Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenge of Art (review)

Earthly Visions seeks to make secular art redemptive, pursuing meditational support in works of art that have been read as having vacated religious meaning. The author does not address the consideration that his search for meaning takes place in what Charles Taylor has called our “secular age.” Gorringe appeals to the Christian reader, arguing in a series of chapters that landscapes, portraits, still lifes, genre scenes, even abstraction, can all be read as “secular parables” offering insight into a “theology of creation.” Many modern genres can be viewed as by-products (Victor Stoichită uses the term parerga) of medieval painting. Gorringe, however, starts with the Reformation. Post-Reformation art may seem “secular” (the scare quotes are his), but indeed it is not. In taking this stand, which counters Benjamin’s argument about aura, much depends on the art one chooses. Although catholic in his taste, Gorringe does not attempt to redeem Duchamp, Munch, Grosz, or Schwitters, let alone Warhol, Sherman, or Koons. Kandinsky, Rothko, and Newman are predictably more to his liking. His exclusions leave one wondering what Gorringe has in mind when he accuses abstraction “of inward emigration, which refuses to face up to the critical issues of the day and has nothing of any consequence to say.”

Nothing? Insofar as there is no more depressing experience for the art lover than a visit to the Vatican Museum’s Collezione d’Arte Religiosa Moderna, one can hardly blame Gorringe for seeking salvation elsewhere. Christianity is predicated on the coincidence of opposites, and Gorringe, arguing for an incarnational aesthetic, presents the art-appreciation equivalent of the argument from intelligent design: it may appear that God has absconded from post-Reformation art, but if we look carefully we will discover that “the truly secular is compatible with the sacred if it is not, indeed, the sacred per se.” By its nature, theology seeks to explain everything within a single, coherent system; in this case, the modern is unmasked, not as post-Christian, but as an expression of Barth’s “radiant humanism.” In effect, Gorringe assimilates art to the traditional notion of nature as a book and a mirror that can both reflect and produce reflection on God’s glory.

Gorringe, however, does not seek to historicize his own way of reading. In Romans 1:20 (“for the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made”), he would have found that a phrase first used by Paul, to condemn the cult of idols, came by the twelfth century to justify empirical experience not only of nature but, contrary to Paul’s sense, of things made by man, including what we have come to call works of art. In taking for granted “that creation is the expression of grace,” Gorringe concludes “that we cannot possibly think in terms of the disenchantment of the world.” Nonetheless, in claiming creation, human as well as divine, for Christianity, Gorringe cannot admit to his pantheon Dürer’s self-portraits, the most profound celebration of the divinity of human creativity: “with their allusions to Christ, and their implied comparison of the artist to an almost divine creativity,” they “are hardly born of religious self-scrutiny.”

Gorringe invokes a seemingly impressive range of authorities, including Karl Barth, Simone Weil, Marcilio Ficino, even John Berger—and also Erich Auerbach. Auerbach, however, like Hegel, located the Christian affirmation of the everyday (sermo humilis) not in modernity, but rather in the God-infused Middle Ages. Gorringe attempts to solve this problem by noting that, in the Middle Ages, “the celebration of everyday life is found more in folk art than in high art,” thereby contradicting not only Auerbach but also those modern historians who hold that this very distinction is itself a product of modernity. One authority to whom Gorringe does not refer is Hans Blumenberg, perhaps because Blumenberg, as opposed to Karl Löwith, declined to explain modernity in terms...