Art and Mysticism: Interfaces in the Medieval and Modern Periods 2018005963, 9781138718388, 9781315195803

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Art and Mysticism

From the visual and textual art of Anglo-Saxon England onwards, images held a surprising power in the Western Christian tradition. Not only did these artistic representations provide a means through which to find God, they also held mystical potential. Likewise, mystical writing, from the early medieval period onwards, is also filled with images of God that refract and reflect His glory. This collection of essays introduces the currents of thought and practice that underpin this artistic engagement with Western Christian mysticism, and explores the continued link between art and theology. This book features contributions from leading international academics, and is divided into four sections. The first section offers theoretical and philosophical considerations of mystical aesthetics and the interplay between mysticism and art. The final three sections investigate this interplay between the arts and mysticism from three key vantage points. The purpose of this volume is to explore the rarely considered yet crucial interface between art and mysticism. It is therefore an important and illuminating collection that will appeal to scholars of theology and Christian mysticism as much as those who study literature, the arts and art history. Helen Appleton is a Career Development Fellow in Early Medieval English at Balliol College, Oxford. She has published on early medieval poetry and hagiography, and is also a co-organiser of The Oxford Psalms Network. Her principal research area is the relationship between religious devotion and the environment in Anglo-Saxon England. Louise Nelstrop is a lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics at York St John University and a College Lecturer in Theology at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. She is co-editor of several earlier volumes in the series, most recently Mysticism in the French Tradition: Eruptions from France with Bradley B. Onishi. She has published several articles on the English Mystics and is also a founder and convenor of The Mystical Theology Network.

Contemporary Theological Explorations in Mysticism Series Editors: Patricia Z. Beckman, Oliver Davies and George Pattison

This series facilitates new points of synergy and fresh theological engagements with Christian mystical traditions. Reflecting the plurality of theological approaches to Christian mystical theology, books in the series cover historical, literary, practical, and systematic perspectives as well as philosophical, psychological, and phenomenological methods. Although the primary focus of the series is the Christian tradition, exploration of texts from other traditions also highlight the theological, psychological and philosophical questions that Christian mysticism brings to the fore. Mysticism in the French Tradition Eruptions from France Edited by Louise Nelstrop and Bradley B. Onishi Mystical Anthropology Authors from the Low Countries Edited by John Arblaster and Rob Faesen Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy Interchange in the Wake of God Edited by David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore and Duane Williams Mystical Theology and Contemporary Spiritual Practice Renewing the Contemplative Tradition Edited by Christopher C.H. Cook, Julienne McLean and Peter Tyler Art and Mysticism Interfaces in the Medieval and Modern Periods Edited by Helen Appleton and Louise Nelstrop For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Contemporary-Theological-Explorations-in-Mysticism/book-series/ ACONTHEOMYS

Art and Mysticism Interfaces in the Medieval and Modern Periods

Edited by Helen Appleton and Louise Nelstrop

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Helen Appleton and Louise Nelstrop; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Helen Appleton and Louise Nelstrop to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Appleton, Helen, editor. Title: Art and mysticism : interfaces in the medieval and modern periods / edited by Helen Appleton and Louise Nelstrop. Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Contemporary theological explorations in mysticism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018005963 | ISBN 9781138718388 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315195803 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Mysticism and art—History. | Mysticism in art—History. | Christianity and art—History. Classification: LCC N72.M85 A78 2018 | DDC 709.04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005963 ISBN: 978-1-138-71838-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-19580-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In memory of Hannah Young (neé Nelstrop) 1975–2016

Figure 0FM.1 Original Banner from St. Luke’s Church Watford by Hannah Young

Contents

List of figures List of plates Notes on contributors Preface and acknowledgements Introduction: Art, articulation and Incarnation: Mystical theology and seeing the invisible

ix xi xii xv

1

H E L E N A P P L E TON AND L OUI S E NE L S T ROP

PART I

Art, aesthetics and mysticism in theory and practice 1 Beneath the surface: Whose phenomenology? Which art?

25 27

K AT E K I R K PATRI CK

2 Art and inarticulacy

41

BILL PROSSER

3 Art, contemplation and intellectus: Aquinas and Gadamer in conversation

70

R I K VA N N I E U W E NHOVE

PART II

Art, mysticism and the everyday 4 Jan van Eyck and the active mysticism of the Devotio Moderna INIGO BOCKEN

87

89

viii Contents 5 Art and mysticism as horticulture: Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries in an interdisciplinary perspective

104

B A R B A R A B AE RT

6 Medieval Pop: Warhol’s Byzantine iconography

128

J E W E L L H O MAD JOHNS ON

PART III

Metaphor, making and transcendence 7 An artist’s notes on the art and the articulation of the mystical moment

149

151

S H E I L A G A L L AGHE R

8 The Desert of Religion: A voice and images in the wilderness

165

A N N E M O U RON

9 ‘Bon Jhesu, sainctefie ces deux, conjoins ensamble par sacrement de mariage’: Le rapport entre le texte et l’image dans le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage et du réconfort des dames mariees de Philippe de Mézières

186

ANNA LOBA

PART IV

Into the darkness

197

10 ‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’

199

B E R N A R D McGI NN

11 Visions of the otherworld: The accounts of Fursey and Dryhthelm in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and the Homilies of Ælfric

221

R O B E RTA B AS S I

12 The gaze of divine sorrow: Envisioning mystical union with Dürer, Cusa and the Theologia Germanica

246

S I M O N D . P O DMORE

Index

269

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 4.1

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 7.1

Bill Prosser, The Sunday Times Magazine, October 29, 1989 Bill Prosser, Responsibility Clearly Defined, 1983, pencil on paper, 76 × 51 cm Bill Prosser, The Hidden Bribe, 1993, graphite on paper, 76 × 51 cm Bill Prosser, Bow, 1996, graphite on paper, 76 × 51 cm Bill Prosser, Room no.10, 2001, pencil on paper, 100 × 70 cm Bill Prosser, Room no.9, 2001, pencil on paper, 100 × 70 cm Bill Prosser, Human Wishes 8, 2008, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm Bill Prosser, HW Crucifixion 1, 2009, ballpoint on paper, 100 × 70 cm Bill Prosser, Landing, 2011, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm Bill Prosser, Leftovers 4, 2013, pencil on paper, 35 × 35 cm Bill Prosser, SCR (inverted), 2009/10, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm Bill Prosser, Mickey and Sam, 2012, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm Bill Prosser, Hearth, 2014, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm Jan van Eyck, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb – Ghent Altar Piece (detail), 1432, tempera and oil on wood, 3.5 × 4.6 m, Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece (Getty Foundation) Annunciation as an Enclosed Garden with unicorn, fifteenth century, embroidery, Damestiftung, Ebstorf Robert Campin (1378–1444), Merode triptych, c. 1425–1432, oil on oak, 64.5 × 117.8 cm, The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Enclosed Garden, 1520, mixed media, Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, Bentlage Old Mechlin lace, bobbin lace, Mechelen Sheila Gallagher, Pneuma Hostis (detail), 2013, gold leafed cigarette butts on wooden armature, 24” diameter, private collection, New York

43 45 46 48 49 52 54 55 56 57 59 61 65

97 107 108 110 115 153

x 7.2 7.3 7.4

Figures Sheila Gallagher, Jacob’s Ladder, 2013, gold-leafed cigarette butts with pins, 156 × 2.5”, private collection, New York Sheila Gallagher, Tired of Speaking Sweetly (still), 2013, single-channel video, collection of the artist, Boston, MA Sheila Gallagher, Smoke Elephant, 2013, smoke on canvas, 60 × 40”, private collection, Boston, MA

154 157 159

Plates

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Enclosed Garden, early sixteenth century, mixed media, Museum of the Hospital Nuns, Mechelen Enclosed Garden, 1499, mixed media, Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, Bentlage Sheila Gallagher, Pneuma Hostis, 2013, gold leafed cigarette butts on wooden armature, 24” diameter, private collection, New York Sheila Gallagher, Plastic Paradisus, 2013, melted plastic trash on armature, 7 × 5’, private collection, New York Sheila Gallagher, Cumulonimbus, 2007, live flower installation, 12 × 9’, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 404, f. 75r Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 404, f. 104r Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 10.3 404, f. 106r

106 109 152 155 160 209 210 212

Contributors

Helen Appleton is a Career Development Fellow in Early Medieval English at Balliol College, Oxford. She has published on early medieval poetry and hagiography, and is also a co-organiser of The Oxford Psalms Network. Her principal research area is the relationship between religious devotion and the environment in Anglo-Saxon England. Barbara Baert (www.illuminare.be) is Professor at the University of Leuven. She teaches in the field of Iconology, Art Theory and Analysis, and Medieval Art. In 2006 Barbara Baert founded the Iconology Research Group, an international and interdisciplinary platform for the study of the interpretation of images (www. iconologyresearchgroup.org). Her articles have appeared in a variety of scientific A1/ISI/peer review journals. She founded as editor-in-chief two series: Studies in Iconology (www.peeters-leuven.be/boekoverz.asp?nr=9995) and Art & Religion (www.peeters-leuven.be/boekoverz.asp?nr=10015). In 2016, Barbara Baert was awarded the prestigious Francqui Prize for her bold approach to and pioneering work in medieval visual culture and the worship of relics. Roberta Bassi holds a doctorate in Old English Literature and has studied in Bergamo, Leeds, Durham, and Bergen. She is an Honorary Fellow and a member of the CriLeF, the Centre for Linguistics and Philology, at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Bergamo, Italy. She works primarily on Anglo-Saxon hagiography and has published on St Oswald in early English chronicles and narratives. Inigo Bocken is the Scientific Director of the Titus Brandsma Institute for the Study of Spirituality at Radboud University, Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. Born in Schoten, Belgium in 1968, Inigo first studied in Antwerp at UFSIA, before attaining a Masters in Philosophy (1990) and also a Masters in Medieval Studies (1991), both at KU Leuven. He gained his doctorate at Radboud University in 1997 in the Faculty of Philosophy and was appointed lecturer there in 1999. Since 2004 he has been a scientific researcher at the Titus Brandsma Institute. Additionally, he is a visiting lecturer in the department of History at Primorsk University, Koper, in Slovenia. His recent publications focus on Thomas Aquinas, Nicolas of Cusa and the pictorial treatises of Charles of Bovelles.

Contributors

xiii

Sheila Gallagher is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and associate professor of Studio Art at Boston College. Working in many media including live flowers, smoke, melted plastic, and video, Gallagher’s work explores the relationship between materiality and theological inquiry. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including at the Moving Image Festival, London; The Crystal Bridges Museum, Arkansas; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA. Together with philosopher Richard Kearney, she is co-director of Guestbook Project, an international creative peacebuilding initiative. Jewell Homad Johnson MA is completing her doctorate at the University of Sydney on ‘The post-Enlightenment Kandinsky: The Modern and Contemporary History of the Individual Artist, Religion and the Spiritual in the Arts – Towards a New Methodology’. Johnson began working in the Visual and Performing Arts in the 1980s (USA), and has continued arts and research projects internationally from Australia since 1998. She is the author of ‘What Is Really Being Bought and Sold?’ for Art And Money (Cambridge, 2014). Kate Kirkpatrick is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire and Lecturer in Theology at St Peter’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Sartre and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Anna Loba teaches in the Romance Philology Department at Adam Mickiwicz University in Poznan, Poland. Her area of specialism is medieval and Renaissance French literature and history, with particular interests in the didactic and religious literature of the late Middle Ages and in medieval theatre. Her current research focuses on subject of marriage in late medieval texts written for women. Recent publications include: Le Réconfort des dames mariées. Mariage dans les écrits didactiques adressés aux femmes à la fin du Moyen Âge (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2013) and ‘Contempler le miroir de la Passion: Philippe de Mézières et les mystiques’, in Philippe de Mézières and His Age: Piety and Politics in the Fourteenth Century, ed. by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kiril Petkov (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 255–267. She has translated several works of French literature into Polish. Bernard McGinn is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago where he taught for thirty-five years before retiring in 2003. McGinn has written extensively on patristic and medieval theology, especially on apocalypticism and mysticism. His longrange project is a multi-volume history of Western Christian mysticism under the general title of The Presence of God. Vol. VI, Part 2, Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain (1500–1650) was published in 2017. Anne Mouron is a member of Regent’s Park College at the University of Oxford. Her main interest lies in religious and devotional texts of the late Middle Ages. She has recently completed an edition of The Manere of Good Lyvyng and with

xiv

Contributors

Professor Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa (Shizuoka University, Japan) and is currently working on a new edition of the Middle English translation of Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Liber spiritualis gratiae. Louise Nelstrop is a lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics at York St John University and a College Lecturer in Theology at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. She is co-editor of several earlier volumes in this series, most recently Mysticism in the French Tradition: Eruptions from France (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) with Bradley B. Onishi. She has published several articles on the English Mystics and is also a co-founder and co-convenor of The Mystical Theology Network. Rik Van Nieuwenhove lectures in Medieval Thought at Durham University. He is the author of Jan van Ruusbroec – Mystical Theologian of the Trinity (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) and Introduction to Medieval Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); co-author of Introduction to the Trinity (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and co-editor of The Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), and Late Medieval Mysticism of the Low Countries (New York: Paulist Press, 2008). His main areas of research are medieval theology and spirituality, soteriology and theology of the Trinity. Simon D. Podmore is Associate Professor in Systematic Theology at Liverpool Hope University. His research explores the confluence of mystical theology, philosophy, psychotherapy, and the arts. He is the author of Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Indiana University Press, 2011) and Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (James Clarke & co., 2013), and co-editor of Exploring Lost Dimensions in Christian Mysticism: Opening to the Mystical (Ashgate, 2013), Christian Mysticism and Incarnation Theology: Between Transcendence and Immanence (Ashgate, 2013), and Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy: Interchange in the Wake of God (Routledge, 2017). He is co-founder and co-convenor of The Mystical Theology Network. Bill Prosser was an illustrator with clients ranging from The Sunday Times to New Society. During the last fifteen years this orderly career has fragmented into drawings of Mickey Mouse, Samuel Beckett’s doodles and marginal indoor spaces. His work has been exhibited in Europe and the USA, and he has been awarded a number of research positions, including Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow at the University of Reading and Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. He is currently a Centre Fellow at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford.

Preface and acknowledgements

Mysticism and Art is, it seems, suddenly à la mode. Within the arena of contemporary art, interest in both spirituality and mysticism has been steadily growing – as a number of recent exhibitions bear witness: the 2017 exhibition ‘Au-delà des étoiles. Le paysage mystique de Monet à Kandinsky’ at Le Musée d’Orsay, and the 2016–2017 exhibition ‘Mystical Landscapes: Masterpieces from Monet, Van Gogh and More’ at The Art Gallery of Ontario, curated in conjunction with Musée d’Orsay.1 Similarly, recent exhibitions of medieval art, such as the Het Noordbrabants Museum’s 2016 exhibition ‘Jheronimus Bosch – Visioenen van een genie’, have highlighted the relationship between the spiritual and the material in medieval culture.2 The purpose of this book is to tease out some of the implications of the relationship between art and mysticism, between the material and the ineffable, in both medieval and modern art by exploring developments in the Latin West from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries, and examining how modern and contemporary art responds to the medieval. This volume offers multiple points of entry into the relationship between art and mysticism. The essays grew out of conversations first begun at the 2016 Mystical Theology Network conference, ‘Art and Articulation: Illuminating the Mystical, Medieval and Modern’ (St Hilda’s College, Oxford).3 The conference brought scholars from diverse fields together with contemporary artists to examine the theme of art and mysticism. An art exhibition, ‘As Above So Below’, curated by Ellen Hausner, was an integral part of the conference. The catalogue was a joint academic-artistic enterprise, reflecting on how and why a number of contemporary artists feel that the mystical and the spiritual intersects with and informs their work. Several keynote lectures were likewise delivered by artists, leading to lively and fruitful discussions concerning how the mystical and the spiritual are understood within contemporary society, and whether art, as product/practice/ craft, is the place in which mystical engagement is most readily to be found – a theme picked up by Kate Kirkpatrick in the opening chapter of this book. The conference could not have taken place without the support of The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, The Eckhart Society and St Hilda’s College. A few people deserve special mention: Ellen Hausner, for curating a beautiful exhibition; the artists who exhibited alongside Ellen – Julian Dourado, Francesca Nella and Matthew Kay; Pol Hermann (conference

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photographer); and our anonymous peer reviewer. We would also like to thank The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece (Getty Foundation) for granting permission to use their images. Finally, we would like to extend our sincere and grateful thanks to the team at Routledge, especially Josh Wells and Jack Boothroyd, for their support and encouragement.

Notes 1 ‘Au-delà des étoiles. Le paysage mystique de Monet à Kandinsky’, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 14 March–25 June 2017, [accessed 2 April 2017]; ‘Mystical Landscapes: Masterpieces from Monet, Van Gogh and More’, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 22 October 2016–12 February 2017, [accessed 2 April 2017]. The latter exhibition also featured a series of talks and workshops covering the relationship between art and mysticism, mindfulness and the current state of religiosity in the West: [accessed 2 April 2017]. These followed the groundbreaking ‘Traces du Sacré’ 2008 and ‘Hilma af Klint: peintre inspirée’ exhibitions. 2 ‘Jheronimus Bosch – Visioenen van een genie’, Het Noordbrabants Museum, s-Hertogenbosch, 13 February–8 May 2016, [accessed 2 April 2017]. 3 Mystical Theology Network, [accessed 2 April 2017], @MysticTheology.

Introduction Art, articulation and Incarnation Mystical theology and seeing the invisible Helen Appleton and Louise Nelstrop

The play of art is a mirror that through the centuries constantly arises anew, and in which we catch sight of ourselves in a way that is often unexpected or unfamiliar: what we are, what we might be, and what we are about.1

The above quotation from Hans-Georg Gadamer nicely captures something of the dynamic that we are concerned with in this volume – namely the idea that art, in all its situated-materiality, speaks to the heart of the human condition in ways that surprise. This might not seem immediately apparent since this book is concerned with how art (understood as image, literary style, process, craft, play, perspective and in terms of aesthetics) may find its home in mysticism and conversely how mysticism may be at home in art. It explores this dynamic in the West across the medieval and modern periods. Yet after an era in which art criticism tended to distance the spiritual from the material, and scholarly discourse on mysticism conversely detached the material from the spiritual, in the study of both mysticism and art new possibilities for re-evaluating the complex and playfully paradoxical relationship between the concrete and the abstract are emerging. One of the aims of this volume is to explore how even apparently highly material images and practices might provide access points to the mystical. The essays that follow consider what this means within a modern context as well as examining how some medieval writers held images to offer access to the divine when viewed through a Christological lens. By highlighting connections between the material and the spiritual, medieval and modern, it is hoped that this volume, like the works it discusses, will serve as a prompt to further exploration. The idea that mysticism and art are complementary, let alone bedfellows, might have been treated with scepticism or even hostility less than fifty years ago. In artcritical circles the emphasis was on ‘art for art’s sake’; the idea of art as a stepping stone to something else was frequently flatly rejected. As Ad Reinhardt famously asserted, ‘No one in his right mind goes to an art museum to worship anything but art, or to learn about anything else.’2 Yet as Hans-Georg Gadamer explores in his short essay, ‘The Play of Art’, cited above, it does not seem right to reduce art to mere materiality, to forbid it from reflecting humanity in ways ‘unexpected or unfamiliar’, which it does, not despite but because of its everydayness. In the world of art-criticism the mood now seems to have shifted to one less hostile to

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the spiritual and mystical, as several high-profile exhibitions indicate. Arguably, the watershed moment came in 1986, when the Los Angeles County Museum and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague jointly organised ‘The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1880–1985’.3 Despite the criticisms that the exhibition received at the time, it opened the door for fresh conversations about art, making possible a tranche of such exhibitions in Europe at the turn of the twenty-first century.4 Likewise, the study of mysticism has moved from a rejection of the material to increasing emphasis on its importance to spiritual engagement. Twentieth-century scholars of mysticism had, until relatively recently, opposed the idea that mysticism belongs to our waking consciousness. In seeking to demonstrate that human knowledge extended beyond the sensual realm, William James turned to the kinds of experiences that seemed to defy such Kantian empiricism – fleeting experiences of being at one with the world, of feeling taken over by a higher power, of understanding things that could not be articulated. He redefined the term ‘mysticism’ to mean just this: states of consciousness that were ‘more like states of feeling than like states of intellect’ and which ‘to those who experience them [. . . are] also states of knowledge’.5 As he wrote in Chapter 16 of The Varieties of Religious Experience: The words ‘mysticism’ and ‘mystical’ are often used [. . .] to throw at any opinion which we regard as vague and vast and sentimental, and without a base in either facts or logic. For some writers a ‘mystic’ is any person who believes in thought-transference, or spirit-return. Employed in this way the word has little value [. . .] to keep it useful by restricting it, I [. . .] simply propose to you four marks [ineffability, noesis, transiency and passivity] which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical.6 James argued that such states of consciousness were experienced as ineffable, but nonetheless noetic, and could be seen to have occurred across religious traditions and outside of them, being for him the essence on which organised religion had (unfortunately) been built (thus obscuring such experiences). His pervasive reading made ‘mysticism’ otherworldly. It gave the idea coherence and academic credibility. Yet, in losing its ties to here and now, it also lost the playful tension between forgetting this world and depending on it that we find in an image such as ‘the cloud of unknowing’ which underpins the anonymous fourteenth-century English mystical work of the same name. The playfulness and tension that this image encapsulates is in fact a mystical strategy, one that honours both the sensual and the otherworldly and which Alistair Minnis terms ‘the imaginative denigration of imagination and symbolic rejection of symbolism’.7 We find a similar strategy at play in the writing of another fourteenth-century English mystic, Julian of Norwich; Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross have described the way that she ties her words into semantic clusters as promoting ‘apophatic image’.8 It reveals the capacity of art to undo itself through itself as itself. Indeed, it is an idea that takes us to the heart of the Christian tradition, to the ultimate Christian image, which is of course the Incarnate Word of God.

Introduction 3

Incarnation, mysticism and aesthetics Early Church and later Medieval discussions of the Incarnation reveal just how complicated it is to articulate what and who the image of God is, and how this image can be an access point to the divine. This is not the place for a discussion of the intricacies of Early Church Christology; however, it seems important to note that many early accounts of Christology were written in response to thinking that failed to keep Christ’s humanity and divinity in play. Early Gnostic accounts, for example, seem to have denigrated the material order. In response, Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the late second century, stresses that Christ’s material humanity is essential to human salvation. It was in this context that he articulated what came to be known as the ‘exchange formula’, that is, that Christ became a man in order that humanity might become divine. Or as he puts it in his Against Heresies 3.19.1: For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and he who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God.9 Central to Irenaeus’s account was the idea that Christ shared himself with humanity, giving back what had been forfeit in the Fall, namely the possibility of growing into the likeness of God. It was through Christ as concrete image of the invisible God that this likening was again made possible. As such, many accounts of Patristic Christology might be classified as mystical, for they raise the possibility not simply of our accessing God, but also in some sense of our becoming divine. We find this idea clearly expressed in the fifth-century writings of Cyril of Alexandria, for example: Therefore his only begotten Word has become a partaker of flesh and blood, that is, he has become man [. . .] And he himself is also in us, for we have all become partakers of him in ourselves through the Spirit. For this reason we have all become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1.4) and are reckoned as sons, and so too have in ourselves the Father through the Son.10 Although such accounts include careful emphases on the difference between our divinity and Christ’s, a key point is that material flesh is our access to that which transcends our comprehension; something which Bernard of Clairvaux, writing in the twelfth century, also stresses.11 Before turning to a short case study that explores how some medieval authors viewed the Incarnation as deeply mystical, and a modern response to that, a few words are needed both on how the term ‘mysticism’ is being used in this collection and on how the idea of the aesthetic is being employed. A useful definition of mysticism is that of Bernard McGinn, a contributor to this volume, who holds mysticism to be broadly: ‘a special consciousness of the presence of God that by definition exceeds description and results in a transformation of the subject who

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receives it’.12 It is an understanding of the term that is particularly appealing in a volume such as this, as it stresses the tension between knowing and transcendence so ably captured by The Cloud-Author’s concept of ‘the cloud of unknowing’. Yet no one definition has been imposed on the contributors. It was felt that this would have rather defeated the aim of teasing out how the mystical is and has been understood in relation to art. Contributors were therefore encouraged to work with conceptions of mysticism that best fitted their material. This has allowed the contributors to explore something of the polyvalent nature of the term ‘mysticism’, alongside the polyvalence of art. In adopting this methodology we have followed the lead of Julia A. Lamm, editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, who invited the authors of each chapter to work with definitions that resonated with their subject matter. Lamm’s statement concerning the purpose of her volume could equally be said of this one: ‘The point [. . .] is not, therefore, so much to determine and define Christian mysticism as it is to provide tools, reference points, and categories so that readers themselves may explore, determine, define, and judge’.13 Likewise by bringing together interdisciplinary contributions across periods which focus on the importance of mysticism in and for art, and the power of art in and for mysticism, this collection seeks to provide not the final word on this area, but rather the impetus for readers’ own explorations, offering points of departure and engagement in a still inchoate field. In terms of aesthetics, it seems important to note that there have been various shifts in thinking as to whether one can speak of aesthetics in the medieval period. In a recent contribution to Blackwell’s A Companion to Aesthetics, John Marenbon provides a valuable overview of the debate. He notes that in the early twentieth century scholars such as Erwin Panofsky argued it was possible to construct a medieval aesthetics by examining philosophical and theological currents and considering how these played out in architecture.14 As such, medieval aesthetics was derived from various discussions of beauty and of the arts; this Marenbon terms the ‘Standard Approach’. However, in the early nineties, although ‘Revisionsists’ such as Paul Oskar Kristeller, Andreas Speer, Jan Aersten and Olivier Boulnois were happy to speak of modern aesthetics as the theory of beauty, especially in terms of art, they argued that no such concept existed in the medieval period. They were not simply objecting to the piecing together of a theory of aesthetics from disparate sources: they contended that there was simply no sense of it to be uncovered. On the one hand, they stress that medieval theories of beauty pertain to the created order, on the other, they note that there was no such thing as the ‘fine arts’ in this period, rather the arts consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric, etc. What we today think of as arts were then viewed as crafts. As Marenbon puts it: The fault of the Standard Approach then, lies, at a deeper level of intruding aesthetics, a theoretical consideration of beauty in art, into a period where it was not practiced. It rests on taking medieval artefacts as if they were works of art [. . .] The Revisionists conclude that we should abandon the idea of medieval aesthetics altogether. It is as empty a subject as medieval nuclear physics or biotechnology.15

Introduction 5 Marenbon has a great deal of sympathy with this revised position. However, he does not think that it completely rules out the exploration of aesthetics in the Middle Ages. Marenbon notes that the problem with both the Standard and the Revisionist positions is that they treat aesthetics as the modern discipline that first emerged in the eighteenth century. However, contemporary philosophical treatments of aesthetics within an Anglophone context have moved beyond such rigid parameters. The philosophical study of aesthetics no longer revolves around the beauty of works of art, so we should not, therefore, exclude medieval discussions of beauty from aesthetics simply because medieval philosophers were not interested in beauty in terms of ‘fine art’. The same, Marenbon argues, is true when we reflect on their lack of interest in what constitutes art: contemporary philosophers, he notes, are rarely concerned with this question either. As Marenbon states: When contemporary philosophers consider individual first-order topics in aesthetics, such as representation, expression, style, intention, narrative, humour, metaphor and symbolism, truth and fiction, the question of what, if anything, constitutes a work of art does not usually play an important part in their discussions.16 Therefore medieval discussions of topics such as poetry, metaphor, symbolism and truth may be considered equally as discussions of aesthetics. In suggesting this Marenbon stresses that he is not advocating a return to the Standard Approach. Marenbon is adamant that there is no history of medieval aesthetics that waits to be written; however, he argues that there are five possible research projects deserving of consideration that focus ‘on bodies of medieval material, linked by subject or theme’.17 The fifth of these involves a contemplation of the problem of representation: how images relate to reality, whether they assist or hinder one’s access to the divine, and whether it is possible to think without recourse to images. Although this present volume inevitably falls far short of addressing all these issues in detail, it is hoped that the explorations of medieval image, art/ craft and representation, brought into conversation with modern and contemporary thinking on the same, contained within will make a contribution towards this larger research project. With these questions in mind, and by way of introduction to the essays that follow, we offer a small case study of how the Incarnation inspired responses from medieval and modern artists/craftsmen that at the same time act as responses to the question of whether images help or hinder us from knowing the divine; as such they are responses that bring ‘art’ into conversation with the mystical by way of aesthetic concerns.

Art and articulating the Word made flesh The theology of the Incarnation had a profound impact on art in the medieval west, creating both tensions around the role of art and opportunities to harness

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the potential of art to express the transcendent.18 Across the period, authors and artists played with the idea of Christ as the Word made flesh, image of the invisible God. Medieval theologians defended the idea of God’s transcendence, while also embracing God’s immanence, and literary and visual arts had a key role to play in expressing this apparent paradox. The fifteenth-century Middle English text, The Desert of Religion, as found in London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, which Anne Mouron discusses in her contribution to this volume, uses the interaction between words and illustrations to bring the reader to a polysemous place of understanding. Several centuries before this copy of The Desert of Religion was made, the same effective combination of text and image as a prompt to spiritual engagement was employed by the creators of Insular Gospel Books such as the famous Book of Kells (Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 58 [A. I.]) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library Cotton MS Nero D IV), long regarded as masterpieces of Insular religious art. In both the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels Matthew 1.18, ‘Christi autem generatio sic erat’ (‘Now the generation of Christ was in this wise’) is marked by a beautifully illuminated page on which the Greek letters Chi, Rho and Iota twine to form an image known as the ‘Incarnation Initial’.19 The intricacy of the interlace work that makes up these letters and the use of gold as a highlight draw the reader’s eye, encouraging them to focus on the words which are both meaningful, yet by being presented in Greek letters, rendered remote and mysterious. In both manuscripts the complexity of the design creates a myriad of visual pathways, a labyrinthine structure in which the viewer’s gaze becomes tangled, creating a space for contemplation. In Kells (34r), the initial is inhabited by an array of figures, patterns of lines and dots and interlace, resolving into figures of angels, a moth, cats and mice with the Eucharist; in Lindisfarne (f. 29r), a series of circling patterns and interlaced creatures lead the eye to retrace its path.20 The result is that, in both of these Gospel Books, the Incarnation Initial is a complex fusion of word and image that represents the paradox of the incarnation in its very failure to represent it.21 Whereas the extraordinary diversity of the figures contained within the Chi-Rho page of Kells presents the mundane and worldly being caught up into the divine, the more abstracted creatures of the interlace decoration on the Chi-Rho pages from manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne and Litchfield/St Chad Gospels (Lichfield Cathedral Library, MS 1, p. 5) highlight the mystery and contemplative potential of the Incarnation. These Incarnation Initials express the puzzling paradox of the Word made flesh by turning Christ’s name into a fleshly word, an image that represents both a part of language but also, by being filled with creatures, a hint perhaps that it was through God’s Word that all things were made, a creation into which he would himself enter. The Chi, Rho and Iota evoke the divine, but the tangled beings that both inhabit and form them represent the worldly, the material. As the reader struggles to separate the creatures from the letterforms, to follow the twisted, stylized and playful bodies and interpret their abstraction, they enter into a kind of productive confusion – a form of play – which facilitates access to the spiritual. To medieval artists these Gospels Books were also a source of wonder. The twelfth-century cleric Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) in his Topographia Hibernica (Ch. 38) marvelled over the craftsmanship of just such an Insular

Introduction 7 Gospel Book, the now lost Gospels of Kildare, which was said to have been dictated by an angel, who provided the scribe with images to copy (Ch. 39). Gerald’s description of the book’s aesthetic fuses religious imagery and contemplative endeavour with attention to its materiality; he writes: Hic Majestatis vultum videas divinitus impressum; hinc mysticas Evangelistarum formas, nunc senas, nunc quaternes, nunc binas alas habentes; hinc aquilam, inde vitulum, hinc hominis faciem, inde leonis; aliasque figuras fere infinitas. Quas si superficialiter et usuali more minus acute conspexeris, litura potius videbitur quam ligatura; nec ullam prorsus attendes subtilitatem, ubi nihil tamen præter subtilitatem. Sin autem ad perspicacius intuendum oculorum aciem invitaveris, et longe penitus ad artis arcana transpenetraveris, tam delicatas et subtiles, tam arctas et artitas, tam nodosas et vinculatim colligatas, tamque recentibus adhuc coloribus illustratas notare poteris intricaturas, ut vere haec omnia potius angelica quam humana diligentia jam asseververis esse composita. Hæc equidem quanto frequentius et diligentius intueor, semper quasi novis obstupeo, semper magis ac magis admiranda conspicio.22 [In one page you see the countenance of the Divine Majesty supernaturally pictured; in another, the mystic forms of the evangelists, with either six, four, or two wings; here are depicted the eagle, there the calf; here the face of a man, there of a lion; with other figures in almost endless variety. If you observe them superficially, and in the usual careless manner, you would imagine them to be daubs, rather than careful compositions; expecting to find nothing exquisite, where in truth, there is nothing which is not exquisite. But if you apply yourself to a more close examination, and are able to penetrate the secrets of the art displayed in these pictures, you will find them so delicate and exquisite, so finely drawn, and the work of interlacing so elaborate, while the colours with which they are illuminated are so blended, and still so fresh, that you will be ready to assert that all this is the work of angelic, and not human skill. The more often and closely I scrutinise them, the more I am surprised, and always find them new, discovering fresh causes for increased admiration.]23 As Gerald highlights, it is only through contemplation that the art of the Gospel Book becomes mystical, moving through the everyday to something divine. Gerald’s urging that readers should look more carefully at the book to understand its manufacture reflects the words that the angel is said to have spoken to its scribe (Topographia Ch. 39): In crastino die dic dominæ tuæ, ut ipsa pro te orationes fundat ad Dominum, quatinus ad acutius intuendum et subtilius intelligendum tibi tam mentis quam corporis oculos aperiat, et ad recte protrahendum manus dirigat.24 [On the morrow entreat your Lady [St Bridget] to offer prayers for you to the Lord, that he would vouchsafe to open your bodily eyes, and give you spiritual vision, which may enable you to see more clearly, and understand with more intelligence, and employ your hands in drawing with accuracy.]25

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The artists of these Gospel Books are elevated by their devotional craft, moving beyond the worldly; yet, as unworldly as the Gospel Book appears, the very skill of the craft highlights that it is only a material representation, albeit one divinely inspired. These incredibly intricate initials turn the words of the text into gloriously transcendent works of art, moving beyond the literal meaning of the language to impress upon the Gospel Books’ audience the profound importance and unworldliness of that which is being conveyed, yet the true mystery of the incarnation remains unknowable. In their extraordinarily detailed craft, these masterpieces of monastic labour highlight their own materiality, express the ineffable nature of that which they attempt to represent, and reveal the devotion of their creators. While attempting to convey the mystery of the Incarnation tested the skill and imagination of those who produced and read such Gospel Books, these marvellous manuscripts themselves became objects that were a challenge to describe or depict. Gerald’s description can only begin to convey the complexity of the Gospels of Kildare’s artistry, offering a shadow of its glory, as the manuscripts themselves are a pale reflection of the divine power they seek to represent. A late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript of Gerald’s Topographia, London, British Library, MS Royal 13 B VIII, illustrates this difficulty by offering us an image of the lost masterpiece. On f. 22r the bottom margin contains illustrations of events described in the text, affording an image of the wondrous Gospels of Kildare. However, rather than attempt to represent the book’s beauty, the image instead depicts its manufacture: a seated scribe, with an expression of intense concentration, works on the manuscript.26 Attention here is to the craft of making. The ruled, yet still blank opening before him serves as a space onto which the viewer is invited to project their own image of the Kildare Gospels, but which makes no attempt to depict the volume’s mystery. The reader of this manuscript of the Topographia is encouraged to focus on the book as something manufactured by man, for all its miraculous artifice – the inspiring angel and the images he held for the scribe to copy are not represented. Here, in Gerald’s text and the marginal illumination that accompanies it we see a focus on the dialogical relationship between art, the mystical and the process of production, a topic discussed by Kate Kirkpatrick, Sheila Gallagher and William Prosser in this volume. The craft of these Insular Gospel Books continues to fascinate, prompting responses from modern artists and writers. The Irish poet Padraic Colum (1881– 1972) engaged with the intricacies of the Book of Kells with his own depiction of the book’s creation that appeared in The Atlantic in 1955, dedicated to the illustrator Willy Pogamy.27 The poem focuses on the scribe’s labour, with the opening likening his letterforms to objects of spiritual significance: First, make a letter like a monument – An upright like the fast-held hewn stone Immovable, and half-rimming it The strength of Behemoth his neck-bone, And underneath that yoke, a staff, a rood Of no less hardness than the cedar wood. (ll. 1–6)

Introduction 9 The act of writing here weaves meaning into the letterforms beyond that of the word they represent, echoing the inhabited, interlaced designs of the manuscript. Colum depicts the gaping mouths of the creatures that form the manuscript’s initials as conveying wonder that cannot be captured by text: With mouth a-gape or beak a-gape each stands Initial to a verse of miracle, Of mystery and of marvel (Depth of God!) That Alpha and Omega may not spell (ll. 37–40) Alpha and Omega recall not only the letters used to form the words that cannot adequately describe the ineffable, but also the time-limited world which has generated the text and which cannot contain God. Colum concludes with a stanza that references Axal, the angel of Colm Cille (St Columba): Axal, our angel, has sustained you so In hand, in brain; now to him seal that thing With figures many as the days of man, And colours, like the fire’s enamelling That baulk, that letter you have greatly reared To stay the violence of the entering Word! Adjutorium nostrum, in nomine Domini Qui fecit caelum et terram. (ll. 43–50) Here Colum highlights how the splendid artifice of the letters not only conveys something of the divine, but also serves to separate it from the worldly – the art undoes itself. Colum’s focus on manufacture, like the images of every-day creatures in the Chi-Rho page of the Book of Kells, emphasises the relationship between the everyday and the divine, a theme central to the contributions of Inigo Bocken, Barbara Baert, Jewell Homad Johnson and Anna Loba. Colum concludes by drawing his own craft and that of his dedicatee together with the labour of the medieval illuminator. The final quotation both likens the artist’s handiwork to the shaping of heaven and earth, and highlights the gulf between mundane human labour (however masterful) and divine creation. Medieval English poets proved equally alert to the difficulty of attempting to contain and circumscribe the divine in language, image and material object, although so doing facilitates human understanding. The Incarnation is explored in several Middle English lyrics, which, with deceptive simplicity, present divine mysteries in what might be considered a ‘popular’ form.28 Some lyrics present the Incarnation in easily intelligible language and clear grammatical structures that nevertheless express something conceptually challenging, such as the insistent ‘þat child ys god, þat child is man’ (that child is God, that child is man) (l. 7) of the fourteenth-century lyric ‘Hond by Hond’ (DIMEV 20), in which the asyndeton of

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the line simultaneously unites and separates God and man, leaving the relationship between the two phrases undefined.29 Others, such as the Harley Lyric ‘Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh’ (‘Earth took of earth earth with woe’) strain the relationship between language and signification almost to breaking point, using puns and ambiguous grammatical structures to create texts in which meaning is multivalent and impossible to grasp.30 Here erthe can be, as Susanna Fein notes, ‘dust, flesh, woman, world, mankind, and incarnate Christ’ – though which is signified by the word at a particular point is unclear.31 Images of material objects also form a key part of medieval textual treatments of the Incarnation. In one of the most famous medieval English lyrics, ‘Ther is no Rose’ (DIMEV 5582), the Virgin Mary is presented as ‘the rose that bare Jesu’ (l. 2).32 The second and third stanzas especially focus on the mystery of the Incarnation: For in this rose conteynyd was Heven and erthe in lytyl space, Res miranda. Be that rose we may weel see That he is God in personys thre, Pari forma. (ll. 6–11).33 The poem presents an enigmatic vision of heaven and earth contained within the tiny space of a flower. The traditional image of the Virgin as the Rose of Jercicho is here combined with a commonplace paradox, enhancing both images into a highly affective whole whose effectiveness is difficult to express: as Rosemary Woolf observed, ‘the result is indefinably stirring and beautiful’.34 This lyric insists that comprehension of the Trinity is possible through contemplation of the rose that is Mary: by it ‘we may weel see’, yet clearly the reader cannot do so with worldly sight – they must open the ‘mentis oculos’ as the scribe’s angel instructs. Sarah Boss argues that what is intended by the third stanza is that – although a great mystery – the reader can nonetheless comprehend the Trinity by contemplating the Incarnation. As Boss comments: ‘This is a mystical poem, by which I mean that it has a spiritual meaning that is both hidden behind, and disclosed through, a symbolic text.’35 The poem demonstrates how, through symbolic materiality (in this case the rose that is Mary), one can find God; as such it points to the mystery and materiality of the Incarnation. In these and other Middle English lyrics we find emphasis placed on how the Incarnation represents human flesh come together with the Father’s divinity through the Holy Spirit at work in the Virgin’s womb. Indeed, so pivotal is this idea that in the fourth chapter of his Meditation to the Virgin Mary, composed in the late fourteenth century, the Monk of Farne even explains ‘Mary’s Flesh is God’.36 In so doing he is not implying that we should understand Mary as the equal of Christ, the Unbegotten Word. Rather he points to the mystery of the Incarnation, in which Christ takes on human, specifically Mary’s, flesh.

Introduction 11 The enfleshed Christ thus provides an access point to the divine; in Augustinian terms the head of the totus Christus connecting mankind to God. As Bernard of Clairvaux, whose Laetabundus supplies the Latin lines concluding the first three stanzas of ‘Ther is no Rose’, wrote in the twelfth century, echoing the exchange formula, this is why God became man, that he might lead us through his humanity to a share in spiritual love: I think this is the principle reason why the invisible God willed to be seen in the flesh and to converse with men as a man. He wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love.37 Christ as image is thus particular and peculiar. It is through the image that access to the mystery of God is granted: the mundane is both barrier to spiritual understanding and facilitator of it. Over the course of the medieval period we find more elevated views of image and imagination emerging, as the work of Michelle Karnes, for example, testifies in relation to the late medieval English mystical tradition.38 This broadening of scope is especially true in the work of Nicholas Cusa, a figure on whom a number of the contributors here draw. His thought acts as a bridge to that of the Early Modern period, yet it pushes beyond it in ways that hold appeal for contemporary theology, as Simon D. Podmore explores in this volume. Cusa is a seminal thinker in terms of teasing out how mysticism and art can both be at home in the everyday, as Inigo Bocken discusses in his contribution. This collection sets out to illuminate this interrelation of mystical and material, doing so at times perhaps counter intuitively by exploring images of negativity, darkness and confusion, as in the chapters of Roberta Bassi and Bernard McGinn. Like the texts and images discussed above, the contributions to this volume take differing approaches in seeking to address the same problem: analysing and articulating the relationship between mysticism and art. In their diverse ways and individual conclusions they collectively highlight art’s polysemy while drawing the reader’s attention to interpretative cruces and recurrent issues around materiality, practice and insight. As a group the essays in this collection seek to reveal, but not to circumscribe, how playfulness and perception, making and process, as well as thinking around aesthetics, are all enhanced when brought into contact with mysticism, and vice versa.

Interfaces The book itself is divided into four sections, each of which illustrates this dynamic conversation in action. Part I: ‘Art, Aesthetics and Mysticism in Theory and Practice’, explores some of the theoretical and practice-based underpinnings of a relationship between art and mysticism. Particularly important for all three contributors in this section is the idea of play and practice, or doing art for its own

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sake and yet finding the mystical within this. Part II: ‘Art, Mysticism and the Everyday’, follows on from this and examines how the mystical dimension can be tied up with the materiality of art. All three contributors in this section explore ways in which ordinariness (activities, people, objects) can lead to a knowledge of the transcendent and even the divine. Part III: ‘Metaphor, Making and Transcendence’, focuses on the creation of art and image often in response to text. It examines how image and text interact in medieval and modern practice in ways that push the reader beyond both. As in Part II, the contributors note that in ordinariness, otherness is to be found. Part IV: ‘Into the Darkness’, turns to associated images and symbols that are today little connected to the divine – negativity, darkness, sorrow and suffering. Each of the three contributors in this section demonstrates how images that seem at first contrary to God, who in the Christian tradition today is most often associated with light, in fact push beyond to the transcendent and apophatic, while nonetheless respecting the value of imagistic and human encounter. These essays offer journeys into the darkness as a meeting point with God. I. Art, aesthetics and mysticism in theory and practice 1

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In the opening chapter of this volume, ‘Beneath the surface: whose phenomenology? Which art?’, Kate Kirkpatrick revisits aesthetic theory, exploring theological and philosophical engagements, as well as phenomenological approaches to art. In so doing, she draws close attention to the issues with which mysticism presents us when we approach art. Developing a conversation between abstract artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Cézanne, together with the psychologist and philosopher William James, and the phenomenological thinkers Kant, Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, Theologian and Philosopher Kate Kirkpatrick argues that mysticism challenges us to do more than look at art. Art in mysticism and mysticism in art do not fit hand in glove with contemporary artistic consumption. The interaction demands that we attend to ‘the process of art-making’.39 It requires that we recognising the value of lived-experience, and particularly the experience of making. In Chapter 2, ‘Art and inarticulacy’, Artist Bill Prosser extends these ideas as he finds in the fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing three prerequisites for achieving a state of grace: ignorance, contemplation and humility. For Prosser, The Cloud-Author proves a congenial partner in a dialogue which elucidates Prosser’s own practice. In this rich essay, which explores a number of his past and recent projects, Prosser invites us to see with him how ‘drawings are able to embrace wider word-shy ideas’, which cannot be grasped by means of reason.40 Indeed, he argues that art is not, at its most honest, an intellectual activity. It involves learning how to ‘release oneself from the rat-run of rationality, where if knowledge cannot be rationally justified it is not true knowledge at all’.41 At its heart stands an attentiveness that embraces this ignorance with a humility that recognises art as essentially learning to be at leisure. Referring to the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, Prosser

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argues that we need to accept ‘that creativity springs from a mental state that is quite distinct from logic’. It is not wasting time, but understanding that ‘art is “serious play”’ as the old saw says, an idea that Prosser relates to his drawings of Mickey Mouse in conversation with a host of famous people, as well as with himself. For Prosser, it is only in the playfulness of doing art for art’s sake, in taking the time to muck about attentively, that one sets off on the path of humility and contemplation of which The Cloud-Author speaks; doing so in a spirit of playfulness that realises how little one has really achieved – which is rather the point. In Chapter 3, ‘Art, contemplation and intellectus: Aquinas and Gadamer in conversation’, Rik Van Nieuwenhove is likewise concerned with the playful dynamic at the heart of contemplation. He examines this idea by bringing Thomas Aquinas’s notion of intellectus and intuitus simplex into conversation with Gadamer’s understanding of art in terms of play, festival and symbol, as developed in his essays in The Relevance of the Beautiful, as well as in Truth and Method. Van Nieuwenhove suggests that Aquinas’s notion of intellectus and its relation to ratio may enrich the anthropological basis of Gadamer’s understanding of art as play (pursued for its own sake, characterised by an inner to-and-fro dynamic), symbol (as a way of integrating our fragmented world) and festivity (its timelessness). In Van Nieuwenhove’s view, these characteristics cohere well with what Aquinas means by intellective contemplation as leisurely and playful, intuitive and integrative, and beyond discursive time. Indeed, he sets out to show how Gadamer’s hermeneutical project (including his notion of interpretation in terms of on-going dialogue) can be enriched by an engagement with Aquinas’s notion of contemplation, and its dialectic between ratio and intellectus. To this end, he notes that for Gadamar, art is ‘an event of disclosure’, much as for Thomas contemplation grasps meaning or truth in one intuitive moment.42 As such, Van Nieuwenhove suggests art offers a privileged medium for nurturing a contemplative disposition of receptivity, one which is also at the heart of our encounter with God. Contemplation, then, is the necessary disposition of receptivity needed to approach art as an event of disclosure (or ‘truth’ in Heidegger’s sense).

II. Art, mysticism and the everyday 4

The next section turns to the theme of mysticism and the everyday. In ‘Jan van Eyck and the active mysticism of the Devotio Moderna’, Theologian and Historian Inigo Bocken explores the concrete and the everyday within the Devotio Moderna movement of the late medieval-early modern period. Bocken argues that Nicholas of Cusa’s The Vision of God offers an insight into the devotional practices of this movement, which have too often been viewed as a simplistic rejection of intellectual theology. Bocken argues that the ‘Devotio Moderna’s turn towards concrete practice [. . .] actually initiates a new paradigm of practice, in which visual experience and performance play a crucial role’, engaging rather than stunting the senses.43 Examining a

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Helen Appleton and Louise Nelstrop central text from this movement, Thomas à Kempis’s, Imitation of Christ, Bocken finds a call to recognise God’s action at work within the human order. The same dynamic is, Bocken maintains, at play in Cusa’s famous portrait exercise, in which monks are invited to circle a portrait whose eyes appear to follow the viewer no matter where he moves. The intention of this exercise was to teach the monks to appreciate, through concrete reality, that their viewpoint was only one viewpoint – and that true knowledge involves a dialogic engagement between worldly actors on a temporal stage. Although God always remains beyond one’s grasp, knowledge is discovered through active engagement with art and the everyday. A similar process, Bocken argues, lies at the heart of Jan Van Eyck’s famous Ghent Altarpiece, which, through a clever use of mirrors, reflections and viewing figures, draws the viewer into the painting. For Bocken, à Kempis, Van Eyck, and the Devotio Moderna all teach that ‘Action is the highest form of theory’ and that ‘God’s judgements, although unknown in themselves, are made manifest through the discernment of the concrete life of the individual.’44 In this way one learns the true meaning of imitatio Christi, that is, how one may become an image of God oneself. Closely related ideas are at work in the next chapter, ‘Art and mysticism as horticulture: Late medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries in an Interdisciplinary Perspective’, in which distinguished Art Historian Barbara Baert explores the Enclosed Gardens of the early sixteenth-century Augustinian Hospital Sisters of Mechelen, in Belgium. The Enclosed Garden (hortus conclusus) was a common feature of medieval religious devotion and literature; it derives from the fourth chapter of the Song of Songs, in which the bride is described as ‘a garden enclosed’.45 Baert explores this feminine dynamic in relation to the material culture of the Enclosed Gardens, which contain artificial flowers and figurines manufactured by the sisters of Mechelen as part of their devotional practice. The gardens are, she notes, deeply sensual – scented and tactile. They also speak of the eroticism of the women’s own bodies: ‘The garden becomes a moment that is “consumed” by the gaze and the whole sensorium’.46 Echoing Kathryn M. Rudy, Baert explores how such gardens are material extensions of the visual and imagistic piety that facilitated virtual pilgrimage, but here the very physical act of their creation belongs to a devotional engagement which draws upon rather than negates the body and its materiality.47 Describing their production as ‘sonic (manual) play’, Baert speculates that the women probably sang and prayed as they worked, with their bodies too ‘singing’ out to God through the work of their hands.48 Art Historian and Graphic Designer Jewell Homad Johnson concludes this section by taking up the idea of the everyday and its mystical dimension in twenty-first-century art. In her essay, ‘Medieval Pop: Warhol’s Byzantine iconography’, Johnson draws attention to a growing perception that Warhol’s ‘Pop Art’ is more than just surface: it contains a religious dimension that, Johnson argues, was ‘simply too radical to be seen’ by Warhol’s contemporaries.49 But with distance and a new awareness of the place of the spiritual in art since in the 1980s, Warhol’s everyday secular iconography seems

Introduction 15 less superficial. Following Jane Daggett Dillenberger, Johnson argues that ‘Warhol’s Byzantine Catholic beliefs materialise in his portraits and ritual objects, coalescing into a system of iconography based in American daily life’.50 Johnson addresses a number of Warhol’s works, notably his Marilyn Monroe paintings and his famous Brillo Boxes, which, as Ruth Adams comments, draw the sacred and the secularly into delicious conversation.51 With reference to Brillo Boxes, Johnson furthermore stresses that to read Warhol’s art as spiritual is in no sense a diminution of its materiality – indeed, contemporary artistic voicings of the spiritual depend on and require the material and the everyday just as much as a non-religious reading of his work: ‘It is impossible for them not to be real Brillo Boxes (with or without soap)’.52 Yet, she continues, ‘when viewed from a religious perspective Warhol is able to disempower illusionism via Byzantine metaphors, creating what we might term “Medieval Pop”’.53 III. Metaphor, making and transcendence 7

The third section in this volume, which focuses on the creation of art and image – often in response to text – begins with ‘An artist’s notes on the art and articulation of the mystical moment’, a perfectly poised essay by Artist Sheila Gallagher, who opens the door on the creative processes the underpin and inspire her practice, particularly her engagement with mystical texts from across religious traditions. Gallagher describes the dance between apophasis and kataphasis – between transcendence and immanence – that she sees within much of her work. Take, for example, Gallagher’s piece Pneuma Hostis (Plate 3).54 Made of used cigarette butts – both her own and those of others – crafted into a Eucharistic host, this piece has been described by Richard Kearney as illustrative of: ‘the spirit of comic traversal, of witty slippage between the human and divine, the historical and fantastical’.55 Gallagher describes the ‘word-image play’ between the ‘kataphatic medium’ of the material with which she works and the viewer-artist relationship to which the term ‘hostis’ (host, guest, enemy) draws attention.56 These are, in turn, brought into contact with the ‘apophatic medium of pneuma (smoke, breath, spirit)’, which offers only a trace of materiality and the actor.57 Another piece, Jacob’s Ladder (Figure 7.2), likewise draws the reader beyond the material by means of it.58 Here again cigarette butts are crafted, this time into a ladder that creates a ‘chiasmic crossing of the sacred and the secular [. . .] a maze of ladders moving upwards and downwards, sideways and backways’.59 Kearney argues that within Gallagher’s art ‘we are not just “seeing” visible objects in a “show”, we are engaged in an interplay of reverie and revelry [. . .] challenged to see “through” everyday things by sensing the sublime at the pit of the mundane.’60 Creating out of ‘melted bits of plastic trash’, or ‘smoke’, Gallagher aims to evoke wonder that puts us into play.61 She stresses, along lines similar to Prosser and Van Nieuwenhove, that such play is essential if wonder is to be cultivated into a metaphorical meaning-making discourse.

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8

Anne Mouron’s chapter, ‘The Desert of Religion: a voice and images in the wilderness’, invites us to explore how medieval reading practices defy the fixity of sense that modern readers often assume in their own practice. A Literary Scholar, Mouron examines the way in which text and image interact within manuscripts of The Desert of Religion, a mid-fifteenth-century Middle English devotional text. All three extant copies are accompanied by images, and here Mouron focuses on London, British Library, MS Additional 37049. She argues that the images across this manuscript work as a series, encouraging its readers to engage with text and image in a meditative manner that echoes the monastic practice of lectio divina. Such slow repetitive reading fed into both oratio (prayer) and meditatio (meditation) – the ultimate goal being contemplatio, that is, a contemplative or mystical encounter with God. Yet Mouron notes that despite this, rather than being otherworldly, the author of The Desert of Religion attempts to engage the reader’s entire sensorium: the reader not only sees an image but engages with it affectively, and on multiple levels. The process involves a ‘forgetting’, to borrow from Mary Carruthers, in order that the soul’s true sensual engagement with the divine may be remembered and then inhabited.62 Mouron’s study highlights the importance of the non-linear nature of late medieval devotional reading practices, moving to-and-fro within a text, demanding of the reader ever more intricate associative engagements with the material. Indeed, Mouron argues that The Desert of Religion demands its readers move between text and image (even to texts and images that stand outside the text), thereby evoking a ‘polytextual and polyvisual reading’ that is experienced with more than just the eyes.63 It is in the midst of this that, for the author of The Desert of Religion, contemplation is to be found. Philogist and Literary Scholar Anna Loba likewise focuses on the relationship between text and image within a late medieval text. Loba’s essay explores the dynamic between artist and author in one manuscript of Mézières’s late medieval French text, Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage et reconfort des dames mariées – Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1175. Loba comments on the unique nature of Phillipe’s book of conjugal advice; we quickly discover that his real interest lies not in the daily life of the couple, but in spiritual marriage, that is, the marriage between God and his Church, and God and each individual soul. It is a concern that, rather surprisingly, leads him to make a strong connection between marriage and the Passion of Christ. By understanding the sacramental quality of marriage, the female reader is taught to see both beyond its everydayness but also to embrace her responsibility within it – to cultivate her own virtue so that she may foster her marriage for the greater good of society. Indeed, in Philippe’s book, her individual virtue in being a good wife is shown to be essential in maintaining public and social goods. The artist who created the image that accompanies the text on the first folio of MS fr. 1175 shows a clear understanding of the work and tries to capture, through complex symbolism, the interaction between the good wife and the Passion. Although he does not go as far as

9

Introduction 17 Jan van Eyck in showing how suffering and everyday life meet in the sacrament of marriage, his treatment of marriage nonetheless invites the reader into mystical nuptials so as to impress upon her the duty she has in the public sphere. Again, text and image work together to push the reader beyond the everyday in order, ultimately, to ground her firmly in it. IV. Into the darkness 10 The final section of this book explores the paradox of images of negativity, darkness, suffering and sorrow as a place where God resides and is to be encountered. The section opens with an essay by Theologian and pre-eminent scholar of Mysticism, Bernard McGinn. In ‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’, McGinn, playing on this line from Bob Dylan, explores how images of darkness have been employed within medieval Christian mysticism from the ninth to the fifteenth century. McGinn draws attention to how Medieval Christian Mysticism confronts us with the sense that in order to see God, it needs to grow dark, an idea that stems from the anonymous author known as Pseudo-Dionysius, who speaks so profoundly and influentially of ‘a brilliant darkness’.64 McGinn traces the image from Eriugena’s reading of PseudoDionysius’ sixth-century Mystical Theology, with its ‘chiastic twist’ into the Franciscan tradition, touching on Thomas Gallus and Bonaventure before focusing on Angela of Foligno, who speaks of spiritual abandonment as ‘a most horrible darkness’, but for whom a dark vision of God is also spiritual sight.65 For Angela, McGinn notes, this darkness is not the endpoint – she passes beyond it, not into the light, but to the ‘clarity, certitude, and the abyssal profundity of God’s presence’.66 Darkness too is a central to theology in the Dominical tradition, that is, to the writings of Albert the Great and Meister Eckhart, and in the tradition that derives from Eckhart in the vernacular. Turning to a little-known Pseudo-Eckhartian treatise, Von der Übervart der Gotheit (The Ecstatic Journey into God), McGinn examines how the author likewise recounts the soul’s journey into the divine darkness. Finally, McGinn turns to The Rothschild’s Canticles, famous for its unique images, nineteen of which are of the Trinity. McGinn argues that these images conceal even as they illustrate imagistically – not only through their profound abstract nature but also through their detail: ‘Small figures around the texts and images often express praise and astonishment at the mystery of the Trinity, which, in good Dionysian fashion, is concealed in its very revelation, dark and hidden in its overpowering light.’67 This magisterial essay offers a profound insight into medieval understanding of image, particularly as it pertains to the Dionysian tradition, and what it means to pass into the darkness to find God. 11 The practical outworking of how image relates to the transcendent is also examined in the next chapter in this section, which comments on texts that predate most of those discussed elsewhere in this collection. In Chapter 11, ‘Visions of the otherworld: the accounts of Fursey and Dryhthelm in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and the Homilies of Ælfric’, Literary Scholar Roberta

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Bassi explores ways in which the Anglo-Saxon authors Bede and Ælfric of Eynsham worked with images and ideas of the afterlife in the eighth and tenth centuries. What particularly fascinates Bassi is that no attempt is made to produce coherent afterlife imaginary. In Bede’s eighth-century Historia ecclesiastica, the visions of Fursey and Dryhthelm read as though they respectively belong to different otherworlds. Indeed, Bassi notes that ‘Bede does not appear to be uncomfortable with the coexistence of two divergent pictures of the otherworld in the same work’.68 Likewise Ælfric, writing homiletic material in the tenth century, maintains this complexity. Bassi postulates that ‘this intrinsic diversity can be seen as an implicit attempt to express the inexpressible’ or, at the very least, it needs to be read as a way of portraying ‘that which had not yet been categorised and dogmatised’.69 Although some images had crystallised by the ninth century, Bassi illustrates that in allowing the imagery to remain open to ‘different levels of learning, understanding or interpretation’ these Anglo-Saxon authors pushed towards the transcendent, and were able to do so without ever denying the material imagery on which their understandings depended.70 12 Chapter 12, ‘The gaze of divine sorrow: envisioning mystical union with Dürer, Cusa and the Theologia Germanica’, the closing chapter of this volume, sees Simon D. Podmore explore how sorrow can be mystical; how it can be both a ‘symptom and a form of the union between the divine and the human’.71 In the Medieval tradition of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, Podmore finds fertile ground for an exploration of what it meant to suggest that God suffers, not as God but on account of human sin. This sorrowing, which is God’s own, is a sorrow into which humanity is drawn through Christ, the Man of Sorrows. It is an idea that Podmore finds residing in images of the Man of Sorrows by artist Albrecht Dürer, whose own identification with suffering, melancholy and illness is well known. Podmore moots that it is also at play within the thought of Luther, with whom Dürer identified personally, and in the anonymous text Theologia Germanica, which grew out of the German Mystical Tradition on which McGinn comments. This latter text speaks of Divine Sorrow intensifying at the moment of union with God, for one who shares in union with God shares too in God’s own sorrow for human sin. Thus suffering itself can be a means through which one is brought to that which is beyond one’s self: to God. Podmore thus argues that the gaze of Dürer’s Man of Sorrows ‘conveys something of the “unspeakable”’.72 It is God’s own gaze that speaks through the eyes of the sorrowing man, a ‘gaze that simultaneously invites the viewer to share in Christ’s suffering while also acting as a forbidding veil to the inner mysteries of Christ’s own suffering’.73 The grouping of the essays in this volume is not intended to suggest anachronistic readings; rather we hope that the intersection of ideas raised by the chapters will encourage fresh considerations of art, aesthetics and mysticism, acting as a useful catalyst to further conversations on the relationship between art and

Introduction 19 mysticism in both medieval and modern works. Read in this way, the essays aim to contribute in a small way to Marenbon’s project of reflecting anew on problems of representation and how medieval thinking might contribute to contemporary exchanges – and, in this sense, challenge periodisation. Given the current resurgent interest in the spiritual in art, this book is, we hope, a timely contribution to on-going thinking in both this field and that of mysticism.

Notes 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘The Play of Art’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. by Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 123–30 (p. 130). 2 Ad Reinhardt, The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 54. 3 See: Maurice Tuchman and others, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986). 4 For examples, see: Tessel M. Bauduin, ‘The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths: Recent European Exhibitions on Art and Spirituality’, Material Religion, 6 (2010), 257–62. 5 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1905; repr. 2013), p. 380. James’s approach to mysticism and the implications for aesthetics is an issue tackled by Kate Kirpatrick in her essay in this volume. 6 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 379–80. 7 Alistair J. Minnis, ‘Affection and Imagination in “The Cloud of Unknowing” and Hilton’s “Scale of Perfection”’, Traditio, 39 (1983), 323–66 (p. 346). 8 Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross, ‘The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Effacement in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium V: Papers Read at the Devon Centre Dartington Hall, July 1992, ed. by M. Glasscoe (D. S. Brewer: Cambridge, 1992), pp. 53–77. 9 Irenaeus of Lyons, ‘Against Heresies’, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, trans. by Alexander Roberts and others, 10 vols (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1867–1873), I (1867), pp. 309–567 (p. 448); quoted in Daniel Keating, Deification and Grace (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2007), p. 11. 10 Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, 14.20, cited and translated by Keating, Deification and Grace, p. 21. 11 See: Bernard of Clairvaux, De diligendo Dei (On Loving God), Library of Latin Texts– A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), [accessed 30 March 2017]. 12 Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism 1200–1350, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, 3 (New York: Crossroads, 1998), p. 26. 13 Julia A. Lamm, ‘A Guide to Christian Mysticism’, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. by Julia A. Lamm (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 28–52 (p. 28). This introductory chapter presents a useful discussion of the issues and problems related to defining mysticism, especially in a multi-disciplinary volume. 14 John Marenbon, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Aesthetics’, in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. by David Cooper and others (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1992) pp. 22–32. 15 Marenbon, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Aesthetics’, p. 26. See also: Mary J. Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 16 Marenbon, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Aesthetics’, p. 26. 17 Marenbon, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Aesthetics’, p. 27.

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18 A useful survey of scholarship and primary materials on this area is to be found in Patricia Ranft, How the Doctrine of the Incarnation Shaped Western Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), pp. 4, 52–60, 82–84. Key tensions are examined by Alexandre Leupin in Fiction and Incarnation: Rhetoric, Theology, and Literature in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 19 The form and symbolism of the design of the monogram of Christ at Matthew 1.18 in Insular Gospel Books is discussed in detail in Michael W. Herren and Shirley Ann Brown, Christ in Celtic Christianity: Britain and Ireland from the Fifth to the Tenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), pp. 224–33. 20 Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS A. I. [58], [accessed 11 April 2017]; London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D IV, [accessed 11 April 2017]. 21 A far more comprehensive discussion of the Anglo-Saxons’ use of images of Christ to express the ineffable is offered by Barbara Raw in Trinity and Incarnation in AngloSaxon Art and Thought, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 54–76. 22 Gerald of Wales, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. by James F. Dimock, 8 vols (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1861–1891), V (1867), pp. 123–24. 23 Translation is that of Thomas Foster from Gerald of Wales, The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. by Thomas Wright, trans. by Thomas Foster and Richard Colt Hoare (London: H. G. Bohn, 1863), p. 99. 24 Gerald of Wales, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, p. 124. 25 Gerald of Wales, The Historical Works, p. 100. 26 London, British Library, MS Royal 13 B VIII, [accessed 12 April 2017]. 27 Padraic Colum, ‘The Book of Kells’, The Atlantic, 196 (1955), 53. 28 On Middle English religious lyrics generally see: Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996); A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. by Thomas G. Duncan (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005); Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). With specific reference to the Incarnation see: Cristina Maria Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 29 Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, ed. by Carleton Fairchild Brown, 2nd edn., rev. by G. V. Smithers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), pp. 110–11. There are two manuscript witnesses: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 26; London, University of London MS 657. 30 Preserved in London, British Library, MS Harley 2253, [accessed 12 April 2017]. Text and translation from The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. by Susanna Greer Fein, 3 vols (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), II, 96–7. 31 Fein, The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, II, p. 388. 32 The lyric is preserved in two sources: a fifteenth-century vellum roll, Cambridge, Trinity College, O.3.58 (1230), [accessed 10 April 2017]; and Holkham, Holkham Hall, Earl of Leicester, MS 229. 33 Middle English Marian Lyrics, ed. by Karen Saupe (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University for TEAMS, 1998), p. 68. 34 Woolf, The English Religious Lyric, p. 289. 35 Sarah Boss, ‘Deification: The Mariology of the Ordinary Faithful’, New Blackfriars, 98 (2017), 188–202 (p. 192). 36 The Monk of Farne, ‘Meditation to the Virgin’: The Monk of Farne: The Meditations of a Fourteenth: Century Monk, ed. by Hugh Farmer, trans. by a Benedictine of Stanbrook (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961), p. 122.

Introduction 21 37 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, Sermon 20.IV.6: On the Song of Songs I, trans. by Kilian J. Walsh (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1971), p. 152. 38 Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Karnes draws attention to the influence of Bonaventure, who places great importance on the humanity of Christ within deification: holding him to be both centre of the Trinity and the centre of creation also seems important in this respect. Although for a different reading of this material in terms of memory, which gives the material an older monastic heritage, see: Mary J. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 39 Kate Kirkpatrick in this volume, p. 27. 40 Bill Prosser in this volume, p. 41. 41 Bill Prosser in this volume, p. 64. 42 Rik van Nieuwenhove in this volume, p. 84. 43 Inigo Bocken in this volume, p. 90. 44 Inigo Bocken in this volume, p. 92. 45 Song of Songs 4.12. 46 Inigo Bocken in this volume, pp. 108. 47 Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 110–18. 48 Inigo Bocken in this volume, pp. 115. 49 Jewell Homad Johnson in this volume, p. 130. 50 Jane Daggett Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol (New York: Continuum, 1998). Jewell Homad Johnson in this volume, p. 132. 51 Ruth Adam, ‘Idol Curiosity: Andy Warhol and the Art of Secular Iconography’, Theology and Sexuality, 10.2 (2004), 90–8 (p. 96). 52 Jewell Homad Johnson in this volume, p. 139. 53 Jewell Homad Johnson in this volume, p. 139. 54 Sheila Gallagher, Pneuma Hostis, Gold Leafed Cigarette Butts on Wooden Armature, 24 (New York: Diameter, Private Collection, 2013). 55 Richard Kearney, Ravishing Far/Near (New York: Dodge Gallery Publications, 2013), p. 12. 56 Sheila Gallagher in this volume, p. 152. 57 Sheila Gallagher in this volume, p. 152. 58 Sheila Gallagher, Jacob’s Ladder, Gold-Leafed Cigarette Butts with Pins, 156 × 2.5 (New York: private collection, 2013). 59 Sheila Gallagher in this volume, p. 153 60 Kearney, Ravishing Far/Near, p. 6. 61 Sheila Gallagher in this volume, p. 155. 62 See: Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 63 Anne Mouron in this volume, p. 177. 64 Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, Chapter 1: Dionysius, Corpus Dionysiacum II, ed. by Günter Heil and Adolf M. Ritter, 2nd edn. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012). 65 Bernard McGinn in this volume, p. 205. 66 Bernard McGinn in this volume, p. 206. 67 Bernard McGinn in this volume, p. 208. 68 Roberta Bassi in this volume, p. 222. 69 Roberta Bassi in this volume, p. 221. 70 Roberta Bassi in this volume, p. 221. 71 Simon D. Podmore, this volume, p. 256. 72 Simon D. Podmore, this volume, p. 259. 73 Simon D. Podmore, this volume, p. 259.

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Bibliography Manuscripts Cambridge, Trinity College, O.3.58 (1230), [accessed 10 April 2017] Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 58 [A. I.], [accessed 11 April 2017] Holkham, Holkham Hall, Earl of Leicester, MS 229 Lichfield, Lichfield Cathedral Library, MS 1 London, British Library, MS Additional 37049, [accessed 24 April 2016] London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D IV, [accessed 11 April 2017] London, British Library, MS Harley 2253, [accessed 12 April 2017] London, British Library, MS Royal 13 B VIII , < www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminated manuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=43331> [accessed 12 April 2017] London, University of London, MS 657 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 26

Primary Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, trans. by Kilian J. Walsh (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1971) ———, De diligendo Dei (On Loving God), Library of Latin Texts: A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), [accessed 30 March 2017] Colum, Padraic, ‘The Book of Kells’, The Atlantic, 196 (1955), 53 The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. by Susanna Greer Fein, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009) Dionysius, Corpus Dionysiacum II, ed. by Günter Heil and Adolf M. Ritter, 2nd edn. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012) Gadamer, Hans-Georg, ‘The Play of Art’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. by Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 123–130 Gallagher, Sheila, Jacob’s Ladder, Gold-Leafed Cigarette Butts with Pins, 156 × 2.5 (New York: Private Collection, 2013) ———, Pneuma Hostis, Gold Leafed Cigarette Butts on Wooden Armature, 24 (New York: Diameter, Private Collection, 2013) Gerald of Wales, The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. by Thomas Wright, trans. by Thomas Foster and Richard Colt Hoare (London: H. G. Bohn, 1863) ———, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. by James F. Dimock, 8 vols (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1861–1891), v (1867) James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1905; repr. 2013) Middle English Marian Lyrics, ed. by Karen Saupe (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University for TEAMS, 1998) The Monk of Farne, The Monk of Farne: The Meditations of a Fourteenth-Century Monk, ed. by Hugh Farmer, trans. by a Benedictine of Stanbrook (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961)

Introduction 23 Reinhardt, Ad, The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (New York: Viking Press, 1975) Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, ed. by Carleton Fairchild Brown, 2nd edn., rev. by G. V. Smithers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924)

Secondary Adam, Ruth, ‘Idol Curiosity: Andy Warhol and the Art of Secular Iconography’, Theology and Sexuality, 10.2 (2004), 90–98 Bauduin, Tessel M., ‘The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths: Recent European Exhibitions on Art and Spirituality’, Material Religion, 6 (2010), 257–62 Boss, Sarah, ‘Deification: The Mariology of the Ordinary Faithful’, New Blackfriars, 98 (2017), 188–202 Carruthers, Mary J., The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) ———, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) ———, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Cervone, Cristina Maria, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. by Thomas G. Duncan (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005) The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. by Susanna Greer Fein, 3 vols (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009) Dillenberger, Jane Daggett, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol (New York: Continuum, 1998) The DIMEV: An Open-Access, Digital Edition of the Index of Middle English Verse, ed. by Linne R. Mooney and others, [accessed 23 March 2017], Dronke, Peter, The Medieval Lyric, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996) Gillespie, Vincent and Maggie Ross, ‘The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Effacement in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium V: Papers Read at the Devon Centre Dartington Hall, July 1992, ed. by M. Glasscoe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 53–77 Herren, Michael W. and Shirley Ann Brown, Christ in Celtic Christianity: Britain and Ireland from the Fifth to the Tenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012) Irenaeus of Lyons, ‘Against Heresies’, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, trans. by Alexander Roberts and others, 10 vols (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1867–1873), I (1867), pp. 309–567 Karnes, Michelle, Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011) Kearney, Richard, Ravishing Far/Near (New York: Dodge Gallery Publications, 2013) Keating, Daniel, Deification and Grace (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2007) Lamm, Julia A., ‘A Guide to Christian Mysticism’, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. by Julia A. Lamm (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 28–52 Leupin, Alexandre, Fiction and Incarnation: Rhetoric, Theology, and Literature in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) Marenbon, John, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Aesthetics’, in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. by David Cooper and others (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1992), pp. 22–32

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McGinn, Bernard, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism 1200–1350, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, 3 (New York: Crossroads, 1998) Minnis, Alistair J., ‘Affection and Imagination in “The Cloud of Unknowing” and Hilton’s “Scale of Perfection”’, Traditio, 39 (1983), 323–66 Ranft, Patricia, How the Doctrine of the Incarnation Shaped Western Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013) Raw, Barbara, Trinity and Incarnation in Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Rudy, Kathryn M., Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011) Tuchman, Maurice and others, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986) Woolf, Rosemary, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968)

Part I

Art, aesthetics and mysticism in theory and practice

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Beneath the surface Whose phenomenology? Which art?1 Kate Kirkpatrick

Introduction In its first iteration, this chapter’s title was ‘A Phenomenology of Art’. As I went about writing, however, I began by attempting to define my terms in the context of others’ uses of them, so I read theological and philosophical works on aesthetics and the phenomenology of art in order to clarify what my working definition of ‘art’ would be. As I read, I became increasingly dissatisfied. As someone who sketches and paints, it was striking to me that most philosophical and theological accounts of visual art focus exclusively on consuming art made by others. It is intuitive to me that where mysticism and art are concerned, making art has been, and still may be experienced by many as, a spiritual – if not mystical – practice. Indeed, whether we want to call such things ‘mystical’ or ‘art’, the contemporary popularity of art therapy, mindfulness colouring books, and indeed neurological investigations of how art-making affect the brain, suggest that making art (broadly construed) can restore human beings in ways art-makers (broadly construed) feel unable fully to articulate or understand. Much like mysticism, art-making is a lived experience that some artists describe as revealing that there is more to the world than the eye can see, mouth can say, or paint can portray. The first aim of this essay, therefore, is to argue that philosophical and theological discussions of art need to get ‘beneath the surface’ of consuming images and artefacts made by others (what I will call art as product) to consider the process of art-making. I propose that a Jamesian phenomenology may help us make this shift.2 There are several obstacles to achieving it, however. For even if we concede that ‘phenomenologies of art’ need to include more phenomenologies of making art, what we find ‘beneath the surface’ raises several methodological questions. Indeed, this essay arguably raises more of them than it answers. In particular, after introducing what I take to be the dominant view of aesthetics as spectator sport and juxtaposing it with art as a vulnerable and variable process, I argue that focusing on art as process raises problems of polyphony and epistemic access. Even so, I suggest, attending to phenomenologies of art-making is a rich resource for both theological anthropology and the philosophy of art.

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(i) Aesthetics as spectator sport In Theodor Adorno’s draft introduction to Aesthetic Theory, he writes that ‘As a phenomenology of art, phenomenology would like to develop art neither by deducing it from its philosophical concept nor by rising to it through comparative abstraction; rather, phenomenology wants to say what art is’.3 Doing a phenomenology of art, on Adorno’s account, is difficult (if not impossible) because phenomenology is supposed to be presuppositionless and ‘Art does not exist as the putative lived experience of the subject who encounters it as a tabula rasa but only within an already developed language of art. Lived experiences’, Adorno continues, ‘are indispensable, but they are no final court of aesthetic knowledge. [. . .] Art awaits its own explanation’.4 One might wish to argue that Adorno’s demand for presuppositionlessness renders phenomenology of anything impossible. But for the purposes of this essay, this methodological question will be left aside in order to pursue others that lie beneath Adorno’s demand, namely, ‘whose phenomenology?’ and ‘which art?’ In The Man without Content, Giorgio Agamben begins his work with Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s aesthetics in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals – in particular, Kant’s definition of the beautiful as impersonal and universal. Nietzsche did not consider his own book to be the place to inquire whether ‘this was essentially a mistake’.5 Rather, Nietzsche writes, ‘all I want to underline is that Kant, like all philosophers, just considered art and beauty from the position of “spectator”, instead of viewing the aesthetic problem through the experiences of the artist (the creator), and thus inadvertently introduced the “spectator” himself into the concept “beautiful”’.6 Philosophers, Nietzsche and Agamben charge, have offered definitions of beauty which fail to live up to the experience of beauty. Comparing Kant’s own definition of beauty as that ‘which gives us pleasure without interest’ with Stendhal’s, who called the beautiful ‘a promise of happiness’ – that is to say, something about which we are unlikely to be disinterested – Agamben follows Nietzsche in suggesting that we need to differentiate the experience of artists from aesthetics.7 This essay argues that in addition to differentiating between the experience of artists and aesthetics, we need to redress the imbalance between spectator-approaches to art (which we might call theory, or aesthetics) and artmaking (which we might call praxis, or process).8 Consider Hegel’s aesthetics, where art is seen as no longer capable of satisfying the soul’s spiritual needs, as it did in earlier civilizations.9 On Agamben’s reading, Hegel correctly diagnoses the problem that ‘our tendency toward reflection and toward a critical stance’ has become overpowering. Agamben continues: ‘when we are before a work of art we no longer attempt to penetrate its innermost vitality, identifying ourselves with it, but rather attempt to represent it to ourselves according to the critical framework furnished by the aesthetic judgment’.10 Whether or not it is true that, to paraphrase Lautréament, judgements about art have greater value than art itself, contemporary debates about how art should be defined reflect the prevalence of ‘institutional’ definitions of art – i.e., that for art to be art it must be, as James Elkin observes, ‘exhibited in galleries and bought

Beneath the surface 29 by museums’.11 On this view the ‘art world’ holds the keys to these sacred spaces, guarding their boundaries to keep out profane impostors. Hegel’s optimism about ‘knowing philosophically what art is’ may seem unwarranted to readers of aesthetics and viewers of art today, but his description, too, places the value of art in the experience and judgment of spectators: What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just our immediate enjoyment but our judgement also, since we subject to our intellectual consideration (i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation, and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of both to one another. The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is [. . .] Art [. . .] acquires its real ratification only in philosophy.12 Although the sources I have cited thus far have been philosophical rather than theological, in much of Western theology, too, thinking about ‘art’ concerns consumption, not creation. In fact, many Christian writers have warned of the dangers of visual arts. In Augustine (heavily influenced by Platonism) we find a close association of Truth and Beauty as cognates of the divine.13 And, as George Pattison writes, since ‘the aim of the Christian life is to come to know this Truth, this Beauty, and to contemplate it in and for itself [. . .] the visible world has a double character’.14 For on the one hand, things in the material world (in Augustine’s words) ‘offer their forms to the perception of our senses, those forms which give loveliness to the structure of the visible world’; but this loveliness can distract the soul from its search for God, tempting it away from Truth into the sin of the ‘gratification of the eye’.15 Augustine’s mistrust of the visual sense reverberated in the Middle Ages, Reformation and beyond: beauty can become an idol, distracting us from cultivating the interior life as we ought.16 But for some art-makers the very process of making is part of cultivating the interior life, of dismantling idols or disillusioning the ego of its pretensions to centrality. Hegel’s words, like Kant’s, prioritize the universal: through philosophy – through universal rationality – on Hegel’s view, art is ratified. To reiterate my opening statements, I sketch and paint. The products of my practices would not be likely to qualify as ‘art’ by any institutional definition of the term. However, my own lived experience of engaging in these practices has led to dissatisfaction with the theoretical offerings of philosophical aesthetics – a dissatisfaction shared, as we shall soon see, by other artists.17 Before turning to consider those artists, however, I will introduce a critic of Hegelianism whose theoretical framework will inform the rest of my discussion: William James. In A Pluralistic Universe James argues against neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophies of the absolute, suggesting in their stead radical empiricism. But as David Lamberth writes, the work’s ‘overarching and enduring philosophical argument’ is against the trend in philosophy that James calls ‘vicious

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intellectualism’.18 As Lamberth expounds it, vicious intellectualism is ‘the reigning philosophic sin of [James’s] day’.19 It is to be distinguished from ‘intellectualism’, which is ‘a valuation of or habitual preference for concepts as products of the intellect as opposed to percepts, sensation, or experience’, a preference for what James would call “knowledge-about” over modes of “direct acquaintance”’.20 Intellectualism per se is not problematic – after all, concepts are demonstrably helpful. But the vice appears when concepts end up silencing percepts and experience. For James, as Lamberth writes, ‘thinking is not generally best understood along the traditional lines of contemplation or theoria. Rather, thinking is a form of adaptive behaviour oriented most basically to action in and on a relatively stable but also continuously evolving environment’.21 Vicious intellectualism refuses to admit that life sometimes ‘exceeds conceptual logic and often obliges us to proceed with hypotheses rather than strictly logical syllogisms’.22 James’s method here and in The Varieties of Religious Experience is intended to allow these excesses that logic cannot explain. It is a phenomenological method, and although a strict Husserlian might dispute this claim, on my reading, James’s attention to consciousness experience – to percepts rather than concepts – may be used to shift theological discussion of art from consumption of products to creative process.23 James’s phenomenology of religious experience relied not only on first-person experience but also on third-person accounts. So we will now turn to consider three artists in their own voice, in an effort to sketch a phenomenology of art from a maker’s point of view.

(ii) Art as vulnerable and variable process Descriptions of art-making – that are not merely technical but involve attending to the consciousness of the artist as he or she lives the experience of making – are relatively few and far between. In the twentieth century, however, artist Robert Morris wrote ‘Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making’, in which he discusses the problem from which I took the title of this chapter, that ‘much attention has been focused on the analysis of the content of art making – its end images – but there has been little attention focused on the significance of the means’.24 Making art, he says, involved ‘forms’ too, but forms that test the limits and possibilities of the artist’s actions and the materials of their environment. Making is, in Morris’s words, the ‘submerged side of the art iceberg. The reasons for this submersion are probably varied and run from the deep-seated tendency to separate ends and means within this culture to the simple fact that those who discuss art know almost nothing about how it gets made’.25 Ignorance of how art is made is thus a factor in this surface-level, spectatordefined appreciation of art. But it may also be that shifting our focus beneath the surface – to the process rather than the product – reveals a vulnerability that some would rather leave hidden. For if we look to the perceptual aspects of art-making we find that human makers are interacting with the world in ways they cannot always predict and control.26 The bleeding of pigment onto too-wet paper can result in a thing of beauty, or it can result in frustration and feelings of failure.

Beneath the surface 31 Beneath the surface of art-as-product, the human experience of making art is a vulnerable one – one that involves not just an object of aesthetic judgment but a subject who is affective and all-too-human. Human creativity is fallible, frequently confronting its limits. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty cites Paul Cézanne, who described the painter in the face of his motif as about ‘to join the aimless hands of nature’.27 Talent and skill, clearly, play a role in the making of art, but as Adorno writes, ‘no artist knows with certainty whether anything will come of what he does, his happiness and his anxiety, which are totally foreign to the contemporary self-understanding of science, subjectively registers something objective: the vulnerability of all art’.28 But even if all art is vulnerable, reading the words of artists suggests that it is not all vulnerable for the same reasons: process is variable. Sometimes the artist is surprised or made joyful by the image that unfolds before her, experiencing making as a kind of play. Sometimes making is non-teleological – the artist may not make with the intention of producing a product, especially not a product of a kind intended to be presented to an art-world public. The submerged side of the iceberg is not universal, but particular, with artists having different and even contradictory accounts of the making and meaning of art. Consider Cézanne, Kandinsky and Klee: three visual artists chosen on the basis that they, like Morris, articulated words as well as images. Paul Cézanne wrote that his business as an artist was ‘to convey the thrill of nature’s permanence along with the elements and the appearance of all its changes’.29 Cézanne presents the artist as one whose ‘whole aim must be silence’, not to interfere with nature while he ‘translates’ it into a different medium: ‘[I]f I interpret too much one day, if I’m carried away today by a theory which contradicts yesterday’s, if I think while I’m painting, if I meddle, then whoosh!, everything goes to pieces’.30 Cézanne is sceptical that any theory will give an adequate account of art. In his conversations with Joachim Gasquet he pronounces that ‘Logic sells us short’, and that ‘Theories are man’s downfall!’31 He tells Gasquet that ‘What [he is] trying to convey [. . .] is something more mysterious, more entangled in the very roots of being, in the impalpable source of all sensation’, proceeding to say that ‘while an artist is at work, his brain should be unencumbered, like a sensitized plate, a recording machine, and no more’.32 On Cézanne’s experience, getting up from painting left him feeling: ‘a sort of intoxication, a sort of ecstasy’.33 Cézanne’s descriptions may remind theological readers of Simone Weil’s descriptions of ‘absolute unmixed attention’ as prayer, or of William James’s famous chapter on mysticism, in which he describes the ineffable character of religious experience as one which ‘defies expression [. . .] its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others’.34 Wassily Kandinsky, on the other hand, is happy to offer theoretical musings about art – musings that are universal in scope. Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in English in 1914, was one of the first theoretical discussions of abstract art. At that point in history, Kandinsky thought artists were

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emerging from a ‘nightmare of materialism’ towards subtler emotions that promoted the spiritual development of human beings.35 For Kandinsky, art belongs to the ‘spiritual life’ of humanity.36 He claimed that all art offers ‘spiritual food’.37 Different arts, in his view, ‘say’ things in their own peculiar languages, but all art, for Kandinsky, expresses an ‘inner need’, which is ‘built up of three mystical elements’.38 All art has a message, for Kandinsky, but we do not always hear it on account of the culture of spectatorship: The spectator is too ready to look for a meaning in a picture – i.e., some outward connection between its various parts. Our materialistic age has produced a type of spectator or ‘connoisseur’, who is not content to put himself opposite a picture and let it say its own message. Instead of allowing the inner value of the picture to work, he worries himself in looking for ‘closeness to nature’, or ‘temperament’, or ‘handling’, or ‘tonality’, or ‘perspective’, or what not. His eye does not probe the outer expression to arrive at the inner meaning. In a conversation with an interesting person, we endeavour to get at his fundamental ideas and feelings. We do not bother about the words he uses, nor the spelling of those words, nor the breath necessary for speaking them, nor the movements of his tongue and lips, nor the psychological working on our brain, nor the physical sound in our ear, nor the physiological effect on our nerves. We realize that these things, though interesting and important, are not the main things of the moment, but that the meaning and idea is what concerns us. We should have the same feeling when confronted with a work of art.39 Like James of ‘vicious intellectuals’, Kandinsky is critical of those connoisseurs who have ‘knowledge about’ art instead of seeking direct acquaintance. Where Robert Morris cites ignorance about how art gets made as a cause of the ‘submerged side of the art iceberg’, Kandinsky seems to imply here that knowing how art gets made can actually distract the spectator from experiencing art as it should be experienced, debasing it to a form of social capital or an object to be mastered. Of course, some might object to Kandinsky that when we meet an interesting person we do bother about the words she uses and we may wonder at the processes by which she came to articulate them; or that, leaving process aside, the meaning and idea of a painting is hardly self-evident. Kandinsky’s British reception focused more on the latter problem. In 1912, Michael Sadleir – art critic and editor of the modernist magazine Rhythm – published an article in which he said that Kandinsky had ‘voiced the inarticulate ideals of a multitude’.40 The Saturday Review complained that ‘intelligent review of this book is not easy; it is vague and confusing, sincere, occult and idealistic; philosophical, psychological, and dogmatic. In much it seems to us soundly critical; in much unsound in its philosophy’.41 But reviewers, like artists, do not all agree with each other: Frank Rutter praised Kandinsky’s book in The Sunday Times as ‘the most lucid and best reasoned account of the aims of abstract painting that has yet been written’.42 Kandinsky’s theories were formulated in part in reaction to positivists’ attempts

Beneath the surface 33 to quantify everything, championing science as the supreme route to knowledge. But ‘arts alone’, Kandinsky argued, spoke to the human spirit.43 Paul Klee provides a further example of the variability of artists’ experiences of making. Klee wrote and lectured extensively about art and perception, and explicitly described his own process of making visual art: ‘the pictorial work came into being from motion, is itself motion that has been fixed in place and is taken up in motion (eye muscles)’.44 Klee thought that artists’ perception was more finely attuned to the world than the perception of non-artists, and on this basis he suggested that studying artists and their work would help the spectator see the world better. On his own experience of process, Klee describes ‘a certain fire’ in the artist: ‘A certain fire, yet to come, revives, works its way along the hand, steams onto the board and, from the board, leaps as a spark, closing the circle from which it came: back to the eye, and beyond’.45 As Mark Wrathall notes, Klee is not treating the act of artistic creation as subjective expression. There is no discussion of inner and outer, but rather ‘in a “receptive” organ, the eye’: Before the fire can revive, it has to be awaited, it is in holding himself ready for the fire ‘yet to come’ that the artist is able to receive from the eye what is needed to awaken the fire. This holding oneself ready is not merely a mental state; it involves an actual physical readiness for the appearance of the object. So the artist’s contribution to the art work is to put herself in position for the fire of inspiration. But she can’t force it, she can only wait for the coming fire to awaken. When that happens, there is no longer an experience of expression – no longer an experience of the artist pressing something inner out into the world.46 Rather, as Klee writes, the artist is ‘swept up’ into this movement: ‘We are ourselves moved, hence find it easier to impart movement’.47 Wrathall discusses Klee’s account of his own experience as ‘giving us phenomenological data, as it were, for which scientific theories of perception need to account’ – Klee’s process is intended to inform the philosophy of perception. But can such accounts inform philosophical and theological thinking about art?48 The problem, as I see it, is not only that ‘direct acquaintance’ with art is – as we heard from Adorno at the outset of this chapter – mediated by the language of art as product, not process, but also that when artists describe their reflections on art – even three artists, in the space of a few lines – we are confronted with polyphony: ‘process’ is particular and diverse, not universal. What James wrote in The Varieties again seems relevant here: ‘So many men, so many minds: I imagine that these experiences can be as infinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals’.49

(iii) The polyphony of process and epistemic access Needless to say the problem of polyphony is not peculiar to academic discussions of art. James’s attack on vicious intellectualism has been applied to theological

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questions – and the analytic philosophy of religion, in particular, where Sami Pihlström has argued that ‘we need Jamesian insights in order to argue that the issue of God’s reality is not exhausted by the narrowly intellectual (evidentialist) considerations one might advance in favour of either theism or atheism’.50 In the language of epistemology, propositional knowledge (or ‘knowledge that’) is not the only kind of knowledge that can be had, for if God is a person, then personal knowledge (or ‘knowledge by acquaintance’) must also be considered. But just as in the philosophy of religion this ‘acquaintance-knowledge’ argument raises the problem of divine hiddenness, we may find a parallel problem concerning art. If it is the case that not all humans make art, then direct ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ with art as process (which indeed, may be better considered procedural knowledge, or ‘knowledge how’) is only possible for a few. In addition to the problem of polyphony, therefore, we may have a problem of epistemic access. But not having had certain experiences does not preclude the value of attending to those who have. To cite James a final time, in The Varieties he wrote that he did not know ‘whether [his] treatment of mystical states [would] shed more light or darkness, [. . .] for [his] own constitution [shut him] out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and [he could] speak of them only at second hand’.51 Since the ‘Process Art’ movement of the 1960s many artists have emphasised ‘process’ as the most important part of their art, emphasising ineffability, transiency, and even passive and noetic dimensions to making art, to name just some of the family resemblances between artists’ and mystics’ descriptions.52 According to artists, making art can transform the way one sees the world and one’s place in it.53 Philosophers such as Matthew Kieran have recently begun to ask questions about what creativity is and why we value it in others and ourselves.54 Is it worthwhile extrinsically, for the resulting product or its potential power to bring other ostensible goods such as wealth or prestige? Or intrinsically, as something that makes life more meaningful for the maker independently of its value to others? Theologians may wish to add: how does human creativity relate to the divine Creator? The OED records that the adjective ‘creative’ is first attested in relation to artistic imagination in 1729, and the first recorded use of applying the word ‘creator’ to human agents was in 1548.55 James M. Watkins argues that since then the word ‘creativity’ has been used so widely, and variously that its meaning has become obscure. But theologically, Watkins argues, human creativity can be understood as ‘an invitation to join in the creative vision God has for the world, and to embody this vision in one’s own creative work’.56 The spectator approach to art fails to get below the surface, theoretically, and to unpack the motivations that underlie the human drive to make. Moreover, its prevalence has practical effects, in that the culture of spectatorship can act as a deterrent, generating distinct castes of ‘artists’ and ‘consumers’, the ‘skilled’ and the ‘amateur’, which prevent people from discovering making for themselves. If Susanne Lange is correct that ‘Art is the articulation, not the stimulation or catharsis, of feeling; and the height of technique is simply the highest power of this sensuous revelation and wordless abstraction’, then making need not be the sanctuary of the few.57

Beneath the surface 35 Artists’ descriptions of their experience (much like theoretical aesthetics) may not resound with all hearers. But, as Augustine wrote in De Trinitate I.3.5, ‘That is why it is useful to have several books by several authors, even on the same subjects, [. . .] so that the matter itself may reach as many possible, some in this way and others in that’.58 As Nick Zangwill writes: We must understand how art can motivate anyone to do anything. And we must understand how art can seem valuable to its makers and consumers. We must understand why we bother with art. A good theory of art gives us such an understanding. And a theory that provides little or no understanding of this is a failure.59

Conclusion Much ink has been spilt by philosophers and theologians on why we bother with looking at art. This chapter has argued that we need to get beneath the surface to consider why we make it, and to that end contemporary discussions of art should invite process into those discussions. As Pattison writes with respect to theology, ‘the dialogue between art and religion is to be just that: a dialogue, with each partner seeking to appreciate the specific contribution of the other’.60 Focusing on the process of making is a rich and under-mined vein of both theology and the philosophy of art. For the former, because such a study could illuminate both the doctrine of a Creator God and the theological anthropology that understands humanity as made in God’s image. And for the latter, because attending to the process of art-making may help us illuminate a neglected aspect of art’s value.

Notes 1 I am grateful to participants of The Mystical Theology Network’s conference on ‘Art and Articulation’ for their feedback on the first version of this chapter; to the editors of this volume and their reviewers for helpful comments; and to my colleagues in the philosophy department at the University of Hertfordshire for their discussion. I would particularly like to thank Pamela Sue Anderson and Constantine Sandis for their conversations on this topic. 2 I will say more about what I take Jamesian phenomenology to be later in this chapter; the similarities and dissimilarities between James’s philosophical method and German phenomenology are the subject of extensive debate. See: e.g., James M. Edie, ‘William James and Phenomenology’, The Review of Metaphysics, 23 (1970), 481–526; and, on James’s methodological self-definition, Richard H. King, ‘Religion, Sociology, and Psychology’, in William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Martin Halliwell and Joel D. S. Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 49–64 (p. 55). 3 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), pp. 463–4. 4 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 465. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. by Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. by Carol Diethe, revised edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 73–4.

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6 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, p. 74. 7 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790) §2 and ‘General Remark on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments’: ed. by Paul Guyer, trans. by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Stendhal, De l’Amour (Paris: Bohaire, 1833), ch. 17. 8 Eugenio Barba has made a similar criticism of the ‘ethnocentrism’ of the spectator, a tendency that involves ‘reluctance to consider the point of view of process. When we are discussing artistic products, our conditioned reflexes lead us to be concerned only with the way in which the result works. It is, however, necessary to realize that in order to understand the way in which the result works, it is not sufficient to understand which means must be resorted to in order to arrive at a result’: The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 108. 9 Georg W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. by T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I, p. 11. 10 Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. by Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 26. 11 ‘Les jugements sur la poésie ont plus de valeur que la poésie’, Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, Poésies, Lettres, ed. by Patrick Besnier (Paris: Livre de poche classique, 1992), Poésies II, 77; James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 1. 12 Hegel, Aesthetics, I, pp. 11, 13. 13 The identification of God with the transcendentals truth, goodness, etc., can be traced back to Plato’s Phaedrus. See Plato, Phaedrus, ed. by Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). To give two later Christian examples, in The Divine Names [De divinis nominibus], Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite provides an extensive treatment of Good, Being, Truth, Beauty, and Unity as the names of God. See Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987). The Catechism of the Catholic Faith § 41 states that: ‘All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfections of creatures – their truth, their goodness, their beauty – all reflect the infinite perfection of God. Consequently we can name God by taking his creatures’ perfections as our starting point, “for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator”’. Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II, 2nd edn. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997). 14 George Pattison, Art, Modernity, and Faith: Restoring the Image (London: MacMillan, 1991), p. 14. 15 Augustine, City of God, trans. by Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 462; and Confessions, trans. by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 241. 16 Pattison, Art, Modernity, and Faith, p. 16. 17 Although there may be a seed of process to be developed in Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism: the Schoolmen’s definition of ‘making’ is ‘productive action, considered not with regard to the use which we therein make of our freedom, but merely with regard to the thing produced or with regard to the work taken in itself.’ Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. by Joseph W. Evans (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), p. 10. 18 David C. Lamberth, ‘A Pluralistic Universe a Century Later’, in William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Martin Halliwell and Joel D. S. Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 133–50 (p. 137). 19 Lamberth, ‘A Pluralistic Universe’, p. 138. 20 Lamberth, ‘A Pluralistic Universe’, p. 138.

Beneath the surface 37 21 Lamberth, ‘A Pluralistic Universe’, p. 135. 22 Joel D. S. Rasmussen, ‘Jamesian Pluralism and the Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry’, in William James and the Transatlantic Conversation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 151–66 (p. 161). 23 ‘When William James appraised kinds of mental activity in the stream of consciousness (including their embodiment and their dependence on habit), he too was practicing phenomenology’: David Woodruff Smith, ‘Phenomenology’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta, [accessed 11 June 2017]. 24 Robert Morris, ‘Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated’, Artforum, 8.8 (1970), 62–6 (p. 62). 25 Morris, ‘Some Notes’, p. 62. 26 In the Jamesian sense. 27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 305 (citing Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. by Christopher Pemberton [London: Thames and Hudson, 1991], p. 148). 28 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 466. 29 Gasquet, Cézanne, p. 148. 30 Cézanne, in Gasquet, Cézanne, pp. 150, 148. 31 Cézanne, in Gasquet, Cézanne, pp. 167, 150. 32 Cézanne, in Gasquet, Cézanne, p. 152. 33 Cézanne, in Gasquet, Cézanne, p. 168. 34 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 117; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 380. 35 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. by Michael T. H. Sadleir (New York: Dover, 1977), pp. 1–2. 36 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 4. 37 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 7. 38 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, pp. 21, 33. 39 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 52. 40 Michael T. H. Sadleir, ‘After Gauguin’, Rhythm, 1.4 (1912), 23–29 (p. 29). Sadleir translated Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912) under the English title The Art of Spiritual Harmony (1914). 41 ‘Art’s Enigma’, Saturday Review 15 August 1914, pp. 202–3 (p. 203). 42 Frank Rutter, ‘Round the Galleries: Twentieth Century Art’, Sunday Times, 24 May 1914; quoted in Anna Gruetzner Robins, Modern Art in Britain, 1910–1914 (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997), p. 134. 43 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 16. 44 Paul Klee, Schöpferische Konfession (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1919), p. 35, cited and translated by Mark Wrathall, ‘The Phenomenological Relevance of Art’, in Art and Phenomenology, ed. by Joseph D. Parry (London: Routledge 2011), pp. 9–30 (p. 22). 45 Klee, Schöpferische Konfession, p. 34, cited in Wrathall, ‘Phenomenological Relevance’, p. 22. 46 Wrathall, ‘Phenomenological Relevance’, p. 22. 47 Paul Klee, Das bildnerische Denken: Schriften zur Form-und Gestaltungslehre, ed. by Jürg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1956), p. 255; cited in Wrathall, ‘Phenomenological Relevance’, p. 22. 48 Wrathall, ‘Phenomenological Relevance’, p. 27. 49 James, Varieties, p. 408. 50 Sami Pihlström, ‘Jamesian Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God’, in William James and the Transatlantic Conversation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 183–98 (p. 191).

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51 James, Varieties, p. 379. 52 On ineffability see, for example, Jackson Pollock, ‘When I’m painting, I am not aware of what I am doing’: Pollock, ‘My Painting’, Possibilities, 1.1 (1947–48), 78–83 (p. 79). On transience see, for example: Andy Goldsworthy’s description of working with nature as a ‘transient process that I cannot understand’, cited in Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 92. By likening artists’ descriptions I do not intend to conflate art-making and religious experience, nor indeed to proclaim that art has ‘replaced’ religious faith, as one Telegraph headline would have us believe: Mark Hudson, ‘Rothko Exhibition: Art Replaces Religious Faith’, Telegraph, 25 September 2008, [accessed 28 May 2017]. 53 E.g. THEFL, who says process art changes the way the world is seen, such that ‘canvas is everywhere’. Process Art with THEFL, LA Street Art Gallery, 1 January 2013, [accessed 22 May 2017]. 54 See Matthew Kieran, ‘Creativity as a Virtue of Character’, in The Philosophy of Creativity, ed. by E. Paul and S. Kauffman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 125–44. 55 ‘creative, adj.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2010 [accessed 13 May 2017]; ‘creator, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2010 [accessed 13 May 2017]. 56 James M. Watkins, Creativity as Sacrifice: Toward a Theological Model for Creativity in the Arts (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2015), p. 16. 57 Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 107. 58 Augustine, The Trinity, trans. by Edmund Hill O. P. (New York: New City Press, 1991), p. 68. 59 Nick Zangwill, Aesthetic Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 23. 60 Pattison, Art, Modernity, and Faith, p. 8.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) Agamben, Giorgio, The Man without Content, trans. by Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) ‘Art’s Enigma’, Saturday Review (15 August 1914), pp. 202–3 Augustine, Confessions, trans. by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) ———, City of God, trans. by Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) ———, The Trinity, trans. by Edmund Hill O. P. (New York: New City Press, 1991) Barba, Eugenio, The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology (London: Routledge, 2005) Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997) Edie, James M., ‘William James and Phenomenology’, The Review of Metaphysics, 23 (1970), 481–526 Elkins, James, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (London: Routledge, 2004) Gablik, Suzi, The Reenchantment of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991) Gasquet, Joachim, Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. by Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991) Hegel, Georg W. F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. by T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) Hudson, Mark, ‘Rothko Exhibition: Art Replaces Religious Faith’, Telegraph (25 September 2008), [accessed 28 May 2017]

Beneath the surface 39 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. by Michael T. H. Sadleir (New York: Dover, 1977) Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, ed. by Paul Guyer, trans. by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Kieran, Matthew, ‘Creativity as a Virtue of Character’, in The Philosophy of Creativity, ed. by E. Paul and S. Kauffman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 125–44 King, Richard H., ‘Religion, Sociology, and Psychology’, in William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Martin Halliwell and Joel D. S. Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 49–64 Klee, Paul, Schöpferische Konfession (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1919) ———, Das bildnerische Denken: Schriften zur Form-und Gestaltungslehre, ed. by Jürg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1956) Lamberth, David C., ‘A Pluralistic Universe a Century Later’, in William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Martin Halliwell and Joel D. S. Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 133–50 Langer, Susanne K., Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 107 Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, Poésies, Lettres, ed. by Patrick Besnier (Paris: Livre de poche classique, 1992) Maritain, Jacques, Art and Scholasticism, trans. by Joseph W. Evans (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002) Morris, Robert, ‘Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated’, Artforum, 8.8 (1970), 62–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. by Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. by Carol Diethe, revised edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Pattison, George, Art, Modernity, and Faith: Restoring the Image (London: MacMillan, 1991) Pihlström, Sami, ‘Jamesian Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God’, in William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Martin Halliwell and Joel D. S. Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 183–98 Plato, Phaedrus, ed. by Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Pollock, Jackson, ‘My Painting’, Possibilities, 1.1 (1947–48), 78–83 Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) Rasmussen, Joel D. S., ‘Jamesian Pluralism and the Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry’, in William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Martin Halliwell and Joel D. S. Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 151–66 Robins, Anna Gruetzner, Modern Art in Britain, 1910–1914 (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997) Sadleir, Michael T. H., ‘After Gauguin’, Rhythm, 1.4 (1912), 23–29 Smith, David Woodruff, ‘Phenomenology’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta, [accessed 11 June 2017]

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Stendhal, De l’Amour (Paris: Bohaire, 1833) THEFL, Process Art with THEFL, LA Street Art Gallery (1 January 2013), [accessed 22 May 2017] Watkins, James M., Creativity as Sacrifice: Toward a Theological Model for Creativity in the Arts (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2015) Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002) Wrathall, Mark, ‘The Phenomenological Relevance of Art’, in Art and Phenomenology, ed. by Joseph D. Parry (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 9–30 Zangwill, Nick, Aesthetic Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

2

Art and inarticulacy Bill Prosser

English, strictly speaking, is not my first language [. . .] so for the time being I use English words in order to say things. Claire-Louise Bennett1

I have long had the feeling that, like Ms. Bennett, English is not my native tongue. As far back as I can remember my first language has been drawing. I have always used it to say things, to narrow the gap between art and inarticulacy by picturing the thoughts, feelings, and intuitions that my words always miss. I also like to think that drawings are able to embrace wider word-shy ideas, perhaps about faith, which are difficult to talk about but that images can shed some light on, however pale. I should stress, though, that as an artist and not an art historian, cultural theorist, or philosopher, my comments will be from a purely personal rather than from an academic point of view. I must confess that I am no theologian either, although in mulling over these thoughts about my work this has proved less of a drawback than I might have expected. Despite not being schooled in its religious or historical contexts, I was pleased to discover that The Cloud of Unknowing’s three demands for achieving a state of grace – ignorance, contemplation and humility – are inseparable from my own, less elevated, ambitions. The Cloud-Author’s requirements are straightforward enough. Ignorance, for example, is essential if we are to make any progress. He declares firmly that we must all ‘cut away the desire for knowledge, for it will hinder [. . .] more than help [us]’.2 Equally eagerly, he elevates contemplation by trimming away the ballast of current thoughts, committing himself ‘to give up everything that I can think, and choose as my love the one thing I cannot think [. . .] the work of contemplation’.3 While as for humility, he believes that our natural tendency towards selfreflection – often a lame excuse for patting ourselves on the back – offers instead a prime opportunity to ‘see what you lack, and not what you have: that is the easiest way to get and keep humility’.4 My relating these three themes to art is not new. The conviction that art defies intellectual comprehension, for instance, has often been maintained, sometimes emphatically: ‘if I think while painting, bang! Everything falls apart’, said Cézanne.5 A little later, and with a coolness befitting his preferred palette, the

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Cubist painter Georges Braque was of the same mind, concluding that ‘In art there is only one thing that counts; the thing you can’t explain’.6 More recently, Abstract Expressionist Barnet Newman expressed himself with typical candour. He was convinced that any apparent conflict was in fact a simple category error, summarily dismissing all art theorising as irrelevant because ‘Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds’.7 Contemplation, too, has had its followers. During their meandering conversations, Rodin said unequivocally to Paul Gsell that ‘art is contemplation’,8 and the Neo-Plasticist painter Piet Mondrian believed that ‘Beauty is realized more purely precisely by assimilating it completely, by forgetting oneself in its contemplation [. . .]’.9 More pointedly, the graphic artist Sue Coe, straining against capitalism’s destructive surge, declared that for her ‘art is about slowing time down, not speeding it up’.10 The virtue of being humble, however, finds fewer advocates. This perhaps reflects the more general hubris of a society where perpetual blog-blurting and selfie-sticking seem de rigueur. But humility’s rare supporters agree that its roots lie in recognising that the artist is not so much master in his own house as one who acts predominantly as a transmitter for something beyond the self. In this sense, Plato’s conception of human creativity being merely inspiration from the Muses – the cause of artists’ ‘divine frenzy’ – lives on, most obviously in society’s heroic romanticising of celebrity ‘mad’ artists such as Van Gogh.11 Ruskin thought that ‘the first test of a truly great man is his humility [as he has] a curious feeling that the greatness is not in [him], but through [him]’, an opinion reiterated by Mondrian in saying that ‘the position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel’.12 Such passive creativity is also championed by Sister Wendy Beckett, at least in her attitude towards spiritual aesthetics. She affirms that Religious art ‘(with a capital R) [. . .] cannot be achieved by willing’, and that on those rare occasions when it does occur we must meet it ‘humbly’.13 With her thoughts in mind, it might not be entirely coincidental that where The Cloud’s two other main themes – ignorance and contemplation – are concerned, artists share something with wider theology. Writing in his book on art, ‘Crucifixions and Resurrections of the Image’, the theologian George Pattison says that, ‘theologians have always [. . .] spoken [. . .] of silence, unknowing and learned ignorance as integral to what they do’.14 *** My own contribution to these ideas begins far from the aspirations of either divinity or fine art by contrasting The Cloud-Mystic’s wisdom with my former career as an illustrator. For about twenty years I was busy making drawings for a variety of newspapers, books and magazines, swimming energetically to stay afloat in the media’s choppy current (Figure 2.1). Such strenuous exercise left precious little breath for reflection. By its very nature illustration demanded the exact opposites of the trio of attributes which later was to become crucial to me, unknowingly borrowed from The Cloud-Author. For a start, ignorance was out. Simply in order to complete commissions I needed to know and understand the texts my pictures would accompany, and there was certainly no time

Art and inarticulacy 43

Figure 2.1 Bill Prosser, The Sunday Times Magazine, October 29, 1989

for contemplation – short deadlines were always snapping at my heels, rushing me along. And any inclination to humility had to take a back seat, as I strained to summon up enough confidence in my ability to persuade anyone to employ me. In addition, my concerns over understanding and promptness were partly predicated on how my drawings would be received. For if editorial pictures of this kind are to come off, they must have an immediacy based on a pool of knowledge shared with their audience. These illustrations shun lengthy contemplation,

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embodying the American artist Ad Reinhardt’s dictum, ‘As for a picture, if it isn’t worth a thousand words, the hell with it’.15 Marx’s crumbling tomb as a metaphor for the death of Communism can only succeed because its viewers are expected to know who Marx was, what he looked like, that he is indivisible from Communism, and in the unlikely event that his grave in Highgate cemetery really were to start spontaneously disintegrating, it might appear something like this. Nevertheless, despite the great satisfaction in being paid to draw such themes to order, doing only commercial work was never quite enough, as pure drawing – drawing simply in and for itself – was what I really hankered after. I dearly wanted to follow Saul Steinberg in being able to say, ‘What I draw is drawing’.16 So to satisfy this inner nagging, throughout my career I also made images that were entirely for myself, ones which had no need to make sense or appeal to anyone else. Here I hoped to be liberated, as any knowledge or explanation of their content would be redundant. This worked for a while, until finally I decided to purge illustration from my system entirely. My ignorance could now be exclusively celebrated, my mindless contemplation given a blank cheque, and with luck I could work on my humility. I committed myself to following my nose, beavering away to create my own graphite Cloud from groups of unknowing, unrehearsed drawings. *** Early on, I had come up with a cluster about ventriloquists (Figure 2.2). Without even a passing acquaintance with the skill needed to throw a voice, I relied instead on catching ventriloquism’s visual foibles – its dapper double-speak straight men and ludicrously got-up, gottle-a-gear sidekicks. A revealing choice, looking back. Despite their apparent flippancy these drawings now disclose rather more than I intended, inadvertently portraying my ever-present linguistic shortfall. Here I am the dummy, the dumb one, forever externally articulated – the empty mouthpiece apparently speaking but always spoken through. Capriciously, I began to put these back-chatting artistes into imaginary situations, often by cobbling together sets and props from old black-and-white feature films and documentaries seen on television. This stagey shuffling gives the drawings an unpredictable atmosphere, their ad-hoc senselessness providing a helpful lubricant in releasing me from the strictly explicable demands of commercial art. I once heard that Berthold Brecht described his short stories as slices of time, periods so strictly bracketed that readers are in the dark about everything that happened both before and after them, rather like looking at anonymous photographs. True or not, this idea chimed perfectly with my invented interiors, presented without contexts. Hooked on the possibilities of random story-telling, I constructed peculiar rooms where, sometimes over years, I waited patiently for characters to turn up and (mis)behave. Out of the blue, in one such scenario I arrived, playing a bit-part, and so the drawings grew into a series of cooped-up, melodramatic selfportraits. To my regret, these gloomily heralded the return of the repressed, conceptually and psychologically. Despite my attempts to escape the discipline, the drawings became inherently illustrative, maladroitly uncovering and displaying

Art and inarticulacy 45

Figure 2.2 Bill Prosser, Responsibility Clearly Defined, 1983, pencil on paper, 76 × 51 cm

various emotional disturbances through graphic scrapes and smudges (Figure 2.3). In addition, and without any conscious desire to do so, they again reiterate my discomfort with language; instead of manipulating a dummy, this time my hand pantomimmically stretches and squeezes my own word-mangling mouth.

Figure 2.3 Bill Prosser, The Hidden Bribe, 1993, graphite on paper, 76 × 51 cm

Art and inarticulacy 47 As was only to be expected after such a prolonged period of obsessive solipsism I grew thoroughly sick of staring at myself, so turned my attention to looking, rather more dispassionately, at other people. This change of topic was partly prompted by life-drawing. Equivalent to a pianist’s practising the piano, this diehard habit was fuelled in my case by a persistent determination to improve dexterity of perception by seeing through my hand. These regular exercises were nippy – a flurry of drawings made in minutes if not seconds – rather than the months and years spent on the rest of my output. Not wanting to waste all that I had learned in drawing myself, I decided to give these speed-drawn work-outs a more prolonged gestation and make some tonally developed, apparently straightforward, pictures from someone else’s body. As it turned out, and largely because I had an obsession with Cranach’s Venus paintings at the time, what emerged was a trio of cropped figures with elongated torsos and delicately exaggerated bellies. In other words, they became my attempt at following the Northern European tradition of the nude, with their missing heads and legs a nod towards the medieval destruction of classical statuary (Figure 2.4). But this was really just a stopgap. What I needed to come up with was something more substantive than a few derivative nudes to replace my autobiographical histrionics. At the time I was reading the maverick Jungian analyst James Hillman, one of whose broadsides against traditional psychiatry is that it is not we who are psychotic but the manic world we live in. The therapeutic armoury, according to him, should be targeted at things outside ourselves rather than trained exclusively within. By mirroring the way psychotherapists listen closely to their patients, we can heal things in the world by caring for them, by paying them proper attention and courtesy. One way to do this would be by drawing, because, as Hillman says, an ‘aesthetic response to particulars would radically slow us down’.17 In addition, such a close scrutiny would release what he called ‘the innate dignity, beauty, and integrity of any act or any thing from doorknob to desk chair’ and thus allow each of them to ‘become fully present in its uniqueness’.18 I had already started absent-mindedly drawing odds and ends lying around at home – ordinary art materials like pens, pencils and bits of India-rubber, along with more fancy household objects such as a set of teaspoons and the subtle undulations pressed onto the lid of their satin-lined box. Now, grabbing hold of Hillman’s aesthetic lifeline, I began looking more slowly and carefully at the chance juxtapositions in the room where I worked, which eventually became a series of large drawings, well over life size, showing ordinary things where they lay, with no dressing of the set (Figure 2.5). Ignorance here is indispensable. As The Cloud-Author says: ‘take care in this work, and do not struggle in your intellect [. . .] in any way. For I tell you truly, it cannot be achieved by this kind of struggle; so give it up and do not attempt it’.19 Although intimately familiar with all these day-to-day objects, in order to draw them it was essential to put my awareness aside, uncoupling as far as possible all I knew of their common-or-garden identities. Only then could I contemplate them simply as a series of interwoven abstract shapes – observational drawing’s vital task – before fumbling for grey tones to match their colours. Making these

Figure 2.4 Bill Prosser, Bow, 1996, graphite on paper, 76 × 51 cm

Figure 2.5 Bill Prosser, Room no.10, 2001, pencil on paper, 100 × 70 cm

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drawings stirs a constant conversation between subjectivity and objectivity, a gentler version of Samuel Beckett’s brusque comment on Avigdor Arikha’s paintings: ‘Siege laid again to the impregnable without’.20 My subjective perception of things and their translation into drawings is a mild besieging, while ‘without’ is, of course, their objective reality and their presence irrespective of my experience of them. It is hard to overestimate the can of worms opened by this apparently simple distinction. Indeed, Mondrian thought it the solitary question that art has to answer: ‘The only problem in art is to achieve a balance between the subjective and the objective’.21 His solution was to divide reality in two, allocating one half to figurative painting and the other to abstraction: ‘Subjective reality and relatively objective reality: this is the contrast. Pure abstract art aims at creating the latter, figurative art the former’.22 This answer, unfortunately, is not much help; partly at least because it seems to pre-suppose that the distinction is already appreciated. Thomas Nagel later summarised the predicament succinctly in The View From Nowhere: This book is about a single problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included [. . .] It is the most fundamental issue about morality, knowledge, freedom, the self, and the relation of mind to the physical world.23 Discounting Mondrian’s split decision, what real hope can the visual arts have in answering such a profound dilemma? Fortunately, I can leave that for the philosophers of aesthetics. For my purposes, it is enough to say that ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in drawing have different meanings from those in grammar. For instance, it is obvious that in the sentence ‘I draw a table’, ‘I’ is the subject, and ‘table’ is the object. But while the table is the object in the sentence, it is also an object in the room and the subject of my drawing. So from the perspective of drawing, in the sentence ‘I draw a table’, ‘table’ is both object (physically as well as grammatically) and subject. I stray into these waters because the drawings of my room required a pragmatic methodological constraint that reveals a particular form of this distinction. Since space was so restricted I first had to draw maquettes of my chosen items and then make larger images from them, things being too cramped to set up a bulky drawingboard in situ. Each final drawing therefore has its own tiny overture. So in the initial, smaller drawings, objects in the room were chosen and taken as subjects, but then to make the second, larger drawings, these small drawings were themselves objects that became viewed as subjects. This graphic leap-frog took a further turn when a drawing-board that had some random pencil marks on it became the subject of two such scaling-up drawings. Now random pencil marks on the board were represented by scrupulous pencil marks on a small sheet of paper depicting the board’s haphazard markings. These, now arbitrary-looking, pencil marks were in turn carefully looked at and made into further meticulous pencil marks on a

Art and inarticulacy 51 larger sheet of paper, which bounced back to replicate the indiscriminate pencilled patterns seen on the board. The material chased its tail; each time the pencil marks were first seen as objects, to be translated in pencil as subjects, so as to be seen as pencilled objects, which became pencilled subjects, again translated in pencil so as to depict the pencilled objects first thought of (Figure 2.6). Representation more usually means using one thing to stand for another. In this case the thing, pencil markings, stands for itself, both object and subject, becoming a manicured exemplification rather than solely a representation. At the beginning, members of this group of work-room drawings were quite complicated formally, with items overlapping and interlocking to make tight patterns. But gradually they became emptier, as I began to appreciate that, aesthetically speaking, less is often more, and suggestion can outweigh plenitude. Until finally each dispersed into snippets of unnoticed ordinariness decorating the paper’s edges: an irregular border whose role was to focus attention on the enclosed vacant space. My drawings’ gradual simplification into meditations on emptiness recalls The Cloud-Author’s thoughts once more: ‘Active life is troubled and harassed about many things, but contemplative life sits at peace with one thing’.24 Here as elsewhere he emphasises that we must cultivate stillness – ‘this work demands the greatest tranquillity’ – advocating something that another of Beckett’s aphorisms, ‘to restore silence is the role of objects’, suggests might be aided by listening hard to our mute surroundings.25 Although only aware of The CloudAuthor’s remarks more recently, I was already a disciple of Beckett, and the two authors’ observations evoke the drawn-out atmosphere permeating ‘this work’, as my eyes crawled over items in my room daily for several years. By now, chancing upon and scrutinising peripheries had become something of an obsession, so when I stumbled across Beckett’s own drawn marginalia I was smitten. Habitually working in cheap exercise books, he doodled all his life, but the golden age was in the 1930s and 1940s, before he became widely published and revered. As well as their topics – ranging from geometry to plants, animals and figures – it was the sheer physical exuberance of his drawings that drew me to them, especially since dashed off by a man considered somewhat ascetic and misanthropic. A new departure in my work came when I began cataloguing all his doodles on manuscripts held by the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading. Once armed with this assortment, I decided to make mugshot drawings of all seventy-two characters embellishing Human Wishes, an unfinished play about Dr Johnson. The holograph covers fifteen loose sheets, and contains dozens of images that have no discernible relation with the text.26 Doodling is, in addition to its humdrum role in easing tedium, sometimes thought to be a more obviously entertaining tributary of graphology, divulging the doodler’s subconscious intentions.27 As far as Beckett’s doodles are concerned, I remain completely ignorant as to his purpose, or indeed if he had one – one reason, of course, why they are so appealing. Having marshalled the Human Wishes cast I broke it down into various subgroups, including heads, legs and bodies. In its way, this was simply about

Figure 2.6 Bill Prosser, Room no.9, 2001, pencil on paper, 100 × 70 cm

Art and inarticulacy 53 housekeeping, sorting out the doodles’ content into neatly manageable bundles. To celebrate their material richness I needed to make selections and magnify them, recreating the particular rasps and blots of Beckett’s dribbling fountain pen on poor paper. Following this pattern, I spent weeks intimately contemplating and laboriously enlarging doodles that are only a centimetre or two high and made in a few moments, trying to capture in pencil all the subtle tonal variations produced by Beckett’s errant nib. Images that had originally, perhaps, been conceived through boredom I now tediously pored over and scrupulously translated in all their minutiae, so that they might again appear to have been made at once. Radically slowing things down and scaling them up compels our attention to linger. Blown up, the off-hand or throwaway become assortments of poise and stability. Apparently sharp pen marks leave blunted edges, while small-scale noses and mouths placed with attempted precision become lopsided, giving lively personalities to stock characters. Cropping and isolating them like this is intended to bring unnoticed details to attention, allowing time for the ephemeral to be contemplated, all in the hope that their aesthetic diversity will be more fully enjoyed. Importantly from my point of view, each composition has a wide range of tones, inevitable by-products of such erratic ink-flow. Occasionally there was an accident. One drawing, as far as I know, commemorates Beckett’s only surviving fingerprint (Figure 2.7). Particularly relevant in a Christian context, planted unexpectedly amongst the cavalcade of doodled characters on Human Wishes are three crucified figures in 1930s costume. Their blend of caricature and cruelty was so unsettling that I made very careful enlargements from each of them (Figure 2.8). More than anything, they could be an unintended set of updated illustrations from paupers’ Bibles – medieval graphic novels strenuously acting-out Gospel stories in wimples or doublet and hose. From these pictures with one kind of religious association I moved to another, as I left Beckett’s elaborately doodled margins to look at simpler, practical corners of Regent’s Park College, a Permanent Private Hall of Oxford University. This is largely a theological institution, and my set of drawings echo Christ’s preference for the marginalised and ignored. I found friendly bits and pieces to draw that normally pass more or less unnoticed, such as a low wad of paper towels above a tap, a pile carpet cushioning a nest of electric wire, a wood-grained windowsill warming itself over an old radiator, three long shadows cast by short candles in the chapel, metal lockers, flashing electric light down in the basement, and a serpentine fire-hose hanging around with some old books in the library. Like the drawings of doodles, these were all contemplated at length and dragged together, snail-like, into coherent images. One reason for such sluggishness is inescapably practical. Eking out a tonal drawing requires a level of contemplation avoided by the quicker options of other media, such as opaque painting. Using the latter in, say, Landing (Figure 2.9), I could simply have painted the bright reflections on top of the plastic bags. But because the lightest tone available is the white of the paper, these highlights need to be identified at the start and then left alone, while all around them is gently massaged and manipulated into persuasive legibility. Trying to find the subtleties among the deep shadows and shallow

Figure 2.7 Bill Prosser, Human Wishes 8, 2008, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm

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Figure 2.8 Bill Prosser, HW Crucifixion 1, 2009, ballpoint on paper, 100 × 70 cm

reflections was like a long, slow motion tug of war. I pulled the greys this way and that, lighter and darker, looking for just the right blend of harmony and pitch. How very fortunate, though, to come across such a marvellous combination of form and content. The floor’s scuffed and clouded grey tiles, segmented by thin dark channels of swept dirt, provided an unbeatable aesthetic foil for such a pristine bin-liner and prophylactic cellophane bag. In staring at things closely enough to draw them, nothing is ever uninteresting or ugly. Surrounded, as we all are, by the never-ending interplay of inanimate meetings, it is a commonplace to say that nothing is ordinary – every interaction is captivatingly unique. Wilde quipped, ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible’.28 Or, as Don Cupitt put it, ‘The world around us is our communal, ever-changing world of

Figure 2.9 Bill Prosser, Landing, 2011, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm

Art and inarticulacy 57 folk-art’.29 But seeing the art-world out there, physically, is one thing; making it into drawings is quite another. Formally translating objects into their constituent angles, proportions, and relative graphite greys stretched my stamina for contemplative tone-assembly to its limits. Ignorance, again, is ubiquitous here, and I was constantly at a loss about how to coax the drawings into lucidity. Fortunately however, they never, ever lie, and always show me just how much I don’t know. This inevitably breeds humility as I see the picture in front of me wax and wane from incoherence to coherence and back again. The Cloud-Author says: ‘the nearer we approach truth, the more careful we need to be of error [. . .] Guard against pride [. . .] If you were truly humble, you would feel the truth of what I say about the work of contemplation [. . .]’.30 Once more, my experience faithfully reflects his thoughts. Trying to push the conviction that gazing at abstract aesthetic qualities can make anything enticing a bit further, I next made some drawings of food left on the plates after college dinners (Figure 2.10). This was also partly because I

Figure 2.10 Bill Prosser, Leftovers 4, 2013, pencil on paper, 35 × 35 cm

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felt that their impromptu compositions echoed the Surrealist practice of automatism; chatty diners managed what a group of sophisticated, twentieth-century artists found extremely thorny. Without thinking, each finicky eater or plate-wiper handed down a unique, smeary residue. Again, as with the drawings of doodles, arbitrary displays produced quickly are slowed to a standstill and meticulously recreated. Substances squelched and slathered are visually dissected and re-formed into graphite patterns. Time grinds on, and once more there is an insistent, familiar nudge to energise and speed things up. Only my grudging certainty that the pictures will lose any chance of achieving their potential clarity checks this temptation to rush towards a premature conclusion. Here I can again find some encouragement in The Cloud-Author when he advises: ‘take care in this work of contemplation not to strain your heart [. . .] too roughly or immoderately, but work with skill rather than with brute force. For the more skilfully, the more humbly and spiritually [. . .]’.31 Given from these examples that the process of drawing can gain from monotony, it is easier to accept that the boring as subject-matter has some affirmative potential as well. John Cage said that according to Zen: ‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all [. . .]’.32 My banal focus embodies this sentiment. I choose to draw things that traditionally orbit only the outer reaches of the visual arts: they demonstrate neither conventional beauty, overt expressivity, nor shock value. ‘Boring’ would describe them for many people. Yet on close inspection each combination of individual items never fails, however paradoxically, to be both unruly and beautiful: a jumble of diverse but formally coherent identities. By going through the long periods of contemplation necessary for drawing them, my intention, however unrealised, is to transform their overlooked or dismissed features into images that others will find absorbing too. One means to encourage this appreciation is through composition. Each drawing might simply be considered as an achromatic abstraction, where rinsed-out colours leave only a series of interconnecting forms and textures that are separable from their representations. Viewed this way they are visual equivalents to pieces of music – harmonies and discords that may not necessarily depict material things. In a way, all representational images are constrained by their subject matter. They are seen to be ‘about’ what succeeds in mimicking or reminding us of the world. But all pictures are more than this. They are necessarily constructed by combining abstract components – shapes, tones, textures – and can be read solely in these terms too. The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson famously judged the formal qualities between two photographs by looking at them upside-down, so as not to be distracted by their subject matter. By turning one of my drawings on its head and adding some connecting lines it is easier to see the way its shapes and rhythms cohere (Figure 2.11). What holds this drawing together can be spotted by following the line at the bottom where the sill joins the wall, which when extended meets the diagonal at the right-hand edge of the drawing about a fifth of the way up. This locks everything in place. Then there is a second imaginary line that connects the left-hand

Figure 2.11 Bill Prosser, SCR (inverted), 2009/10, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm

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edge of the curtain to the left side of the control valve. Other formal elements help too. For instance, the valve’s ellipse is rhymed by the curtain’s crescent motif just below it and there are syncopated rhythmic echoes between the wood-grain and the fabric pattern, while the dark shape of the window-catch against the lighter frame at bottom left balances the lighter radiator-cap against the dark wall at top right. Overall the strong diagonal dark shapes at the top of the drawing press forcefully against the lighter diagonal tones at the bottom, energising the drawing’s internal space in a way quite distinct from its more empty, figurative reading. And although this weighing and measuring might sound calculated – and far from ignorance – in fact these underpinning compositional linkages are more often sensed than decided, only becoming properly noticeable after the event. The significance of this intuitive understanding of aesthetic plasticity can be appreciated by the fact that it is shared by practitioners with widely differing aims and methods. Mondrian, painting the underlying unities of perception, wrote: ‘Through conscious intuition, art gradually discovered the universal plastic means by abstracting the natural appearance of form, without any premeditated intellectual calculation’.33 From the other side of the tracks, Cartier-Bresson, snatching for photography’s ‘decisive moment’, agreed: Obviously any geometrical analysis or reduction to a set of values can be undertaken only in retrospect, and only as a matter of reflection. It is by means of form, by careful plastic organization, that our thoughts and emotions become communicable.34 Simple, abstract analyses can be made for all my drawings, which, to a certain extent, and from another direction entirely, also pay their dues to Georges Perec’s painstakingly written accounts of similar topics.35 Furthermore, Perec and Beckett (among others including Antonin Artaud, Mark Rothko and George Orwell) have become guests in another gathering of pictures, conversation pieces between writers or artists and a persistent visitor, Mickey Mouse (Figure 2.12). Many painters and authors have enlisted the latter’s help to make a case. In the early days of Pop Art, Claes Oldenberg and Roy Lichtenstein found that Mickey’s ubiquity made him the perfect lever for cranking up the tension between Fine and Applied art,36 perhaps spurred on by Walter Benjamin’s analysis challenging a more primal pecking-order: ‘Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.’37 However, his appearance helps my images to put these high-cultural solemnities aside, enabling them to demonstrate another of drawing’s crucial values that is often underestimated: its pointlessness. *** Under the umbrella of my three themes – ignorance, contemplation and humility – pointlessness might be thought of as combining ignorance of purpose, aimless contemplation, and the humility of irrelevance. And although the theme is not mentioned directly in The Cloud of Unknowing, it is nonetheless inferred by

Figure 2.12 Bill Prosser, Mickey and Sam, 2012, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm

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the author’s insistence that its opposite – the urgent prod towards making sense – must be resisted for fear that it will flatten us: ‘the sharp stirring of your understanding, which keeps on thrusting itself on you when you apply yourself [. . .] must always be forced down; and unless you force it down, it will force you down [. . .]’.38 However, despite this glum warning, we can afford to be optimistic as he is also at pains to emphasise that the work itself can give us a helping hand: let [it] do with you whatever it pleases and lead you wherever it pleases. Let it do the working, and you be the material it works upon; just watch it, and let it be. Do not interfere with it, as if to help, for fear you should spoil everything. You simply be the wood, and let it be the carpenter; you simply be the house, and let it be the master who lives there.39 His advocacy for the work’s independence, once put into practice, fulfils Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’, where we hold our ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’ at arm’s length.40 These days Keats has a firm ally in Adam Phillips, who senses that the gutreaction of ‘irritable reaching’ can be countered by the simple remedy of ‘not getting it’. Phillips explains: Getting what people say [. . .] may be complicity [. . .] colluding with someone to protect yourself from unwanted experiences; or that you prefer agreement to revision or conflict. And this might [lead to] not always assuming that there is an it to get; living as if missing the point [. . .] could also be a point [. . .].41 Not getting it is the point and not the problem. This is a therapist’s take on artist Marcel Duchamp’s statement that ‘there is no solution because there is no problem’.42 In art, as in the act of faith (but unlike physics or golf), there is no given set of difficulties to solve in the most efficient possible manner. Nowadays doing something for the sake of it, for the fun of it, is often frowned upon. To be playful is not enough, and the simple pleasure of mucking about is scoffed at. From junior school on, we are indicted to be solemn and thoughtful, to engage in productive activities that can be weighed and measured. What are now referred to as the Creative Industries are an asset, we are told, because they add a percentage point or two to our Gross National Product. Funds are apparently allocated on a strict, cost-benefit analysis: ‘The neoliberal state offers no view on what a good [. . .] artist looks like. Instead, it uses rankings, contests and markets in order to find out who rises to the top’.43 Despite the earnest advocacy of politicians and educators alike, however, we all know that art does not really thrive under those sorts of conditions. It is an old saw, repeated in his 2014 Reith Lectures by Grayson Perry, that art is ‘serious play’.44 Just as Terry Eagleton said that God created the Universe for the utter ‘love and delight of it’,45 art also needs to feel a whiff of freedom – of ‘not getting’ the injunctions so often placed upon it. Attempting to rationalise the value of irrationality is itself fanciful, pressing illogicality to have logical merit. Nevertheless, back in those pre-ironic days of

Art and inarticulacy 63 Dada and Surrealism, when Freudian ideas of unconscious processes could be seen as a fresh and authentic stimulus to imagination instead of simply one of any number of symbolic systems, Artaud (a one-time Surrealist) wrested drawings from reason’s iron clutch by calling each ‘a machine that [. . .] breathes’.46 I would like to promote the idea that sometimes it is still good for drawings to in- and exhale the vivifying air of nonsense. One (rational) consequence would be that to do so encourages them to harness inherently expressive aspects of our collective consciousness that are regularly marginalised by a voracious consumer culture. In other words they could become the visual equivalents to such terms as gobbledygook, drivel, or tosh – precisely les mots justes in countering the hectic exhortations to buy ever more things that we will never really need. Drawing often functions as a form of information-sharing that lies close to careful linguistic description: for example, when used to communicate something specific to a third party – such as an idea, a real or imagined scene, or an instruction. But alongside the proposal that exhilaration can be found in picturing nonsense, how about drawing’s potential to express the essentially private, verbally amorphous atmosphere of an anxiety or a joy, something that happens in what Montaigne called ‘the room behind the shop’?47 Such intangibles might well stand more chance of being successfully depicted than spoken. By accepting that there are emotions that cannot be rationally explained, articulacy in its narrower, linguistic sense can be replaced by the special eloquence of imagery, an idiom floating free from the anchorage of grammar and syntax. Oscar Wilde, whose belief in the superiority of language one could have thought unshakable, in fact doubted its hegemony by saying that there are two ways of disliking art: ‘one way is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally’.48 The idea that art both appeals to and erupts from places beyond conscious explanation was also raised by the psychoanalyst Marion Milner. While discussing the apparent quantum leap towards Modernism by Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures – carvings where figures seem to be bursting from blocks of virgin marble – she cited Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain as believing that creativity springs from a mental state that is quite distinct from logic, because it ‘possesses a life both deeper and less conscious than its articulate logical life’.49 Perhaps Maritain remembered that there is an old French saying, ‘stupid like a painter’.50 The Futurists, who worshipped technology and might therefore have been expected to dismiss all folksy aphorisms, surprisingly agreed: Dominique Braga wrote, ‘Marinetti hates intelligence’.51 To be a painter does not require intelligence, at least not the kind of intelligence necessary to become an academic, or a scientist, or a banker. Those professions require rational abilities that simply are not essential in making a painting. Of course certain kinds of drawing and painting can be learnt analytically, but numerous Outsider artists (that is, artists without an art education, or who are in one way or another inoculated against culture’s lures and reprimands) prove once and for all that this is dispensable, and that there are more direct routes from feeling to making. These all rely on an inner logic quite separate from that of the intellect, and reinvigorate the old scholastic sense of ‘intuition’ – ‘The spiritual perception

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or immediate knowledge [where] vision and knowledge are identical’.52 Sometimes to make drawings or paintings it is necessary to shut off our intellect as far as possible; to be, in that sense, stupid and ignorant. It means trying to release oneself from the rat-run of rationality, where if knowledge cannot be rationally justified it is not true knowledge at all. My Mickey drawings are, in a way, half-way houses. Like the rest of my work they rely on a whole series of strategies that are, at least up to a point, acknowledged in advance. And while these inevitably go wrong and need revising as the drawings develop, Mickey and his companions are unlikely to turn into landscapes or abstractions through random acts of irrationality. But their content is not intended to make a point. I never think of them as conveying anything in particular beyond what they depict. Mickey and Beckett gazing at each other is neither ironic nor serious – neither a comment on the hybridity of culture nor a reflection on the nature of what constitutes a self – being instead just a ludicrous meeting that popped into my head from who knows where. To try justifying the pictures as conveying any other ‘idea’ would diminish their daftness, turn them into carriers of meticulous meanings instead of farcical fantasies, made simply for their own nonsensical sake. These works connect contemplation and pointlessness through form and content – their form is contemplative in execution and their content pointless to examine. Like my drawings of doodles, rooms and leftovers, their straightforwardness requires a laborious gestation, with the additional demand that Mickey’s companion is readily recognisable. Naturally, just as these get-togethers appeared unbidden in my mind’s eye, anyone looking at them might spontaneously imagine all kinds of yarns around them, from invented scenarios as to how, where, and why they met, to overheard scraps of conversation. Personally, I cannot validate their existence other than to say it felt necessary to make them. If I knew any more about them, I would have put it in. *** Finally, a drawing of heat that is a metaphor for my work as a whole, whose tedious, meticulous filling-in continually dampened my spirits until eventually it was over and the drawing warmed up (Figure 2.13). Hearths are often thought of as contemplative places; we stare vacantly into the flames, and lose ourselves in reverie among the smoke and mirrors of our imagination. Bewilderment and diffidence are present, too, as the blaze suggests in microcosm the mysterious physical forces of creation and our irrelevancy in the urges of the universe. The atheist philosopher Gerald Cohen said that when he retired from All Souls College in Oxford he was so grateful to have had such a fulfilled life there that he felt blessed. Surprised at expressing himself this way, he wondered: are the literal materialist and [. . .] deity readings ends of a continuum? [. . .] Might there not be certain human attitudes [. . .] that can be captured only by descriptions that mobilize religious discourse that isn’t translatable into day-to-day talk?53

Figure 2.13 Bill Prosser, Hearth, 2014, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm

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I share Cohen’s sense of gratitude in that I have been able to fill my life largely doing the things I like to do. And, even though my pictures lack any direct religious connotations, in that sense I feel that I have been blessed too. I certainly do not discount that my drawings can be seen from a Christian point of view, partly because, to quote Eagleton again, ‘Art can only speak of God allegorically’, but more specifically because they match Simone Weil’s assertion that ‘Attention, taken to the highest degree, is the same thing as prayer’.54 And it is in that spirit that I would like to confirm my belief that The Cloud’s three themes – ignorance, contemplation and humility – are indivisible from the kind of drawings I make. They require first of all the rejection of preconceived knowledge and rational explanation; then the tranquillity and concentration of meditation; and lastly the acceptance that no matter how long and hard I try, they will never achieve anything very much.

Notes 1 Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2015), pp. 44–5. 2 The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. by A. C. Spearing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), p. 57. 3 The Cloud of Unknowing, pp. 27–8. 4 The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 21. 5 Dore Ashton, Saul Steinberg (Valencia: Institut Valencia d’art Modern, 2002), p. 152. 6 Quoted in The Penguin Book of Art Writing, ed. by Martin Gayford and Karen Wright (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 573. 7 The Penguin Book of Art Writing, p. 573. 8 Auguste Rodin and Paul Gsell, Art, trans. by Jacques de Caso and Patricia B. Sanders (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1911; repr. 1984), p. 4. 9 Piet Mondrian, The New Art: The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. and trans. by Harry Holtzmann and Martin S. James (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 93. 10 Sue Coe, ‘Stories Unfolding in Time and Space’, Eye, 31 (1999), 21. 11 Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 7. 12 Joan Evans, John Ruskin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954), p. 422; Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way (London: Souvenir Press, 1994; repr. London: Pan 1995), p. xv. 13 Sister Wendy Beckett, ‘The Spirituality of Contemporary Art’, in The Journey: A Search for the Role of Contemporary Art in Religious and Spiritual Life (Lincoln: Usher Gallery and the Redcliffe Press, 1991), pp. 85–90. 14 George Pattison, Crucifixions and Resurrections of the Image (London: SCM, 2009), p. 73. 15 Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997), p. 119. 16 Ashton, Saul Steinberg, p. 152. 17 James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (Woodstock, CT: Spring, 1992), p. 115. 18 James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy: And the World’s Getting Worse (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 52. 19 The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 26. 20 Samuel Beckett, Richard Channin, Andre Fremigier, Robert Hughes, Jane Livingstone, Barbara Rose, Arikha (Paris: Hermann, 1985), p. 10. 21 Mondrian, The New Art, p. 289. 22 Mondrian, The New Art, pp. 298–9. 23 Nagel Thomas, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 3.

Art and inarticulacy 67 24 The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 31. 25 The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 64; Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Paris: Les Editions de Minuet, 1950; repr. London: Calder, 1959), pp. 13–14. 26 University of Reading, MS 3458. 27 E.g. Russell M. Arundel, Everybody’s Pixillated (Boston: Little Brown, 1937); Helen King, Your Doodles and What They Mean to You (New York: Fleet, 1957). 28 Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, Evergreen Review, 34 (1964), 76–80, 93. 29 Don Cupitt, Above Us Only Sky (Farmington, MN: Polebridge Press, 2008), p. 15. 30 The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 57. 31 The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 69. 32 John Cage, Every Day Is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (London: Hayward, 2010), p. 10. 33 Mondrian, The New Art, p. 93. 34 Henri Cartier-Bresson, The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), n.p. 35 E.g. Georges Perec, Thoughts of Sorts, trans. by David Bellos (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011). 36 See, for example: Oldenberg’s drawings (1968–9) in Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen, A Bottle of Notes and Some Voyages (Leeds: The Henry Moore Centre, 1988), pp. 52, 53, 93, 190; and Lichtenstein’s painting ‘Look Mickey’ (1961) in Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1990) p. 196. Among many other artists who succumbed to Mickey’s temptations was the Surrealist Max Ernst with his assemblage ‘Mickey’s Ascension’ (1969), see: Max Ernst: A Retrospective, ed. by Werner Spies (London: Tate Gallery, 1991), p. 361. 37 Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol.2 1927–1934, ed. by Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith Smith, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 545. 38 The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 32. 39 The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 57. 40 John Keats, Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. by Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 60. 41 Adam Phillips, Missing Out (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), p. 38. 42 Harriet Janis and Sidney Janis, ‘Marcel Duchamp: Anti-Artist’, View, 5.1 (1945), 18–24, 53–4 (p. 24). 43 William Davies, ‘Home Office Rules’, London Review of Books, 3 November 2016, pp. 3–6. 44 Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery (London: Particular Books, 2014), p. 110. 45 Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections of the God Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 8. 46 Jacques Derrida and Paule Thevenin, The Secret life of Antonin Artaud, trans. by Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998), p. 41. 47 Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 6. 48 Adam Phillips, Unforbidden Pleasures (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015), p. 20. 49 Marion Milner, The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-Four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock, 1987), p. 194. 50 Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999), p. 170. 51 Mondrian, The New Art, p. 93. 52 ‘intuition, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, 1989 [accessed July 14, 2016]. 53 Gerald, A. Cohen, Finding Oneself in the Other (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 202–3, n. 2. 54 Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 98; Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Crawford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 105.

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Bibliography Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999) Arundel, Russell M., Everybody’s Pixillated (Boston: Little Brown, 1937) Ashton, Dore, Saul Steinberg (Valencia: Institut Valencia d’art Modern, 2002) Beckett, Samuel, Molloy (Paris: Les Editions de Minuet, 1950; repr. London: Calder, 1959) Beckett, Samuel, Richard Channin, Andre Fremigier, Robert Hughes, Jane Livingstone and Barbara Rose, Arikha (Paris: Hermann, 1985) Beckett, Sister Wendy, ‘The Spirituality of Contemporary Art’, in The Journey: A Search for the Role of Contemporary Art in Religious and Spiritual Life (Lincoln: Usher Gallery and The Redcliffe Press, c. 1991), pp. 85–90 Benjamin, Walter, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.2 1927–1934, ed. by Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) Bennett, Claire-Louise, Pond (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2015) Cage, John, Every Day Is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (London: Hayward 2010) Cameron, Julia, The Artist’s Way (London: Souvenir Press, 1994; repr. London: Pan 1995) Cartier-Bresson, Henri, The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968) The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. by A. C. Spearing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001) Coe, Sue, ‘Stories Unfolding in Time and Space’, Eye, 31 (1999), 21 Cohen, Gerald, A., Finding Oneself in the Other (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013) Cupitt, Don, Above Us Only Sky (Farmington MN: Polebridge Press, 2008) Davies, William, ‘Home Office Rules’, London Review of Books (3 November 2016), 3–6 Derrida, Jacques and Paule Thevenin, The Secret life of Antonin Artaud, trans. by Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998) Eagleton, Terry, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections of the God Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) ———, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014) Evans, Joan, John Ruskin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954) Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (Woodstock, CT: Spring, 1992) Hillman, James and Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy: And The World’s Getting Worse (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) Janis, Harriet and Sidney Janis, ‘Marcel Duchamp: Anti-Artist’, View, 5.1 (1945), 18–24, 53–4 Keats, John, Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. by Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) King, Helen, Your Doodles and What They Mean to You (New York: Fleet, 1957) Max Ernst: A Retrospective, ed. by Werner Spies (London: Tate Gallery, 1991) Milner, Marion, The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-Four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock, 1987) Mondrian, Peit, The New Art: The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. and trans. by Harry Holtzmann and Martin S. James (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987) Murdoch, Iris, The Fire and the Sun (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)

Art and inarticulacy 69 Nagel, Thomas, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) Pattison, George, Crucifixions and Resurrections of the Image (London: SCM, 2009) The Penguin Book of Art Writing, ed. by Martin Gayford and Karen Wright (London: Penguin, 1999) Perec, Georges, Thoughts of Sorts, trans. by David Bellos (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011) Perry, Grayson, Playing to the Gallery (London: Particular Books, 2014) Phillips, Adam, Missing Out (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012) ———, Unforbidden Pleasures (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015) Porter, Roy, Flesh in the Age of Reason (London: Allen Lane, 2003) Prosser, Bill, Responsibility Clearly Defined, 1983, pencil on paper, 76 × 51 cm ———, The Sunday Times Magazine (October 29, 1989) ———, The Hidden Bribe, 1993, graphite on paper, 76 × 51 cm ———, Bow, 1996, graphite on paper, 76 × 51 cm ———, Room no.9, 2001, pencil on paper, 100 × 70 cm ———, Room no.10, 2001, pencil on paper, 100 × 70 cm ———, Human Wishes 8, 2008, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm ———, HW Crucifixion 1, 2009, ballpoint on paper, 100 × 70 cm ———, SCR, 2009/10, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm (inverted) ———, Landing, 2011, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm ———, Leftovers 4, 2013, pencil on paper, 35 × 35 cm ———, Mickey and Sam, 2012, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm ———, Hearth, 2014, pencil on paper, 60 × 42 cm Rodin, Auguste and Paul Gsell, Art, trans. by Jacques de Caso and Patricia B. Sanders (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1911; repr. 1984) Sontag, Susan, ‘Against Interpretation’, Evergreen Review, 34 (1964), 76–80, 93 Tufte, Edward R., Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997) Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Crawford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952)

3

Art, contemplation and intellectus Aquinas and Gadamer in conversation Rik Van Nieuwenhove

Introduction: exploring the possibilities of a dialogue between Aquinas and Gadamer The main theme of this book can be situated broadly on the crossroads between mystical theology and art. Contemplation, which is the topic of this contribution, lies at the very core of this interface. I will make this point by considering the Thomist notion of contemplatio, and bring it into dialogue with Gadamer’s hermeneutical project, and his views on art in particular (as developed in the first part of Truth and Method and in his short treatise The Relevance of the Beautiful). One may wonder, however, whether bringing Gadamer into conversation with Aquinas is actually a meaningful venture. As is well known, many scholars (e.g., Johannes Lotz, Bertrand Rioux, Gustave Siewerth, Max Müller, John Caputo, JeanLuc Marion, amongst others) have engaged Aquinas in dialogue with Heidegger, and have addressed the question of whether Aquinas is vulnerable to Heidegger’s critique of Seinsvergessenheit (forgetfulness of being) in particular.1 The discussion seems to have abated somewhat and this may very well be a welcome development.2 In my view, a more interesting dialogue could indeed be engendered between Aquinas and Heidegger’s pupil, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Admittedly, while both Aquinas and Gadamer are sensitive to the manner in which our thinking is shaped by traditions that precede us, some might doubt whether Aquinas’s philosophy can be squared with Gadamer’s historicist and contextual perspective. This is a complex issue, if only because it hinges on the extent to which we are willing to consider Gadamer a realist thinker who makes truth-claims which, no matter how contextualised, nonetheless transcend a particular perspective, and claim universal validity. For all his critique of foundationalism and rational autonomy, and his emphasis upon the contextuality and linguistic nature of human understanding, Gadamer does subscribe to a realist position. In the words of Brice Wachterhauser: ‘We simply cannot make sense of human knowledge in all of its relativity to this historically conditioned, linguistically constituted, value-laden standpoints, if we do not see these standpoints as in principle compatible with and in contact with the intelligibility of the world’.3 Thus, Gadamer is committed to metaphysical views that assume the inherent intelligibility of our world and

Art, contemplation and intellectus 71 language. The perspectivist and linguistically and tradition-conditioned outlook of his philosophical stance does not exclude the possibility of a realist position in which we can make claims of universal intent about our world. Gadamer’s critique of the Enlightenment project, its alleged ‘presuppositionless’ stance and the distancing from, or even disparagement of, the tradition that it implies, and its problematic preoccupation with positivistic methodology not only place him in the company of postmodern thinkers but also allow us to bring him into dialogue with pre-modern thinkers, such as Aquinas, who is obviously free from these Enlightenment presuppositions. Incidentally, while a dialogue between Gadamer and post-modern thought has proven to be a venture which has met with rather mixed success, an engagement with pre-modern thinkers, such as Aquinas, may yield more positive results – which is perhaps not all that surprising given the indebtedness of both Aquinas and Gadamer to the classical Greek tradition.4 Scholars who have brought Aquinas in dialogue with Gadamer have mainly focused on how Gadamer draws on Aquinas’s theology of the Trinity to address the issue of the forgetfulness of language (cf. the work of John Arthos and David Vessey).5 More specifically, in the section ‘Language and verbum’ from Truth and Method, Gadamer engages with the Trinitarian thought of Augustine and Aquinas as instances of authors who are not guilty of the so-called forgetfulness of language he attributes to Plato and the ensuing tradition.6 Gadamer takes issue with the Western way of thinking in which (as he sees it) words are mere signs, and no longer eikons. The views of Augustine and Aquinas, on the other hand, make clear the intimate link between thought and language: as the verbum or Word is begotten from the Father, so too our language expresses our thought. The Christian notion of the Incarnation, which itself must be understood in light of the generation of the inner Word from the Father, challenges the notion of the word as a mere sign of things.7 While Gadamer’s explicit engagement with Aquinas’s theology of the generation of the Word offers a foothold for dialogue between the two thinkers, a whole range of other topics could also be fruitfully examined. When developing his hermeneutical project Gadamer goes in search of non-modern ways of understanding, which might offer a more hospitable source for the event of understanding as it occurs in the humanities. One of the key sources here is Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom ( phronesis). As is well known, phronesis or prudentia occupies a central role in Gadamer’s hermeneutical project (which centres on discovering truth in human historicity) – but it is also of central concern to Aquinas’s project, especially in the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae (ST). Another possible avenue of research is the exploration of the role of species in Aquinas and language in Gadamer as that through which we understand the world. There is also Gadamer’s discussion of the transcendentals in the last part of Truth and Method – a part of his writing that has received little scholarly attention. In this chapter, however, I will limit myself to some introductory remarks on the intellective nature of contemplatio, as Aquinas characterises it, and bring this into dialogue with Gadamer’s views on art and hermeneutics.

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1) Aquinas on the beautiful, intellectus and contemplation Although, admittedly, Aquinas has fairly little to say on art and aesthetics, a conversation between Aquinas and Gadamer on beauty and contemplation actually benefits from the fact that Aquinas is writing at a time when aesthetics had not yet grown into an autonomous philosophical discipline. Gadamer considers the very coming into existence of aesthetics in the eighteenth century an indication of the subjectivisation and ‘differentiation’ of aesthetics – an evolution which he deplores.8 For Aquinas, therefore, aesthetics is still deeply embedded into a metaphysical framework. This can be illustrated by ST I, q.5, a.4 ad 1. The article deals with the question of whether goodness is to be associated with final causality. Aquinas prefers to associate goodness with final causality (as that which draws us), and beauty with formal causality. The latter connection is not surprising. In Latin forma (the form or essence of a thing) and formosus (beautiful) are closely related.9 One objection, however, quotes The Divine Names ch. IV by PseudoDionysius who had associated goodness with beauty, and hence suggests that goodness is connected with formal rather than final causality. Aquinas replies: Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally; for they are based upon the same thing, namely, the form; and consequently goodness is praised as beauty. But they differ logically, for goodness properly belongs to the appetite (goodness being what all things desire); and therefore it has the aspect of an end (the appetite being a kind of movement towards a thing). On the other hand, beauty relates to the cognitive faculty; for beautiful things are those which please when seen. (Pulchrum autem respicit vim cognoscitivam, pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent). Hence beauty consists in due proportion; for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind – because even sense is a sort of reason (nam et sensus ratio quaedam est), just as is every cognitive faculty. Now since knowledge is by assimilation, and similarity relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause.10 In this quotation Aquinas first acknowledges that beauty and goodness are both based on the form of things, which is why Pseudo-Dionysius associates goodness with beauty. This explains, for instance, why we call virtues beautiful (e.g., ‘Honesty is a beautiful trait’). However, there is a difference: goodness is associated with final causality (what we desire), while we simply delight in things of beauty we apprehend. Each thing has its form, which is characterised by due proportion or harmony, as well as clarity and integrity or perfection.11 We should not take these characteristics in too literal or straightforward a manner. For instance, when Aquinas mentions claritas he has more in mind than simply brightness. He means something more profound and more ontological: the form is that through which each thing radiates and displays its inherent splendour as a created thing. Indeed, its beauty ultimately participates in the beauty of God himself.12 Associating beauty and goodness with formal and final causality respectively seems reasonable: when contemplating the inner splendour of a thing of beauty we do

Art, contemplation and intellectus 73 not necessarily aim to possess it. There is an element of gratuity in our encounter with beauty which is absent from our attraction towards goodness. The quotation illustrates that Aquinas emphasises the cognitive aspect of beauty as that which pleases when apprehended.13 This is in marked contrast to later modern subjectivist and experientialist understandings of art (what Gadamer calls Erlebniskunst). Given the fact that the beautiful is subsumed in goodness and that truth (the object of intellect) and goodness (the object of the appetitive power) inhere in one another, Aquinas is happy to attribute a cognitive dimension to the contemplation of beauty:14 The beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only. For since good is what all seek, the notion of good is that which calms the desire; while the notion of the beautiful is that which calms the desire, by being seen or known (quod in eius aspectu seu cognitione quietur appetitus). Consequently those senses chiefly regard the beautiful, which are the most cognitive, namely, sight and hearing, as ministering to reason; for we speak of beautiful sights and beautiful sounds. [. . .] Thus it is evident that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty.15 In the encounter with beauty intellect and will co-inhere in the contemplative act. Gazing at things of beauty constitutes a privileged form of contemplation: just as the beatific vision culminates in delight, so does the apprehension of a thing of beauty. Although Aquinas never states it explicitly, I do not think that the claim that contemplation extends to the realm of aesthetics as well, especially to things of visual and auditory beauty (music, poetry), is at odds with the central insights of Thomism. After all, truth (the object of intellect) and goodness (the object of the appetitive power) mutually include each other: ‘Truth is something good, otherwise it would not be desirable; and good is something true, otherwise it would not be intelligible’.16 While things of beauty offer a medium of contemplation insofar as they are goodness that can be seen or apprehended, Aquinas further claims that a life of contemplation can be called beautiful in its own right. In ST II – II, q.180, a.2 ad 3 he explains that there is beauty in the contemplative life because the very operation of our intellectual faculties in our encounter with beauty is essential in disclosing the clarity and due proportion that characterises it.17 Although it must be admitted that Aquinas does not treat beauty extensively, and the contemplation of things beautiful even less so, there are sufficient points of convergence between his intellective notion of contemplation and Gadamer’s non-subjectivist notion of art as event which discloses truth to generate a dialogue between our two authors. I will now discuss Aquinas’s views on contemplation and intellectus before returning to Gadamer. Aquinas, following his sources in Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius, distinguishes between two acts of the one power of understanding, namely ratio (discursive reasoning) and intellectus (intellect or understanding): Reason and intellect in man cannot be distinct powers. We shall understand this clearly if we consider their respective actions. For to understand is

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Rik Van Nieuwenhove simply to apprehend intelligible truth: and to reason is to advance from one thing understood to another, so as to know an intelligible truth. And therefore angels, who according to their nature, possess perfect knowledge of intelligible truth, have no need to advance from one thing to another; but they apprehend the truth simply and without mental discursion, as Pseudo-Dionysius says (Div. Nom. VII). But man arrives at the knowledge of intelligible truth by advancing from one thing to another; and therefore he is called rational. Reasoning, therefore, is compared to understanding, as movement is to rest, or acquisition to possession; of which one belongs to the perfect, the other to the imperfect.18

As I have tried to show elsewhere, when making the distinction between intellectus and ratio, which is central to his notion of contemplation as intuitus simplex, Aquinas invariably draws on the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius and Boethius, and does not refer to Aristotle.19 Within the confines of this contribution it may suffice to say that the act of intellectus is to apprehend intelligible truth, whereas to reason is discursive, i.e., it involves movement and a reasoning process, so as to come to know an intelligible truth. For this reason, Aquinas compares reasoning to movement and understanding to rest or possession.20 A reasoning process, if successful, culminates in the moment of insight, ‘when the penny drops’, in colloquial English. Those moments of insight are a dimension of intellect (intellectus), not reason. Again, reason can only begin to operate in light of certain truths which it simply accepts but cannot argue for in a discursive manner. For instance, the principle of non-contradiction, a key axiom in traditional logic, is a truth which we can perceive in an intellective manner, not in a rational manner. Human reason or ratio thus operates against an intellective horizon, and is quite literally unthinkable without it.21 It has a self-transcendent dynamic to it, and is surrounded by truths which we can perceive or see in an intellective or, if you like, intuitive manner, without discursive reasoning or analysis. The very fact that we speak, in English, of ‘insight’ (German: Einsicht; Dutch: Inzicht), alludes to the fact that the intellect can simply see or perceive things. It is important to note that it is not simply the case that ratio needs the insight of intellectus to generate the reasoning process; nor is it simply the case that this reasoning process finally results in a moment of intellective insight. Rather, the process of human understanding implies a to-and-fro movement of insight and reasoning.22 In other words, when we are engaged in profound intellectual activity, struggling, for instance, to interpret a text or solve a theoretical problem, there will be a to-and-fro movement between intellective insight and searching, discursive reason. This dynamic at the heart of intellect and reason coheres well with Gadamer’s analysis of interpreting the art-work as play, characterised by a similar to-and-fro movement, as we will see. Now, contemplation is deeply intellective as distinct from rational-discursive. When contemplating, discursive reasoning must be put aside and the gaze of the soul must be fixed on the contemplation of the one simple truth.23 In his early III

Art, contemplation and intellectus 75 Sent. d.35 q.1, a.2 qc. 2 Aquinas spells out the significance of a simple, intellective grasp for contemplation in greater detail: The contemplative life consists in the activity that one assumes (acceptat) above all others. [. . .] Now, the inquiry of reason (inquisitio rationis) proceeds from a simple regard of the intellect (a simplici intuitu intellectus progreditur) – for one proceeds by starting out from principles which the intellect holds; so too the intellect attains certainty when the conclusions it draws can revert back to the principles through which the intellect attained certainty. This is why the contemplative life consists primarily in the operation of the intellect (Et ideo vita contemplativa principaliter in operatione intellectus consistit): the very word ‘contemplation’ suggests this as it denotes ‘vision’. The contemplative person, however, uses rational inquiry (inquisitione rationis) so as to attain the vision of contemplation, which is his main goal. As this quotation suggests, Aquinas associates contemplation proper with an intellective ‘simple regard’, gaze (intuitus), or vision, which is ultimately nondiscursive. While contemplation in the strict sense is clearly intellective, it does involve, for human beings, a rational-discursive process (as the last sentence of the quotation suggests). It is the specifically intellective aspect (actus intellectus) – as distinct from the rational-discursive dimension (actus rationis) – which is characteristic of contemplation: ‘according to the Philosopher in Bk X of his Ethics we share the contemplative life with God. Now, we do not share with God discursive reasoning (inquisitio rationis) but rather the insight of intellect (intuitus intellectus)’.24 Or again: ‘Contemplation consists in the simple gaze of the intellect upon a truth (contemplatio pertinet ad ipsum simplicem intuitum veritatis)’.25 Thus, when contemplating, discursive reasoning must be put aside and the gaze (intuitus) of the soul must be fixed on the contemplation of the one simple truth.26 The claims that there is an intellective dimension to human understanding (rather than a merely rational-discursive one), which we share, to some extent, with higher intelligences, and, secondly, that it is this intellective dimension, understood as a simple gazing on the truth, which he considers to be the characteristic feature of contemplation, were to be Aquinas’s constant teaching until the end of his life. The contrast between discursivity of ratio and restfulness of intellectus suggests that contemplation is also beyond ordinary time marked by discursiveness and succession.27 Contemplation is further characterised by a purely receptive approach to reality, disinterested and independent of all practical aims of the active life. It is pursued for its own sake (contemplatio maxime quaeritur propter seipsam) and is not subject to any other goal.28 It consists in ‘a certain liberty of mind (libertas animi)’, in ‘leisure and rest’.29 Given these features it is not surprising that Aquinas explicitly associates contemplation with play (which is pursued for its own sake) and feasting.30 In Sent. I, d.2 q.1, a.5 Expos. Aquinas alludes to this connection between contemplation and play: ‘Because of the leisure of contemplation (otium contemplationis) the Scripture says of the divine Wisdom itself

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that it plays all the time, plays throughout the world’ (Prov. 8:30). Similarly, in his Prologue to his Commentary on Boethius’s De Hebdomadibus he writes: There are two features of play which make it appropriate to compare the contemplation of wisdom to playing. First, we enjoy playing, and there is the greatest enjoyment of all to be had in the contemplation of wisdom. As Wisdom says in Ecclesiasticus 24:27, ‘My spirit is sweeter than honey’. Secondly, playing has no purpose beyond itself; what we do is done for its own sake. And the same applies to the pleasure of wisdom. Let us summarise our discussion of Aquinas: first, I suggested that things of beauty can act as a privileged medium for contemplation, given the fact that beauty is goodness which can be apprehended or beheld; there is a cognitive dimension to things of beauty. I then drew attention to the distinction between ratio and intellectus. The former is discursive, while intellectus is more intuitive, an immediate apprehension of truth. I made the point that contemplation, as Aquinas sees it, is predominantly intellective, although the intellective insight always presupposes discursive reasoning, as well as a return to the phantasmata and the senses (a topic I cannot develop here).31 So there is a dialectical relation between discursive reasoning, and intellective insight, generating a to-and-fro movement between reasoning and insight. I further pointed out that contemplation, in its intellective dimension, is beyond ordinary time (the flash of insight), and intuitive and synthetic (you grasp something as a meaningful and coherent whole in one single apprehension). It is also being pursued for its own sake, in contrast to the active life. I will now discuss Gadamer’s views on theoria and art as play, symbol and festival.

2) Gadamer on art and theoria As is well known, one of the central concerns of Gadamer’s writings is the legitimacy and integrity of understanding as it takes place in the humanities. It is this concern that drives his hermeneutical project, and is the foundation for its claims of universality: when interpreting ‘texts’ (in the broad sense of the word) we engage in understanding. Understanding is deeply dialogical for Gadamer – in the first place it implies a dialogue between the reader and the text; but the reader or interpreter herself is in conversation with tradition(s) and pre-understandings, which do not hinder interpretation but rather render it possible.32 In his work, The Relevance of the Beautiful, Gadamer refers to the phenomena of play, symbol and festivity so as to illuminate the ontological nature of art. As hinted at earlier, for Gadamer this is part of a broader project: his aim is to show that the subjectivisation of art, in which art is reduced to some variety of personal experience, is an unwelcome reductionism. Drawing on Heidegger, Gadamer argues that the work of art is an event which discloses truth. Therefore, art should not be primarily understood in terms of feelings or personal experience but rather in terms of what the art work

Art, contemplation and intellectus 77 as an event is able to disclose – and disclosure or bringing out of concealment is what truth does for Heidegger.33 This discussion of art as an event of truth assists Gadamer in safeguarding the integrity of the humanities in an intellectual climate which has largely succumbed to a positivistic methodology (‘social sciences’). The experience of art, so Gadamer argues, contains a claim to truth which is different from that of science, but is not inferior to it. Because there is specific truth in art, he can further claim that the mode of being of the work of art can assist us in revealing the nature of understanding in general, which is an essential aspect of his overall hermeneutical project. I hope to suggest that Gadamer’s reference to art as play, symbol and festival complements and coheres well with our previous outline of what Aquinas has to say on the nature of contemplation.

3) Art as play, symbol and festival Gadamer identifies a number of characteristics of play. First, it is dynamic, full of inner movement and tension. Gadamer mentions the to-and-fro of constantly repeated movement in play (e.g., a child bouncing a ball), or the ebbing and flowing of a competitive game of football. This proves a significant analogy, not just in relation to the piece of art itself but also to the nature of interpretation. After all, interpretation for Gadamer is always dialogical in character, as a process in which truth arises in the to-and-fro of question and response. Secondly, play is characterised by a non-purposive rationality: when playing, we engage in an activity for its own sake, which has its own set of rules and logic. Thus, the game masters the players. What Gadamer means by this is that the real subject of the game is not the player but the play itself.34 Play invites spectators to participate, ‘to play along’ because we are captured by what is intended in the game, ‘even if it is not something conceptual, useful, or purposive’. In contrast to ‘the subjective turn in aesthetics’ which he associates especially with Kant, Gadamer wants to focus on ‘the mode of being of the work of art itself’.35 Play contains its own sacred seriousness, and somebody who does not take the game seriously is a spoilsport. So play only fulfils its purpose if the player loses himself in play. There is therefore an important element of self-forgetfulness in play, and I will return to this momentarily. Play demands our undivided attention and commitment for the very reason that we merely participate in an event of play which has primacy over the consciousness of the players. As Gadamer states in Truth and Method: ‘The structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus frees him from the burden of taking the initiative [. . .] The real subject of the game [. . .] is not the player but instead the game itself. What holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, and keeps him there is the game itself’.36 In other words: the player experiences the game as a reality that surpasses her.37 The players are not the subjects of play but play itself reaches presentation (Darstellung) through the players. Having developed the analogy of play to uncover the ontology of the work of art, Gadamer examines art as ‘symbol’. He reminds us that a symbol originally referred to tessera hospitalis, an object broken in two, whereby one was kept by

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one person, and the other half was given to a guest or friend. A descendant of the guest could enter the house, and the two pieces could be fitted together again to form a whole in an act of recognition.38 Thus, the element of recognition is essential: the symbol is ‘that other fragment that has always been sought in order to complete and make whole our own fragmentary life’.39 Insofar as it is symbolic, art is ‘the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things’. In our encounter with art our ontological place in the world, and our finitude before that which transcends us, is revealed.40 Against Hegel, Gadamer asserts that the meaning that is revealed can never be fully grasped in concepts or knowledge. Following Heidegger’s alethiological understanding of truth, Gadamer further claims that art does not simply reveal but conceals as well.41 In Gadamer’s view, this is due to our finitude, which precludes a reductionism of the ‘ontological fullness’ of the artistic creation to graspable meaning: ‘The symbolic does not simply point toward a meaning but rather allows that meaning to present itself’.42 It ‘represents’, i.e., it makes present again. Insofar as it is symbolic, art is ‘the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things’. Thirdly, Gadamer’s discussion of art as festival is particularly relevant in relation to the issue of temporality. During the celebration of festivals time is ‘fulfilled’ or autonomous. We cease to calculate time in terms of weeks and months which are to be ‘filled’ with something, lest we have nothing to do. Like a festival, the work of art ‘proffers time, arresting it and allowing it to tarry. [. . .] The calculating way in which we normally manage and dispose of our time is, as it were, brought to a standstill’.43 Or as he puts it in a conversation with Carsten Dutt: The Weile [the ‘while’ in Verweilen, tarrying] has this very special temporal structure – a temporal structure of being moved, which one nevertheless cannot describe merely as duration, because duration means only further movement in a single direction. This is not what is determinative in the experience of art. In it we tarry, we remain with the art structure [Kunstgebilde], which as a whole then becomes ever richer and more diverse [. . .] [W]e learn from the work of art to tarry.44 While the purpose of Gadamer’s discussion of art in terms of play, symbol and festival is to resist an experientialist subjectivised interpretation of art he does acknowledge that the human subject requires a certain disposition, which we can best characterise as self-forgetful contemplation: We started by saying that the true being of the spectator, who belongs to the play of art, cannot be adequately understood in terms of subjectivity, as a way that aesthetic consciousness conducts itself. But this does not mean that the nature of the spectator cannot be described in terms of being present at something, in the way we pointed out. Considered as a subjective accomplishment in human conduct, being present has the character of being outside of oneself. [. . .] [B]eing outside of oneself is the positive possibility of being

Art, contemplation and intellectus 79 wholly with something else. This kind of being present is a self-forgetfulness (Solches Dabeisein hat den Charakter der Selbstvergessenheit), and to be a spectator consists in giving oneself in self-forgetfulness to what one is watching. Here self-forgetfulness is anything but a privative condition, for it arises from devoting one’s full attention to the matter at hand, and this is the spectator’s own positive accomplishment.45 Gadamer links self-forgetfulness with contemplation, Θεωρία (theoria – the Greek equivalent of contemplatio; it is derived from the Greek verb theorein, meaning ‘to contemplate’ or ‘to gaze’) and even ekstasis. He makes the point that theoria is not to be conceived primarily as ‘subjective conduct, as a self-determination of the subject, but in terms of what it is contemplating. Theoria is not something active but something passive (pathos), namely being totally involved in and carried away by what one sees’.46 He further argues that self-forgetfulness, necessary to appreciate the work of art or understand the text, also leads to some kind of self-discovery or better: self-recognition through an encounter with the otherness of what has a claim over us (the work of art, a text, etc.):47 A spectator’s ecstatic self-forgetfulness corresponds to his continuity with himself. Precisely that in which one loses oneself as a spectator demands that one grasp the continuity of meaning. For it is the truth of our own world – the religious and moral world in which we live – that is presented before us and in which we recognise ourselves. [. . .] What rends him from himself at the same time gives him back the whole of his being.48 This self-forgetfulness is more than abandoning all references to practical or goaloriented concerns, although it certainly involves that as well. Through the selfforgetfulness we begin to understand our world and ourselves – which is why Gadamer rehabilitates the classic idea that knowledge (cognition) is ultimately recognition. In passing I would like to observe that this kind of self-forgetfulness is not necessarily merely intellectual. It can also be interpreted in a broader vein in terms of dispossession of will and desire. Neither Gadamer nor Aquinas pursued this line of thought – but Meister Eckhart did. Mystical theologians such as Eckhart, Ruusbroec, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Simone Weil, amongst others, have made clear that detachment (or radical dispossessiveness of self) enables us to engage with the world in an authentic manner. By letting go of our own selfpreoccupied concerns we can begin to be truly involved with the world as it is. This suggests that there is deep congruity between the mystical-theological ideal of detachment, on the one hand, and the non-instrumentalist, ‘disinterested’ manner characteristic of the aesthetic attitude.49 Both the encounter with art and God involve a kind of renunciation of self, which further illustrates that contemplating works of art can act as a praeparatio evangelica. While it would be incorrect to attribute the language of ‘self-forgetfulness’ that Gadamer associates with theoria to Aquinas’s own notion of contemplation,

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his notion of intellectus does have connotations of receptivity and openness to reality. In De veritate 15.1 Aquinas contrasts reason and intellect as movement relates to rest, and generation to being (esse). It is therefore intellectus which enables us to attend to being, to be really present to reality. As Pierre Rousselot made clear many years ago in his book L’Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas, it is through intellectus that we acquire the contemplative openness to what is really real.50 According to Aquinas the word intellectus is derived from reading (legit) the truth within (intus) the very essence of things.51 Intellectus thus denotes an openness or receptivity as to how things essentially are. Moreover, in light of this notion of intellectus as openness towards being we can begin to understand Aquinas’s notion of truth, which he defines as adaequatio intellectus et rei. As is well-known, it would be a mistake to translate this in terms of correspondence, as if there were two parallel tracks, mind and reality, and we can at best hope that the two might meet. Such an understanding of truth in terms of correspondence between intellect and reality is Cartesian rather than Thomist. A better translation would be ‘assimilation’ of intellect and reality. In his Commentary on John, 18:38 (no. 2365) Aquinas speaks of commensuratio rei ad intellectum, a conformity between reality and intellect: on the one hand, things conform to the divine intellect, which creates them; on the other hand, our intellect conforms to things, when we truly understand them.

Conclusion Contemplation of art can assist us in gaining an understanding of our world and ultimately (insofar as this is possible in this world), catching a glimpse of God’s splendour. Let us return briefly to the main topic of this book: the encounter between art and mystical theology. In the last thirty years scholars have questioned whether mysticism is best understood in terms of an immediate experience of God (as William James proposed in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience).52 We have become more sensitive to the fact that our encounter with God is always mediated through faith, hope and love, offering us a lens through which we may encounter God in liturgical settings, the created world, fellow-humans, suffering and art. This shift in perspective – away from a subjectivist-experientialist interpretation of mystical theology – finds an interesting analogy in our appraisal of theories of art, where a similar shift has taken place. Simplifying matters we can say that in the nineteenth century aesthetics was mainly understood in terms of expressivism or emotivism. Tolstoy’s essay ‘What is Art?’ has given an eloquent expression of this experientialist or even emotivist understanding of art. Basically Tolstoy argued that art is a mere medium through which the subjective emotions of the artist are being transferred to the listener (reader, spectator). This reduces the work of art to a mere channel of feelings. In the twentieth century philosophers have distanced themselves from this romanticist notion of art and have espoused a more cognitivist approach, which considers art in terms of its power to disclose our world and enhance our understanding

Art, contemplation and intellectus 81 of it.53 It will have become clear that Gadamer, with his critique of subjectivistexperientialist understandings of art (Erlebniskunst) shares this anti-subjectivist stance, and prefers to see the artwork as an event which reveals our world. This anti-modern stance makes a dialogue with pre-modern authors, such as Aquinas, an exciting and viable venture. Aquinas was writing at a time when aesthetics was still deeply embedded in a metaphysical framework and thus concerns itself with the most profound questions of being, truth, goodness and beauty. It is for this reason that I have attempted to bring Gadamer’s thought on art and theoria into dialogue with Aquinas’s views on intellect and contemplation, even though as I admitted earlier, Aquinas says little enough about art, and contemplation of art in particular. Gadamer mentions a number of characteristics that reveal the ‘event-ful’ nature of interpreting art. He describes art in terms of (a) play (pursued for its own sake, characterised by an inner to-and-fro dynamic); (b) symbol (as a way of integrating our fragmented world); and (c) festivity (its timelessness). These three characteristics cohere well with what Aquinas has to say on intellective contemplation as (a) leisurely or pursued for its own sake, playful and predicated on the on-going dynamic of ratio and intellectus; (b) intuitive and integrative; and (c) beyond discursive time. This means that Gadamer’s hermeneutical project (including his notion of interpretation in terms of on-going dialogue) could be enriched by an engagement with Aquinas’s anthropology, and his understanding of the dialectic between ratio and intellectus in particular. An engagement with the Thomist distinction between intellectus and ratio could thus further enhance Gadamer’s attempt to describe ‘the dialogue that we are’.54

Notes 1 Johannes Baptist Lotz, Martin Heidegger und Thomas von Aquin: Mensch, Zeit, Sein (Freiburg: Herder, 1975); Bertrand Rioux, L’Etre et la verité chez Heidegger et Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); Gustave Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik vom Thomas zu Heidegger (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1959); John Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay in Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982); Jean-Luc Marion, ‘Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’onto-théologie’, Revue Thomiste, 95 (1995), 31–67. 2 My reservations, broadly speaking, in regard to this debate are inspired by Aquinas’s profound apophaticism, his insistence that God’s esse radically transcends esse commune and is not in any genus; his teaching on analogy; the fact that Aquinas himself appears to anticipate the revelatory or ‘disclosing’ character of truth that is central to Heidegger’s notion of aletheia [as in De veritate I, 1, where Aquinas quotes St Hilary of Poitier’s definition of the true as ‘that which manifests and proclaims existence’ and continues with a citation from Augustine: ‘Truth is that by which that which is, is shown’ (verum est declarativum et manifestativum esse)], and finally, his notion of intellectus itself, which as Pierre Rousselot argued denotes receptivity to being, as I will point out later in this contribution: Pierre Rousselot, Intelligence: Sense of Being, Faculty of God: A New Translation of L’Intellectualisme de saint Thomas, trans. by Andrew Tallon, Rousselot’s Collected Philosophical Works, vol. 1 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1999). This understanding of intellectus as openness to being allows us to address Heidegger’s admittedly rather sweeping critique of Seinsvergessenheit and onto-theology. It was Heidegger’s stated aim to merge thought and being; but it is arguably exactly in the unity of intellectus and esse that this union is achieved,

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Rik Van Nieuwenhove and this union is truth, which reveals or discloses being (cf. also Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas, p. 256). Brice Wachterhauser, ‘Getting It Right: Relativism, Realism and Truth’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. by Robert Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 52–78 (p. 76). I have in mind both the ‘dialogue’ between Gadamer’s thought and post-modern philosophy (with which he shares a scepticism of both subjectivity, foundationalism, and autonomy of reason), and the actual meeting of Gadamer and Derrida in Paris in 1981. Richard Bernstein comments: ‘It was clearly Gadamer’s intention to explore the differences between hermeneutics and deconstruction in his face-to-face encounter with Derrida. But a serious intellectual encounter never really happened’. Richard Bernstein, ‘Hermeneutics, Critical Theory, and Deconstruction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, pp. 267–82 (p. 276). Cf. John Arthos, The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); David Vessey, ‘Gadamer, Augustine, Aquinas, and Hermeneutic Universality’, Philosophy Today, 55 (2011), 158–65. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1993), pp. 418–28. The forgetfulness of language thus refers to the fact that the intimate unity between language and thought has been severed. It is predicated on the notion that words are mere signs for things and ideas. Language, then, becomes a mere instrument of thought. Gadamer disagrees with this account: ‘A word is not just a sign. In a sense that is hard to grasp, it is also something almost like a copy of image. [. . .] A word has a mysterious connection with what it ‘images’; it belongs to its being. [. . .] the ideality of the meaning lies in the word itself. It is meaningful already. [. . .] We seek the right word – i.e., the word that really belongs to the thing – so that in it the thing comes into language’. (Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 416–17). According to Gadamer, the Christian idea of the generation and Incarnation of the Word prevented the forgetfulness of being that characterised Greek thought (Truth and Method, p. 418, ff.). Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 42, ff.: ‘from the classical period up to the age of the baroque art was dominated by quite other standards of value than that of being experienced’ (Truth and Method, p. 71). Gadamer decries the phenomenon of ‘aesthetic differentiation’ that accompanies the modern (eighteenth-century) understanding of art, i.e., the original religious or secular function and context in which the work of art is rooted, is being disregarded and it becomes a ‘pure work of art’ (Truth and Method, p. 85). Through this ‘differentiation’ the work loses its place and the world to which it belongs and now pertains to ‘aesthetic consciousness’ (Truth and Method, p. 87). Or again, Augustine connected the words speciosus (beautiful) and species, which he associated with form. All translations from Thomas Aquinas’s writings are from [accessed 11 April 2017], with the exception of those from his Commentary on the Divine Names and The Commentary on the Sentences, which are my own. Cf. ST I, q.39, a.8. Commentary on The Divine Names IV, 7: ‘the beauty of creatures is simply a likeness of the divine beauty in which things participate’. Thomas Aquinas, De divinis nominibus Dionysii, [accessed 23 April 2017]. ST I-II, q.27, a.1 ad 3. ST I, q.79, a.11, ad 2: ‘Truth and good include one another (se invicem includunt); for truth is something good, otherwise it would not be desirable; and good is something true, otherwise it would not be intelligible’. ST I-II, q.27, a.1 ad 3. ST I, q.79, a.11 ad 2. ‘Beauty, as stated above (II-II, q.145, a.2) consists in a certain clarity and due proportion. Now each of these is found radically in the reason; because both the light that

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makes beauty seen, and the establishing of due proportion among things belong to reason. Hence since the contemplative life consists in an act of the reason, there is beauty in it by its very nature and essence; wherefore it is written (Wis. 8:2) of the contemplation of wisdom: “I became a lover of her beauty”’. ST I, q.79, a.8. Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius appear to be Aquinas’s most important source for the contrast between intellect and reason: cf. ST I, q.79, a.10 ad 2. See also: De veritate 24.3 ad 1: ‘Reason is sometimes taken broadly for any immaterial cognition; and in this sense reason is found in God [. . .]. It is also taken properly, as meaning a power which knows with discourse (cum discursu). In this sense reason is not found in God or the angels, but only in men’. Other key texts which emphasise the distinction between ratio and intellectus include: I Sent. d.3 q.4, a.1 ad 4 (with a reference to Pseudo-Dionysius); II Sent. d.9 q.1, a.8 ad 1 (Pseudo-Dionysius); De veritate 5.1 ad 5 (with a reference to Boethius); 8.15 (Pseudo-Dionysius); 15.1 (Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius); 24.3 (no reference); Expos. De Trin. q.2, a.2 (no reference) q.6, a.1 (Boethius); ST I, q.58, a.3 (no reference) and a.4 (Pseudo-Dionysius); I, q.59, a.1 ad 1 (no reference); I, q.79, a.8 (Pseudo-Dionysius); ST I, q.79, a.8 ad 2 (Boethius); II–II, q.8, a.1 obj. 2 (Pseudo-Dionysius); I, q.83, a.4 (no reference); II–II, q.9, a.1 ad 1 (no reference); II-II, q.180, a.3 (Pseudo-Dionysius). For a more in-depth discussion, see: Rik Van Nieuwenhove, ‘Contemplation, intellectus and simplex intuitus in Aquinas: Recovering a Neoplatonic Theme’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 91 (2017), 199–225. ST I, q.79, a.8; see also: Aquinas’s Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate, Question 6 art. 1, reply to the third question: Thomas Aquinas. The Division and Methods of the Sciences, trans. by Armand Maurer (Toronto: PIMS, 1986), pp. 70–1 and n. 36. Denys Turner summarises: ‘We could not be rational if we were not also more than rational; human beings are not rational unless they are also intellectual’, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 89. I am indebted to Colm McClemens (‘The Distinction Intellectus-Ratio in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: A Historical and Critical Study’ [unpublished doctoral dissertation, University College London, 1990]), quoted by Kevin O’Reilly in Aesthetic Perception: A Thomist Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), p. 46. ST II-II, q.180, a.6 ad 2. Josef Pieper writes that contemplation is ‘a type of knowing which does not merely move towards its object but already rests in it. The object is present – as a face or a landscape is present to the eye when the gaze “rests upon it”’: Happiness and Contemplation (South Bend, IN: St Augustine Press, 1998), p. 74. III Sent. d.35 q.1, a.2 qc.2 s.c. ST II-II, q.180, a.3 ad 1. ST II-II, q.180, a.6 ad 2. Cf. Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, p. 74 (n. 23 above). ST II-II, q.59, a. 1: ‘intellect and reason differ as to their manner of knowing; because the intellect knows by simple intuition (simplici intuitu), while reason knows by a process of discursion from one thing to another (discurrendo de uno in aliud)’. See also: ST I, q.59, a.1 ad 1 and Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, p. 74. Contemplation on earth represents an inchoate participation in the vision of God, which involves ‘a participation in eternity, as completely transcending time’. In the vision of God, the action of the soul ‘as joined to higher things which exist above time, participates in eternity’: Summa contra Gentiles, ed. by Joseph Kenny, O.P., trans. by Anton C. Pegis and others, 4 vols (New York: Hanover House, 1955–1957), III, p. 61). Contemplation on earth is a foretaste of this heavenly vision, as Aquinas mentions in ST II-II, q.180, a.4. ST I-II, q.3, a.5. ST II-II, q.182, a.1. Aquinas discusses the merits of games and play in ST II-II, q.168, a.2. He writes that words or deeds wherein nothing further is sought than the soul’s delight are called playful or humorous (this is, of course, typical of contemplation, which is also pursued for its own sake). In ST I-II, q.1, a.6 ad 1 Aquinas had already written that playful actions (actiones ludicrae) are not directed towards an extrinsic end but merely to the good of

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Rik Van Nieuwenhove the player (ad bonum ipsius ludentis). For feasting see: ST II-II, q.182, a.1: ‘The contemplative life is more enjoyable than the active. Thus Augustine says that Martha was troubled, while Mary feasted’. The reference is to Augustine’s Sermon 103.3. This theme is well-known (see: ST I, q.84, a.7). For a discussion of Aquinas’s epistemology and the role of phantasmata, see: Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 284–95. This dialogical notion of understanding coheres well in purely formal terms with the approach of disputed questions that characterise some of the key writings of medieval authors (objections, replies, etc.). From the Commentary on the Sentences and his several Disputed Questions to his Summa Theologiae Aquinas has adopted this dialogical style when developing his arguments. In his major work, Truth and Method, Gadamer had already used the notion of play to make clear a key aspect of his hermeneutics, namely that understanding is always ‘an event of being’; or, as he puts it in the Preface to the second edition: ‘My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing’ (Truth and Method, p. xxviii). Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 106. In relation to modern art this implies that the audience can actively participate in making the art-event ‘happen’. Gadamer, ‘The Play of Art’, pp. 123–30. The analogy with play is made for two reasons. First, as suggested earlier, it illustrates Gadamer’s point that understanding (of a text, views expressed to us in a conversation, a work of art etc.) is not something purely subjective but, rather, in understanding we participate in an event of disclosure. Secondly, and related to this, in this instance it also assists us in making sense of modern art, in which the art-work tries to break down the barrier between the audience and the work of art. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 105–6. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 109. Gadamer, Relevance, p. 31; Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 153. Gadamer, Relevance, p. 32. Gadamer, Relevance, p. 33. In another essay, ‘Aesthetic and Religious Experience’, Gadamer makes the same point: ‘We can define the symbol as that through which someone or something is known and recognised. [. . .] The recognition that the work of art procures for us is always an expansion of that infinite process of making ourselves at home in the world which is the human lot’ (Relevance, pp. 140–53 [pp. 150–1]). In this context Gadamer discusses the notion of mimesis or imitation, which has nothing to do with imitation of something already familiar to us. Rather, ‘it implies that something is represented in such a way that it is actually present in sensuous abundance’ (Relevance, p. 36). Gadamer, Relevance, p. 34. Gadamer, Relevance, p. 34. Gadamer, Relevance, p. 42. Richard Palmer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 76–7. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 125–6. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 124–5. This even applies to the artist himself, for whom the work of art has its own integrity, which stands before the artist as before anybody else. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 128. I have developed this theme elsewhere. See: Rik Van Nieuwenhove, ‘The Religious and Aesthetic Attitude’, Literature and Theology, 18 (2004), 174–86. Rousselot, L’Intellectualisme de saint Thomas. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by C. I. Litzinger, O.P., 2 vols (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1964), no. 1179. See the classic study: Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For an application of this

Art, contemplation and intellectus 85 approach to Ruusbroec, see: Rik Van Nieuwenhove, Jan van Ruusbroec: Mystical Theologian of the Trinity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). 53 For an eloquent and highly readable overview, see: Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2000). 54 This is the title of a chapter in Jean Grondin’s book on The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. by Kathryn Plant (Chesham: Acumen, 2003). It is a reference to Friedrich Hölderlin’s verse from Friedensfeier (‘Viel hat von Morgen an, / Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander, / Erfahren der Mensch; bald sind wir aber Gesang’.) Gadamer comments on this verse, which captures a key tenet of his thought. See also: Donatella Di Cesare, Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 158–63.

Bibliography Primary Gadamer, Hans Georg, Truth and Method, trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1993) ———, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. by Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947) ———, De Veritate, trans. by Robert W. Mulligan, James, V. McGlynn and Robert W. Schmidt (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952–1954) ———, Summa contra Gentiles, ed. by Joseph Kenny, O.P., trans. by Anton C. Pegis and others, 4 vols (New York: Hanover House, 1955–1957) ———, Commentary on Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by C. I. Litzinger, O.P., 2 vols (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1964) ———, The Division and Methods of the Sciences, trans. by Armand Maurer (Toronto: PIMS, 1986) ———, Commentary on the Sentences, [accessed 13 April 2017] ———, De divinis nominibus Dionysii, [accessed 23 April 2017] ———, Quaestiones Disputatae, St. Thomas Aquinas’ Works in English, [accessed 11 April 2017] ———, De Trinitate Boethii (Expos. De Trin.), [accessed 10 April 2017]

Secondary Arthos, John, The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009) Bernstein, Richard, ‘Hermeneutics, Critical Theory, and Deconstruction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. by Robet Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 267–82 Caputo, John, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay in Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982) Di Cesare, Donatella, Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007)

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Graham, Gordon, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2000) Grondin Jean, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. by Kathryn Plant (Chesham: Acumen, 2003) Lotz, Johannes Baptist, Martin Heidegger und Thomas von Aquin: Mensch, Zeit, Sein (Freiburg: Herder, 1975) Marion, Jean-Luc, ‘Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’onto-théologie’, Revue Thomiste, 95 (1995), 31–67 McClemens, Colm, ‘The Distinction Intellectus-Ratio in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: A Historical and Critical Study’ (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University College London, 1990) O’Reilly, Kevin, Aesthetic Perception: A Thomist Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), p. 46 Palmer, Richard, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001) Pasnau, Robert, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Pieper, Josef, Happiness and Contemplation (South Bend, IN: St Augustine Press, 1998) Rioux, Bertrand, L’Etre et la verité chez Heidegger et Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963) Rousselot, Pierre, Intelligence: Sense of Being, Faculty of God: A New Translation of L’Intellectualisme de saint Thomas, trans. by Andrew Tallon, Rousselot’s Collected Philosophical Works, vol. 1 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1999) Siewerth, Gustave, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik vom Thomas zu Heidegger (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1959) Turner, Denys, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) ———, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Van Nieuwenhove, Rik, Jan van Ruusbroec: Mystical Theologian of the Trinity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) ———, ‘The Religious and Aesthetic Attitude’, Literature and Theology, 18 (2004), 174–86 ———, ‘Contemplation, intellectus and simplex intuitus in Aquinas: Recovering a Neoplatonic Theme’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 91 (2017), 199–225 Vessey, David, ‘Gadamer, Augustine, Aquinas, and Hermeneutic Universality’, Philosophy Today, 55 (2011), 158–65 Wachterhauser, Brice, ‘Getting It Right: Relativism, Realism and Truth’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. by Robert Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 52–78

Part II

Art, mysticism and the everyday

4

Jan van Eyck and the active mysticism of the Devotio Moderna Inigo Bocken

Introduction In his Soliloquium, finished around 1438, Thomas à Kempis discusses the role of images within the practice of meditation, for our way on earth is full of sadness, lacking the divine fulfilment of our deepest desire – the desire for God.1 For Thomas à Kempis, personal meditation is a crucial tool that enables us to find consolation in this earthly condition. Quoting 1. Corinthians 13, Thomas affirms that we cannot avoid the use of images if we are to find a perspective beyond the dark sadness we experience during our earthly existence. This need for images could be seen as a limitation and an obstacle to our ultimate happiness. Yet in spite of the somewhat dark colours with which Thomas paints this aspect of the human condition, he seems to have firmly believed in the possibility of a consolation which was not only a heavenly hope but also belonged to this earthly life.2 Although we are never able to see God directly in the here and now, for Thomas images enable us to remember that our life in the end is orientated towards an illumination. Images can, he suggests, mirror our earthly life and present it to us in another light, just as a mirror shows us light that cannot be seen directly (an idea that I will discuss in more detail below). In Chapter 21 of this marvellous and somewhat forgotten collection of meditations, Thomas describes how the final goal of our earthly pilgrimage gives us hope and helps us to find orientation in the darkness. This goal is nothing less than the heavenly Jerusalem described in Revelations 21–22, which although distant and in that sense absent, still enables consolation in the present. Thomas’s chapter contains a stunning description of people coming together around the lamb, an almost verbatim visual depiction of which can be found in the famous Ghent Altarpiece by the renowned Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, contemporary of Thomas à Kempis.3 Of course, both, Thomas’s meditation and Jan van Eyck’s altarpiece draw on the same chapters of Revelations, so it is not wholly without reason that there should be some similarities. Nevertheless, there is something more at stake than a common reference to the text of the Bible. In his Soliloquium, Thomas describes the different groups coming together to praise the lamb in great detail: there are the Prophets and Patriarchs, the apostles, regular clergymen, martyrs and confessors. They all converge from different directions to praise the lamb, beholden by the Lord, by Mary, and by the Lord’s friend, John

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the Baptist. Despite some differences, such as the more politically inspired presence of bishops and popes in van Eyck’s painting, the similarities with Thomas’s meditative text are quite striking. There is, as far as I can tell, no historical evidence to link Thomas’s text to Jan van Eyck’s pictorial masterpiece.4 We lack detailed knowledge of the historical and intellectual background to Thomas’s text, excepting that it must have been written before 1438 – in other words at around the same time as van Eyck worked on his polyptych. One must therefore be careful not to speculate about a relationship between Jan van Eyck and Thomas. What I think can be asserted, however, is that both shared a similar approach to images and their capacity to exceed the power of the senses, and it is on this that I wish to focus. Specifically I will draw parallels between van Eyck’s methods and the mysticism of everyday life as found in the religious reform movement of the Devotio Moderna.5 To my mind we find in the Devotio Moderna a way of thinking, or we might say, a logic about how to deal with images which comes close to the innovative art of Jan van Eyck. The connection between the Devotio Moderna and the painting of the fifteenth century is not self-evident. Since Johan Huizinga’s Autumn of the Middle Ages, the Devotio Moderna has had the reputation of representing a narrow-minded and moralistic way of life, contrary to the great cultural innovations of the fifteenth century, including its art. Huizinga’s contempt for the Devotio Moderna has had an enormous influence, such that in Sabine Augath’s otherwise excellent study of Jan van Eyck’s Ars mystica, she repeats the idea that the personal piety of daily life as found in the Devotio Moderna is contrary to the splendid mysticism of van Eyck; being only the expression of a limited, moralistic, even simplistic, piety.6 My contribution will, I hope, show that the Devotio Moderna’s turn towards concrete practice does not, as it is often maintained, entail a simple ascetic rejection of sophisticated theological reasoning, or of the richness of sensual perception, but actually initiates a new paradigm of practice, in which visual experience and performance play a crucial role.7 It is this practical dynamic that I hope to show has a relationship to contemporaneous innovative artistic practices, such as those found in the work of Jan van Eyck. As has already been mentioned, this relation is not self-evident. A not insignificant number of art historians contrast the critical attitude towards sensual images of this reform movement directly with the fascination for human vision as it finds expression in the naturalistic images of precious stones and robes of this Flemish artist. Yet what underlies this contrast has much more to do with the extreme luxury of the Burgundian Court, of which Jan van Eyck was an envoy, as compared to the duty to lead a sober life advocated by the pious brethren and sisters of the Common Life, than attitudes towards the visual, or at least that is my contention. I see a fundamental relation between the form of thinking outlined in Thomas’s imitatio Christi and the Eyckian conception of painting, particularly in his ‘play of realism’ (to borrow a phrase from the art historian Craig Harbison).8 I hope to demonstrate that a concordance exists in terms of the performative character of vision between van Eyck’s famous Ghent Altarpiece and the performative logic of the Devotio Moderna; I understand the former as a kind of mystagogic installation

Jan van Eyck and the Devotio Moderna 91 that invites the viewer to enter into the artwork, there to discover the divine by means of concrete vision and perception. Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei will be used to provide a theoretical hermeneutic for the performative character of vision which I see at play in both the Devotio Moderna and van Eyck’s altarpiece. In no sense am I suggesting that Cusa and Jan van Eyck ever met, nor even that Cusa was familiar with the latter’s paintings, although the possibility cannot be ruled out since they operated in the same circles: Nicholas of Cusa as papal diplomat, and Jan van Eyck as envoy to the Duke of Burgundy.9 What links both writers is their interest in the spiritual movement of the brothers and sisters of the Common Life, the Devotio Moderna, such that a natural triangulation arises between the thought of Cusa and key Devotio Moderna authors such as Thomas, a connection which I hope to show is also informative of van Eyck.

1) Imitation and consolation in the Devotio Moderna One of the main reasons for the success of the Devotio Moderna was the growth of major cities in the Netherlands and Flanders in fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.10 The movement can be seen as a kind of monastic life for the urban classes.11 Indeed, the urban character of this reform movement, initiated by Geert Groote, is evidenced by its attitude towards the lessening of hierarchy in its overall cosmology; for urban life always supposes social flexibility, and that was certainly the case in this region where the son of a vine grower from Kues was able to become a cardinal of the Roman Church, a craftsman, a professor or a mystic.12 Indeed, one of the movement’s main spiritual authors, Thomas à Kempis, held that the divine hierarchy could never be encompassed by human attempts to create order. Divine government was, for him, wed to the practice of daily life; it was here that true reform had to take place. The brothers and sisters of the Common Life set about finding how they could be an image of God – imitatio Christi – through living humble active lives. It is an idea that we find throughout the literature of the Devotio Moderna, for example, in the sisters’ books, such as that of Emmerich, which states that ‘the daily work at the spinning wheel is my prayer, my practice is my contemplation’.13 Inspired by nominalist theology, Geert Groote and Thomas à Kempis held firmly to the belief that a human being could never leave the domain of human action in this life, so it was in this field that God’s action had to become apparent.14 Contrary to Augustine’s influential understanding of St Paul’s rapture to the third heaven, from this viewpoint the faithful had the task of discovering the active power of God within the human order of action.15 Thus in his imitatio Christi, Thomas à Kempis stresses that it is far more important to practice virtues such as compunction than to know its definition – he placed little importance on the capacity to give sophisticated theological or philosophical causative explanations.16 Rather what mattered was the concrete practical realisation of the Gospel in an individual’s life. Concrete life is for him the stage on which the Gospel becomes visible. Indeed, the renowned specialist in the Devotio Moderna, Rudolf

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van Dijk, always maintained that imitatio means to become an image yourself.17 Action is the highest form of theory: it is how one sees God – in daily practices. One must therefore avoid the temptation to hide oneself behind human knowledge and judgements: by doing so we prevent ourselves from becoming an image of God ourselves.18 God’s judgements, although unknown in themselves, are made manifest through the discernment of the concrete life of the individual. Such ideas are central Thomas’s De imitatione Christi where he asks critically whether theologians, with their many judgments about the Trinity, ever stop to ask themselves how the Trinity judges them.19 Nominalist thinkers had already argued that it was not possible to grasp God’s judgment by way of philosophical or theological reasoning. Thomas extends this argument by arguing that we must learn to find God’s judgements in our practical life, in our own doing. To see God means becoming an illuminating image ourselves. This for Thomas is imitatio Christi. Images expressed in the enlightening stories of the Gospels can help. They can become a paradigm for our own itinerary from darkness into light, as Thomas à Kempis reiterates in the very first sentences of his imitatio Christi, quoting the Gospel of John 8.12.20 Such practical mysticism has often been the reason why scholars have not taken the theological and philosophical content of the Devotio Moderna very seriously.21 Yet, with the aid of Nicholas of Cusa, the theological value of this new mode of practical mysticism can, I think, be better appreciated.22 Even though Cusa did not belong to the inner circle of the Devotio Moderna, recent studies have shown that extensive relations existed between cardinal Cusa and this religious reform movement. Cusa left a legacy to establish the Bursa Cusana in Deventer, which enabled twenty young people to study at the Latin school of the Brethren of the Common Life. As papal legate in the Netherlands, he was also responsible for the foundation of several houses in the Windesheim tradition.23 He even attempted to establish the Windesheim rule in further monasteries. In addition, we find important traces of this relationship in his philosophical and theological works – one might even say that Nicholas of Cusa was a critical friend to the Devotio Moderna, understanding its spiritual and theological potential, whilst avoiding its antiintellectual impetus. An example of the paradigmatic relationship between theory and action of which we have just been speaking can be seen in Cusa’s figure of the idiota in three of his books on the layman. It is often said that the Devotio Moderna was a lay movement, a movement of people without theological formation, without knowledge of Latin, people of practice:24 citizens of the towns in the Netherlands, craftsmen, tradesmen, politicians, [. . .] idiota (from the Greek idios, one who does it his own way), or illiteratus are the Latin words used for this state of being.25 In Cusa’s idiota de mente, the layman is a spoonmaker, who can hardly read or write, but understands mystical theology by knowing the secrets of divine creativity. Through making spoons, he discovers divine creativity through his own way of doing – thus understanding that the human being is an image of divine creativity. Cusa never ceases to stress that humans have the capacity to think through active and practical living. Thus the idiota is the one who is able to liberate him/

Jan van Eyck and the Devotio Moderna 93 herself from every form of outer knowledge and tradition and to understand that ‘wisdom proclaims itself openly in the streets’ (sapientia enim clamat in plateis, to quote the Psalmist).26 The whole process of truth and reality starts all over again with every individual in his concrete existence. As is stressed in De imitatio Christi and elsewhere in the writings of the Devotio Moderna, every human being has to follow the path of Christ over and over again. And imitation of Christ does not only mean simply a pious ‘following’ of Christ, but entails expressing Him within one’s own life by fulfilling daily tasks. It is in this sense that it rejects the development of sophisticated theological systems. This way of thinking, this practical mysticism, is intensified in Cusa’s famous 1453 work De visione Dei, which contains nothing short of a mystagogic installation, aimed at helping the reader to see God with earthly eyes, in this life, through concrete action.27

2) Mystagogy in Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei The background to Cusa’s De visione Dei is well known. The book was written at the behest of the Benedictine monks of Tegernsee Abbey, who asked the cardinal for assistance with their spiritual lives. In response, they receive a painting, an omnivoyant portrait, whose gaze followed the viewer of the painting no matter where he stood. Interestingly, Cusa refers in the text to a self-portrait by the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden, which was at that time hanging in Brussels town hall.28 It not only attests to Cusa’s awareness of the most recent developments in the visual arts, but also shows that in his opinion the vision of God – theoria – was to be found within actual cultural and human practices.29 In classical tradition, theoria was reserved for those who were free from earthly duties and cares; human action was perceived as an obstacle to the soul’s reformation.30 Cusa seems to be convinced that for the monks of Tegernsee to reach theoria within this earthly life, a reformed perception of their daily experience was required.31 Thus Cusa develops a piece of theatre in which the monks are invited to participate.32 It is a kind of experiment, which only makes sense if the reader, as the viewer, also becomes an active part of it. The experiment is a practice (praxis), in which, in the words of the French historian and philosopher Michel de Certeau, ‘the act enables the words’.33 The vision of God cannot be achieved through theoretical efforts, but only in as much as the reader/viewer follows the path indicated by the theatrical experiment. Whoever enters this scenic space understands how he will be able to see the invisible divine light. Each monk has to move from the right to the left or vice versa around the portrait, getting the impression that it has been made only for him and that he is in the centre of the attention of its gaze. The more the viewer explores this way of seeing, the more he feels confirmed in his impression that he is at the centre of the portrait’s gaze. However, the viewer circling around the portrait finds that his brother, moving in the opposite direction and performing the same experiment, reports the same experience. This is incomprehensible for the first. He cannot understand it, unless he believes his colleague – that he is in the centre of its attention as well: ‘And so, through the disclosure of the respondent he will come to know that that face does not desert anyone who is moving – not even those who are

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moving in opposite directions’.34 Thus it is that he discovers that what he sees is only his way of seeing, from a concrete, determined point of view. He is not the centre at all; his way of seeing is only one of many. The point of the experiment, in making the reader aware of this vanishing point, is not to deny the truth of concrete seeing; rather Cusa invites us to recognise that more than one perspective is true. Indeed, it is only from within his concrete sight that the viewer understands the impossibility of perfectly sight.35 In other words, he sees the invisible, when and only when he takes into account the idea that there are other viewers and so other perspectives, which are impossible for him to see, since it is impossible for him to take a viewpoint that is other than his own.36 Contrary to the traditional ideas of spiritual sight, for Cusa, theoria is an outworking of physical perception itself. The vision of God consists of this awareness of the paradoxes at play within our physical perception.37 Yet even though we may be tied to our own perspective, we are not its prisoners. The fact of being bound to our own concrete way of seeing and experiencing is, in Cusa’s view, far from tragic. For it is only from this vantage point that we are able to appreciate other ways of seeing and understanding. Such knowledge opens up the possibility of ‘seeing’ other perspectives. A human being is able to move in several directions in order to collect more points of view, even though, of course, he is only able to integrate them into his own way of seeing. Cusa quotes the Greek philosopher Xenophanes, who says that God is for the lion a lion, for the ox an ox, for the young man as a young man, and for the old man likewise old.38 In this, the only known quotation of Xenophanes within a medieval text as far as I am aware, Cusa significantly alters the sense of the original removing its anthropomorphising character, using it instead to stress the unavoidable human character of religious practices.39 Even the most abstract metaphysical insights and ideas are bound to the practical human imagination. The divine truth remains invisible, but it is an invisibility that works within the visible. Given that Cusa thought that a circle had an infinite number of angles, the perspective of the human viewer is actually taking part in the infinity of perspectives of the divine vision. In the experiment the viewer is confronted with the challenge of becoming an image himself – a living image (viva imago).40 The point is that this ‘invisible’ truth is not separated from the process of visual seeing, but rather belongs to the more comprehensive spiritual task of becoming aware of being this living image. This is thus grounds for taking concrete human practices seriously. Time and again, Cusa gives examples of these kinds of vanishing points, and does so in what comes close to a phenomenological way of proceeding, by showing us how our private perspective is ‘suddenly’ interrupted, to echo Michel de Certeau.41 For in Cusa’s thought the act of perceiving itself confronts us with the limits of our perception, and thus is an appeal to see and be seen anew. In De visione Dei, the viewer ‘suddenly’ sees that he is the one who is viewed himself, as a living image. With this in mind I want now to return to Jan van Eyck and his famous altarpiece in order to show how it functions as a theatre of contemplation, with a mystagogic vanishing point through which the viewer, as they circle around it, is guided towards a vision of God in daily life. I will focus particularly

Jan van Eyck and the Devotio Moderna 95 on the logic of consolation and imitation, which were so central to the practice of the Devotio Moderna.

3) The Ghent Altarpiece as mystagogic installation It is difficult not to be fascinated by the detailed and naturalistic representation of van Eyck’s altarpiece in Saint-Bavo-Cathedral, Ghent.42 Often, this naturalism has been interpreted as an expression of secularisation.43 However, one can also view it as mystagogic play enacted by the viewer and painter in unison. The painting invites the viewer to enter its space in order to follow traces of light. These illuminating traces direct the viewer’s gaze across the whole of the painting. Light is in fact the defining feature in this painting, both in terms of objects and persons. However, van Eyck does not paint the light as if it were an object itself, rather he offers a road of light which frames visible nature. As I hope to indicate, the extreme realism found in the painting is not only an extraordinary technical achievement, it is the necessary foundation out of which mystagogic meaning arises. One of the fundamental procedures which forms the dynamic structure of the representation is without any doubt the reflection and refraction of light, which can be found everywhere in the picture, operating precisely as described in Alhazen’s optics, which also informed Cusa’s notion of the vanishing point.44 In van Eyck’s painting refraction continually draws the eye of the viewer towards different features, collecting his/her attention and organising a dynamic movement. The painting invites the viewer to play through the play of light; a playing that is further enacted through the various mirrors that are found throughout the painting. Light, which is itself invisible, becomes visible in these mirrors, which are in turn painted objects themselves. Nature, buildings, bishops, pilgrims, precious stone, and amour all become points of reflection. One is thus brought into the painting’s paradoxical structure, which uses concrete images as reflections and refractions of light, such that one becomes aware that one does not see what one sees, much as we find with the monks who view Cusa’s painting. This paradoxical structure thus becomes the mise en scene of the painting, an example of which can be found in the amour of the soldiers, the milites of Christ. One can easily observe that the amour works like a mirror, in which one is presented with an ambiguous vision, for mirrored in the metal of the uniform, one sees the outline of green pastures. This is nothing less than the landscape that forms the background of all the lowest panels, but here we see it fractured as it is reflected in the metal. This reflection challenges our sense of perspective, since by rights it ought to be situated in front of the painting, behind the viewer, yet in fact it forms the background behind the painting. Our natural vision is interrupted as we are drawn into the painting itself.45 This playful engagement with mirrors, which demands of us that we too become players, is perhaps even more evident when looking at the fountain in the middle of the lower panel. Here again in the metal of the fountain, as in the spurts of water, one is able to see a reflected image. Yet this image is the window of the Vijd Chapel in Ghent Cathedral – the concrete, original location of the painting.

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In both instances, the viewer is invited to make an effort, to actively participate in seeing the picture (and the mirrors and reflections it contains) through which s/he is invited to enter the space of the picture, in which a divine happening is being developed (as noted above the whole piece draw heavily on Revelations). The ambiguous reflections act as a vanishing point, such that we might say a circle exists around the painting, similar to the one described by Cusa, through which the viewer is able to partake of a vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Indeed the viewer is confronted with a task – namely s/he is asked to realise the synthesis of different perspectives within the painting. The window of the Vijd Chapel appearing everywhere in the painting shows the viewer that it is not only the chapel which is present within the painting, but also the viewer, who is present in the chapel. By looking into the painting, s/he is present in the vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the here and now, despite lacking the fullness of this vision in his/her earthly existence. We might say that the image is offering consolation – making present what is absent, the invisible via visible. The viewer of this altarpiece does not have the all-seeing eye of the central perspective in Italian art, which is a perspective from the outside. The Eyckian viewer finds him/herself within the circle around the lamb. Indeed, it is not the viewer who is outside of the painting, but it is the light, which is likewise everywhere and nowhere.46 This effect is also created through other painted viewers, who view the viewers of the painting. Time and again in the works of Jan van Eyck, we find small, almost invisible figures, looking at the painted scenery. Although these figures are generally not the main actors in the scene, they nonetheless take part in the event. Mostly it is unclear who these viewers are or what they are doing. The most famous are, without any doubt, the endlessly discussed small figures in the mirror of the Arnolfini Portrait. Scholars postulate that they are witnesses of the wedding, or perhaps the painter and his assistant at work, who look to us from far beyond the surface of the image, through the mirror in the centre of the scene. It is this that has led art historian Yvonne Yiu to speculate that it is the eye of the infinite God which looks through the mirror.47 The vision we are presented with is mysterious, and if this was his goal, van Eyck has succeeded in making generations of scholars and viewers look deeply into his paintings, causing them to reflect on and question what being a viewer means.48 Another example can be found in the van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Canon Van der Paele where a figure can be seen on the shield of Saint George. So subtle is this reflection that it was only discovered in recent decades. It is arguably the silhouette of a viewer – or perhaps it is that of the painter, who is in the end also a viewer. He is present in an almost invisible way, although he is there, and once we have seen him, he is unavoidable, again posing questions about what it means to see and be seen. Likewise in the painting of Chancellor Rolin, figures can be seen in the very centre of the painting. They – or at least one of them – is looking into the immense, almost infinitely developing landscape. They share the line of their gaze with the viewer. A path on the floor leads to these small figures, a path that thus invites the viewer to participate in a direct and immediate way in the sacred events painted here. As such, the line dividing the world of the viewer from the painting becomes blurred. What is more, we might go so far as to argue that the

Jan van Eyck and the Devotio Moderna 97 reality of the image only becomes complete in the presence of viewers. We find them again in the Ghent Altarpiece. We discover almost invisible viewers on the outside panel, which can only be seen when it is closed. Here, we are witnesses at the Annunciation, the starting point of sacred history, the moment in which Mary becomes aware of her unique role as the bearer of the future salvation of mankind. The event of which we are witnesses is nothing less than the turning point in human history, however, the world of the painting seems unaware of it: the panel is characterised by a fundamental contrast between the inside events of annunciation and the outside world, the town with its rumours, people conducting their daily lives and engaging in daily activities. By viewing it in the light of what is within the altarpiece, however, we find the inner, divine event offering us a new perspective on this outside world. Indeed, this action can be seen through a window, but one to which the actors within the room of the Annunciation fail to pay attention (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Jan van Eyck, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb – Ghent Altar Piece (detail), 1432, tempera and oil on wood, 3.5 × 4.6 m, Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece (Getty Foundation), [accessed 2 February 2017]

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Exactly at the vanishing point in the shadow of a tower at the end of the street, we can see three figures, staying somewhat at a distance from the other townspeople. They belong to the earthly town, but at the same time, they are not totally absorbed by the multitude, for they seem to have their attention elsewhere. Are they perhaps aware of the unique divine event, the annunciation that signals mankind’s future salvation, which is taking place nearby, in the humble and somewhat narrow room at the front of the painting? At the very least they represent an interruption to the events of everyday life and as such they operate to contrast the inner world of the room and the outside world of the street. The street life is filled with the light of the sun, but our viewers seem to be the only ones who are focused on the source of that light, which is not visible in the painting. They are seeing something which escapes the attention of the other people, and which we, the viewers of the painting, are likewise unable to see. They see, in other words, the invisible, the source of the light, which is dispersed everywhere in the scene, indeed, everywhere in the painting. Thus to my mind the presence of viewers (both painted and actual) is in no way accidental in van Eyck’s paintings. They show the painter reflecting on the human ability to see, the limits of human vision, and how by searching these limits one may catch a glimpse of the invisible. ‘Als ich can’, ‘as much as I can’, he leads us to agree the line that divides what can be seen from what is invisible. He does this by reminding us that what we see is always that which is seen by human eyes. Indeed, Jan van Eyck is the master of detail, and if we discover a disquieting scene, we can be almost certain that we are confronted with one of his famous riddles, as Marc de Mey has pointed out.49

Conclusion Both in the work of van Eyck, and that of Nicholas of Cusa, a decisive role is given to the viewer who is invited to participate in an event through which s/he both momentarily sees a vision of God, whilst at the same time becoming a living image of God him/herself. This same logic can be found in the writings of Thomas à Kempis, both in his Imitatio Christi and his Soliloquium. A sight of the divine is gained over and over again, and each time it finds its starting point with the individual. To arrive at this perspective, the viewer has to do something; they imitate Christ by becoming an image of God himself, as they are invited into the picture that they view, becoming that which is viewed by others. This is likewise tied to consolation, for the viewer finds that s/he has the ability to make the invisible divine reality visible within his/her own daily existence. In the logic of the Devotio Moderna, with which Jan van Eyck was familiar, the vision of God can be realised only in such a concrete manner, through how we view to the world. In his Soliloquium, Thomas à Kempis describes how the pious seeker after God, distressed by the darkness of this world, can find consolation by making images of the Heavenly Jerusalem.50 These images present some of the light of God already at work in this world, and do so, as Thomas stresses, in an immediate way. It is the role of these images of consolation to show that the

Jan van Eyck and the Devotio Moderna 99 vision of God is, although only partially, found in real, concrete vision, offering us a way of dealing with the material conditions of this world. The technical achievements of van Eyck should not be reduced to this pious ideal; nevertheless, they cannot be isolated from it. Jan van Eyck, Cusa and Thomas equally challenge us to look carefully at what we, as viewers, are in fact seeing. Perhaps they can teach us that we, the viewers of a painting like van Eyck’s famous Ghent Altarpiece, are present within the reality of the painted scene itself, thus enabling us to truly engage in practical everyday mysticism.

Notes 1 See: Thomas à Kempis, The Soliloquy of the Soul (London, 1888; repr. Charleston, SC: NaBu Press, 2012), pp. 6, 48. See also: Kees Waaijman in his introduction to the Dutch translation of this work, De alleenspraak der ziel, trans. by Rijcklof Hofman (Amsterdam: Ten Have, 2004), pp. 3–4, 34. 2 See: Ronald K. Rittgers, ‘Grief and Consolation in Early Lutheran Devotion’, Church History, 81 (2012), 601–30. 3 Jan van Eyck, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Ghent Altar Piece), 1432, tempera and oil on wood, 3.5 × 4.6 m, Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent. 4 Marc de Mey, ‘Performative Painting: Jan Van Eyck and the Devotio Moderna’, in Kann das Denken malen? Philosophie und Malerei in der Renaissance, ed. by Tilman Borsche and Inigo Bocken (München: Fink, 2010), pp. 46–62. 5 Previous research on the relationship between Jan Van Eyck and the Devotio Moderna includes: de Mey, ‘Performative Painting’; Hans Belting, Florenz und Bagdad. Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks (München: Beck, 2007); Inigo Bocken, ‘Performative Vision: Jan Van Eyck, Nicholas of Cusa and the Devotio Moderna’, in Ritual, Images and Daily Life: The Medieval Perspective, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2012), pp. 95–106. 6 See: Sabine Augath, Jan Van Eyck’s ‘ars mystica’ (Paderborn: Fink Verlag, 2007). 7 See: Kees Veelenturf, Geen povere schoonheid: Laat-middeleeuwse kunst in verband met de Moderne Devotie (Nijmegen: Valkhof Pers, 2000). 8 See: Craig Harbison, Jan Van Eyck: The Play of Realism (Chicago: Redaktion, 1997), p. 24, ff. 9 Wolfgang Schneider compared the travelling of Van Eyck with that of Cusa and concluded that it must have been difficult for them to avoid each other: ‘Betrachtung, Aufstieg und Ordnung in Jan van Eyck’, in Videre et videri coincident: Theorien des Sehens in der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Harald Schwaetzer and Marc de Mey (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2011), pp. 209–36. 10 See: John van Engen, The Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: A History of the Devotio Moderna (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 20. 11 See: Berndt Hamm, The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Piety (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 45. 12 See: Berndt Hamm, Lazarus Spengler (1479–1534): Der Nürnberger Ratsschreiber im Spannungsfeld von Reformation und Humanismus (Tübingen: Mohr und Siebeck, 2004), p. 123, ff.; Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), p. 187. 13 See: Anne Bollmann, Schwesternbuch und Statuten des St.-Agneskonventes in Emmerich (Emmerich: Emmericher Geschichtsverein, 1998), p. 23. 14 See: Heiko Oberman, The Two Reformations: The Journey from the Last Days to the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 36–42. See also Wolfgang Göbel, Die Subjektgeltung des Menschen im Praktischen nach der Entfaltungslogik der Geschichte (Freiburg i.B./Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1996), pp. 62–4.

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15 See: Louis Dupré, A Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 120. 16 See: Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Chrisi, ed. by Rudolf van Dijk (Kampen: Ten Have, 2008), I, 1.3. 17 See: Rudolf van Dijk, De imitatione Christi, p. i. New in Thomas’ conception of ‘imitatio’ is both the interiorisation of the ideal as well as its performative aspects. 18 Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi, I, 3.1. 19 Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi, I, 1.3. 20 Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi, praefatio. 21 See: Alfons Auer, Die volkommene Frömmigkeit des Christen: Nach dem Enchiridion militis christiani des Erasmus von Rotterdam (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1954), p. 65. 22 See: Inigo Bocken, ‘Visions of Reform: Lay Piety as a Form of Thinking in Nicholas of Cusa’, Reassessing Reform: A Historical Investigation into Church Renewal, ed. by Christopher M. Bellito and David Zacharias Flanaghan (Washington: Catholic University Press, 2012), pp. 214–32. 23 See: Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen, ‘Ut pia testatoris voluntas observetur. Die Stiftung der bursa cusana in Deventer’, in Conflict and Reconciliation: Perspectives on Nicholas of Cusa, ed. by Inigo Bocken (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004), pp. 53–76. 24 See, for example: Helmut Zschoch, Klosterreform und monastische Spiritualität im 15. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr/Siebeck, 1988), p. 18. 25 See: Bocken, ‘Visions of Reform’, p. 220. 26 Cusa quotes this Psalm in both his Idiota de sapientia I. 3 and De apice theoriae n. 5. Nicholas Cusa, Nicolai de Cusa Opera omnia, ed. by Ernst Hoffmann and Raymond Klibansky, 22 vols (Leipzig/Hamburg: Felicis Meiner, 1932–2002), V (1937); XII (1982). All references to Cusa’s works are to this edition. 27 See: Bocken, Performative Vision. 28 ‘Pandam nunc quae vobis dilectissimis fratribus ante promiseram circa faciliatem mysticae theologiae. Arbitror enim vos, quos scio zelo dei duci, dignos, quibus hic thesaurus aperiatur utique pretiosus valde et maxime fecundus, orans imprimis mihi dari verbum supernum et sermonem omnipotentem, qui solum se ipsam pandere potest, ut pro captu vestro enarrare queam mirabilia, quae supra omnem sensibilem rationalem et intelletualem visum revelantur. Conabor autem simplicissimo atque communissimo modo vos experimtentaliter in sacratissimam obscuritatem manuducere, ubi dum eritis inaccessibilem lucem adesse sentientes quisque ex se temptabit modo, quo sibi a deo concedetur, continue propius acedere et hic praegustare quodam suavissimo libamine cenam illam aeternae felicitates, ad quam vocati sumus in verbo vitae per evanglium Christi semper benedicti. [. . .] Harum etsi multae reperiantur optime pictae, – uti illa sagittarii in foro Nurembergensi, et Bruxellis Rogeri maximi pictoris in pretiosissima tabula, quae in praetorio habetur, et Confluentiae in capella mea Veronicae, et Brixinae in Castro angeli arma ecclesiae tenentis, et multae aliae undique – , ne tamen deficiatis in praxi, quae sensibilem talem exigit figuram, quam habere potui, caritati vestrae mitto tabellam, figuram cuncta videntis tenentem, quam eiconam Dei appello.’ Nicholas of Cusa, De visione Dei I. Cusa, Opera omnia, VI (2000). 29 See: Spiegel der Seele: Reflexionen über Mystik und Malerei, ed. by Elena Filippi and Harald Schwaetzer (Münster: Aschendorff, 2012), pp. 1–5. 30 See: Hannelore Rausch, Theoria: Von ihrer sakralen zur philosophischn Bedeutung (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1982), p. 23. 31 See: Bocken, Performative Vision, p. 99. 32 This practice is also discussed by Simon Podmore in Chapter 12 of this volume. 33 See: Michel de Certeau, La fable mystique: XVIème–XVIIème siècle (Paris: Gallimard 2013), p. 32. 34 See: Cusa, De visione Dei, I. Cusa, Opera omnia, VI (2000). 35 See: Cusa, De visione Dei, II. Cusa, Opera omnia, VI (2000).

Jan van Eyck and the Devotio Moderna 101 36 In De docta ignorantia Cusa stresses that even if we would try for another thousand years to imitate the position of the other, we never will achieve it. ‘Etiam si mille annnis unus aliam imitari studeret in quocumque, numquam tamen praecisionem attingeret, licet differentia sensibilis aliquando non percipiatur’. De docta ignorantia II, 1. Cusa, Opera omnia, I (1932). 37 See: Johannes Hoff, The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), p. 120. 38 See: Cusa, De visione Dei, c. 6. Cusa, Opera omnia, VI (2000). 39 Pauline Moffit Watts, Nicolau Cusanus: A Fifteenth-Century Vision of Man (Leiden: Brill, 1982), p. 115. 40 See: Cusa, Idiota de mente, n. 106. Cusa, Opera omnia, V (1937). 41 See: de Certeau, La fable mystique, p. 46. 42 Jan van Eyck, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Ghent Altar Piece), 1432. Extremely high quality images and scans of the altarpiece are now available online: Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece (Getty Foundation), [accessed 2 February 2017]. 43 See: Norbert Schneider, ‘Aequalitas: Zu Jan Van Eycks Porträts’, in Kann das Denken malen?, pp. 155–65. 44 See: Christian Kiening, ‘Gradus visionis: Reflexion des Sehens in der Cusanischen Philosophie’, Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft, 19 (1991), 234–72 (pp. 256–8); See: Lasse Hodne, ‘Omnivoyance and Omnipresence: Word and Vision According to Nicholas of Cusa and Jan van Eyck’, Ikon, 6 (2013), 237–46. 45 James H. Marrow, ‘Illusionism and Paradox in the Art of Jan Van Eyck’, in Ars nova: Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Northern Painting and Illumination, ed. by Caroline Zöhl and Mara Hoffmann (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 156–75. 46 See: Inigo Bocken, ‘The Viewers in the Ghent Altar Piece’, in Vision and Material: Interaction between Art and Science in Jan Van Eyck’s Time, ed. by Marc de Mey and Cyriel Stroo (Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2012), pp. 118–31. 47 Yvonne Yiu, Jan van Eyck: das Arnolfini Doppelbildnis. Reflexionen über die Malerei (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2001), p. 15. 48 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait’, Burlington Magazine, 64 (1934), 117–27. 49 Marc de Mey, ‘The Ghent Altar Piece and Performative Painting’, in Kann das Denken malen?, pp. 54–69. 50 Thomas à Kempis, Soliloquium animae (1473), ed. and trans. by Rijcklof Hofman (Amsterdam: Ten Have, 2004).

Bibliography Primary Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece, [accessed 2 February 2017] Cusa, Nicholas, Nicolai de Cusa Opera omnia, ed. by Ernst Hoffmann and Raymond Klibansky, 22 vols (Leipzig: Felicis Meiner, 1932–2002) Thomas à Kempis, Soliloquium animae (1473), ed. and trans. by Rijcklof Hofman (Amsterdam: Ten Have, 2004) ———, De imitatione Chrisi, ed. by Rudolf van Dijk (Kampen: Ten Have, 2008) ———, The Soliloquy of the Soul (London, 1888; repr. Charleston, SC: NaBu Press, 2012) van Eyck, Jan, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Ghent Altar Piece), 1432, tempera and oil on wood, 3.5 × 4.6 m, Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent

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Secondary Auer, Alfons, Die volkommene Frömmigkeit des Christen. Nach dem Enchiridion militis christiani des Erasmus von Rotterdam (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1954) Augath, Sabine, Jan Van Eyck’s ‘ars mystica’ (Paderborn: Fink Verlag, 2007) Belting, Hans, Florenz und Bagdad: Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks (München: Beck, 2007) Bocken, Inigo, ‘Performative Vision: Jan Van Eyck, Nicholas of Cusa and the Devotio Moderna’, in Ritual, Images and Daily Life: The Medieval Perspective, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2012), pp. 95–106 ———, ‘The Viewers in the Ghent Altar Piece’, in Vision and Material: Interaction between Art and Science in Jan Van Eyck’s Time, ed. by Marc de Mey and Cyriel Stroo (Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2012), pp. 118–31 ———, ‘Visions of Reform: Lay Piety as a Form of Thinking in Nicholas of Cusa’, in Reassessing Reform: A Historical Investigation into Church Renewal, ed. by Christopher M. Bellito and David Zacharias Flanaghan (Washington: Catholic University Press, 2012), pp. 214–32 de Certeau, Michel, La fable mystique: XVIème–XVIIème siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2013) de Mey, Marc, ‘The Ghent Altar Piece and Performative Painting’, in Kann das Denken malen? Philosophie und Malerei in der Renaissance, ed. by Tilman Borsche and Inigo Bocken (München: Fink Verlag, 2010), pp. 54–69 ———, ‘Performative Painting: Jan Van Eyck and the Devotio Moderna’, Kann das Denken malen? Philosophie und Malerei in der Renaissance, ed. by Tilman Borsche and Inigo Bocken (München: Fink Verlag, 2010), pp. 46–62 Dupré, Louis, A Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) Göbel, Wolfgang, Die Subjektgeltung des Menschen im Praktischen nach der Entfaltungslogik der Geschichte (Freiburg i.B./Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1996) Hamm, Berndt, Lazarus Spengler (1479–1534): der Nürnberger Ratsschreiber im Spannungsfeld von Reformation und Humanismus (Tübingen: Mohr und Siebeck, 2004) ———, The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Piety (Leiden: Brill, 2004) Harbison, Craig, Jan Van Eyck: The Play of Realism (Chicago: Redaktion, 1997) Hoenen, Maarten J. F. M., ‘Ut pia testatoris voluntas observetur: die Stiftung der bursa cusana in Deventer’, in Conflict and Reconciliation: Perspectives on Nicholas of Cusa, ed. by Inigo Bocken (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 53–76 Hoff, Johannes, The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014) Marrow, James H., ‘Illusionism and Paradox in the Art of Jan Van Eyck’, in Ars nova: Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Northern Painting and Illumination, ed. by Caroline Zöhl and Mara Hoffmann (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 156–75 Moffit Watts, Pauline, Nicolau Cusanus: A Fifteenth-Century Vision of Man (Leiden: Brill, 1982) Oberman, Heiko, The Two Reformations: The Journey from the Last Days to the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) Panofsky, Erwin, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait’, Burlington Magazine, 64 (1934), 117–27 Rausch, Hannelore, Theoria: Von ihrer sakralen zur philosophischn Bedeutung (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1982)

Jan van Eyck and the Devotio Moderna 103 Rittgers, Ronald K., ‘Grief and Consolation in Early Lutheran Devotion’, Church History, 81 (2012), 601−30 Schneider, Norbert, ‘Aequalitas. Zu Jan Van Eycks Porträts’, in Kann das Denken malen? Philosophie und Malerei in der Renaissance, ed. by Tilman Borsche and Inigo Bocken (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010), pp. 155–65 Schneider, Wolfgang Christian, ‘Betrachtung, Aufstieg und Ordnung in Jan Van Eyck’, in Videre et videri coincident: Theorien des Sehens in der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Harald Schwaetzer and Marc De Mey (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2011), pp. 209–36 Spiegel der Seele: Reflexionen über Mystik und Malerei, ed. by Filippi Elena and Schwaetzer Harald (Münster: Aschendorff, 2012) van Engen, John, The Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: A History of the Devotio Moderna (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) Veelenturf, Kees, Geen povere schoonheid: Laat-middeleeuwse kunst in verband met de Moderne Devotie (Nijmegen: Valkhof Pers, 2000) Waaijman Kees, De alleenspraak der ziel, trans. by Rijcklof Hofman (Amsterdam: Ten Have, 2004) Yiu, Yvonne, Jan van Eyck: das Arnolfini Doppelbildnis. Reflexionen über die Malerei (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2001)

5

Art and mysticism as horticulture Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries in an interdisciplinary perspective1 Barbara Baert

Introduction The early sixteenth-century Enclosed Gardens or horti conclusi of the Augustinian Hospital Sisters of Mechelen form an exceptional part of late medieval world heritage. Most Enclosed Gardens have been lost through the ravages of time, exacerbated by lack of understanding and interest. No fewer than seven Enclosed Gardens, however, were preserved until the late twentieth century in their original context: in the small community of Augustinian nuns in Mechelen. Like ‘sleeping beauties’, they remained secluded in the sisters’ rooms as aids to devotion. They testify to a cultural identity connected with strong mystical traditions; they are a gateway to a lost world, an essential part of the rich material and immaterial culture of the Southern Netherlands in the early sixteenth century. The flowers and embroidered wrappings for objects such as stones, medallions and relics in the Enclosed Gardens were created by the religious with subtle refinement and show an astonishing range of effects. With silk and precious silver threads, nuns twisted knots and patterns over armatures of fine parchment, incorporating glass pearls, paper quilling ( paperolles), semi-precious stones and sequins. Artificial flowers and fruit, especially branches of wild roses, white lilies and pink grapes, surround the wooden statuettes known as Poupées de Malines (‘Dolls of Mechelen’), relics and small pipe-clay figures. At the back of the wooden box containing each Garden, dense lozenge patterns are created by webbed threads stitched over the rolls of silk damask that cover relics and parchment. Only recently have Enclosed Gardens, as a genre, come to be acknowledged and recognised as a worthwhile field of study.2 As they are such typically hybrid objects, they long seemed to defy the accepted terminology and conventions in research into medieval material devotional culture.3 Then, in the 1990s, drawing from gender studies and the ‘anthropological turn’, Jeffrey Hamburger, Miri Rubin and Paul Vandenbroeck pioneered the recontextualisation of the genre.4 Today, Enclosed Gardens are approached as ambivalent artefacts whose purpose lies somewhere in between retable and domestic furniture. They most probably played a part in the nuns’ private lives, as well as in communal life at their convents – one is documented as having been present in the nuns’ spindle room.5 Moreover, as they contain relics and a variety of ‘lesser’ remnants, such as stones,

Art and mysticism as horticulture 105 bones and even bags of sand, they may also be seen as shrines. Enclosed Gardens may even be conceptualised as cabinets of curiosities, whose content conveys the character and spirituality of the religious women who assembled them: a fascinating testimony of past and present of over many generations of their community.6 A striking problem however, remains: lack of written sources. There is perhaps still some hope that sources will come to light inside the gardens themselves, in the paperolles which are being tested for authenticity by the restorers. We may find in the rolled-up parchments hidden authentic texts, providing biblical, or other spiritual clues to the direct inspiration behind their creation.7 This as yet is mere hopeful speculation. We must turn instead to a textual level outside the gardens if we hope to make spiritual sense of these creations, moving beyond the very small archive of the Mechelen sisters, which holds nothing concerning making processes, patronage, orders for outside the cloisters, or specific devotional uses.8 Although this presents us with something of a methodological conundrum, if we are willing to move beyond art history to view gardens from an interdisciplinary perspective – looking further afield to literary sources that explore gardens and their spiritual veracity – I think it is possible to return to the Enclosed Gardens of Mechelen to view them as (1) a symbol of Paradise and mystical union, (2) a sanctuary for interiorisation, (3) a sublimation of the physical sensorium (particularly smell), (4) a web of handiwork that gains meaning in the making processes and from materiality itself, (5) and finally as a phenomenon of spiritual ‘nesting’. It is to an image such as Plate 1, now kept at the Museum Hof van Busleyden of Mechelen, that I wish to apply such thinking.9

1) Paradise, hofje and the mystical union The Dutch word hof carries multiple meanings, ‘courtyard’, ‘farmstead’, and also ‘garden’, and hence the Beguinehof (Hofjes) in which these Enclosed Gardens were created is itself associated with the archetypal paradise (Dutch paradijs), which in turn has semantic roots in the Persian language and culture. In light of this, we are I think justified in approaching the Enclosed Gardens, such as that illustrated above, with reference to the Song of Songs, in which a man and a woman express their desire for one another in the Garden of Love.10 The groom invites the bride and says (5.1): Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat the fruit of his apple trees. I am come into my garden, O my sister, my spouse, I have gathered my myrrh, with my aromatical spices: I have eaten the honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends, and drink, and be inebriated, my dearly beloved.11 The Song of Songs was interpreted from the time of the earliest Church Fathers as an allegory of mystical love.12 Scholars identified the marriage between the bride and the groom with the union between Christ and his bride ecclesia. To Bernard of

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Plate 1 Enclosed Garden, early sixteenth century, mixed media, Museum of the Hospital Nuns, Mechelen

Clairvaux (1090–1153) the opening kiss of the Song of Songs – Osculator me (Let him kiss me) – was the mystical kiss and an image of Christ Incarnate, the word become flesh: ‘Then, at last – with fear and trembling I say it – perhaps, then, we may venture to raise ourselves to that divinely glorious Mouth, not merely to contemplate its beauty, but even to enjoy its kiss’, he writes in his Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles.13 As the bride of Christ, the spiritual woman could relate to such exegetic interpretations of the Song of Songs and its spiritual application within a mysticism of love.14 Artistically, too, the Song of Songs became her principal iconographic source.15 This can be seen in Enclosed Gardens, where feminine spirituality is veiled with flowers and sublimated into an intimate and highly personalised topos of love, with stumbled-upon objects serving as mysteriously concealed catalysts. A well-known example of this ‘feminine enhancement’ is found in the theme of the Annunciation, which symbolises the virginity of Mary: The Song of Songs uses the image of the porta clausa and the sealed spring. The Angel of the Annunciation is subsequently ‘cast’ from the profane courtly tradition: he is the bearer of the horn and the leader of the hunt.16 Mary’s virginity must after all be protected.17 Even the wild unicorn, with the ostentatiously phallic attribute on its head, turns into a tame beast in her lap.18 A representative example of this femininely enhanced iconography is a fifteenth-century altar cloth with silver and gold embroidery from a convent in Ebstorf (Figure 5.1).19 In sum, the aforementioned shows how women

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Figure 5.1 Annunciation as an Enclosed Garden with unicorn, fifteenth century, embroidery, Damestiftung, Ebstorf

personalised their gardens, crafting them as spiritual sanctuaries, unbothered by the insertion of profane motifs with sexual connotations, in their new spiritual ‘horticultural’ world.20

2) The sanctuary of interiorisation Our second literary excursion takes us into the Enclosed Garden acting as a metaphor for immaculacy, purity and virginity, as well as paradise, where, prior to the Fall, all was perfect. Enclosed Gardens provide a means for locating and entering the immaculate ‘place’ in one’s soul. They serve as a plastic pars pro toto for paradise and as a medium for interiorising the metaphor of purity. In this sense, the genre ties in with the late medieval spiritual exercises described in certain sermons and now commonly referred to as ‘interior allegory’ on the one hand and as ‘virtual pilgrimage’ on the other. The interior allegory is based on a mental technique whereby viewing a painting becomes like stepping into the (pictorial) reality and the spiritual experience of the interior.21 The vernacular texts describing the technique display an interesting affinity with the notions of a ‘room’ and a ‘garden’. The faithful are to project the lessons onto their own room, and take its spare interior, furnished only with a bed, chair and candlestick, as a spiritual point of departure: ‘Near

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the bed is found peace and rest for the conscience; by the table penitence; by the chair a judgment of himself; and by the candlestick a confession of himself’ (De doctrina cordis, fifteenth-century).22 Some sermons and instructions even go into detail with regards to the bed linen, the food on the table and the decoration of the space for flowers, as developed by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) in relation to the Annunciation.23 To enter the room is to enter the mystical heart. Mary’s room, which the angel enters – and by extension which we enter – is described as having been decorated with pleasing flowers and herbs of a delicious perfume.24 Such descriptions are often intertextual references to the Song of Songs, in which the bride and bridegroom experience their love in a room. According to Reindert Falkenburg, the Merode Triptych (Robert Campin, c. 1378–1444), for example, not only represents a typical medieval room in which the symbolic reality of the Annunciation is concealed, but also reveals the devotional instructions for entering a room, just as one would penetrate one’s own soul (Figure 5.2). In this way, the viewer is encouraged to feel, to touch, to smell and to hear what takes place in the space thus evoked in order to attain virtue.25 The garden becomes a moment that is ‘consumed’ by the gaze and the whole sensorium. Viewing is now equated to entering; it is a devotion channelled by endoscopy.26 This brings me to the second approach: ‘virtual pilgrimage’. In her book Virtual Pilgrimages, Kathryn M. Rudy presents a convincing case for her hypothesis that Enclosed Gardens, in their capacity as ‘interior allegory’, actually constitute a vehicle for undertaking a mental journey to Jerusalem (or, by extension, to any holy place), without physically travelling.27 Examples of such ‘virtual pilgrimages’ are found in a genre of manuscript in which holy places are visualised and described so that they could be ‘visited’ mentally. Enclosed Gardens can similarly mediate a spiritual journey to a physically unreachable destination; as one strolls through the garden, one

Figure 5.2 Robert Campin (1378–1444), Merode triptych, c. 1425–1432, oil on oak, 64.5 × 117.8 cm, The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Art and mysticism as horticulture 109 playfully searches for the natural objects hidden in the shrubs, and experiences delight at whatever treasure one finds (a relic, a souvenir). Rudy writes: To enter them visually is to be mesmerized by their dizzying array of flowers. To move in their first layer of interpretation is to penetrate the garden fence using prayer as a vehicle. Entering the box, the viewer enters the Holy Land on the scale of a dollhouse, an idealized microcosm of female enclosure.28 The author substantiates her hypothesis by arguing that Enclosed Gardens share two essential characteristics with other forms of virtual pilgrimage: ‘replacement’ and ‘accumulation’. What Rudy means by these terms can be explained on the basis of two Enclosed Gardens created for the Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross at Bentlage (Germany) between 1499 and 1520 (Plate 2 and Figure 5.3).29

Plate 2 Enclosed Garden, 1499, mixed media, Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, Bentlage

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While these Enclosed Gardens were intended for members of a male religious order, according to tradition they were manufactured by women, i.e., by nuns from the convent at Bersenbrück (Lower Saxony, Germany).30 As was customary, a variety of objects were wrapped in embroidered textiles and decorated with semi-precious stones, pearls and silk thread. In the earlier of the two boxes, the frame is lined with skulls, likewise covered in textile. Integrated into the centre of both specimens is a Golgotha scene. Obviously, the Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross had a special relationship with Jerusalem. Moreover, their sermons are known to have contained elements of natural symbolism. The Crucifixion and Resurrection are compared to ‘the tender green’ of nature, which appears to die in the autumn, only to miraculously re-arise in the spring, and the suffering of Christ is referred to as a ‘spiritual flower garden’.31 The Enclosed Gardens of Bentlage are gardens of relics that have been wrapped up, identified and presented with ‘wild regularity’. They constitute a small sample of the Holy

Figure 5.3 Enclosed Garden, 1520, mixed media, Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, Bentlage

Art and mysticism as horticulture 111 Land. They literally serve as substitutes, or, as Rudy puts it: ‘Places replace saints, and stones replace bones’.32 The striking zest for collecting, listing, detailing, describing and recording holy places in Jerusalem is also apparent from pilgrims’ reports and diaries. These texts are examples of narrative horror vacui.33 The genre is a literary pendant to the plastic, repetitive and accumulative representation in Enclosed Gardens. In the words of Rudy: In wrapping miles of thread around tiny armatures, were the nuns pacing off equal distances toward Rome, Jerusalem, or any of the local shrines? Not only do these hofjes provide an alternative to traveling to Jerusalem, but also they provide an alternative to the bookish pilgrimage. They anticipate a body of images that let go of the tangible traces and move one step closer to the purely imagined.34 More often than not, Jerusalem is unreachable, but it returns to us through material fragments, souvenirs, as pars pro toto, via relics and moulded remains, concealed, wrapped up and decorated, and thus sublimated. Therefore, the Enclosed Garden not only relocates the holy place, but also transforms it. Through its plastic and artistic referential framework, it represents the perpetual metamorphosis of the phantasm that is ‘Jerusalem’.

3) Scent as a natural metonymy This brings us now to the way in which these gardens work on and sublimate the physical sensorium. I quote Julia Kristeva: There are unmistakable parallels to be drawn between woman and flower. As an image of fertility and sex, the flower is certainly suggestive of the secret, of the natural cycles, the ecstasy of life, the mystery of the seed, as well as the beautiful wilting and, further, the invisible working together of root, sap, stem and leaf. After all, the flower, in its immovability, to its cultivator-admirer offers an enchanting yet merely ephemeral perfume. Female melancholy identifies with this fragile, proud and immortal world as if its own image were reflected in it, holding the promise of reflowering in the coming season, the promise of a Resurrection.35 In this passage, Julia Kristeva connects Enclosed Gardens with femininity, on account of their fragility, the aspect of the vegetative cycle, and their shape. She also refers to the motif of scent. The relationship between Enclosed Gardens and the evocation of the sensorium, more specifically its olfactory aspect, has hitherto been unexplored.36 The impact and meaning of odour as part of a model of knowledge has long been underestimated. In the Greek-Western paradigm, smell and taste come fourth and fifth in the hierarchy of the senses.37 Nevertheless, JudeoChristian thought shows a particular fascination with these lower senses. In Late

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Antique and medieval epistemology, rites and models were developed in which scent (incense, oils and flowers) occupied a prominent place.38 The unseen God manifests himself through his voice and through scent, and is worshipped with the scents of sacrifice, incense, herbs and fragrant oils.39 Perfume is a medium that allows people to move between the now and the transcendent, as Mark Smith notes: ‘Incense traveling through the air, was believed to attract and unite humans and gods, while the absence of odour, or unpleasant odours, had the opposite effect’.40 The relationship between flower, garden and divine knowability through scent is a deep archetype. It was already developed by the earliest Church Fathers, including for didactic reasons; as Susan Ashbrook Harvey observes: Fragrance worked especially well in this role (the human-divine relation) because it could carry a sacrificial sense – the offering of good works, of prayer, of good teaching – while at the same time evoking the notion of identity, the perfumed scent of sanctity, divine presence, and grace. The ‘sweet smell’ of virtuous conduct pervaded accounts of monastic life, with both religious meanings clearly intended.41 Gregory the Great (540–604) refers to the combination of senses in the context of the marriage with the soul: ‘Visus quippe, auditus, gustus, odouratus, et tactus, quasi quaedam viae mentis sunt, quibus foras veniat [. . .]. Per nos etenim corporis sensus quasi per fenestras quasdam exterior quaeque anima respicit, respiciens concuspicit’ (‘For seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching, are kinds of ways of the mind, by which it should come forth without, [. . .] For by these senses of the body as by a kind of windows the soul takes a view of the several exterior objects, and on viewing longs after them’).42 Gregory the Great links the sensorium and the co-operation of the senses with the desire of the soul. Odour particularly is the pre-eminent binding agent of synesthetic apprehension.43 Finally, besides the conviction that fragrances make us travel through the air and evoke the divine in our environment, scent was believed to be the source of an exceptional form of ‘knowledge’: knowledge through anamnesis (scent as a catalyst for memory) and knowledge through instinct (scent as a catalyst for primary and basal feelings such as fear and sexuality, and as a warning against dangers such as disease and death). For example, in his prologue to the Liber Floridus, the twelfth-century Canon Lambert of Saint-Omer refers to smell and taste as metaphors of a certain type of knowledge.44 The author wishes to offer the reader the honey that the bees collect from flowers in the garden. He also refers to the etymology of sapere as sapor, which consequently inserts the notion of taste and smell into the heart of wisdom, or sapientia. The notion of the bees and the garden is of course topical: it refers to paradise. However, this reference to the locus amoenus defines smell and taste as primordial senses of a lost world. We can see how Lambert is interested specifically in the prototype of scent as a ‘knowledgegenerating sense’. This is why he refers to the Legend of the Rood, a story that was profoundly embedded and widely disseminated in medieval culture.45 Adam

Art and mysticism as horticulture 113 is dying and asks his son for a branch or some fragrant oil from the tree of life. The last sense before death, according to the legend, is his smelling of the lost paradise. And in this scent all knowledge came to him: he could go to the afterlife now. It evokes the importance that odour holds in the more intuitive and cosmological realms of deeper insight. We might consider that the idea of divine horticultural fragrance served as a natural form of metonymy for the Hofjes (Beguinehofs). The garden reveals fragrances; and this is considered as the proximity of God: ‘Awake, O north wind and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden. That its fragrance may be wafted abroad. Let my beloved come to this garden, and eat its choicest fruits’ (Song of Songs 4.15–16). The garden’s scent is reminiscent of the Paradise that has been lost. The eleventh-century poem by Archbishop Gebuin of Lyon sings the praise of Paradise and the Heavenly Jerusalem exclusively in olfactory terms: Paradisis amena region Quam possedit quondam primus homo Quam pulcra es sanctis animabus e requies. In te spiranr odoura gramina Rubet rosa, albescunt lilia, Et arbusta profununt balsama Quam pulcra es sanctis animabus et requies. Pulcher hortus, mellita flumina Sonat aura lenis per nemor Ibi flores et ùmala punic Quam pulcra es sanctis animabus et requies.46 And as Reindert Falkenburg demonstrated in his Fruit of Devotion, early modernity was a pivotal moment in the mystical tradition of the ‘love garden’: The first tractates to employ allegorical references to the spiritual garden as a central theme date from the beginning of the thirteenth century. However, the genre only gained wider popularity in the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. In this period, spiritual garden allegories appeared as separate texts, but also as elements within other, mainly devotional literary forms.47 These tracts were also read by the laity and were stimulated by the Devotia Moderna. Examples that come to mind are Die geestlicke boomgaert der vruchten, printed around 1500, and Gerard Leeu’s earlier Thoofkijn van devotien, in which the soul and its spiritual relationship with God are described as entering the garden and the drinking (and hence tasting) of the water of life in the fragrances of the Garden of Eden.48 If texts and prayers can employ taste and smell as conduits of devotional experience and spiritual insight, then why might not flowers and fruits as motifs in paintings and other art forms fulfil a similar spiritual function? As Falkenburg argues, ‘in the perspective of “mirrored piety” it is possible to

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look to the garden tracts for greater insight into the nature of devotional attitudes associated with the consumption of fruit and flowers in the Andachtsbilder’.49 This reasoning also holds in relation to the Enclosed Garden as a topos, as a visual motif, which intrinsically evoke the (mystical) pleasures of the garden, and hence may be seen as essentially ‘fragrant’ and even tasted. Finally, the garden is scented because its perfume constitutes a unique immaterial and ephemeral mode of transport: it invites the soul to be carried to the essence on clouds of fragrance. Those who follow the scent will reach the ultimate destination without physical exertion. This destination is anamnestic and archetypical, for now the trail of the scent leads beyond paradise and Jerusalem. In the anamnestic (olfactory) journey, the ultimate is interiorised, namely the return to the self, the awakening from the cycle of life and death, and the gnosis that stayed behind in the garden from before the fatal bite. Like a barely noticeable breeze – a breath of air, a mere sigh – it brings a brief understanding that is lost no sooner than it is captured. And indeed, we noticed how some of the smaller elements, such as pearls and little leaflets, indeed shiver. Enclosed Gardens react to our breath, the wind, etc.: they move. Enclosed Gardens are multi-sensory performatively-staged objects of art.

4) The garden as a performative hub of ‘making’ Thus far, we have not yet discussed the significance of the striking formal aspects of this phenomenon.50 Yet, we did describe the gardens as examples of horror vacui, as proliferating relic art, as a form of montage and mixed media.51 These characteristics make them stand out from the contemporary stylistic canon and certainly nestle themselves in the sensory-haptic creative process. They are after all inextricably linked with ‘handicraft’. Hence a garden is never finished. It is a continuum of growth, in which the actual creative process serves as the signifier: wrapping up, turning, embroidering, sewing, attaching, detaching, applying, weaving, clumping, tucking, tacking, crocheting, plugging, folding, rolling, etc. In short, in the universe of the Enclosed Gardens, the creative hands manifest themselves as the subversive and corporeal conduits of a deeper significance.52 Likewise, the handiwork involved in creating Enclosed Gardens puts a spell on time, in two senses: time that conceals as a thick jelly and moves on, and time that encapsulates like a cocoon, that envelopes fate, literarly rolls it up, binds it up, enwraps it, and invites the momentary in secure detail. With the introduction of this aspect of ‘time’, it becomes clear how Enclosed Gardens constitute a scenography of the most intense meditation. Labour-intensive work, particularly repetitive chores, like embroidering or weaving, can induce a concentration flow: the hands then seem to operate automatically, detached from the body like creatures in a closed, autonomous state.53 The ‘artistically-minded’ hand as an automaton, with its own memory, in turn creates a new ‘flow space’: that of meditation and spiritual prayer. Horst Wenzel also refers to Augustine (354–430) in this respect:

Art and mysticism as horticulture 115 ‘Foris enim cum per corpus haec fiunt, aliud est locutio, aliud visio: intus autem cum cogitamus, utrumque unum est’ (‘When these things are done outwardly by means of the body, then speech and sight are different things; but when we think inwardly, the two are one’).54 I would even like to consider the Enclosed Gardens as the garden of ‘sonic (manual) play’. Is it not likely that, during the creative process, the women in question sang, prayed or muttered words, or possibly produced rhythmic droning sounds? This rhythmic translation from manual labour to sound, song, and speech may have served as a mnemonic device, facilitating the execution of complex actions in working textiles, as in knotting taken to its most complex extreme, namely lacework (Figure 5.4).55 Embroidering, bobbining, knotting, turning, enveloping, and the entire semantic field constitutes the corporeal variationes on what happens when fingertips come into contact with threads.56 Now the hands ‘sing’ with tiny woollen voices their sophisticated love duets, perceptible only inside the Enclosed Gardens. And now the sensorium attains a state of synaesthesia whereby seeing and hearing (and smelling) enter into an interiorised pact with meditation. I quote Paul Vandenbroeck: Only through a, for that matter unexpressed, surrendering to an infiniteness while working, at the same time, in the here and now on something microscopic, and through the relinquishing of ego-drives was it possible for lacework [as in Enclosed Gardens] to come into being. In our view, they are analogous to certain musical genres developing subtle shifts (variationes), tonal exercises, ‘research’ (ricercare).57

Figure 5.4 Old Mechlin lace, bobbin lace, Mechelen

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Conclusion: framing a nest The garden being, according to Sir Henry Wotton writing c. 1624, ‘a very wild regularity’, it serves as a gateway through which the devotional purpose of the interiorisation can be realised more efficiently.58 It makes the implosion of energy bearable. So might these Enclosed Gardens – on the basis of their content of curiosities and relics, their treasuring of precious pearls, their function as a homelike shelter, their techniques of binding, knotting, sewing, gluing together, and finally the pyscho-energetic and physical contamination with the makers’ body – not just as easily be referred to as ‘nests’?59 The word ‘nest’ is etymologically related to the notion of an Enclosed Garden through ‘niche’. French niche is most likely derived from the verb nicher ‘to build a nest’, which in turn comes from Latin nidicare or nidificare, from nīdus (nest). Hence, the spatial connotation of niche emerged through formal similarities with the most intimate shell around something extraordinarily precious and fragile. Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) writes in his The Poetics of Space about the nest: The philosophical phenomenology of nests is being able to elucidate the interest with which we look through an album containing reproductions of nests or even more positively, in our capacity to recapture the naïve wonder we used to feel when we found a nest. This wonder is lasting, and today when we discover a nest it takes us back to our childhood or, rather, to a childhood; to the childhoods we should have had. For not many of us have been endowed by life with the full measure of its cosmic implications.60 The dialects between forest love and love in a city room is between wilderness and a nest, between nature and the Enclosed Garden: ‘A nest is never young; we come back, it is the sign of return and of daydreams’.61 In conclusion, this essay has explored these unique mixed-media shrines as symbols of mystical union, sanctuaries of interiorisation and as sensorial vehicles stimulating the inner senses. Furthermore, this chapter considered the making of these Gardens as a creative process which intensively charged these cabinets with devotional energy. This psycho-energetic process resulted in the creation of a secluded garden where the soul of the devout would at some point encounter her lost bridegroom. It is this same peaceful, unifying and embracing nature of the Gardens that is mirrored in the nurturing ‘nest’.

Notes 1 This chapter is an adapted extract of Barbara Baert, Late Medieval ‘Enclosed Gardens’ of the Low Countries: Contributions to Gender and Artistic Expression, Studies in Iconology, 2 (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2016). I am grateful to Louise Nelstrop who invited me for the Art and Articulation Conference, and to the audience. Everybody helped me, with their valuable comments and input, to develop some new ideas about the Enclosed Gardens. 2 To reflect on their material life and to gain knowledge about their sources and techniques, an interdisciplinary research and conservation project was established in 2014

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at the Art History Department, KU Leuven, coordinated by Lieve Watteeuw. See: Barbara Baert, Hannah Iterbeke and Lieve Watteeuw, ‘Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries: Mixed Media, Remnant Art, Récyclage and Gender in the Low Countries (16th c. onwards)’, in The Agency of Things in Medieval and Early Modern Art: Materials, Power and Manipulation, ed. by Grażyna Jurkowlaniec, Ika Matyjaszkiewicz and Zuzanna Sarnecka (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 33–50. Eight specialized conservator-restorers were appointed to treat the complex objects in the cellars of the civic museum; Historic interventions reveal the nuns’ ongoing care for the objects: replacing and overpainting missing statues (eighteenth century?), adding protective glass in lead (early nineteenth century?), rewrapping the brocade silk plant stems (paperollen (Dutch), paperolles (French) with linen (early twentieth century), redecorating the damaged backing paper (late nineteenth or early twentieth century), and fixing fallen artifacts with glue, nails and staples (mid-twentieth century). See: Joke Vandermeersch and Lieve Watteeuw, ‘De conservering van de 16de-eeuwse Mechelse Besloten Hofjes: Een interdisciplinaire aanpak voor historische mixed media’, Innovatie in de conservatie-restauratie: Postprints van de internationale BRK-APROA, 8 (2015), 41–52. See also: Barbara Baert, ‘Enclosed Garden: A Utopian and Mystical Sanctuary’, in In Search of Utopia, ed. by Jan Van der Stock (Leuven: Davidsfonds; Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), pp. 49–53; Barbara Baert, ‘Growing, Making, Meaning (With Special Attention to the Paperolles)’, in Enclosed Gardens of Mechelen: Late Medieval Paradise Gardens Revealed, ed. by Lieve Watteeuw and Hannah Iterbeke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). Currently, Lieve Watteeuw and Hannah Iterbeke are working on a BRAIN-project entitled ‘ArtGarden: Art Technical Research and Preservation of Historical Mixed-Media Ensembles’ in which the Enclosed Gardens are the main focus. On the ‘material turn’ in research into medieval devotional culture, see the standard work: Caroline W. Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011). Also of interest is: Images of Cult and Devotion: Function and Reception of Christian Images in Medieval and Post-Medieval Europe, ed. by Søren Kaspersen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004). Paul Vandenbroeck, Hooglied: De Beeldwereld van Religieuze Vrouwen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, vanaf de 13de eeuw (exhibition catalogue) (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju and Zoon, 1994); Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Hamburger, ‘Body vs. Book: The Trope of Visibility in Images of Christian-Jewish Polemic’, in Ästhetik des Unsichtbaren: Bildtheorie und Bildgebrauch in der Vormoderne, ed. by David Ganz and Thomas Lentes (Berlin: Reimer, 2004), pp. 113–45; Hamburger and Robert Suckale, ‘Zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits: Die Kunst der geistlichen Frauen im Mittelalter’, in Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern (exhibition catalogue), ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Munich: Hirmer, 2005), pp. 21–39. See also: Femmes, art et religion au Moyen Âge, ed. by Jean-Claude Schmitt (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2004). For some nuanced points of view within the methodologically rigorous division between so-called profane and sacred space, see: Diana Webb, ‘Domestic Space and Devotion in the Middle Ages’, in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 27–48. See also: Hannah Iterbeke, ‘Cultivating Devotion: The SixteenthCentury Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries’, IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies, 10 (2017), 237–250. On the ambiguous typology of Enclosed Gardens within the phenomenon of the relic, the curiosity, the fetish and, by extension, research into what is a ‘remnant’ and what is an ‘object’, see: Stefan Laube, Von der Reliquie zum Ding: Heiliger Ort – Wunderkammer – Museum (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2011), p. 31; Tristan Weddigen, ‘Resteverwertung’, Kritische Berichte: Zeitschrift für Kunst-und Kulturwissenschaften

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(Rest, Fetisch, Reliquie), 36.3 (2008), 3–6; Allison Stielau, ‘The Case of the Case for Early Modern Objects and Images’, Kritische Berichte (Die Kunst und die Dinge: Perspektiven einer schwierigen Beziehung), 39.3 (2011), 5–16. We know about gardens, smell, and bride songs of that period such as a refrain by the Bruges rhetorician Eduard de Dene composed for the Walburga church. It would be interesting indeed, to have documents or direct links that specifically relate songs with our artefacts. For more information on the archives of the Gasthuizusters see: Andrea Pearson, ‘Sensory Piety as Social Intervention in a Mechelen Besloten Hofje’, JHNA – Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 9.2 (2017). Jan Van der Stock (Art History department, KU Leuven) specialises in tractates on brodery printed in Antwerp around 1530. This kind of primary source is currently being investigated by Hannah Iterbeke (Art History department, KU Leuven). Enclosed Garden, early 16th century, Museum of the Hospital Nuns, Mechelen. Vandenbroeck, Le jardin, clos de l’âmei, cat. no. 175, pp. 93–7. This particular Enclosed Garden was dismantled in November 2014. Every item was handled by different conservatorspecialists in textile, pearls, bones, stones, clay, parchment, etc. This project was coordinated by Professor Dr Lieve Watteeuw (see above). The results were made public during a three-day conference entitled Imaging Utopia: New Perspectives on Northern Renaissance Art, the XXth symposium for the Study of Underdrawing and Technology in Painting organised by Illuminare – Centre for the Study of Medieval Art (KU Leuven). Felix B. A. Asiedu, ‘The Song of Songs and the Ascent of the Soul: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Language of Mysticism’, Vigiliae Christianae, 55 (2001), 299–317; Jurjen Beumer, ‘Die marianischen Deutung des Hohen Liedes in der Frühscholastik’, Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, 76 (1954), 411–39; Heimo Reinitzer, Der verschlossene Garten: der Garten Marias im Mittelalter, Wolfenbütteler Hefte, 12 (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 1982). Biblical quotations are taken from the Douay-Rheims. Anne W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Jean-Marc Vercruysse, Le cantique des cantiques, Graphè, 8 (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2005); E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1990). Alain Michel, Théologi Théologiens et mystiques au Moyen Âge: La poétique de Dieu – Ve-XVe siècles, Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 247. On the semiotics of the Song of Songs and the spirituality of love and eroticism: Patricia Cox Miller, ‘Pleasure of the Text, Text of Pleasure: Eros and Language in Origen’s “Commentary on the Song of Songs”’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 54 (1986), 241–53. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) is a monograph study on a manuscript produced for nuns that contains an interesting corpus of miniatures that are suggestive of a typological relationship between the Song of Songs (and the kiss) and the Passion of Christ. The key to this unconventional iconography can be found on the accompanying text on fol. 17v. Here, verse 4.9 of the Song of Songs, ‘You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride’ is combined with a paraphrase on Revelation 3.20 ‘I stand at the door and knock’. Christ’s side wound is that door, the cor salvatoris: the heart as the locus of love and mystical satisfaction. The imagery is directed specifically at religious women, as in Bonaventure’s (1221–1274) spiritual manual for sisters, De perfectione Vitae ad sorores: ‘but enter with your whole being through the door of His side into Jesus’ heart itself. There, transformed into Christ by your burning love for the Crucified [. . .] seek nothing, desire nothing, wish for no consolation, other than to be able to die with Christ on the cross’: Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, p. 72. The Rothschild Canticles are examined by Bernard McGinn in this volume.

Art and mysticism as horticulture 119 16 An Smets and Baudouin van den Abeele, ‘Medieval Hunting’, in A Cultural History of Animals, ed. by Brigitte Resl and Bruce Boehner, 6 vols (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2007), II (2007), 59–79. 17 Maria Elisabeth Gössmann, Die Verkündigung an Maria im dogmatischen Verständnis des Mittelalters (Munich: Hueber, 1957). 18 Hellmuth Graff, ‘Die Darstellungen der sakralen Einhornjagd in der altdeutschen Kunst’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, 1922); Rüdiger Robert Beer, Einhorn: Fabelwelt und Wirklichkeit (Munich: Callwey, 1972); Jürgen Werinhard Einhorn, Spiritualis Unicornis: das Einhorn als Bedeutingsträger in Literatur und Kunst des Mittelalters (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998); Leopold Kretzenbacher, Mystische Einhornjagd: Deutsche und slawische Bild-und Wortzeugnisse zu einem geistlichen Sinnbild-Gefüge, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophische-Historische Klasse, 6 (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1978). 19 Michael Wolfson, ‘Lesepulttuch mit Einhornjagd und “hortus conclusus” aus Ebstorf’, in Krone und Schleier, p. 430; Michael Wolfson, Ein Rundgang durch Kloster Ebstorf (Königstein im Taunus: Langewiesche, 2001), p. 65. See also the complex tree allegory and several garden-related elements, including the Enclosed Garden of the Annunciation, on the Wichmannsburger antependium, Kestner-Museum, Hannover, late fifteenthcentury; Henrike Lähnemann, ‘“An dessen bom wil ik stighen”: Die Ikonographie des Wichmannsburgere Antependiums im Kontext der medinger Handschriften’, Oxford German Studies, 34 (2005), 19–46. 20 Eva Schlotheuber, ‘Klostereintritt und Übergangsriten: Die Bedeutung der Jungfräulichkeit für das Selbstverständnis der Nonnen der alten Orden’, in Frauen – Kloster – Kunst: neue Forschungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Carola Jäggi, Susan Marti and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 43–55; Elisabeth Vavra, ‘Bildmotiv und Frauenmystik – Funktion und Reception’, in Frauenmystik im Mittelalter, ed. by Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (Stuttgart: Schwabenverlag, 1985), pp. 201–30. 21 Reindert L. Falkenburg, ‘The Household of the Soul: Conformity in the “Mérode Triptych”’, in Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads: A Critical Look at Current Methodologies, ed. by Maryan W. Ainsworth (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 2–17; Emanuel S. Klinkenberg, ‘“Wil diin herte bereeden gheliic eenen huze”: De binnenhuisallegorie in de geestelijke letterkunde’, Queeste: Tijdschrift over middeleeuwse letterkunde, 14.2 (2007): 126–53. 22 ‘Biden bedde es te uerstane pays ende ruste van consciencien; bider tafele penitencie; biden zetel een vonnesse ziins sellefs; ende bi den candelare een bekennen van hem zeluen’, Hugo de Sancto Caro, Hugo de Sancto Caro’s traktaat De doctrina cordis. 2: Pragmatische editie van De bouc van der leerlinghe van der herten naar handschrift Wenen ÖNB, 15231, autograaf van de Middelnederlandse vertaler, ed. by Guido Hendrix, 4 vols (Leuven: KUL Bibliotheek van de Faculteit Godgeleerdheid, 1995–2000), II (1995), p. 14. 23 See also my stance on this phenomenon: Barbara Baert, ‘The Annunciation and the Senses: Late Medieval Devotion and the Pictorial Gaze’, in The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe, Images, Objects and Practices, ed. by Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan and Laura Skinnebach (Dublin: Four Courts, 2015), pp. 121–45. 24 The sermon is known from a Dutch manuscript of the fifteenth century: wi die floeren end die wanden mede vercieren sullen als mit welrukende bloemen: Leiden, University Library, Ltk 2189, fol. 198v. 25 When the house has been cleaned (gereynicht is van den voirledenen sonden overmits die biechte ende veercyert is mit den gueden gewoenten de geesteliken levens), Christ can enter to teach us the virtues: Leiden, University Library, MS Ltk 2189, fol. 199.

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26 Thomas Lentes, ‘As Far as the Eye Can See: Rituals of Gazing in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 360–2. 27 Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 110–18. 28 Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages, p. 114. 29 Plate 2: Enclosed Garden, 1499, Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, Bentlage. Mieke M. van Zanten, ‘Anschauung und Sinnbild: Zur Ikonographiedes Kreuzherrenordens’, in In cruce salus 1210–2010: 800 Jahre Klosterleben, ed. by Mechthild Beilmann-Scöner, Mieke M. van Zanten and Roger Janssen (Rheine: Stadt Rheine, 2010), pp. 62–83, and illustrations on p. 123 and p. 125. 30 van Zanten, ‘Anschauung und Sinnbild’, p. 42. 31 van Zanten, ‘Anschauung und Sinnbild’, p. 42. 32 Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages, p. 117. 33 Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages, p. 117. 34 Rudy, Virtual Pilgrimages, p. 118. 35 ‘Il existe une communion inimitable de la femme (sic) et de la fleur (sic). Image de la fécondité et du sexe, certes, la fleur suggère l’énigme des cycles naturels; le ravissement de la vie, le mystère de la graine, mais aussi la belle fanaison, et encore l’invisible coopération de la racine, la sève, la tige et la feuille. Et, pour finir, dans sa quiétude immobile, la fleur ne transmet à sa cultivatrice-adoratrice qu’un envoûtant mais provisoire parfum. Les mélancolies féminines se reconnaissent dans cet univers fragile, fier et mortel, comme s’il leur renvoyait leur propre image, avec, en plus (sic) la promesse de la repousse à la saison prochaine, une résurrection’: Julia Kristeva, ‘Le bonheur des béguines’, in Le jardin, clos de l’âme: L’imaginaire des religieuses dans les Pays-Bas du Sud, depuis le 13e siècle (exhibition catalogue), ed. by Paul Vandenbroeck (Brussels: Société des Expositions Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1994), pp. 167–77 (p. 172). 36 I previously explored the hermeneutics of odour (and taste) in Barbara Baert, ‘An Odour, a Touch, a Smell: Impossible to Describe: Noli me tangere and the Senses’, in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Wietse de Boer and Christine Goettler, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 26 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 109–52; Barbara Baert, ‘Wind und Sublimierung in der christlichen Kunst des Mittelalters: die Verkündigung’, Das Münster: Zeitschrift für Christliche Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, 66 (2013), 109–17; Barbara Baert, ‘Pentecost in the Codex Egberti and the Benedictional of Robert of Jumièges: The Visual Medium and the Senses’, Convivium, 2 (2015), 82–97; Barbara Baert, ‘La Pentecôte dans le Codex Egberti (v. 980) et le Bénédictional de Robert de Jumièges (fin du 10ème siècle): Le médium visuel et les sens’, in Les cinq sens au moyen âge, ed. by Eric Palazzo (Paris: Cerf, 2016), pp. 521–44. 37 On the hierarchy of the senses, see: Hans Jonas, The Phenomenology of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1982), pp. 135–56; Carl Nordenfalk, ‘The Five Senses in Flemish Art Before 1600’, in Netherlandish Mannerism, ed. by Görel Cavalli-Björkman (Stockholm, 1985), pp. 135–54; Eric Palazzo, ‘Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge: état de la question et perspectives de recherche’, Cahiers de civilisation medieval, 55 (2012), 339–66. 38 Susan Ashbrook Harvey, ‘St Ephrem on the Scent of Salvation’, Journal of Theological Studies, 49 (1998), 109–28 (p. 113); Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Martin Roch, L’intelligence d’un sens: Odeurs miraculeuses et odourat dans l’Occident du haut Moyen Âge (Ve – VIIIe siècles) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); David Parkin, ‘Wafting on the Wind: Smell and the Cycle of Spirit and Matter’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13 (2007), 39–53.

Art and mysticism as horticulture 121 39 Henry J. Cadbury, ‘The Odour of the Spirit at Pentecost’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 47 (1928), 237–57. 40 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California press, 2008), pp. 61, 62–3. 41 Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation, pp. 164–5. See also: Augustine, Sermon 8.6.15, St. Augustine’s Confessions, trans. by William Watts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). And Paulinus Nolanus (ca. 354–431) Poems 25 and 27, The Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola, trans. by Patrick G. Walsh (New York: Newman, 1975). 42 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, XX, II: Gregory the Great, S. Gregorii Magni Moralia in Iob, ed. by Marcus Adriaen, 3 vols, Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina, 143, 143A, 143B (Turnhout: Brepols 1979–85); Palazzo, Les cinq sens, p. 350; Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church Anterior to the Division of East and West, 21–23, trans. by James Bliss and Charles Marriott, 3 vols (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844–1850), II, 515–16. 43 Palazzo, Les cinq sens, pp. 347–51, refers to the tenth book of Augustine’s Confessions, Chapters 9 and 11, where the author interprets synaesthesia as the door towards the soul and the inner self. See also: Laura Katrine Skinnebach, ‘Practices of Perception: Devotion and the Senses in Late Medieval Northern Europe’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Bergen, 2013), pp. 233–59. 44 Karen De Coene, ‘Navelnacht: Regeneratie en kosmologie in de middeleeuwen’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, KU Leuven, 2006), p. 68. 45 Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image, trans. by Lee Preedy (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2004). 46 Ernst Lohmeyer, Vom göttlichen Wohlgeruch (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1919), p. 45. 47 Reindert L. Falkenburg, The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450–1550, Oculi, 5 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1994), p. 20. 48 Antwerp, 1487; Ghent, University Library, MS Res. 169, fol. 16. This is a Middle Dutch translation of Pierre d’Ailly’s, Le jardin amoureux de l’âme; Falkenburg, Fruit of Devotion, pp. 36–7, figs. 47–8. 49 Reindert L. Falkenburg, p. 83. 50 I particularly focus on these hermeneutics in Barbara Baert, ‘Echoes of Liminal Spaces: Revisiting the Late Mediaeval “Enclosed Gardens” of the Low Countries (A Hermeneutical Contribution to Chthonic Artistic Expression)’, Antwerp Royal Museum Annual 2012 (2015), 9–45. 51 See also: Barbara Baert, ‘Die spätmittelalterlichen eingefassten Gärten in den Niederlanden’, Zeitschrift für Medien-und Kulturforschung, 7 (2016), 27–44. For this point of view, I was very stimulated by the workshop organized by Bernhard Siegert and Helga Schulz at Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy) of the Bauhaus University in Weimar: ‘Excessive spaces: Considering media genealogies of trompe l’oeil in Netherlandish book illumination and early still lives’ (21–22 January 2016). See also: Bernhard Siegert and Helga Lutz, ‘Metamorphosen der Fläche’, in Die Wiederkehr der Dinge, ed. by Friedrich Balke, Maria Muhle and Antonia von Schöning (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2011), pp. 253–84. I have published an essay on the textile-inspired techniques such as weaving, stitching and the making of the flowers, and also the format of the grid and lozenge composed by the mentioned paperolles; see: Barbara Baert (in collaboration with Hannah Iterbeke), ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries (15th century onwards): Gender, Textile, and the Intimate Space as Horticulture’, Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture, 15 (2017), 2–33. In this article, I also explore the ‘transmediality’, or the relationship between Enclosed Gardens and contemporary Ghent-Bruges manuscript productions with their flower and insect borders (see: James H. Marrow, Pictorial Invention in Netherlandish

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Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages, the Play of Illusion and Meaning (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2005)). For this particular relationship one might consult Isabel von Bredow-Klaus, Heilsrahmen: Spirituelle Wallfahrt und Augentrug in der flämischen Buchmalerei des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Herber Utz Verlag, 2009); Jos Koldeweij, Geloof en geluk: sieraad en devotie in middeleeuws Vlaanderen (Bruges: Terra Lannoo, 2006). See also: Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). Its origins might lie in the Eastern desert fathers who showed a more than average interest in descriptions bordering on mysticism in which labour and the senses passed into others or, more radically, all five senses imploded into an exceptional, overwhelming experience: David Chidester, ‘Symbolism and the senses in Saint Augustine’, Religion, 14 (1984), 31–51, 33. De trinitate, col. 1070, cited in Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen: Schrift und Bild: Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter (Munich: Beck, 1995), p. 330. See also: Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (London: Arnold, 1979), p. 202. I wish to extend my thanks to Ellen Harlizius-Klück and Marie-Louise Nosch for their input at seminars at the Centre for Textile Studies, Copenhagen, 2–3 December 2013. On mnemonics, see: Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. by Mary J. Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Weberei als episteme und die Genese der deduktiven Mathematik (Berlin: Edition Ebersbach, 2004), is a challenging study that starts from Greek semantic roots in analysing the linguistic idiom surrounding weaving. The author finds traces of the origins of mathematics as a cosmological model. Paul Vandenbroeck, Azetta: Berbervrouwen en hun kunst (Ghent-Amsterdam: Ludion, 2000), p. 200. Jose Ortega y Gasset, ‘Meditations on the Frame’, Perspecta, 26 (1990), 185–90. Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 85. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas and others (New York: Penguin, 2014), p. 114. See also: Barbara Baert, ‘Instrumentalities and the Late Medieval “Enclosed Gardens” in the Low Countries’, Kunst og Kultur, 3 (2016), 131–41. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 119.

Bibliography Manuscripts Ghent, University Library, MS Res. 169 Leiden, University Library, MS Ltk 2189

Primary Annunciation as an Enclosed Garden with unicorn, fifteenth century, embroidery, Damestiftung, Ebstorf Augustine, St. Augustine’s Confessions, trans. by William Watts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) Campin, Robert, Merode triptych, c. 1425–1432, oil on oak, 64.5 × 117.8 cm, The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Enclosed Garden, 1499, mixed media, Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, Bentlage

Art and mysticism as horticulture 123 Enclosed Garden, 1520, mixed media, Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, Bentlage Enclosed Garden, early sixteenth century, mixed media, Museum of the Hospital Nuns, Mechelen Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church Anterior to the Division of East and West, 21–23, trans. by James Bliss and Charles Marriott, 3 vols (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844–1850) ———, S. Gregorii Magni Moralia in Iob, Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina, 143, 143A, 143B, ed. by Marcus Adriaen, 3 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979–1985) Hugo de Sancto Caro, Hugo de Sancto Caro’s traktaat De doctrina cordis. 2: Pragmatische editie van De bouc van der leerlinghe van der herten naar handschrift Wenen ÖNB, 15231, autograaf van de Middelnederlandse vertaler, ed. by Guido Hendrix, 4 vols (Leuven: KUL Bibliotheek van de Faculteit Godgeleerdheid, 1995–2000) Old Mechlin lace, bobbin lace, Mechelen Paulinus of Nola, The Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola, trans. by Patrick G. Walsh (New York: Newman Press, 1975)

Secondary Ashbrook Harvey, Susan, ‘St Ephrem on the Scent of Salvation’, Journal of Theological Studies, 49 (1998), 109–28 ———, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) Asiedu, Felix B. A., ‘The Song of Songs and the Ascent of the Soul: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Language of Mysticism’, Vigiliae Christianae, 55 (2001), 299–317 Astell, Ann W., The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) ———, Le cantique des cantiques, Graphè, 8 (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2005) Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas and others (New York: Penguin, 2014) Baert, Barbara, A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image, trans. by Lee Preedy (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2004) ———, ‘An Odour, a Touch, a Smell: Impossible to Describe: Noli me tangere and the Senses’, in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 26, ed. by Wietse de Boer and Christine Goettler (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 109–52 ———, ‘Wind und Sublimierung in der christlichen Kunst des Mittelalters: die Verkündigung’, Das Münster: Zeitschrift für Christliche Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, 66 (2013), 109–17 ———, ‘The Annunciation and the Senses: Late Medieval Devotion and the Pictorial Gaze’, in The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe, Images, Objects and Practices, ed. by Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan and Laura Skinnebach (Dublin: Four Courts, 2015), pp. 121–45 ———, ‘Echoes of Liminal Spaces: Revisiting the Late Mediaeval “Enclosed Gardens” of the Low Countries (A Hermeneutical Contribution to Chthonic Artistic Expression)’, Antwerp Royal Museum Annual 2012 (2015), 9–45 ———, ‘Pentecost in the Codex Egberti and the Benedictional of Robert of Jumièges: The Visual Medium and the Senses’, Convivium, 2 (2015), 82–97 ———, ‘Enclosed Garden: A Utopian and Mystical Sanctuary’, in In Search of Utopia, ed. by Jan Van der Stock (Leuven: Davidsfonds; Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), pp. 49–53

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———, ‘Instrumentalities and the Late Medieval “Enclosed Gardens” in the Low Countries’, Kunst og Kultur, 3 (2016), 131–41 ———, Late Medieval ‘Enclosed Gardens’ of the Low Countries: Contributions to Gender and Artistic Expression, Studies in Iconology, 2 (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2016) ———, ‘La Pentecôte dans le Codex Egberti (v. 980) et le Bénédictional de Robert de Jumièges (fin du 10ème siècle): Le médium visuel et les sens’, in Les cinq sens au moyen âge, ed. by Eric Palazzo (Paris: Cerf, 2016), pp. 521–44 ———, ‘Die spätmittelalterlichen eingefassten Gärten in den Niederlanden’, Zeitschrift für Medien-und Kulturforschung, 7 (2016), 27–44 ———, ‘Growing, Making, Meaning (With Special Attention to the Paperolles)’, in Enclosed Gardens of Mechelen: Late Medieval Paradise Gardens Revealed, ed. by Lieve Watteeuw and Hannah Iterbeke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) Baert, Barbara and Hannah Iterbeke, ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries (15th Century Onwards): Gender, Textile, and the Intimate Space as Horticulture’, Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture, 15 (2017) 2–33 Baert, Barbara, Hannah Iterbeke and Lieve Watteeuw, ‘Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries: Mixed Media, Remnant Art, Récyclage and Gender in the Low Countries (16th Century Onwards)’, in The Agency of Things in Medieval and Early Modern Art: Materials, Power and Manipulation, ed. by Grażyna Jurkowlaniec, Ika Matyjaszkiewicz and Zuzanna Sarnecka (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 33–50 Beer, Rüdiger Robert, Einhorn: Fabelwelt und Wirklichkeit (Munich: Callwey, 1972) Beumer, Jurjen, ‘Die marianischen Deutung des Hohen Liedes in der Frühscholastik’, Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, 76 (1954), 411–39 Bynum, Caroline Walker, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011) Cadbury, Henry J., ‘The Odour of the Spirit at Pentecost’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 47 (1928), 237–57 Chidester, David, ‘Symbolism and the Senses in Saint Augustine’, Religion, 14 (1984), 31–51 Clanchy, Michael T., From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (London: Arnold, 1979) Cox Miller, Patricia, ‘Pleasure of the Text, Text of Pleasure: Eros and Language in Origen’s “Commentary on the Song of Songs”’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 54 (1986), 241–53 DeCoene, Karen, ‘Navelnacht: Regeneratie en kosmologie in de middeleeuwen’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, KU Leuven, 2006) Einhorn, Jürgen Werinhard, Spiritualis Unicornis: das Einhorn als Bedeutingsträger in Literatur und Kunst des Mittelalters (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1976) Falkenburg, Reindert L., The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450–1550, Oculi, 5 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1994) ———, ‘The Household of the Soul: Conformity in the “Mérode Triptych”’, in Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads: A Critical Look at Current Methodologies, ed. by Maryan W. Ainsworth (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 2–17 Femmes, art et religion au Moyen Âge, ed. by Jean-Claude Schmitt (Strasbourg-Colmar: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg-Musée d’Unterlinden, 2004) Gasset, José Ortega y and Andrea L. Bell, ‘Meditations on the Frame’, Perspecta, 26 (1990), 185–90

Art and mysticism as horticulture 125 Gössmann, Maria Elisabeth, Die Verkündigung an Maria im dogmatischen Verständnis des Mittelalters (Munich: Hueber, 1957) Graff, Hellmuth, ‘Die Darstellungen der sakralen Einhornjagd in der altdeutschen Kunst’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, 1922) Hamburger, Jeffrey F., The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) ———, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) ———, ‘Body vs. Book: The Trope of Visibility in Images of Christian-Jewish Polemic’, in Ästhetik des Unsichtbaren. Bildtheorie und Bildgebrauch in der Vormoderne, ed. by David Ganz and Thomas Lentes (Berlin: Reimer, 2004), pp. 113–45 Hamburger, Jeffrey F. and Robert Suckale, ‘Zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits: Die Kunst der geistlichen Frauen im Mittelalter’, in Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern (exhibition catalogue), ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Munich: Hirmer, 2005), pp. 21–39 Harlizius-Klück, Ellen, Weberei als episteme und die Genese der deduktiven Mathematik (Berlin: Edition Ebersbach, 2004) Images of Cult and Devotion: Function and Reception of Christian Images in Medieval and Post-Medieval Europe, ed. by Søren Kaspersen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004) Ingold, Tim, Lines: A Brief History (London/New York: Routledge, 2007) Le jardin, clos de l’âme: L’imaginaire des religieuses dans les Pays-Bas du Sud, depuis le 13e siècle (exhibition catalogue), ed. by Paul Vandenbroeck (Brussels: Société des Expositions Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1994) Iterbeke, Hannah, ‘Cultivating Devotion: The Sixteenth-Century Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries’, IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies, 10 (2017), 237–250 Jonas, Hans, The Phenomenology of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1982) Klinkenberg, Emanuel S., ‘“Wil diin herte bereeden gheliic eenen huze”: De binnenhuisallegorie in de geestelijke letterkunde’, Queeste: Tijdschrift over middeleeuwse letterkunde, 14 (2007), 126–53 Koldeweij, Jos, Geloof en geluk: sieraad en devotie in middeleeuws Vlaanderen (Bruges: Terra Lannoo, 2006) Kretzenbacher, Leopold, Mystische Einhornjagd: Deutsche und slawische Bild-und Wortzeugnisse zu einem geistlichen Sinnbild-Gefüge, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophische-Historische Klasse, 6 (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1978) Kristeva, Julia, ‘Le bonheur des béguines’, in Le jardin, clos de l’âme: L’imaginaire des religieuses dans les Pays-Bas du Sud, depuis le 13e siècle (exhibition catalogue), ed. by Paul Vandenbroeck (Brussels: Société des Expositions Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1994), pp. 167–77 Lähnemann, Henrike, ‘ “An dessen bom wil ik stighen”: Die Ikonographie des Wichmannsburgere Antependiums im Kontext der medinger Handschriften’, Oxford German Studies, 34 (2005), 19–46 Laube Stefan, Von der Reliquie zum Ding: Heiliger Ort – Wunderkammer – Museum (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2011) Lentes, Thomas, ‘As Far as the Eye Can See: Rituals of Gazing in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouche (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 360–2

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Lohmeyer, Ernst, Vom göttlichen Wohlgeruch (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1919) Marrow, James H., Pictorial Invention in Netherlandish Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages, the Play of Illusion and Meaning (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2005) Matter, E. Ann, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) Michel, Alain, Théologiens et mystiques au Moyen Âge: La poétique de Dieu – Ve-XVe siècles, Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) Nordenfalk, Carl, ‘The Five Senses in Flemish Art before 1600’, in Netherlandish Mannerism, ed. by Görel Cavalli-Björkman (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1985), pp. 135–54 Palazzo, Eric, ‘Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge: état de la question et perspectives de recherche’, Cahiers de civilisation medieval, 55 (2012), 339–66 Parker, Rozsika, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012) Parkin, David, ‘Wafting on the Wind: Smell and the Cycle of Spirit and Matter’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13 (2007), 39–53 Pearson, Andrea. ‘Sensory Piety as Social Intervention in a Mechelen Besloten Hofje’, JHNA: Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 9.2 (2017) Reinitzer, Heimo, Der verschlossene Garten: Der Garten Marias im Mittelalter, Wolfenbütteler Hefte, 12 (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 1982) Rhetoric beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. by Mary J. Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Roch, Martin, L’intelligence d’un sens: Odeurs miraculeuses et odourat dans l’Occident du haut Moyen Âge (Ve–VIIIe siècles) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009) Rudy, Kathryn M., Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011) Schlotheuber, Eva, ‘Klostereintritt und Übergangsriten: Die Bedeutung der Jungfräulichkeit für das Selbstverständnis der Nonnen der alten Orden’, in Frauen – Kloster – Kunst: neue Forschungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Carola Jäggi, Susan Marti and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 43–55 Siegert, Bernhard and Helga Lutz, ‘Metamorphosen der Fläche’, in Die Wiederkehr der Dinge, ed. by Friedrich Balke, Maria Muhle and Antonia von Schöning (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2011), pp. 253–84 Skinnebach, Laura Katrine, ‘Practices of Perception. Devotion and the Senses in Late Medieval Northern Europe’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Bergen, 2013) Smets, An and Baudouin van den Abeele, ‘Medieval Hunting’, in A Cultural History of Animals, ed. by Brigitte Resl, 6 vols (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2007), II (2007), 59–79 Smith, Mark M., Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) Stielau, Allison, ‘The Case of the Case for Early Modern Objects and Images’, Kritische Berichte: Zeitschrift für Kunst-und Kulturwissenschaften (Die Kunst und die Dinge. Perspektiven einer schwierigen Beziehung), 39.3 (2011), 5–16 Vandenbroeck, Paul, Azetta: Berbervrouwen en hun kunst (Ghent: Ludion, 2000) ———, Hooglied: De Beeldwereld van religieuze Vrouwen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, vanaf de 13de eeuw (exhibition catalogue) (Brussels/Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju and Zoon, 1994) Vandermeersch, Joke and Lieve Watteeuw, ‘De conservering van de 16de-eeuwse Mechelse Besloten Hofjes: Een interdisciplinaire aanpak voor historische mixed media’, Innovatie in de conservatie-restauratie: Postprints van de internationale BRK-APROA, 8 (2015), 41–52

Art and mysticism as horticulture 127 van Zanten, Mieke M., ‘Anschauung und Sinnbild: Zur Ikonographiedes Kreuzherrenordens’, in In cruce salus 1210–2010: 800 Jahre Klosterleben, ed. by Mechthild BeilmannScöner, Mieke M. van Zanten and Roger Janssen (Rheine: Stadt Rheine, 2010), pp. 62–83 Vavra, Elisabeth, ‘Bildmotiv und Frauenmystik – Funktion und Reception’, in Frauenmystik im Mittelalter, ed. by Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1985), pp. 201–30 von Bredow-Klaus, Isabel, Heilsrahmen: Spirituelle Wallfahrt und Augentrug in der flämischen Buchmalerei des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Herber Utz Verlag, 2009) Webb, Diana, ‘Domestic Space and Devotion in the Middle Ages’, in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 27–48 Weddigen, Tristan, ‘Resteverwertung’, Kritische Berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst-und Kulturwissenschaften (Rest, Fetisch, Reliquie), 36.3 (2008), 3–6 Wenzel, Horst, Hören und Sehen: Schrift und Bild: Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter (Munich: Beck, 1995) Wolfson, Michael, ‘Lesepulttuch mit Einhornjagd und “hortus conclusus” aus Ebstorf’, in Krone und Schleier, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Munich: Hirmer, 2005), p. 431 Wolfson, Michael, Ein Rundgang durch Kloster Ebstorf (Königstein im Taunus: Langewiesche, 2001)

6

Medieval Pop Warhol’s Byzantine iconography Jewell Homad Johnson

In a period in which religious discourse has become isolated, we must search the shadows for religious art in secular disguise as avant-garde or non-literal imagery. As a result, what constitutes the religious, sacred, mystical or spiritual in twentiethcentury art will be confirmed by a study of the artist’s life. These art historical investigations are handicapped by masks that obscure the relationship between the artist and non-traditional religious expression, which is the thesis of this essay. In what Jürgen Habermas has termed the ‘post-secular’ world, art historian Dave Hickey details how the art of Andy Warhol can be reconsidered in terms of traditional religious symbolism indiscernibly merged with secular semiotics:1 He was the most American of artists, and the most artistic of Americans. So American in fact, that he was virtually invisible to us. We look at him, and knowing little of ourselves, learn little of Warhol because he was us, in all our innocence, ambition, and insecurity. A hard working Democrat, a church goer and business man, a social climber, empire builder and inveterate consumer, in Warhol, the simplicity of a typical American citizen, and the simplicity of artistic genius, are so intermingled that we cannot distinguish them, nor properly credit either his American-ness or his genius.2 Warhol’s iconography for secular culture presents his religion as aesthetically of its time, but in its tendency to remove shadows and symbolise through technology (the high contrast photograph) and processes (the silk screen), it is also evocative of the Byzantine icon and his Ruthenian heritage. Clare Elliott explains the word Byzantine as ‘imprecise’: Strictly, it applies to the Orthodox Christian empire governed from the city of Constantinople (now Istanbul) from AD 324 to 1453 [. . .]. The influence of the Eastern Orthodox Church – its tradition of icon painting – extended not only throughout the Byzantine Empire but also well into western Russia and the Slavic countries’.3 This chapter draws on Jane Daggett Dillenberger’s work on Warhol’s religious art, and the ideas of Pavel Florensky, to examine the deep coherence of the secular and

Medieval Pop 129 the sacred in Warhol’s art.4 Focusing particularly on the use of iconographic echoes in his ‘Marilyn’ images, ‘Brillo Boxes’, and the ‘Last Supper’ cycle, I argue for the reunification of the worldly and the religious in Warhol’s art. Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans objectifies transformation, presenting the viewer with new ‘ritual’ objects from the cult of modern ‘convenience’;5 his Brillo Boxes still confront capitalism with an esoteric character behind what fronts as secular existentialism.6 Warhol sounds a religious voice throughout the iconoclastic appearance of much of his Pop iconography. That is to say, Warhol confirms what he appears to critique, leaving a body of work alerting to a historical need to identify and document alternative activities – providing the basis for a new methodology – one suitable for engagement with the religio-secular art of the twentieth-century – capable of considering global culture, pre-Enlightenment and even pre-Renaissance sensibilities.7 As art historian, curator and rebel Dave Hickey observes: Basically, Andy grew up in something that looked like, and felt like, and acted like, a central European ghetto, completely surrounded by America. You know, I mean that, if he’d been in that neighbourhood in Pittsburgh and you’d been in Czechoslovakia physically, that’s the same place, and if everybody is talking Slovak, and everybody is living in village ways, and then you’re totally surrounded by all this iconography and everything. You’ve got to both see the connections and see the differences, and I think that Warhol understood the power of that. He had that sort of romance with America but just the giant distances, you know.8 Given Warhol’s background as a Byzantine Catholic, the historical impact of both post-modern and Byzantine models remain unavoidable influences on his work, reflecting Western and American culture, contextualised by the peculiarities of the Eastern Byzantine Church’s traditions reconsidered here. Annemarie Weyl Carr informs us that: Orthodoxy remains the Christianity of the lands converted by Byzantium. The empire evangelized not in its own, Greek language but in the native languages of the peoples it addressed, yielding in time eleven autocephalous churches with the Orthodox communion; the Russian, Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Bulgarian are the largest of them. Each maintained the tradition of icon painting rooted in Byzantium but inflected it in distinctive ways, and the art is still being practiced today.9 Initially, as a result of twenty-first-century branding, it is easy to confuse Warhol himself with the zeitgeist. Unlike the more contained grandiosity of Picasso, Warhol represents a recasting of the figure of the artist who is as important as the works of art they have created. Warhol prolifically documented the cultural zeitgeist of post-WWII American life in its darkest shadows and brightest Hollywood light, but this documentation is transcended, first and foremost by his multi-disciplinary works’ ability to anticipate so accurately the future culture. The

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famous ‘15 minutes of fame’ statement first appeared in the brochure for Warhol’s exhibition in Sweden (1968), and it remains attributed to Warhol even though, as Rachel Nuwer observes, ‘Warhol himself admitted to never saying it in 1980. But by then, the line was firmly his’, adding to the consistent presence of paradox and contradiction that comes with everything Andy.10 While easy to imagine today, Warhol’s alleged ‘15 minutes of fame’ statement is contextualised by coming from a period in which America had only three television networks, all going off-theair round about midnight and preceded by the blatantly patriotic Star Spangled Banner scored footage of ‘Old Glory’ waving against clear blue sky.11 Within this atmosphere, and defined by his public persona – with what would later be defined as ‘Pop Art’ – the religious themes in his paintings were simply too radical to be seen. Instead his works were identified as being avant-garde, fashionable, satirical or shallow reflections of the American-Dream culture that they revised. Warhol did not lampoon culture or religion: he executed depictions of the daily and the mundane, the famous and the tragic, with equal seriousness and sincerity. In retrospect, Warhol’s freewheeling equanimity remains dangerous, threatening critical precepts of art, social history and religion. Warhol’s art is egalitarian while conversely elite, popular and anti-judgmental. The work is as much ‘dollar store’ as auction house, regardless of the viewer’s projections onto his work. On a secular level, the lasting magnetism of his work might best be described by what also makes it the most dangerous: Warhol’s ‘all things being equal’ art gives no support to current systems of value excepting the religious or socialist idealism. In his own words: ‘If Everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is’. Fellow Pop artist Ed Ruscha confirmed: ‘Most artists are born to be opinionated, but [Andy] was like no artist I had ever met because he was for everything and nothing at the same time’.12 This Warhol-persona reflects an opposition to secular stratification. It echoes in many respects his personal commitment to Byzantine Catholicism: post-modern categories are absent and unnecessary. Were it not for his final series of Last Supper paintings, and renewed interest in the spiritual in art, we might still fail to see beyond the infamous façade of the so-called ‘Pope of Pop’s’ catalogue raisonné. Warhol’s obvious significance as an artist is in painting popular figures and objects of American consumer culture, or in his own words: ‘The United States has a habit of making heroes out of anything and anybody’.13 By choosing an iconic person or product of convenience he turned up the volume on the ‘what constitutes art’ (and here ‘what constitutes religious iconography’). The affront to the citadel of high-art modernism achieved by Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol, Jasper Johns and others succeeded in spite of a prejudice against the participation of graphic artists, and the appearance of graphic design as ‘fine art’.14 What else could twentieth-century art give birth to while being double-teamed by materialism and American capitalism? Perhaps because of an apparently superficial focus on popular culture, Warhol’s exuberant work seems to have been taken purely on face, or surface value during his lifetime. But, as John Richardson, his biographer, observes, such judgments are problematic: To believe the envious Truman Capote, Andy was a Sphinx without a secret. In fact, he did have a secret, one that he kept dark from all but his closest friends:

Medieval Pop 131 he was exceedingly devout – so much so that he made daily visits to the church of Saint Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. [. . .] Although famously thrifty, he was also secretly charitable. Besides giving financial support, he often spent evenings working in a shelter for the homeless run by the Church of the Heavenly Rest. It was not soppy social consciousness or guilt that prompted Andy’s good works; it was atavism as personified by his adored and adoring mother, the pious Julia.15 How then, do we approach Warhol’s conflicted subject matter, for example Big Electric Chair (1967), an instrument of capital punishment, in light of his deep religious devotion?16 New readings of Warhol’s painting have initiated a re-evaluation of his effect on American art and popular culture during and after his lifetime, which can now be undertaken with greater historical distance from the public persona and media frenzy of his lifetime. One such reappraisal is Jane Dillenberger’s 1991 study, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol.17 In a 1972 interview, Art critic and historian Harry Geldzahler connects Warhol’s ‘Electric Chair’ to American culture: The electric chair painting, which he calls Orange Disaster [1963], is, I think, perhaps the most powerful single Pop art painting, that I know of, and it brings to mind the remark attributed to Elaine de Kooning, that the only American contribution to the history of furniture is the electric chair.18 Two decades later, Dillenberger saw Warhol’s ‘Electric Chair’ in a different light: ‘The Chair is transformed from a grotesque instrument of death into a numinous object, suggesting transcendence, much as the cross, which was used for a particularly cruel kind of execution, is seen in Christian art as a symbol of salvation’.19 Further time and 16,000 miles away have amplified this shift in perspective in a nation that abolished the death penalty in 1967.20 Fifty years from its creation, Warhol’s Electric Chair in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s 2014 ‘Pop to Popism’ exhibition was viewed in a completely new context, drawing out its dialogue with religious imagery.21 Developing from Dillenberger’s reading, Electric Chair on view in Australia seemed to reveal an America, despite (and perhaps because of ) its evangelical reputation, that has replaced the redemption of the cross with the revenge wrought by this particular apparatus. Dillenberger’s study tackles Warhol’s religious themes via a biographical narrative of an artist who, despite appearing to live at contrary purposes, lead a devout life. Dillenberger introduces each ‘religious’ series and, as with ‘Electric Chair’, occasionally reads between the lines. How Warhol’s beliefs possibly influenced his total artistic output is, however, beyond the focus of her critical introduction to Warhol and his obvious religious subject matter. Consequently, his ‘Marilyn’ paintings are absent from Dillenberger’s focus on his religious work, though she does include his abstract ‘Shadows’ series, ‘once referred to by Warhol as “disco décor” ’; evidence Andy was not all Studio 54.22 There is, therefore, scope to apply insights drawn from Dillenberger to other Warhol work. Hilton Als noted of African-American playwright Lynn

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Nottage, that she ‘realized that she didn’t have to write black; she was black, and her race would be inherent in everything she did – as would her feminism’.23 This is an apt metaphor for Warhol’s Christianity, which permeates his personal and creative life. As Warhol’s friend and biographer Bob Colacello notes: Andy as a little boy was taken by his mother to vespers, a Saturday night ceremony service and then 3 masses on Sunday morning back to back. And they had this kind of iconostasis, which is a grid, these screens that cover the altar and only opened up during the communion service. So he was eight hours a week looking at this iconostasis. A little child, you know, taking it all in. And what he was seeing was the grid of portraits of the saints, very two dimensional with gold leaf backgrounds and perhaps 9 on either side, maybe 18 all together. I mean which is so much like his work, you know, especially his portraits. They’ve got this simplicity and this sense of color, and this iconic quality that comes right from that sort of Byzantine Eastern rite kind of art.24 The centrality of faith and devotional practice to Byzantine Catholic culture is made apparent in Stanislaw Mucha’s documentary ‘Absolut Warhola’, in which the documentary crew ‘travel through Eastern Slovakia to interview Warhol’s surviving relatives, ethnic-Ruthenians living near the Polish border in Miková, and to visit the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce’.25 Mucha receives directions from three ladies who welcome him and his crew to Slovakia before mentioning: ‘We’re going to church’.26 Warhol’s Byzantine Catholic beliefs materialise in his portraits and ritual objects, coalescing into a system of iconography based in American daily life. He retains the freedom found in Byzantine Catholic ontological aesthetics which unify the sacred and the secular rather than reducing the religious to purely secular iconography: Warhol transforms each via the other. His trail of philosophical and theological clues, often positioned within a secular disguise, only make sense from a Byzantine perspective, where, as Bertrand Davezac comments ‘the icon makes the sacred visible’.27 Warhol transports this perspective into the museum space, defying what Davezac holds to be the contradiction between iconography and museology: ‘In a museum the icon becomes opaque, a surface on which one can sort out imitation, which tradition demands, from originality; fidelity to the archetype from the idiosyncrasy of the hand’.28 Warhol seems to have single-mindedly attempted to overcome the handicap of the secular museum space, avoiding the ‘idiosyncrasy of the hand’, through various processes and media: photography, the silkscreen, and film. Although this approach may appear to present the antithesis of mystical activity, Dillenberger notes how Warhol’s assistant, Cutrone, insisted that for Andy his art had an apophatic quality: Cutrone testified to the intuitive nature of the process of doing the photography, then the painted background, and then working with the printer’s

Medieval Pop 133 image, saying ‘there are moments of grandeur that appear [. . .] it’s just not audible. And that’s nice because when you work closely with somebody, you know how you feel about what you’re doing. Sometimes words just aren’t necessary’.29 When the seemingly cryptic Warhol said: ‘I delight in the world. I get great joy out of it, but I’m not sensuous’, he shares the priest, nun, monk, sage and shaman’s Achilles heel of religious conviction: the pursuit of a balanced personal connection to both terrestrial and celestial worlds. Many modern artists of the generation before Warhol practiced their religion with far less adherence or formal participation, neutralising the signs of religious traditions; however, they were still using ‘spirituality’ as their form of addressing materialism. For example, in Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, Michel Henry makes just this point: ‘The painting, however, cannot be reduced to its material support. It represents something’.30 Warhol’s art draws on both the ‘secular spirituality’ of his immediate artistic predecessors and the deep incorporation of his own devotional practice. Before leaving his Manhattan home each day Warhol knelt to pray with his mother; there was always a cross under his shirt, and a rosary and missal in his pocket as he faced the challenge of ‘to be in this world but not of it’.31 Warhol’s approach is radical in the medieval sense, i.e., from late Latin radicalis ‘of or having roots’, revealing a contemporary artist possessed of the potential to create new religious symbolism via the collaboration of medieval and secular aesthetics.32 A decade before Warhol’s birth another member of the Russian Orthodox Church, Wassily Kandinsky, broke new ground with his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911); Kandinsky’s non-traditional Abstraction evidences theories of mystical abstraction. Warhol pushed this envelope further by merging the aesthetics and symbolism of both Church and secular culture. Eastern Church doctrine (whether Orthodox or Catholic) unifies areas of life and material culture in a discourse that provides the freedom of expression embraced in both Kandinsky and Warhol’s contributions to religious Modern Art, ideologically, doctrinally and methodologically. For both artists, Byzantine iconography becomes an ontological schema encoded within their work, whether through abstraction or representation. Carr shared, ‘With the templon or iconostasis, the moveable icons for each day of the year, and the cult icons, Orthodox churches were – and still are – characteristically dense with icons, and their multiplicity intensifies their impact’.33 The deep engagement of both Kandinsky and Warhol with public life can also be seen to accord with ideas current in the Eastern Church surrounding the connection between cult and culture, particularly the views of Pavel Florensky. Florensky, a priest, polymath and twentieth-century martyr of the Russian Church, wrote extensively on aesthetics, art and culture. He emphasised the role of the individual both inside and outside of the church/cult. As Nikolai Pavluchenkov argues: [In] Florensky’s ‘symbolic world concept’, the activities of a person that are related to culture occupy a special place in the existence hierarchy and must

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Jewell Homad Johnson not be identified with the cult itself [. . .] The culture must be [active also] outside the temple, keeping its living in extricable connection with the cult. Otherwise it can become extinct [. . .] a phenomenon without a noumenon, which is, in Florensky’s ontology, an empty ‘case’ with no objective content which, like a mirage, does not exist in the world created by God.34

Like the person in Florensky’s ‘Symbolic World Concept’, Byzantine iconography also functions variously in diverse locations: church (as iconostasis), home and museum.35 Warhol is able to draw on this mechanism of Byzantine iconography: he can be seen to fuse cult and culture, both as an individual and through his art works. In her 1967 interview for the Greenwich Village Other journalist Gretchen Berg put words into Warhol’s mouth, leading many to assume that Warhol’s art operated purely at a surface level: It’s all there on the surface then; it’s what we can see. Berg added, ‘Then that’s all we can see; if you want to know about Andy Warhol, we just look at your paintings and your films and [. . .] There’s nothing profound underneath’.36 Warhol’s response to this was ‘No’. Berg’s leading question prepares us to assume his ‘no’ confirms the rhetorical suggestion that his images have no hidden meanings. Still, Warhol’s ‘no’ can be taken as a characteristically discrete rebuttal. That which is ‘underneath’ the physical surface, i.e., the image, is the iconographic ‘opening’ to something beyond. As discussed further below, the Eastern Church provides beliefs and practices – non-normative to American, Western or Protestant doctrines – that allow for the absorption of secular life.37 In particular, the icon creates room for a greater diversity of religious expression. The iconic image’s main task is not aesthetic, serving as a connection point to an other space, Davezac clarifies that ‘icons are a devotional means with a mystical purpose’.38 Using Orthodox Byzantine methods, Warhol brings this potential to contemporary iconography. Warhol’s eschewing of his own signature can be read as an attempt to give his art power through the power of the icon. Warhol’s relationship to originality can also be seen as Byzantine. Davezac states Byzantine icons are ‘[. . .] made holy through their adherence to tradition. Their style and type thus in theory, must remain immutable, an idea that can be difficult for Westerners to reconcile with the relativistic foundation of their aesthetic judgment’.39 Warhol’s statement: ‘But why should I be original? Why can’t I be non-original?’40 reveals him to be in sympathy with a perspective embedded in Eastern Christian culture: he uses Byzantine aesthetics to endow the otherwise banal. The nature of the icon helps to explain the opacity of religious integration natural to Warhol within American life. All of Warhol’s images integrate what is otherwise a duality within secular society. By doing so they inadvertently document not only the divisions of secular life, but also its co-opting of religion, her church, objects and rituals for secular individualism. Society is seeking not redemption but ‘the

Medieval Pop 135 pursuit of happiness’ and the ‘American Dream’, images of which function as religious icons. Warhol was not technically innovative when harnessing the power of the Byzantine icon’s schema for his modern chameleons of iconography: neither in his exploitation of the camera or the high contrast photographic process, nor in the use of bright colours, silver and gold leaf. Ironically, while groundbreaking in its ability to anticipate and portray popular culture, Warhol’s work remains extremely traditional, both conceptually and methodologically. The multi-image iconostasis screen from St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh, familiar through his childhood attendance, appears throughout his signature multiplication of an image, each slightly unique, as seen in the extreme with Marilyn x 100, and Sixty Last Suppers, as well as in Double Elvis and Mao Series more particularly.41 Clare Elliott’s catalogue essay ‘Imprinting the Divine’ notes: ‘icon painters, unconcerned with Western notions of individuality and naturalism, strove not to innovate but to faithfully emulate venerated “originals”’.42 Religious figures of medieval icons connect to the religious mystery; they are to be read, as Elliott argues, ‘as not merely “religious” images but as sacred images that not only represented holy figures and events but also embodied their holiness’.43 In a similar way, Warhol recalibrated the socio-cultural relationship with celebrity by returning intimacy to the individual, making persons universally sacred and available through the iconographic treatment of the images. Warhol, by virtue of his own public persona and celebrity status, knew that the private self is mysterious, vulnerable, and in need of protection. While privacy decreased throughout his lifetime, the public encountered his celebrity portraits when the private lives of the famous were still predominantly unknown. Warhol brought this sensitivity to his memorial iconography of ‘Marilyn’ (coming shortly after her death), forcing the image of ‘Marilyn’ to be encountered in a way diametrically opposed to Hollywood’s obsession with making secular replacements for royalty.44 Nearly seven feet in height, the centered image of Gold Marilyn Monroe is easily curated to ensure that the average gallery visitor comes face to face with ‘Marilyn’ in the manner of one viewing a religious icon.45 Though Monroe and Warhol never met, she shares with Warhol a sense of public ownership, writing in her unfinished biography: ‘I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else’.46 The public’s continuing obsession with Marilyn, more than fifty years after her death, owes much to Warhol.47 For Hickey ‘[Andy] literally changed the world [. . .] and you change the world by changing what people look at, the priorities they place on it, and so he changed the world. And the cultural consequences of that are really profound’.48 From a secular point of view Warhol’s ‘Golden Marilyn Monroe’ can be viewed as America’s Mona Lisa, the Virgin Mother or both, so long as one observes the distinction between a ‘portrait’ and an ‘icon’. In Davezac’s terms: ‘[. . .] in icons, style lends the works a specific inflection, be it through the passing of time or by virtue of cultural differences [. . .] it does not corrode the iconic tradition but gives it a slant [. . .] the archetype remains fully visible, just as the alphabet is readable in a diversity of scripts’.49 This idea of the archetype is

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apparent in Warhol’s works, as several critics have highlighted. Craig Detweller and Barry Taylor, in A Matrix of Meanings (Engaging Culture): Finding God in Pop Culture, view Warhol as creating a new iconostasis for the museum space, noting that ‘Protestant skepticism regarding “religious saints” may have encouraged the rampant veneration of secular saints instead’.50 Key figures in popular culture such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley can be regarded as ‘secular saints’, and Warhol’s portrayal of Marilyn participates in this cultural discourse.51 Australian art critic, Robert Hughes, viewed Warhol’s Marilyn through the lens of his own Jesuit education and lapsed Catholicism: Marilyn, patched like a gaudy stamp on a ground of gold leaf (the favorite color of Byzantium, but of drag queens too) could become a sly and grotesque parody of the Madonna-fixations of Warhol’s own Catholic childhood, of the pretentious enlargement of media stars by a secular culture, and of the similarities between both.52 But ‘Marilyn Monroe’ is a persona performed on screen and off by Norma Jean Baker who, like the private Warhol, is not known to us. Was Warhol attempting to breach this private divide using the Byzantine tradition, presenting an iconic image with which the viewer is required to confront the artifice of the public image? Warhol’s secular support for Byzantine orthodoxy blurs all lines; secular images are recontextualised within the Eastern Byzantine thought: All is holy (though things may appear sacrilegious). Returning to the life and ideas of Father Florensky (discussed above) sheds further light on a coherence of the sacred and secular in Warhol’s work. In Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, Nicolette Misler and Wendy Salmond’s collection of Florensky’s essays in English, they reveal how he joined Symbolist literary circles, discussing alongside the artists the essence of religion, art and literature: [He was] consum[ed with] desire to discover the essential meaning of religion, literature and art. His research into wisdom and the Russian faith focused on the religious and the iconological, and promoted, in his essay on ‘Efimovs’ Puppet Theatre that it is by studying ‘everyday life monographically [. . .]’ that a micrology of popular life would reveal the essential unity of all.53 This last point is essential to the religious freedom offered to the artist by Byzantine orthodoxy. It eliminates the question of suitability in Warhol’s depiction of grocery store products as modern religious iconography. Bertrand Davezac qualifies this idea in ‘The Icon and the Museum’, insisting that there is a difference between religious and secular iconography: Not all icons are given equal veneration, but all are equally sanctified, regardless of any qualitative differences. Thus theologians, philosophers, and lay devotees address icons indiscriminately and collectively. This spiritual communion

Medieval Pop 137 distinguishes the approach to icons in a church or in the ‘beautiful corner’ of Russian Orthodox homes from the secular delectation of those on display in a museum or reproduced in a book. Both museums and books subvert the spiritual egalitarianism of icons.54 Warhol’s work can be seen to operate in a similar way to icons, but also to challenge the effect of the museum space, encouraging the viewer to engage in sanctification, restoring the ‘spiritual egalitarianism’ that Davezac holds the museology of traditional icons subverts. Florensky’s ideas can also contribute to our understanding of the ‘flatness’ of Warhol’s art. Florensky explained the flat plane of the icon as the archetype of a space that denies the illusion of perspective in painting, which can only pretend dimensionality. Victor Bychkov argues that Florensky’s ‘Explanation of the Cover’ helps us to understand the flatness of icons as a prompt to spiritual consciousness: Transparent vision [which passes through] ‘a window, a glass object, water or the visual fluidity of a multitude of blades of grass . . . is apparitional – it is a ghostly image and an illusion. [Florensky viewed art as] [. . .] an opaque body in its essence, and this opaque body can become transparent only via our spiritual consciousness [. . .] The icon, in its physicality and in the formal, but symbolic abstraction of what it represents, becomes the ideal screen upon which we focus our gaze.55 Warhol’s art exploits the same effect: there is no exception to the appearance of this compositional ‘flattening’ throughout Warhol’s work. While this technique informs Warhol’s paintings, Byzantine iconography also re-positions Warhol’s ‘graphic design’ style in Campbell’s Soup Cans and other products, opening up a discussion of their own religious symbolism. Warhol’s own creative environment and the way in which his work was viewed by his nearest art world supporters suggests a productive dialogue with devotional culture. Robert Hughes views the Factory somewhat cynically as a parody of institutional religion: the Factory resembled a sect, a parody of Catholicism enacted (not accidentally) by people who were or had been Catholic, from Warhol and Gerard Malanga on down. In it, the rituals of dandyism could speed up to gibberish and show what they had become – a hunger for approval and forgiveness. These came in a familiar form, perhaps the only form American capitalism knows how to offer: publicity.56 Yet, the environment may be seen more as a function of cult and culture than as a parody. Many of those involved in Warhol’s world saw a productive connection between contemporary art and religious devotion. Andy’s manager Fred Hughes ran the Factory, published Interview magazine, founded the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in Manhattan after Warhol’s death, and visited the

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Pope with Andy in 1980. Indeed, it was Hughes who introduced Warhol to the de Menils, who had mentored Hughes in Houston at St. Thomas University’s art history department, which they financed. John and Dominique de Menil were both devout Roman Catholics who merged postwar American art with the religious and the spiritual. They commissioned Mark Rothko to create a sacred space for Houston, the Rothko Chapel, because: ‘We saw what a great master can do for a religious building when he is given a free hand. He can exalt and uplift as no one else’.57 Indeed, Warhol’s work suggests a concern with connection, with the coherence of cult and culture, as much as, if not more than, publicity. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts made a gift of the Camouflage Last Supper to the Menil Collection in 1994.58 Susie Kalil wrote on news of the gift that it was to her mind deeply appropriate, since it captures Warhol’s personal stance: Appropriately, Warhol’s last series dealt with a person who was both superstar and daily bread of one of the most powerful hagiographies in the world: Christ. Certainly Warhol’s double reproduction in Camouflage Last Supper is intended to suggest both sameness of meaning and loss of meaning in media representation, but the entire effect – the overlay of religious and military power – is so potent that meaninglessness could hardly have been his intent.59 In the Menil Collection, Camouflage Last Supper is in good Byzantine company: The Menil Collection houses an important collection of Balkan, Greek, and Russian icons spanning twelve hundred years, from the sixth to the eighteenth centuries; in addition, it recovered and restored the thirteenth-century murals of Lysi, Cyprus, which were displayed from 1997–2012 in the Byzantine Chapel designed by Francois de Menil before their return to the Orthodox Church of Cyprus.60 Considering Warhol’s work alongside Byzantine art presents us with overwhelming evidence that Warhol embraced Byzantine methods in his art: he employed them as a powerful traditional lens for the contemporary viewer. Warhol’s work becomes simple and direct in its existential propositions when viewed via Byzantine beliefs. As Art critic Peter Schjeldahl asserts, we see this within depictions such as ‘fame’s sacrificial lamb and hovering angel, Marilyn Monroe’: Warhol conferred on defunct subjects the immortality of art, understood as permanent publicity. Beyond iconic, the pictures are icons in the Byzantine mode – direct links to eternity – which came to Warhol naturally from his upbringing and his never discontinued observance as an Eastern Orthodox Catholic.61 Warhol’s ‘Marilyns’ remain shocking because these memorial images reject the usual expectations of glamour photography. The magnetism of his vivid, at times garish, Pop iconography raises the question, in ways that perhaps traditional images no longer can, of why would anyone place images of famous strangers in their home except to establish a connection? And, if we are honest in the case

Medieval Pop 139 of Marilyn, to connect with the woman beyond the mask of fame, the girl next door, Norma Jean? Warhol’s appropriation and reconfiguration of key elements of Byzantine art can be viewed in a similar manner. When viewed in relief, alongside medieval works such as Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia’s (ca. 1403–1482) illustrations of Dante, Warhol’s Heaven and Hell or Death and Disaster series can be seen to operate as icons that reintroduce medieval culture to us as a way of reunifying the secular and the religious, both in his Renaissance paintings, and on the sly through his outrageous appropriation of popular culture.62 Pavluchenkov on Florensky is informative here: In the late 1920s, two years before his first arrest and short-time exile, Florensky, in his autobiographical article for The Granat Encyclopedia (1927), emphasized his role as a ‘medieval scholar’. Obviously, he meant the medieval culture according to his classification, declaring his inclination to implement its main features. Those are, according to Father Pavel, first of all, a deep organicity and, as he wrote, ‘religious stability’ of mindset.63 Warhol’s appropriation and reconfiguration of key elements of Byzantine art can be viewed in a similar manner. Warhol’s ‘religious mindset’ was a stablising factor in his life, a kind of bedrock out of which he worked. Neglect this, and the existential paradox of ‘Brillo Boxes’ becomes as circular as ‘which came first the chicken or the egg?’ It is impossible for them not to be real Brillo boxes (with or without soap), or real art. Any argument is merely one of personal taste. Yet when viewed from a religious perspective, Warhol is able to disempower illusionism via Byzantine metaphors, creating what we might term ‘Medieval Pop’. Once seen, this becomes difficult to un-see. Working in the silver foil lined walls of the ‘Factory’, in what Warhol referred to as the ‘Silver Sixties’, Warhol transformed ‘the standard for clean, Brillo® Steel Wool Soap Pads’ by placing his Brillo Boxes on a floor of silver foil, such that they became a Pop transubstantiation of the purification in Christ, or at least I think that a case can be made for this when we consider the symbolism attributed to silver and light within the Christian East. As Frederick O. Waage and Per Jonas Nordhagen note: [T]he Christian East began to use silver to depict the symbolic light emanating from Christ. First, it was used for the entire disc of his halo, later only for the cross arms. The archangels were the only figures besides Christ for whom the silver halo was used. The light of God, appearing as rays from above in scenes of the Annunciation, Nativity, Baptism, and Transfiguration, was also depicted with silver tesserae.64 Warhol’s use of silver can be read as a direct engagement with this iconography; it presents the Brillo boxes as emanating the light of Christ like pyxides. In her analysis of Warhol’s process, Dillenberger argues that we need to be alert to the deliberate manner in which Warhol worked, decisions were not coincidental for the devout Warhol, regardless of subject matter: ‘He never chose an object, an image, or a logo

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randomly. So what are these advertising and marketing labels doing obscuring the contours of the Last Supper?’65 Thus, Warhol can co-opt General Electric’s slogan ‘brings good things to light’ or the Dove soap logo to suggest peace, and purity. Each Warhol Brillo Box carries the potential to represent the Orthodox mystery of transubstantiation through the secular ritual object. We are given a represented image that ‘changes substance’; it demands of us that it be viewed like a religious icon, which works as it changes perception of symbolised events. In this sense, what he is doing is not new. It echoes Henry’s understandings of Kandinsky (fellow Russian Orthodox artist): the work must symbolise something.66 Warhol could utilise brand familiarity (as costuming) to distract a secular viewer from religious connotations while subconsciously suggesting these at the same time: for example, Mott’s Apple juice as the iconic fruit of Eden and representation of the earthly fall; Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, corn most identified as a Native American grain, to represent the bread of life; and Del Monte peaches for the fruit often in Medieval and Renaissance religious paintings featuring the Virgin Mary, and a symbol of veracity.67 Warhol’s Heinz Tomato Ketchup Box (1964) continues a formative experience in the power of product symbolism from when Warhol was at the Carnegie Institute.68 When an assignment required students to depict a suicide from a Willa Cather Story, unlike all the other students, Warhol chose not to draw the described bridge, but rather offered a sole red blob of tempura paint. Standing before Warhol’s work the professor observed: ‘It could be catsup’ to which Andy replied ‘It’s supposed to be blood’.69 Profound in retrospect, Andy discovered then what his Pop symbolism could be. Death and the resurrection are also key themes in Warhol’s work. Death had hovered on Warhol’s shoulders throughout childhood illnesses, and the Valerie Solanis assassination attempt occurred 3 June 1968, only six years after Warhol’s first exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Warhol was pronounced clinically dead, his chest cut open and his heart massaged. After one and a half minutes Warhol was resurrected, and for the rest of his life the extent of damage to his health, and its ongoing treatment, gave an added impetus to his work. His ‘resurrection’ pervades Warhol’s entire body of work as powerful iconography. We see it for example in his 1982 Eggs series of prints and paintings, first given to friends and clients as Easter gifts, in which he draws on Eastern symbolism of eggs as the emblems of immortality, and (coloured as these are) resurrection. Such ideas clearly echo religious iconography, as highlighted by Annemarie Weyl Carr in ‘How Icons Look’: [I]cons may elicit a range of responses – devotion, contemplation, meditation, admiration, petitionary prayer – but the attitude specified for them is veneration: they are to be treated with deep respect. [. . .] They depict people: icons are a relentlessly figural art, for salvation is a human drama. But they are not just images of holy people. They are holy images. As such, they pose the question of how images can be understood to participate in the divine.70 Arguably Warhol was not seeking veneration for himself as an artist, well not merely that, for it appears that he presented modern iconographic images which

Medieval Pop 141 could be considered as seriously as the old Byzantine saints and relics. Warhol’s Eggs demand a similar engagement in divine mysteries and their relation to the mortal world.71 Other aspects of Warhol’s work can be viewed through a similar lens. While his eggs engage with the mysteries of the resurrection, his Skull paintings engage with the iconography of death. As Dillenberger states: The Skull paintings are related to a long tradition in art and in Christian iconography. Jesus was crucified at Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’, and those works of art which picture the crucifixion often have a skull conspicuously located at the foot of the cross. This skull has a special identity: it is the skull of Adam, who was buried, legend tells, at the very spot where the cross of Jesus was erected.72 Dillenberger exhumed the particular skull present in Warhol’s Skulls series in order to place it within this religious art history.73 Warhol never discussed the Skulls series with his assistant and fellow artist, Ronnie Cutrone, with whom he had discussed much while making his life’s work, but Warhol had shared that his Selfportrait with skull (1978) owed much to Franz Hals’ seventeenth century vanitas picture, ‘Young Man Holding a Skull’, suggesting his engagement with the skull as a symbol of the transience of life and the certainty of death, going back to the Fall.74 With historical hindsight, works such as Warhol’s Camouflage Last Supper reveal more about this artist and the demands of a secular art world through what appears now as unsuccessfully hidden religious motifs. Dillenberger notes that the 1987 Milan exhibition of Warhol’s monumental Last Supper cycle is an exhibition of religious art on a grand scale: It is also one of the largest groups of paintings with religious subject matter by an American artist of our century, indeed, of our three-hundred-year history. Only John Singer Sargent’s murals for the Boston Public Library on the grandiose theme, ‘The development of Religious Thought from Paganism to Christianity’ approaches Warhol’s series in size.75 Although the images, with their superimposition of advertising logos on Christ and the Apostles, are often read as depicting a spiritual message that has been degraded into commercialism, the cycle can be read as a sincere engagement with a tradition of religious art. Dillenberger records a significant exchange at the opening: [Warhol said to the French art critic Pierre Restany] ‘Pierre, do you think that the Italians will see the respect I have for Leonardo?’ Restany commenting that ‘Consciously or not Warhol seemed to me to having acted there as a curator of a masterpiece of Christian culture, of maintaining a tradition he was a part of’.76 Andy Warhol died a month after the exhibition of the Last Supper cycle, to which nearly 6000 people showed up on opening night in Milan in January 1987.77 Yet, at

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the time of his death, his Last Supper paintings were still virtually unknown. Thus, in conclusion, almost three decades later, the Milwaukee Art Museum organised Andy Warhol: The Last Decade. Dallas curator Andrea Karnes considered the exhibition provided the viewer with: ‘the artist’s renewed vigor for painting at the same time it brings to light aspects of his private and spiritual life’.78 This aspect is often overlooked. Only now, in the culmination of decades-long engagement with the iconographic tradition, can Warhol’s works be seen as icons that reintroduce medieval culture to us as a way of reunifying the secular and the religious. His sly appropriation of popular culture so outrageous, so Warholian, continues today.

Notes 1 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’, SignandSight, 18 June 2008, [accessed 15 November 2015]. This text originally appeared in German as ‘Die Dialektik der Säkularisierung’, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 53.4 (2008), 33–46. 2 Andy Warhol: The Documentary, dir. Ric Burns (Steeplechase Films, Mr. Wolf, High Line Productions and Thirteen/WNET New York, 2006), time code 0:47. 3 Clare Elliott, ‘A History of Icons in the Menil Collection’, in Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from the Menil Collection, ed. by Annemarie Weyl Carr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 9–14 (p. 9.). 4 Jane Daggett Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol (New York: Continuum, 1998). Although Dillenberger’s book was not well received in all quarters, David Morgan, for instance, arguing that she oversimplifies the secular sacred divide and overplays Warhol’s religiosity, Dillenberger is not alone is re-sacralising Warhol. Ruth Adams likewise argues that Warhol’s Byzantine Catholicism had an important impact on his art: ‘Idol Curiosity: Andy Warhol and the Art of Secular Iconography’, Theology and Sexuality, 10 (2004), 90–8. Adams, from a rather different perspective to the one that I take here, likewise focuses on Warhol’s images of Marilyn Monroe and his Brillo Boxes. As such, I hope to show that the religious dimension of Warhol’s work is an argument worth pursuing. See: David Morgan, ‘The Religious Art of Andy Warhol by Jane Daggett Dillenberger’, Review Article, Church History, 68 (1999), 1053–4. 5 Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962, synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 6 Andy Warhol, Brillo Box (Soap Pads), 1964, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on wood, gift of Doris and Donald Fisher, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 7 The history of contemporary art includes artists’ work which appears secular while coding the religious content. In Warhol’s case both possibilities are in view, and determined by the reception of the viewer. As a result of secular bias, this is left predominantly unexplored. 8 Andy Warhol: The Documentary, Time code 16:05. Author’s transcript. 9 Annemarie Weyl Carr, ‘How Icons Look’, in Imprinting the Divine, pp. 19–33 (p. 19). 10 Olle Granath, ‘With Andy Warhol 1968’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, [accessed 10 February 2017)]. Rachel Nuwer, ‘Andy Warhol Probably Never Said His Celebrated “Fifteen Minutes of Fame” Line: In the Interest of Branding, However, It Doesn’t Matter Who Said It Only That It Worked’, SmithsonianMagazine,April2014, [accessed 20 October 2016]. 11 ABC Broadcasting Company (ABC) National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). The fourth network, Public Broadcasting Services

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15 16 17 18

19 20

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(PBS), did not appear until 1970, years after Warhol’s quote. See: ‘Old Glory’, [accessed 20 November 2016]. For the history of ‘Old Glory’ as name for the American flag see: Sally Jenkins, ‘How the Flag Came to be Called Old Glory’, Smithsonian Magazine, October 2013, [accessed 14 November 2016]. Mark Rosenthal, Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), p. 25. Gregg Barrios, ‘Dandy Andy Warhol’, in Celebrating the Rag: Austin’s Iconic Underground Newspaper, ed. by Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree and Richard Croxdale (Texas: New Journalism Project, 2016), pp. 82–4 (p. 84). Theodore Gracyk, The Philosophy of Art: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 148. Warhol furthers the discourse Jasper Johns began with his American Flag series. See: ‘Jasper Johns: Ideas in Paint’, dir. Rick Tejada-Flores, American Masters (Eagle Rock Entertainment, WNET Channel 13 New York, 1989). John Richardson, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters: Beaton, Capote, Dalí, Picasso, Freud (London: Pimlico, 2001), pp. 247–8. Andy Warhol, Big Electric Chair, 1967, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas. Dillenberger, Religious Art, p. 70. Dillenberger, Religious Art. Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940–1970, dir. Emile de Antonio (Turin Film Corp., 1973); Transcript: Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, ‘Everybody Talks about the Art Establishment’ [accessed 15 November 2015]. Dillenberger, Religious Art, pp. 70–1. ‘Since 1973 and the passage of the Death Penalty Abolition Act 1973 (Cth), the death penalty has not applied in respect of offences under the law of the Commonwealth and Territories’: ‘Death Penalty Abolition Act, 1973’, Law Council of Australia, [accessed 11 November 2017]. The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 1 Mar 2014–14 November 2015, [accessed 10 November 2016]. Andy Warhol, ‘Shadows’, September 20, 2014–February 15, 2015, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Ave, Los Angeles. Studio 54 was New York’s most famous nightclub for the stars which opened in 1977 and was known for its lavish parties and strict glamour dress code. It was closed down by the IRS in 1979. Warhol was a frequent visitor: [accessed 12 November 2016]. Hilton Als, ‘The Theatre: “Playing to Type”’, The New Yorker, 23 May 2011, [accessed 23 November 2016]. Andy Warhol: The Documentary, timecode: 20:00. Absolut Warhola, dir. Stanislaw Mucha (ZDF Production Company, 2001). Absolut Warhola, timecode: 4:07. Bertrand Davezac, ‘The Icon and the Museum’, in Imprinting the Divine, pp. 15–18 (p. 17). Davezac, ‘The Icon and the Museum’. Dillenberger, Religious Art, p. 73. Cutrone goes on to explain that ‘I don’t really touch his paintings at all [. . .] We work on it together, we talk about it [. . .] But nobody really touches the work except Andy’. Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, trans. by Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2005). Original text: Henry, Michel, Voir l’invisible sur Kandinsky (Paris: PUF, 2005), p. 9. Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol, p. 21. The concept of Warhol’s religiosity is discussed throughout Dillenberger’s text. See also: Avril Pyman, Pavel

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Florensky: A Quiet Genius, The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia’s Unknown Da Vinci (New York: Continuum, 2010). ‘radical, adj. and n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2008 [accessed 11 March 2017]. Carr, ‘How Icons Look’, p. 21. Nikolai Pavluchenkov, ‘Pavel Florensky on Christ as the Basis of Orthodox Culture and Christian Unity’, in Apology of Culture: Religion and Culture in Russian Thought, ed. by Artur Mrowczynski-Van Allen, Teresa Obolevitch and Pawel Rojek (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Pub, 2015), pp. 63–71. The icon’s effectiveness is challenged uniquely in each context, and is addressed in this essay. Gretchen Berg, ‘Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol’, Cahiers du Cinémas in English, 10 (1967), 38–42. Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. by Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996). Davezac, ‘The Icon and the Museum’, p. 15. Davezac, ‘The Icon and the Museum’, p. 15. Kenneth Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), §2. Warhol, Marilyn x 100, 1962, screenprint ink and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art, Sixty Last Suppers, 1986, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Double Elvis, 1963, silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mao, 1973, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago. Elliot, ‘Imprinting the Divine’, p. 9. Elliot, ‘Imprinting the Divine’, p. 9. MoMA Learning, ‘Gold Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, 1962’, [accessed 10 October 2016]. See: Adrienne Away, ‘An Afternoon at MoMA’, A Wedding Weekend in New York, 15 September 2016, [accessed 17 November 2016]. Gloria Steinem, ‘The Woman Who Will Not Die’, in All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader, ed. by Yona Zeldis McDonough (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), pp. 63–77 (p. 63). For an alternative view on the creation of Monroe’s image within Hollywood see: Thomas Harris, ‘The Building of Popular Images: Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe’, in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. by Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 40–3. Andy Warhol: The Documentary, time code: 2:42. Davezac, ‘The Icon and the Museum’, p. 17. Craig Detweller and Barry Taylor, A Matrix of Meanings (Engaging Culture): Finding God in Pop Culture (Ada, MI: Baker Books, 2003), p. 17. Detweller and Taylor, Matrix of Meanings, pp. 116, 117. Robert Hughes, ‘The Rise of Andy Warhol’, The New York Review of Books, 18 February 1982, [accessed 27 November 2016]. Pavel Florensky, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. by Nicolette Misler, trans. by Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). Davezac, ‘The Icon and the Museum’ p. 15. Victor Bychkov, Aesthetic Face of Being: Art in the Theology of Pavel Florensky (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993). Hughes, ‘The Rise of Andy Warhol’. Rothko Chapel, [accessed 19 November 2016]. The website states, ‘Our Mission: The Rothko Chapel is a sacred space open to all, every

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day, to inspire people to action through art and contemplation, to nurture reverence for the highest aspirations of humanity, and to provide a forum for global concerns’. Dillenberger noted a personal signature in Warhol’s Last Suppers: ‘he had omitted the wine glass from the scene, reflecting his own church’s liturgical practice at St Vincent Ferrer ‘where only the consecrated bread was offered to the congregation at Mass, but not the wine’: Religious Art, pp. 86–7. Susie Kalil, ‘The Last Warhol’, Houston Press, 26 May 1994, [accessed 23 November 2016]. The Menil Collection’s icons were showcased with the exhibition ‘Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from the Menil Collection’ in 2012 curated by Annemarie Weyl Carr, See: Imprinting the Divine, esp. Josef Helfenstein, ‘Acknowledgements’, Imprinting the Divine, p. 7. On the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, see: The Menil Collection, [accessed 23 November 2016]. Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Culture Desk: Grave Sight’, The New Yorker, 9 August 2013, [accessed 27 October 2016]. Timothy Hyman, Sienese Painting: The Art of City-Republic (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), p. 164; Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia, Paradiso section, 1441, 61 illuminations; Warhol, Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away!, c. 1985–86, silkscreen on canvas; Warhol, The Death and Disaster Series, 1962, silkscreen on canvas. See: Dillenberger, Religious Art, pp. 42, 45–63, 66–70. Nikolai Pavluchenkov, ‘Pavel Florensky on Christ’, in Apology of Culture: Religion and Culture in Russian Thought, ed. by Artur Mrowczynski-Van Allen, Teresa Obolevitch and Pawel Rojek (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2015), pp. 63–71 (p. 65). Florensky was arrested in 1929 and spent three months of his exile in Nizhny Novgorod. Frederick O. Waage and Per Jonas Nordhagen, ‘Mosaic Art; Glass’, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, 2014, [accessed 10 December 2015]. Dillenberger, Religious Art, p. 92. Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible, p. 59. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), p. 29. Andy Warhol, Heinz Tomato Ketchup Box, 1964, synthetic polymer paint, screenprint on wood, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Dillenberger, Religious Art, pp. 65–6. Carr, ‘How Icons Look’, p. 19. Dillenberger, Religious Art, p. 49. Dillenberger, Religious Art, p. 77. Dillenberger, Religious Art, pp. 71–5. Dillenberger, Religious Art, pp. 71–5. Dillenberger, Religious Art, p. 117. Dillenberger, Religious Art, p. 102. Dillenberger, Religious Art, p. 101. Andrea Karnes, curator, Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 14 February 2010–16 May 2010. The Andy Warhol: The Last Decade exhibition was organized by guest curator Joe Ketner (Emerson College), and John McKinnon, The Milwaukee Art Museum (26 September 2009–3 January 2010).

Bibliography Primary Warhol, Andy, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962, synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, Museum of Modern Art, New York

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———, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York ———, Marilyn x 100, 1962, screenprint ink and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH ———, Double Elvis, 1963, silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York ———, Brillo Box (Soap pads), 1964, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on wood, gift of Doris and Donald Fisher, Museum of Modern Art, New York ———, Heinz Tomato Ketchup Box, 1964, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on wood, Museum of Modern Art, New York ———, Big Electric Chair, 1967, silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas ———, Mao, 1973, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago ———, Shadows, 1978–79, synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas, Dia Art Foundation ———, Sixty Last Suppers, 1986, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Secondary Absolut Warhola, dir. Stanislaw Mucha (ZDF Production Company, 2001) Adam, Ruth, ‘Idol Curiosity: Andy Warhol and the Art of Secular Iconography’, Theology and Sexuality, 10 (2004), 90–8 Als, Hilton, ‘The Theatre: “Playing to Type”’, The New Yorker (23 May 2011), [accessed 23 November 2016] Andy Warhol: The Documentary, dir. Ric Burns (Steeplechase Films, Mr. Wolf, High Line Productions and Thirteen/WNET New York, 2006) Away, Adrienne, ‘An Afternoon at MoMA’, A Wedding Weekend in New York (15 September 2016), [accessed 17 November 2016] Barrios, Gregg, ‘Dandy Andy Warhol’, in Celebrating the Rag: Austin’s Iconic Underground Newspaper, ed. by Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree and Richard Croxdale (Texas: New Journalism Project, 2016), pp. 82–4 Berg, Gretchen, ‘Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol’, Cahiers du Cinémas in English, 10 (1967), 38–42 Bychkov, Victor, Aesthetic Face of Being: Art in the Theology of Pavel Florensky (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993) Carr, Annemarie Weyl, ‘How Icons Look’, in Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from the Menil Collection, ed. by Annemarie Weyl Carr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 19–33 Chapel, Rothko, [accessed 19 November 2016] Davezac, Bertrand, ‘The Icon and the Museum’, in Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from the Menil Collection, ed. by Annemarie Weyl Carr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 15–18 de Antonio, Emile, and Mitch Tuchman, transcript of ‘Everybody Talks about the Art Establishment’, [accessed 15 November 2015] ‘Death Penalty Abolition Act, 1973’, Law Council of Australia, [accessed 11 November 2017]

Medieval Pop 147 Detweller, Craig and Barry Taylor, A Matrix of Meanings (Engaging Culture): Finding God in Pop Culture (Ada, MI: Baker Books, 2003) Dillenberger, Jane Daggett, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol (New York: Continuum, 1998) Elliott, Clare, ‘A History of Icons in the Menil Collection’, in Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from The Menil Collection, ed. by Annemarie Weyl Carr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 9–14 Florensky, Pavel, Iconostasis, trans. by Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996) ———, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. by Nicolette Misler, trans. by Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion Books, 2006) Goldsmith, Kenneth, I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004) Gracyk, Theodore, The Philosophy of Art: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2011) Granath, Olle, ‘With Andy Warhol 1968’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, [accessed 10 February 2017] Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Die Dialektik der Säkularisierung’, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 53.4 (2008), 33–46 ———, ‘Notes on a Post-Secular Society’, SignandSight (18 June 2008), [accessed 15 November 2015] Harris, Thomas, ‘The Building of Popular Images: Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe’, in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. by Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 40–3 Helfenstein, Josef, ‘Acknowledgements’, in Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from the Menil Collection, ed. by Annemarie Weyl Carr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 7 Henry, Michel, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, trans. by Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2005) ———, Voir l’invisible sur Kandinsky (Paris: PUF, 2005) Hughes, Robert, ‘The Rise of Andy Warhol’, The New York Review of Books (18 February 1982), [accessed 27 November 2016] Hyman, Timothy, Sienese Painting: The Art of City-Republic (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003) Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from the Menil Collection, ed. by Annemarie Weyl Carr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) ‘Jasper Johns: Ideas in Paint’, dir. Rick Tejada-Flores, American Masters (Eagle Rock Entertainment, WNET Channel 13 New York, 1989) Jenkins, Sally, ‘How the Flag Came to be Called Old Glory’, Smithsonian Magazine (October 2013), [accessed 14 November 2016] Kalil, Susie, ‘The Last Warhol’, Houston Press (26 May 1994), [accessed 23 November 2016] The Menil Collection, [accessed 23 November 2016] MoMA Learning, ‘Gold Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, 1962’, [accessed 10 October 2016] Morgan, David, Review of ‘The Religious Art of Andy Warhol by Jane Daggett Dillenberger’, Church History, 68 (1999), 1053–4

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Nuwer, Rachel, ‘Andy Warhol Probably Never Said His Celebrated “Fifteen Minutes of Fame” Line: In the Interest of Branding, However, It Doesn’t Matter Who Said It Only That It Worked’, Smithsonian Magazine (April 2014), [accessed 20 October 2016] ‘Old Glory’, [accessed 20 November 2016] Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940–1970, dir. Emile de Antonio (Turin Film Corp., 1973) Panofsky, Erwin, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1955) Pavluchenkov, Nikolai, ‘Pavel Florensky on Christ’, in Apology of Culture: Religion and Culture in Russian Thought, ed. by Artur Mrowczynski-Van Allen, Teresa Obolevitch and Pawel Rojek (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Pub, 2015), pp. 63–71 ———, ‘Pavel Florensky on Christ as the Basis of Orthodox Culture and Christian Unity’, in Apology of Culture: Religion and Culture in Russian Thought, ed. by Artur MrowczynskiVan Allen, Teresa Obolevitch and Pawel Rojek (Eugene, OR; Pickwick Pub, 2015), pp. 63–71 Pop to Popism Exhibition, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (1 March 2014–14 November 2015), [accessed 10 November 2016] Pyman, Avril, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius, The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia’s Unknown Da Vinci (New York: Continuum, 2010) Richardson, John, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters: Beaton, Capote, Dalí, Picasso, Freud (London: Pimlico, 2001) Rosenthal, Mark, Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years (London: Tate Publishing, 2012) Schjeldahl, Peter, ‘Culture Desk: Grave Sight’, The New Yorker (9 August 2013), [accessed 27 October 2016] Steinem, Gloria, ‘The Woman Who Will Not Die’, in All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader, ed. by Yona Zeldis McDonough (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), pp. 63–77 Waage, Frederick O. and Per Jonas Nordhagen, ‘Mosaic Art; Glass’, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online (2014), [accessed 10 December 2015] Warhol, Andy, Shadows, Exhibition, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Ave, Los Angeles (20 September 2014–15 February 2015), [accessed 12 November 2016]

Plate 1 Enclosed Garden, early sixteenth century, mixed media, Museum of the Hospital Nuns, Mechelen

Plate 2 Enclosed Garden, 1499, mixed media, Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, Bentlage

Plate 3 Sheila Gallagher, Pneuma Hostis, 2013, gold leafed cigarette butts on wooden armature, 24” diameter, private collection, New York

Plate 4 Sheila Gallagher, Plastic Paradisus, 2013, melted plastic trash on armature, 7 × 5’, private collection, New York

Plate 5 Sheila Gallagher, Cumulonimbus, 2007, live flower installation, 12 × 9’, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Plate 6 Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 404, f. 75r (s. xiiiex/xivin)

Plate 7 Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 404, f. 104r (s. xiiiex/xivin)

Plate 8 Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 10.3 404, f. 106r (s. xiiiex/xivin)

Part III

Metaphor, making and transcendence

7

An artist’s notes on the art and the articulation of the mystical moment Sheila Gallagher

The difficulty with speaking about the aesthetic experience aroused by an art object or image is that so much is happening simultaneously that only a fraction of it becomes conscious and an even smaller fraction can be verbalised.1 In this way, the artwork functions as a narrative rupture in that it causes the viewer to encounter holes in their attempts to create a story, and in fact calls for any linear model of connected events to be tossed aside. Experiencing visual art follows no storyline: there is no beginning, middle and end, but rather a cross-section of simultaneity. As Arthur Koestler noted in The Act of Creation, the challenge of transducing aesthetic experience is not due to its irreducible quality, but to the sheer volume of unconscious and non-verbal associations which interlace with it.2 While it therefore may seem like something of a performative contradiction to attempt to describe some of the ‘interlacings’ in a few examples of my recent works, I will nonetheless offer some thoughts on my creative process as it relates to wonder and the art of contemplation. I will describe some of the inspirations behind my practice and give examples of how my interest in mystical theology determines material and thematic choices. I approach this project not from the position of theologian, philosopher, or art historian, but as an artist who sees their practice as informed by theological inquiry. While theological and philosophical perspectives can deepen the experience of art (and vice versa), as curator Donald Siedell reminds us, we must always allow the art object to operate ‘as art and not to pretend to be some covert philosophy or theology or visual illustrations of ideas, meanings, and worldviews’.3 And to allow art to be art we must trust in its mute materiality and its wordless invitation to manifest a silent and beautiful question for both maker and viewer. Pneuma Hostis (Plate 3) – meaning ‘Spirit-Breath Host-Guest’ – is a tondo made of gold-leafed cigarette butts.4 It is a circular mandala-like maze which shares both the shape and exact dimensions of the commercial Lasco fan installed in the window of my Boston studio to clear smoke and toxic fumes from my work space. The used butts – some my own and others picked off the industrial street where I work – combine with fan blades in the shape of a gold host. This combinatio oppositorum sets in motion a smoker’s dance between inhalation and exhalation; the addict’s fix meeting the saint’s halo, trash and treasure. Intended to be polycoded in both form and material, the rotating icon-fan mimes a communion host. It also takes

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Plate 3 Sheila Gallagher, Pneuma Hostis, 2013, gold leafed cigarette butts on wooden armature, 24” diameter, private collection, New York

the form of a gold monstrance used in the Catholic rite of Benediction to exhibit Eucharistic bread to the public, the container for the body of Christ. As such, the sacred-profane host replays the ‘exposition’ of the inner core of divinity: namely the chora which contains the uncontainable; the matter that grounds the Word in the smoke and ashes of incinerated butts; the mother host (hostis) who invites each viewer to become a guest (hostis) in the image-play of spirit ( pneuma).5 This notion of word-image play between the negatively charged smoked butt, itself a kind of trace of the apophatic medium of pneuma (smoke, breath, spirit) and the kataphatic medium of hostis (material, flesh, guest) is mirrored in the gaps between the blades which compose the circle. There are eight panels in the halo’s radius, four filling and four emptying. It is hard to tell which is which, but negative spaces suggest there are cracks, fractures and differences in the most holy

An artist on the art of the mystical moment 153 of things, as well as our understanding. The image is formed from both the rotator blades of the fan and the four spaces in between them where dust, wind and fumes pass through.6 Faced with the play between positive and negative, figure and ground, stasis and motion we oscillate between the two. The fan spins, the spirit breathes; the mind is present to its movement. This chiasmic crossing of the sacred and the secular is a maze of ladders moving upwards and downwards, sideways and backwards. The detail (Figure 7.1) is echoed in Jacob’s Ladder (2013), based on the ladder of Jacob’s dream, which was installed opposite Pneuma Hostis in the 2013 exhibition Ravishing Far/ Near at Dodge Gallery.7 This Jacob’s Ladder extends the Christian communion host to the famous Jewish narrative through proximity to and with a shared medium; ascents and descents as the gold-leafed butts break from the mandala host into a multitude of crossing lines – a rickety 13-foot ladder with 108 rungs created from interlocking verticals and horizontals.8 The dream of Jacob in Genesis 28.12–17, of angels climbing up and down between heaven and earth, is, we remember, dreamt by a sleeping man lying on the ground.9 In Jacob’s

Figure 7.1 Sheila Gallagher, Pneuma Hostis (detail), 2013, gold leafed cigarette butts on wooden armature, 24” diameter, private collection, New York

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Ladder (Figure 7.2) vertical and horizontal stinky cigarette filters are delicately and internally pinned together as the celestial and the terrestrial, man and God, sleeping and wakefulness are invisibly but structurally dependent upon each other.

Figure 7.2 Sheila Gallagher, Jacob’s Ladder, 2013, gold-leafed cigarette butts with pins, 156 × 2.5”, private collection, New York

An artist on the art of the mystical moment 155 The inter-play between the biblical account as well as between the two works performs the primacy of relation over self-enclosed substance, of open allusion over hermetic enclosure. Both works solicit movement and migration, not security or stasis, and invite a visual, non-linear engagement over clean narrative interpretation, again and again. The game of relationality is extended through the motif of the gold circle into Plastic Paradisus (Plate 4), another work from the Ravishing Far/Near exhibition.10 In Plastic Paradisus, based on a rare, early Persian figurative image of Adam and Eve, I have removed the first humans, left their halos, and recreated the image entirely out of melted bits of plastic trash. It is composed of everyday

Plate 4 Sheila Gallagher, Plastic Paradisus, 2013, melted plastic trash on armature, 7 × 5’, private collection, New York

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junk – bottle caps, hotel cards, yogurt containers, hypodermic needles – all cut, arranged on cookie tins, melted on a gas grill in my driveway, and then blowtorched together to create a toxic mosaic of Eden.11 Here the sacred is fused with the profane as mundane dreck is transformed into a mystical garden. Part of a larger series of plastic paintings which explores the garden as the site of the theoerotic encounter in different wisdom traditions, Plastic Paradisus asks the viewer to get up close and to wonder how it is constructed.12 To wonder or wunder (interestingly the German also means miracle), is a state of not knowledge – if you wonder if someone is coming, you do not know – it is an inquiry, a question put to yourself first. Wonder can be speculation or awe or marvel, it is often equated with a sudden glimpse into mystery. Wonder (in Old English wundor) and wound (OE wund ) are bound together not only by a similar sound, but in a shared relationship to openness or being open as in ‘agape’, with the mouth wide open in wonder or love, or an opening like a gap or hole; recall St John of the Cross’s wounded stag, Teresa of Avila’s fiery spear, and other mystical punctures.13 Like many artists I use materials which are intended to provoke wonder and provide an opening for questioning how the works are made, a strategy of seduction to entice a viewer to approach and then stay with the piece. The three most significant characteristics of wonder as defined by the literary critic Philip Fisher are that it is sudden, it is primarily visual, and it is rare.14 The contents of the experience may not be new, but the experience of it must be. Descartes declares ‘wonder is the first of all passions’ because it is the means by which man learns.15 It demands attention and seems to compel a response, which in the presence of visual art may be as simple (or difficult) as willingly allowing our attention to be focused entirely. Wonder does not freeze us, but rather puts us into play. I think this notion of play is significant; the artist or viewer as the forgotten homo ludens who through his brush with mystery kindles the desire to engage rather than to answer. Wonder turns homo ludens into homo faber by begetting the desire to make and to create metaphor, meaning, and art. It is a creative eros, an eros of questioning which precedes and ignites the desire for knowledge and making. The unexpected quality of wonder finds example in the mystical writings of Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz, the fourteenth-century Sufi whose poems are full of vivid images of God pursuing the soul with a raging and passionate might. The use of semi-erotic destructive imagery to describe the soul’s encounter with God is not unusual in mystical writings and runs through the work of a number of Hafiz’s contemporaries in the West, most notably in those of the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381). According to Bernard McGinn, Ruusbroec frequently uses the word minne (as distinct from other words for love such as liefde) in expressions such as ‘the strife of love’ (der minnen strift) and the ‘insanity of love’ (ore-woet van minnen) to describe the encounter between the human spirit and the Divine as ‘a struggle and contention that leads to mutual wounding’.16

An artist on the art of the mystical moment 157 God’s tactic of surprise and inflicting wounds to stir the soul served as inspiration for my single channel video Tired of Speaking Sweetly, 2013, (Figure 7.3) loosely based on a conflation of two of Hafiz’s poems: Tired of Speaking Sweetly By Hafiz Love wants to reach out and manhandle us, Break all our teacup talk of God. If you had the courage and Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights, He would just drag you around the room By your hair, Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world That bring you no joy.17 A Barroom View of Love By Hafiz I will tell you something Of the Barroom view of Love. Love is grabbing hold of the Great Lion’s mane And wrestling and rolling deep into Existence While the Beloved gets rough And begins to maul you alive.

Figure 7.3 Sheila Gallagher, Tired of Speaking Sweetly (still), 2013, single-channel video, collection of the artist, Boston, MA

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Sheila Gallagher True Love, my dear, Is putting an ironclad grip upon The soft, swollen balls Of a Divine Rogue Elephant And not having the good fortune to Die!18

In the moving image piece a miniature tea service is set on a table in a field while a gentle wind causes the tablecloth to waft softly in the setting sun of a warm autumn day. The bucolic scene is animated by a quiet female voice reading Hafiz’s poems in Persian and then suddenly interrupted by the wild cries of a stampeding elephant caught in an archival film of an African tourist safari gone bad. The two-minute video ends quickly when the gigantic foot of the rogue elephant (obviously made of plaster) smashes the saucers and dainty cups to bits. In Tired of Speaking Sweetly, words traverse flesh; concepts traverse materiality; and vision traverses sensibility. I use the technique of carnal performance, enacting and constructing attempts at wondrous images and objects to elicit a response analogous to what I imagine is experienced in the mystical moment when puzzlement meets pleasure in an all-at-once incomparable experience of non-verbal communion between viewer and artwork, God and soul, maker and created. The strategy is often a material one; I prefer to work in media that are unusual and ephemeral (live flowers, melted trash, smoke, sound). I am drawn to substances which can be mined for their metaphorical and cultural associations and that cannot be entirely controlled. Smoke is perhaps the most unpredictable of the media I work with. Since 2007, I have been creating a series of paintings of endangered animals made from smoke, where fire acts as a symbol of violence and loss and an idiom of ritual purgation and devotion. Suspending the canvas from the ceiling of my studio, I manipulate the smoke from different burning implements including birthday candles, oil lamps and matches to create a variety of textures and values. Except to block off areas of white, my hand never touches the canvas nor do I draw on the surface. The soot from the candles imbeds itself into the warp and weave of the canvas. In Smoke Elephant (Figure 7.4), where the visual motif of the elephant is intended to refer back to the divine rogue beast of Hafiz’s poem A Barroom View of Love, we see only half of the elephant; he is there and not there. The theme of partial sight as a metaphor for the limits of spiritual understanding was also explored in Unknown Source, a hybrid exhibition of paintings, video, and live flower installation at the Boston ICA, 2007. As in Ravishing Far/Near, the works related to each other through visual rhymes intended as an invitation to reflection as well as a series of clues to interpretation. As in much of my work, Unknown Source explored the interplay between perception and belief and the complex friction that occurs when the limitations of representation rub up against spiritual experiences. Inspired by the fourteenth-century mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing, the exhibition featured a 12’ × 9’ installation of a cumulonimbus cloud (Plate 5) made entirely of flowers.19

Figure 7.4 Sheila Gallagher, Smoke Elephant, 2013, smoke on canvas, 60 × 40”, private collection, Boston, MA

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Plate 5 Sheila Gallagher, Cumulonimbus, 2007, live flower installation, 12 × 9’, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Orchids, roses, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums and carnations were implanted into an armature of floral foam and constantly watered by an internal irrigation system for the duration of the nine-week exhibition. In the Cloud of Unknowing the anonymous author goes to great lengths to explain to the beginning searcher that the cloud to which he refers is not ‘any cloud congealed of vapours on the air’ and should not be visualised as such, but ‘a cloud of unknowing; betwixt thee and thy God’.20 He is acutely aware of the limits of the intellect in knowing God or representing the experience of divine presence, and is equally suspicious of will. Yet in spite of all of the directives to rest in the darkness of apophatic prayer, there is a constant recourse to imagery, and above all an assertion of the

An artist on the art of the mystical moment 161 primacy of love. On the exhibition wall across from Cumulonimbus I installed a vinyl wall text in lieu of an artist’s statement. It was an excerpt from the CloudAuthor’s entreaty to tread lightly towards divine awareness which also offered a possible approach for the contemporary viewer seeking to articulate aesthetic experience: Be careful and do not imprudently strain yourself in this work. Rely more on joyful enthusiasm than on sheer brute force. Dismiss every subtle or clever thought. Cover it over with a thick cloud of forgetting. Then let your loving desire reach out to pierce the darkness above.21

Notes 1 This is a paraphrasing of Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964), p. 383. The exact quote reads, ‘The trouble with putting into words the aesthetic experience aroused by a picture is, as we saw, that so much is happening at the same time; that only a fraction becomes conscious, and an even smaller fraction is verbalized. “The forceps of our minds”, to quote H.G Welles, “are clumsy things, and crush the truth a little in the taking hold of it”’. 2 See: Koestler, Act of Creation, in particular, ‘Image and Emotion’, chapter XXII, where Koestler puts forth his theory of ‘bisociation’, arguing that because the experience of visual art is loaded with unconscious inferences and is the result of a series of non-verbal processes of association and ‘participatory emotions’, it allows us to participate in several different planes of reality at once. Koestler writes, ‘The difficulty of analysing aesthetic experience is not due to its irreducible quality but the wealth, the unconscious and non-verbal character of the matrices which interlace in it, along ascending and gradients in various dimensions’, (p. 391). ‘Neither the artist, nor the beholder of his work can slice his mind into sections, separate sensation from perception, perception from meaning, sign from symbol’ (p. 392). 3 Daniel A. Siedell, Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Essays of Modern Art and Theology in Conversation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015); back cover. 4 Sheila Gallagher, Pneuma Hostis, 2013, gold leafed cigarette butts on wooden armature, 24” diameter, private collection, New York. 5 For a more in depth discussion of chora, see: Richard Kearney, ‘God or Khora?’ in Strangers Gods and Monsters, ed. by Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 191–210; and later in Richard Kearney and Catherine Keller, ‘Beyond the Impossible’, in Reimagining the Sacred, ed. by Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmerman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 46–75 (pp. 74–5); see: also Kearney’s recent work ‘Mystical Eucharistics: Abhishiktananda and Teilhard de Chardin’, in Mysticism in the French Tradition: Eruptions from France, ed. by Louise Nelstrop and Bradley Onishi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 185–204. 6 I am deeply indebted and grateful to Richard Kearney for his many insightful comments regarding Pneuma Hostis. The description here is a collage of our multiple conversations from 2013–2016, some of which were incorporated into and then drawn from Kearney’s essay, ‘God Making: An Essay in Theopoetic Imagination’, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 4 (2017), 31–44. We jointly presented ‘PneumaHostis’ in a two-part lecture entitled ‘God-Making/Making-God’ at the conference ‘Art, Nature, and Spirituality’, Gonzaga University, 28 January 2016. See: Sheila Gallagher, ‘Artist’s Note’, in Reimagining the Sacred, pp. 259–60; see also: Sheila Gallagher and Richard Kearney, Ravishing Far/Near (New York: Dodge Gallery Publications, 2013).

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7 The title of the exhibition Ravishing Far/Near is taken from Margaret Porete, an itinerant mystic of the thirteenth century who was burned at the stake for writing a daring treatise which described the soul becoming one with God in sacred eros. 8 ‘108 is a highly significant number in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In Islam the number 108 is used to refer to God. In Hinduism it is said that there are 108 different lies that people tell, 108 desires, 108 Indian goddess names, and 108 gopis or cowherd girlfriends of Krishna. Buddhists refer to the 108 defilements to avoid and virtues to cultivate. There are also 108 mantra counting beads on a mala’, see: Gallagher and Kearney, Ravishing Far/Near, p. 6. 9 On the importance of dreaming in God’s communication to Jacob, see: Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 188–93. Zornberg notes, ‘Jacob’s sleep, therefore is the basic condition for God’s revelation, it also produces a kind of awe, of estrangement. One extraordinary motif in the midrashic reading of Jacob’s dream is the depiction of the angels “going up and down on it [the ladder]” (28.12). In the midrash in Bereshit Rabbah, the angels are going up and down on Jacob, not the ladder. Jacob is the ladder’, p. 191. On the relationship between ladder and the shape of cross, as well as the role of the unconscious and dreaming in spiritual awakening, see: Mark Patrick Hederman, Kissing the Dark: Connecting with the Unconscious (Dublin: Veritas, 1999). 10 Sheila Gallagher, Plastic Paradisus, 2013, melted plastic trash on armature, 7’ × 5’, private collection, New York. 11 Illumination from a manuscript of Abu Sa’id Ubaid Allah ibn Bakhtyashu, Manafi alHayawan (The Useful Animals) depicting Adam and Eve, Maragheh, Iran, 1294–99. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.500, f. 4v, [accessed 10 January 2017]. 12 Elsewhere I have compared artists to crows or bower birds ‘drawn to trash and shiny things and beautiful concepts to continually inspire them to create and to wonder’ (Sheila Gallagher, ‘Suddenly Seeing: The Aesthetics of the Mystical Moment’ (unpublished lecture, Power of the Word Conference: At the Threshold of Wonder, St Anselmo, Rome, June 2015). I believe this concept of wonder is also a key component of any exploration of the mystical. To quote Abraham Joshua Heschel, philosopher and professor of Jewish mysticism, ‘Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. It is the result of what man does with his higher contemplation’. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Between Man and God: An Interpretation of Judaism, From the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, ed. by Fritz A. Rothschild; with a new foreword by David Hartman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 41. 13 For another layer of meaning between wound and wonder see the narrated visions of the thirteenth-century Cistercian nun, mystic and stigmata bearer Lukardis of Weimar, where the verb stringo is used to convey both ‘to touch lightly’ as well as ‘to wound’, as quoted in Jeffrey M. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 131–4, 258). I would add ‘wonder’ to Hamburger’s observation that in Lukardis’s vision of herself as the blind centurion Longinus ‘sight and insight, palpable sensation and sacramental love, all are condensed into a single vision’: Nuns as Artists, p. 133. 14 Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 15 Passions of the Soul, Article 53: ‘When our first encounter with some object surprises us and we find it novel – i.e., very different from what we formerly knew or from what we supposed it should be – this brings it about that we wonder and are astonished at it. All this can happen before we know whether the object is beneficial to us, so I regard wonder as the first of all the passions’. Rene Descartes, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Steven Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett Classics, 1989), p. 52. 16 Bernard McGinn, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550), The Presence of God, 5 (New York: Herder and Herder, 2015), pp. 47–55, 507–8.

An artist on the art of the mystical moment 163 17 Hafiz, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky (New York: Penguin Compass, 1999), p. 187. 18 Hafiz, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky (New York: Penguin Compass, 2006), p. 41. 19 Sheila Gallagher, Cumulonimbus, 2007, live flower installation, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 12 × 9’. 20 William Johnston and Thomas Merton, The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Fordham University, 2000), pp. 51–66. 21 The Cloud of Unknowing and Book of Privy Counselling, ed. and trans. by William Johnson (New York: Image Books, 1973), p. 100.

Bibliography Manuscripts New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.500, [accessed 10 January 2017]

Primary The Cloud of Unknowing and Book of Privy Counselling, ed. and trans. by William Johnson (New York: Image Books, 1973) Descartes, René, Passions of the Soul, trans. by Steven Voss (Indianapolis: Hacket Classics, 1989) Gallagher, Sheila, Cumulonimbus, 2007, temporary live flower installation, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA ———, Jacob’s Ladder, 2013, gold-leafed cigarette butts with pins, 156 × 2.5”, private collection, New York ———, Plastic Paradisus, 2013, melted plastic trash on armature, 7 × 5’, private collection, New York ———, Pneuma Hostis, 2013, gold leafed cigarette butts on wooden armature, 24” diameter, private collection, New York ———, Smoke Elephant, 2013, smoke on canvas, 60 × 40”, private collection, Boston, MA ———, Tired of Speaking Sweetly (still), 2013, single-channel video, collection of the artist, Boston, MA Hafiz, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky (New York: Penguin Compass, 1999) Hafiz, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky (New York: Penguin Compass, 2006)

Secondary Fisher, Philip, Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) Gallagher, Sheila, ‘Artist’s Note’, in Reimagining the Sacred, ed. by Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmerman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 259–60 ———, ‘Suddenly Seeing: The Aesthetics of the Mystical Moment’ (unpublished lecture, Power of the Word Conference: At the Threshold of Wonder, St Anselmo, Rome, June 2015)

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Gallagher, Sheila and Richard Kearney, Ravishing Far/Near (New York: Dodge Gallery Publications, 2013) ———, ‘God-Making/Making-God’ (unpublished conference presentation, Art, Spirituality, Nature, Gonzaga University, 28 January 2016) Hamburger, Jeffrey M., Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1995) Hederman, Mark Patrick, Kissing the Dark: Connecting with the Unconscious (Dublin: Veritas, 1999) Heschel, Abraham Joshua, Between Man and God: An Interpretation of Judaism, ed. by Fritz A. Rothschild (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997) Johnston, William and Thomas Merton, The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000) Kearney, Richard, ‘God or Khora?’, in Strangers Gods and Monsters, ed. by Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 2002) ———, ‘Mystical Eucharistics: Abhishiktananda and Teilhard de Chardin’, in Mysticism in the French Tradition: Eruptions from France, ed. by Louise Nelstrop and Bradley Onishi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 185–204 ———, ‘God Making: An Essay in Theopoetic Imagination’, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 4 (2017), 31–44 Kearney, Richard and Catherine Keller, ‘Beyond the Impossible’, in Reimagining the Sacred, ed. by Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmerman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 46–75 Koestler, Arthur, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964) McGinn, Bernard, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550), The Presence of God, 5 (New York: Herder and Herder, 2015) Siedell, Daniel A., Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Essays of Modern Art and Theology in Conversation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015) Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1995)

8

The Desert of Religion A voice and images in the wilderness Anne Mouron

Introduction In the National Gallery in London, there is an unfinished painting by Michelangelo portraying, on a desert background, the Virgin Mary with Christ and John the Baptist as children, accompanied by four angels (‘The Manchester Madonna’). This painting inspired the artist and poet Sebastian Evans (1830–1909), who had an interest in medieval texts, with the following lines: For he heard, though an Angel’s sighing Made fainter the whispered word, Of a Voice in the wilderness crying – ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord!’ [. . .] Thus I saw them, I, Michel, those seven, In the Gardens one morning in May: They were neither on earth or in heaven, Yet I saw them clear as the day. And I drew.1 Unlike Evans’ poem, The Desert of Religion does not quote the Gospel (Mark 1.3.), but it features an illustration of John the Baptist who says, in one of the surviving manuscripts of the text: ‘I am a voice in wildernes, / Criinge with my steuen, / Dose [worthy] penance and ȝow dres / Vnto ȝoure lorde of heuene’.2 The Desert of Religion is a Middle English devotional poem of the first half of the fifteenth century. It is mostly known to medieval scholars for its image of Richard Rolle which features in all of its extant manuscripts.3 It is perhaps less known that each and every folio of the text presents the reader with illustrations that were specifically designed to accompany and complement the text and without which the latter cannot be read satisfactorily. This essay examines how text and images work together within The Desert of Religion, how the manuscript context changes and enriches the reader’s experience, and how the reading of the poem demands the reader’s active participation. The Desert of Religion comprises twenty sections consisting each of a recto and a verso, as well as what could be termed a Prologue at the beginning and

166 Anne Mouron an Epilogue at the end. It is 943 lines long and written in rhyming couplets. The poem survives as one text, among others, in three manuscripts held by the British Library: MS Additional 37049; MS Cotton Faustina B.vi, pars ii; and MS Stowe 39, and it is usually accepted that all three manuscripts come from monastic establishments.4 It is an anonymous poem, the only indication of authorship within the text being a reference to a ‘haly man’.5 All three manuscripts contain other texts and images besides The Desert of Religion, but only MS Additional 37049 could be described as ‘An Illustrated Yorkshire Carthusian Religious Miscellany’, as it offers the reader a plethora of ‘image-texts’.6 Although this article mentions all three manuscripts, its main focus is on MS Additional 37049. As with many other medieval works, the title, The Desert of Religion, is editorial, but nevertheless entirely justified, as the poem begins with a Latin quotation from Psalm 54.8: ‘Elongaui fugiens, et mansi in solitudine’ which the text translates as: ‘Fleand I fled fra mare and les, / And dwelled in herd wyldernes’.7 This verse is often mentioned by devotional writers as an incentive to leave the world for the solitude of God. Such is the case, for example, in Richard Rolle’s Incendium Amoris in a chapter which treats of the solitary life.8 This first scriptural quotation in The Desert of Religion is followed a few lines down by a second Latin Biblical quotation, this time from the Gospel according to St Matthew 4.1: ‘Ductus est Jhesus in desertum a Spiritu, ut tentaretur’ which is regularly chosen for the theme of Lent sermons, thus emphasising the necessity for penance.9 The last Latin quotation to feature in The Desert of Religion occurs at the very end of the text and is from Deuteronomy 32.10: ‘Inuenit eum in terra deserta in loco horroris et vastae solitudinis’, again underlining the same concept of desert or wilderness.10 These three quotations are not the only allusions to Biblical verses in the Desert, but they are the only ones in Latin and their importance is highlighted by their position in the text, two in the Prologue and one in the Epilogue.11 These three Latin Biblical quotations are also all glossed by the poem, but in each case, it is only one word which is given an explanation, ‘wyldernes’ or ‘deserte’: Þis wyldernes betakens wele / Herd penaunce þat men suld fele / Þat fleys fra þe werld. For þe deserte of religioune / Is cald a felde of temptacioune. Be þis deserte þou vnderstand / Penaunce of hert sorowand.12 As these explanations demonstrate, the wilderness referred to by the poem is not so much a location as a state of mind or soul. Indeed in the Prologue alone, the text specifically refers to ‘gastely wyldernes’, ‘gastely foreste’, and ‘gastely garthe’.13 As one French thirteenth-century gloss on Psalm 54.8 aptly says, ‘En mi Rome puet l’en estre el desert, et en la gastine puet l’en trouer le delit et la beuerie de Babiloine’!14 This state of affairs has led at least one scholar to think that the poem’s audience may not necessarily be monastic.15 With this emphasis on penance and temptation, it will come as no surprise then, that The Desert of Religion focuses on catechetical Christian doctrine: the Seven Virtues, particularly Humility and Chastity; the Seven Deadly Sins, more specifically

The Desert of Religion 167 Pride and Accidia, the latter being usually regarded as a specific monastic expression of Sloth. It also includes the Creed, the Seven Sacraments, the Seven Works of Mercy, the Ten Commandments, and so on. As one might expect from this list of subjects, there are numerous other short catechetical treatises written in the vernacular after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. These, however, usually move from one subject to the next – from the Seven Deadly Sins to the Seven Virtues, for example – sometimes simply listing Sins and Virtues, and sometimes providing a longer analysis for each sin and virtue, but without an overal structure which binds together the separate subjects treated in these short texts.16 The Desert of Religion here differs from these other works in that it gives the poem an overall allegorical framework which brings together its twenty sections. Although, as has been seen earlier, the poem begins with a reference to the desert, it tells the reader at the end of the Prologue: ‘In þis gastely foreste groves / Trees with braunches and boghes: / Sum groves to heuen and sum to hell, / Sum to stande and sum to fell, / Svm to grove in gastely garthe, / [And sum to grub awai with þe swarth]’.17 Each subsequent section of the poem (with the exception of the Epilogue) is then regarded as a ‘tre’. The first section, for example, begins with the following words: ‘Þe fyrste tre of þis forest schene / Is þe tre of vertus þat ay is clene, / Þat in mekenes festis his rotes’.18 Of course, the use of such metaphorical trees occurs elsewhere in medieval literature.19 But The Desert of Religion differs from these other texts in that the allegory is sustained throughout the poem, with the reader referred to at one point as a ‘gode gardynere’ who has to tend to the good trees and get rid of the bad ones, i.e. to ‘fell [them] doune into þe fyre’, if he wishes ‘Heuen [. . .] [to] be [his] hyre’.20

1) Tree-diagrams In The Desert of Religion, this verbal image, the forest allegory, is accompanied in each section by a diagram drawn in the shape of a tree which repeats or expands in an easy memorable form the doctrine expounded in the facing text. For example, as has been mentioned above, the text of The Desert of Religion’s First Tree begins: ‘Þe fyrste tre of þis forest schene / Is þe tre of vertus þat ay is clene, / Þat in mekenes festis his rotes’.21 The accompanying tree-diagram repeats on its root: ‘Þe rote spryngand is meknes / Of al vertewes mare and les’ and the inscription on its trunk reads: ‘In verteus suld al men floresche, / And froyt bryng forth as þir trees’.22 The Seven Virtues (Three Theological and Four Cardinal) form the seven branches of the tree and each branch is then divided up into seven leaves or sub-virtues. The first branch ‘Faythe’, for example, has the following leaves: ‘Chastite’, ‘Contynence’, ‘Clennes of þoght’, ‘Maydenhede’, ‘Clennes of body’, ‘Deuocion’ and ‘Sympilnes’.23 One of the surviving manuscripts, MS Cotton Faustina, varies the shape of the leaves of its tree-diagrams, to include one tree with finely drawn oak leaves and acorns to reinforce the illusion of a real forest.24 In MS Additional 37049, this illusion extends beyond The Desert of Religion as there are representations of trees elsewhere in the manuscript. On folio 25r, for example, next to the end of a

168 Anne Mouron poem describing Christ, one finds a tree-diagram entitled: ‘Arbor amoris / þe tre of luf’.25 The diagram has three branches with one leaf each: ‘Dilige Deum patrem fortiter. Luf God þe fadyr strangly’, ‘Luf God þe son wysely’, and ‘Luf God þe holy gost of al þi mynde swetly’.26 At the foot of the tree one finds the following words: ‘Dilige Deum super omnia. Luf God abowne al thynges’.27 A similar instruction is enjoined to the reader of The Desert of Religion: ‘þou lufe God þat þe boght / With all þi hert, and all þi thoght, / And all þi vertu, and þi witt, / And all þi mynde togedyr knytt’.28 But this is not the only instance of a tree-diagram elsewhere in this manuscript. There is another diagram on folio 38r which is even more directly relevant to The Desert of Religion. It is entitled at the bottom: ‘Þe froyte of relygyon’29 and has seven leaves, a number of which, ‘Luf to God and to his breþer’, ‘To oyse besely prayer’, and ‘To forsake erthly þinges’, again anticipate advice later proffered in The Desert of Religion.30 In addition to this, the text placed alongside the treediagram on folio 38v is given the rubric ‘Of þe state of religion’ and is excerpted from the Speculum vitae, the main source for The Desert of Religion itself. Indeed ‘Of þe state of religion’ begins with the following lines which are repeated almost verbatim in The Desert of Religion: Of þe State of Religion The state of religioune Suld be þorow right intencione Far fro þe warld, as þe boke telles, Als in deserte þer no man dwelles Þat he þat þis state kepis wele Þe maners of þe warld noght fele.31 The Desert of Religion Þe state of relygioune Suld be, thurgh right intencioune, Far fra þe werld, als þe boke telles, Als in deserte whar na man dwelles. For he þat kepes þat [state] wele Þe maners of þe werld suld not fele.32 Besides these two tree-diagrams there are still a number of other illustrations featuring trees in MS Additional 37049 outside of The Desert of Religion. There is, for example, a short extract from Barlaam and Josaphat on folio 19v illustrated by a man climbing into a tree, with the following inscription in the top leaf: ‘mans lyfe’.33 On folio 67v Christ is portrayed crucified on a tree with three leaves bearing the following inscriptions: ‘þe tre of lyfe’ on the top leaf, with ‘luf’ on the left leaf and ‘char[i]te’ on the right leaf.34 The Desert of Religion was first edited by Walter Hübner in 1911, but his edition was only a partial one in that he only edited the text of the poem.35 That

The Desert of Religion 169 the text was always meant to be accompanied by illustrations of tree-diagrams is obvious from the very beginning of the work. The First Tree, for instance, attracts the reader’s attention to the facing diagram thus: ‘In seuen braunches of þis tre, / [Þe] seuen vertus may men se; / And out of ilka vertu euen / Sprynges other vertus in leves seuen, / Þat forth brynges þe froyte of lyfe’,36 and similar remarks punctuate the text at regular intervals throughout The Desert of Religion.37 Although in other sections of the poem the text often lists all the branches of the tree, in the First Tree, the text itself does not list them nor the further subdivisions (i.e. the seven leaves which are attached to each branch), but the diagram does (as has been mentioned earlier). It is perhaps in the Epilogue, though, that the poem provides the fullest explanation of the role of the tree-diagrams: Take gude kepe to þis tretis, Þat here is writen on englis, For itt is taken of bokes sere, And made groveand in treys here, Bath þat þou may study and see Vertus to folow and vices to flee.38 This last example not only reiterates that the poem consists of text and treediagrams, it also clearly states the next step: to ‘study and see’. Seeing (or reading the tree-diagrams) in itself is not enough and the poem invites reflection in his reader with such expressions in the text as ‘betakens’, ‘betakenes’, ‘is cald’, ‘Þarfor men calles [it] wyldernes’, etc.39 In other words, the reader must be actively involved, and seeing and reading must be followed by interpretation, reflection, and meditation prompted by the tree-diagrams.40 The reader’s active involvement in studying and understanding the lists of doctrinal concepts provided him by The Desert of Religion becomes even more obvious when one compares the poem to its main source, the Speculum vitae. The poem’s Eighth Tree, for example, lists the Seven Sacraments and the Seven Virtues with lines taken from the Speculum vitae: And gode vertus, als we may fele, And namely with þir vertuse seuen Þat in þis tre groves vpward euen: [Þ]at is fayth, hope, and charyte, And sleght, þat thurgh grace bus be, [M]ethfulnes, strenght, and ryghtwisnes, Thurgh whilk ilk gode man gouernd es. [Þ]ir thre, deuyne vertus men calles, And þir four efter, cardynalles. Dyuyne, men calles þe fyrst thre, Fayth, and hope and charyte, For þir thre ordayns specialy All þe hert to God Allmyghty.41

170 Anne Mouron But the Speculum vitae continues thus: First Trouthe, als says Saynt Austyn, Þat es þe first Vertu Dyuyne, Puttes vs here vnder Goddis lawe And makes vs þat Lorde to knawe Of wham we halde, als he vouches saue, Alle þe godes þat we here haue. Right Trouth, als says þis clerkes Es bigynnyng of alle gode werkes; Trouth withouten gode werk es dede, For of alle gode werkes it es hede. Thurgh werkes anely na man may Withouten Trouth Godde wele pay.42 The Speculum vitae then examines each of the remaining six virtues.43 In The Desert of Religion, though, it is the reader’s responsibility to engage in such explanations. They are not provided by the poem, but one can sometimes guess where the reader should begin his meditation. The Third and Fourth Tree-diagrams, for example, list without any acknowledgment, the degrees of humility and pride taken from Bernard of Clairvaux’s De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae.44 As Bernard’s text immediately achieved fame and renown, it is not impossible that a fifteenth-century monk would be aware of the origin of these diagrams, and start his reflection by recalling Bernard’s text. In MS Additional 37049 the reader may also reflect and meditate on other texts and images present in the manuscript. The Desert of Religion’s Tenth Tree focuses on the Ten Commandments, but an earlier text in the manuscript already lists and explains the Ten Commandments in verse.45 Thus when the reader of The Desert of Religion is told that the first commandment is ‘withouten erroure, / Þat þou sall na fals goddes honoure’ (in the text) and ‘Hafe no God bot one’ (in the tree-diagram),46 he may very well recall to his mind the following lines from the earlier text: ‘Primum mandatum. Non habebis Deo alienos. / Þe fyrst comawndment: / Thow sal luf God with hert intere, / With al þi saule and al þi myght; / Oþer God in no manere / Þow sal not hafe, be day nor nyght’.47 Of course, such a method of multiple reading is not unique to The Desert of Religion. Sylvia Huot, for example, discusses what she calls ‘polytextual reading’ in Books of Hours, saying that the ‘reading of one text becomes a process of reading multiple “virtual” texts. These supplemental texts may be produced through intellectual and imaginative processes of memory and association, whereby a single text becomes a springboard for the recollection and reconsideration of many others’.48 How much would be read into these concepts depends on the reader himself, and his reading of the poem (text and tree-diagrams) is never fixed but evolves at each new reading and is enriched by the knowledge he may have accumulated since he last read the poem. In other words, in this instance, it is not the text itself which may be described as ‘en mouvance’, but the reader’s experience of it.49

The Desert of Religion 171

2) The role of the five senses in reading The Desert of Religion The Desert of Religion repeatedly attracts his reader’s attention ‘here [to] se’50 the tree-diagrams, but it further emphasises the visual aspect of the forest in a number of ways: by emphasising its beauty with adjectives such as ‘schene’ and ‘fayre’;51 by specifying the colour of some of the trees: the third tree ‘wynter and somer is ay grene’, the eleventh’s ‘leves’ are ‘wynter and somer elyke grene’, the fourteenth ‘is full white’, and the seventheenth ‘is grene all tymes of þe ȝere’;52 and by noting the size of trees: the thirteenth tree ‘in wyldernes sprynges full hee’, and the sixteenth ‘spredes his boghes bath wyde and hee’.53 As Brunetto Latini points out in Li Livres dou Tresor, sight is usually regarded as the highest and most important of the Five Senses: Mas li cors a .v. autres sens: veoir, oïr, odorer, guster, tochier, & ensi com li uns avanse l’autre por onrobelité de son estage, tout autressi avanse li un l’autres por vertu [. . .] & le veoir les sormonte tous & de leu & de dignités.54 There is no denying its importance in The Desert of Religion, but sight is not the only sense mentioned in the poem, for all Five Senses are called upon to play a part in The Desert of Religion which the tree allegory and tree-diagrams throughout facilitate. From its very inception, the reader is told to hear: ‘in þe sawter boke þus we here say’, ‘Þis is þe tre of whylk we here’, the ‘tuelfe degrees of þis werlde’ are ‘ilka day [. . .] sene and herde’, and ‘men may here in sentence say’.55 The sense of smell is also present in the text: the fruit of the fifteenth tree is ‘baske, and bitter of odoure’, the Eighteenth Tree ‘beres full many flour’, and ‘Þe thryd payn [of Hell] is bath filth and stynke’.56 The sense of taste is manifest through the numerous references to the trees’ ‘froyte’ which might be ‘bath bytter and fell’, ‘swete, / And delycyous forto ette’, and ‘ay rype’.57 The sense of touch is not explicitly mentioned but is implicitly referred to in the following lines: ‘þe state of religioune, / [. . .] Suld be scharpe in all thynge / Thurgh scharpenes of strayt lyfynge. / Þat es als a thorne garth to tell’; the fifteenth tree ‘many scharpe thornes forth brynges, / Þat many prykes and makes wrath’, John the Baptist ‘with scharpe clethyng was ouer begone’.58 All these references to the Five Senses perhaps culminate in the Eleventh Tree of the poem, or ‘þe tre [. . .] Of þe fyfe inwytts clene’, which tells the reader: ‘Fra vanytes, with all þi myght, / Þat ar vnleffull, kepe þi syght; / Fra vnlefull heryng, þin eres / Kepe and ditt man saule þat deres’, and so on.59 This involvement of all the Five Senses or Witts in the fight against vices is hardly surprising when one considers other devotional texts of the period such as the Ancrene Wisse’s second part which is ‘of þe heorte warde þurh þe fif wittes’.60 Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet notes, moreover, that in the Middle Ages, if texts recognise ‘l’opposition sens corporels-sens intérieurs’, they also ‘ramènent généralement les cinq sens intérieurs au seul sens commun des philosophes, qu’ils désignent du nom de coeur’.61 She then gives examples of writers (such as Oliver de La Marche or Jacques de Baisieux) who include the heart in the list of five (or

172 Anne Mouron six) senses.62 It will come as no surprise, therefore, that in The Desert of Religion ‘þe tre [. . .] Of þe fyfe inwytts clene’ extends its discussion to include the heart in another common metaphor: All þat God bath lofes and hates, In hert and oute, gase be þir ȝates [i.e. the five senses] [. . .] A castell, mannes hert here is called, Þat with vertuse wele is walled, Or els a cite þat hase gates. Þir fyue betakens þe ȝates, Be þe whilk men gase oute or jn, Or þai þe cite lose or wyn. For if þaites of any cite Be wele sperd, als þai suld be, Þar is na enmys þat may dere Nane þat withjn þe cite ere.63 Later in the text, all surviving manuscripts of the poem include an illustration of a Heart with the rubric ‘Contemplacion’ from which issue branches and leaves inscribed with virtues.64 The Desert of Religion, therefore, does not simply offers his reader a forest of trees so that he ‘may study and see / Vertus to folow and vices to flee’, it also gives him advice as to how to achieve this aim by the control of his Five Senses.65

3) A second series of illustrations: saints and hermits Nicholas Love, in the Proem to The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, tells his reader: Þou þat coueytest to fele treuly þe fruyt of þis boke, þou most with all þi þought & alle þin entent, in þat manere make þe in þi soule present to þoo þinges þat bene here writen seyd or done of oure lord Jesu, & þat bisily, likyngly & abyndyngly, as þei þou herdest hem with þi bodily eres, or sey þaim with þin eyen don, puttyng awei for þe tyme, & leuyng alle oþer occupacions & bisynesses.66 In The Desert of Religion, the tree-diagrams, albeit allegorically, greatly help the reader in ‘mak[ing] [him] in [his] soule present to þoo þinges þat bene here writen’ ‘as þei [he] [. . .] [saw] þaim with [his] eyen don’. But the reader does not merely figuratively place himself in a forest of tree-diagrams by reading and meditating on them, he is also portrayed vicariously in the poem, in a second series of illustrations of saints and hermits, and this is made clear from the very beginning. The Prologue of The Desert of Religion is not illustrated by a tree-diagram, but is accompanied by the illustration of a hermit.67 The hermit is kneeling and praying

The Desert of Religion 173 between two trees and is looking towards the left. This illustration is framed by four rhyming couplets: Jhesu graunt me grace to dres All my dedes with delyte, Þat no beste of þis wyldernes Bytterly me byte. [F]le into þis wyldernes, If þou will be perfite, And hald þe þare in halynes, Als falles to gode hermet.68 The use of the first person singular pronoun in the first two couplets, and the fact that the hermit remains nameless, although other hermits or saints may be named later in the poem, suggest that the reader is to empathise with him. This is made even more obvious by the illustration in MS Stowe 39, where the hermit is given the first four lines in a scroll – ‘Jhesu graunt me grace to dres / All my dedes with delyte, / Þat no beste of þis wyldernes / Bytterly me byte’ – and is surrounded on his left, on the verso folio, by a doctor pointing to Psalms 54.8 – ‘Elongaui fugiens, et mansi in solitudine’ – and on his right by an angel-like figure whose scroll corresponds to the last two couplets – ‘[F]le into þis wyldernes, / If þou will be perfite, / And hald þe þare in halynes, / Als falles to gode hermet’.69 In the subsequent sections of the poem (in all three manuscripts), further illustrations of hermits or saints, many of which actually fled to the wilderness, provide the reader with specific examples to imitate: among others, Paul the First Hermit, Saint Anthony, Mary of Egypt, Mary Magdalene, St Giles and, of course, Richard Rolle. These saints and hermits may have been included in The Desert of Religion for the reader to be inspired by their exemplary lives, but it is not always possible to see why a particular saint or hermit should accompany a given section of the poem. It is noticeable, however, that some of the depictions of saints in The Desert of Religion resemble illustrations of the same saint in manuscripts of Books of Hours, where the litany of saints may be illustrated.70 In The Desert of Religion in MS Cotton Faustina, for example, Mary Magdalene is represented taken up in the air by two angels.71 Similar illustrations occur in the Dunois and Sforza Hours.72 In the Taymouth Hours, Mary of Egypt is represented covered with her hair and depicted between two trees. The accompanying rubric reads: ‘Cy est Marie Gypcian en desert’, which is the way she is depicted in Cotton Faustina.73 In The Desert of Religion in MS Additional 37049 Mary of Egypt is also portrayed in this way but with the addition of an image of the Virgin and child above her to whom she prays.74 The recurrence of praying figures in The Desert of Religion in MS Additional 37049 – whether they are named or recognisable saints praying to God, to Mary, or to a shield with the Wounds of Christ; or unnamed hermits praying to a ladder of virtues, or to birds representing the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost; or still a Benedictine(?) monk praying to a shield presenting him with a

174 Anne Mouron crucifixion – all point to the intercessory role of the saints who can assist the reader in his spiritual battle against the vices.75

4) The Desert of Religion as visual lectio When one considers all three parts of The Desert of Religion together, it becomes obvious that each section of the poem or Tree presents its reader with a text for his lectio, a tree-diagram for his meditatio, and an illustration of a praying hermit for his oratio. The importance of all three exercises and their interconnection is stated in the Livres des enfans Israel: Trois manieres sont d’esperituel exercite. C’est leçons, meditations, et oroisons. Ces trois sont si conjointes que l’une ne puet valoir sans l’autre. Car leçons sans meditation tourne a negligence et a ociosité. Meditations sans leçon mainne en erreur. Et meditations sans oroison engendre vanité. Et oroisons sanz meditation est sans lumiere et sans fervour. Pour ce convient premiers le cuer enfourmer par leçon, et fermer par meditation, et puis refourmer par oroison.76 It could be argued, therefore, that in its combination of text and images, The Desert of Religion offers the reader an intuitive and visual explanation of the necessity and interconnection of all three spiritual exercises. As the layout of the three manuscripts of The Desert of Religion shows, the verso folio is divided into two and presents the text accompanied by the series of hermits and saints, with the recto folio being entirely devoted to the tree-diagram.77 This means that the text is most likely the first thing to be examined by the reader. It is not entirely clear what he does next. Does he look at the hermit illustration first, as he would for the Prologue (since the Prologue is not accompanied by a tree-diagram), and only then deciphers the tree-diagram? Or is there a kind of coming and going between the two series of illustrations of a given section?78 One thing is clear, though, the hermit illustration also requires some deciphering and ‘study[ing]’. First, most such illustrations are accompanied by a number of words. In the First Tree of the poem, for example, the hermit is framed by four rhyming couplets: Fourty ȝer in wyldernes I dwelled in a caue, Whare God of his gret godenes Graunted me forto haue, And ilk day to me gun dres With a raven halfe a lafe. Þar my clathes ware mare and les Of leues þat me gun save. The illustration renders these words visually, and shows Paul the first hermit, in clothes made of leaves and enclosed in a cave, receiving bread from a bird.79

The Desert of Religion 175 Paul’s legenda was probably sufficiently known for the reader to be reminded of the hermit’s life when looking at this illustration. There is a version of the ‘Lyff of Seint Paule the Hermite’ in the Middle English Gilte Legende, for example, which begins thus: ‘Poule the furst hermite, as Seint Ierom saiethe that wrote the lyff of hym, witnessithe that [. . .] he went into a gret deserte and duelled there in a pitte fourti yere witheoute knowlage of man’.80 Perhaps the best known episode of Paul’s life, and of which there are a number of illustrations in manuscripts, is the meeting of Paul the First Hermit and St Anthony.81 The Gilte Legende says later that when they both met ‘anone thei clipped eche other. And whanne dyner tyme come a rauene brought double that he was wont to do of brede, and Seint Antony wondered of this. Thanne Poule said that eueri daye oure Lorde mynistred to hym in suche wise’.82 It may not come as a surprise, then, that the second section of The Desert of Religion is illustrated by St Anthony.83 Furthermore, and this is more specifically the case in MS Additional 37049, the great majority of illustrations of saints and hermits offers the reader additional material to consider. As has been described above, next to the text, the verso folio represents a saint or hermit kneeling, sitting or standing on green grass and between two trees, but there is also a manifestation of heaven and the divinity in the upper half of the folio. In the Prologue, the unnamed hermit has above him an angel holding a shield with the Jesus monogram.84 In the next section, in the First Tree, the illustration of Paul the First Hermit also features an angel and a shield, this time with a depiction of the Five Wounds of Christ.85 In both cases, the hermit is shown praying and looking up to the heavenly sight above him. Note incidentally that the angel is facing the reader and not the hermit below. It would seem, therefore, that independently of the topic treated by the text and tree-diagram, the angel offers the reader a subject for his prayers which enables and highlights his direct relationship with God. If each section of the poem, verso and recto, offers its reader a different subject to read and meditate on, the presence of angels or the divinity in the upper half of the saints-and-hermits series of illustrations, like the allegory of the forest, may be seen as a unifying motif throughout the poem. This means that if on the one hand each open folio must be read, examined and meditated upon as a single unit, then on the other hand it must also be seen and understood together with the other sections of The Desert of Religion. To take just one example, the shields with the name of Jesus or with the Five Wounds that have been referred to are echoed later in the poem by four other shields: a shield representing the Crucifixion, one depicting the Arma Christi (i.e. the instruments of Christ’s Passion), one displaying a different version of the Five Wounds of Christ, and lastly a shield of Faith or ‘Scutum fidei’.86 Each of them also features a monk or hermit praying and looking at the shield above him. As noted previously, MS Additional 37049 has been described as ‘An Illustrated Yorkshire Carthusian Religious Miscellany’ and contains a great number of texts and images. Reading words and images in The Desert of Religion in this manuscript, therefore, is not done in isolation but is enhanced by the presence of similar images in the other texts in the manuscript, as has already been pointed

176 Anne Mouron out with the presence of some simplified tree-diagrams outside of The Desert of Religion, but this reading and looking throughout the manuscript goes far beyond trees. The Desert of Religion in all three manuscripts but even more so in MS Additional 37049 contains depictions of the Crucifixion and the Wounds of Christ. In MS Additional 37049, such illustrations also permeate the whole of the manuscript. On folio 20r, for example, in addition to the text of the Querela divina and Responsio humana, the manuscript offers an illustration of Christ, covered with blood and showing his wounds, next to a Heart depicting the Five Wounds, and with a hermit kneeling in prayer at his feet.87 On folio 24r, above a short lyric, there is a similar image of Christ and his Heart (with one wound), with a Carthusian monk praying at the bottom of the folio.88 Another striking depiction of the Crucifixion occurs on folio 67v (i.e., placed in the manuscript after The Desert of Religion), where Christ is portrayed crucified on a tree, his body covered with drops of blood, and surrounded by the Arma Christi. At the bottom of the treecross a Carthusian is praying to the image.89 The text on the left of the illustration has the rubric: ‘Take gode hede wele of þis medytac[i]on’.90 This depiction of the Crucifixion illustrates another aspect of MS Additional 37049 in that the themes and images present throughout (here: tree, cross, Arma Christi, drops of blood, praying religious) are inter-woven like the different strands of a tapestry, and to look at one strand will bring to mind the others.91 This inter-weaving is all the more manifest when one considers the layout of many folios in MS Additional 37049. In two of these images, folios 20v and 67v, the format used is identical to the layout of The Desert of Religion’s, with the folio divided into two vertically, with a text on the left and on the right an image with a praying hermit or monk.92 In all three illustrations (folios 20v, 24r, and 67v), moreover, the accompanying texts enjoin the reader to think of Christ’s Passion. The presence of the hearts and the crucifixion on folios 20r, 24r and 67v cannot but remind the reader of the shields depicted in The Desert of Religion, and vice-versa.93 However, in the latter, the shields are not complemented by texts directly relevant to them, and so the earlier or later occurrences of such images outside of The Desert of Religion in the manuscript where they are accompanied with relevant texts, provide the reader with words to meditate on or to remember whilst viewing the images of shields in The Desert of Religion. As has been implied throughout this chapter, this suggests that the reader was reading the manuscript forwards and backwards for which there is no evidence in the manuscript itself. But, as Jessica Brantley noted: the fifteenth-century reader of Additional 37049 may have encountered its texts and images in sequence, beginning at the start and reading meticulously through to the end. More likely, the medieval consumer [. . .] moved around and through it in unpredictable and varied ways, dwelling first upon one image-text, backtracking to another, finally jumping ahead, omitting some, often repeating one or more.94 Of course, the reader may also recall similar images that he may have encountered elsewhere, as for instance in Books of Hours, which may contain illustrations of

The Desert of Religion 177 the Arma Christi, as is the case in a fourteenth-century manuscript in the Arsenal Library in Paris which contains the illustration of a shield with the Arma Christi accompanied by a short text explaining what they mean.95

Conclusion To borrow and extend Sylvia Huot’s phrase, in his polytextual and polyvisual reading, looking at, but also experiencing The Desert of Religion with all his senses, the reader of the poem in MS Additional 37049 may be helped in his meditations by remembering texts and images encountered elsewhere and sometimes in the same manuscript. In this regard, it is interesting to note that in MS Additional 37049, The Desert of Religion is not only the longest text to feature in the codex, but is also placed more or less in its middle. The present binding of the manuscript is dated ‘post-1600’ by the British Library,96 and there is evidence that the order of items in the manuscript is not always the original one, so it is not possible to say if The Desert of Religion was deliberately placed at its heart. Whether or not this was the case, The Desert of Religion, in its uniqueness of a text accompanied by two series of illustrations in all of its three surviving versions, offers the reader a lesson in reading, meditating and praying that engages the three Augustinian aspects of the mind: his will, his memory and his understanding. Of course other works do this too, but perhaps no other ‘image-text’ enhances its reader’s spiritual life in such a remarkable and distinctive fashion.97

Notes 1 Sebastian Evans, ‘Michel Angelo: Of His Madonna in the National Gallery’, in In the Studio: A Decade of Poems [with Some Verse Translations] (London: Macmillan and Co., 1875), pp. 115–24 (pp. 122–3). 2 London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B VI, pars ii, f. 12v. ‘I am a voice in the wilderness, shouting with my voice: do worthy penance and turn your attention to your Lord in Heaven’. 3 See London, British Library, MS Add. 37049, f. 52v (the whole manuscript has been digitised and is available on the British Library website, [accessed 10 March 2017]); British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B VI, pars ii, f. 8v; British Library, MS Stowe 39, f. 16v. 4 MS Add. 37049 comes probably from a Carthusian house, possibly Mount Grace; MS Cotton Faustina B VI, pars ii, perhaps from a Benedictine monastery in the North Riding; and MS Stowe 39 from a ‘nunnery (probably Benedictine), perhaps in one neighbourhood of the North Riding’. See Anthony Ian Doyle, ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the 14th, 15th and early 16th Centuries’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1953), 2 vols, II, pp. 191–3. 5 The Desert of Religion, l. 928, ed. by Anne Mouron, forthcoming. This edition is based on MS Add. 37049. I have argued elsewhere that the poem may be of Carthusian origin. See Anne Mouron, ‘An Edition of The Desert of Religion and its Theological Background’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1996), 2 vols, I, pp. 19–29. The thesis is an edition of MS Cotton Faustina B VI, pars ii (it was written under the name McGovern-Mouron). 6 The quotation is taken from James Hogg’s title, ‘An Illustrated Yorkshire Carthusian Religious Miscellany, BL, MS Add. 37049’, Analecta Cartusiana, 95, 3 vols (1981).

178 Anne Mouron

7

8

9 10 11

12

13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20

The manuscript contains well over 77 items spread over 96 folios. These include texts and images from many works, including extracts from the Prick of Conscience, Richard Rolle’s Ego dormio, a dialogue in verse between the body and worms, a poem on the foundation of the Carthusian Order, etc. MS Cotton Faustina and MS Stowe, both much shorter manuscripts, have only a few texts and images besides The Desert of Religion. For a description of all three manuscripts including their contents, see Desert of Religion, Introduction. For the phrase ‘image-texts’, see note 97 below. Desert of Religion, ll. 1–5, my emphasis (all italics in quotations are mine). ‘Lo, I have gone far off flying away; and I abode in the wilderness (Douay Rheims, all biblical translations are from this version); ‘Fleeing, I fled from more and less, / And dwelled in hard wilderness’. Unless otherwise stated all translations from Latin, Middle English, and Old French are mine. See Richard Rolle, The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. by Margaret Deanesly, University of Manchester History Series, 26 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1915), p. 181; The Fire of Love, trans. by Clifton Wolters, Penguin Classics (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972; repr. 1981), p. 85. Desert of Religion, l. 20. ‘Then Jesus was led by the spirit into the desert, to be tempted by the devil’ (Douay Rheims). See, for example, Gregory the Great, ‘Homilia XVI, Liber Primum’, in XL Homiliarum in evangelia libri duo, PL 76. 1134D–38C. Desert of Religion, l. 901, ‘He found him in a desert land, in a place of horror, and of vast wilderness’. The poem also quotes Psalms 1.3 but only in English: ‘Þis is þe tre of whylk we here / Þat Dauyd of spekes in þe sawtere: / “Þe ryghtwys is als a tre þat standes / Besyde þe course of þe water strandes, / And gyfes his froyte in conabill tyme; / His lefe sall nother fade ne dwyne”’, Desert of Religion, ll. 83–8. Respectively, Desert of Religion, ll. 6–8; 21–2; 906–7. ‘This wilderness well betokens hard penance that men who flee from the world should feel’; ‘For the desert of religion is called a field of temptation’; ‘You must understand by this [word] ‘desert’ penance from a sorrowing heart’. Desert of Religion, ll. 9, 43, 47. ‘Spiritual wilderness’, ‘spiritual forest’, ‘spiritual yard (enclosed)’. The poem later mentions: ‘gastely foreste’, l. 473, ‘gastely gardyn’, l. 596, and again ‘gastely wildernes’, l. 897. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS francais 963, p. 13 (MS appears to be paginated). ‘In the middle of Rome, one can be in a desert, and in the wilderness one can find the pleasures and drunkeness of Babylon’. Boyda Johnstone argues that MS Stowe 39, which includes The Desert of Religion, was written for ‘spiritually ambitious laywomen’. See Boyda Johnstone, ‘Theatre of the Mind: Devotional Performance in British Library MS Stowe 39’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Calgary, 2010), p. 77. See Robert Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, ed. by Jonathan Burke Severs and Albert E. Hartung, 9 vols (New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967– 1993), VII (1986), pp. 2255–378, 2467–582 (esp. 2270–8). Desert of Religion, ll. 43–48. ‘In this spiritual forest grow trees with branches and boughs: some grow to heaven and some to hell, some to stand and some to be felled, some to sprout in a spiritual yard, and some to be removed by digging with the turf’. Desert of Religion, ll. 49–51. ‘The first tree of this beautiful forest is the tree of virtues which is always chaste and firmly plants its roots in meekness’. Perhaps Langland’s Tree of Charity in Passus 16 of Piers Plowman will be the first to come to mind. See William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Aubrey Vincent Carlyle Schmidt, new edn. (London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1987), pp. 198–201. Desert of Religion, ll. 209–12. ‘Good gardner’, ‘fell them down into the fire’, ‘heaven to be his reward’. For an examination of The Desert of Religion and medieval garden

The Desert of Religion 179

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31 32 33

34 35 36

treatises, see Anne Mouron, ‘The Desert of Religion: A Textual and Visual Compilation’, in Proceedings of Late Medieval Religiosity in England. The Evidence of Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century Devotional Compilations (Turhout: Brepols, forthcoming). Desert of Religion, ll. 49–51. For a translation of these lines, see above note 18. For the First Tree and Tree-diagram, see MS Add. 37049, ff. 46v–47r. Desert of Religion, f. 47r. ‘The root springing [here] is meekness of all virtues more and less’, ‘All men should flourish in virtues and bring forth fruit as these trees [do]’. Desert of Religion, f. 47r. ‘Chastity’, ‘Continence’, ‘Purity of thought’, ‘Virginity’, ‘Purity of body’, ‘Devotion’, ‘Innocence’. See MS Cotton Faustina B VI, pars ii, f. 19r. Note that MS Add. 37049 also varies the shapes of leaves in the diagrams, including oak leaves, but with much less artistic skills. See MS Add. 37049, ff. 55r and 60r. ‘The tree of love’ (in Latin and repeated in Middle English). ‘Love God the Father strongly’ (in Latin and Middle English), ‘Love God the Son wisely’, and ‘Love God the Holy Ghost with all your mind lovingly’. ‘Love God above all things’ (in Latin and Middle English). Desert of Religion, ll. 455–58. ‘Love God who bought you with all your heart, and all your thought, and all your strength, and your knowledge and all your mind joined together’. The Desert of Religion explains in its section on the Ten Commandments: ‘Þir ten commaundmentes on raw / Ar taken oute of þe ald law, / And closed in twa of þe new, / Þat in þe rote þou se grew’ (Desert of Religion, ll. 451–4). The text does not mention the second, but the tree-diagram does: ‘And luf þi neghbour as þiselfe’ (Desert of Religion, f. 56r). ‘The fruit of religion’. ‘Love to God and to one’s brethren’, ‘To practice prayer diligently’, and ‘To forsake earthly things’. The Desert of Religion’s Tenth Tree-diagram tells the reader ‘Luf þi Lord God of al þi hert, of [al] þi saule, and of al þi vertew’ and ‘And luf þi neghbour as þiselfe’; the seventh degree of perfection in the Seventeenth Tree is: ‘orisone, als telles þe text’; the Prologue enjoins the reader to ‘fley [. . .] fra þe werld (þat es þe flesch)’, Desert of Religion, respectively, f. 56r , ll. 741, 8. MS Add. 37049, f. 37v. ‘Of the state of religion’ / ‘The state of religion, through the right intention, should be far from the world, as the book tells, as in deserts where no man dwells, so that he that keeps this state well should not feel the ways of the world’. Desert of Religion, ll. 223–8. ‘The state of religion, through the right intention, should be far from the world, as the book tells, as in deserts where no man dwells. For he that keeps that state well should not feel the ways of the world’. The illustration represents a man who is pursued by a unicorn and finds refuge in a tree whose roots are gnawed by two mice, one white (with the inscription: ‘day’) and the other black (with the inscription: ‘nyght’). An inscription at the top of the tree reads ‘mans life’, and a Mouth of Hell opens under its roots. This image clearly depicts the parable Barlaam tells Josaphat in order to urge him to leave the world. See Gui de Cambrai, Barlaam and Josaphat, trans. by Peggy McCracken, intro. by Donald S. Lopez, Jr (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), pp. 38–9. ‘The tree of life’, ‘Love’, ‘Charity’ (i.e. Love towards God and one’s neighbour). There are still other illustrations containing trees in MS Add. 37049, ff. 26r, 69v, 84r, as well as smaller trees on many other folios. See ‘The Desert of Religion’, ed. by Walter Hübner, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprache und Literaturen, 126 (1911), 56–74, 360–4. He included the illustration of Richard Rolle from all three manuscripts. Desert of Religion, ll. 77–81. ‘In the seven branches of this tree men may see the seven virtues; and out of each virtue equally spring other virtues in seven leaves which bring forth the fruit of life’. Note that the text specifically says ‘[Þe] seuen vertus may men se’, not ‘read’ or ‘understand’, but ‘se’.

180 Anne Mouron 37 See Desert of Religion, ll. 120, 133, 165, 205, 218, 303, 454, 563, 728, 734, 770, 808, ff. 49r, 60r, 61r. Note that the extract of Barlaam and Josaphat mentioned above also insists on the illustration. It begins: ‘Behalde here as þou may se / A man standyng in a tree / And ane vnycorne fast persewyng hym / Þat caused hym in þe tre to clym’, MS Add. 37049, f. 19v. 38 Desert of Religion, ll. 920–25. ‘Take good notice of this treatise which is here written in English, for it is taken of many books and made growing here in trees, that you may both study and see virtues to follow and vices to flee’. 39 Desert of Religion, ll. 6, 55, 22, 28. ‘Betokens’, ‘is called’, ‘Therefor men call it wilderness’. 40 Earlier in the poem, the reader is told about the Fifteenth Tree: ‘Bot men may vnderstand and se / Þat wikked tonge is þe tre’, Desert of Religion, ll. 647–8. 41 Desert of Religion, ll. 364–76. These lines are taken from the Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition, ed. by Ralph Hanna, EETS, os 331–32, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), I, p. 62, ll. 1786–98. ‘And good virtues, as we may feel, and namely with these seven virtues that grow upwards in this tree evenly: that is Faith, Hope, and Love, and Prudence (that must be through grace), Temperance, Strength, and Justice, through which every good man is governed. These three men call divine [i.e. theological] virtues, and these four following cardinal [virtues]. Men call the first three divine, Faith, Hope, and Love, for these three especially prepare the heart to God Almighty’. 42 Speculum vitae, I, pp. 62–3, ll. 1799–810. ‘First Faith, as St Augustine says, that is the first divine virtue, places us here under God’s law and makes us to know that Lord of whom we hold all the goods that we have here, as he grants them [to us]. Right Faith is the beginning of all good deeds, as these clerics say; Faith without good deeds is dead, for it is the source of all good deeds. Through deeds only and without Faith no man may well please God’. 43 Speculum vitae, I, pp. 62–74, ll. 1811–2158. 44 Desert of Religion, ff. 49r, 50r. 45 MS Add. 37049, f. 20v. This text is extracted from The Speculum Christiani. For an edition of the text, see Brant Lee Doty, ‘An Edition of British Museum Manuscript Additional 37049: A Religious Miscellany’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Michigan State University, 1969), pp. 126–30. 46 Desert of Religion, ll. 437–8, f. 56r. ‘Without error, you shall not honour any fals god’, ‘Have no God but one’. 47 MS. Add. 37049, f. 20v; Doty, ‘An Edition of British Museum Manuscript Additional 37049’, p. 127. ‘The first commandment. You shall have no strange God [Latin]. The first commandment: you shall love God with your whole heart, with all your soul and all your might; in no way you shall have any other God by day or night’. 48 Sylvia Huot, ‘Polytextual Reading: The Meditative Reading of Real and Metaphorical Books’, in Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages, ed. by Mark Chinca and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 203–22 (p. 203). 49 The concept of ‘mouvance’ was developped by the French medievalist Paul Zumthor in his Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972). For more recent discussions of the concept, see: [accessed 2 May 2107]. 50 Desert of Religion, l. 133. ‘Here to see’. 51 Desert of Religion, respectively, ll. 49; 89 and 341. ‘Beautiful’ and ‘fair’. 52 Desert of Religion, respectively, ll. 136, 475–6, 602, 732. ‘Winter and summer is always green’, ‘Winter and summer alike [are] green’, ‘is completely white’, ‘is green at all times of the year’. 53 Desert of Religion, respectively, ll. 560, 686. ‘In wilderness springs very high’, ‘Spreads its boughs both high and wide’. 54 Brunetto Latini, Li livres dou tresor, ed. by Spurgeon W. Baldwin and Paul Banette (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), pp. 12–13.

The Desert of Religion 181

55 56 57 58

59 60 61

62 63

64 65

66

67 68 69 70

‘But the body has five other senses; sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and as one outdoes the other by the honourability of its way of being, likewise one outdoes the other by its strength [. . .] and sight is above them all in place and in dignity’. Desert of Religion, ll. 3, 83, 259–60, 425. ‘In the Book of Psalms thus we hear say’, ‘This is the tree of which we hear’, ‘The twelve degrees of this world [are] each day [. . .] seen and heard’, ‘Men may truly hear say’. Desert of Religion, ll. 676, 794, 827. ‘Sour and bitter of odour’, ‘bears very many flowers’ (although not explicitly commented upon, ‘flour’ suggests the perfume of flowers), ‘the third pain [of Hell] is both filth and stink’. Desert of Religion, ll. 94, 169–70, 137. ‘Fruit’, ‘both bitter and hard to digest’, ‘sweet and delicious to eat’, ‘always ripe’. For further references to taste in the poem, see ll. 179, 221–2, 433–4, 472, 524, 604, 675–6, 793, 815–16, 895. Desert of Religion, ll. 29–33, 644–5, f. 53v. ‘The state of religion [. . .] should be hard in all things through the austerity of a strict life, that is to say as a fence made of thorns’, ‘brings forth many sharp thorns that prick many and make [them] angry’, ‘with rough clothing was covered all over’. Desert of Religion, respectively, f. 57r, ll. 485–8. ‘The tree of the chaste Five Senses’, ‘Keep your sight with all your might from vanities that are unlawful; keep and stop your ears from unlawful hearing that harms man’s soul’. Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Bella Millett, EETS 325–26, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–2006), I, pp. 20–47. ‘Of the keeping of the heart through the Five Senses’. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Le schéma des cinq sens, d’une théorie de la connaissance à la création de formes littéraires’, Micrologus, 10 (c2002), 55–69 (p. 56). ‘The opposition between the bodily senses and the interior senses’, ‘usually refer the five interior senses to the common sense of the philosophers which they call the heart’. See Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Le schéma des cinq sens’, pp. 56–7. Desert of Religion, ll. 497–514. ‘All that God both loves and hates goes into the heart and out through these gates [. . .] The heart of man is called a castle which is well encircled by walls of virtues, or else [it is called] a city that has gates. These five betoken the gates by which men go out or in, before they lose or win the city. For if the gates of any city be well closed, as they should be, there is no enmy that may harm anyone that would be within the city’. MS Add. 37049, f. 62v; MS Cotton Faustina B VI, f. 23r; MS Stowe 39, f. 30v. Note that many of these virtues are already listed in the First Tree-diagram. ‘May study and see virtues to follow and vices to flee’. Moral advice and guidance is also proffered in other ways throughout The Desert of Religion: by the Tree of the Ten Commandments, the Tree of Twelve Abuses in the World, etc. See Desert of Religion, respectively, ll. 429–72, 257–96. Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2004), pp. 12–13. ‘You who desire to truly feel the fruit of this book, you must with all your thought and all your intention make present in your soul in this way those things that are here written, said or done about our Lord Jesus, and this diligently, cheerfully and continually, as though you heard them with your bodily ears, or saw them done with your eyes, at this time putting away and leaving aside all other occupations and business’. MS Add. 37049, f. 46r. Desert of Religion, f. 46r. ‘Jesus, grant me grace to govern all my deeds with delight, so that no beast of this wilderness may bitterly bite me. Flee into this wilderness, if you wish to be perfect, and keep yourself there in holiness, as is appropriate to a good hermit’. MS Stowe 39, ff. 10v – 11r. ‘Lo, I have gone far off flying away; and I abode in the wilderness’. The Middle English quotation is translated in the previous note. As there are no significant variants here, the quote is from MS Add. 37049. Some manuscripts accompany each text with an illustration of the corresponding saint. See for example, Cambridge University Library, Inc.5.D.1.19[2530]. Incidentally,

182 Anne Mouron

71 72 73

74 75 76

77 78 79

80

81

82

83 84 85 86 87 88

Books of Hours sometimes contain catechetical doctrine similar to that which is found in The Desert of Religion. This is the case, for example, in British Library, MS Add. 18852 (or the Hours of Joanna I of Castile) which includes the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, etc. See London, BL, Add. MS 18852, ff. 15r–24v. Note, however, that this manuscript is in Latin, not in the vernacular. Cotton Faustina B VI, pars ii, f. 6v. MS Add. 37049, f. 50v also represents Mary Magdalene born up into the air by angels but adds underneath her the picture of a church. London, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 3, f. 280r; British Library, MS Add. 34294, f. 211v. London, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 13, f. 188v. ‘In this way is Mary of Egypt in the desert’. Note that in this instance the illustration is not part of the Litany of the saints but a bas-de-page illustration in the Office of the Dead. For the illustration of Mary of Egypt in Cotton Faustina B VI, pars ii, see f. 5v. MS Add. 37049, f. 48v. For the illustration of Mary of Egypt in MS Stowe 39, see f. 13v. MS Add. 37049, ff. 47v, 48v, 46v, 49v, 55v, 58v. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 1802, f. 201v. ‘There are three kinds of spiritual exercise: reading, meditation, and prayer. These three are so interconnected that no one of them is worth anything without the others. For reading without meditation turns to negligence and idleness. Meditation without reading leads to error, and meditation without prayer engenders vanity. And prayer without meditation is lacking light and fervour. Therefore one must first inform the heart through reading, and firm it up through meditation, and then reform it through prayer’. The translation is taken from Sylvia Huot, ‘Polytextual Reading’, p. 204. See, for example, MS Add. 37049, ff. 46v–47r. For the mnemonic function of tree-diagrams, see Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 18–41; Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; rep. 1992), pp. 248–57. Desert of Religion, f. 46v. ‘I dwelled in a cave in the wilderness for forty years, where God of his great goodness granted me to have and sent me every day half a loaf [of bread] with a raven. There my clothes were more and less made of leaves that preserved me [from the elements]’. The Gilte Legende, ed. by Richard Frederick Sanger Hamer with the assistance of Vida Russell, EETS, os 327, 328, 339, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006– 2012), I (2006), p. 87. ‘As Saint Jerome who wrote a life of him says, Paul the First Hermit declares that [. . .] he went into a vast desert and dwelled there in a pit for fourty years withouth seeing any man’. See for example, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 223, f. 12v; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, The Cloisters, 54.1.1, The Belles Heures du Duc de Berry, f. 192. For a painting of the meeting between St Anthony and Paul the First Hermit, see Master of the Osservanza (Sano di Pietro?), The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul, c. 1430/1435, Samuel H. Kress Collection 1939.1.293, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The Gilte Legende, ed. by Richard Frederick Sanger Hamer with the assistance of Vida Russell, p. 88. ‘They immediately embraced each other. And when dinner time came a raven brought twice the portion of bread that it was wont to bring, and St Anthony wondered about this. Then Paul said that every day our Lord ministered to him in such a way’. MS Add. 37049, f. 47v. MS Add. 37049, f. 46r. MS Add. 37049, f. 46v. Respectively, MS Add. 37049, ff. 58v, 60v, 61v, 63v. Cotton Faustina B VI, pars ii and Stowe 39 also have a number of shields but not as many as MS Add. 37049. For an edition of the text, see Doty, ‘An Edition of British Museum Manuscript Additional 37049’, pp. 122–5. For a description and edition of the various texts in MS Add. 37049, f. 24r, see ‘An Edition of British Museum Manuscript Additional 37049’, pp. 150–7.

The Desert of Religion 183 89 This tree-cross has been mentioned earlier. See above, p. 168. For another image of the Crucifixion with a Carthusian monk, see MS Add. 37049, f. 91r. 90 ‘Take well good attention of this meditation’. For a description of the illustration and edition of the accompanying text, see Doty, ‘An Edition of British Museum Manuscript Additional 37049’, pp. 369–72. 91 Other motifs and images in The Desert of Religion and in other texts in MS Add. 37049 are images of the Virgin Mary, ladders, Richard Rolle, a building/city/churches, praying hermits/monks looking upon the illustrations, etc. 92 In two of these illustrations explicitly and in the third implicitly, there is a dialogue taking place between Christ and the hermit-monk/reader. 93 Note that even though not exactly the same, the shape of the hearts is reminiscent of the shape of the shields. 94 Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 21–2. 95 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS-288, f. 15r. 96 British Library, Digitised Manuscripts, Additional MS 37049, online description [last accessed 20th November, 2016]. 97 The phrase ‘image-text’ is taken from Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, p. 94.

Bibliography Manuscripts Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Inc.5.D.1.19[2530], [accessed 8 November 2016] London, British Library, MS Additional 18852, [accessed 8 November 2016] London, British Library, MS Additional 34294, [accessed 8 November 2016] London, British Library, MS Additional 37049 [accessed 24 April 2016] London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B VI, pars ii London, British Library, MS Stowe 39 London, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 3, [accessed 24 April 2016] London, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 13, [accessed 24 April 2016] New York, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, The Cloisters, MS 54.1.1, The Belles Heures du Duc de Berry Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 223 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 365 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS-288, [accessed 8th November 2016] Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 1802

Primary Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. by Bella Millett, EETS 325–26, 2 vols (Oxford: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 2005–2006)

184 Anne Mouron ‘The Desert of Religion’, ed. by Walter Hübner, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprache und Literaturen, 126 (1911), 56–74, 360–4 The Desert of Religion, ed. by Anne Mouron, forthcoming Doty, Brant Lee, ‘An Edition of British Museum Manuscript Additional 37049: A Religious Miscellany’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Michigan State University, 1969) Evans, Sebastian, ‘Michel Angelo: Of His Madonna in the National Gallery’, in In the Studio: A Decade of Poems [with Some Verse Translations] (London: Macmillan and Co., 1875), pp. 115–24 The Gilte Legende, EETS 327, 328, 339, ed. by Richard Frederick Sanger Hamer with the assistance of Vida Russell, 3 vols (Oxford: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 2006–2012) Gregory the Great, ‘Homilia XVI, Liber Primum’, in XL Homiliarum in evangelia libri duo, PL 76. 1075A-1314B, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: Apud Garnier fratres, 1857), 1134D–38C Gui de Cambrai, Barlaam and Josaphat, trans. by Peggy McCracken, with an intro. by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2014) Langland, William, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Aubrey Vincent Carlyle Schmidt, new edn. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1987) Latini, Brunetto, Li livres dou tresor, ed. by Spurgeon W. Baldwin and Paul Banette, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 257 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003) Love, Nicholas, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2004) Mouron, Anne, ‘An Edition of The Desert of Religion and its Theological Background’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1996) Rolle, Richard, The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. by Margaret Deanesly, University of Manchester History Series, 26 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1915) ———, The Fire of Love, trans. by Clifton Wolters, Penguin Classics (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972; repr. 1981) Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition, ed. by Ralph Hanna, EETS, os 331–32, 2 vols (Oxford: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 2008)

Secondary Brantley, Jessica, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) Carruthers, Mary J., The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; repr. 1992) Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline, ‘Le schéma des cinq sens, d’une théorie de la connaissance à la création de formes littéraires’, I cinque sensi = The five senses, ed. by Nathalie Blancardi and others, Micrologus, 10 (c2002), 55–69 Doyle, Anthony Ian, ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the 14th, 15th and early 16th Centuries’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1953) Hogg, James, ‘An Illustrated Yorkshire Carthusian Religious Miscellany, BL, MS Add. 37049’, 3 vols, Analecta Cartusiana, 95 (1981) Huot, Sylvia, ‘Polytextual Reading: The Meditative Reading of Real and Metaphorical Books’, in Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages, ed. by Mark Chinca and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 203–22

The Desert of Religion 185 Johnstone, Boyda, ‘Theatre of the Mind: Devotional Performance in British Library MS Stowe 39’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Calgary, 2010) Raymo, Robert R., ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, ed. by Jonathan Burke Severs and Albert E. Hartung, 9 vols (New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967–93), VII (1986), pp. 2255–378, 2467–582 Yates, Frances Amelia, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966) Zumthor, Paul, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972)

9

‘Bon Jhesu, sainctefie ces deux, conjoins ensamble par sacrement de mariage’ Le rapport entre le texte et l’image dans le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage et du réconfort des dames mariees de Philippe de Mézières Anna Loba

Parmi les livres portant sur le savoir-faire conjugal, écrits et adressés au public féminin à la fin du Moyen Âge (je pense tout particulièrement au Livre pour l’enseignement de ses filles de Geoffroi de La Tour Landry et au Mesnagier de Paris), le traité de Philippe de Mézières le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage et du réconfort des dames mariees occupe une place très particulière. D’abord parce que la sphère matérielle et le quotidien de la vie d’un couple ne l’intéressent que marginalement, puis parce qu’il tourne toute son attention à l’essence même du mariage qui est de caractère spirituel. Chevalier, pèlerin en Terre Sainte, voyageur et diplomate, Philippe de Mézières, né vers 1327 et mort en 1405, est un des plus pittoresques personnages de la vie politique et religieuse du XIVe siècle. Cultivé et érudit, latiniste éminent et chrétien marqué d’une spiritualité profonde, il était obsédé par l’idée du renouveau moral de la chrétienté. Ce ‘rêveur obstiné et lucide’, comme le qualifie Alphonse Dupront,1 a accédé à de hautes fonctions en tant que chancelier du roi de Chypre Pierre Ier de Lusignan et, dès son retour en France vers 1373, proche conseiller de Charles V et précepteur du dauphin, futur Charles VI. Après une longue période de vie active, il s’est retiré au couvent des Célestins à Paris où il a passé les vingt-cinq dernières années de sa vie, pendant lesquelles il a rédigé la plus grande partie de ses œuvres.2 C’est pendant cette retraite, entre 1385 et 1389, qu’il a écrit son Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage et du réconfort des dames mariees.3 Dans cet ouvrage, Philippe, homme qui ne s’est jamais marié et qui a fini sa vie comme un religieux: ‘célestin abortif’, s’adresse à des époux chrétiens, en particulier aux femmes mariées.4 L’intention de Philippe est double et se résume dans une phrase qui revient modulée tout au long de son traité: ‘conforter et confermer les bien contens en mariage et reconforter les tourblés et malcontens’.5 Le projet de fortifier ceux qui souffrent dans le mariage s’adresse avant tout aux femmes car ‘dame a trop plus grant mestier de reconfort pour sa fragilité feminine que l’ommen’a qui est ou doit estre de plus forte complection’.6 Les paroles de Philippe semblent en outre viser tout spécialement le public noble.

‘Bon Jhesu, sainctefie ces deux’ 187 En effet, comme nous l’apprenons du prologue, il l’a dédié à ses bienfaiteurs – un noble baron et son épouse, identifiés par Joan B. Williamson, éditrice et fine interprétatrice du Livre, avec Pierre de Craon et sa femme Jeanne de Châtillon.7 Cette dédicace personnelle, est occultée par les grattages effectués ultérieurement. Elle est pourtant confirmée par la miniature qui agrémente la première page du seul manuscrit préservé, conservé dans le fonds français de la Bibliothèque nationale de France sous la cote 1175. L’identification des bienfaiteurs fut possible grâce à l’examen du manuscrit à l’infrarouge. Or, même à l’œil nu il est facile de repérer les modifications apportées ultérieurement. Au-dessus du couple des dédicataires il est possible de distinguer une bannière dont la hampe descend devant l’homme agenouillé. La photographie infrarouge révèle sous les surpeints la représentation des armes des bienfaiteurs: celles de la famille de Craon (losangé d’or et de gueules) et celles de la famille de Châtillon (de gueules, à trois pals de vair, au chef d’or). Même si dans le Livre Philippe présente la dédicataire de son ouvrage comme une épouse heureuse (‘de desconfort de son mariage elle en est quitte’), vu le triste sort qu’allait connaître ce mariage, Jeanne avait besoin de réconfort et de consolation.8 Pierre de Craon, grand baron, seigneur de la Ferté-Bernard et de Sablé, chambellan du roi Charles VI jouissait d’une réputation de voleur et de meurtrier. En 1392, il tenta d’assassiner le connétable Olivier de Clisson. Condamné à mort par le parlement de Paris et ses biens confisqués, il fuit le royaume laissant sa femme dans la misère. Naturellement, Philippe ne pouvait pas le prévoir au moment de la rédaction de son ouvrage, ce que Joan B. Williamson appelle ‘une fine ironie du hasard’.9 C’est probablement après la condamnation de Pierre de Craon, vers 1394, que les noms des dédicataires sont effacés dans le manuscrit. On pourrait imaginer qu’un livre sur le mariage destiné à un couple marié, aurait fait un beau cadeau de mariage.10 Mais le livre ne fut pas offert à Jeanne et à Pierre à l’occasion de leur mariage, car cet événement avait eu lieu longtemps avant la rédaction de l’ouvrage, probablement en 1364. Peut-être la donation du livre est due aux services que Pierre de Craon aurait rendu à Philippe de Mézières en appuyant l’Ordre de la Chevalerie de la Passion. La référence fréquente aux ‘femmes mariées’ comme futures lectrices de son Livre, indique toutefois que l’auteur avait imaginé qu’un public beaucoup plus large pourrait bénéficier de ses conseils. Il ne cesse pas de souligner la portée universelle de son traité en indiquant qu’il sera profitable à l’ensemble des fidèles: ‘toute creature devote’,’gent laie’, ‘simples seculiers’.11 À l’origine du projet de Philippe demeure la même constatation qu’on retrouve chez presque tous les critiques de l’institution du mariage: c’est une réalité imparfaite, on n’y est pas heureux. Mais l’objectif de son livre n’est pas la satire matrimoniale ni la morale pratique, le but de Philippe de Mézières est de dévoiler l’essence même du mariage chrétien. Il se réfère notamment à l’autorité de Hugues de Saint-Victor (1096–1141) qui dans son traité Sur la virginité de la bienheureuse Marie (De Beatae Mariae virginitate) soutient la thèse selon laquelle c’est le consentement mutuel, et non la consommation, qui constitue l’union conjugale. Le caractère durable du mariage est donc basé sur l’unité spirituelle: ‘Dans cette

188 Anna Loba parfaite communion réciproque, chacun ne vit plus pour lui-même, mais pour l’autre, et tous deux trouvent en cela même le plus parfait bonheur’.12 Philippe de Mézières reprend fidèlement les idées de Victorien. Il s’agit d’aller au-delà de la réalité terrestre, matérielle et corporelle du contrat conjugal pour retrouver son fondement qui réside dans une union spirituelle, union des âmes, non pas des corps. Selon Philippe la vraie cause de la souffrance des époux réside dans la rupture du lien sacré qu’il appelle le ‘mariage spirituel’ et qui est le reflet du lien existant entre l’âme humaine et Dieu. Le modèle de cette alliance entre deux sexes est l’amour qui lie le Christ et son Église, le ‘mystère’ dont saint Paul parle dans l’épître aux Éphésiens: ‘C’est pourquoi l’homme quittera son père et sa mère, il s’attachera à sa femme, et tous deux ne seront qu’une seule chair. Ce mystère est grand: je déclare qu’il concerne le Christ et l’Église’ (Ep 5, 22–33). Ainsi, l’image du Christ-Époux, connue de l’Évangile et des visions des mystiques, est utilisée par Philippe pour identifier les époux terrestres au Christ: ‘il doit souvenir a la dame mariee qu’elle n’a pas un mari seul, car elle en a .ij. auxquelx elle a promis et foy et loyauté. C’est assavoir principaument a l’Espoulz de son ame’.13 Le devoir des épouses chrétiennes est d’aimer ceux à qui elles sont liées par le sacrement du mariage. Le livre de Philippe de Mézières est en fait une longue méditation sur le caractère sacramentel du mariage. Pour embrasser l’ensemble de son sujet, le locataire du couvent des Célestins conçoit son ouvrage à l’image d’un miroir carré, dont les quatre faces correspondent à quatre aspects du mariage spirituel. La première reflète donc les noces spirituelles du Christ et de son Église, dont le mariage chrétien est l’image. La deuxième face, représentant les noces mystiques de la Vierge Marie, illustre les voies difficiles du rachat de la race humaine. La troisième face montre le mariage de l’homme et de la femme comme le reflet des noces spirituelles du Christ et de l’Église. Enfin la quatrième présente le lien spirituel de Dieu et de l’âme, en se servant de l’exemple de Griseldis comme modèle à imiter pour toute femme mariée.14 La métaphore du miroir, choisie pour la forme de son livre, reste très significative: ce procédé, souvent utilisé dans les textes spirituels, est une invitation à dépasser l’ordre de l’immédiat et du sensible pour ‘vers l’au-delà’.15 Selon Philippe de Mézières, le lien spirituel entre les époux, qu’il appelle le ‘mariage spirituel’, est le reflet du lien unissant l’âme humaine et le Christ. Mais ce qui semble essentiel dans sa réflexion, c’est l’exaltation de la correspondance entre le mariage et la Passion, entre la douloureuse réalité maritale et le sacrifice du Christ. L’auteur en est parfaitement conscient, lorsque dans un des chapitres de son livre (II, 20), il essaie de répondre aux objections des lecteurs qui pourraient être étonnés par la place accordée à la méditation de la Passion dans un traité sur le sacrement du mariage: ‘selonc la prolixité du traictié de la Passion de Jesu Crist en ce livre contenue, cestui livre deveroit mieulx estre intitulé De la Passion de Jesu Crist que Des sacremens de mariage selonc l’ymagination d’aucuns’.16 La raison de ce parallélisme s’expliquerait non seulement par le traitement de la méditation de la Passion comme un chemin de la connaissance, comme un moyen de l’acquisition d’un savoir, mais aussi par l’importance donnée aux sacrements dans la théologie chrétienne, l’importance réévaluée aux moments charniers de l’histoire.

‘Bon Jhesu, sainctefie ces deux’ 189 Or, selon la tradition patristique, tous les sacrements tirent leur origine des souffrances et du cœur percé de Jésus-Christ.17 En commentant l’Évangile de saint Jean, saint Augustin explique que les sacrements prennent leur origine sur la croix. Comme Adam fut endormi pour que la mère de tous les vivants soit tirée de son flanc, de même le Christ meurt sur la croix pour que l’Église, la mère des nouveaux vivants, sorte de son côté droit, ouvert par le coup de lance de Longin: ‘Le second Adam, Jésus-Christ, ayant baissé la tête, s’est endormi sur la croix, pour qu’une épouse lui fût donnée, et, pendant son sommeil, cette épouse est sortie de son côté’.18 Philippe reprend presque mot à mot les idées de l’évêque d’Hippone en écrivant: Lors a l’ouvrir du costé, aveuc le sanc et l’iaue, issirent habondanment et amoureusement les sains sacremens de l’Eglise par une maniere de douaire distribueé a son espouse, nostre mere sainte Eglise, en cestui monde faisant son pelerinage. Et par especial et au propos de ceste presente matere, de la grant fontaine sourgant, c’est de la grande et precieuse plaie susdite, yssi avec les autres sacremens le sacrement de mariage entre Jesu Crist et l’Eglise, entre Dieu et l’ame crestienne, et entre l’omme et la femme.19 Par ailleurs dans le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, la Passion est associée aux noces mystiques, union de l’âme avec Jésus crucifié, l’Époux divin, et apellée: ‘aliance et perpetuelle confederacion’, ‘grant mariage’,’noces les plus grandes qui onques furent faites en ce monde’.20 Cette idée trouve son supplément iconographique sur la miniature ornant la première page du Livre.21 Il s’agit de l’image qui occupe la moitié supérieure du premier folio, au début du prologue, et qui mesure 13,3 centimètres de largeur et 10 centimètres de hauteur. Sur le fond vermeil couvert de fins ornements dorés on aperçoit trois personnages: Philippe de Mézières, portant un habit brun, se tient à genoux devant le couple des dédicataires, eux aussi agenouillés.22 D’une main il leur offre son livre, de l’autre il leur montre la scène de la Crucifixion peinte sur le médaillon quadrilobé qui occupe le centre de la scène. L’intention de Philippe est exprimée dans la prière contenue dans une bannière visible au-dessus de sa tête: ‘Bon Jhesu, sainctefie ces deux, conjoins ensamble par sacrement de mariage’. Au centre de la miniature se trouve le médaillon aux contours dorés, sur le fond bleu couvert de feuilles noires, on voit des lettres dorées ‘yhs’. Le jambage supérieur de la lettre ‘h’ est barré par un trait horizontal et forme une croix. Les lettres, monogramme de Jésus, sont des lettres historiées, représentant la scène de Crucifixion, peinte à l’encre noire. Sur la lettre ‘h’ transformée en croix on distingue le Christ, avec une plaie saignante au côté droit, les mains et les pieds transpercés. Aux pieds du Christ crucifié on voit le torse d’un homme nu sortant de la terre. Il lève ses bras pour recueillir le sang du Christ. C’est Adam, le premier homme par qui le péché est entré dans le monde. Dans l’art médiéval, comme le rappelle Louis Réau, il apparaît sous plusieurs formes: le plus souvent réduit à une tête ou à un crâne décharné, mais parfois avec son squelette tout entier ou encore ressuscité par le sang divin.23 C’est cette dernière variante que

190 Anna Loba représente l’image dans le livre de Philippe: Adam se soulève de sa tombe et joint les mains vers le Sauveur. Par la mort du nouvel Adam, Jésus-Christ, la vie revient au premier. Chez Philippe de Mézières Adam ressuscité devient la figure allégorique de l’Église. À l’intérieur du bras gauche de la lettre ‘y’ on a peint la Sainte Vierge, reconnaissable grâce à une auréole. Le deuxième bras représente la figure d’un homme pliant le genou droit, tenant une lance, que l’on peut identifier avec Longin. Dans le trait qui forme la panse de la lettre ‘h’ on distingue une autre figure humaine avec une auréole, saint Jean Evangéliste. La lettre ‘s’ est laissée blanche. Les détails de la miniature révèlent, écrit Joan B. Williamson, une très bonne connaissance non seulement du sujet, mais aussi du contenu du Livre de Philippe de Mézières, ce qui prouverait, selon la chercheuse une étroite collaboration entre l’auteur et l’illustrateur.24 François Avril, grand spécialiste des manuscrits à peintures, identifie cet artiste avec le Maître du Policraticus, ce qui permet de dater l’exécution du manuscrit à la période entre 1385 et 1395. Il reste à savoir pourquoi la lettre ‘s’ reste vide. Selon Joan B. Williamson, cette omission semble délibérée compte tenu du fait que la miniature a été repeinte peu de temps après son exécution, sans qu’aucune modification ne soit alors apportée. La comparaison avec les autres représentations de ce type permet de constater que la lettre ‘s’ était réservée à l’image de la descente aux limbes et de la résurrection.25 Or, Philippe se concentre uniquement sur la Passion et la mort du Christ. Par conséquent, cette iconographie incomplète de la Crucifixion correspond de façon particulièrement étroite à l’intention de l’auteur et à la portée de son traité.26 La scène de la Crucifixion inscrite dans le monogramme de Jésus, YHS, invite d’autre part les époux à la contemplation du nom de Jésus. On sait combien Philippe de Mézières était sensible à la dévotion christique. Le monogramme YHS est également représenté sur le premier folio de son Epistre au roi Richard. Pour sensibiliser ses lecteurs, l’auteur cite dans son Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage la célèbre légende de saint Ignace d’Antioche, telle qu’elle est rapportée par Jacques de Voragine dans la Légende dorée: le saint ne cessait pas d’invoquer le nom de Jésus, car, comme il l’expliquait à ses bourreaux, il portait ce nom gravé dans son cœur. Après la mort du martyre, on a extrait son cœur et on a trouvé le nom de Jésus inscrit en lettres d’or.27 Le même sens salutaire est donné à la pratique fréquente du signe de la croix, accompagné d’une brève oraison: ‘Bon fait donques dire souvent “O bone Jhesu” et faire la croix en la poitrine’.28 L’image annonce donc d’emblée le caractère spirituel de l’ouvrage de Philippe de Mézières et résume dans un raccourci symbolique admirable sa portée théologique. Philippe de Mézières invite donc les époux chrétiens à lire son livre et méditer la Passion du Christ pour comprendre que l’amour du Christ se reflète dans les relations entre les êtres humains, en particulier dans le lien constitué par le mariage. Il leur promet que grâce à cette méditation leur mariage deviendra “saint, plus doulz et plus atrempéz que autrefoiz n’a esté” et qu’ils seront consolés.29 Les femmes mariées, premières et privilégiées destinataires du Livre, doivent contempler la souffrance du Christ, tout en la traitant comme un remède pour le corps et l’âme:

‘Bon Jhesu, sainctefie ces deux’ 191 ‘Se la dame mariee donques malcontente et malade se vauldra bien mirer en cestui miroir plain de larmes de la piteuse mort de son Expoulx immortel, certainement elle sera bien purgie de toute sa maladie et amera parfaictement son mari doulcement et sainctement comme lui’.30 Philippe de Mézières n’arrête pas de recommander à ses lectrices de voir dans le Christ, Époux parfait, le reflet de leurs maris terrestres et imparfaits.31 Faisant appel aux diagnostics monastiques du mariage, Philippe de Mézières semble postuler l’idéal traditionaliste de cette institution. L’image négative de l’union conjugale qu’il dénonce dans la réalité qui l’entoure est pourtant l’effet de sa banalisation, de l’abandon des valeurs spirituelles au sein du couple au profit du bonheur et des intérêts terrestres. Philippe de Mézières conçoit que le bien public et social est enraciné dans la morale fondée sur la foi religieuse et dans la vertu de l’individu. Son but était de construire une société où règnent la paix et l’ordre, effet de la conscience des devoirs et des obligations réciproques des tous les états et de toutes les conditions. Le mariage – institution imparfaite – est vu comme un exercice, un chemin vers la perfection au prix de sa spiritualisation et la responsabilisation des individus. Les femmes nobles, en travaillant à l’intérieur de leur couple, portaient dans la même mesure que les hommes la responsabilité de construire un monde porté vers une vie qui s’ouvre davantage à la dimension spirituelle.32 Pour comprendre et apprécier l’originalité de l’œuvre de Philippe de Mézières on pourrait évoquer un autre traité adressé au public féminin, datant de la même époque (1393), Le Mesnagier de Paris qu’un bourgeois anonyme a rédigé à l’intention de sa toute jeune épouse. Dans un des trois manuscrits conservés, celui de Bibliothèque nationale de France, la miniature initiale représente un couple assis sur un banc. L’image annonce le thème central de l’ouvrage – l’éducation de l’épouse, la vie de couple, ses soucis et ses joies au rythme des saisons. Les affaires domestiques occupent une place primordiale dans la structure et le message de l’ouvrage. Les conseils que donne le bourgeois parisien à son épouse relèvent non seulement du domaine de la morale, mais aussi de celui des pratiques et des usages de la vie quotidienne. Une large part est donnée à la réflexion sur le bien-être et la sécurité matérielle et financière de la maison. Par sa composition, centrée sur le couple dans l’intimité, ainsi que par la date de la création, cette miniature fait penser au célèbre tableau hollandais représentant un couple débout, dit des Époux Arnolfini, peint par Jan van Eyck.33 Nous y retrouvons un décor, des vêtements et des attitudes très proches de la miniature ornant le manuscrit du Mesnagier de Paris. Le tableau s’ouvre sur un espace intérieur qui est la sphère privée du couple.34 Comme sur la miniature du Mesnagier, la chambre représente le domaine privé de la maison, qui s’ouvre par la porte et par les fenêtres sur le monde extérieur, c’est-à-dire sur l’espace public de la cité. Dans les deux cas il s’agit de la même représentation symbolique des obligations domestiques, des devoirs de la femme, de la répartition des rôles et des tâches au sein du foyer. Mais la signification du tableau de Van Eyck dépasse largement la sphère du matériel et du quotidien. Une autre signification s’impose, car au fond du tableau

192 Anna Loba et à son centre, la présence de la Passion du Christ qui encercle un miroir suivant dix petites scènes circulaires, faisant ainsi comprendre que la réflexion interne au tableau est celle d’une comparaison avec l’histoire chrétienne, de par ce point ‘frontière entre art sacré et profane’.35 Ce sont les scènes de la Passion qui entourent le miroir de Van Eyck, reflétant un couple marié, montrant le mariage selon l’idée de saint Paul, comme une réalité ‘mystérieuse’, la figure de l’union du Christ avec son Église. C’est ici que la signification du tableau rejoint celle du traité de Philippe de Mézières et de la miniature qui constitue son emblème. Le miroir, placé au centre du tableau, invite à l’instar du livre de Philippe de Mézières, à se regarder pour réfléchir sur sa propre condition, vivre une métamorphose morale et spirituelle. Mais il établit avant tout un rapport entre la Passion et le mariage, tout en soulignant sa valeur sacramentelle et spirituelle. Loin d’être seulement un contrat d’ordre matériel et économique, le mariage dévoile sa réalité cachée, salutaire. Ces idées, comme écrit Robert Baldwin, étaient connues au XVe siècle et popularisées dans les écrits des mystiques.36 Transposées dans le tableau de Van Eyck, elles révèlent à travers leur figuration iconique une richesse et une complexité symboliques qui se montrent utiles pour relancer et réévaluer l’institution du mariage. Soulignons cependant pour terminer la différence entre Van Eyck et De Mézières. Les scènes de la Passion chez le peintre flamand commencent par la prière au Jardin des oliviers, en bas du cadre du miroir, précisément au-dessus des mains jointes des époux. Elles montent, dans le sens des aiguilles d’une montre, à travers l’arrestation, l’entretien avec Pilate, la flagellation et le portement de croix, jusqu’à la Crucifixion, en haut du cadre. On distingue ensuite la déposition de croix, la mise au tombeau, la descente aux limbes et la résurrection. Les deux dernières scènes, comme on se rappelle, manquent sur la miniature du Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage. Le tableau de Van Eyck par son respect de la chronologie, dépasse la vision mystique de Philippe de Mézières, montre le mariage comme une réalité où la souffrance et le quotidien se rencontrent, pour ne pas dire – se réconcilient. Le texte et la miniature de Philippe de Mézières dont j’ai cherché à dégager la richesse symbolique et la complementarité réciproque trouvent dans la peinture de l’artiste flamand un supplément théologique et spirituel inattendu.

Notes 1 Cité par Philippe Contamine, “Croisade, réformation religieuse, politique et morale de la chrétienté au XIVe siècle: Philippe de Mézières (vers 1325–1405)”, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome–Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines, 124.1 (2012), [consulté le 18 Mai 2017]. 2 Nicolae Iorga, Philippe de Mézières 1327–1405 et la croisade au XIVe siècle (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1896), pp. 443–52; cf. aussi Olivier Caudron, “La spiritualité d’un chrétien du XIVe siècle: Philippe de Mézières (1327? – 1405)” in Positions des Thèses de l’École des Chartes (Paris: École des Chartes, 1983), pp. 36–45. 3 Cette date, établie par Joan B. Williamson fut rectifiée par Keith Val Sinclair qui propose pour la composition de l’œuvre la période entre 1386 et 1388. Voir Keith Val Sinclair, “Un élément datable de la piété du Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage

‘Bon Jhesu, sainctefie ces deux’ 193

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et du reconfort des dames mariées de Philippe de Mézières”, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 63 (1996), 156–76 (p. 166). Philippe de Mézières (1327–1405), passa les vingt-cinq dernières années de sa vie au couvent des célestins de Paris, partageant la vie des religieux, sans pourtant prendre l’habit de l’ordre. Cf. Iorga, Philippe de Mézières, p. 446. Toutes les citations du Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage (LVSM) selon l’édition: Philippe de Mézières, Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement du mariage (LVSM), ed. by Joan B. Williamson (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993), p. 219. LVSM, p. 308. Cf. Joan B. Williamson, “La première traduction française de L’Histoire de Griseldis de Pétrarque: pour qui et pourquoi fut-elle faite”, in Amour, mariage et transgressions au Moyen Âge, ed. by Danielle Buschinger and André Crépin (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1984), pp. 447–56. LVSM, p. 217. LVSM, p. 454. Cf. Williamson, “L’Histoire de Griseldis de Pétrarque”, p. 450. LVSM, pp. 46, 207, 109. Hugues de Saint-Victor, “De Beatae Mariae virginitate”, in Hugonis de S. Victore, opera Omnia II, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, 176 (Paris: Fratres Garnier, 1854), col. 857–74 (col. 860), trad. d’après Jean Leclercq, Le Mariage vu par les moines au XIIe siècle (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1983), p. 47. Cf. aussi Dyan Elliot, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 137–9. LVSM, p. 229. Cf. Élie Golenistcheff-Koutouzoff, Étude sur ‘Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage et reconfort des dames mariées’ de Philippe de Mézières (Belgrade: Impr. Svetlost, 1937), pp. 15–16; Joan B. Williamson, “Philippe de Mézière’s Book for Married Ladies: A Book from the Entourage of the Court of Charles VI”, in The Spirit of the Court, ed. by Glyn S. Burgess and Robert A. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 390–408 (pp. 393–4). Johan Huizinga, L’Automne du Moyen Âge, trans. by Julia Bastin (Paris: Payot, 1995), p. 212; Voir Einar Már Jonsson, Le Miroir. Naissance d’un genre littéraire (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995), pp. 157–210. LVSM, p. 195. Cf. Augustin, Traité sur saint Jean, 120, 2, trans. by M. l’abbé Auber, in Augustin, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean-Joseph-François Poujoulat and Jean-Baptiste Raulx, 135 t. (Bar-Le Duc: L. Guérin, 1864–1873), XI (1872), p. 139; Tertullien, De l’âme, XLIII, 10, in Tertullien, Œuvres, trans. by Antoine-Eugène Genoude, 3 t. (Paris: Louis Vivès, 1852), II, 87; Jean Chrysostome, Huit catéchèses baptismales inédites, III, 16–17en Jean Chrysostome, Huit catéchèses baptismales inédites, trans. by Antoine Wenger (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2005), p. 161. Augustin, Traité sur saint Jean, 120, 2, in Œuvres complètes, XI, 139. LVSM, p. 97. LVSM, pp. 75–76. Cf. Anna Loba, “Contempler le miroir de la Passion: Philippe de Mézières et les mystiques”, in Philippe de Mézières and His Age: Piety and Politics in the Fourteenth Century, ed. by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kiril Petkov (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 255–67. Comme le rappelle Madeleine Jeay: “L’imaginaire nuptial est devenu une composante centrale de la spiritualité à partir du XIIIe siècle, sous la double influence de la littérature courtoise et des commentaires du Cantique des Cantiques, notamment ceux de Bernard de Clairvaux qui ont profondément marqué la spiritualité chrétienne par leur façon d’exprimer l’intensité de l’aspiration au divin”, “Choisir l’époux divin. Mariages mystiques aux XIIIe – XVe siècles”, in Le Mariage et la loi dans la fiction narrative avant 1800. Actes du XXIe colloque de la SATOR, Université

194 Anna Loba

21 22

23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33

34 35 36

Paris VII – Denis Diderot, 27–30 juin 2007, ed. by Françoise Lavocat and Guiomar Hautcoeur (collab.) (Louvain: Éditions Peeters, 2014), pp. 335–48 (p. 342). Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1175, f.1, [consulté le 18 Mai 2017]. Le vêtement des frères convers était de couleur brune, tandis que les moines portaient une robe blanche, un capuce et un scapulaire noir. Cf. Aubin Louis Millin, Abrégé des antiquités nationales ou recueil de monuments pour servir à l’histoire de France (Paris: J.-N. Barba, 1837), p. 97. Il est représenté dans la même posture sur la miniature ornant son Epistre au roi Richard II de 1395. Cf. Alain Marchandisse, “Philippe de Mézières et son Epistre au roi Richart”, Le Moyen Âge, 116 (2010), 605–23 (pp. 613–14). Louis Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, 3 t. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1955–59), II (1957), p. 488. Joan B. Williamson, “Paris B. N. MS fr. 1175: A Collaboration between Author and Artist”, in Text and Image, ACTA, 10, ed. by David. W. Burchmore (Binghampton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1986), pp. 77–92. Il s’agit de l’icône avec les initiales IHS peinte par le peintre crétois Andrea Rizo de Candie (seconde moitié du XVe siècle), conservée actuellement au Musée byzantin et chrétien d’Athènes. Cf. Michele Bacci, “The Holy Name of Jesus in Venetian-Ruled Crete”, Convivium, 1 (2017), 190–205 (pp. 194–8). Williamson, “Paris B. N. MS fr. 1175: A Collaboration”, p. 84. LVSM, pp. 173–4. LVSM, p. 215. LVSM, p. 76. LVSM, p. 272. Le problème de la mystique de la vie quotidienne, une sorte de mystique “pratique” basée sur l’exercice de l’imitatio Christi, dans l’oeuvre de Philippe de Mézières, reste une piste intéressante à explorer. Voir à ce propos (“practical mysticism”) les remarques intéressantes d’Inigo Bocken dans l’article: “Jan van Eyck and the Active Mysticism of the Devotio Moderna” dans ce livre. Cf. Carolyn P. Collette, “Chaucer and the French Tradition Revisited: Philippe de Mézières and the Good Wife”, in Medieval Women: Text and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and les autres (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 151–68 (p. 155). Cf. Hélène Dauby, “Couple assis devisant. Remarques sur les miniatures initiales des manuscrits du Ménagier de Paris”, in L’Image au Moyen Âge. Actes du Colloque du Centre d’études médiévales de l’Université de Picardie, Amiens, 19–23 mars 1986 (Amiens: Centre d’études médiévales Université de Picardie, 1992), pp. 79–84 (p. 82). Je tiens aussi à remercier M. Jarosław Jarzewicz d’avoir attiré mon attention sur la ressemblance entre ces deux représentations. Cf. Hans Belting, Miroir du monde. L’Invention du tableau dans les Pays-Bas, trans. by Jean Torrent (Paris: Hazan, 2014), p. 123. Nella Arambasin, “Les Époux Arnolfini de van Eyck, une écriture critique contemporaine”, in Aspects de la critique. Colloque des Universités de Birmingham et de Besançon, ed. by Ian Pickup and Philippe Baron (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997), pp. 87–100 (p. 87). Robert Baldwin, “Marriage as a Sacramental Reflection of the Passion: The Mirror in Jan van Eyck’s ‘Amolfini Wedding’”, Oud Holland, 98.2 (1984), 57–75 (p. 67).

Bibliography Manuscrits Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1175, f.1, [consulté le 18 Mai 2017]

‘Bon Jhesu, sainctefie ces deux’ 195 Sources primaires Augustin, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean-Joseph-François Poujoulat and Jean-Baptiste Raulx, trans. by M. l’abbé Auber, 135 t. (Bar-Le Duc: L. Guérin, 1864–1873), XI (1872) Hugues de Saint-Victor, “De Beatae Mariae virginitate”, in Hugonis de S. Victore, opera Omnia II, Patrologia Latina, 176, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne, (Paris: Fratres Garnier, 1854) cols 857–74 Jean Chrysostome, Huit catéchèses baptismales inédites, trans. by Antoine Wenger (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2005) Philippe de Mézières, Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage (LVSM), ed. by Joan B. Williamson (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993) Tertullien, Œuvres, trans. by Antoine-Eugène Genoude, 3 t. (Paris: Louis Vivès, 1852), II

Sources secondaires Arambasin, Nella, “Les Époux Arnolfini de van Eyck, une écriture critique contemporaine”, in Aspects de la critique. Colloque des Universités de Birmingham et de Besançon, ed. by Ian Pickup et Philippe Baron (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997), pp. 87–100 Baldwin, Robert, “Marriage as a Sacramental Reflection of the Passion: The Mirror in Jan van Eyck’s ‘Amolfini Wedding’”, Oud Holland, 98.2 (1984), 57–75 Bacci, Michele, “The Holy Name of Jesus in Venetian-Ruled Crete”, Convivium, 1 (2017), 190–205 Belting, Hans, Miroir du monde. L’Invention du tableau dans les Pays-Bas, ed. by Jean Torrent (Paris: Hazan, 2014) Caudron, Olivier, “La spiritualité d’un chrétien du XIVe siècle: Philippe de Mézières (1327?– 1405)” in Positions des thèses soutenues par les élèves de la promotion de 1983 pour obtenir le diplôme d’archiviste paléographe, Paris, École des Chartes, 1983, pp. 35–45 Collette, Carolyn P., “Chaucer and the French Tradition Revisited: Philippe de Mézières and the Good Wife”, in Medieval Women: Text and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and les autres (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 151–68 Contamine, Philippe, “Croisade, réformation religieuse, politique et morale de la chrétienté au XIVe siècle: Philippe de Mézières (vers 1325–1405)”, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines, 124.1 (2012), [consulté le 18 Mai 2017] Dauby, Hélène, “Couple assis devisant. Remarques sur les miniatures initiales des manuscrits du Ménagier de Paris”, in L’Image au Moyen Âge. Actes du Colloque du Centre d’études médiévales de l’Université de Picardie, Amiens, 19–23 mars 1986 (Amiens: Centre d’études médiévales Université de Picardie, 1992), pp. 79–84 Einar Már Jonsson, Le Miroir. Naissance d’un genre littéraire (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995) Elliot, Dyan, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) Golenistcheff-Koutouzoff, Élie, Étude sur ‘Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage et reconfort des dames mariées’ de Philippe de Mézières (Belgrade: Impr. Svetlost, 1937) Huizinga, Johan, L’Automne du Moyen Âge, trans. by Julia Bastin (Paris: Payot, 1995) Iorga, Nicolae, Philippe de Mézières 1327–1405 et la croisade au XIVe siècle (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1896), pp. 443–52 Jeay, Madeleine, “Choisir l’époux divin. Mariages mystiques aux XIIIe–XVe siècles”, in Le Mariage et la loi dans la fiction narrative avant 1800. Actes du XXIe colloque de

196 Anna Loba la SATOR, Université Paris VII – Denis Diderot, 27–30 juin 2007, ed. by Françoise Lavocat and Guiomar Hautcoeur (collab.) (Louvain: Éditions Peeters, 2014), pp. 335–48 Leclercq, Jean, Le Mariage vu par les moines au XIIe siècle (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1983) Loba, Anna, “Contempler le miroir de la Passion: Philippe de Mézières et les mystiques”, in Philippe de Mézières and His Age. Piety and Politics in the Fourteenth Century, ed. by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kiril Petkov (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 255–67 Marchandisse, Alain, “Philippe de Mézières et son Epistre au roi Richart”, Le Moyen Âge, 116 (2010), 605–23 Millin, Aubin Louis, Abrégé des antiquités nationales ou recueil de monuments pour servir à l’histoire de France (Paris: J.-N. Barba, 1837) Réau, Louis, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, 3 t. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1955–1959) Sinclair, Keith Val, “Un élément datable de la piété du Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage et du reconfort des dames mariées de Philippe de Mézières”, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 63 (1996), 156–76 Williamson, Joan B., “Paris B. N. MS fr. 1175: A Collaboration between Author and Artist”, in Text and Image, ed. by David. W. Burchmore, ACTA, 10 (Binghampton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1986), pp. 77–92 ———, “Philippe de Mézière’s Book for Married Ladies: A Book from the Entourage of the Court of Charles VI”, in The Spirit of the Court, ed. by Glyn S. Burgess and Robert A. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 390–408 ———, “La première traduction française de L’Histoire de Griseldis de Pétrarque: pour qui et pourquoi fut-elle faite”, in Amour, mariage et transgressions au Moyen Âge, ed. by Danielle Buschinger and André Crépin (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1984), pp. 447–56

Part IV

Into the darkness

10 ‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’ Bernard McGinn

‘It’s Not Dark Yet, but It’s Gettin’ There.’1 These lyrics of Bob Dylan’s might be taken as a commentary on the lines from the end of John Scottus Eriugena’s philosophical-theological-mystical classic Periphyseon: ‘Unusquisque in suo senso abundet’ (Romans 14.5), donec veniat illa lux, quae de luce falso philosophantium facit tenebras, et tenebras recte cognoscentium convertit in lucem. [‘Let each person be content in his own understanding’, until the coming of that light which makes darkness out of the false light of the philosophers, and which changes the darkness of those who truly know into light.]2 Here Eriugena gives a chiastic twist to the relation of darkness and light and of true and false philosophy – a great light is coming which will have reverse effects, revealing the false light of worldly philosophy for the darkness it truly is, and at the same time changing the salutary darkness of Christian faith (the caligo mystica ignorantiae, as he called it in his translation of Chapter 1 of Dionysius’s Mystical Theology) into the everlasting light of eternity.3 The transition from darkness to light also appears a few pages prior to this text in a passage where Eriugena analysed the last three stages of the return of all things into God. First will come the transformation of the mind into the knowledge of all things below God; second, the absorption of that knowledge into the wisdom that is ‘the innermost contemplation of truth’; there follows, ‘third, the highest, the sunset (occasus) of the perfectly purified souls in a supernatural way into God himself, and, as it were, into the darkness of the incomprehensible and inaccessible light in which the causes of all things are hidden’. Then, says Eriugena, citing a psalm text, ‘the night will be illuminated like the day’ (Psalm 138.12).4 So it seems that all will be light at the end. Yet, as anyone who has studied Eriugena knows, even at the culmination of the return which absorbs all things into God in a unification that retains differentiation, the blazing light of eternity will still involve darkness and unknowing. Earlier in Book 5 Eriugena says that the search for the incomprehensible God will never end: the quest is unending and [. . .] it moves on forever. And yet although the search is unending, by some miraculous means it finds what it is seeking

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Bernard McGinn for; and again, it does not find it, for it cannot be found. It finds it through theophanies, but through the contemplation of the divine nature itself, it does not find it.5

So, it is always getting dark in some sense. Affirmation and negation, light and darkness, are intertwined on the mystical path, and perhaps also when the mystic attains the goal, at least according to Eriugena. What has been called ‘the mysticism of darkness’ (la mystique des ténèbres) is an integral part of Christian spirituality. My intention in this essay is to investigate some of the verbal and artistic evidence for the interplay of light and dark in Christian mysticism’s search for the Ultimate, for why it is perhaps always ‘not dark yet, but gettin’ there’.6 I do not claim that all mystical authors were equally interested in the dialectic of light and dark, but a good number were, and their variations on the theme reveal a central aspect of mystical apophaticism.7 I will start with the master of mystical darkness, Dionysius himself.8 Dionysius is most often associated with divine darkness, his account building on the biblical texts that speak about God in reference to cloud and darkness, primarily the account of the ascent of Moses up Sinai in Exodus, but also from passages in the Psalms (e.g., Psalms 17.29, 106.14; 111.4, 138.11–12), and elsewhere in the Old Testament (e.g., Job 17.12).9 In the New Testament, darkness is generally negative (e.g., John 1.5, 8.12, 12.35–46; 2 Corinthians 4.6, 6.14; Colossians 1.13; 1 Peter 2.9). Nevertheless, by reading the Old Testament in the light of the New, and especially on the basis of such texts as 1 Timothy 6.16 that says that God can never be seen because he dwells in unapproachable light (see also 1 John 1.5), both testaments set up the possibility for a dialectical relation between light and darkness. If God dwells in light, why can he not be seen? How does the night become bright as the day (Psalm 138.12)? What did Moses see, if anything, after he passed beyond the lightning flashes on the way up the mountain, asked to see God, but did not receive permission to see God’s face, but only his ‘back parts’ (Exodus 33.23)? The dialectic is not just biblical, but also has philosophical aspects, as can be seen in the famous analogy from Aristotle (much cited by theologians and mystics) comparing the difficulty of attaining even evident truth to ‘the eyes of bats [blinded] by the blaze of day’ (Metaphysics 2.1). Light is as important to Dionysius as darkness, but it is not as final.10 Both Dionysius and Eriugena agree that Omnia quae sunt lumina sunt [‘All things that exist are lights’].11 What this means is that the only way to commence on the path to God is to recognise that everything in the created universe is a theophania, an illumination manifesting God as its creative cause. Without this universe of incandescent lights – something like a cosmic Christmas tree – we would remain trapped in the privative darkness of ignorance, selfishness and sin. But what is necessary as a manifestation is radically insufficient as a representation. The light of creatures fades and is snuffed out on the apophatic, or negative path, as transcendent darkness begins to take over. Nevertheless, for Dionysius there always remains an interplay of light and darkness, as can be seen in The Mystical Theology (De mystica theologia, hereafter MT), and in the brief Letters 1 and 5 that

‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’ 201 form comments on the treatise. In the first chapter of the MT light and darkness appear six times. ‘The Hymn to the Trinity’ that begins the chapter asks the Triune God to ‘Lead us up beyond unknowing and light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture’ where the theological mysteries, ‘lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the super-brilliant darkness (hyperphôton gnophon) of a hidden silence’.12 The oxymoron of ‘super-brilliant darkness’ is extended in the next phrases which note that the mysteries ‘pour overwhelming light on what is most manifest’, but that this happens ‘amidst the deepest shadow (tôi skoteinotatôi)’ as they fill ‘our sightless minds’. Our minds are sightless because they are operating beyond any human form of perception in a realm where light is dark and vice versa. If Timothy, the addressee, totally abandons himself, says Dionysius, he ‘will be uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that is’ (pros ton hyperousian tou theîou skotous aktîna; 1000A). The unworthy cannot penetrate into this realm, because those who do not believe in ‘superessential reality’ cannot have knowledge of the God ‘who has made the shadows his hiding place’, as Dionysius says, quoting Psalm 18.11. When Dionysius turns to exegeting the story of Moses climbing Sinai (Exodus 19–20, 24) as an example of the ascent to super-brilliant darkness, similar language appears. Moses leaves behind ‘every divine light [. . .] and plunges into the darkness where, as scripture proclaims, there dwells the One who is beyond all things’ (1000CD). All the highest and holiest things that can be seen by eye or mind are theophanies whose function is to point towards ‘his unimaginable presence’. Moses has to break free of them, ‘away from what sees and is seen [. . .] as he plunges into the truly mystical darkness of unknowing’ (eis ton gnophon tês agnôsias eisdunei ton ontôs mystikon) (1001A).13 Chapters 2 and 3 of the MT continue the praise of ‘this darkness so far above light’ (1025A and 1025B), where all speech and conception is gradually reduced to nothing. ‘The fact is’, Dionysius says, ‘that the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing’ (1013BC). In the concluding Chapter 5, however, the failure of thought and speech affects all language, including the metaphors of light and darkness. Cataphatically, we can call God ‘the Cause of all’; apophatically, we must deny all positive terms of God. But IT (Dionysius does not use theos in the Chapter) is beyond both affirmation and negation, above the predicates of nonbeing and being, transcendent to both light and darkness. ‘There is no speaking of IT, nor name nor knowledge of IT. Darkness and light (oute skotos estin oute phôs), error and truth – IT is none of these. It is beyond assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to IT (tôn met’autên), but never of IT [. . .]’ (1048AB). Letter 5 to the deacon Dorotheus echoes the paradoxes of the first Chapter of the MT. The divine darkness (o theîos gnophos) is here identified with the ‘unapproachable light’ of 1 Timothy 6.16.14 ‘And if it is invisible because of a superabundant clarity’, he continues, ‘if it cannot be approached because of the outpouring of its transcendent gift of light, yet it is here that is found everyone

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worthy to know God and look upon him’ (1073A). Such knowing is by notknowing and such seeing is by not-seeing, as David said in Psalm 139.6: ‘Knowledge of you is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it’.15 In this sense, neither darkness nor light wins out. Or rather, both do, as long as they remain dialectically intertwined: light must become darkness, and darkness become light. In the end, even ‘super-brilliant darkness’ is only a metaphor for the unknown God. We might even say that in this place-beyond-place, ‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’, while at the same time ‘It’s not bright yet, but it’s gettin’ there’. A similar dialectic of light and dark can be found in Dionysius’s translator Eriugena.16 Like Dionysius, Eriugena’s thought features a complex relation of affirmation, negation and eminence that makes possible the return of all things to the unknown God, the fourth species of the genus natura, that is, the ‘nature that neither creates nor is created’. On our journey to this goal we begin positively with the created universe as theophany.17 ‘Just as we come to understanding through sense knowledge’, says the Irishman, ‘so the return to God is made through the creature’.18 The two great books, that is, the book of the universe and the book of scripture that helps us to understand nature, need to be decoded, both in positive and negative fashion. Positively, we must recognise how all visible and corporeal things function as symbols of incorporeal and intelligible realities.19 Negatively, we must come to realise that God cannot be captured in either corporeal or incorporeal terms, so that the way of negation is higher than that of affirmation. Light and darkness play a key role in this process, as symbols and metaphors, as well as categories with a metaphysical density capable of revealing the dialectic of divine manifestation and hiddenness. From our human perspective, light and darkness express the interpenetration of the positive and the negative poles of the process of ‘de-theophanising’, one which involves both illuminating and darkening, a knowing that becomes unknowing without ever losing its claim on being transformed into a higher form of knowing, a docta ignorantia. As Werner Beierwaltes put it: ‘the interaction or the One-Being of thinking and non-thinking is a model for the “divine metaphor” of a darkness which is light itself, or a light which must appear dark because of its absoluteness’.20 The process by which the cosmological return is effected depends on both the Creative Wisdom (sapientia creatrix) by which the world was made and who became man in Jesus Christ, as well as the Created Wisdom (sapientia creata), that is, humanity as the foremost intellectual concept in the mind of God. The Word creates the Primordial Causes and through them the physical universe as their efficient cause (causaliter), while humanity (homo) has a correlative role in the sense that the world is brought into existence as an effect (effectualiter) in human knowing, that is, everything created is present in the mind of sapientia creata. Thus, as Eriugena says, ‘The universal goal of the entire creation is the Word of God. Both the beginning and the end subsist in God’s Word, indeed, to speak more plainly, they are the Word itself, for it is the manifold end without end, the beginning without beginning [. . .]’.21 We cannot follow all the details of Eriugena’s presentation here, but the passages cited at the beginning of this essay show that even at the end of the return process light

‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’ 203 and darkness interpenetrate – the light that blinds all created seeing is at the same time a brilliant darkness. The dialectic of light and darkness is central to the Dionysian tradition, of which Eriugena is an outstanding example; but other forms of mysticism made use of the Dionysian motif of ‘dazzling darkness’, though with diverse accents and often within different religious and cultural contexts. An example of a form of mystical darkness developed in company with but also in different ways from Dionysianism can be found in how some Franciscan mystics employ the darkness motif. The Franciscans, especially Bonaventure, were heirs to the twelfth-century revival of Dionysianism associated with the School of St Victor, which reached its culmination in the extensive commentaries on the Dionysian corpus produced by Thomas Gallus in the 1230s and 1240s.22 For Gallus mystical theology has two great textbooks, the Song of Songs, which portrays the positive side of ecstatic love of God, and the quasi-apostolic writings of Dionysius that present the message from the viewpoint of negation. Their teaching is the same – the path to union proceeds by a process of the ‘angelisation’ of the soul through moral action and mental activity up to the supernal knowledge of the Cherubim, and then beyond that into the negation of all knowing realised in the apex affectus, the seraphic high point of love. This form of Dionysianism, often called affective Dionysianism, strongly influenced Bonaventure in such treatises as the Itinerarium mentis in Deum and the Collationes in Hexaemeron.23 Although the Dionysian writings contain a Christology, their picture of the ascent to God is not essentially Christological and has no direct role for Christ’s Passion. Things are different with Bonaventure, where a Dionysian mystical ascent of an affective cast is incorporated as one of the elements in a Christocentric and Franciscanised Passion mysticism.24 The Prologue to the Itinerarium expresses this clearly. Basing himself on the appearance of the fiery Seraph to Francis on La Verna when the saint received the stigmata, Bonaventure says: The six wings of the Seraph can rightly be taken to symbolize the six levels of illumination by which, as if by steps or stages, the soul can pass over to peace through ecstatic elevations of Christian wisdom. There is no other path but the burning love of the Crucified One.25 The six levels lead up to the seventh, that of ‘spiritual and mystical ecstasy’, where, after contemplating all created things, the mind is ready ‘to transcend and pass over not only this sense world, but even itself’. Bonaventure continues, ‘Christ is the way and the door in this passing over (transitus)’, specifically Christ hanging on the cross and passing over into God in his sacrificial death.26 The transitus is essentially affective: ‘In this passing over, if it is to be perfect, all intellectual activities must be left behind and the height of our affection (apex affectus) must be totally transferred and transformed into God’ (VII.4). Bonaventure expounds this transformation by citing large passages from MT 1.1 and its language of divine darkness, but with subtle changes to fit his own affective emphasis. Addressing the reader, he says that if one wishes to know how the transitus is effected, he must ‘ask grace not instruction, desire not understanding [. . .] God not man, darkness not clarity, not light but the

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fire that totally enflames and carries us into God by ecstatic unctions and burning affections [. . .]’. The fire is God and ‘Christ enkindles it in the heat of his burning Passion’ (VII.6). This note of fire and heat is not found in Dionysius’s account of the ‘super-brilliant darkness’, nor is that of the crucifixion and a mystical death (mors mystica) in imitation of Christ: ‘Let us, then, die and enter into the darkness; [. . .] with Christ crucified let us pass out of this world to the Father’ (John 13.1) (VII.6). Bonaventure’s view of God’s darkness has affective and Christological dimensions not present in Dionysius, as is evident in many of his writings, especially in the Collationes in Hexaemeron. The Franciscan follows the Latin versions of Dionysius in generally using tenebrae to indicate the negative darkness of sin, error and ignorance, while employing caligo for the transcendent darkness of God. Speaking of ‘perfect contemplation’ in Number XX of the Collationes he asks how it is that the divine ray blinds us rather than illuminates? The answer is: ‘This blinding is the highest illumination, because it is in the height of the mind beyond the investigation of the human intellect [. . .]. Therefore, there is an inaccessible darkness (caligo inaccessibilis) there, which nonetheless illumines the minds that have rid themselves of idle investigations. And this is what the Lord says, namely that he lives in a cloud (3 Kings 8.12), and in the Psalm, “He made darkness his hiding place” (Psalm 17.12)’.27 In Collatio II Bonaventure says that this stage is called ‘darkness’ (caligo), ‘because the intellect does not understand and yet the soul is supremely illuminated’. There is a kind of perception in the darkness, one of spousal love as revealed in the Song of Songs: When the mind is united to God, it sleeps and is vigilant at the same time – ‘I sleep but my heart keeps watch’ (Song of Songs 5.2). Only the affective power keeps watch; it imposes silence on all the other powers. A person is then alienated from his senses and lifted up into ecstasy. He hears ineffable words which he is not allowed to reveal (2 Corinthians 12.4), because they are only in the loving power.28 The Franciscan third-order mystic Angela of Foligno (c. 1248–1309) propounded another original view of divine darkness. Attempts have been made to tie her teaching to the Dionysian tradition, but, while some contact cannot be excluded, especially because what we have of this female ecstatic comes to us through the filter of her theologically-informed Franciscan amanuensis, ‘Brother Scribe’, Angela’s experience of God ‘in and through darkness’ (in et cum tenebra) is not really Dionysian, but is an integral part of her own distinctive spiritual journey.29 The Memoriale, which gives us the scribe’s rendition of what he heard from Angela, provides us with a remarkable testimony about the interaction of men and women in the New Mysticism of the later Middle Ages.30 How much came from Angela herself, and how much from the friar is probably impossible to know. In any case, their collaboration features an unusual view of divine darkness. The complex spiritual journey that Angela underwent from about 1291 to 1296 involved no less than thirty stages (passus), the first twenty of which had been completed by the time the scribe began writing down her account in 1292. The final ten, more

‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’ 205 difficult, stages were completed by 1296, but the friar had difficulty understanding them and so condensed them into seven supplementary stages. In the culmination of Angela’s path it is hard to separate Stage 6, a state of mystical dereliction, and Stage 7, which features accounts of the highest experiences of ecstasy and union.31 The terrible sufferings of Stage 6, in which Angela is tormented by demons and feels abandoned by God, features ‘a most horrible darkness’ (horribilissima tenebra), obviously a darkness of suffering and despair. Stage 7, which began before the onset of Stage 6 and continued after it, features revelations that Angela says cannot be conceived or really described, but about which she nonetheless has a good deal to say. During an elevation of the soul in which she sees God’s light, beauty and fullness, she loses her love and becomes non-love (et effecta sum non amor). She continues: ‘Afterward, after this, I saw him in a darkness, and in a darkness precisely because he is a greater good than can be conceived or understood’.32 Subsequently, Angela says that in this darkness she sees the ‘All Good’ (omne bonum), and that the soul ‘sees nothing and sees everything altogether’ (et nihil videt, et videt omnia omnino). The friar has difficulty understanding this dark vision, so Angela explains it, invoking the distinction between in tenebra and cum tenebra: ‘The All Good was all the more certain and superior to everything the more it was seen in darkness (in tenebra) and most secret. And this is why I see [the All Good] with darkness (cum tenebra), because it surpasses every good and all things and everything else is darkness’.33 In this text at least Angela seems to distinguish between the transcendent and secret ‘in darkness’ of Godself and the lower ‘with darkness’, according to which all things in comparison with God are seen as dark. Angela gives a lengthy description of seeing God in darkness, a seeing which involves an ecstatic state in which ‘the body sleeps and speech is cut off’, and which surpasses all the previous loving favours she received from God. Angela tells Brother Scribe that she had seen the ‘All Good’ many times and always with some darkness, but that ‘she had been elevated only three times to this most exalted and altogether ineffable way of seeing God with such darkness [. . .]’.34 God draws her into this state more powerfully than all her previous states. ‘In this state’, she says, ‘it seems to me that I am standing or lying in the midst of the Trinity, and that is what I see with such darkness’. She does not remember any form, even the form of the God-man, but she does see ‘all and nothing’. When this state lessens, she sees the God-man and hears him saying to her, ‘You are I and I am you’, and she then feels his embrace. Angela says that she enjoys almost continuous loving union with the God-man in one kind of darkness, but such a state draws her less powerfully than the occasional absorption into the Trinity in full darkness.35 In contrast to Bonaventure, she identifies sharing in Christ’s Passion ‘on the bed of the Cross’ with the penultimate, not the final, darkness. It might seem that being drawn into the darkness of the Trinity is the highest stage of union, but as Chapter IX goes on, Angela introduces a yet higher stage which she expresses in terms of ‘abyss’ language. In Lent of 1295 she reports that she found herself more totally immersed in God than ever, so that she seemed to be in the midst of the Trinity and receiving continuous great gifts from God. Once

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again, the experience was ineffable: ‘I am convinced that there is no saint, angel, or creature which has anywhere near the capacity to understand these divine workings and that extremely deep abyss’.36 She makes it clear that the abyssal experience surpasses the darkness stage: ‘I was also drawn out of the vision of God in the darkness in which I used to take such delight. Every previous state was put to sleep so tenderly and sweetly that I could not tell it was happening’.37 Here she paradoxically finds nothing of the Cross of Christ, of the poverty of the Son of God, and all the things in which she used to take such delight. She speaks of this final state as characterised by clarity, certitude and the abyssal profundity of God’s presence. In it God gathers her totally into himself so that He can address her and say: ‘Daughter of peace, in you rests the whole Trinity, the whole Truth, so that you hold on to me and I hold on to you’.38 While Angela’s experience of God in and with darkness was a new creation, it was not the final stage on the path.39 The ‘affective Dionysianism’ found in these Franciscan authors was not the only new interpretation of the Dionysian corpus in the later Middle Ages. Between 1248 and 1252 the Dominican theologian Albert the Great completed an extensive commentary on the Dionysian writings with the assistance of his baccalureus biblicus, the young Thomas Aquinas.40 This reading concentrated on the role of knowing and not-knowing in the path to God. Its intellectualist and indeed supra-intellectualist approach is encapsulated in Albert’s insistence that the Dionysian writings teach us ‘how it is necessary to be united to God through intellect and to praise him by word’.41 Albert’s version of Dionysianism had a powerful effect on the philosophers, theologians and mystical teachers of the German Dominican school centred in Cologne during the period from about 1260 to 1350. These different styles of Dionysianism, of course, are only pedagogical paradigms. In practice, both forms of Dionysianism interacted in interesting ways in the late Middle Ages. Among the direct heirs of Albert was the greatest of the Cologne Dominicans, Meister Eckhart, who spoke of ‘the hidden darkness of the eternal divinity’ in his German Sermon 22.42 Eckhart, as well as his followers Henry Suso and John Tauler, made considerable use of the metaphor of divine darkness, but I would like to suggest something of the richness of the darkness motif in this period in Western mysticism by looking at a little-studied treatise among the ‘PseudoEckhartiana’, that is, the tracts and sermons often ascribed to the Meister, but actually produced by his contemporaries and followers.43 The treatise called Von der Übervart der Gotheit (The Ecstatic Journey into God) is one of the longer of the Pseudo-Eckhartiana and is divided into three parts by its editor, Franz Pfeiffer.44 Like many such works it does not appear to have any internal order, but jumps from one theme to another in a manner similar to what has been called the ‘paradigmatic substitution’ found in Eckhart’s sermons.45 The work, however, contains some profound discussions of basic themes of fourteenthcentury German mysticism. Von der Übervart is much concerned with the flowing out of the three persons of the Trinity and their relation to the powers of the soul, although it departs from Eckhart in considering the will higher than the intellect (p. 496, ll. 20–36). Several sections feature complicated discussions of how the soul’s dialectic of iht (existence) merging into niht (nothingness) allows it to

‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’ 207 attain the immovability (unbeweglichkeit) of the divine nature.46 The treatise uses many Eckhartian terms, such as grund (ground) and abgrund (abyss), to describe the hidden depth of the divine nature.47 It also speaks of ‘the desert of the Godhead’, and refers to God as ein einig ein, both important Eckhartian themes.48 The work analyses the relation of God and creation through the metaphor of the point and circle, with the creative work of the three persons being described as a circle whose centre is the power of the unmoved Trinity into which all things return.49 Although all creation pre-exists in the mind of God, human nature, because of its participation in the dynamism of the inner relation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, has a special role in the return to ‘the purity of the bottomless spring of the divine nature’ (die blôzheit des grundelôsen brunnen goetliche natûren).50 The text says that we must regain what we were in God before our creation, that is, become what is described as nihtes niht (Nothing of Nothing; p. 509, l. 31), or undürftige niht (Not-Needy Nothing; p. 510. ll. 26–28). Without neglecting Christ and his grace, The Ecstatic Journey stresses the role of human free will in the process of detachment and letting go of images needed to effect the return. Final union with God is often described in the language of absorption and annihilation. The role of light and darkness in The Ecstatic Journey makes heavy use of passages from Dionysius, both quoted and summarised, as well as from der minne buoche, that is, the Song of Songs.51 The prevalence of the latter indicates possible familiarity with Gallus’s affective Dionysianism, something in need of further study. The treatise does not hesitate to use the language of light in relation to God and divine activity. Citing Dionysius, for example, it says: ‘The divine existence is an intellectual essence. Dionysius says, “The intellectual light that is God has given its likeness to the intelligent soul”’.52 God is said to illumine all things (p. 514, ll. 11–12), and the soul’s nature is described as ‘an exalted clarity’ (uf gezogeniu klârheit; p. 514, l. 26). Nevertheless, it is the language of darkness, most especially the darkness of God, that predominates in the treatise. Six passages discuss, often at length, how the soul makes its übervart into the divine darkness. These all occur in the second and third parts of the treatise. Early in the second part, after citing Augustine about the soul’s true home in God where all things become nothing, the author sets out the following apophatic formula: ‘Then she [the soul] becomes from knowing unknowing, from loving unloving, from will will-less, and from light dark [. . .]. She comes to such a nothingness in herself that there is nothing there but God. Hence, God outshines her as the sun does the moon and with the same subtle movement that is God she flows into all things that God in God is flowing into eternally’.53 It is interesting to see this passage invoking both the soul’s passage from light to dark, as well as the supernal light of God. Later sections of The Ecstatic Journey emphasise darkness more strongly. One important passage identifies darkness with the hidden nature of the Father. This text begins by citing both Dionysius (‘God lives in undisturbed silence’) and the Song of Songs (‘I have climbed over every mountain and my own capacities into the dark power of the Father’).54 But what do these citations signify? The author explains that traversing every mountain indicates going beyond all reasoning (redelichkeit) and coming to the Father where reasoning

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ends. There follows another string of apophatic paradoxes: ‘There I heard without sound, there I saw without light, there I smelled without scent, there I tasted what was not, there I received what did not remain. And so my heart was without ground, my soul without love, my spirit without form, and my being without nature’.55 These paradoxes are then supplied with appropriate theological explanations (p. 507, l. 26 – p. 508, l. 1). The discussion closes by quoting two more passages from Dionysius, including the important text from MT 5 cited above: ‘The first reality is above all names, above love, above being, above intellect, above speaking, and above nature. The first reality is neither light nor darkness. Ah yes, it is diverse from all that is created’.56 One more passage must suffice for indicating the importance of divine darkness in The Ecstatic Journey. In the third section of Pfeiffer’s edition there are two darkness passages, the second of which deals with the Father’s power as comprehending all things, as well as his unmanifested appearance in himself. The author says: And he has covered this comprehension with a darkness pulled over it that can be understood by no creature in the way that he comprehends himself. What the soul comprehends in the light, it loses in the darkness. Yet, she yearns for the darkness, because she would rather be dark in the darkness than in the light. And so she loses herself and the light in the darkness.57 So, the soul must continually move on into darkness on its ecstatic journey. The interplay of dark and light in the mystical journey was given visual representation in the late Middle Ages, as shown in the ‘Rothschild Canticles’, a richly-decorated manuscript produced in Lorraine around the year 1300.58 The research of Jeffrey Hamburger has shown that this enigmatic work painted for a wealthy nun is closely tied to the world of German mysticism of the early fourteenth century.59 My interest here is not in the full range of the remarkable pictures of the manuscript, but in its series of unprecedented Trinitarian illustrations, which provide a fascinating portrayal of the unveiling and veiling of the deepest mystery of Christian faith. There are nineteen surviving pictures of the Trinity in two sections (three images on ff. 39v to 44r, and sixteen on ff. 74v to 106r). Each features the same format with the left hand page having a series of brief quotations from scripture and the Fathers meant for reading and meditation, while the right side has a full length illustration of the Trinity. Small figures around the texts and images often express praise and astonishment at the mystery of the Trinity, which, in good Dionysian fashion, is concealed in its very revelation, dark and hidden in its overpowering light. Though there were a number of traditional images for the Trinity in both Eastern and Western art, the Rothschild Canticles stand out for their creativity – none of these images had been previously employed.60 The Trinity images follow a threefold pattern (though not in a linear way, at least in the surviving manuscript). The first form consists of basically anthropomorphic images in which three recognisable figures illustrate the three Persons (e.g., f. 75r, Plate 6).61 The second series plays with veiling and unveiling the mystery. Here, as in this scene found on f. 104r (Plate 7), we see a circular screen of (originally) golden

Plate 6 Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 404, f. 75r (s. xiiiex/xivin)

Plate 7 Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 404, f. 104r (s. xiiiex/xivin)

‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’ 211 rays which implodes on a golden starburst that may represent the Godhead.62 The screen is upheld by three figures only partly visible – the Holy Spirit above and the Father and Son on the sides. The facing text quotes the famous definition of God saying, ‘My centre is everywhere, my circumference nowhere’. Finally, there are several totally non-anthropomorphic images. In this image from f. 106r (Plate 8), for example, the veils are drawn back and hang in a gravity-defying way from the clouds, revealing concentric fields of pulsating colour and energy around a central burst of light – a kind of supernova.63 The effect of such an explosion would, of course, darken the sight of anyone beholding it, something expressly suggested in the texts that accompany the image. Three biblical texts expressing divine transcendence appear (Exodus 3.14, John 1.18, and Isaiah 55.9), along with two prayers. The first says, ‘O Lord, lead me into the desert of your deity and the darkness of your light, and lead me where you are not’.64 The second prayer is put in the mouth of St Bernard: ‘Bernard prayed, “O Lord, lead me where you are”. God said, “Bernard, I will not do it, because if I were to lead you where I am, you would be annihilated, both to me and to you”’.65 Light and dark, God’s presence and absence, are inextricably joined on the mystical path according to the Rothschild Canticles. It may seem strange that I am not treating the theme of darkness and night in John of the Cross, the figure most often identified with la mystique des ténèbres. This is not to neglect the great Carmelite mystic, who could well be the subject of another essay.66 I have chosen my texts to show that John, for all his originality, built upon a long tradition of mystical darkness. This perspective may also help us see that for the Spanish mystic, as well as for his predecessors, there is as much light and flame as cloud and darkness in the path to God. Those who see John as only a mystic of darkness seem to forget about the saint’s The Spiritual Canticle and The Living Flame of Love, which are as filled with light and fire as The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night emphasise the other polarity. Further, John’s psychological analysis of the experience of darkness has often been thought to represent a new stage in the mysticism of darkness; but, despite its originality, mystics as early as Angela of Foligno had cast their expressions of divine darkness in personal and introspective terms. John’s three reasons for conceiving the journey to God as a ‘dark night’ are not new, although they do provide an important framework for showing how darkness is integral to approaching God.67 We can also note that theologically speaking John’s system is not more complex than the way John Scottus Eriugena wrestled with the relation of the metaphorical and metaphysical aspects of light and darkness in the Periphyseon. Borrowing a distinction from Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae Ia, q. 2, art. 1), we might say that God is dark from two perspectives: quoad nos and secundum se. From our created perspective (quoad nos), we have no choice but to strip away all positive sense experiences and intellectual concepts as we approach the God who transcendentally excels everything so strongly that he appears to us as a dark night. And, while God in Godself (secundum se) is ‘unapproachable light’, as we are told in scripture, such light is always too much for us and so must darken our sight. What I have been arguing in this brief exploration of the mystical road to God is that the metaphorical and even metaphysical contrast between light and darkness

Plate 8 Rothschild Canticles, New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 10.3 404, f. 106r (s. xiiiex/xivin)

‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’ 213 contains an inner dynamism in which neither polarity is final. God alone is final, that is, the God who is both light and darkness – and ultimately beyond light and darkness in a realm that we can only stammer about with our metaphors and metaphysical speculations. One of the finest poetic evocations of this fruitful paradox is found in Henry Vaughan’s poem, ‘The Night’. I quote just the final stanza of this apophatic masterpiece: There is in God (some say) A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here Say it is late and dusky, because they See not all clear; O for that night! Where I in him Might live invisible and dim.68

Notes 1 ‘Not Dark Yet’ appeared in the Album ‘Time Out of Mind’, first released in 1997 by Columbia Records. Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted with permission. 2 I cite Eriugena’s Periphyseon from the edition of Édouard A. Jeauneau, Iohannis Scotti seu Eriugenae Periphyseon, 5 vols, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis [CCCM] 161–65 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1996–2003). This passage is from Periphyseon 5 (Jeauneau 5:228, also in Ioannes Scotus Eriugena, ed. by J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina (PL) 122 (Paris: J. P. Migne, 1853; repr. Turhout: Brepols, 1999), 1022C. 3 De mystica theologia, Cap. I (PL 122:1174A): ‘in caliginem ignorantiae occidit vere mysticam’ (Eriugena’s translation). All translations from Latin are my own unless otherwise stated. 4 Periphyseon 5 (Jeauneau 5:225; PL 122:1020D–21A). 5 Periphyseon 5 (Jeauneau 5:84; PL 122:919C), as well as Periphyseon 5 (Jeauneau 5:210–11; PL 122:1010CD). There are similar passages in Eriugena’s other works, e.g., Expositiones 6.1 and Commentarium in Johannem 1.32: Iohannis Scoti Eriugenae Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, ed. by J. Barbet, CCCM 31 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1975), pp. 87–8; Jean Scotus Eriugena, Commentaire sur l’Évangile de Jean, ed. by E. Jeauneau, Sources Chrétiennes 180 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1972), p. 182. 6 On the role of darkness and the polarity of light and darkness in religion and religious psychology, see: Gilbert Durand, ‘Le régime nocturne’: Durand, Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire (Paris: Bordas, 1969), pp. 217–433; Mircea Eliade, ‘Le symbole des ténèbres dans les religions archaiques’, in Polarité du Symbole, Ferdinand Alquié and others (Bruges: Les Études Carmélitaines chez Desclée de Brouwer, 1960), pp. 15–28; and Zwi Werblowski, ‘Light and Darkness’, in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. by Mircea Eliade, 16 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1987), VIII, pp. 547–50. More specifically on Christianity, see: Michael Plattig, ‘Die “dunkle Nacht” als Gotteserfahrung’, Studies in Spirituality, 4 (1994), 165–205. 7 There is considerable literature on apophaticism in Christian mysticism. Here I cite only the influential work of Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 8 For Dionysius, I will use the edition of Günter Heil and Adolf M. Ritter, Corpus Dionysiacum II, 2nd edn. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), as well as the translation of Colm Luibheid: Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), though with a few adjustments.

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9 For introductions to the biblical basis and its reception, see: the multi-author article ‘Cloud’, in The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, ed. by Hans-Josef Klauck and others, 30 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), V (2012), pp. 446–51; as well as Irénée Hausherr (as J. Lemaitre), ‘Préhistoire du concept du gnophos’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité (hereafter DS), ed. by Marcel Viller and others, 17 vols (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–94), II, pp. 1868–72; and Michel Dupuy, ‘Nuit’, in DS, XI, pp. 519–24. Much has been written on Dionysian darkness. A useful summary is Henri-Charles Puech, ‘Le Ténèbre mystique chez Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite et dans la tradition patristique’, in En quête de la Gnose I: La Gnose et le temps et autres essais, ed. by Henri-Charles Puech (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp. 119–41. See also: Endre van Ivánka, ‘Dunkelheit, mystische’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, 28 vols (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1950), IV (1959), pp. 350–8; and René Roques, ‘Contemplation, extase et ténèbre chez le Pseudo-Denys’, DS, II, pp. 1885–911. 10 Martin Laird argues a similar case for Gregory of Nyssa, showing the importance of light in Gregory, who is often considered only a mystic of darkness; see: ‘Gregory of Nyssa and the Mysticism of Darkness: A Reconsideration’, Journal of Religion, 79 (1999), 592–616. 11 The phrase is from the beginning of Eriugena’s Expositiones (Barbet, Expositiones, p. 3). 12 MT 1, 1 in Corpus Dionysiacum II, pp. 141–42. For the sake of convenience, I will use the standard column identifications from the earlier edition of the Dionysian corpus in Patrologia Graeca 3, where this text is at 997B (these numbers also appear in Corpus Dionysiacum II). A translation of the MT can be found in Pseudo Dionysius: The Complete Works, pp. 135–41, where this passage is on p. 135. For an introduction to the history of the corpus, see: Paul Rorem, The Dionysian Mystical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). Too much has been written on Dionysian negative theology to try to give any real bibliography here, but I would note Jeffrey Fisher, ‘The Theology of Dis/Similarity: Negation in Pseudo-Dionysius’, Journal of Religion, 81 (2001), 529–48. 13 Darkness also triumphs in the brief Letter 1, where Dionysius invokes the general principle that darkness disappears in the light, so that the more light there is, the less darkness. But this is not the case in the transcendent realm, where ‘His transcendent darkness remains hidden from all light and concealed from all knowledge’ (1065A). 14 Dionysius also references 1 Timothy 6.16 in the De divinis nominibus 4.11 (708D). 15 All biblical quotations are from the New International Version unless otherwise stated. 16 On Eriugena’s use of light and darkness, see: Werner Beierwaltes, ‘Eriugena’s Platonism’, Hermathena, 109 (1992), 53–72; James McEvoy, ‘Metaphors of Light and Metaphysics of Light in Eriugena’, in Begriff und Metapher: Sprachform des Denkens bei Eriugena, ed. by Werner Beierwaltes (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990), pp. 149–67; and Deirdre Carabine, ‘Eriugena’s Use of the Symbolism of Light, Cloud, and Darkness’, in Eriugena East and West, ed. by Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1994), pp. 141–52. See also: Marianne Delaporte, ‘“He Darkens Me with Brightness”: The Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius in Hilduins’s Vita of St. Denis’, Religion and Theology, 13 (2006), 219–46. 17 Hilary Anne-Marie Mooney, Theophany: The Appearing of God according to the Writings of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). 18 Periphyseon 3 (Jeauneau 3:616–17; PL 122:723C). 19 Periphyseon 5 (Jeauneau 5:10; PL 122:886A). 20 Beierwaltes, ‘Eriugena’s Platonism’, p. 66. 21 Periphyseon 5 (Jeauneau 5:366–67; PL 122:893A). 22 For a sketch of Thomas Gallus, Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism: 1200–1350 (New York: Crossroad, 1998), pp. 78–87. For more detail, Boyd Taylor Coolman, Eternally Spiraling into God: Knowledge, Love, and Ecstasy in the Theology of Thomas Gallus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 23 On the role of Dionysius in Bonaventure, Jacques Bougerol, ‘St. Bonaventure et le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite’, Études franciscaines, 18 (Supplement, 1968), 33–123; and

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Charles A. Bernard, ‘Saint Bonaventure Lecteur de Denys dans l’Itinerarium Mentis in Deum’, Studies in Spirituality, 1 (1991), 37–56. On the theme of darkness in Bonaventure, Paul Lachance, The Spiritual Journey of the Blessed Angela of Foligno according to the Memorial of Frater A. (Rome: Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1984), pp. 286–99. On Bonaventure’s transformation of Dionysius, Turner, The Darkness of God, pp. 131–3. Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Prol. 1–3, in Bonaventure, Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae opera Omnia, 10 vols (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1883–1902), V (1891), pp. 295–6. For the Itinerarium I use the translation of Ewert Cousins: Bonaventure, Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis, trans. by Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), where this passage is found on p. 54. Itinerarium VII.1–2 (V:312; trans., 111). Collationes in Hexaemeron XX.11 (Bonaventure, Opera Omnia, V, 427; my translation). Collationes II.30 (Bonaventure, Opera Omnia, V, 341; my trans.). Collationes II.29 features another long quotation from MT 1. The singular form tenebra is not Classical, but is found in Late Antique and Medieval Latin. For a brief introduction to Angela, see: McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, pp. 141–51. I will use the edition of Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti: Il Libro della Beata Angela da Foligno (Grottaferrata: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1985). There is a translation and study by Paul Lachance, Angela of Foligno: Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1993). See also: Lachance, The Spiritual Journey. The sixth and seventh passus take up Chapters VIII–IX of the Memoriale (ed., 340– 401; trans. Lachance, pp. 196–218). Memoriale, Cap. IX (ed., p. 354, my trans.). There is a previous mention of darkness and light in Chap. VI under the fourth passus (ed., 282; trans. Lachance, p. 177). It is unclear how this relates to the darkness of the seventh passus. Memoriale Cap. IX (ed., pp. 356–8; my trans.). Memoriale Cap. IX (ed., pp. 358–60; trans. Lachance, p. 204). Memoriale Cap. IX (ed., pp. 360–2; trans. Lachance, pp. 204–5). Memoriale Cap. IX (ed., pp. 378–80; trans. Lachance, p. 211). Memoriale Cap. IX (ed., p. 380; trans. Lachance, p. 212). Angela repeats that she is drawn out of the darkness in Cap. IX (ed., p. 384, trans. Lachance, p. 213). Memoriale Cap. IX: ‘cum tanta claritate et cum tanta certitudine et cum tanto profundissimo abysso’ (ed., p. 384; trans. Lachance, p. 213). Later in the chapter (ed., p. 390) God addresses her saying: ‘Filia pacis, in te pausat tota Trinitas, tota veritas, ita ut tu tenes me et ego teneo te’ (ed., p. 390; trans. Lachance, p. 215). It is noteworthy that in the Instructiones that represent Brother Scribe’s notes on Angela’s teaching to her followers c. 1295–1309, the darkness theme is not present, while the language of the abyss continues to be developed. Instructio XXXII (ed., 666–8; trans. Lachance, p. 294) does speak of a kind of docta ignorantia without using Dionysian language. The Dionysian writings had a strong influence on the thought of both Albert and Thomas; see, for example: Bernhard Blankenhorn, The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015). Albert the Great, Alberti Magni Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum Super Dionysii Mysticam theologiam et epistulas, Albert Magni Opera Omnia, 37, ed. by Paulus Simon, 2 vols (Münster: Aschendorff, 1978), II, p. 465. For a brief sketch of Albert’s Dionysianism, see: Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (New York: Crossroad, 2005), pp. 12–27. The critical edition is Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke herausgegeben im Auftrag der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, ed. by Josef Quint and others, 5 and 6 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1937–2006). The passage from German Sermon

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(Pr.) 22 can be found in Die deutschen Werke (DW), I (1958), 389, l. 7: ‘diu verborgen vinsternisse der êwigen gotheit’. There are many passages in Eckhart’s works about divine darkness; e.g., Pr. 72 (DW 3 [1976], 250–1), the quotation from MT 1 in Pr. 101 (DW 4 [2003], 359–60), and the text from the commentary on Exodus 20.21, In Exodum n. 237 in Die lateinische Werke, II (1992), pp. 195–6. Henry Suso, Leben Seuses, Kap. LI, in: Heinrich Seuse Deutsche Schriften, ed. by Karl Bihlmeyer (Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1907; repr. 1961), p. 177, l. 19. Bihelmeyer’s ‘Glossar’ (619) lists fifteen appearances of vinster in his writings. On divine darkness in Tauler, see: Die Predigten Taulers, ed. by Ferdinand Vetter (Zurich: Weidman, 1968); e.g., Pr. 60 (pp. 278, ll. 14–19). Von der übervart der gotheit [as Traktat XI], in Meister Eckhart, ed. by Franz Pfeiffer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1857; repr. 1924), pp. 494–516. There is a rather problematic translation by C. de B. Evans, Meister Eckhart by Franz Pfeiffer (London: Watkins, 1925), pp. 350–67. I will make my own versions and cite by page and line numbers from the Pfeiffer edition. Little has been written on this text, but there is an introduction by Peter Schmitt, ‘Von der übervart der gotheit’, in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. by Kurt Ruh and others, 2nd edn., 14 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978–2005), IX (1995), pp. 1205–9. There is a question as to whether the three parts really fit together, since various manuscripts give different orderings and leave out some sections. On this problem, see: Schmitt, ‘Von der übervart der gotheit’, p. 1206, who speaks of it rather harshly as ‘ein besonders extremes Beispiel eines “Trümmergeschiebes”’ (i.e., rubble pile). On paradigmatic substitution, see: Burkhard Hasebrink, Formen inzitativer Rede bei Meister Eckhart: Untersuchungen zur literarische Konzeption der deutschen Predigt (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992). On God and the soul as iht/niht and the immovable character of the divine Nothing, see: Von der Übervart, pp. 498, ll. 30–34; p. 506, ll. 9–24; p. 508, ll. 25–36; and p. 510, ll. 18–27. Von der Übervart: ‘diu sele [. . .] sô versinket si iemer mê in daz apgründe der gotheit’ (p. 501, ll. 11–12); see also: Von der Übervart, p. 500, ll. 27; p. 507, ll. 35; and p. 515, ll. 33. On the desert motif, see: Von der Übervart, p. 502. l. 39, p. 503, l. 5; and p. 511, ll. 35–40. Both passages cite Dionysius. Ein einig ein appears in Von der Übervart, p. 502, ll. 28–29; and p. 508, l. 1. Von der Übervart, p. 503, l. 20, p. 504, l. 6. The metaphor is found in the Liber XXIV Philosophorum, Axiom II. The latest edition and discussion of this work is Was ist Gott? Das Buch der 24 Philosophen, ed. by Kurt Flasch (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011), where this definition is treated on pp. 29–34. The history of the definition was given a detailed treatment by Dietrich Mahnke: Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt: Beiträge zur Genealogie der mathematischen Mystik (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1937), pp. 152–4, on our text. For this phrase, Von der Übervart, p. 511, l. 7–8, as well as p. 510, l. 7; and p. 511, l. 26. Usually under the formula ‘Dionysius sprichet [. . .]’, Denys is quoted fifteen times: Von der Übervart, p. 496, l. 4–5; p. 503, l. 1; p. 505, ll. 36–40; p. 506, ll. 32–34; p. 507, ll. 15–16; p. 508, ll. 3–4; p. 508, ll. 6–9; p. 509, ll. 4–12; p. 511, ll. 20–22; p. 511, ll. 36–38; p. 513, ll. 18–20; p. 514, ll. 6–28 (a series of three passages); and p. 515, ll. 23–26. In contrast, Augustine is cited only three times, and John Chrysostom and Origen once each. Not all the passages from the Song of Songs are identifiable, since the author edits, adds, and seemingly makes up some texts. Here is a list of seven passages with my identifications: Von der Übervart, p. 503, ll. 17–18 (actually Ecclesiastes 21.5); p. 504, ll. 6–7 (Song of Songs 4.9); p. 507, ll. 16–18 (Song of Songs 2.8); p. 508, ll. 11–12 (‘Nû sprichet diu sêle in der minne buoche “mir ist nieman got und ich bin niemanne sêle”’: unknown); p. 508, l. 18 (Song of Songs 6.2); p. 508, ll. 23–24 (Song of Songs 8.14); and p. 512, ll. 26–28 (same unidentified quote as p. 508, ll. 11–12).

‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’ 217 52 Von der Übervart, p. 506, ll. 32–4: ‘Daz gotlich iht ist ein vernünftic wesen. Dionysius spichet: daz vernünftic lieht, daz got ist, das hât sîn glîchnisse geben der vernünftigen sêle’. No passage in Dionysius says this directly, but the author may be thinking of De coelesti hierarchia 1.2 (121AB). 53 Von der Übervart, p. 504, ll. 36–7; and p. 505, ll. 5–8: ‘Do wart si von kennende kennelòs, von minnende minnelòs, von willen willelòs unde von liehte vinster [. . .] Si sol sô gar ze nihte werden an ir selben, daz da niht enblîbe dan got, unde got sî got überschîne als diu sunne den manen, unde daz si mit der selben cleinfüegunge, die got ist, flieze in allez daz, dar got êwiklîche in got vliezende ist’. 54 Von der Űbervart, p. 507, ll. 14–18: ‘Diz meinde sant Dionysius, dô er sprach: got wonet in einer unberüerlîche stilheit. Nû sprichet diu brut in der minne buoche “ich hân übersteigen alle berge unde die vermügenheit biz an der dunster kraft des vaters”.’ The text from Dionysius appears to be MT 1.1, while Song of Songs 2.8 speaks of ‘leaping over the mountains’, but has nothing on passing into the darkness of the Father. Such an addition is typical of how the treatise uses the Song of Songs. 55 Von der Übervart, p. 507, ll. 21–5: ‘Dâ hôrt ich sunder lût, dâ sach ich sunder lieht, dâ rouch ich sunder bewegen, dâ smaht ich des dâ niht enwas, dâ enpfant ich des dâ niht enbleib, Har nâch wart mîn herze grundelôs, mîn sêle minnelôs, mîn geist formelôs unde mîn nature weselôs.’ 56 Von der Übervart, p. 508, ll. 6–10: ‘Dionysius sprichet: diu êrste sache ist ob allen namen, si ist überminnic, überweselich, überverstentlich, überredelich und übernatùrelich. Diu erste sache ist noch lieht noch dunsternis. Eyâ, also ist si entfrömedet allen gesachten sachen.’ The quotation appears to be a kind of summary of MT 5. 57 Von der Übervart, p. 512, ll. 20–5: ‘Und der begrîfen hat er bedeket mit eime gedregten dunsternisse, daz in kein crêatûre begrîfen mac, al ser sich selben begrîfet in ime selben. Swaz diu sêle in dem liehte begrîfet, daz verliuret si in dem dunsternisse. Sô krieget si doch nach dem dunsternisse, wan sî wager dunket daz dunster dan daz licht. Aldâ verliuret si sich unde daz lieht in dem dunsternisse.’ Two other treatments of divine darkness not treated here are found in p. 509, ll. 14–15; and p. 512, ll. 20–5. 58 New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 404. The manuscript has been digitised and is available online: [accessed 2 January 2017]. 59 Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). For a brief treatment, see: McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism, pp. 304–9. 60 For a survey of these images, see: ‘Chapter 8. The Trinitarian Miniatures’, in Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles, pp. 118–42. For a treatment of some aspects of the development of the iconography of the Trinity, see: Bernard McGinn, ‘Trinity Higher Than Any Being: Imaging the Invisible Trinity’, in Die Äesthetik des Unsichtbaren. Bildtheorie und Bildgebrauch in der Vormoderne, ed. by David Ganz and Thomas Lentes (Berlin: Reimer, 2004), pp. 76–93; and ‘Theologians as Trinitarian Iconographers’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 186–207. 61 Beinecke, MS 404, [accessed 2 January 2017]. 62 Beinecke, MS 404, [accessed 2 January 2017]. 63 Beinecke, MS 404, [accessed 2 January 2017]. 64 Folio 105v: ‘Domine, duc me in desertum tue deitatis et tenbrositatem tui luminis et duc me ubi tu non es.’ The prayer is accompanied by an antiphon from the Feast of St Lawrence: ‘Mea nox obscurum non habet, sed lux glorie mee omnia inlucessit’ (based on Psalm 138.12). 65 Folio 105v: ‘Bernardus orauit: domine, duc me ubi es. Dixit ei: barnarde [sic], non facio, quoniam si ducerem te ubi sum, annichileraris michi et tibi.’

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66 In the large literature on John’s view of the dark night I cite only a few essays that I have found especially useful, such as Alois M. Haas, ‘Die dunkle Nacht der Sinne und des Geistes’, in Die Dunkle Nacht der Sinne, ed. by Gotthard Fuchs (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1989), pp. 108–25; and Ruud Weiten, ‘The Night in John of the Cross and Michel Henry’, Studies in Spirituality, 12 (2003), 213–23. 67 On the three reasons why the journey to God is described as a ‘dark night’, see: The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book I, chap. 2. The first is that the soul must deprive itself of all desire for worldly things; the second is because the journey is one of faith, which is darkness to the intellect; the third is because the journey leads to God, ‘who is the dark night to the soul in this life’. On the influence of Dionysius on John of the Cross, see: Steven Wlusek, ‘The Foundations of John of the Cross’s Spiritual Theology in the Thought and Writings of Pseudo-Dionysius’, Studies in Spirituality, 18 (2008), 195–214; and especially Ysabel de Andía, ‘San Juan de la Cruz y la “Teología Mística de ‘San Dionisio’”’, in Actas del Congreso Internacional Sanjuanista, ed. by A. García Simón, 3 vols (Junta de Castilla y León: Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, 1993), III, 97–125. 68 Henry Fogle, ed., The Complete Poetry of Henry Vaughan (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), p. 325.

Bibliography Manuscripts New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 404, [accessed 2 January 2017]

Primary Albert the Great, Alberti Magni Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum Super Dionysii Mysticam theologiam et epistulas, ed. by Paulus Simon, Albert Magni Opera Omnia, 37, 2 vols (Münster: Aschendorff, 1978) Angela of Folgnio, Il Libro della Beata Angela da Foligno, ed. by Thier Ludger and Abele Calufetti (Grottaferrata: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1985) ———, Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, trans. by Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist Press, 1993) Bonaventure, Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae opera Omnia, 10 vols (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1883–1902) ———, Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis, trans. by Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978) Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) ———, Corpus Dionysiacum II, ed. by Günter Heil and Adolf M. Ritter, 2nd edn. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012) Dylan, Bob, Time Out of Mind (Columbia Records, 1997) Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke herausgegeben im Auftrag der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, ed. by Josef Quint and others, 5 and 6 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1937–2006) Henry Suso, Heinrich Seuse Deutsche Schriften, ed. by Karl Bihlmeyer (Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1907; repr. 1961) John Scotus Eriugena, Ioannes Scotus Eriugena, ed. by J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 122 (Paris: J. P. Migne, 1853; repr. Turnout: Brepols, 1999)

‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there’ 219 ———, Commentaire sur l’Évangile de Jean, ed. and trans. by Édouard A. Jeauneau, Sources Chrétiennes 180 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1972) ———, Iohannis Scoti Eriugenae Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, ed. by Jeanne Barbet, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 31 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1975) ———, Periphyseon, in Iohannis Scotti seu Eriugenae Periphyseon, ed. by Édouard A. Jeauneau, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 161–65, 5 vols (Turnholt: Brepols, 1996–2003) Liber XXIV Philosophorum, in Was ist Gott? Das Buch der 24 Philosophen, ed. by Kurt Flasch (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011), pp. 24–76 Tauler, Johannes, Die Predigten Taulers, ed. by Ferdinand Vetter (Zurich: Weidman, 1968) Vaughan, Henry, The Complete Poetry of Henry Vaughan, ed. by Henry Fogle (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964) Von der übervart der gotheit [as Traktat XI], in Meister Eckhart, ed. by Franz Pfeiffer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1857; repr. 1924), pp. 494–516 Von der übervart der gotheit, in Meister Eckhart by Franz Pfeiffer, trans. by C. de B. Evans (London: Watkins, 1925), pp. 350–67

Secondary Beierwaltes, Werner, ‘Eriugena’s Platonism’, Hermathena, 109 (1992), 53–72 Bernard, Charles A., ‘Saint Bonaventure Lecteur de Denys dans l’Itinerarium Mentis in Deum’, Studies in Spirituality, 1 (1991), 37–56 Blankenhorn, Bernhard, The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015) Bougerol, Jacques, ‘St. Bonaventure et le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite’, Études franciscaines, 18 (1968), 33–123 Carabine, Deirdre, ‘Eriugena’s Use of the Symbolism of Light, Cloud, and Darkness’, in Eriugena East and West, ed. by Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1994), pp. 141–52 Coolman, Boyd Taylor, Eternally Spiraling into God: Knowledge, Love, and Ecstasy in the Theology of Thomas Gallus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) de Andía, Ysabel, ‘San Juan de la Cruz y la “Teología Mística de ‘San Dionisio’”’, in Actas del Congreso Internacional Sanjuanista, ed. by A. García Simón, 3 vols (Junta de Castilla y León: Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, 1993), III, pp. 97–125 Delaporte, Marianne, ‘“He Darkens Me with Brightness”: The Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius in Hilduins’s Vita of St. Denis’, Religion and Theology, 13 (2006), 219–46 Dupuy, Michel, ‘Nuit’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ed. by Marcel Viller and others, 17 vols (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–94), XI, pp. 519–24 Durand, Gilbert, Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire (Paris: Bordas, 1969) Eliade, Mircea, ‘Le symbole des ténèbres dans les religions archaiques’, in Polarité du Symbole, ed. by Ferdinand Alquié and others (Bruges: Les Études Carmélitaines chez Desclée de Brouwer, 1960), pp. 15–28 Fisher, Jeffrey, ‘The Theology of Dis/Similarity: Negation in Pseudo-Dionysius’, Journal of Religion, 81 (2001), 529–48 Haas, Alois M., ‘Die dunkle Nache der Sinne und des Geistes’, in Die Dunkle Nacht der Sinne, ed. by Gotthard Fuchs (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1989), pp. 108–25 Hagedorn, Anselm C. and others, ‘Cloud’, in The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, ed. by Hans-Josef Klauck and others, 30 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), V (2012), pp. 446–51

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Hamburger, Jeffrey F., The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) Hasebrink, Burkhard, Formen inzitativer Rede bei Meister Eckhart: Untersuchungen zur literarische Konzeption der deutschen Predigt (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992) Hausherr, Irénée (as J. Lemaitre), ‘Préhistoire du concept du gnophos’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ed. by Marcel Viller and others, 17 vols (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–94), II, pp. 1868–72 Laird, Martin, ‘Gregory of Nyssa and the Mysticism of Darkness: A Reconsideration’, Journal of Religion, 79 (1999), 592–616 Mahnke, Dietrich, Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt: Beiträge zur Genealogie der mathematischen Mystik (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1937) McEvoy, James, ‘Metaphors of Light and Darkness in Eriugena’, in Begriff und Metapher: Sprachform des Denkens bei Eruigena, ed. by Werner Beierwaltes (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990), pp. 149–67 McGinn, Bernard, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism: 1200–1350 (New York: Crossroad, 1998) ———, ‘Trinity Higher Than Any Being: Imaging the Invisible Trinity’, in Die Äesthetik des Unsichtbaren: Bildtheorie und Bildgebrauch in der Vormoderne, ed. by David Ganz and Thomas Lentes (Berlin: Reimer, 2004), pp. 76–93 ———, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (New York: Crossroad, 2005) ———, ‘Theologians as Trinitarian Iconographers’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 186–207 Mooney, Hilary Anne-Marie, Theophany: The Appearing of God according to the Writings of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009) Plattig, Michael, ‘Die “dunkle Nache” als Gotteserfahrung’, Studies in Spirituality, 4 (1994), 165–205 Puech, Henri-Charles, ‘Le Ténèbre mystique chez Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite et dans la tradition patristique’, in En quête de la Gnose I: La Gnose et le temps et autres essais, ed. by Henri-Charles Puech (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp. 119–41 Roques, René, ‘Contemplation, extase et ténèbre chez le Pseudo-Denys’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ed. by Marcel Viller and others, 17 vols (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–94), II, pp. 1885–911 Rorem, Paul, The Dionysian Mystical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015) Schmitt, Peter, ‘Von der übervart der gotheit’, in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, ed. by Kurt Ruh and others, 2nd edn., 14 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978–2005), IX (1995), pp. 1205–9 Turner, Denys, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) van Ivánka, Endre, ‘Dunkelheit, mystische’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, 28 vols (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1950), IV (1959), 350–8 Weiten, Ruud, ‘The Night in John of the Cross and Michel Henry’, Studies in Spirituality, 12 (2003), 213–23 Werblowski, Zwi, ‘Light and Darkness’, in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. by Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), VIII, pp. 547–50 Wlusek, Steven, ‘The Foundations of John of the Cross’s Spiritual Theology in the Thought and Writings of Pseudo-Dionysius’, Studies in Spirituality, 18 (2008), 195–214

11 Visions of the otherworld The accounts of Fursey and Dryhthelm in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and the Homilies of Ælfric Roberta Bassi Introduction The otherworldly journeys through the interim space between heaven and hell experienced by Fursey and Dryhthelm are reputed to be among the most influential examples of vision literature prior to Dante, and for this reason they have been studied extensively, for example by Jacques Le Goff in his seminal – and controversial – work on the birth of Purgatory, but also by Maria Pia Ciccarese and many others.1 This short contribution is an attempt to explore the ways in which the visions experienced by these two holy men are depicted in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (731) and in the Homilies of Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 990–995).2 It should be underlined at the outset that, despite occurring together in two very different textual landscapes, i.e. in the Historia ecclesiastica and in the second collection of Ælfric’s Homilies, the two vivid accounts are far from being homogeneous in their depictions of the otherworld; in fact, the visionaries give two entirely different pictures of the interim space between heaven and hell. The monk from Ireland and the layman from Northumbria each experience a different otherworld, and neither Bede nor Ælfric appear to be worried by this diversity, which, as I will explain below, is also carried through in different ways from Bede to Ælfric (who relies on Bede as a source for Dryhthelm), and is never reconciled to form a unified picture of the otherworld. In fact, I would like to argue that this intrinsic diversity can be seen as an implicit attempt to express the inexpressible, or that which had not yet been categorised and dogmatised, by providing images that somehow complement each other and can appeal to different levels of learning, understanding or interpretation. The idea of purgatory was very much in a state of flux at the time in which the works analysed here were written, and would only find a stable depiction much later in history.3 These are therefore very early attempts to articulate a novel concept through the means of textual art, one that would become extremely popular and ever present in the late medieval Christian imaginary. A basic outline of the main events narrated in the two accounts could be summarised thus: Fursey is a holy man from Ireland who undertakes a life of peregrinatio, or voluntary exile for Christ.4 After establishing a monastery in Ireland, he

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leaves everything behind and goes to East Anglia, where he is welcomed by King Sigeberht and establishes another monastery. Pagan attacks force him to move to France, where he founds yet another monastic institution before dying around the year 650. During his life, Fursey has four visionary experiences; the second of these episodes offers a detailed account of what he saw and experienced while in the otherworld and of the accursed souls that attempt to harm him during his journey. Dryhthelm is a layman who died around the year 692; in his Vita he experiences a four-fold vision of the otherworld, in which he is guided by an angel and granted access to the ante-chambers of hell and heaven; he also approaches the pit of hell and the kingdom of heaven. Finally, he is led back to his body, and from that moment onwards lives a life of penance as a monk. Bede devotes two separate chapters of the Historia ecclesiastica to the visions of Fursey (III.19) and Dryhthelm (V.12). Whereas Bede does not mention any written sources for the account of the visions experienced by Dryhthelm, he does refer to a written source for his account of the life of Fursey. This is the Vita Fursei, a Latin prose text of Frankish origin probably composed in the second half of the seventh century.5 The two accounts in Bede do not present any form of connection or cross-reference; in fact, the picture of the otherworld contained in the two narratives is far from being homogeneous. The otherworldly space visited by Fursey and Dryhthelm is so different in the two accounts that it almost seems to be two different places, and Bede does not appear to be uncomfortable with the coexistence of two divergent pictures of the otherworld in the same work. After all, ideas concerning the fate of those souls who do not quite deserve to go straight to heaven, but who also have been worthy enough to avoid the torments of hell, are still fluctuating at the time of Bede, and will remain in this undefined state for many centuries to come, as Sarah Foot among others has noted.6 Ælfric relates the otherworldly experiences of Fursey and Dryhthelm in two consecutive homiletic pieces contained in the Second Series of his Catholic Homilies.7 The homilies for the Tuesday in Rogationtide are in fact a composite text for the same liturgical occasion; taken as a whole, this composite homily contains several narrations of otherworldly visions and can be divided into three separate sections, each of them ending with the word amen.8 The first section of the homily treats the life of Fursey (II.20), whereas the second section tells the story of Dryhthelm (II.21); the third and concluding section of the homily contains the story of Imma (II.21), a short miraculous account showing the redemptive power of the Mass, also taken from Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica (IV.20). In addition, the stories of Dryhthelm and Imma are interpolated into the sermon alongside a quick overview of some of the most vivid images of the otherworld contained in Book IV of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. As Malcolm Godden points out, it is not clear whether Ælfric intended the three episodes to be read together, or if he meant to provide his readers with separate, interchangeable episodes on the same topic.9 Taken together as a unit, the different episodes share a preoccupation with the life to come and with reporting reliable visions of what awaits every soul after death.10 Although Bede devotes three separate chapters of the Historia ecclesiastica to each of the three figures included in the composite homily

Visions of the otherworld 223 (Fursey, Dryhthelm, and Imma), Ælfric chose not to make use of the Historia ecclesiastica as his source for Fursey, but turned instead to the anonymous Vita Fursei.11 However, he does rely on the Historia ecclesiastica for the accounts of Dryhthelm and Imma. And therefore it appears that he did not consider it at all problematic to juxtapose such different depictions of the otherworld within the very same composite sermon.

1) Fursey The most relevant moment in Fursey’s life for the purposes of this short study is the second vision, which he experiences during an illness and which can be summarised from the anonymous Latin Vita Fursei as follows: While Fursey is bedridden, three angels take him with them outside of his body. On his way upwards he hears the horrible voices of demons approaching them, described as ugly, unshaped shadows. The demons attack Fursey with darts, but the angels protect him and fight the demons back. The battle continues on a verbal level with the demons and the angels disputing over Fursey’s merits and wrongdoings. When the demons are defeated, one of the angels commands Fursey to look back upon the world; Fursey sees a dark valley and four fires.12 The angels explain that those are the fires of falsehood, avarice, discord, and injustice, and that they will burn each man according to their sins. The four fires merge together and draw near Fursey, but he is protected by the angels and passes safely through the parted flames. The dispute between angels and demons resumes, and once again the angels win. Fursey then sees two holy men from his region. The two souls are granted permission to talk to Fursey and command him to return to his body. Instead, Fursey questions them about the end of the world, and the two souls proceed to rebuke the vices of the clergy and to offer remedies for the atonement of deadly sins, before exhorting Fursey to be steadfast in his missionary activity. On his way back to his body, Fursey is wounded on the jaw and shoulder by an unrighteous soul that the demons throw at him from the conflagration of the four fires. The angels explain to Fursey that he has been burnt because, at the time when the man was on his deathbed, Fursey had accepted a garment from him without being aware of the fact that the man had not repented for his sins. Therefore, Fursey was involuntarily tainted by the man’s sins, and for this reason he also has a share of his punishment. Fursey is finally brought back to his body, but he is reluctant to return to his earthly life; the angels instruct him to sprinkle his body with water so as to be relieved from all pain, except for the burns, which will always be visible on his jaw and shoulder. With the chapter on Fursey, Bede offers a summarised account of the life of the Irish monk in which the audience is frequently reminded of the existence of a much more detailed narrative of his visions and travels, a libellus de vita eius which should also be read in order to know the full story.13 The Vita Fursei,

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however, is not the only source for Bede’s writing; he also mentions an oral source for his knowledge of Fursey’s life, namely the memories of a brother of his own monastery who knew a trustworthy, pious man who saw Fursey with his own eyes and heard the story of his visions from Fursey in his own words.14 Bede’s text thus shows not only his customary fondness for historical and geographical precision, but also the great significance he gives to his sources, both written and oral. With this in mind, it is perhaps easier to understand why Bede’s text treats the written source with a certain degree of freedom and why the chronological sequence of events is rearranged in a way that allows Bede to link Fursey’s life more explicitly with the exposition on the kingdom of East Anglia contained in the previous chapters of Book III. Indeed, Bede tends to summarise the often quite lengthy descriptions of the Vita Fursei, only seldom quoting verbatim from it and rather showing a tendency to paraphrase his source material. For example, Bede shows no particular interest in the disputes between the angels and demons concerning Fursey’s merits and sins, so he summarises the lengthy sequence of accusations into a very compact reference;15 the same can be said for the long conversation between Fursey and the blessed souls:16 Sequuntur aduersus ipsum accusationem malignorum, defensiones spirituum bonorom, copiosor caelestium agminum uisio; sed et uirorum de sua natione sanctorum, quos olim sacerdotii gradu non ignobiliter potitos fama iam uulgante compererat, a quibus non pauca, quae uel ipsi uel omnibus qui audire uellent multum salubria essent, audiuit. [There follow, in the book, the accusations of the evil spirits against himself, the defence of the good spirits, and a fuller vision of the heavenly hosts, as well as of the saints of his own nation, whose names he knew by repute and who had been devoted priests in days gone by. From them he learned many things valuable both to himself and to those who might be willing to listen.]17 The passage describing the burning received by Fursey from the soul of the sinner represents another detailed phase of the narrative, though Bede’s rendering of his source is quite free.18 Fursey’s vision of the otherworld pivots around the idea of going through fire. Fire has the power to purify from sin, and this is one of the main characteristics of the early conceptions of purgatory.19 Fursey goes through this ordeal twice, and the second time he does not go through it unharmed, because he has sinned. The burns he receives punish and purify him at the same time, before sending him back to the world, in a sort of baptism by fire.20 In this case the dialogue between the angel and the ensuing explanation of the incident follow the Vita Fursei quite closely by reproducing all the dialogic exchange between the characters. Conversely, the instructions for the salvation of those who repent at the moment of their death, as well as Fursey’s awakening back in his body, are only briefly mentioned by Bede.21 In general, Bede’s account is extremely dense and compact and presents an overall brisk narrative pace. His written source is highly summarised, with the exception of those few verbatim quotations from the Vita Fursei that correspond to the sensory climax of the narration.

Visions of the otherworld 225 In particular, three aspects of Fursey’s life emerge most evidently from Bede’s chapter: his visionary experiences (more specifically: what he sees, what he hears, and what he feels on his skin as a result of the burn he receives); his years in East Anglia with Sigeberht; and the concept of peregrinatio. Bede offers a detailed mapping of Fursey’s earthly peregrinatio that focuses more specifically than his source on his years in East Anglia. In the Vita Fursei, Fursey’s journey to England is but a second stage of his peregrinatio. Bede is more interested in showing his audience only the superior grade of peregrinatio, the one that necessarily entails a journey overseas and a perpetual exile from country and family.22 In the sixth and seventh centuries, this type of peregrinatio makes the Irish monk into a muchwelcomed missionary of God in those unknown territories where his faith leads him.23 Moreover, the purpose of the detailed mapping of Fursey’s earthly peregrinatio appears to counterbalance the vagueness of the geography of his spiritual peregrination in the otherworld. Bede prefers to quote the visual aspects of the vision in detail rather than including the lengthy theological, or quasi-legal, debates between angels and demons. Of course, it is possible that the preponderance of the visual elements in Bede’s chapter might also have something to do with Bede’s oral source and with those parts of Fursey’s experiences that he remembered most vividly from that account. The second and third most relevant aspects of Bede’s chapter are linked together in so far as the missionary activity undertaken by Fursey is closely connected with royal figures, first in East Anglia and then in Gaul. This fits in quite well with Bede’s general attitude towards conversion and evangelisation in the Historia ecclesiastica, where adherence to Christianity is always prompted from the higher ranks of society down to the lower classes and never presents a bottom-up structure. Moreover, the connection between peregrinatio and royal figures seems to be a necessary requirement for the fulfilment of this superior form of voluntary exile.24 By emphasising Fursey’s accomplishments in England, which on the whole constitute but a minor part of Fursey’s missionary life and visionary experience, Bede ensures that the account of Fursey’s life he inserts in Book III fits in with the general purpose of the Historia ecclesiastica. In other words, he gives Fursey’s life a narrower focus, and he makes the reader look at it from an English point of view. Ælfric gives shape to a different Life of Fursey, one which follows its source in detail, especially when translating the sections concerning the visionary experiences and the theological debate between angels and demons – but one which also departs most vigorously from it, avoiding mention of Fursey’s earthy peregrinatio across three countries and his successful missionary activity. It seems clear, therefore, that Ælfric and Bede present us with two quite different agendas and two equally different contexts of use. In the case of Ælfric, his focus does not lie in the historical or missionary side of Fursey’s Vita, but rather in the moral and penitential exemplum that his visionary experiences may offer to those who would hear the homily during Rogation, the time of the liturgical year devoted to atonement and to the invocation of God’s mercy for human sin.25

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Ælfric shows a clear tendency to emphasise the penitential moments described in his source. In the Vita Fursei, the soul is made the object of two moments of fierce theological contention between angels and demons. These quasi-legalistic debates are about Fursey’s wrongdoings and merits in life.26 Ælfric retains all the disputes between angels and demons of the Vita Fursei. Some of the accusations made by the demons question the integrity of Fursey’s life, not so much as a man, but rather as a monk. The demons bring forward a long list of accusations, most of which are discarded by the angels:27 • • • • • • • • •

Fursey practised evil discourse; He did not forgive sins; He was not meek; He received evil from men; He did not execute his master’s will; His spirit is unclean; He did not love his neighbour as himself; He loved worldly things; He did not correct the unrighteous.

These rebukes could certainly apply to laymen as well as clerics, but the specific duties of forsaking worldly things and correcting sinners seem to be more pertinent to a tonsured or ecclesiastical life. Here the demons are referring to the only sin Fursey can actually be blamed for, namely, that once he had accepted a garment from a dying man, without being aware that the man had not repented of his sins. Therefore, Fursey had involuntarily taken part in the man’s sins; for this reason, Fursey is burnt by the soul of the unrighteous man and will bear the marks of this burning on his body. In this way, he is purged from his sin. Ælfric generally deals with his sources with freedom; he is usually more interested in producing a text that suits his audience, and his own agenda, rather than one that mirrors his source in every respect.28 Nevertheless, in this case Ælfric translates the disputes in detail. This is even more remarkable if we consider how this episode is treated in the Historia ecclesiastica: the theological disputes are completely omitted by Bede, whose interests clearly lie elsewhere in the narrative.29 Ælfric follows his source in detail also when it comes to the rebukes directed towards teachers, priests and monks: Ofer ðam láreowum is godes yrre swyðost astyred. for ðan ðe hí forgymeleasiað. þa godcundan bec. and ymbe ða woruldðing eallunge hogiað; Biscopum and sacerdum gedafenað. þæt hí heora lare gymon. and ðam folce heora ðearfe secgan; Mynstermannum gedafenað. þæt hí on stilnysse heora líf/adreogon; Þu soðlice cyð þine gesihðe on middanearde. and beo hwiltidum on digelnysse. and hwíltidum betwux mannum; Ðonne ðu on digelnysse beo. heald þonne geornlice godes beboda. and eft ðonne þu ut færst betwux mannum. far for/heora sawla hælu. na for woruldlicum gestreonum; Ne beo ðu carful ymbe woruldlicum gestreonum. ac miltsa eallum ðinum

Visions of the otherworld 227 wiðerwinnum mid hluttre heortan. and agyld gód for yfele. and gebide for ðinum feondum; Beo ðu swa getreowe dihtnere. and nan ðing ðe ne geahnige. buton bigleofan and scrude; Aféd ðinne lichaman mid alyfedum mettum. and ælc yfel forseoh;30 [Over the teachers is God’s anger most excited, because they neglect the divine books, and are wholly solicitous about worldly things. It is appropriate to bishops and priests that they observe their doctrine, and say to the people their need. It is appropriate to monks that they lead their lives in stillness. Make known your vision in the world, and be sometimes in privacy, and sometimes among men. When you are in privacy, hold zealously to the commandments of God; and again, when you go out among men, go for the salvation of their souls, not for worldly profit. Be not solicitous about worldly gains, but be merciful to all your adversaries with pure heart, and return good for evil, and pray for your enemies. Be as a faithful steward, and appropriate nothing to yourself, except for food and clothing. Feed thy body with allowed food, and despise every evil.] By omitting certain passages of the source and by expanding others, the focus of the narrative shifts from a more general reflection on sin and on how to live a righteous life, to the righteous conduct teachers, priests and monks should have.31 In addition, the final exhortations of the angels who lead Fursey back to his body are clearly directed to further explain Fursey’s own penitential experience. They also offer practical advice to priests and monks on confession, and on what to do with the body and the possessions of sinners after their death. Once again, Ælfric translates this section of the Vita Fursei in detail: Boda nu eallum mannum dædbote to dónne. and andetnysse to sacerdum. oð ða endenextan tide heora lifes. ac swa ðeah nis to underfonne nanes synfulles mannes æhta on his geendunge. ne his lic ne sy on haligre stowe bebyrged. ac beo him gesæd ær hé gewite ða teartan witu. þæt his heorte mid ðære biternysse beo gehrepod. þæt hé eft mage æt sumon sæle beon geclænsod. gif he his unrihtwisnysse huru on his forðsiðe behreowsað. and genihtsumlice ælmessan/dælð; Ne underfo se sacerd swa ðeah nan ðing þæs synfullan mannes æhta. ac hí man dæle ðearfum æt his byrgene;32 [Preach now to all men make penance and confession to priests, until the last hour of their lives; but yet the possessions of no sinful man must be accepted on his death, nor should his body be buried in a holy place; but before he departs let him be instructed about the painful torments, that his heart may be touched with the bitterness, that he may at some time be purified, if at least at his death he repents of his unrighteousness, and distributes alms in abundance. Nevertheless the priest should not accept anything of the sinful man’s possessions; let them be distributed to the poor at his grave]. Bede, on the other hand, only includes a scanty reference to these final exhortations: ‘Et plura locutus, quid erga salutem eorum qui ad mortem poeniterent esset

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agendum, salubri sermone docuit’ [‘He then went on to give helpful advice as to what should be done for the salvation of those who repented in the hour of death’].33 One could say that Ælfric provides his readers with the very information that Bede did not include in his chapter. Ælfric gives prominence to the rebukes and the practical advice directed to priests and monks, and most especially those regarding the practice of confession. This, combined with the symbolic imagery of Fursey’s otherworldly journey, might suggest that Ælfric had an ecclesiastical audience in mind: an audience who would draw practical profit from this homily, and an audience who would be equipped with the cultural tools to understand in full the complex baptismal symbolism of this narrative.

2) Dryhthelm The story of Dryhthelm as told by Bede in the Historia ecclesiastica can be summarised as follows: a man named Dryhthelm, who always led a very pious life, dies one night following an incurable illness. In the morning, he comes back to life and suddenly sits up, scaring all those who had been mourning his death. He explains to his wife that he has been granted permission to come back but that now he must live a different life. After dividing his possessions between his children, his wife and himself, and donating his part to the poor, he enters the monastery of Melrose and lives in penance until his death. In the vision experienced on his deathbed, Dryhthelm is guided by an angelic figure to a very deep valley in which one side is flames, and the other is battered by snow and hail. Souls of men are tossed from one side of the valley to the other without respite. Dryhthelm begins to think that these might be the torments of hell, but his guide tells him he is mistaken. The angel guides him further down the valley into the darkness and disappears, leaving Dryhthelm alone in the face of terrible globes of fire that shoot up and fall back into a pit, producing a horrible stench; the flames are full of human souls. He also sees a crowd of evil spirits taking five souls into the pit, as the laughter of the devils and the cries of despair of the damned resonate in the darkness. Some of the evil spirits come from the pit towards Dryhthelm, but do not dare to touch him. Finally, a shining light grows nearer and scatters the spirits away. This light is the angel, who leads Dryhthelm away from the valley into a much brighter place until they find themselves on top of a great wall. Dryhthelm sees a bright plain, full of the sweet scent of flowers, in which men in white robes sit around. He begins to think that this might be heaven, but his guide replies that he is again mistaken. Walking past the plain, Dryhthelm sees a brighter light than before, smells an even more wonderful scent, and hears the sound of people singing; he hopes to be led thence, but the angel turns round and takes him back to the plain. The angel explains to Dryhthelm what he saw: the dark valley is the place where sinners who repented on the point of death are punished until judgement day, when they will join the kingdom of heaven; the pit is the mouth of hell, from which nobody

Visions of the otherworld 229 will ever be released. The bright plain is the place for those souls that practised good works, but that were not yet in such a state of perfection as to be directly admitted into the kingdom of heaven; those who are already perfect when they die, on the other hand, go straight to the kingdom of heaven, which is near the place that Dryhthelm wished to see. After this explanation, Dryhthelm finds himself back in his body. Dryhthelm tells his vision to the monk Hæmgisl as well as to King Aldfrith of Northumbria. During his new life as a monk, Dryhthelm punishes himself with very harsh penances, including standing in the river Tweed in prayer, no matter what the season. In contrast to the emphatic descriptions of the Historia ecclesiastica, Ælfric offers a more linear exposition of the events. For example, Ælfric condenses Bede’s allusive, undefined description of Dryhthelm’s guide’s appearance to a somewhat more hasty, clear-cut definition: ‘Me com to an scinende engel [. . .] and gelædde me to eastdæle suwigende’ [‘A shining angel came to me [. . .] and silently led me eastwards’].34 The visual image described by Bede, in which the reader is left to infer that the guide is, in fact, an angel, is replaced by a much more linear, straightforward account of the essential narrative elements.35 Dryhthelm then proceeds to describe the valley in which he found himself walking with his guide. He sees souls being tossed without respite from one side of the valley, icy cold, to the other, fiery hot; Dryhthelm begins to wonder whether these might be the torments of hell, but his guide replies that what he is seeing is not hell.36 Ælfric tones down the rendering of this distressing image and makes it less visually emphatic than the Latin.37 Instead of lingering on the description of the valley as found in the Historia ecclesiastica, Ælfric carries on with his summarising tone and only reports Dryhthelm’s reflections. Moreover, in general, the sense of fear that permeates the account in the Historia ecclesiastica is absent in Ælfric. Both tendencies can be exemplified by looking at the passage of the Historia ecclesiastica describing hell, which begins with a quote from Book VI of the Aeneid (vi.268), ‘sola sub nocte per umbras’ [through the shades in the lone night].38 This quote quite fittingly evokes the beginning of another very illustrious journey to the underworld. Dryhthelm sees a great number of flaming globes emerging from a pit and then falling back into it again: Et cum progrederemur ‘sola sub nocte per umbras’, ecce subito apparent ante nos crebri flammarum tetrarum globi ascendentes quasi de puteo magno rursumque decidentes in eundem. [As we went on ‘through the shades in the lone night’, there suddenly appeared before us masses of noisome flame, constantly rising up as if from a great pit and falling into it again.]39 Efne þa færlice æteowdon gelomlæcende ligas. sweartes fýres upastigende [. . .] [Then suddenly frequent flames of dark fire appeared rising up].40

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Claude Carozzi underlines the volcanic imagery in this description of hell; this motif also recurs in Gregory the Great’s Dialogues (IV.36), as well as in Bede’s own De natura rerum (50).41 In these two texts Mount Etna strongly resembles hell: Quod uero se ad Siciliam duci testatus est, quid sentiri aliud potest, nisi quod prae ceteris locis in eius terrae insulis eructuante igne tormentorum ollae patuerunt?42 [That he should sail to Sicily is best explained by recalling that in the islands around Sicily there are more open pits burning with fires from hell than in any other region].43 Inde montis aetnae ad exemplum gehennae ignium tam diutinum tam durat incendium, quod insularum Aeolidum dicunt undis nutriri, dum aquarum concursus spiritum se cum in imum profundum rapiens, tamdiu suffocat, donec uenis terrae diffusus fomenta ignis accendat.44 [This is why the very long lasting fire of Mount Etna endures like the fires of hell. They say this fire is nourished by the waves of the Aeolian Islands, as the tumult of waters taking the air down with itself into the deepest depths gasps for a long time, until, having been diffused through the veins of the earth, it ignites the kindling materials of fire].45 Book III of the Aeneid contains a description of the landscape surrounding Mount Etna that presents some interesting similarities with the landscape evoked by Bede in this passage, especially with regard to the globes of flame rising up from the bottom and falling back again: Portus ab accessu ventorum immotus et ingens ipse, sed horrificis iuxta tonat Aetna ruinis interdumque atram prorumpit ad aetherea nubem turbine fumantem piceo et candente favilla attolitque globos flammarum et sidera lambit, interdum scopolos avolsaque viscera montis erigit eructans liquefactaque saxa sub auras cum gemitu glomerat fundoque exaestuat imo.46 [There lies a harbour, safe from the winds’ approach and spacious in itself, but near at hand Aetna thunders with terrifying crashes, and now hurls forth to the sky a black cloud, smoking with pitch-black eddy and glowing ashes, and uplifts balls of flame and licks the stars – now violently vomits forth rocks, the mountain’s uptorn entrails, and whirls molten stone skyward with a roar, and boils up from its lowest depths].47 Bede also describes the vertical motion of the globes of fire. Considering that Bede begins this paragraph with a direct quote from the Aeneid, it might be plausible to see another echo of Vergil, albeit only an indirect one, in the description of hell.

Visions of the otherworld 231 As regards the treatment of this learned passage in the Old English homily, Ælfric completely omits the direct quote from Book VI of the Aeneid, and he also does not qualify the flames as having the shape of globes; on the other hand, he focuses on the darkness of the flames.48 That flames in hell are dark is something Ælfric also underlines in the First Series homily for the twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost; it was widely acknowledged that fire in hell is not only very hot, but also burns in darkness and does not produce light.49 Thus Ælfric re-shapes the learned reference of his source by referring to a widely known characteristic of hell and by omitting the parallels with the Vergilian hades. Suddenly Dryhthelm finds himself alone, ‘in medio tenebrarum et horridae uisionis’ [‘in the midst of the darkness and of the horrible scene’].50 Once again, Ælfric leaves out every reference to Dryhthelm’s state of fear but maintains the reference to the darkness surrounding him: ‘and min latteow me þær ana forlet on þam þeostrum middum’ [‘and my guide left me alone there in the midst of the darkness’].51 The references to the foul smell that characterises this second phase of the journey are maintained by Ælfric, who reproduces the source text without summarising it.52 While still alone in the darkness, Dryhthelm watches a group of evil spirits dragging five souls into the pit; he is able to identify three of them, a clericus, a laicus, and a femina.53 The scene is characterised by a pervasive sense of fear and by an overlapping of confused auditory perceptions: Et cum diutius ibi pauidus consisterem, utpote incertus quid agerem, quo uerterem gressum, qui me finis maneret, audio subitum post terga sonitum immanissimi fletus ac miserrimi, simul et cachinnum crepitantem quasi uulgi indocti captis hostibus insultantis. Vt autem sonitus idem clarior redditus ad me usque peruenit, considero turbam malignorum spirituum, quae quinque animas hominum merentes heiulantesque ipsa multum exultans et cachinnans, medias illas trahebat in tenebras; e quibus uidelicet hominibus, ut dinoscere potui, quidam erat adtonsus ut clericus, quidam laicus, quaedam femina. [When I had stood there a long time in great terror, uncertain what to do or where to turn or what end awaited me, I suddenly heard behind my back the sound of wild and desperate lamentation, accompanied by harsh laughter as though a rude mob were insulting their captured foes. As the noise grew clearer and finally reached me, I beheld a crowd of evil spirits, amid jeers and laughter, dragging five human souls, wailing and shrieking, into the midst of the darkness. I could see that one was tonsured like a clerk, one a layman, and one a woman].54 Ælfric presents a simplified version of his source text: only the sequence of events is maintained, but Dryhthelm’s confused perception of the sounds surrounding him is completely omitted. The homily also presents an explanatory comment attached to the passage in which the evil spirits are dragging the five souls into the pit.55 The homily thus makes clear that the souls are dragged into the pit on account of their sins. Ælfric’s tendency to offer a more straightforward, condensed version of the account can also be seen in the way he defines the evil spirits that inhabit this passage. Bede refers to them as maligni spiritus [evil spirits] and as obscuri

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spiritus [gloomy spirits], whereas Ælfric makes explicit reference to the fact that these accursed spirits are devils: the noun deofol occurs three times, in contrast with awyrigedan gastas [accursed spirits] which only occurs once in the text.56 The evil spirits come back from the pit and threaten Dryhthelm with their tongs, but they do not succeed in harming him in any way; while Dryhthelm is trying to find a way to escape, his guide, as bright as a star, approaches him and scatters the accursed spirits.57 This passage is characterised by a palpable sense of fear on the part of Dryhthelm. In contrast to the emphatic descriptions of the Historia ecclesiastica, Ælfric offers, as usual, a more linear exposition of the events. He also adds another explanatory note when he points out that the evil spirits cannot seize Dryhthelm because he is protected by God: ‘ac hi ne mihton þurh godes gescyldnysse me hreppan’ [‘but they could not touch me through God’s protection’].58 Once again, the sense of fear is absent from Ælfric’s account; moreover, Dryhthelm is able to identify his guide straightaway when he reappears, whereas in the Historia ecclesiastica it is only after the evil spirits have been scattered that the narrator makes clear the connection between the shining figure and Dryhthelm’s guide. Dryhthelm and his guide leave darkness behind them and proceed southeastwards into the light. They come to a wall, exceedingly high and long, and Dryhthelm quite inexplicably finds himself on top of it.59 Ælfric offers a somewhat different account of this phase of Dryhthelm’s journey to that of Bede. Conciseness and simplicity are the defining features of his narrative, but in this passage the olfactory perceptions inserted by Bede to express how different this place is from the dark, fearsome valley are replaced by Ælfric with a visual image; instead of the fragrance of flowers, we now have the greenness of the plants.60 The fourth station of Dryhthelm’s journey is, at the same time, the most glorious as well as the least defined place. His guide will later explain that this place is the kingdom of heaven, and yet the very climax of the narrative is the most vaguely characterised station of all. Dryhthelm comes to a place of even greater brightness than the shining meadow; he is hoping to be admitted inside, but his guide turns round and leads him back. Dryhthelm proceeds from a valley to the entrance of a pit; he then comes to a meadow and then approaches the entrance of something that is not at all defined in the text; we are offered a series of sensory perceptions: Dryhthelm sees light around him, hears voices, and smells perfumes. We are only told that this is a locus, but Bede does not offer any further physical or descriptive characterisation of it. We are left with a place that, in comparison with the other loci of the narrative, is in fact a place that human words cannot describe: Cumque procedentes transissemus et has beatorum mansiones spirituum, aspicio ante nos multo maiorem luminis gratiam quam prius, in qua etiam uocem cantantium dulcissimam audiui; sed et odoris flagrantia miri tanta de loco effundebatur, ut is, quem antea degustans quasi maximum rebar, iam permodicus mihi odor uideretur, sicut etiam lux illa campi florentis eximia, in comparatione eius quae nunc apparuit lucis, tenuissima prorsus uidebatur et parua. In cuius amoenitatem loci cum nos intraturos sperarem, repente doctor substitit; nec mora, gressum retorquens ipsa me, qua uenimus, uia reduxit.

Visions of the otherworld 233 [When we had passed through these abodes of the blessed spirits, I saw in front of us a much more gracious light than before; and amidst it I heard the sweetest sound of people singing. So wonderful was the fragrance which spread from this place that the scent which I had thought superlative before, when I savoured it, now seemed to me a very ordinary fragrance; and the wondrous light which shone over the flowery field, in comparison with the light which now appeared, seemed feeble and weak. When I began to hope that we should enter this delightful place, my guide suddenly stood still; and turning round immediately, he led me back by the way we had come].61 Similarly with Ælfric: He lædde me ða gyt furðor. and ic geseah þær ætforan us myccle mare leoht. and ic þær wynsume stemne ormætes dreames gehyrde and wundorlices bræðes swæc of ðære stowe utfleow; Hwæt ða min latteow lædde me ongean to þære blostmbæran stowe.62 [Then he led me further, and there I saw before us a much greater light, and I heard the pleasant voice of a great melody, and from that place flew out a flavour of wonderful smell. Lo, then my guide took me again to the blossoming place]. This attempt to say the inexpressible precisely by not saying it – i.e. by leaving the description open, undefined, thus attempting to fix onto the page the essence itself of this ineffability, calls into mind the tradition of Christian mysticism known as negative theology. As Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger writes, ‘Negative theology takes as its starting point the assertion that human language always falls entirely short of the divine reality, and human comprehension can in no way conceive of what is infinite’.63 At the end of the otherworldly journey, the angelic guide instructs Dryhthelm on what he just saw before accompanying him back to his body and his earthly life.64 The angelic guide begins by revealing the significance of the first place they encountered, the dark valley of heat and cold.65 Ælfric offers a slightly different characterisation of the valley: whereas Bede stresses the heat and the cold as the main features of that place, or possibly as memory aids for his readers, Ælfric chooses only to mention fire (but not ice), and to remind his audience that this is a form of punishment.66 One might see this rendering of the source text as a simplification of its original message; only its most immediate attribute is maintained (i.e. fire), and the ultimate function of this place is also made explicit. This might suggest that the doctrine of penal fire had already acquired widespread recognition even among the laity and the illiterate by the time Ælfric wrote this homily, and it could explain why the reference to the cold has been left behind when the homily reaches the crucial moment of delivering the divine/official interpretation of Dryhthelm’s vision. In contrast with the lengthy explanation of the valley, only one brief sentence is devoted to hell itself; one might assume that the place of eternal torment as a locus

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is well established in the collective imagery, hence the anticlimax in the narrative. Only three defining characteristics of hell are evoked by Bede: its flames, its stench and the eternity of its torments for those who fall into the pit.67 In Ælfric’s homily, the flames of the Latin text (flammiuomus) are twice replaced by darkness (swearte; þeostrum), but the overall description is maintained.68

Conclusion To sum up, the two otherworldly journeys examined here present some points of contact, but also some interesting differences: first of all, Dryhthelm is a layman at the time of his vision, and in this sense the narrative differs from the one about Fursey, because it is the vision itself which brings Dryhthelm to lead a monastic life, whereas Fursey was already a monk when he experienced his journeys to the otherworld. Secondly, Dryhthelm’s vision is characterised by a very rich otherworldly landscape. The otherworld is experienced through extremely vivid sensory perceptions and is composed of four distinct locations. And yet, Dryhthelm is only granted access to the temporary loci of the otherworld, those that will only exist until judgement day, those that human understanding can approach. Fursey, who is already a monk, experiences a symbolic journey of fire, penance and theological debates, whereas Dryhthelm, who is only a pious layman, experiences a more descriptive journey permeated by sensory perceptions of the environment surrounding him and during which even spatial directions are given. Taken together, the two visions seem to balance each other, the latter supplying the descriptive elements which the former, being focused on a more symbolic dimension, is lacking. I would like to argue that, if what we see in Dryhthelm’s case can be interpreted as a form of ‘proto-purgatory’ – and we may interpret the twofold articulation of the interim space between damnation and eternal bliss as two actual separate places, or as one big locus with opposed functions – Fursey’s vision is stripped of any kind of visual or interpretive aids: there is no physical rendition of the idea of an interim space for atonement, or of a place of waiting, depending on the state of your soul at the moment of death; there is no vivid description of the torments you will endure if you do not reconcile yourself with Christ before it is too late. All that remains is a symbolic space for atonement, one in which the four fires sum up all the causes that can lead one’s soul to end up in this interim space after death; all that remains is angels and demons debating over the worthiness of your soul – and as Book 5 of the Historia ecclesiastica shows, angels do not fight for every soul: if the evidence is against the soul in question, they actually take a step back and allow demons to take the soul to its eternal torment in hell.69 As C. J. Holdsworth notes, detailed accounts of visions would appeal more to untrained laymen rather than to the clergy.70 Thus Ælfric combines two different levels of visions in his composite sermon for Tuesday in Rogationtide; both visions focus on otherworldly journeys, but the nuances of Fursey’s visionary experience seem to be intended for a monastic, learned audience, whereas the

Visions of the otherworld 235 vision of Dryhthelm is more straightforward and might have appealed to a wider, less learned, audience. By not allowing any one vision of the afterlife to be the ‘fixed’ vision, even if ideas were solidifying by the time that both Bede and Ælfric wrote, the dialectic in Bede’s own writing between competing landscapes and those that we find in Ælfric keep not only the afterlife of heaven inexpressible – where we are unable to glimpse it – but also ideas of hell and embryonic ideas of proto-purgatory.71 The imagery is in a constant state of play, which helps it to express the inexpressible even whilst at the same time providing a vivid, memorable picture for the readers or listeners of these accounts of otherworldly journeys, and thus communicating the need for penance and atonement in a compelling manner.

Notes 1 On early medieval visions of the otherworld and discussions concerning the development of purgatory, see: Jacques Le Goff, La nascita del Purgatorio [La naissance du Purgatoire] (Torino: Einaudi, 1981; repr. 1982); Claude Carozzi, Le voyage de l’âme dans l’Au-delà d’après la littérature latine (V–XIII siècle) (École française de Rome: Palais Farnèse, 1994); Christopher J. Holdsworth, ‘Vision and Visionaries in the Middle Ages’, History, 48 (1963), 141–53; Giovanni Orlandi, ‘Temi e correnti nelle leggende di viaggio dell’occidente alto-medievale’, in Popoli e paesi nella cultura altomedievale, Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 29 (Spoleto: Presso la sede del centro, 1983), pp. 523–71; Eileen Gardiner, Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante (New York: Italica, 1989); Carol Zaleski, The Life of the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope, The Albert Cardinal Meyer Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Marilyn Dunn, The Vision of St. Fursey and the Development of Purgatory, Fursey Occasional Papers 2 (Norwich: Fursey Pilgrims, 2007); Ananya J. Kabir, Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 32 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Andrew Rabin, ‘Bede, Dryhthelm and the Witness to the Other World: Testimony and Conversion in the Historia Ecclesiastica’, Modern Philology, 106 (2009), 375–98; Sharon Rowley, ‘The Role and Function of Otherworldly Visions in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum’, in The World of Travellers: Exploration and Imagination, ed. by Kees Dekker, Karen Olsen, and Tette Hofstra, Mediaevalia Groningana, 15 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), pp. 163–81. 2 Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series, Text, ed. by Malcolm Godden, EETS s.s. 5 (London: Oxford University Press, 1979); Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: Introduction, Commentary and Glossary, ed. by Malcolm Godden, EETS s.s. 18 (London: Oxford University Press, 2000). All references to Ælfric in the text, including, In letania maiore, are taken from the above sources. 3 See: Le Goff, Purgatorio. 4 See: n. 24 below for a discussion of peregrinatio. 5 Edited by Bruno Krusch in Monumenta Germaniae Historica–Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, 4 (1902), pp. 434–40; Maria Pia Ciccarese, ‘Le visioni di S. Fursa’, Romanobarbarica, 8 (1984), pp. 231–303. Oliver Rackham’s recent study (Transitus Beati Fursei: a Translation of the 8th-Century Manuscript, Life of Saint Fursey, Fursey Occasional Papers 3 [Norwich: Fursey Pilgrims, 2007]) is a transcription and translation of the earliest extant manuscript text, London, British Library, MS Harley 5041, ff. 79–100. Though Rackham’s work is worthy of notice as the only extant translation

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of the Vita Fursei, Rackham does not collate the text and does not provide an apparatus of the complex manuscript tradition of the Vita Fursei, thus not accounting for some important changes in the tradition of this text that are reflected in the accounts of Fursey’s life written by Bede and Ælfric. Krusch edited only the beginning and end of the Vita Fursei (the sections covering his life and journeys), but omitted the entire central section of the Vita Fursei concerning Fursey’s visions. Ciccarese supplies the edition of the beginning of the Vita Fursei as well as of the visions not included by Krusch. In other words, a complete edition of the Vita Fursei can be obtained by taking together Ciccarese, for the beginning and the visions, and Krusch for the concluding section. In the present paper, Vita Fursei therefore indicates the works of both Ciccarese and Krusch. The latter provides a list of c. 40 manuscripts of the Vita Fursei, to which Ciccarese (‘Le visioni’, p. 248, n. 52) adds one further witness; Levison also signals another witness in the appendix to MGH, SRM 4 (Carozzi, Le voyage, p. 678). The three oldest witnesses of the Vita Fursei date to the ninth century: London, British Library, MS Harley 5041, ff. 79–100 (H); Roma, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 641 (B IV, 18), ff. 97–104 (C); Roma, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Sessorianus 40, ff. 185–199 (S). Krusch bases his edition on MS H (which he calls A1), whereas Ciccarese collates the three witnesses previously mentioned. The manuscript tradition of the Vita Fursei divided into two branches before the ninth century; MSS H and C represent one branch, MS S the other (Ciccarese, ‘Le visioni’, pp. 248–51). See also: Historiam ecclesiasticam gentis Anglorum: Historian abbatum, Epistolam ad Ecgberctum, una cum Historia abbatum auctore anonymo, ed. by Charles Plummer, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), II, p. 16; John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 112; Georg K. Grützmacher, ‘Die Viten des heiligen Furseus’, Zeitschrift für Kinrchengeschichte, 19 (1899), 190–6; Frederick E. Warren, ‘St. Fursey’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, 16 (1918), 252–77; Marilyn Dunn, ‘Gregory the Great, the Vision of Fursey and the Origins of Purgatory’, Peritia, 14 (2000), 238–54; Minwoo Yoon, ‘Origin and Supplement: Marvels and Miracles in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History’, in Global Perspectives on Medieval English Literature, Language, and Culture, ed. by Noel H. Kaylor and Richard S. Nokes (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 195–228. 6 See, for example: Sarah Foot, ‘Anglo-Saxon “Purgatory”’, Studies in Church History, 45 (2009), 87–96 (p. 90). 7 Godden, Second Series, pp. 190–205, II.20–21: I Item in letania maiore. Feria tertia: Fursey Source: Vita Fursei II Alia visio: Dryhthelm + visions from Gregory the Great’s Dialogues Sources: Bede, Historia eccl. (V.12); Gregory the Great, Dialogues (IV.37) III Hortatorius sermo de efficacia sanctae missae: Imma; Source: Bede, Historia eccl. (IV.22) The present study is partly based on my doctoral dissertation, in which I look at the composite homily in its entirety (Roberta Bassi, ‘Saints’ Lives and Miracle Stories in Bede, the Old English Bede and Ælfric: Between Translation and Rewriting’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, 2011), [accessed 12 February 2017]. 8 It should be noted that visions of the otherworld intended to function as a warning for the Doomsday to come are a popular subject in the Anonymous Rogation homily corpus, as explained by Joyce Bazire and James E. Cross, Eleven Old English Rogationtide Homilies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. xxiv). In this light, it may be possible to intepret the dense juxtaposition of different images of the otherworld in this

Visions of the otherworld 237 composite homily as an attempt on the part of Ælfric to fulfil audience expectations, whilst at the same time condemning the widespread popularity of apocryphal stories such as the Visio Pauli (which is fully discredited in the opening of this homily), and reaffirming the importance of the transmission of orthodoxy and of correct knowledge. See, for example: Joyce Hill, ‘Reform and Resistance: Preaching Styles in Late AngloSaxon England’, in De l’homélie au sermon–histoire de la predication médiévale, ed. by Jacqueline Hamesse and Xavier Hermand (Louvain-la-Neuve: Institut d’études médiévales de l’Université catholique de Louvain, 1993), pp. 15–46 (p. 30). On the Visio Pauli, see: n. 13 below. 9 As Godden observes, each of the three homilies is treated as a separate piece by the scribe of MS K (Cambridge, University Library, Gg.3.28), but the length of the second and third pieces is far less than the usual: ‘The Development of Ælfric’s Second Series of Catholic Homilies’, English Studies, 54 (1973), 209–16 (p. 212). Godden therefore argues that ‘Aelfric meant these three items to be combined in some way to form only one or two homilies’. In Thorpe’s edition (The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church: The First Part, Containing the Sermones Catholici or Homilies of Ælfric, ed. by Benjamin Thorpe, 2 vols [London: Ælfric Society, 1844–46], II), each of the homiletic pieces is a separate item (nos. xxii, xxiii, and xxiv); Godden, on the other hand, numbers the homily on Fursey as II.20 and groups together the pieces on Dryhthelm and Imma as II.21, but the two different numberings share the same liturgical occasion (Tuesday in Rogationtide). Since there are several two-part homilies in the Second Series, and none in the First Series, Godden concludes that in the Second Series Ælfric is no longer addressing directly the lay congregation, but instead he is assembling ‘a collection of homiletic material which preachers are to select from and adapt in various ways for their own listeners, and probably to study for their own benefit too’ (Godden, ‘The Development’, p. 216). The present analysis provides further support for the hypothesis that these homiletic pieces are interchangeable according to the type of audience the preacher is addressing. 10 It should also be noted that Ælfric begins his discourse with a vigorously negative comment on the Visio Pauli, an apocryphal vision of the otherworld very popular at the time, but which was made the object of very bitter criticism by Augustine (Godden, Introduction, p. 530): ‘Humeta rædað sume men. ða leasan gesetnysse. ðe hí hatað paulus gesihðe. nu hé sylf sæde. þæt he ða digelan word gehyrde. þe nán eorðlic mann sprecan ne mót’ [‘How do some men read the false composition, which they call the vision of Paul, when he himself said that he heard the secret words that no earthly man ought to speak?’] (Ælfric, In letania maiore, CH II.20.1–16). It seems therefore that Ælfric assembled together as many reliable accounts of the otherworld as he could in order to compensate for the unreliability of the Visio Pauli. Ælfric presumably finds the motivation to question the authenticity of the Visio Pauli in St Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John (see: Godden, Introduction, p. 530); Augustine was in fact a fierce opponent of the Visio Pauli, see: Theodore Silverstein, Visio Sancti Pauli: the History of the Apocalypse in Latin, Together with Nine Texts (London: Cristophers, 1935), p. 4; Le Goff, Purgatorio, pp. 44–8. Ælfric contrasts the secrecy of Paul’s vision with the truth of the vision of Fursey: whereas Paul was forbidden to share what he saw with other people, Fursey instead was not urged to keep his visions secret, therefore his account of the otherworld is more trustworthy than Paul’s apocryphal narrative: ‘We wyllað nu eow gereccan oðres mannes gesihðe. ðe unleas is. nu se apostol paulus his gesihðe mannum ameldian ne moste’ [‘We shall now relate to you the vision of another man, which is true, since the apostle Paul was not allowed to announce his vision to men’] (Ælfric, In letania maiore, CH II.20.16–8). Ælfric thus provides his audience with an orthodox, local exemplum to replace the unreliable account of the Visio Pauli. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 11 Ælfric used the version of the Vita Fursei contained in the Cotton-Corpus Legendary. See: Patrick H. Zettel, ‘Saints’ Lives in Old English: Latin Manuscripts and Vernacular

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accounts: Ælfric’, Peritia, 1 (1982), 17–37. Both the anonymous Vita Fursei and Bede’s account of the life of Fursey are used for the entry on Fursey in the Old English Martyrology. See: The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation and Commentary, ed. and trans. by Christine Rauer, Anglo-Saxon Texts 10 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), p. 237. Bede, Historia eccl., III.19, p. 272: ‘At ille oculos in inferiora deflectens, uidit quasi uallem tenebrosam subtus se in imo positam, uidit et quattuor ignes in aere non multo abinuicem spatio distantes. Et interrogans angelos, qui essent hi ignes, audiuit hos esse ignes qui mundum succendentes essent consumturi: unum mendacii, cum hoc quod in baptismo abrenuntiare nos Satanae et omnibus operibus eius promisimus minime inplemus; alterum cupiditatis, cum mundi diuitias amori caelestium praeponimus; tertium dissensionis, cum animos proximorum etiam in superuacuis rebus offendere non formidamus; quartum impietatis, cum infirmiores spoliare et eis fraudem facere pro nihilo ducimus. Crescentes uero paulatim ignes usque adinuicem sese extenderunt, atque in inmensam adunati sunt flammam; cumque adpropinquassent, pertimescens ille dicit angelo: “Domine, ecce ignis mihi adpropinquat.” At ille “Quod non incendisti” inquit “non ardebit in te”’. Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.20.94–105: ‘He ða beheold underbǽc. and geseah swilce án ðeostorful dene. swiðe niðerlic. and geseah ðær feower ormǽte fyr atende. and se engel cwæð him to; Þas feower fyr ontendað ealne middaneard. and onælað þæra manna sawla. þe heora fulluhtes andetnysse. and behát ðurh forgægednysse awægdon; Þæt án fyr ontent þæra manna sawla. ðe leasunge lufedon; Þæt oðer ðara. ðe gitsunge filigdon; Þæt ðridde þæra. þe ceaste and twyrednysse styredon; Þæt feorðe fyr forbærnð þæra manna sawla þe facn. and arleasnysse beeodon; Ða genealæhte þæt fyr ðam halgan were. and he sona afyrht to ðan engle cwæð; Þæt fyr genealæhð wið min; Se engel andwyrde; Ne byrnð on ðe þurh wite. þæt þæt ðu on life ne onældest / ðurh leahtras’ [‘He then looked back, and saw, as it were, a dark valley, very low; and there he saw four immense fires kindled: and the angel said to him, “These four fires will consume all the world, and burn the souls of those men who through transgression have made void the confession and promise of their baptism. That one fire will burn the souls of those men that loved lying; the second, of those that followed covetousness; the third, of those that stirred up strife and discord; the fourth fire will burn the souls of those men who have practised fraud and improbity”. The fire then approached the holy man, and he forthwith terrified, said to the angel, “The fire approaches me.” The angel answered, “That will not burn you for a punishment which you have not kindled in life by sins”’]. Bede, Historia eccl., III.19, pp. 270, 276. Bede, Historia eccl., III.19, p. 274: ‘Superest adhuc frater quidam senior monasterii nostri, qui narrare solet dixisse sibi quondam multum veracem ac religiosum nomine, quod ipsum Furseum uiderit in prouincia Orientalium Anglorum, illasque uisiones ex ipsius ore audierit [. . .]’. Vita Fursei, §9–10. Vita Fursei, §11–15. Bede, Historia eccl., III.19, p. 272. Bede, Historia eccl., III.19, p. 274. Le Goff, Purgatorio, p. 12. Carozzi, Le voyage, pp. 126–7. Vita Fursei, §16–17; Bede, Historia eccl., III.19, p. 274. Thomas Mowbray Charles-Edwards, ‘The Social Background to Irish Peregrinatio’, in Celtica vol. XI–Miles Dillon Memorial Volume, ed. by D. Greene and B. Ó Cuív (Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1976), pp. 43–59 (p. 44). As Michelle Brown points out, peregrinatio has a special meaning in secular Irish law, because ‘it represented the most severe level of deterrent, alongside capital punishment. To remove oneself, or to be expelled, from the social structures of kingship and kindred

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was to fall outside of any means of legal or economic support. You became, in effect, an outlaw, but were also freed of any attendant obligations, other than to the Lord, in the case of those religious who so chose. Such an option also freed one, in spiritual terms, from what early sources describe as one of the greatest of earthly sorrows: the attachment to loved ones and the fear and grief of separation in life or in death’. Brown, The Life of St. Fursey: What We Know, Why It Matters, Fursey Occasional Papers, 1 (Norwich: Fursey Pilgrims, 2001), p. 20. Kathleen Hughes, ‘The Changing Theory and Practice of Irish Pilgrimage’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 11 (1960), 143–51 (p. 144). In the words of Charles-Edwards, ‘The association between king and monastery was generally close in seventh century England; the association between king and peregrinus was even closer. The peregrinus left his homeland to serve a heavenly lord; he enjoyed also the protection of royal lordship’: Social Background, p. 45. Stephen J. Harris, ‘The Liturgical Context of Ælfric’s Homilies for Rogation’, in The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation, ed. by Aaron J. Kleist (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 143–69 (p. 169): ‘Of all the topics and themes Ælfric might have addressed, he chose to compose or to select passages which fulfilled the mandate of the Rogationtide liturgy. This mandate is to encourage blessings and bounty, to stop war, to heal the sick, and to abate the fiery anger of God. Rogationtide coheres in its progression and reiteration of themes, themes distinct from those of, for example, the Easter liturgy. During the Rogationtide Mass, the Christian seeks blessedness through progressive and varied striving. This striving (for penance, forgiveness, understanding, and mercy) is re-enacted physically during the Rogationtide services. Rogationtide liturgy serially invokes suffering, resignation, wisdom, and joy. A celebrant moves from place to place, moment to moment, prayer to prayer, in a constant ritual peregrination’. Milton McC. Gatch also underlines that Ælfric turns to narratives of the afterlife particularly ‘in connection with penance and amendment of life’, mostly for the liturgical occasions connected with Lent and Rogation, ‘or in connection with instruction by means of the examples of the saints’: Gatch, Preaching and Theology in Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric and Wulfstan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 76. Ciccarese, ‘Le visioni’, p. 242. Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.20.74–82, 91–92: ‘[. . .] Þa deofla eft cwædon. ydele spellunge he beeode. ne sceal hé ungederod þæs ecan lifes brucan; Se halga engel cwæð; Buton ge ða heafodleahtras him on befæstnian. ne sceal hé for ðam læssan losian; Se ealda wregere cwæð; Buton ge forgifon mannum heora gyltas. ne forgifð se heofenlica fæder eow eowere gyltas; Se engel andwyrde; On hwam awrǽc þes man his teonan? Se deofol cwæð; Nis na awriten þæt hí wrecan ne sceolon. ac buton ge forgyfon of eowerum heortum wið eow agyltendum; [. . .] Þa wiðerwinnan wurdon ða oferswiðe. þurh ðæs engles gewinne. and ware’ [‘The devils again said, “He practised evil discourse: he shall not enjoy unhurt the everlasting life”. The holy angel said, “Unless you can fix on him the deadly sins, he shall not die for the smaller ones”. The old accuser said, “Unless you forgive men their sins, the heavenly Father will not forgive you your sins.” The angel answered, “On whom has this man avenged his injuries?” The devil said, “It is not written that they shall not take vengeance, but, unless you forgive from your hearts those sinning against you.” [. . .] The adversaries were then overcome, through the angel’s fighting and caution’]. See: Dorothy Bethurum, ‘The Form of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints’, Studies in Philology, 29 (1932), 515–533 (p. 519); Peter Clemoes, ‘Ælfric’, in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. by G. E. Stanley (London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 176–209 (p. 187). Bede, Historia eccl., III.19, p. 270: ‘[. . .] uidit non solum maiora beatorum gaudia sed et maxima malignorum spirituum certamina, qui crebris accusationibus inprobi iter illi caeleste intercludere contendebant, nec tamen, protegentibus eum angelis, quicquam

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proficiebant. De quibus omnibus siqui plenius scire uult, id est, quanta fraudis sollertia demone et actus eius et uerba superflua et ipsas etiam cogitationes quasi in libro descriptas replicauerint, quae ab angelis sanctis, quae a uiris iustis sibi inter angelos apparentibus laeta uel tristia cognouerit, legat ipsum de quo dixi libellum uitae eius, et multum ex illo, ut reor, profectus spiritalis accipiet’. Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.20.183–198. Bede offers a much more reduced account of this section of the Vita Fursei (Historia eccl., III.19, p. 272): ‘Sequuntur aduersus ipsum accusationes malignorum, defensiones spirituum bonorum, copiosor caelestium agminum uisio; sed et uirorum de sua natione sanctorum, quos olim sacerdotii gradu non ignobiliter potitos fama iam uulgante conpererat, a quibus non pauca, quae uel ipsi uel omnibus qui audire uellent multum salubria essent, audiuit.’ As regards the emphasis placed by Ælfric on the necessity for good teachers, see also: Mary Clayton, ‘Hermits and the Contemplative Life in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. by Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 147–76 (p. 164–6). Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.20.218–227. Bede, Historia eccl., III.19, p. 274. Ælfric, In letania maiore, I.21.22–4. Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 488: ‘Lucidus [. . .] aspectu et clarus erat indumento, qui me ducebat’. In the Historia eccl. Dryhthelm describes his guide as having a shining countenance and wearing bright robes. This is reminiscent, for example, of the angels in the Gospel of Matthew (28.2–3). Bede makes use of biblical symbols which his learned audience probably had no difficulty understanding. Ælfric chooses a more clear-cut rendering, in which the guide is explicitly defined as an angel. We have another example of this in the passage describing the ante-chamber to heaven, where in Bede Dryhthelm sees groups of men in white robes, and many companies of happy people sitting around. As Kabir notes, ‘the image of rejoicing people clad in white remained a convenient iconographic description of the blessed’: Paradise, Death and Doomsday, p. 80. In Ælfric whiteness pertains to the men rather than to their robes; he writes that within the walls was a great multitude of white men, in great joy; Ælfric makes the association between whiteness and grace more direct: he clarifies the connection between whiteness and the joy of the blessed souls who dwell in heaven. He explains a biblical symbol that Bede considers perfectly suitable for his audience without the need for further explanation. Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 490: ‘Vtrumque autem erat animabus hominum plenum, quae uicissim huc inde uidebantur quasi tempestatis impetus iactari. Cum enim uim feruoris immense tolerare non possent, prosiliebant miserae in medium rigoris infesti; et cum neque ibi quippiam requiei inuenire ualerent, resiliebant rursus urendae in medium flammarum inextinguibilium. Cumque hac infelici uicissitudine longe lateque, prout aspicere poteram, sine ulla quietis intercapedine innumerabilis spirituum deformium multitude torqueretur, cogitare coepi quod hic fortasse esset infernus, de cuius tormentis intolerabilibus narrari saepius audiui. Respondit cogitationi meae ductor, qui me praecedebat, “non hoc” inquiens “suspiceris; non enim hic infernus est ille, quem putas”’. Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.28–33: ‘Seo dene wæs afylled mid manna sawlum. þa scuton hwiltidum of þam weallendum fyre. into ðam anþræcum cyle. and eft of ðam cyle into þam fyre. buton ælcere toforlætennysse; Đa þohte ic þæt þæt wære seo helle þe ic oft on life embe secgan gehyrde. ac min lateow andwyrde þærrihte minum geþance. and cwæð nis þis wite seo hel ðe þu wenst’ [‘The valley was full of souls of men that at times shot from the burning fire into the terrible cold, and again from the cold into the fire without any intermission. Then I thought that that was hell, which I often heard being described in life, but my guide immediately answered my thought and said this torment is not hell as you think’]. Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 490; Bede, Storia degli Inglesi, ed. by Michael Lapidge and Paolo Chiesa, 2 vols (Rome: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla; Milan: Mondadori,

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2008–2010), II (2010), p. 678; Vergil, P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed. by R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), hereafter Aeneid. Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 490. Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.37. Gregory the Great, Storie di santi e diavoli, ed. by Salvatore Pricoco and Manlio Simonetti, 2 vols (Milano: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Mondadori, 2005–2006), hereafter Dial. Dial. IV.36.72–4. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, trans. by Odo John Zimmerman (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959), pp. 235–6. Bede, De natura rerum, ed. by Charles W. Jones, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 123A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975), p. 233. Translation from Bede, On the Nature of Things and On Times, trans. by Calvin B. Kendall and Faith Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p. 102. Aeneid III.570–77. Translation from Virgil: Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1–6, Loeb Classical Library 63, trans. by Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 410–11. Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.37–8. Gardiner, Visions, p. xv. Ælfric, Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost (I.35.195–7): ‘Witodlice þæt hellice fyr hæfþ unásecgendlice hætan 7 nan leoht. ac ecelice byrnð on sweartum þeostrum’ [‘Certainly that infernal fire has indescribable heat and no light, but perpetually burns in black darkness’]. Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 490. Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.38–9. Bede, Historia eccl., V.12.64–5: ‘Sed et fetor incomparabilis cum eisdem uaporibus ebulliens omnia illa tenebrarum loca replebat.’ Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.42–4: ‘and þær sloh út of þære nywelnysse ormæte stenc mid þam æðmum. se afylde ealle þa þeosterfullan stowe’ [‘and there came out of the abyss such a heavy stench together with the vapour that it filled all the dark place’]. Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 492. Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 490–2. Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.44–9: ‘Ða ða ic þær lange stod. ormod and ungewiss mines færeldes. þa gehyrde ic þæt þa deoflu gelæddon fif manna sawla hreowlice gnornigende and grimetende into þam sweartum fýre; Sum ðæra wæs preost. sum læwede man. sum wimman. and þa deoflu scegdon hlude hlihnende þæt hi ða sawla for heora synnum habban moston’ [‘When I stood there for a while, despairing and uncertain of my course, I heard that the devils were taking five souls of men wretchedly lamenting and howling into the dark fire. One of them was a priest, one a layman, one a woman, and the devils said, laughing loudly, that they had to have their souls on account of their sins’]. Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 492; Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 492; Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.45; 48; 57; Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.50. Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 492: ‘Interea ascenderunt quidam spirituum obscurorum de abysso illa flammiuoma, et accurrentes circumdederunt me, atque oculis flammantibus et de ore ac naribus ignem putidum efflantes angebant; forcipibus quoque igneis, quos tenebant in minibus, minitabantur me comprehendere, nec tamen me ullatenens contingere, tametsi terrere, praesumebant. Qui cum undiqueuersum hostibus et caecitate tenebrarum conclusus, huc illucque oculos circumferrem, si forte alicunde quid auxilii quo saluarer adueniret, apparuit retro uia qua ueneram quasi fulgor stellae micantis inter tenebras, qui paulatim crescens, et ad me ocius festinans, ubi appropinquauit, disperse sunt et aufugerunt omnes qui me forcipibus rapere quaerebant spiritus infesti’. Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.53–4.

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59 Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 492: ‘Ille autem, qui adueniens eos fugauit, erat ipse qui me ante ducebat; qui mox conuersus ad dextrum iter quasi contra ortum solis brumalem me ducere coepit. Nec mora, exemtum tenenbris in auras me serenae lucis eduli. Cumque me in luce aperta duceret, uidi ante nos murum permaximum, cuius neque longitudini hinc uel inde neque altitudini ullus esse terminus uideretur. Coepi autem mirari, quare ad murum accederemus, cum in eo nullam ianuam uel fenestram uel ascensum alicubi conspicerem. Cum ergo peruenissemus ad murum, statim nescio quo ordine fuimus in summitate eius’. 60 Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 492: ‘tantaque flagrantia uernantium flosculorum plenus, ut omnem mox fetorem tenenbrosi fornacis, qui me peruaserat, effugaret admirandi huius suauitatis odoris’. Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.59–65: ‘þærbinnan wæs swyðe smeðe feld and brad. mid blowendum wyrtum and grennysse eal afylled. and mid beorhtan leohte þonne ænig sunne scinende; Binnan þam weallum wæron ungerime meniu hwittra manna on mycelre blisse; Ic ða betwux þam werodum ðam engle flygende. þohte þæt hit wære heofonan rice. ac min latteow cwæð þæt hit swa nære’ [‘Therein was a very smooth and broad field, filled with blossoming plants and greenness, and shining with a light brighter than any sun. Within the wall were countless multitudes of white men in great joy. Then, among the multitudes and following the angel, I thought that this was the heavenly kingdom, but my guide said that it was not’]. 61 Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 494. 62 Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.65–69. 63 Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger, ‘Mysticism and Materiality: Pearl and the Theology of Metaphor’, Exemplaria, 28 (2016), 161–80 (p. 170). 64 On the fourfold division of the otherworld, see: Helen Foxhall Forbes, ‘Diuiduntur in Quattuor: The Interim and Judgement in Anglo-Saxon England’, Journal of Theological Studies, 61 (2010), 659–84. 65 Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 494: ‘Et ait: “Vallis illa, quam aspexisti flammis feruentibus et frigoribus horrenda rigidis, ipse est locus in quo examinandae et castigandae sunt animae illorum, qui differentes confteri et emendare scelera quae fecerunt, in ipso tandem mortis articulo ad paenitentiam configiunt, et sic de corpore exeunt; qui tamen, quia confessionem et paenitentiam uel in morte habuerunt, omnes in die iudicii ad regnum caelorum perueniunt. Multos autem preces uiuentium et elemosynae et ieiunia et maxime celebratio missarum, ut etiam ante diem iudicii liberentur, adiuuant”’. 66 Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.71–9: ‘Seo mycele byrnende dene þe þu ærest gesawe is witnungstow. on þære beoð þæra manna sawla gewitnode and geclænsode. þe noldon heora synna þurh andetnysse. and dædbote gerihtlæcan. on gehalum þingum. hæfdon swa þeah behreowsunge æt heora endenextan dæge. and swa gewiton mid þære behreowsunge of worulde. and becumað on domes dæge ealle to heofonan rice; Eac hi sume þurh freonda fultum and ælmysdæda. and swyðost þurh halige mæssan. beoð alysede. of ðam witum ær þam mycclum dome’ [‘The great burning valley that you saw first is a place of punishment, in which the souls of men are punished and cleansed, who would not correct their sins through confession and penance while healthy, though they were penitent on their last day, and departed from the world with repentance, and they will all enter the kingdom of heaven on judgement day. Some of them are released from the punishment before the great judgement through the aid of friends and almsgiving and above all through the holy mass’]. 67 Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 494: ‘Porro puteus flammiuomus ac putidus, quem uidisti, ipsum est os gehennae, in quo quicumque semel inciderit, numquam inde liberabitur in aeuum’. 68 Bede, Historia eccl., V.12, p. 494; Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.80; 81; Ælfric, In letania maiore, II.21.80–3: ‘Witodlice seo swearte nywelnyss þe ðu gesawe mid þam ormætum þeostrum and fulum stence. seo is helle muð. and se ðe æne þæron befylð.

Visions of the otherworld 243 ne wyrð he næfre on ecnysse ðanon alysed’ [‘Truly the dark abyss that you saw with the thick darkness and foul stench, that is the mouth of hell, and those who fall therein once, will never be freed from there throughout eternity’]. 69 Bede, Historia eccl., V.13 and V.14. 70 Holdsworth, ‘Vision and Visionaries’, p. 143. 71 It is worth noting that according to Charles D. Wright, the topos of inexpressibility as found in the eschatological and hagiographical writings of Anglo-Saxon England, both in Old English and Latin, owes a debt to the Irish tradition. The story of Fursey in particular, given the Irish elements of the narrative, is a good example of this tendency: Charles D. Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 23–25.

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Secondary Bassi, Roberta, ‘Saints’ Lives and Miracle Stories in Bede, the Old English Bede and Ælfric Between Translation and Rewriting’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, 2011), [accessed 12 February 2017] Bethurum, Dorothy, ‘The Form of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints’, Studies in Philology, 29 (1932), 515–33 Brown Michelle P., The Life of St. Fursey: What We Know, Why It Matters, Fursey Occasional Papers 1 (Norwich: Fursey Pilgrims, 2001) Carozzi, Claude, Le voyage de l’âme dans l’Au-delà d’après la littérature latine (V–XIII siècle) (École française de Rome: Palais Farnèse, 1994) Charles-Edwards, Thomas Mowbray, ‘The Social Background to Irish Peregrinatio’, in Celtica Vol. XI: Miles Dillon Memorial Volume, ed. by D. Greene and B. Ó Cuív (Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1976), pp. 43–59 Clayton, Mary, ‘Hermits and the Contemplative Life in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. by Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 147–76 Clemoes Peter, ‘Ælfric’, in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. by G. E. Stanley (London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 176–209 Dunn, Marilyn, ‘Gregory the Great, the Vision of Fursey and the Origins of Purgatory’, Peritia, 14 (2000), 238–54 ———, The Vision of St. Fursey and the Development of Purgatory, Fursey Occasional Papers 2 (Norwich: Fursey Pilgrims, 2007) Eleven Old English Rogationtide Homilies, ed. by Joyce Bazire and James E. Cross (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989) Foot, Sarah, ‘Anglo-Saxon ‘Purgatory’, Studies in Church History, 45 (2009), 87–96 Foxhall Forbes, Helen, ‘Diuiduntur in Quattuor: The Interim and Judgement in AngloSaxon England’, Journal of Theological Studies, 61 (2010), 659–84 Gardiner, Eileen, Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante (New York: Italica Press, 1989) Gatch, Milton McC., Preaching and Theology in Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric and Wulfstan (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977) Godden, Malcolm, ‘The Development of Ælfric’s Second Series of Catholic Homilies’, English Studies, 54 (1973), 209–16 Grützmacher, Georg K., ‘Die Viten des heiligen Furseus’, Zeitschrift für Kinrchengeschichte, 19 (1899), 190–6 Harkaway-Krieger, Kerilyn, ‘Mysticism and Materiality: Pearl and the Theology of Metaphor’, Exemplaria, 28 (2016), 161–80 Harris, Stephen J., ‘The Liturgical Context of Ælfric’s Homilies for Rogation’, in The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation, ed. by Aaron J. Kleist (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 143–69 Hill, Joyce, ‘Reform and Resistance: Preaching Styles in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in De l’homélie au sermon–histoire de la predication médiévale, ed. by Jacqueline Hamesse and Xavier Hermand (Louvain-la-Neuve: Institut d’études médiévales de l’Université catholique de Louvain, 1993), pp. 15–46 Holdsworth, Christopher J., ‘Vision and Visionaries in the Middle Ages’, History, 48 (1963), 141–53 Hughes, Kathleen, ‘The Changing Theory and Practice of Irish Pilgrimage’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 11 (1960), 143–51

Visions of the otherworld 245 Kabir, Ananya J., Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 32 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Le Goff, Jacques, La nascita del Purgatorio [La naissance du Purgatoire] (Torino: Einaudi, 1981; repr. 1982) Orlandi, Giovanni, ‘Temi e correnti nelle leggende di viaggio dell’occidente alto-medievale’, in Popoli e paesi nella cultura altomedievale, Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 29 (Spoleto: Presso la sede del centro, 1983), pp. 523–71 Rabin, Andrew, ‘Bede, Dryhthelm and the Witness to the Other World: Testimony and Conversion in the Historia Ecclesiastica’, Modern Philology, 106 (2009), 375–98 Rackham, Oliver, Transitus Beati Fursei: A Translation of the 8th Century Manuscript, Life of Saint Fursey, Fursey Occasional Papers 3 (Norwich: Fursey Pilgrims, 2007) Rowley, Sharon, ‘The Role and Function of Otherworldly Visions in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum’, in The World of Travellers: Exploration and Imagination, ed. by Kees Dekker, Karen Olsen, and Tette Hofstra, Mediaevalia Groningana, 15 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), pp. 163–81 Silverstein, Theodore, Visio Sancti Pauli: The History of the Apocalypse in Latin, Together with Nine Texts (London: Cristophers, 1935) Wallace-Hadrill, John Michael, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) Warren, Frederick E., ‘St. Fursey’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, 16 (1918), 252–77 Wright, Charles D., The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Yoon, Minwoo, ‘Origin and Supplement: Marvels and Miracles in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History’, in Global Perspectives on Medieval English Literature, Language, and Culture, ed. by Noel H. Kaylor and Richard S. Nokes (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 195–228 Zaleski, Carol, The Life of the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope, The Albert Cardinal Meyer Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) Zettel, Patrick H., ‘Saints’ Lives in Old English: Latin Manuscripts and Vernacular Accounts: Ælfric’, Peritia, 1 (1982), 17–37

12 The gaze of divine sorrow Envisioning mystical union with Dürer, Cusa and the Theologia Germanica Simon D. Podmore Introduction: sub species aeternitatis To what extent is the form that unio mystica assumes shaped by the form of vision (visio mystica) itself? Furthermore, might a recovery of mystical notions of vision offer an alternative hermeneutic of ‘the gaze’ to the prevailing media spectacle of human suffering, counterfeit immediacy, and false estrangement that is relentlessly exposed to our sight? In light of such concerns, this chapter offers a theological reflection on notions of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’ by God in Christ; as well as seeing Christ in ‘the other’, and seeing ‘the other’ through the gaze of divine sorrow. Tracing ideas of visionary mystical union in Christian tradition, focus falls upon the theological role of ‘the gaze’ in the late medieval motif of ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’, as reinterpreted via the optical mysteries of Nicholas of Cusa (Nicholas Cusanus, 1401–1464) and Christomorphic (self-)portraits by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). Ultimately, thinking with die Deutsche Mystik tradition, particularly as crystalised in the fourteenth-century devotional text the Theologia Germanica (Theologia Deutsch), I propose a reading of unio mystica, not primarily at the level of intellectus (Intellect) or voluntas (Will), but within the reflective hermeneutic space opened by the gaze of Divine Sorrow. ‘Divine Sorrow’ is here offered as a sorrow (tristitia) that belongs to God, yet is shared with humanity – in this context, through the affective vision of an inter-subjective gaze that dissolves conventional binaries of self/other, interiority/ exteriority for the sake of omnivoyant compassion. At the level of such sorrow, visualised in Dürer, the human being enters into union with the divine through a vision that establishes a communion between the suffering of God, the self, and ultimately the ‘people of sorrow’ whose state of ‘affliction’ – malheur in the lens of Simone Weil (1909–1943) – appears to place them beneath compassion. In Weil’s interpretation, ‘affliction’ renders its victim so abject that compassion for the afflicted becomes an ‘impossibility’ that can only occur as ‘a miracle’.1 In this vein, I suggest that when sorrow becomes divine, or divinised, it is enabled to see sin and suffering within the vision of God: that is, via an omnivoyant gaze that, as Cusa repeatedly affirms, ‘deserts no one’ and forsakes the truth of no single face.2 This relatively melancholic approach pushes somewhat against the grain of more sanguine readings of Cusa, which also tend to emphasise the humanistic

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and Stoical dimensions of Dürer’s (self-)portraits. Casting a darker shade upon Dürer’s Christomorphic works, I suggest that the self-divinising, even ostensibly narcissistic traits of Dürer’s (self-)portraits can also be read as commensurate with more self-mortifying elements in German mystical and Lutheran theology. While this hermeneutic of ‘the gaze of divine sorrow’ can justifiably be identified as relatively pessimistic about the human condition, it also gives rise to an underrepresented ethic of alterity and divine omnivoyance in mystical theology which enables one to behold every other within a Christomorphic gaze of compassion. The central imagery for this reading derives from the ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’ tradition that emerges in western devotional imagery from earlier byzantine iconography of the post-Crucifixion Christ. Offering typological as well as anagogical (mystical) readings of Isaiah 53.3, the presence of Christomorphia confers an identification with Christ’s suffering which extends, beyond the apotheosis of the self, to the suffering ‘other’:3 what Emmanuel Levinas calls the ‘destitution in the face of the Stranger, the widow, and the orphan’.4 Through this gaze of divine sorrow, the afflicted, who are often excluded from human sight (‘one from whom others hide their faces’ Isaiah 53.3), are be-held by the ‘Christomorphic self’ through Christ’s omnivoyant gaze: expressing a compassionate union of Christomorphia which embraces all ‘peoples of sorrow’.5 The affect of sorrow offers the distinctive hermeneutic key to this unitive gaze insofar as sorrow elicits a recognition of compassion (com-passio: with suffering; suffering with) that unites all human beings in the spectacle of forsakenness and redemption. Interpreted through mystical theology, sorrow initiates a kenosis and ekstasis that ‘empties’ and ‘disperses’ the confines of ‘the self’ through a recognition of love, guilt and responsibility, as elicited in the visceral gaze of ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’. This visual devotional motif recurs in the works of Dürer, via the Deutsche Mystik tradition, culminating in Dürer’s ostensibly presumptuous yet ultimately self-mortifying 1522 Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows, reflecting a wider tendency in Dürer’s work to elide, at the liminalities of ostensible blasphemy, the face of Christ with that of the artist.6 However, as I shall suggest below, it is the vulnerability of this self-portrait, in tension with the more resplendent Self-Portrait in a Fur Collar (1500), which renders this ‘Christomorphic likeness of the artist’ as Dürer’s ‘most personal vera icon’.7 The Vision of God is often articulated in mortifying form, echoing the melancholy of the insatiable desire for union with the Beloved that can neither be satiated nor consummated. When Paul ‘sees’ the risen Christ on the road to Damascus he is blinded by ineffable light. As Eckhart (1260–1328) reflects, Paul opened his eyes and saw a fourfold ‘nothing’: ‘he saw Nothing, and the Nothing was God [. . .] he saw nothing but God [. . .] in all things, he saw nothing but God [. . .] when he saw God, he saw all things as nothing’.8 Developing Eckhart’s speculative vision in synthesis with the more affective imitatio Christi tradition of Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471), Nicholas Cusa produces a ‘vision of God’ (De visio Dei) grounded in the experience of ‘the gaze’ of a vera icon: a true face of Christ, ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1.15) who is God ‘made in the likeness of a man’ (Philippians 2.7).9 Through the incarnational experience of gazing upon the Face of

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Christ, Cusa elaborates an innovative via mystica with the potential to pass through the visio corporalis, spiritualis, and intellectualis – even to glimpse that which is beyond the intellectus.10 Central to Cusa’s mystical theology is the Christomorphic potential of ‘the gaze’ itself, elevating the viewer into and beyond the ‘coincidence of opposites’ (coincidentia oppositorum) of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’.

1) De visione Dei: the face of faces In De visione Dei (1453) of Cusa, traditional devotional treatments of images of Christ are subjected to a more speculative enrichment which retains and even enhances the importance of affectus. Cusa’s text is in turn suspected by many scholars to be a key influence on Dürer’s own creation of Christomorphic (self)portraiture.11 Cusa’s treatise interleaves sophisticated theories of optics with an apophatic theology of coincidentia oppositorum, all serving to evoke a unitive experience of the Face of Christ. Cusa ultimately regards each human being as fulfilling an individual destiny in order to form a divine image in which God, as divine painter, beholds Godself.12 Each individual is also a self-portrait of God such that the formative space between the face of Christ and the face of the individual becomes a space of intimate divine union. This ‘mirror’ space is a deeper dimension in which conventional distinctions between ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’, between subject and object, dissolve.13 In the fulfilment of spiritual imitatio, for Dürer the task of self-portraiture becomes a process of union with God through the material labour of creating (as seen below). The text of De visione Dei was sent by Cusa to an audience of the Benedictine Brothers of Tegernsee along with an image of Christ: ‘an all-seeing image’ that Cusa declares to be a vera icon, ‘a true icon’.14 It is not entirely clear what form this image took, as it is now lost. Cusa himself gives conspicuously little description of it, preferring instead to focus on the subjective nature of personal experience as it takes one far beyond the material object. In extolling the qualities of omnivoyant images (a phenomenon marvelled at from antiquity) one of the works Cusa invokes is a self-portrait by Roger Van der Weyden – a prescient observation for both Cusa’s ensuing discussion and for subsequent analysis of Dürer.15 There is an intriguing presumption from Johannes Hoff, however, that Cusa’s icon was a ‘Veronica’: a replica of the venerable true icon (vera icon), the veil Veronica applied to Christ’s face, resulting in a miraculous true likeness.16 Potentially supporting this supposition, one extant manuscript of De visione Dei contains an image of the Sudarium, the Towel/Veil of Veronica.17 Although there is no conclusive evidence that such an image was original to the book Cusa sent, it would be an evocative accompaniment to the text. The image of the Veronica is an image from the passion, the face of the suffering Christ glimpsed on the via dolorosa. The image of ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’ is not, however, an explicit motif in Cusa’s text. As Kroener observes, the painted image itself becomes almost obsolete in Cusa’s narrative as he ‘constantly undermines the objective status of the image’.18 The material identity of the image merely sets the stage for a more multi-dimensional encounter. The fact that Cusa’s text

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has so effectively survived the loss of the icon itself is due, in part, to the manner in which De visione Dei performs a sophisticated rhetorical and transformative interplay of linguistic and visual imagery such that, as Andrea Hollingsworth notes, ‘The text thus comes to figure and conjure the God of which it speaks’. More than this, the text also elicits the ‘possibility, power, or potentiality’ (posse) of divine creativity within the reader.19 Despite the optimism of many readings of De visione Dei, however, particularly through Renaissance affirmation of the dignitas hominis and humanistic ideas of ‘Man’ as approaching God’s equal, or as alter Deus, sorrowful recognition of Cusa’s own sinfulness is affirmed in several places.20 This sorrow over sin is accompanied by numerous assertions that the omnivoyant gaze of Christ communicates the consolation that God will not ‘abandon’, ‘desert’, or ‘forsake’ the viewer, even ‘in a time of tribulation’ (Psalms 10–11).21 This element culminates in the penultimate paragraph: ‘You offer all things to me, wretched as I am, whom you have created from nothing’.22 Cusa’s central concern, however, is evident in his promise to the Brothers that this icon and text will guide them in ‘the facility of mystical theology’, praying first to ‘the Word from on high [. . .] which alone can disclose itself’, so that each ‘according to your grasp’ may experience ‘the wonders which are revealed beyond all sensible, rational, and intellectual sight’.23 Cusa promises to guide the Brothers using ‘a very simple and commonplace method’ by which Cusa vows that ‘I will attempt to lead you experientially into the most sacred darkness’. Cusa offers assurance to the Brothers that ‘While you abide there, feeling the presence of the inaccessible light, each of you, in the measure granted him by God, will of himself endeavor to draw continuously nearer and in this place’ to a ‘foretaste’ of the future ‘feast of eternal happiness’.24 Despite avowing himself to be a ‘wretched sinner’, Cusa confesses to his deeper desire to ‘surrender myself to rapture in order to see you who are invisible and who are unrevealable vision revealed’.25 Invoking his own encounter with the icon Cusa expounds how: The longer I behold your face, O Lord, my God, the more keenly you seem to fix your glance on me. [. . .] I see the invisible truth of your face, represented in this contracted shadow here, not with the eyes of flesh, which examine this icon of you, but with eyes of the mind and the intellect. [. . .] Thus, O Lord, I comprehend that your face precedes every formable face, that it is the exemplar and truth of all faces and that all are images of your face. [. . .] Every face, therefore, which can behold your face sees nothing that is other or different from itself, because it sees there its own truth.26 Cusa proceeds to describe how when he gazes upon this ‘all-seeing’ icon, ‘In whatever direction I turn my face, its face seems turned toward me. Thus, too, your face is turned to all faces which look on you’.27 Cusa encourages the monks to likewise process past the icon, experiencing the phenomena of the all-seeing icon which appears to meet and retain the gaze of all and each who look upon it simultaneously.28 In other words, the gaze appears infinite within a finite space: a

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coincidentia oppositorum which confronts and affronts reason with a ‘mortification of the intellect’ and a violation of apparent rules of optics.29 At the same time, it grants experiential one-to-one intimacy to all monks simultaneously and continuously as they proceed past the icon. Recognition of the depth of this encounter demands that one recognises that every other also participates simultaneously in a personal and shared vision of God: In this [icon’s] painted face I see an image of infinity, for the gaze is not limited to an object or a place and thus it is infinite. For those who look on it, it is not turned more to one than to another. Although its gaze is infinite in itself, yet it seems limited by anyone looking on it, because it so fixes its gaze on anyone beholding it as if it saw this person alone and no one else.30 As such, Cusa’s treatment appears to affirm a sense of mutual and intimate intersubjectivity in which the true Face of Christ exceeds the question of discovering the objective true likeness of Christ’s historical face. Instead it becomes a matter of manifesting the self’s relation to the painting and ultimately its likeness to Christ; but also the likeness to Christ in every other, who each participates in synchronous union. The truth of the icon is not the face itself as an object for the gaze. Rather it is the omnivoyant gaze of Christ itself. The unitive space of the gaze is the truth of the true likeness. As Cusa states, Christ is the Truth and we are but a shadow: ‘You are the image of me and of everyone else in such a way that you are the exemplar’.31 Insofar as Christ as exemplar is the face in which all faces can be seen, Christ’s face is the face of all faces. As such, it is possible not only to see all faces in Christ but to see Christ in all faces – thereby extending a sense of Christomorphic self-recognition towards all others who are seen (and unseen), through the omnivoyant gaze of Christ, as in themselves uniquely Christomorphic. The ethical potential (posse) of this realisation resides in breaking open the narcissism of the self’s solipsistic gaze, recognising the alterity of every other who participates, uniquely, in the divine gaze.32 The potential of this ethic of alterity will be returned to further below. To appreciate this ethic of alterity, however, it is first vital to examine the provisional sense of self-affirmation inherent in Cusa’s vision. This avowal of subjectivity in ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’ is elucidated by Joseph Koerner’s elaboration of how the ‘“vision of God” appears doubly, as that which sees (God’s absolute vision figured as omnivoyance) and as that which is seen (the vera icon testifying to God’s physical appearance in the world)’.33 Koerner develops such a line of thinking on ‘Cusa’s subjectivism’, discerning how the vera icon’s gaze ‘hails me as subject’.34 Such subjection in terms of sorrow demands a particular recognition of oneself as implicated in the suffering of Christ. Koerner, however, prefers a more ‘ontological’ than ‘moral’ emphasis, comparing contingent finite human subjectivity to the omnivoyance of the divine gaze. In Koerner’s reading, the self is affirmed in its almost solipsistic self-esteem and even narcissism. Koerner intensifies this self-regard, claiming that ‘it is only through our primary narcissism that we can grasp the magnitude of God’s love’.35 There is important

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truth within this claim, but it does not quite do justice to Cusa’s references to contrition, which are more than mere theological conventions and pious platitudes. When Cusa affirms self-regard, he does so within the context of praise for God’s omnivoyant salvific providence: ‘For if you do not abandon me, the vilest of all, you will never abandon anyone’.36 Cusa does acknowledge that the loving gaze of God confers a sense of solipsism which does not allow any thought of God loving ‘anything other than me more than me, for it is I alone that your gaze does not abandon’.37 This concession, however, is presented in the context of the realisation of unity-in-alterity, that God is ‘present to all and to each, just as being, without which they cannot exist, is present to all and to each’. Even the sense of solipsistic divine love is ultimately acknowledged by Cusa as belonging to every other: ‘For thus you, who are the absolute being of all, are present to all as if you had concern for no other’.38 As such, every other experiences divine love in total exclusive concern for oneself. The self-love to which this concession is given, however, is rooted in a selfcentred concern for one’s own being – a concern which, as explored below, must eventually be mortified by the mystical death of the ‘self-will’, equivocal to the death of the modern narcissistic ego. This self-concern, I suggest, is essentially a symptom of a fallen eigen-wille (own-will) that desires its own life over the life of every other, such that, in Cusa’s words, ‘there is nothing which does not prefer its own being to all others’. This pertains in the sense that each being ‘upholds its own being’, as Cusa writes, even to the extent that it ‘would rather allow the being of all others to perish than its own’.39 Self-concern, or self-love, therefore exists in a state of anxiety over its being and its fear of non-being, even to the point of preferring the death of all others to its own destruction. While this is a concession of Divine Providence and Grace to the primal narcissistic and solipsistic self, it is located by Cusa within an anxious yet consolatory concern for life in the possibility of dereliction. The gaze of love is therefore confirmed in the consolation that ‘you do not abandon me’, that ‘You do not forsake me Lord; you guard me on every side’.40 The gaze confirms being in the midst of the anxiety of non-being; Eternal Life for one ‘created from nothing’, in mortal fear of returning to the nothing from whence it came.41 This is not to say that the vision of God does not cultivate subjectivity, but rather that such subjectivity arises in the state of subjection to the anxiety of nonbeing. This is, however, just a beginning since ultimately, as Hoff explicates, ‘it is impossible to integrate’ the ‘phenomena’ of God’s omnivoyance ‘in the framework of my narcissistic world’.42 In other words, this initial narcissism needs to be ruptured by the face of the other. It is the face of the other that induces an emptying-outwards (kenosis-in-ekstasis) of the solipsistic self: the narcissistic self that is solely concerned with its own beauty or its own salvation. Koerner interprets Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight Years Old as an appropriation of Cusa’s ‘logic of an absolute gaze’, so that Dürer’s Christomorphic painting does not necessarily become presumptuous or even blasphemous.43 Each face is an image of the Face – Dürer’s no less than any other. There is also a possible affirmation in Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait, with its expressions of the ideals of

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Beauty evident in compositional elements of sacred geometry, of the creative genius of the artist as a reflection, even an embodiment, of the Divine Creator.44 The self-portrait also symbolises the ‘process’ of production and ‘human labour’ (as identified with the Renaissance cultural view of the self); the ennobled status of the human being at the pinnacle of the cosmos as self-creative. In fashioning a work that is at once self-portrait and vera icon, Kroener argues that the SelfPortrait thereby becomes ‘the emblem of the artist’s pious imitation of Christ’ as well as ‘the participation of human making – here the art of painting – in divine creation’.45 It illustrates the belief in the artist as ‘alter Deus’ – echoing Cusa’s idea of human creativity as ‘imago viva creatoris’ – which became, as Martin Germ notes, ‘a hallmark of Renaissance art’.46 Kroener’s reading of Dürer in relation to Cusa is predicated upon the important belief that Christomorphic elements of the Self-Portrait emerged from contemporary discussions of piety and a developing emphasis upon the role of the self. In other words, narcissism as self-love is the beginning of Christomorphia, of divinisation, resulting in a mimetic re-production of the omnivoyant gaze in the self-portrait of the artist. However, while such a reading discovers significant potential support in Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait, there are other portraits by Dürer that may seem to cast a more melancholic shadow upon its optimistic vision of the self-apotheosis of the devotional self. Narcissism or self-love may constitute a beginning for Christomorphia; but in further discourse with Dürer and die Deutsche Mystik, the Christomorphic gaze also requires a mortification of the narcissistic self. Elsewhere in his portraits, we see Dürer, as artist and devotee, in a darker shade: subjected to a ‘divine sorrow’ reflective of other mystical works, beyond Cusa, arising, as Kroener argues, in ‘discussions of piety in Germany in the late fifteenth century’.47

2) Dürer and the passio Christi: ‘the Man of Sorrows’ Exemplifying the tradition of the Imago Pietas, images of ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’ (Isaiah 53.3) emerge in the mid-twelfth century, from Byzantium to the West, and give birth to an enormously diverse tradition of forms, genre, meanings, and functions. Byzantine icons of ‘Utmost Humiliation’ (Akra tapeinosis) (Isaiah 5.8) were received in the West as devotional images, subsequently informed by the theology of Passion mystics (especially Bernard of Clairvaux and his attendant notion of imitatio Christi); the practices of monastic penitence, and affective piety, then further enshrined these within Eucharistic contexts.48 By being framed within the Eucharist, as Mitchell Merback observes, the tradition coalesces around a potency to evoke and arouse feelings and obligations of compassion towards those in suffering, initiated by the personal confrontation of beholding the suffering Christ.49 The passio Christi therefore inspires imitatio Christi towards every other ‘man of sorrow’ – Levinas’s ‘the stranger, the widow, and the orphan’ – abandoned along the via dolorosa.50 Simultaneously, such images function at an interior level of personal conviction and contrition, insofar as the viewer recognises their own guilt, as well as their own salvation as a recipient of grace, in the

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suffering of the Man of Sorrows. This personal implication would be intensified via the reflective hermeneutic circle of the gaze – accusatory, piteous and loving, according to the affectus of the beholder. As Mitchell Merback argues in his study of images of ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’, extra-biblical scenes of Christ pausing on the via dolorosa are imagined as means of capturing in one moment the paschal mystery and function as ‘something like the emblem of a cognition that mirrors our own’.51 The devotional viewer lingers in stillness before the image, considering their reflection in a potentially incongruous moment of repose which interrupts an otherwise relentless narrative of torture and abjection. In this moment, Christ embodies an ‘active stillness’, evoking the detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) and even the releasement (Gelassenheit) of die Deutche Mystik tradition. This potent stillness Merback names ‘vigilant repose’.52 This is a repose that, in vigilance, watches the eye of the beholder, searching for a moment of union between self-searching gazes, between ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’. In Dürer’s work Christomorphic theology becomes explicit at the material, as well as interior, level through the visible, even scandalous, imposition of the artist’s face upon the Face of Christ. While Dürer’s Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows (1522) stands as a relatively startling development of his work on the theme (though the absence of the name ‘Christ’ in the title may mitigate against otherwise implicitly Christomorphic claims), in his numerous other works on Christ’s Passion and the ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’ theme, Dürer reframes established conventions and tropes, even reiterating contemporary emphasis upon imitatio christi.53 Dürer’s wider oeuvre utilises the traditional devotional motifs of Christ’s wounds of crucifixion, Christ bearing the instruments of his torture and humiliation, a Veil of Veronica in which the imposition of Dürer’s own face can be discerned, and Christ in sorrowful (even melancholic) repose.54 The gaze is often downcast and abject, though also, in some instances, Christ gazes directly out towards the gaze of the viewer. Some of Dürer’s ‘Christ as The Man of Sorrows’ works employ the classical pose of pensiveness, head sunken in one hand, while the other arm lies cradling in the lap. This ‘stereotyped’ pose, Merback argues, marks Christ as ‘a model of that tragic-poetic absorption that ancient, medieval, and modern beholders would recognize as melancholic’.55 Such is the alignment between these poses and the posture of the sorrowful angel in Dürer’s famous Melencholia I that it is tempting to decipher Dürer’s deeply encoded work accordingly.56 As Dürer’s work reflects, images of ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’ sought, as Merback states, to elicit a potential or latent melancholia, inviting ‘an affective, subjective response from the beholder’ which can be developed towards ‘the mystical goal of union with God’.57 The sources which inspire Merback’s reading, however, are drawn from the reviving influence of Hellenistic and Roman Stoicism on Renaissance culture. Here is philosophy as therapeia and ‘spiritual exercise’: the calming and mastering of the passions being the self-refining and self-reliant means to combat temptations, including the temptation to despair (tentatio desperationis).58 Merback offers two subject positions from which the

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dialogue can proceed: the Andachtsbild, the traditional devotional view of ‘compassionate identification’; and Meditationsbild, styled to reflect the embattled condition of the soul as it withstands the turbulences of the world.59 The two options are seemingly presented as incommensurable, as if, in rarefied form, the second belongs to Stoic philosophy and speaks a purely alternative language to the Christian mystical tradition. In the identification of Christ as sophia (wisdom), however, Christian mystics frequently recognise Christ as teacher as well as lover-beloved.60 For German mystics such as Suso and Tauler, ‘the sorrowful gaze of the beloved’ evokes a piercing and infernal descent into self-reflection, one that, through the recognition of sinfulness, confronts the soul with every shade of temptation and spiritual trial. Christ’s serenity in the midst of suffering demonstrates the struggle (Anfechtung) and releasement (Gelassenheit), the restlessness and rest of the passion, through which the via mystica must pass on the way to divine union. In this respect, the imagery of the passion – the Man of Sorrows, and Christ in repose – reflects both Anfechtung and Gelassenheit in a narrative moment of sublime coincidentia oppositorum. In the mystical rather than stoical gaze, therapeia of the soul is only possible in Christ – that is, by a total renunciation and annihilation of the self-will in the Divine Will. Christ serves as the Eucharistic Gift itself, as the necessary offering of cosmic Grace, rather than merely as the therapeutic teacher whose releasement mirrors the reflexive human being’s struggle with the inner passions. In Cusa’s terms, Christ is more than exemplary. He is ‘the Exemplar’ incarnate. In other words, what I propose is an interruption, a subjection or Anfechtung, of more optimistic readings of human subjectivity’s potency. According to this Anfechtung, Christomorphia represents the human being’s presence in Christ, beyond the mere image of Christ as exemplary reflection of human being and becoming. Pursuing this more agonistic-mystical hermeneutic, I now turn to offering an alternative reading of Dürer’s (self-)portraits of ‘Christ as the Man of Sorrows’ through a gaze of divine sorrow – a gaze that is more evocative of humanity’s inherent fallenness than its self-apotheosis.

3) Dürer and the gaze of divine sorrow Dürer’s Self-portrait as Man of Sorrows, 1522 (produced six years before his death) was lauded by Erwin Panofsky as ‘a supreme symbol of the likeness of man unto God’.61 Around the time of the work’s composition, Dürer had been suffering profoundly from fever, caught during a visit to the Netherlands. Reflecting this condition of illness, the more ‘naturalistic’ treatment of this work suggests a direct visceral identification between the artist’s suffering and the suffering of Christ.62 Merback proposes that behind this work’s self-splitting lies a concern for peace among the fracturing community of Christians, as well as between humanity and God. Rather than insistently asserting the gospel, or indulging in extravagant devotion, Dürer is suggesting an alternative penitence different, Merback claims, from ‘the feverish ascent of the mystic toward the godhead’.63 In this reading, Dürer’s Christomorphic sorrow laments the violent and fractious state of

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Western European Christianity while also invoking an appeal to Reason, both as means to the serenity of self-knowledge and to a peaceful stability within Christendom. I do not dismiss this powerful reading so much as suggest that it implies a premature forgetting of mystical theology.64 Reviving mystical theology, in its ‘sorrow’ more than in the ‘feverish’ apotheosis of ostensibly Cusan readings of Dürer’s more resplendent 1500 Self-Portrait, I suggest that the possibility of Christomorphic union in Dürer reckons also with the Anfechtung that marks the infinite difference between the human and the divine. There is undeniable tension between the visions of the human condition supposed by these different readings. Nonetheless, Merback elicits a vital and often neglected dimension of ‘the man of sorrows’ tradition in his suggestion that the gaze of divine sorrows also evokes an apocalyptic challenge to the New Jerusalem. True peace can only be realised through inner peace. The inner peace of mystical theology entails a releasement (Gelassenheit) of ‘the self’ into God such that ‘creaturely’ distinctions between ‘self’ and ‘other’ are mortified in a state of divine union. For true peace to be realised, the root of evil must be brought to nothing in each person – since it is precisely within each person that evil’s heart is found, enshrined in the insidious form of the ‘self-will’ (eigen-wille). As such, mystical theology demands the death of the self-will, through its drowning in the abyss of the Divine Will. The peace of Gelassenheit, therefore, demands the self-mortifying struggle with Anfechtung – a struggle that Gelassenheit alone is able to overcome. This dialectic between Anfechtung and Gelassenheit defines the process of Christomorphia itself to the extent that in Christomorphic union there is no longer just the ‘Thou and I’ of bridal union, but a recognition, as Cusa invokes, of the Christomorphia of every other. As such, Christomorphia is not merely union between self and God, but compassionate union-in-alterity with all ‘peoples of sorrow’. It is precisely ‘the gaze’ of ‘the Man of Sorrows’ that educes the condition in which union must take place, a human condition of both personal and universal responsibility. In order to elucidate this condition of mystical union, particularly as a hermeneutic lens for Dürer’s ‘Man of Sorrows’ portraiture, I draw finally upon the Theologia Germanica and its captivating notion of human participation with the attribute of ‘divine sorrow’.

4) Theologia Germanica: divine union in sorrow Designated by Bernard McGinn as ‘The most widely read of all the late medieval [Middle High German] mystical commentaries’, the Theologia Germanica (Theologia Deutsch) is an anonymous vernacular text written around 1350 and attributed to a priest of the Teutonic Order.65 The work is situated in the context of divergent notions of vergottet – becoming divine, deified, or divinised – between the ‘Friends of God’ (Gottesfreunde), generally regarded as a reference to John 15.15: (‘I have called you friends’), and the ‘Free Spirits’, offering an important bridge between die Deutsche Mystik tradition and Lutheran theology.66 The work rose to greater distinction after Martin Luther’s discovery of a shortened version in 1516, which he had printed, with the addition of his own preamble to the

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text.67 Luther recognised in it his own experiences of dereliction, of Anfechtung, echoing the judgment that ‘To be deprived of the vision of God is hell itself’.68 The Theologia Germanica, due in part to its ability to succinctly and eloquently crystalise much dense mystical thought of die Deutsche Mystik tradition, became a venerable text for both Catholic and Lutheran devotion. Given its prominence and location at the intersection between Catholicism and Lutheranism, to which Dürer was drawn, it is conceivable that Dürer had been aware of it, especially given the dating of Luther’s publications in the few years leading up to Dürer’s 1520 and 1522 self-portraits. Like Luther in his endless struggles with Anfechtungen, Dürer presents himself as a man afflicted by sorrow, especially in the latter part of his life, blighted by illness.69 Dürer’s admiration for Luther, despite his own Catholicism and divergence from some of Luther’s ideas, renders him, as Richard Viladesau notes, ‘a transitional figure between two religious paradigms’, while David Price observes that Dürer’s relation to the Reformation itself ‘has bedevilled scholarship’.70 On a personal level, Dürer laments rumours of Luther’s death, and there is even expression of his (unfulfilled) desire in 1520 to go to Luther in order to engrave a lasting copperplate portrait of the Reformer.71 It is tempting to wonder whether, in light of their unity in Anfechtung, Dürer might have opted to develop his own method, alongside contemporary convention, to depict Luther himself in conformitas Christi, as the Man of Sorrows. However, no claims of direct influence are being staked along the lines of Cusa’s De visione Dei. More reservedly, yet perhaps more speculatively, I am employing the text of the Theologia Germanica as a contemporary hermeneutic lens through which to view Dürer’s Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows (1522), eliciting a theological reading of ‘the gaze’ that is both complementary to and in tension with readings of Cusan Christomorphic tropes. Key to this is the presence of ‘sorrow’ as it both challenges and evokes possibilities of union between the self and God. The paradoxical notion of ‘divine sorrow’ is affirmed in the opening to the thirty-seventh chapter of the Theologia Germanica: ‘In God, as God, neither sorrow nor grief nor displeasure can have place, and yet God is grieved on account of men’s sins’.72 As such, sorrow signifies an affective effect on God deriving from the sinfulness of human creatures. This sorrow takes place wherever God ‘dwells in a Godlike man’.73 God’s union with humanity is motivated by a loving grief due to which God ‘would a thousand times rather die’ for the sake of one person’s sins than allow sin to endure and the creature perish. Foreshadowing Cusa’s singular yet universal notion of the gaze of Christ’s concern for each sinner, God would die for one person, but also for each and every one. But since sin is ‘nothing else than that the creature wills otherwise than God wills’ an inevitable collision (Anfechtung) between the Divine Will and the self-will is elicited ‘where God is made man, or when He dwells in a truly Godlike man’.74 Sorrow is therefore both a symptom and a form of the union between the divine and the human. Such is the severity and the sanctity of sorrow that the Theologia Germanica declares that, in the process of Divine Union, sorrow is actually

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intensified, alongside all that is contrary to God. And yet, in this purgative reduction of ‘the self’ to nothing in God, sorrow endures even within one who has become divinised: ‘the mourning and sorrow of a truly Godlike man on account of sin, must and ought to last until death, should he live till the Day of Judgment, or for ever’.75 Such was the life of Christ that he ‘had not one joyful day, but only trouble, sorrow and contradiction’.76 Therefore, ‘in Christ and in all His true followers’ there must be ‘a heart laden with a secret sorrow and mourning as long as this mortal life lasts’.77 While the singular mystery of the passio Christi remains ineffable, sorrow is a means of divine-human union as well as an expression of alterity. In this sense, the Theologia Germanica ventures that sorrow ‘is an attribute of God’ which God has freely chosen and ‘that He is pleased to see in man’; nonetheless, it remains ‘indeed God’s own, for it belongs not to the man’, since, as a source of self-will, ‘he cannot make sin to be so hateful to himself’.78 Sorrow appears, therefore, as a paradoxical union, a coincidentia oppositorum, between self-will and Divine Will. Or, in other words, sorrow is the expression of this seemingly incommensurable union, the Anfechtung of a radical alterity between sin and God. But more than this, sorrow expresses the desire to overcome this difference. As such, sorrow is an expression of love – the shadow-side of love. As the Theologia Germanica states, ‘where God finds this grief for sin’, God ‘loves and esteems it more than anything else; because it is, of all things, the bitterest and saddest that man can endure’.79 Evoking Christ’s words, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5.8), the Theologia Germanica speaks frequently of purity of heart in terms of the simplicity of vision: ‘For if my eye is to see anything, it must be single, or else purified from all other things’.80 The central problem for seeing in this purified way is ‘creatureliness’. God cannot be known ‘by the creature as a creature’, essentially ‘that by which it says ‘I’ and ‘myself’.81 The creature, despite its pretensions to ‘self-will’, ‘is no Substance, and has no Substance, except in the fire where the brightness flowed forth, such as the sun or a candle’.82 Sin is therefore a refutation of one’s ontology as ‘an accident, or a brightness, or a visible appearance’, a desire of the light for itself, the ‘I, Me, Mine’, which, by turning in on itself and away from its source of being, is ultimately a will towards non-being.83 In thrall to this nihilistic self-will, all human beings ‘are bent upon themselves’ and ‘have more likeness to the Evil Spirit than to God’.84 That which strives against God is experienced in terms of Anfechtung, which is overcome in the need to ‘simply yield to God’ – realised via Eckhartian notions of ‘detachment’ (Abgeschiedenheit) and ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit).85 In order for God and humanity to be ‘wholly united’, one must give way to God so that ‘God Himself is there and yet the man too’, so that ‘man becomes nothing, and God alone is everything’.86 Such a one has ‘come out from Self and given up to God alone’.87 Union therefore requires ekstasis and kenosis (a ‘coming out of’ and ‘emptying’) of oneself, such that to become ‘wholly at one with the Eternal Will of God’ means to be ‘altogether without will, so that the created will should flow out into the Eternal Will, and be swallowed up and lost therein’.88

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In the eighth chapter, the Theologia Germanica embarks on a pertinent reflection upon the visual qualities of the soul of Christ and its likeness to the ‘seeing’ of the common human soul. The chapter begins by calling its reader to ‘remember how it is written and said that the soul of Christ had two eyes, a right and a left eye’.89 The distinction between these two eyes is revealed by relating how ‘In the beginning, when the soul of Christ was created, she fixed her right eye upon eternity and the Godhead, and remained in the full intuition and enjoyment of the Divine Essence and Eternal Perfection’.90 By virtue of this unmoved state of visual contemplation, ‘the inner man of Christ’, corresponding to ‘the right eye of the soul’, remained untouched by all the affliction and suffering that befell ‘the outward man’.91 This outward man of Christ corresponds to the left eye of Christ’s soul, the eye which ‘beheld the creature and perceived all things therein’, attending to the difference and gradations between all creatures.92 It is the outward man and the left eye of Christ’s soul that ‘stood with Him in perfect suffering, in all tribulation, affliction and hardship’.93 Meanwhile, the inner man and right eye remains pristine and untouched since it ‘stood in the full exercise of His divine nature, in perfect blessedness, joy and eternal peace’.94 The text invokes familiar images of the Man of Sorrows tradition: Christ’s being bound to a pillar and subjected to scourging; Christ hanging in anguish on the cross, affirming that in spite of such abjection, the inner man and right eye of the soul remains ‘in as full possession of divine joy and blessedness as it did after His ascension, or as it does now’.95 Likewise, ‘the created soul of man has also two eyes’: one which is ‘the power of seeing into eternity, the other of seeing into time and the creatures’, in all their differentiation and gradation.96 Unlike Christ, who is able to unite contrary natures and wills, these two eyes in the human soul cannot perform both ways of seeing simultaneously. As such, if the soul sees ‘with the right eye into eternity, then the left eye must close itself and refrain from working, and be as though it were dead’.97 Likewise, one who gazes through the left eye, ‘holding conversation with time and the creatures’, cannot sustain the eternal ‘contemplation’ of the right eye.98 Whereas Christ is able to harmonise both ways of seeing, the gaze of temporality and the gaze of eternity, human beings are torn between the two, as if between two masters, and must let go of one to have the other.99 The implication, therefore, is that human beings must be willing to relinquish the gaze of temporality to receive a unitive gaze with the divine. Christ alone, as the only one who can sustain the incommensurable tension between these two gazes, can overcome it. Human beings themselves ‘will not yield to’ but continually resist the ‘drawing’ of Eternal Goodness. This is because ‘when God draws us up to something higher’ God also ‘withdraws His comfort and sweetness from us’, so that the soul falls into a state of dereliction and loss.100 In such a state, the soul, having forsaken creaturely things, is tempted also to feel forsaken by God. This temptation is an Anfechtung, a spiritual struggle, that can only be overcome by a deeper detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) and releasement (Gelassenheit) that learns to love God in all things in equanimity: ‘For a true lover of God, loves Him or the Eternal

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Goodness alike, in having and in not having, in sweetness and bitterness, in good or evil report [. . .] he stands alike unshaken in all things, at all seasons’.101 Once again, the Exemplar of such simplicity of love is already given in the life and passion of Christ. Pointing to this Exemplar, the eleventh chapter opens with the declaration that ‘Christ’s soul had to descend into hell, before it ascended into heaven. So must also the soul of man’.102 Such a descensus ad inferna takes place when a person ‘truly perceives and considers’ themselves. This is not the self-mastery of the Stoic or the Delphic-Socratic gnothi seauton (know thyself), but a horrifying form of selfreflection in which a person finds themselves ‘utterly vile and wicked, and unworthy of all the comfort and kindness’. This sense of abjection causes one to fall ‘into such a deep abasement and despising’ of oneself, that one even comes to consider oneself ‘unworthy that the earth should bear’ one, even to the point that ‘all creatures in heaven and earth should rise up [. . .] and avenge their Creator’ against oneself.103 Such a person, according to the Theologia Germanica may cry out de profundis, ‘Let me perish, let me die! I live without hope [. . .] let no one pray that I may be released’; but despite such despair, ‘God has not forsaken a man in this hell, but He is laying His hand upon him, that the man many not desire nor regard anything but the Eternal Good only’.104 In other words, the sorrow of God-forsakenness, and its self-ascription, is not truly a mark of God’s absence but of the presence of the Hand of God which purifies all longing, all hope, until desire is refined for the Eternal Good alone. In the Eternal Good, one no longer seeks oneself, in self-love or even in sorrow over oneself, but seeks only God for God’s sake.105 Yet an even deeper and more inscrutable sorrow is hidden within the inner life of Christ, constituting the source of ‘the hidden anguish of Christ, of which none can tell or knows anything save Himself alone, and therefore is it called a mystery’.106 Such is the singularity of Christ’s human nature that ‘Of this matter no more can be said or written here, for it is unspeakable’.107 In other words, even in the sharing of human nature with Christ, there is a veil of mystery beyond which no imitatio or unio can pass. There is no ‘becoming divine’ without the persistence of sorrow – beyond which lies a Divine Sorrow that remains secret.

Conclusion: ecce homo Though ‘no more can be said or written’, might there still be more to be seen? I conclude here by looking once more at Dürer’s images of ‘Christ as Man of Sorrows’ – images in which ‘the gaze’ conveys something of the ‘unspeakable’, the gaze that simultaneously invites the viewer to share in Christ’s suffering while also acting as a forbidding veil to the inner mysteries of Christ’s own suffering. The serenity and Gelassenheit reflected in the gaze of Dürer’s Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows offers a glimpse towards the ineffable Anfechtung of Christ, while Christ’s/Dürer’s gaze also sinks deeply into the gaze of the viewer. In doing so, the gaze of divine sorrow acts as a mirror in which one beholds one’s own sinfulness, descending into the inner hell of one’s own ‘self-will’ – for, as the Theologia Germanica states, ‘nothing burns in hell but self-will’.108 Simultaneously,

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Christ’s gaze of divine sorrow conveys a compassion that unites with the viewer’s compassion for the suffering Christ: a union of compassionate sorrow that gives birth to an inter-subjective consciousness of guilt, repentance and forgiveness, uniting all human beings in an omnivoyant ethic of responsibility. Cusa has articulated how the Face of Christ is seen in every face – as envisaged in Dürer’s Christomorphic self-portraits. But Dürer’s election to present his own Christomorphia in the image of the Man of Sorrows shows, in light of the Theologia Germanica, the form (morphe) that imitatio and conformitas Christi must take. This form is envisioned via a gaze of divine sorrow: a divine attribute in which the self becomes one with God in a coincidentia oppositorum of Anfechtung and Gelassenheit. While the Self-Portrait as Christ as the Man of Sorrows may evoke pity and compassion between Christ, Dürer, and viewer, the undated painting that echoes this work, Ecce Homo, may show us something more.109 Here the sideways glance of the 1522 Self-Portrait is modified to a gaze that, while still somewhat askance, engages the viewer more intimately. It appeals to the viewer to ecco homo [‘Behold the Man’] (John 19.5): the one who is presented as an object of abjection and ‘affliction’ (malheur). He is not the apotheosis of subjectivity, he is not just Dürer, but also the Christomorphic ‘other’. In light of De visione Dei and the Theologia Germanica, Ecce Homo reminds us that the omnivoyant gaze of Christ beholds every other, even those ‘people of sorrow’ from whom we would hide our faces (Isaiah 53:3). Divine sorrow transfigures the gaze, emptying and drawing the Christomorphic ‘self’ in unio mystica, through a visio Dei that not only sees Christ in every other but sees every other through the eyes of Christ. Christomorphia is nothing without Love; it is Love that makes a person one with God such that one ‘can nevermore be separated’ from God.110 One who is ‘Godlike’ loves God and ‘loves all things in One as All [. . .] for, in truth, All is One and One is All in God’.111 The desire to go beyond the divine sorrow that is the mutual condition of this mortal life is to desire to go ‘beyond Christ’, and towards a ‘false, and deluded light’.112 It is a desire to forsake those whom God has not forsaken.

Notes 1 Simone Weil, ‘The Love of God and Affliction’, in Waiting for God, trans. by Emma Craufurd (London: Harper Perennial, 2009), pp. 67–82 (p. 69). 2 Nicholas Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. by H. Lawrence Bond, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), pp. 233–90 (pp. 236, 264). 3 Isaiah 53.3 ‘He was despised and rejected by others; a man of sorrows [maḵ·’ō·ḇō·w ṯ- ‫ ]וֹת ַמכְא ֹֹב‬and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces; he was despised, and we held him of no account’. All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise stated. 4 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingus (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 78. 5 Weil identifies ‘affliction’ as ‘an uprooting of life’ in which the condition of social exclusion and corporal humiliation are essential markers: ‘The Love of God and Affliction’, p. 68.

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6 Albrech Dürer, Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows, 1522, lead pencil on blue-green primed paper, 40.8 × 29 cm, formerly Kunsthalle, Bremen (destroyed in war), [accessed 30 November 2016]. Images of all of Dürer’s works are available online: Albrecht Dürer: The Complete Works, [accessed 30 November 2016]. 7 This claim is actually made by Koerner of Dürer’s 1500 ‘narcissistic’ self-portrait (Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight Years Old Wearing a Coat with Fur Collar, 1500, oil on wood panel, 66.3 × 49 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, [accessed 31 December 2016]), although I am here transcribing it to the more self-mortifying 1522 Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows: Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 132. 8 Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. by Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroad, 2009), p. 153. 9 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (Imitatio Christi), trans. by Robert Jeffery (London: Penguin Classics, 2013). 10 XII.50–51 of Augustine’s commentary on The Literal Meaning of Genesis elaborates an instrumental hierarchy of these types of visio. See: Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram), trans. by John Hammond-Taylor, Ancient Christian Writers, 2 vols (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1982), II, pp. 491–3. 11 Franz Winzinger was among the first to initiate this fruitful line of inquiry, elaborating upon the ideal geometrical proportions of Dürer’s 1500 (Self-) Portrait: Albrecht Dürer mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, ed. by Franz Winzinger and Kurt Kusenberg (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1971). While some point to the lack of surviving historical evidence of any direct link between Cusa and Dürer, there is a significant possibility that Dürer would have learnt something of Cusa from his humanist circle in Germany, particularly Wilibald Pirkheimer and Conrad Celtis. See: Martin Germ, ‘Christology of Nicholas of Cusa and Christological Iconography in Self-Portraits of Albrecht Dürer’, IKON, 1 (2008), 179–98 (pp. 180–1). Germ provides a helpful overview of recent treatments of Christological iconography in Dürer scholarship (p. 189, n. 1). 12 See further: Koerner, The Moment, pp. 132–3. 13 See further: Germ, ‘Christology’, p. 184. 14 Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 235. Germ suggests that Cusa in fact ‘shows a considerable knowledge of contemporary art by enumerating several works of art that have the same quality of omnivoyance’: ‘Christology’, p. 82. 15 Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, pp. 235, 324, n.10. See also: Koerner, The Moment, p. 127. 16 Johannes Hoff, ‘The Visibility of the Invisible: From Nicholas of Cusa to Late Modernity and Beyond’, in Christian Mysticism and Incarnational Theology: Between Transcendence and Immanence, ed. by Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013; repr. London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 47–68 (p. 50). 17 Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 324, n.13. 18 Koerner, The Moment, p. 131. 19 Andrea Hollingsworth, ‘The Faces of Possibility in Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei’, Modern Theology, 32 (2016), 341–60 (pp. 345, 341). ‘The text thus pictures by its form, and elicits in readerly experience, the unfolding within the self of the abilityto-create, and in creating, to be transformed, even divinized’. Hollingsworth, ‘Faces of Possibility’, p. 352. 20 Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, pp. 239, 241, 270, 273, 289. Cusa states that the intellect is perfected by the Word of God and is ‘not perfected by the sensible spirit except accidentally’. See: Germ, ‘Christology’, pp. 179, 181, 184, 189. 21 For example, Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, pp. 236, 239–42, 264, 265. 22 Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 289. 23 Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 235. The intellect cannot grasp God, who is infinite, but the intellect is able to recognise that God is unknowable (p. 258). Only in Christ

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Simon D. Podmore is the human intellect united to the divine intellect (pp. 275–276). Christ teaches humanity that ‘By faith, the intellect approaches the Word; by love, it is united to it’ (p. 286). While scholarly consensus on Cusa veers towards an integrative approach to intellectus and affectus, there remain differences in weighting. See further: Hollingsworth, ‘Faces of Possibility’, p. 344, n. 16. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 235. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 270. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, pp. 242–3. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 243. This practice is also examined by Inigo Bocken in Chapter 4 of this volume. Hollingsworth, ‘Faces of Possibility’, p. 348, n. 47. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 263. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 264. See: Hoff, ‘The Visibility of the Invisible’, pp. 56–7. Koerner, The Moment, p. 128. Although Cusa is frequently regarded as bestowing on early modernity an intensifying notion of subjectivity, any reading of De visione Dei in the light of modern subjectivity is potentially anachronistic and should proceed with a degree of caution. Koerner, The Moment, p. 131. Koerner, The Moment, p. 131. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 239. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 239. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 239. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 239. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 239. Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, p. 289. Hoff, ‘The Visibility of the Invisible’, p. 59. Koerner, The Moment, p. 128; Koerner, The Moment, p. 132. See: Germ, ‘Christology’, p. 187. Koerner, The Moment, p. 132. Germ also emphasises the element of thanksgiving in the artistic labour: ‘Christology’, p. 189. Germ, ‘Christology’, p. 188. Kroener, The Moment, p. 137 See: Mitchell B. Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows in Northern Europe: Ritual Metaphor and Therapeutic Exchange’, in New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows, ed. by Catherine R. Puglisi and William L Barcham (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), pp. 77–116 (p. 80). On the Byzantine context see: Hans Belting, ‘An Image and Its Function in the Liturgy: The Man of Sorrows in Byzantium’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 34/35 (1980/1981), 1–16. Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows’, p. 78. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 78. Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows’, p. 97. Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows’, p. 98. Merback points to the example of Hans Holbein the Elder, ‘Christ Resting’, from Graue Passion, c. 1498, oil tempera on fir wood, 88 cm × 86 cm, Fürstlich Fürstenbergische Sammlungen, Donaueschingen. On the influence of Kempis’s Imitatio Christi in Dürer’s visual and written works see further: Germ, ‘Christology’, p. 190, n. 6. Germ, however, maintains that Cusa’s idea of christifomitas differs from Kempis’s Imitatio Christi and Franciscan conformitas Christi insofar as Cusa emphasises a sense of visual identity with Christ, whereas the latter are concerned only with interior spiritual conformity (p. 191, n. 20; see also: p. 180). I suspect this delineation requires further exploration and substantiation. Specifically, Dürer’s engraving: Sudarium of St Veronica; two angels holding the cloth depicting the face of Christ, 1513, ink on paper, 10 × 13.9 cm, B.25, [accessed 3 December 2016]. See further: Germ, ‘Christology’, p. 180. For the sorrowful Christ see, for example: Dürer’s Man Of Sorrows By The Column, 1509, engraving, 11.6 × 7.5 cm, B.3, [accessed 11 December 2016]; Man of Sorrows, Seated, etching, 1515, 11.2 × 6.7 cm, B.22, [accessed 10 December 2016]; Man of Sorrows, 1511, frontispiece to Large Woodcut Passion, woodcut, 33 × 19.7 cm, B.4, [accessed 18 December 2016]. The words below the latter image read (in Latin): ‘I bear these cruel blows [or wounds] for you, o man, | And by my blood I cure your ills. | I take away your wounds by my wounds, your death by my death, | I, God, for you, a human creature, | And you ungratefully often stab at my wounds with your sins | Often I am flogged by your offences. | It was enough for me to have borne so many torments in the past | Under the Jewish crowd; now, friend, cease’: translation from Richard Viladesau, The Triumph of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 146. 55 Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows’, p. 98. Accepted biblical models for Christ in Repose include Job, David, Jeremiah, Adam, and even Aeschylus (p. 101). 56 Dürer, Melancholia I, 1514, engraving, 24 × 18.5 cm, B.74, [accessed 5 December 2016]. David Hotchkiss Price suggests that Dürer’s Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows shows ‘a configuration that [. . .] hints at the struggle implied in Melencholia I’: Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 91. On the dense complexities of Melencholia I see further: Philip L. Sohm, ‘Dürer’s “Melencolia I”: The Limits of Knowledge’, Studies in the History of Art, 9 (1980), 13–32. Mitchell Merback has recently developed a powerful case for this work as representing Dürer’s desire to function as a physician of the soul, including his own. See: Mitchell B. Merback, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (New York: Zone Books, 2017). 57 Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows’, p. 101. 58 Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows’, pp. 102–3. The temptation to despair (tentatio desperationis) can represent a form of what Augustine identifies as tentatio tribulationis or even tentatio probationis. Such tentationem provide impetus for analogous notions of Versuchung (temptation) and Anfechtung (spiritual trial) in die Deutsche Mystik and subsequently in Luther. On the relation between Augustine’s tentatio and Lutheran Anfechtung, see: Simon Podmore, ‘The Spiritual Trial of Divine Seduction: Temptation and the Confessing Self’, in Augustine and Kierkegaard, ed. by Kim Pafenroth and others, Augustine in Conversation: Tradition and Innovation (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), pp. 63–87. 59 Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows’, p. 109. 60 See, for example: Henry Suso (Heinrich Seuse, 1290–1365) in die Deutsche Mystik tradition, and his works Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom) and Horologium Sapientiae (Clock of Wisdom): Heinrich Seuse, Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit: nach der Handschrift Nr. 40 des Suso-Gymnasiums in Konstanz, ed. by Jörg Mauz (Konstanz: Verlag am Hockgraben, 2003); Henry Suso, Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, trans. by James M. Clark (London: Faber and Faber, 1953); Heinrich Seuses Horologium sapientiae, ed. by Pius Künzle (Freiburg:

264

61

62

63 64 65 66

67

68

Simon D. Podmore Universitätsverlag, 1977); Henry Suso, Wisdom’s Watch Upon the Hours, trans. by Edmund Colledge (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994). Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, ed. by Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 241. See: Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows’, p. 110. Roland H. Bainton argues that Panofsky’s reading of Dürer’s selfportraits in terms of the imitation of Christ and the derivative resemblance of human creativity to the power of God ‘is sound but admits of amplification and illustration: ‘Dürer and Luther as the Man of Sorrows’, The Art Bulletin, 29 (1947), 269–272 (p. 269). Richard Viladesau appears to align with Panofsky in his comments on Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait: The Triumph of the Cross, p. 141. Nonetheless, Robert Smith refers more positively to Bainton’s view in ‘Durer As Christ?’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 6.2 (1975), 26–36 (p. 34). Germ, ‘Christology’, p. 179. Germ suggests this analogy between Dürer’s suffering and that of Christ is also attested by the inscription accompanying Dürer’s drawing Head of the Dead Christ (1503, charcoal on paper, 31 × 22.1 cm, British Museum, London, SL,5218.29, [accessed 3 January 2017]) which outlines that the work coincided with a period of illness. Germs likewise discerns this in Dürer’s contemporaneous Nude Self-Portrait, c. 1503 (brush and ink heightened with white on green tinted paper, 29 × 15 cm, Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Weimar). In this rather piteous vision of Dürer’s body there is a curious mark in the area conventionally regarded as the site of Christ’s final wound from the spear. Germ suggests, as Werner Schmidt has previously, that this mark in Dürer’s side alludes to the wound of Christ (‘Christology’, p. 180). Dürer’s final 1521 Self-Portrait (coloured pen drawing, 12.7 × 11.7 cm, Kunsthalle, Bremen, [accessed 5 December 2016]) shows him pointing to a mark in a similar position, though possibly reversed through a mirror. However, this is a sketch for Dürer’s physician, bearing the words ‘Do wo der gelb fleck is und mit dem finger drawff dewt do is mir we’ [‘There, where the yellow spot is located, and where I point my finger, there it hurts’]. On the question of the location of Christ’s wound on the left or right, see: Smith ‘Durer As Christ?’, pp. 26–36. Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows’, p. 110. Merback, ‘The Man of Sorrows’, p. 110. Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (New York: Crossroad, 2005), p. 392. Luther’s preface provided the emphatic endorsement that ‘Next to the Bible and Saint Augustine no other book has come to my attention from which I have learned – and desired to learn – more concerning God, Christ, man, and what all things are’: The Theologia Germanica of Martin Luther, trans. by Bengt Hoffman (Toronto: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 54. The Theologia Germanica remained a key devotional text for traditional Lutherans and pietists through to the nineteenth century, as well as a vital inspiration for Lutheran mystics such as Johan Arndt and Jacob Boehme. The work was erroneously attributed by Luther to Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361), a key mystic in the Eckhartian tradition, whose theology of the mortification of the ‘self-will’ (eigenwille), ‘selfness’ (selbheit), and ‘I-ness’ (icheit) the text adapts in fundamental ways. In 1518 Luther discovered a longer version in a monastic library, which he subsequently published, including a more extensive and effusive version of his preface. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. by Hans Joachim Grimm and others, 56 vols (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1955–1986), IV (1964), p. 315. On Luther’s notion of Anfechtung see: Simon D. Podmore, Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013), pp. 100–26. See also: Dennis R.

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69 70 71

72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

265

Janz, ‘To Hell (and Back) with Luther: The Dialectic of Anfechtung and Faith’, Seminary Ridge Review, 13.2 (2011), pp. 41–55. See: Bainton, ‘Dürer and Luther as the Man of Sorrows’, p. 272; Viladesau, The Triumph of the Cross, p. 288. Viladesau, The Triumph of the Cross, pp. 139, 283–93; Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance, p. 225. According to Martin Marty, Dürer reacts in his diary by proclaiming, ‘O God, to think of what he might be able to write for us in another ten or twenty years!’: Marty, Martin Luther: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 71. See further: Price, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance, pp. 225–48. Theologia Germanica, trans. by Susan Winkworth (Mesa, AZ: Scriptioria Books, 2014), p. 61. This translation is based on a fuller manuscript than Luther published, dating to 1497. The Pauline distinction (2 Corinthians 7.10) between tristitia saeculi (worldly sorrow; sorrow over worldly goods – an aggravated sorrow: tristitia aggravans) and tristitia secundum Deum (Godly sorrow; sorrow according to God and sorrow over the Divine Good) is conceivably formative for the difference between ‘creaturely’ and ‘divine sorrow’. Theologia Germanica, p. 61. Theologia Germanica, pp. 60, 62. Theologia Germanica, p. 62. Theologia Germanica, pp. 44–5. Theologia Germanica, p. 45. It is later stated that the claim to be free from such ‘grief’ is evidence that one ‘is not truly Godlike, or a partaker of the divine nature’ (p. 80). Theologia Germanica, p. 62. Theologia Germanica, p. 62. Theologia Germanica, p. 2. Theologia Germanica, p. 2. Theologia Germanica, pp. 1, 3. ‘Substance’ is understood in terms of as sub-stantia, that which stands under and gives life to, but not necessarily in the sense of being of one ‘matter’. The first chapter of the Theologia Germanica begins by affirming God as ‘the substance of all things’ and the One ‘in whom all things have their substance’ (p. 1). Charles Kingsley warns of this false elision between ancient and modern notions of ‘substance’, which he attributes to the influence of Locke’s philosophy: ‘Preface’, Theologia Germanica, p. xvii. Theologia Germanica, pp. 3–4. Theologia Germanica, pp. 42, 35. Theologia Germanica, p. 5. Theologia Germanica, pp. 79, 38–9. The caveat ‘and yet the man too’ is paralleled later in the text’s declaration that all ‘Self, all self-seeking, self-will’ must be ‘utterly lost and surrendered and given over to God, except in so far as they are necessary to make up a person’. Theologia Germanica, p. 79. Theologia Germanica, p. 39. Theologia Germanica, p. 46. Theologia Germanica, p. 9. Theologia Germanica, p. 9. Theologia Germanica, p. 10. Theologia Germanica, p. 10. Theologia Germanica, p. 10. Theologia Germanica, p. 10. Theologia Germanica, p. 10. Theologia Germanica, p. 10. Theologia Germanica, p. 11. Theologia Germanica, p. 11.

266 99 100 101 102 103

104 105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112

Simon D. Podmore Theologia Germanica, p. 11. Theologia Germanica, p. 16. Theologia Germanica, p. 16. Theologia Germanica, p. 16. Theologia Germanica, p. 17. As if echoing these words of the Theologia Germanica, such almost-paranoid self-abasement is reflected in Luther’s own expressions of Anfechtung as an experience of the absence, even enmity, of God and being: ‘God seems terribly angry, and with him the whole creation. At such a time there is no flight, no comfort, within or without, but all things accuse. At such a time, as the Psalmist mourns, “I am cut off from thy sight” (Psalm 31.22)’: Luther’s Works, 31 (1959), p. 129. Turning to the example of Christ, at such times one is to focus not on the words ‘Let this cup pass from me’ (Anfechtung), but rather on ‘Not my will, but your will be done’ (Gelassenheit): Luther’s Works, 42 (1959), p. 183. However, Luther’s suspicion towards speculative mystical theology is evident in the way he appropriates the agonistic and even apophatic dimension of Anfechtung while shunning what he sees as the more unitive excesses of Eckhartian Gelassenheit. As Bernard McGinn aptly observes, there is significant ‘negativity of apophasis’ and ‘negativity of dereliction’ present in Luther, whereas in Eckhart we see ‘nothing of the torturous character of Luther’s Deus absconditus’. McGinn, ‘Vere tu es Deus absconditus: The Hidden God in Luther and Some Mystics’, in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. by Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 94–114 (p. 103). Theologia Germanica, p. 18. The Theologia Germanica outlines three stages here: ‘purification’, including ‘sorrow for sin’; ‘enlightening’, involving ‘the willing endurance of all manner of temptation and trials’; and finally ‘union’, which ‘belongs to such as are perfect’. Union itself ‘is brought to pass in three ways: [. . .] by pureness and singleness of heart, by love, and by the contemplation of God, the Creator of all things’ (pp. 22–3). The closer one comes to Christ-like obedience ‘the more Godlike and divine’ one becomes (p. 28). Theologia Germanica, p. 62. Theologia Germanica, p. 24. Theologia Germanica, p. 57. Dürer, Ecce Homo, c. 1523, oil on canvas 86 × 58 cm, Schloss Weißenstein, Pommersfelden, [accessed 3 January 2017]. Theologia Germanica, p. 75. Theologia Germanica, p. 87. Theologia Germanica, p. 96.

Bibliography Primary Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram), trans. by John HammondTaylor, Ancient Christian Writers, 2 vols (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1982) Dürer, Albrecht, Albrecht Dürer: The Complete Works, [accessed 30 November 2016] ———, Albrecht Dürer mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, ed. by Franz Winzinger and Kurt Kusenberg (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1971) ———, Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight Years Old Wearing a Coat with Fur Collar, 1500, oil on wood panel, 66.3 × 49 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, [accessed 31 December 2016]

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———, Head of the Dead Christ, 1503, charcoal on paper, 31 × 22.1 cm, British Museum, London, SL,5218.29, [accessed 3 January 2017] ———, Nude Self-Portrait, c. 1503, brush and ink heightened with white on green tinted paper, 29 × 15 cm, Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Weimar ———, Man of Sorrows By the Column, 1509, engraving, 11.6 × 7.5 cm, B.3, [accessed 11 December 2016] ———, Sudarium of St Veronica: Two Angels Holding the Cloth Depicting the Face of Christ, 1513, ink on paper, 10 × 13.9 cm, B.25, [accessed 3 December 2016] ———, Melancholia I, 1514, engraving, 24 × 18.5 cm, B.74, [accessed 5 December 2016] ———, Man of Sorrows, Seated, 1515, etching, 11.2 × 6.7 cm, B.22, [accessed 10 December 2016] ———, Self-Portrait, 1521, coloured pen drawing, 12.7 × 117 cm, Kunsthalle, Bremen, [accessed 5 December 2016] ———, Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows, 1522, lead pencil on blue-green primed paper, 40.8 × 29 cm, formerly Kunsthalle, Bremen (destroyed in war), [accessed 30 November 2016] ———, Ecce Homo, c. 1523, oil on canvas 86 × 58 cm, Schloss Weißenstein, Pommersfelden, [accessed 3 January 2017] Eckhart, Meister, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. by Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad, 2009) Hans Holbein the Elder, ‘Christ Resting’, from Graue Passion, c. 1498, oil tempera on fir wood, 88 x 86 cm, Fürstlich Fürstenbergische Sammlungen, Donaueschingen Luther, Martin, Luther’s Works, ed. by Hans Joachim Grimm and others, 56 vols (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1955–1986) Nicholas of Cusa, ‘On the Vision of God’, in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. by H. Lawrence Bond, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), pp. 233–90 Seuse, Heinrich, (Suso, Henry), Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, trans. by James M. Clark (London: Faber and Faber, 1953) ———, Heinrich Seuses Horologium sapientiae, ed. by Pius Künzle (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1977) ———, Wisdom’s Watch Upon the Hours [Horologium Sapientiae/Clock of Wisdom], trans. by Edmund Colledge (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994) ———, Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit: nach der Handschrift Nr. 40 des Suso-Gymnasiums in Konstanz, ed. by Jörg Mauz (Konstanz: Verlag am Hockgraben, 2003) Theologia Germanica, trans. by Susan Winkworth (Mesa, AZ: Scriptioria Books, 2014) Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ [Imitatio Christi], trans. by Robert Jeffery (London: Penguin Classics, 2013)

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Secondary Bainton, Roland H., ‘Dürer and Luther as the Man of Sorrows’, The Art Bulletin, 29 (1947), 269–72 Belting, Hans, ‘An Image and Its Function in the Liturgy: The Man of Sorrows in Byzantium’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 34/35 (1980/1981), 1–16 Germ, Martin, ‘Christology of Nicholas of Cusa and Christological Iconography in SelfPortraits of Albrecht Dürer’, IKON, 1 (2008), 179–98 Hoff, Johannes, ‘The Visibility of the Invisible: From Nicholas of Cusa to Late Modernity and Beyond’, in Christian Mysticism and Incarnational Theology: Between Transcendence and Immanence, ed. by Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013; repr. London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 47–68 Hollingsworth, Andrea, ‘The Faces of Possibility in Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei’, Modern Theology, 32 (2016), 341–60 Janz, Dennis R., ‘To Hell (and Back) with Luther: The Dialectic of Anfechtung and Faith’, Seminary Ridge Review, 13.2 (2011), 41–55 Koerner, Joseph Leo, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingus (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991) Marty, Martin, Martin Luther: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2004) McGinn, Bernard, ‘Vere tu es Deus absconditus: The Hidden God in Luther and Some Mystics’, in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. by Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 94–114 ———, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (New York: Crossroad, 2005) Merback, Mitchell B., Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (New York: Zone Books, 2017) ———, ‘The Man of Sorrows in Northern Europe: Ritual Metaphor and Therapeutic Exchange’, in New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows, ed. by Catherine R. Puglisi and William L. Barcham (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), pp. 77–116 Panofsky, Erwin, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, ed. by Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) Podmore, Simon D., Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013) ———, ‘The Spiritual Trial of Divine Seduction: Temptation and the Confessing Self’, in Augustine and Kierkegaard, ed. by Kim Pafenroth and others, Augustine in Conversation: Tradition and Innovation (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), pp. 63–87 Price, David Hotchkiss, Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance: Humanism, Reformation, and the Art of Faith (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2006) Smith, Robert, ‘Durer as Christ?’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 6.2 (1975), 26–36 Sohm, Philip L., ‘Dürer’s “Melencolia I ”: The Limits of Knowledge’, Studies in the History of Art, 9 (1980), 13–32 Viladesau, Richard, The Triumph of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Weil, Simone, ‘The Love of God and Affliction’, in Waiting for God, trans. by Emma Craufurd (London: Harper Perennial, 2009), pp. 67–82

Index

abjection 253, 258–60 Adam, (The first man) 112, 141, 155, 162, 189–90, 263 Adorno, Theodor 28, 31, 33 Ælfric of Eynsham 17–18, 221–3, 225–9, 231–7, 239–40 Aeneid, The 229–31 aesthetics 1, 3–5, 11–12, 18–19, 25, 27–9, 35–8, 42, 47, 50, 60, 72–3, 77–8, 81, 83–6, 132–3, 144, 146, 151, 161–2, 164 afterlife, the 17–18, 113, 221–3, 225, 227, 229, 231, 233–7, 239, 242 Agamben, Giorgio 28 Albert, St. 17, 206, 215 Angela of Foligno 17, 204–5, 211, 215 angels 6–7, 9, 74, 83, 106, 108, 153, 162, 165, 173, 175, 182, 203, 206, 222–9, 233–4, 238–40, 242, 253, 262 Annunciation, The 97–8, 106–8, 139 Anthony, St. 173, 175, 182 apophasis 12, 15, 81, 132, 152, 200, 208, 213, 266 Aquinas, Thomas, St. 13, 70–7, 79–81, 83, 206, 211 attention 47, 53, 66, 79, 93, 95, 97–8, 156, 177 audience 43, 84, 116, 223, 225–6, 228, 233, 235, 237, 240, 248 Augustine, St. 11, 29, 35, 71, 81–2, 84, 91, 114, 170, 180, 189, 207, 216, 237, 263–4 beauty 4–5, 28–30, 36, 42, 47, 58, 72–3, 76, 81–3, 106, 130, 171, 205, 251–2 Beckett, Samuel 50–1, 60, 67–8 Beckett, Sister Wendy 42 Bede, the Venerable 17–18, 221–32, 234–6, 240 Bernard of Clairvaux 3, 11, 105–6, 108, 170, 193, 211, 252

body 14, 47, 51, 112, 114–16, 176, 178, 181, 205, 222–4, 226–7, 229, 233 Boethius 73–4, 76, 83 Bonaventure, St. 17, 21, 118, 203–5 Byzantine orthodoxy 15, 129–30, 132, 135–6, 138–9 Cézanne, Paul 12, 31, 41 Cloud-Author, The 2, 4, 12–13, 41–2, 47, 51, 57–8, 60, 158, 160 Colum, Padraic 8–10 consolation 89, 91, 95, 98, 118, 187, 249, 251 contemplation 7, 12–13, 16, 30, 41–3, 51, 53, 57–8, 60, 64, 66, 70–9, 81, 83–4, 91, 94, 140, 145, 151, 162, 190, 199–200, 204, 258, 266 creativity 31, 34, 42, 92, 208, 249, 252, 264 Crucifixion 42, 66, 69, 110, 141, 174, 175–6, 183, 189–90, 192, 204, 253 Cusa, Nicholas 11, 13–14, 18, 91–6, 98–100, 246–52, 254–6, 260–2 darkness, theme of 11–12, 17, 34, 89, 92, 98, 160–1, 197, 199–208, 211, 213–14, 216–18, 228–9, 231–2, 234, 241 detachment 79, 207, 253, 257 Devotio Moderna 13–14, 89–93, 95, 97–9, 113 Dillenberger, Jane 131–2, 139, 141–2 Dionysian tradition 17, 203–4, 206–7, 214–15 Dionysius, Pseudo (The Areopagite) 17, 36, 72–4, 83, 200–4, 207–8, 214, 216–18 Dryhthelm 17, 221–3, 228–9, 231–5, 237, 240 Dürer, Albrecht 18, 246–8, 251–6, 260–1, 264 Dylan, Bob 17, 199

270

Index

Eckhart, Meister 17, 79, 206, 247, 266 Enclosed Gardens 14, 104–11, 114–16 Eriugena, John Scottus (Scotus) 17, 199–200, 202–3, 211 eternity 83, 138, 199, 234, 243, 258 everyday, the 7, 9, 11–15, 17, 87, 155 eyes 14, 16, 18, 27, 32–3, 51, 95–6, 181, 200–1, 224, 247, 249, 253, 257–8, 260

James, William 2, 12, 19, 22, 27, 29–35, 37, 80 Jesus Christ 3, 6, 10–11, 18, 20–1, 93, 95, 105–6, 110, 118–19, 138–9, 141, 152, 165, 168, 175–6, 178, 181, 183, 188–92, 202–7, 221, 234, 246–8, 250, 252–4, 256–64, 266 journey, spiritual 108, 114, 211, 218, 221–2, 228, 231, 233–6

Florensky, Pavel 128, 133–4, 137, 139, 145 Franciscans 203–4, 206 Fursey 18, 221–8, 234–7, 243

Kandinsky, Wassily 12, 31–3, 133, 140 Kant, Emmanuel 2, 12, 28–9, 77 Kearney, Richard 15 Kells, Book of 6, 8–9 Kempis, Thomas à 14, 89–92, 98–9, 247 Klee, Paul 31, 33 Koestler, Arthur 151, 161 Kristeva, Julia 111

Gadamer, Hans Georg 1, 13, 70–4, 76–9, 81–2, 84–5 Gallus, Thomas 17, 203 gardens 14, 104–5, 107–18, 156, 165, 192 Gerald of Wales 6–8 Ghent Altar Piece 14, 89–90, 97, 99 goodness 36, 72–3, 76, 81, 259 grace 12, 41, 112, 173, 180, 203, 207, 240, 251–2 Gregory the Great, St. 112, 178, 222, 230, 236 Hafiz, Shams-ud-din Muhammad 156–8 Hamburger, Jeffrey F. 104, 208 heart, the 1, 58, 118, 171–2, 176, 182–3, 208, 227, 239, 257, 266 heaven 9–10, 91, 96, 98, 105, 113, 153, 165, 175, 178, 221–2, 228–9, 232, 235, 240, 242, 259 Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich 12, 28–9, 78 Heidegger, Martin 70, 76–7, 81 hell 139, 167, 171, 178–9, 181, 221–2, 228–31, 233–5, 240, 242–3, 256, 259 hermeneutics 71, 82, 84, 120, 247 hermits 172–6 Hugh of Saint-Victor 187 humility 12–13, 41–4, 57, 60, 66, 166, 170 icons 15, 106, 117–18, 129, 132–42, 240, 248–50 ignorance 12, 41–2, 47, 57, 60, 66, 200, 204 imagination 2, 8, 11, 63–4 Imitatio Christi 14, 91–3, 95, 98, 100, 194, 204, 252–3, 256, 259–60, 264 Incarnation, The 2–3, 5–6, 8–10, 71, 205 ineffability 2, 31, 34, 205, 233 intellect, the 2, 13, 30, 47, 63–4, 70, 73–6, 80–1, 83, 160, 201, 204, 206, 208, 218, 246, 248–9, 261 intention 5, 179, 181 interiorisation 107, 116 invisible God, the image of the 247

Levinas, Emmanuel 247, 252 light 12, 17, 82, 89, 92, 95–6, 98, 139, 182, 199–203, 205, 207–8, 211, 214–15, 228, 231–3, 241, 257 love 11, 41, 80, 105–6, 108, 116, 118, 156–8, 161, 179–80, 203, 205, 208, 211, 226, 247, 250–1, 257–60, 262, 266 Luther, Martin 18, 255–6, 263–4, 266 Magdalene, Mary 173, 182 Marenbon, John 4–5, 19 Marion, Jean-Luc 70 Maritain, Jacques 12, 63 marriage 16–17, 105, 112, 186–92 materiality 1–2, 6–8, 10–12, 14–16, 18, 30, 62, 104–5, 151–2, 158, 253 meditation 10, 16, 51, 66, 89, 114–15, 140, 169–70, 174, 177, 182–3, 208 memory 112, 114, 170, 177 Merback, Mitchell B. 252–3, 263 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12, 31 Mézières, Phillippe de 16, 186–92 Mickey Mouse 13, 60–1, 64, 67, 69 mirrors 1, 14, 64, 89, 95–6, 188, 192, 259, 264 Mondrian, Piet 42, 60 Monk of Farne, The 10 Monroe, Marilyn 135–6, 138, 142 nature 31, 38, 95, 110, 116, 202, 208 negation 200–3 Nietzsche, Fredrich 28 nothingness 118, 201, 205–7, 217, 227, 247, 251, 257 Passion, The 16, 188–90, 192, 248, 252, 254, 259 Pattison, George 29, 35, 42

Index Paul, The First Hemit 38, 173–5, 182 penance 165–6, 177, 222, 227–8, 234–5, 239, 242 perception 11, 29, 33, 36, 47, 60, 91, 94, 140, 158, 161, 201, 204 phenomenology 27–8, 37 pilgrimage 107–9, 221, 225, 238–9 play 1–2, 6, 11, 13–15, 31, 62, 74–8, 81, 83–4, 90, 95, 115, 155–6 poetry 5, 8, 10, 73, 113, 158, 165–75, 177–8, 180–1, 213 portraits 14–15, 93, 132, 135, 141, 246–8, 251–2, 254–6, 260 prayer 7, 16, 31, 66, 91, 109, 112–14, 133, 140, 160, 168, 173–6, 179, 182–3, 211, 217, 227, 229, 239, 259 process (in art) 1, 8, 11, 27–9, 31–6, 58, 128, 132, 252 purgatory 221, 224 reason, the 12, 62, 72–5, 80, 82–3, 255; see also intellect, the resurrection 110–11, 120, 140–1, 190, 192 Rolle, Richard 165, 173, 179 Rothschild Canticles 17, 208–12 Rudy, Kathryn 108–9, 111 Ruusbroec, John of 79, 156 saints 111, 132, 172–5, 181, 190, 203, 206, 211, 224 salvation 97–8, 131, 140, 224, 227–8, 251–2 scent 111–14, 208, 228, 233 self, the 18, 42, 50, 64, 79, 114, 246–7, 250–2, 255–7, 260–1, 265 sensation 2, 13–14, 16, 29–31, 72–3, 76, 90, 108, 111–13, 115, 122, 161, 171–2, 177, 181, 204, 232, 234 shadows 53, 98, 128, 201, 250 sight 7, 15, 17, 34, 47, 57, 64, 73, 75, 83, 90–1, 93–6, 98–9, 112, 115, 137, 158, 169, 171, 175, 181, 202–3, 205–6, 211, 224, 227, 246–53, 256–8; see also sensation; viewers; visions sinfulness 18, 29, 167, 200, 204, 223–8, 231, 238–9, 241–2, 246, 249, 254, 256–7, 259, 263, 266 sins, the deadly 166–7, 182, 223, 239 smell 105, 108, 111–13, 115, 118, 171, 181, 228, 233; see also sensation Song of Songs, The 14, 105–6, 108, 113, 193, 203–4, 207, 216–17

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sorrow 12, 17–18, 188–90, 192, 246–9, 252–7, 259–60, 265 soul, the 16, 28–9, 74–5, 83, 107–8, 112–14, 116, 156–8, 162, 166, 180–1, 188–90, 203–8, 216, 218, 222–4, 226–9, 231, 234, 238, 241–2, 254, 258–9 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 28 suffering 12, 17–18, 80, 110, 205, 239, 246–7, 250, 252–4, 258–9, 264; see also sorrow Suso, Henry 206, 254 symbolism 2, 5, 12–13, 20, 76–8, 81, 84, 105, 116, 131, 133, 139–41, 158, 161, 202 taste 112–13, 126; see also sensation Tauler, John 206, 254 temptation 58, 92, 166, 178, 253–4, 258, 263, 266 Tolstoy, Leo 80 Trinity, the 10, 17, 21, 71, 92, 201, 205–6, 208 truth 5, 7, 13, 29, 36, 71, 73–7, 79–82, 93, 199, 201, 206, 249–50 unicorns 106–7, 179 union, mystical 18, 81–2, 105, 116, 188–9, 192, 203, 205, 246–8, 253, 255–7, 260, 266 unknowing 42, 44, 199, 201–2 Vandenbroeck, Paul 104, 115 van Eyck, Jan 13–14, 17, 89–91, 93–9, 191–2 Vaughan, Henry 213 Veronica, The 248, 253 viewers 8, 14, 18, 29, 44, 91, 93–9, 108–9, 129, 136–7, 142, 151–2, 156, 158, 248–9, 252–3, 259–60 Virgin Mary 10, 106, 108, 135–6, 140, 165, 183, 188, 190 virtues 16, 42, 108, 119, 162, 166–7, 169–73, 178–81, 191 visions 17, 96, 188, 221–5, 227–9, 231, 233–7, 246 Warhol, Andy 14–15, 21, 128–42 Weil, Simone 31, 37, 66, 79, 246 Wilde, Oscar 55, 63 wilderness 16, 116, 165–6, 173, 177–8, 181–2 Xenophanes 94