The other day my wife said to me you often use the expression ‘beyond the veil’ in your reflections – just what exactly does it mean. So began my thoughts for this week’s Reflection. In everyday speech the expression going ‘across the veil’ is often used to mean going from life into death, but within the context of art history the expression is much more nuanced and is worthy of some careful analysis, involving the meaning of God, and of transcendence.
But first of all I should explain where I am coming from in my study of art history and why I have limited it to what is generally referred to as the Age of Romanticism.
With such a vast range of art, much of which has a spiritual content, over a timescale of several thousand years, I have had to limit my interest to a particular period and artistic genre. For the reasons given below, I have restricted this my interest to an examination of the way in which the visible world and especially landscape has been used by British and German artists to intimate the spiritual world that may express the numinous. In art history terms this was the time when landscape painting became respectable and could be viewed on a par with history and portrait painting
My starting point for this essay is that I will be assuming that there is a God and that that God is a reality which is beyond time and space and almost beyond human capacity in its conception. This difficulty leads to God always being referred to by analogy – the most usual one being anthropomorphic – God as Father or Mother. Although this analogy is essential when trying to speak of God to children, as one becomes more mature different concepts or word images are more appropriate. This subject has been treated in great detail by James W.Fowler who in 1981 published Stages of Faith –the psychology of human development and the quest for meaning.[i] The essence of Fowler’s thesis is that faith develops in a series of stages, from zero at birth where it is undifferentiated to conjunctive at stage 5 and universalising-commonwealth at stage 6. It is the conjunctive stage, where one is open to the many possible approaches to the ultimate truth and accepts that there is no literal physical entity called God that I will be assuming in this essay.[ii] An additional advantage of this approach to the meaning of God is that the apophaticism (saying what God is not) associated with God is implicit in this way of thinking about that Ultimate Reality.
Whilst there is no need of the anthropomorphic approach, there is the need to attempt to describe God that is consistent with an image-less concept of God and the expression I use is the fifth dimension. (In these days of String Theory and the positing of multi-dimensional universes, the original idea of fifth dimension may seem outdated, but I think that except for theoretical physicists, the term still has the ability to suggest that which is beyond time and space and at the limit of that of which the human mind can conceive.) This term has also been utilised by the late John Hick (1922-2012) who has used it to provide a title to his exploration of the spiritual world.[iii] For completeness I should add that Fowler’s stage 6 would be the stage reached only by the true mystic – for example Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) or Thomas Merton (1915-1968).[iv]
We come now to Transcendental. The definition of transcendentalism is ‘the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining a scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible experience’- which comes from Emerson, was developed during the age of German Idealism and can be applied independently of any particular religious context. Indeed this definition of transcendentalism is sufficiently general to be applied to any of the art forms – visual art, poetry, literature or music – in which the artist is endeavouring to express their intuition of that spiritual force which is beyond the reach of our physical senses. While German Idealism would have been the philosophy applied by the artists of the period that I have studied in detail, today we could be looking at the refinement of that philosophy – critical realism which in turn has been derived from Oxford Realism of the 1920s. Oxford Realism is defined by Alister McGrath, quoting Pritchard as: ‘knowledge unconditionally presupposes that the reality known exists independently of the knowledge of it, and that we know it as it exists in this independence.’[v] In a development of this, the ‘critical realist principle – that there are realities external to us, but that we are never aware of them as they are in themselves, but always as they appear to us with our particular cognitive machinery and conceptual resources is … a vital clue to understanding what is happening in different forms of religious experience’.[vi]
When analysing the iconography of my particular artists – Palmer and Friedrich there are two ways of approaching the analysis. The works of art could be examined in a way that would be appreciated by contemporaries of the artists or they could be analysed in a way that would apply to a viewer of the post-modern period. For example, Palmer would not be applying a critical realist principle but could well be applying the principle of the naïve realist. John Hick quotes as an example of naive-realism the visions of Christ experienced by Julian of Norwich in which she really believed ‘that the living Christ was personally present to her, producing the visions that she saw, and uttering in Middle English the words that she heard’.[vii] The critical realist would say that she was having a transcendental experience but clothed in a Christian form’. (Exactly the same argument could be applied to Blake’s visions when, for example he claimed to have had a conversation with St. Paul that morning.)
Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) and Blake would have been imbued with a sense of the immanence of God – when they had their transcendental experiences, it could almost be said that the transcendent component was breaking through the veil and joining with the immanent.
Thinking along these lines highlights the problem of speaking of God within a framework of language that ideally needs to be non-spatial and without any limitation of time. H.A.Williams deals with this problem in the Joy of God when he suggests that:
Christian orthodoxy has always asserted, if God is transcendent He is also immanent. In fact, when you look at it, you find that transcendence and immanence are one and the same thing. Professor Ninian Smart has summarised this very clearly:
If transcendence means that God is not spatial, and yet is distinct from the cosmos while sustaining it, so to say, from behind, then there is no strong reason to distinguish this account of transcendence from one main meaning of immanence. The belief that God works within all things merely uses a different spatial analogy from the belief that He is behind (a veil) or beyond the cosmos.[viii]
This suggests that endeavouring to define clearly the boundary between immanent and transcendent is not always fruitful, with the immanent being lost in the transcendent or the transcendent being lost in the immanent. This explains why Hick in his book on religious experience hardly ever uses the word immanent but uses transcendent throughout. As he writes:
The fifth dimension of our nature, the transcendent within us answers to the fifth dimension of the universe, the transcendent without. In speaking of this, the limitations of language create a problem to which there is unfortunately no satisfactory solution. We want to refer to that which, according to the religions, is the ultimate object of human concern. In a western context we speak of God. And it is possible to use this familiar term with the stipulation that it points to the ultimate reality without however defining it, and so without prejudging whether that reality is personal or non-personal or even such that this duality exists. But in practice the long established associations of the word as referring to an infinite divine Person are generally too strong for this stipulation to be effective. And so we resort to such terms as the Ultimate, Ultimate Reality, Absolute Reality, the Real, the Transcendent, The Divine, the Holy, the Infinite (and) the Eternal.[ix]
Iconographical analyses will identify those particular characteristics which the artists have included in their paintings and which ensure that for the sensitive viewer, the painting as a whole could be said to point to the Transcendent. The identification of those characteristics would have been just as relevant at the time of the production of the paintings as at the present time. Where appropriate, reference will of course be made to the Bible but this will not be a universal feature of the analyses.
While Palmer and Friedrich have not written down their understanding of the Ultimate Reality, they have expressed their understanding of the Divine through their art and I have in previous reflections in a series of case studies, analysed the way in which they have portrayed the numinous, producing works which point towards the Transcendent.
A sense of the Transcendent may lie deep within the psyche or it may in some other way be existent but beyond our ability to detect using either the five senses or any instrumentation currently available. Some artists including Palmer and Friedrich tried to express the immanence of God, the God within, to show the glory of God. They would have been quite content with the late Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey’s (1904-1988) suggestion that ‘Man exists to glorify his Creator’.[x] It is important to highlight that Glory is a biblical word with a special meaning, which Ramsey defines as follows:
To glorify God is to reflect the radiance of God like a mirror, in a life of righteousness, justice and compassion. But the nearer to God man comes in so reflecting him, the more he is aware of his creaturely dependence, his unworthiness, his need for forgiveness, and the more he finds his joy in God himself in praise and gratitude.[xi]
While Palmer would have been unaware of this definition it epitomises my understanding of his artistic aims: ! argue that Palmer used his talent to fulfil this objective to glorify God and in so doing produce paintings which point to the Transcendent or try to express what might lie beyond the veil.
There are some obvious similarities between art and religion in terms of inspiration and contemplation. As Gordon Graham indicates when discussing art and religion in relation to the philosophies of Sören Aaby Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900):
There is a good case to be made for thinking that Art and Religion are closely allied in some way or other. In their most developed forms both make important use of three concepts, namely ‘creation’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘contemplation’. God is a creator, and his creative acts both invite our contemplation and inspire us. Something very similar is said of art and artists – that artworks are also the outcome of creativity and objects worthy of studied contemplation. They are also commonly said to be both inspired and inspiring.[xii]
The Romantics and idealist philosophers regarded experience as very important: as Reardon points out – ‘faith has its roots in feeling and intuition, of which theological doctrines can never be more than an imaginative symbolism, historically determined.’[xiii] This viewpoint is very much in accord with Schleiermacher – ‘in neither the Bible nor the doctrinal tradition does the ultimate authority reside, but in the vital momentum of religious experience itself.’[xiv] In summarising Schleiermacher’s influence, Reardon states the logical development of this idea – ‘immanentism brought the divine into the world –process itself, God, man and nature coming together in a cosmic harmony in which each blends with the other in the soul of the believer.’[xv] To quote Barzun, he emphasises that the ‘power of art to evoke the transcendent…is what has led artists and thinkers in the last two centuries to equate art and religion, finally to substitute art for religion’.[xvi]
The divine presence, the ultimate reality or God cannot be pictured because, unless one uses the anthropomorphic image or metaphor for God as the Father, God is not a picturable object. One can only suggest from one’s experience a signpost pointing towards that reality that one senses but cannot prove. Palmer’s solution to this problem as set out in the Oxford Sepia paintings is to create a veil (the ‘something infinite behind’ of Traherne) by making some of his images of nature less clear, placing them in the evening with the characteristic large moon or church steeple pointing towards the infinite. In this way he is presenting the viewer with a signpost which suggests a Transcendence which can then be perhaps instrumental in furthering the faith of a receptive viewer. In addition, if one looks at the Lonely Tower (1879), a work which was produced towards the end of his life (and which I will look at in my next Reflection) he is suggesting the limitlessness of the numinous in the way in which he combines the idea of a veil with the infinite immensity of the night sky. As Harvey suggests:
For Palmer, the natural and the supernatural were almost indivisible, as they had been in Eden. The natural world was like a transparent curtain (the veil) through which, vaguely, we might perceive the greater splendour of the heavenly or supernatural world.[xvii]
I hope the above words and those of my tutor Professor John Harvey will go some way towards explaining what I mean when I refer to trying to see beyond the veil.
Dr David Greenwood d.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk February 2022
[i] Fowler, J.W. Stages of Faith –the psychology of human development and the quest for meaning New York Harper Collins 1981 (first edition) Paperback edition 1995 pp. 122-211. The methodology of Fowler has been questioned – two criticisms being the omission of perception and volition from aspects of faith. (See, Astley, J. and Francis, L. (ed) Christian Perspectives on Faith Development Leominster (Herefordshire) Gracewing 1992 especially essay by Webster, D. p.77.)
[ii] Fowler, J. pp. 184-198
[iii] Hick, J. The Fifth Dimension – An exploration of the spiritual realm Oxford Oneworld Publications 1999 This will be dealt with in more detail in the introduction to section two of the thesis.
[iv] Fowler, J.W. p. 201.
[v] McGrath, A. The Intellectual World of C.S.Lewis Chichester (West Sussex) Wiley-Blackwell 2014 p.38.
[vi] Hick, J. The Fifth Dimension – an exploration of the spiritual realm Oxford One World 1999 p.41.
[vii] Ibid. p.42.
[viii] Williams, H.A. The Joy of God London Mitchell Beazley 1979 p. 26. Quoting also Smart, N. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Volume 2, Talk of God London Macmillan 1969 p.78.
[ix] Hick, J. p .8-9.
[x] Ramsey, Michael Canterbury Pilgrim London SPCK 1974 p. 56.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Graham, G. The Re-enchantment of the World Oxford OUP 2007 p. 17.
[xiii] Reardon B.M.G. p29
[xiv] Ibid p. 56.
[xv] Ibid p. 58. This was not a universally accepted viewpoint and Karl Barth was opposed to the liberal theological views expressed at this time – referring to this liberal era ‘Schleiermacher’s century’. However the views of Schleiermacher would have the support of de-mythlogising theologians such as Paul Tillich
[xvi] Barzun, J p. 26.
[xvii] Harvey, J.. p. 59.
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