3 MODERN MYSTICISM IN ACTION: Art & Language
THE TENSION OF BEING MAN
There is a real tension in being a modern man because no one can live at ease in the area of despair. A Christian knows that this is because man has been made in the image of God and though man is fallen, separated from God by his true guilt, yet nevertheless he has not become a machine. The fallenness of man does not lead to machineness, but to fallen-manness. Therefore, when people feel this utter despair, there is a titanic pressure, like being extruded (against all the long history of reasoned thinking) to accept a dichotomy, and then later to accept some mysticism which gives an illusion of unity to the whole.
I remember sitting in a Lyons’ Corner House near Marble Arch in London some years ago, talking to a brilliant young physicist. I asked him about the latest work he was doing, and he told me about a new idea that he thought might solve Einstein’s problem concerning electromagnetism and gravity. He became very enthusiastic about this, because I knew enough about the subject to stimulate him, and he was far away in his thought. Then I brought him back by saying, “This is fine for the Christian, who really knows who he is, to say that the material universe may finally be reduced to energy particles moving in opposite directions in a vortex, but what about your naturalistic colleagues? What happens to them when they go home to their wives and families at night?”
He paused for a moment and then said, “Oh, Dr. Schaeffer, they just have to live in a dichotomy.”
The very “mannishness” of man refuses to live in the logic of the position to which his humanism and rationalism have brought him. To say that I am only a machine is one thing; to live consistently as if this were true is quite another.
Again I remember one night crossing the Mediterranean on the way from Lisbon to Genoa. It was a beautiful night. On board the boat I encountered a young man who was building radio stations in North Africa and Europe for a big American company. He was an atheist, and when he found out I was a pastor, he anticipated an evening’s entertainment, so he started in. But it did not go quite that way. Our conversation showed me that he understood the implications of his position and tried to be consistent concerning them. After about an hour I saw that he wanted to draw the discussion to a close, so I made one last point which I hoped he would never forget, not because I hated him, but because I cared for him as a fellow human being. He was accompanied by his lovely little Jewish wife. She was very beautiful and full of life, and it was easy to see, by the attention he paid her, that he really loved her.
Just as they were about to go to their cabin, in the romantic setting of the boat sailing across the Mediterranean and a beautiful full moon shining outside, I finally said to him, “When you take your wife into your arms at night, can you be sure she is there?”
I hated to do it to him, but I did it knowing that he was a man who would really understand the implications of the question and not forget. His eyes turned, like a fox caught in a trap, and he shouted at me, “No, I am not always sure she is there,” and walked into his cabin. I am sure I spoiled his last night on the Mediterranean, and I was sorry to do so. But I pray that as long as he lives he will never forget that when his system was placed against biblical Christianity, it could not stand, not on some abstract point, but at the central point of his own humanity, in the reality of love.
In a different but related way this is also true of a man like Bernard Berenson (1865-1959). He was the world’s greatest expert on Renaissance art during his lifetime. He graduated from Harvard and lived most of his later life in Florence. He was such an authority on his subject that when he dated and priced a picture, it was generally accepted as decisive. He was a truly “modern” man and accepted sexual amorality. Therefore when he took Mary Costelloe (sister of the American essayist Logan Pearsall Smith) away from her husband, he lived with her for a number of years until her husband died and then married her (the Costelloes’ marriage was Roman Catholic, and so a divorce could not be arranged). When Berenson eventually married her, they had an agreement that they would both be free to engage in extramarital affairs, and both took advantage of the agreement many times. They lived this way for forty-five years. When anyone chided Berenson, he would simply say, “You are forgetting the animal basis of our nature.” Thus he was perfectly willing in his private life to accept a completely animal situation.
But in contrast to this, he expressed a completely different view where his real love and true integration point—Renaissance art—was concerned. “Bernard Berenson found that modern figure painting in general was not based on seeing, on observing, but on exasperation and on the preconceived assumption that the squalid, the sordid, the violent, the bestial, the misshapen, in short . . . low life was the only reality!” In the area of sexual morals he was perfectly willing to live consistently to his view of life as an animal. But in the area which had become his attempt to find an integration point, that of art, he was prepared to say that he disliked modern art because it is bestial! No man like Berenson can live with his system. Every truly modern man is forced to accept some sort of leap in theory or practice, because the pressure of his own humanity demands it. He can say what he will concerning what he himself is; but no matter what he says he is, he still is man.
These kinds of leaps, produced in desperation as an act of blind faith, are totally different from the faith of historic Christianity. On the basis of biblical Christianity a rational discussion and consideration can take place, because it is fixed in the stuff of history. When Paul was asked whether Jesus was raised from the dead, he gave a completely nonreligious answer, in the twentieth-century sense. He said: “There are almost 500 living witnesses; go and ask them!” This is the faith that involves the whole man, including his reason; it does not ask for a belief into the void. As the twentieth-century mentality would understand the concept of religion, the Bible is a nonreligious book.
MYSTICISM IN ART—PAUL KLEE AND SALVADOR DALI
In one of his writings Paul Klee (1879-1940) speaks of some of his paintings as though they were a kind of artistic Ouija board. (A Ouija board is a little board used by spiritists upon which participants place their hands and then ask questions. The spirits are supposed to move the board and spell out the answers.)
Paul Klee and men like him use art like a Ouija board not because they believe there are any spirits there to speak, but because they hope that the universe will push through and cause a kind of automatic writing, this time in painting. It is an automatic writing with no one there, as far as anyone knows, but the hope is that the “universe” will speak.
Klee not only painted and drew, but also wrote about his work to explain what he was doing. In his essay “Creative Confession” he has this to say: “People used to reproduce things seen on earth—things which had been or would be seen with pleasure. Today the reality of visible objects has been revealed and the belief has been expressed that, in relation to the universe, the visible is only an isolated case and that other truths exist latently and are in the majority.” He goes on to employ a phrase, plastic polyphony, which means “elements and their regrouping.” To Klee the word elements is a technical term. He defined this term in his essay as “points, the energy of the line, surface and space.” He is referring to these as he continues: “But that [the elements] is not art in its most exalted form. In its most exalted form there is behind the ambiguity a last mystery and at that point the light of the intellect dies away miserably.” So he too allows himself to be placed in the dichotomy. He hopes that somehow art will find a meaning, not because there is a spirit there to guide the hand, but because through it the universe will speak even though it is impersonal in its basic structure.
I would add that in almost all forms of the new mysticism there is a growing acceptance of the ideas of pantheism. The West and the East are coming together, and these pantheistic concepts are one of the strongest elements in the semantic mysticism of which we are speaking.
In his earlier days Salvador Dali (1901-1989) was a surrealist. As such he united the teaching of Dada with the concept of the Freudian unconscious, because this is what surrealism is. But at a certain point he could stand this no longer, and so he changed.
One day he painted his wife and called the picture The Basket of Bread. It is obvious from looking at the picture that on that day he really loved her. It is the same kind of situation as when Picasso wrote on his canvas, “I love Eva.” Before I had heard of any change in Dali, I saw a reproduction of this picture, and it was obvious that there was something different being produced. It is significant that his wife has kept this painting in her private collection.
So on this particular day Dali gave up his surrealism and began his new series of mystical paintings. He had, in fact, already painted two other pictures with the title A Basket of Bread, one in 1926 and one in 1945. These just showed baskets of coarse Spanish bread. But this third picture, also painted in 1945, was of his wife Galarina, and shows her with one breast exposed. Her name is written on the picture, and the wedding ring is prominent on her finger.
The second painting in his new style was called Christ of Saint John of the Cross, painted in 1951, which now hangs in the Glasgow Art Gallery. Salvador Dali has written about this painting in a little folder on sale in the museum: “In artistic texture and technique I painted the Christ of Saint John of the Cross in the manner in which I had already painted my Basket of Bread, which even then, more or less unconsciously, represented the Eucharist to me.”
What does he mean? He means that when he looks at his wife one day, really loving her, and paints her with one breast exposed, this is equated by him to the Eucharist—not in the sense that anything really happens, either in the Roman Catholic Mass, or that anything really happened back there in Palestine 2,000 years ago, but his love jarred him into a modern type of mysticism.
In this painting he differed from Picasso’s J’aime Eva. As far as we know, Picasso never really went beyond the problems of his individual loves; but to Dali it became the key to a mysticism. In order to express the leap that he felt forced to take, he picked up Christian symbols, not to express Christian concepts but a nonrational mysticism.
After these two paintings he painted his next Crucifixion, called Corpus Hyperoubus, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and then later The Sacrament of the Last Supper, which is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. This latter painting expresses his thought vividly. As the viewer looks at Jesus, he can see the background showing through him; he is a mist. This is no Christ of history. Above him stands a great human figure with arms outspread, its head cut off by the top edge of the picture. No one is sure what this figure is. However, it is strongly reminiscent of the “Yakso” which in Hindu art and architecture often stands behind the “saviors” (“savior” here bearing no relation to the Christian idea). Yaksa and Yaksi connect vegetable life with man on one side and the complete concept of pantheism on the other. I think this is what Dali is also saying by this cut-off figure in the painting. Whether this is so or not, the symbolism of the form of the “room” is clear because it is constructed by means of the ancient Greek symbol of the universe.
In an interview Dali connects this religious interest of his later life with science’s reduction of matter to energy: “. . . the discoveries in quantum physics of the nature of energy, that matter becomes energy, a state of dematerialization. I realized that science is moving toward a spiritual state. It is absolutely astonishing, the mystical approach of the most eminent scientists: the declaration of Max Planck and the views of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a great Jesuit scientist: that man in his constant evolution is coming closer and closer to a oneness with God.”
Here he relates his own mysticism and the religious mysticism of Teilhard de Chardin to impersonal dematerialization rather than to anything personal. He is quite correct and need not have confined himself to modern liberal Roman Catholicism but could also have included the Protestant forms of the new theology as well.
It is perfectly possible to pick up nondefined Christian symbols or words and use them in this new mysticism, while giving them opposite meanings. Their use does not necessarily imply that they have Christian meanings. Dali’s secular mysticism, like the new theology, gives the philosophic other or impersonal “everything” a personal name in order to get relief by connotation from meaninglessness.
MYSTICISM IN LANGUAGE—MARTIN HEIDEGGER
Because he could not live with his existentialism, Heidegger as an older man moved his position. His new position rests on these points: (1) something, Being, is there; (2) this something makes itself known; (3) language is one with Being and makes Being known. We can never know rationally about what is there (brute fact), but language does reveal that something is there. Thus language is already itself an interpretation (a hermeneutic).
He postulates that there was long ago an era, before Aristotle (and before the entrance of rationality), when men spoke in Greek in such a way that the universe was speaking ideally. He then tries to transfer this to all of man’s language—not the content of what is spoken but simply the existence of language. In this way the existence of language becomes for Heidegger the mysticism by which he tries to find relief from his previous existential dichotomy. It is semantic mysticism because it does not deal with content in language but simply language as such. Man speaking becomes the mouthpiece of the impersonal “What is” (Being). The impersonal and unknown Being speaks through the being who speaks (verbalizes)—that is, man.
This could be a quite correct view if there were any personality behind man to speak meaningfully to and through man. But because Heidegger is a rationalist and begins absolutely from himself, he cannot accept that a person behind man has spoken. So he is shut up to his particular form of semantic mysticism. The word language is a connotation word which seems to involve personality. The whole solution hangs on the connotation inherent in the one word language.
At the end of his book What Is Philosophy? he says that in our modern day this use of language is found particularly in the poet. So the conclusion of this view is that we are to listen to the poet. This does not mean we are to listen to the content of what the poet says, but to listen to the fact that there is a speaking which exists. That is all.
There is a strong parallel between Klee and Heidegger here. Both speak of their hope that somehow the universe will speak either through art or language. However, Heidegger has much more importance in the flow of modern thought because by using connotation words he has become the father of a new form of the new theology—the new liberalism. There is no real difference between Heidegger’s secular mysticism and the mysticism of the new theology.