Over recent weeks I have analysed paintings by Palmer and Friedrich and highlighted those parts of the paintings which point to the transcendence or suggest what might lie ‘beyond the veil’. This week I am looking in more general at influences on those painters which led them to produce works which we can describe as truly transcendent.
In other words, I am concerned with signposts which point to the Transcendent – particularly those which are mediated to us through the iconography of particular artists. For those signposts to be effective there needs to be a two–way process between the artist who through divine inspiration communicates with the viewer. The viewer in turn needs to have an appreciation of the idea that there is thought to exist a spiritual dimension beyond the physical constraints of the cosmos. In over-simplified terms one could say that both the artist and the viewer need to believe in God.
There are many analogies or models of that Ultimate Reality that we call God, ranging from the idea of an ever-loving Father as used in the Bible, the Ground of all Being suggested by the theologian Paul Tillich through to the fifth dimension which is used by John Hick and me. James Fowler, theologian and social scientist has set out the stages of faith through which many will travel, with loving father conforming to stage 3 – synthetic-conventional faith, and the fifth dimension, which aims to express that which lies beyond the boundaries of space and time, confirming to stage 5 – conjunctive faith.[i] It is possible that Palmer and Friedrich both regarded the biblical loving father analogy as the most useful, but they would both have been open to other possibilities. Palmer read widely including Milton and Bunyan and would have been influenced by William Paley. Friedrich was influenced by Schleiermacher with his experiential approach to faith, an approach which left him (Schleiermacher) open to the criticism that he did not give priority to revelation and to doctrine.
The earlier models of God suggest that there are two components to that Reality, the Transcendent, being defined as that part which is wholly other in the sense that it is unlike its creation and stands beyond the created order, and the Immanent where God is regarded as everywhere present in nature and the lives of people.[ii] John Macquarrie produced an interesting development of this model in which he associated immanence with the timeless, the impersonal and the mystical, and transcendence with the eschatological (concerned with the four last things), the personal and the rational, with both coming together in what he describes as existential-ontological theism, an example of which would be Christianity.[iii] On the theme of the mystical, in a succinct summary of Evelyn Underhill, Rankin highlights the difference between immanence which sees humans and the universe as infused with the divine and emanation which envisages the divine as completely separate from the human.[iv] While the Bible does not make specific reference to immanence, there are a number of verses in, for example, the Book of Job which could be read as indicating immanence, one of the most appropriate being verse 4 of Chapter 33: ‘The spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life.’ Similarly for transcendence there are verses which are suggestive of this characteristic, for example, in Isaiah, Chapter 55, verse 8 there is: ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.’
However, the symbiotic relationship which must be effective between the viewer and the artist is, I feel, not assisted by a model of the ultimate Reality which suggests a split between inner and outer components; I see the process of communication, if established, being continuous and without any artificially created boundaries. However, if we were to apply the Transcendent/Immanent or Emanation/Immanent models then the Underhill definition of Immanent would most certainly apply both to Samuel Palmer and to Caspar David Friedrich.
The definition of transcendentalism that I have used – ‘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, and was developed during the age of German Idealism can be applied independently of any particular religious context. The Zeitgeist of German Idealism would have been familiar to both Palmer and Friedrich. 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 under consideration, 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 both 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 transcendent 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 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]
At this distance in time and without specific statements of letters, it is difficult to know exactly how Palmer and Friedrich would have defined God. But it is known that from Palmer’s Baptist background and from Friedrich’s Pietist background that both would have had engrained within them a thorough knowledge of the Bible and would probably have had a fairly conservative approach to the Bible which would have been typical of the time. But they would have also been aware of other influences and other approaches to spirituality which would, or, at least could, have informed their iconography. For Palmer these would have ranged from Blake and his visions through to the allegorical approaches of John Bunyan (1628-1688) and John Milton (1608-1674) as well as the quasi scientific approaches of the supporters of natural theology and teleology (the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world) such as Paley.[x] In addition Palmer would have been subject to the views and philosophies coming from the German speaking part of Europe as mediated through Crabb Robinson and Coleridge. For Friedrich the influences would have been from German Idealism, especially as mediated through Schelling and Schleiermacher.
I do not, therefore, in the analyses that I have completed and those that may follow be utilising an exegetical pattern that might be appropriate when interpreting the Bible – that is: an analysis that would be correct within the life and times of the period and then an analysis that would be appropriate today taking into account all the scientific and philosophical changes that have occurred during the past two thousand years. 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 is made to the Bible but this is 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 will, in a series of case studies from time to time be analysing the way in which they have portrayed the numinous, producing works which point towards the Transcendent. These case studies will be contextualised where necessary by highlighting the influences – political, literary and theological – that were at work at the time of the production of the various paintings
Dr David Greenwood d.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk April 2021
[i] Fowler, J.W. Stages of Faith – The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning
New York Harper One 1981 pp.151-198.
[ii] For a paper on this approach see for example this website article: http://www.apttoteach.org/Theology/God%20and%20Angels/pdf/302_Imm_and_Transcendence .
[iii] Macquarrie, J. Principles of Christian Theology London SCM Press 1966 pp.150-155.
[iv] Rankin, M. Introduction to Religious and Spiritual Experience London Continuum (Bloomsbury) 2008 p. 244.
[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] This subject was discussed through to the twentieth century when for example William Temple entitled his Gifford Lectures – Nature, Man and God, published in book form in 1934. See: (http://www.giffordlectures.org/lecturers/william-temple) This book is still available, published in London by Macmillan in 1951 (reprint).
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