties are the hallmarks of a restless soul and a comfortless spirit. Each one tries to impose comfort by manifestations of action. Awe, intellect and emotions and contemplation. Each good in their own way but as systematized they fall short of the real Christian life, one of beholding beauty so that all else, including the things of religion, become as straw. How beauty affects us when we encounter it is beyond our ability to know. Beauty is sudden and it is powerful. But do not fret. Follow the laws of Christ, love God and love your neighbor, and you will find that within each command is a world of actions not dilutable to mere orthodox beliefs or kindness to strangers, but the life of Christ.
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