The Colorful Depictions of God in Mystical Consciousness

Introduction

In 1960 Walter T. Stace suggestively wrote that “[t]here are underground connections between the mystical and the aesthetic (whether in poetry or in other forms of art) which are at present obscure and unexplained.”² Since that statement there has been tremendous work done by commentators and scholars on bringing these connections to the surface, and in this essay I want to make a brief contribution to this ongoing effort.³ My basic contention is that there is a concordance, a harmony to be sure, between artistical consciousness and mystical consciousness, which is tantamount to a meeting of minds, and which is shown by the intersecting urge to depict what is felt, or thought, to be beautiful or sublime. The relationship between these two modes of apprehending reality—in the mundane and the spiritual—can be regarded as metaphorical, if it involves a transference of ideas or words. More specifically, the association is predicated on analogy, for both of these conscious endeavors are dependent on cognitive support for realization and recognition. An indirect comparison may be admitted by introducing the terms painting and consciousness, such that art is to mysticism as painting is to consciousness, with the mediating force as color. One consequence of this association is that it can be used to critique the notion of ineffability. I would argue that the encounter with the divine and its experiential concomitants are, as a general rule, descriptively available as a coloration, even where that awareness is designated as being beyond images.⁴ If artistic consciousness can be situated as an intentional activity, then so too can mystical or spiritual consciousness, since we know that it is informed by linguistic, psychological, and theological conditions.⁵ In whatever way it is determined, the ephemeral or persistent awareness of divinity involves an expressive and reflective act of being. I shall attempt to read mystical consciousness correlatively through an artistic lens, and to that end I shall illustratively appeal to ideas and terminology employed by art critics and historians, with their use of allusive and metaphorical language. Just as artists transfer their haptic and perceptual consciousness of the real or imaginary world onto a canvas, which can then be admired, so mystics fix their haptic and perceptual consciousness of divinity onto a canvas—a canvas of enunciation—which can then be appreciated (by themselves in the first instance).⁶

Classroom, courtesy Émil Manfrini

Coloring the Picture of Divinity

The influential Renaissance architect, artist, and writer Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) asserted in his pioneering treatise De pictura that painting has a “divine power” as it can make “the absent be present.”⁷ He wrote that painters should perfect their art by depicting an historia, a narrative scene drawn from literary, mythological or religious themes, which ought to act as an ideal and virtual stimulus to the mind and senses of the spectator.⁸ In theorizing the art of painting he initially proposed a three-fold division:⁹ “Painting is realized therefore through the drawing of profiles, composition, and the reception of light.”¹⁰ The first is to do with “circumscrib[ing] the trace of the edges through lines,”¹¹ the second is to do with “that procedure of depicting according to which the parts are arranged in a work of painting,”¹² and the third is to do with how the use of colors enhances “the grace and beauty of a picture,” though “the highest quality and mastery reside only in the distribution of black and white.”¹³ The influential French painter and writer Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy (1611–68) in his didactic poem De arte graphica divided the art of painting into invention/disposition, design (that is, drawing), and color or chroma.¹⁴ By analogy, if the art of painting is based on the experience of circumscribing, composing, and coloring a picture, then so does the art of mysticism involve an experience of outlining, placing, and coloring a picture, which is the imaged or intellectual form of divine light. (All of this may relate to work...