Do the Paintings of J. M. W. Turner Signpost the Transcendent?
Could Turner be regarded an anonymous Christian?
While the religious and spiritual aspects of the lives of all the other artists considered in this series of weekly Reflections are readily ascertained, those of Turner, one of England’s greatest landscape painters, have not featured. One of the reasons for this is that Turner showed no obvious interest in theology or indeed any interest in matters relating to church. Even on Sundays, whilst his friends went to church, Turner went off to do more landscape painting. The question arises can one who expressed so little interest in church actually create works of art which could be regarded as spiritual or pointing towards the transcendent?
The usual sources of information, for example biographies, have had to be treated with care. In the early part of the twentieth century there were no reliable biographies of Turner – Sir John Rosenstein remarked ‘there is to this day not even a biography of him that is both reliable and organised as a readable life’.[i]
One gleans some information from Ruskin’s Lectures on Art, but rather more from Dinah Birch’s Ruskin on Turner – where we receive both the distilled thoughts of the famous art critic as well as extracts from The Works of Ruskin.[ii] From this latter work, it can be learnt that Ruskin ‘sees Turner’s paintings as an expression of natural truth, so faithful that they almost transcend art, and become facts of nature in themselves … Ruskin brooded on him as the great painter of human mortality’.[iii] Furthermore, Turner had a particular affinity for the poets of the Romantic period; as Birch writes ‘Turner’s deference to the spiritual grandeur of nature must be seen as a Romantic phenomenon, one which grew out of a new kind of contact between the intellectual ambitions of poets and painters’.[iv]
Assessing Turner through Ruskin is fraught with difficulty because Ruskin has an almost hagiographical view of the artist, but we can perhaps assume that Turner’s influence was so great we can derive some of Turner’s thought from Ruskin’s Lectures on Art.[v] In his particular lecture on the relation of Art to Religion, Ruskin asserted that the great arts have ‘three principal directions of purpose: – first, that of enforcing the religion of men; secondly, that of perfecting their ethical state; thirdly, that of doing them material service’.[vi] He concluded that particular lecture with the hope ‘That we may have the splendour of art again, and with that, we may truly praise and honour our Maker, and with that set forth the beauty and holiness of all that He had made.[vii] Birch emphasises that modern scholarship has ‘made it clear that Turner’s interest in non-Christian religions was one of the most radical dimensions of his work’ but unfortunately she does not give any references to back up this assertion.[viii] It is certainly true that Turner avidly studied the subject of mythology a topic which could be said to be means of expressing the worship of nature.[ix] This is an idea which as Birch describes, had taken a new direction in the nineteenth century when the sun, ‘as the source of all life, could be seen as the central divinity, taking various guises, of primeval religions’.[x]
To complete this investigation into the spirituality or religiosity of Turner the question of whether or not it is possible to apply the concept of the anonymous Christian – a concept devised by the theologian Karl Rahner – to the artist must be considered. Essentially Rahner postulates that the spiritual self-communication is an act of God’s freedom – that is, an act of giving himself in ‘free and absolute love’.[xi] We can see here a link with Christianity with its concept of the unmerited grace of God being available to all, including sinful persons. In Rahner’s view this free and unmerited grace is available, as an offer, to absolutely all people and is present in all people as an existential of their concrete existence, ‘and is present prior to their freedom, their self-understanding and their experience’.[xii]. The acceptance of this grace, i.e. the acceptance of God in the living out of the human existence in the concrete world, is itself an act of God’s self-communication, for, if it were not, God would be in danger of being reduced to a level of finiteness. ‘God in his salvic will has offered and destined this fulfilment not only for some, but for all people, a fulfilment which consists in the fully realised acceptance of this divine self-communication’.[xiii]. (Footnote xiii gives a more detailed description of the concept.)
The alternative view expressed by the twentieth century philosopher Jacques Maritain is that ‘the artist as artist is not called on to love God or the world or humanity, but to love what he or she is doing. In a rather extended sense, the activity of the artist does have a serious moral character simply because it pushes aside the ego and the desire of the artist as individual.’[xiv]
To summarise this short investigation into the inherent spirituality of Turner, it is clear that in Ruskin’s view Turner was a painter of ‘the truths of nature’ and that in his final volume of Modern Painters he expresses the view that the truths of nature were ‘also spiritual in a sense still wider and deeper than could be contained within Christian tradition’.[xv] This does give some credence to the quoted, but possibly apocryphal, deathbed words of Turner that ‘The Sun is God’.[xvi] So, at the very least, it could be said that Turner was a follower of Heliolatry and, possibly by Rahner’s criteria, an anonymous Christian.
In the next reflection, I will examine in some detail Turner’s Shade and Darkness: Evening of the Deluge and Morning after the Deluge: Moses writing the Book of Genesis. (The suggestion of Moses writing Genesis should not be taken literally.)
Dr David Greenwood d.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk February 2021
[i] Lindsay, J. J.M.W.Turner – His Life and Work London Cory, Adams and Mackay 1966 quoting Rothenstein p. 9 The first reliable biography seems to be that of A.J. Finberg but even here there is a lack of personal information about Turner and the first accurate, detailed critical biography seems to be that of Jack Lindsay. More recently there is the research undertaken by the late John Gage who ‘transformed Turner scholarship and greatly deepened our understanding of the role of light and colour in Western culture. His second book…revolutionised Turner studies with its detailed examination of many aspects of the artist’s work’. (The Times February 2012 obituary of John Gage (1938-2012)) Gage published the Collected Correspondence of J.M.W.Turner in 1980 and a critical biography in 1987. A detailed study of Turner’s correspondence reveals nothing about his spiritual life or indeed his philosophy and the two above mentioned biographies have very little information about his religiosity or lack thereof.
[ii] Birch, D. (Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University) Ruskin on Turner London Cassell 1990 including extracts from Cook, E.T. and Wedderburn, A. (eds.) The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols. London 1903-1912.
[iii] Birch, D. p. 10a.
[iv] Birch, D. p. 10b.
[v] Ruskin, J. Lectures on Art – Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary Term, 1870 London George Allen and Sons 1910. Birch gives some substance to this assumption when she writes ‘What Ruskin wrote about art – not only Turner’s art, but all art – is deeply informed by what Turner had taught him’. Birch, D. p.17b.
[vi] Ruskin, J. p. 43-4.
[vii] Ibid. p.77.
[viii] Birch, D. p.12a.
[ix] For a detailed study of Turner and mythology see: Nicholson, Kathleen Turner’s Classical Landscapes – Myth and Meaning New Jersey Princeton University Press 1990.
[x] Birch, D. p. 80b.
[xi] Rahner, K. Foundations of Christian Faith New York Crossroad Publishing 1995 p. 123
[xii] Ibid. p 127.
[xiii] Ibid. p.129. Contemplation of the discovery of this self-communication leads us to the interpretation of transcendental experience which is offered by Christianity, salvation history and the history of revelation. A person can then legitimise their existentiell decision and accept the theological interpretation of the situation provided by Christianity. Thus the holy mystery can be experienced in a hidden closeness, ‘a forgiving intimacy, a real home that it is a love which shares itself, something familiar which he can approach and turn to from the estrangement of his own perilous and empty life’.[xiii] As Rahner sees it, the self-communication of God is universal and the offer to accept the grace of God is there for all. Inasmuch as it is accepted by Christians that God’s self-communication reaches its acme in Jesus Christ (the objectification of that self-communication), and that it is possible for someone who has had no contact with the teaching of Jesus to receive and accept the offer of God’s self-communication (the justifying grace of Jesus), then that person ‘has accepted what is essential in what Christianity wants to mediate to him: his salvation in that grace which objectively is the grace of Jesus Christ’.[xiii] That person could then be regarded as an anonymous Christian. The question then is whether or not this applies to Turner. Whilst he obviously had knowledge of the Bible (which perhaps he treated in the same manner as he would a work by the Latin poet Ovid), and it is difficult therefore to say that he had absolutely no knowledge of the teaching of Jesus, it is possible to argue that he accepted the grace of God inasmuch as he used his God-given talent (God’s self-communication) to reveal the truth of the created world.
[xiv] Williams, R. Grace and Necessity – Reflections on Art and Love London Morehouse 2005 pp. 15-16.
[xv] Birch, D. p .81.
[xvi] Ibid. p. 81.
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