BIBLIOGRAPHY
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© 1999-00 John W. Dixon, Jr.
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Painting as Theological Thought
The Issues in Tuscan Theology
Introduction
Somewhere I once read an essay by a young philosopher who was explicating an intricate passage from a German philosopher and added admiringly, "German is a language which seems to have been designed for the discussion of philosophy." I wanted to add, less admiringly, "On the contrary, philosophy has become that which is discussible in German."
There is no special insight involved, given the context of modem scholarship, in recognizing that specific languages shape our thought. It is less usual but not any longer uncommon to assert that the structure of language itself determines in advance the shape of things we can think. What is much less commonly asserted is that systematic thought can occur in languages other than the verbal. Elsewhere I have defended this assertion ("The Matter of Theology," in The Journal of Religion, April 1969). It is my hope now to pay the first installment on the debt I there willingly incurred by making that assertion.
More is involved than simply extending the language of theology. It is, rather, a matter of determining the structures by which men have defined their relation to the world and responded to their apprehension of the manifestation of the divine. To do theology is not to know God in a particularly modern way, but to respond to God in the weight and structure and movement of a given language. The propositional language of traditional theology is a great imaginative achievement and part of the discipline and the nourishment of the spirit of man. But it shapes thought by the specificities of its location (German as against English) and by the generality of its form (the structured action of Indo-European grammar); neither of these is the whole of human experience. Those things that cannot be embodied in the structures of the verbal language can, at best, be talked about and thus are not actively present to the intelligence. Things which are talked about are things of curiosity, of argumentative interest, but they are not operative in the experience of men. It is only as the experience of the sacred becomes embodied, takes shape in those structures that can in turn shape the nervous system that they work rather than standing as specimens in a logical museum.
The substantiation of these assertions requires an examination of a wide range of evidence; the illustration of them can be more limited. I choose two areas for that illustration: the beginning of painting in Tuscany and the art of the twentieth century. Since my final concern is not the particulars of analytic demonstration but method, presumably any period of significant art would suffice for the demonstration of the way in which the method works and I might choose Tuscan art simply because it is the area of my special competence. It is more to the point, however, that Tuscan painting shaped the imagination and sensibility of Western man for nearly 500 years; an analysis of it, therefore, is not just methodologically useful but it is an analysis of the beginning of what we now are.
It is my hope that the method will be sufficiently clear from this analysis so that my treatment of the twentieth century revolution can be somewhat briefer and less exemplary. Nevertheless, it is vital to the conclusion I want to reach; if Tuscan painting exemplifies where we were, modern painting exemplifies where we are and I will argue, finally, that no artistic or theological language has any validity unless it takes into account where we are, not as definitions of rhetoric ("to speak the language of modern man") but as a constituent element of the language itself.
I
It should not be necessary to validate the Tuscan enterprise. A certain priority in the arts has been generally granted to Tuscany but so long as the arts were peripheral in an enterprise to which propo-sitions were central this was of no great moment. What is less generally recognized is the primacy of the Tuscans, particularly the Florentines, in so many other areas of our life. I am told that the foundations of modern business and finance were laid in Florence. The origins of the modern study of history are found in the Florentines, particularly Machiavelli and Gucciardini. Those same two great men and others generated the modern idea of political science, Even science, with business the other major determinant of the modem imagination, has one of its major springs in the Pisan Galileo who worked in Florence. Such energy of imagination manifested over nearly five centuries not only is virtually unparalleled in history, it points to a decisive act of the human intellect. It was the Florentines who shaped the primary imaginative acts of the western world for half a millennium. Perhaps, in the search for theology's definition, it would be well to turn away for a time from the Germans to those of another race and language.
All things have a history, and creativity is never creation from nothing but a response to all that has been inherited. The enterprise of Tuscan theology, their formal and structural response to their part of God's creation was acted out in a particular landscape, in the shapes of a particular city, within the habits of mind and images of order generated in a particular history. What came to them was, above all, a particular sense of wall surfaces, a particular sense of the function, within the economy of devotion, of sacred objects that defined man's relation to the holy.
All Italians grew up in the consciousness of the Byzantine icon. This is one of their circumstances that worked most constructively on the imagination, for the icon is a singular enactment of the relation between the human and the divine and thus a theological act of the highest importance. It is not an ordinary image. It is the point of agreed encounter between man and God. In function it is not just for contemplation or instruction but it was an instrument of prayer. The sacred is present in the icon, not as the god inhabits the idol but as that to which the Lord comes.
It is altogether natural that the art of the icon should have been codified; the sacred does not bear change or interpretation and its very antiquity becomes a dimension of its sacrality. That Byzantine art is unchanging, has no historical development, is as untrue as such statements usually are. That it is unchanging in comparison to the violent changes in Western art is quite importantly true. The persons portrayed are the heroes of the faith. The events are the great acts of the faith as glorified in the liturgy. The form in which the persons and events are manifested lends to them some variety of emotional tone but the intent is always to make an object that in its radiant splendor is fit as the habitation of the holy.
Thus is man's relation to the physical order defined. In the dialogue of history every intense passion tends to produce its opposite and Byzantine theology works itself out against a background of a mistrust of matter and a violent iconoclasm but in the main and finally official position the sacred could inhabit, if not the generality of matter, then the specifically consecrated object.
This is not the only definition of the function of the sacred image. The canonical definition in the Western church was laid down by Pope Gregory the Great: the image is an aid and direction to devotion. It is a reminder of that to which devotion is rightly given and is, therefore, the occasion but not the instrument of the devotional act.
It goes without saying that neither the Eastern nor the Western church was quite so single minded as this account suggests but this does describe the center of gravity in each church. Under the pressure of the Byzantine authority Western art, in Italy at least, had small chance to develop its concern with the pedagogical and the narrative that inspires devotion. It is precisely here that the issues that concern me are formulated and a specifically Tuscan theology begins to take shape. And what takes shape here shaped the Western imagination from that time on.
Tuscany was a distinct region of the spirit before it was a political unit and the revival of Western art was an affair of the Pisans Nicolo and Giovanni before it was of the Florentines or the Sienese. But it was in Florence and Siena that the final shaping of the issues took place.
The pressures of selectivity compel me to restrict my attention; I shall deal now largely with Giotto and Duccio. They stand at the beginning of Tuscan theology and they stand together on the definition of the issues, however diverse their fate. Giotto is perhaps a little short of Leonardo and Rembrandt as a household word but is, nonetheless, known in honor and most fervently loved. Duccio is known and honored by the specialists but beyond that known and somewhat patronized by those with a taste for the exotic. They do not divide subsequent history between them. Duccio had a few artistic heirs, the Lorenzetti, Simone Martini, finally the cold frenzy of Giovanni de Paolo and Sassetta. Beyond that even the tradition of his native town belongs to the Florentines. Giotto bestrides the next half millennium of the Western mind as few men ever do. Only Paul and Augustine among the verbal theologians so dominate history is did this man. Five hundred years of Western thought is built around issues in large part laid down by him. I speak not only of artistic thought; 'that honor is given him in every textbook. I speak rather of the shaping of the imagination, that power in men that defines and forms our experience of the world. The doctrines were shaped in other quarrels but the shape of those quarrels was fixed in the image of order laid down by Giotto.
I am not a determinist or even much concerned with linear causality. It may be that Giotto's work was the consequence of forces external to himself and those bearers might lay claim to the honor I here give Giotto. Be that as it may, what comes to us is Giotto's.
But Duccio faced the same issues and it is by no means fixed in the fate of things that he should lose the allegiance of men nor is it fixed in historical determinism that we cannot turn to him for the merit of his answer now that five hundred years' work have used up what Giotto taught us to do. The comparison between these two great men is instructive as such things always are but out of this might come more than instruction.
The unit of all critical investigation is the individual work of art. The theological reference is the mage of order embodied, incarnated in the individual work. It is this image of order that determines the choices the artist makes in his contention with his material; it is the embodied image, the organizing principle of the individual work that shapes the structural imagination of those who see it, including the artist who has had his imagination reshaped in his struggle to bring to life a work of art out of the resistance of living material to the imposition of an ideal order.
It is a cliché of historical criticism that Duccio is, of all the great Italians, the closest to the Byzantine. Clichés become clichés because in some way they satisfy the evidence but as clichés they begin to blind the vision. Certainly the Byzantine derivation is obvious. Elegant and eloquent linear rhythms, figures reduced to two-dimensionality, the iconography of the presentation. Against this cliché, again rightly, Giotto is represented as the revolutionary figure who places his figures in a real if limited space, who created solid, massive, three-dimensional persons, who interlocked them in precisely felt dramatic action.
These things are true and very importantly true. Yet there are things, particularly in Duccio, that go outside the cliché.
Duccio is not the culmination of the Byzantine style in Italy; he is a true Tuscan and his awareness of the issues in Tuscan theology is as profound as Giotto's.
No generalization about art is any more nearly true than generalizations about any other aspect of human experience yet it may be more generally true than most generalizations are to say that, prior to the work of the fourteenth-century Tuscans, the sense of personality was absent from art. Since drama is enacted only by persons, since dramatic action is by definition the interaction of persons with moral weight and the power of choice, then dramatic action does not exist without personality. Even the great Greek dramas are not interaction of dramatic personalities but the working out of general ideas in the lives of specific people.
Personality hardly exists outside Christian art. Individuality is the distinctiveness of appearance that belongs to a particular and specific person. Personality is the individuality of moral act that comprises the integrity of the specific persons. Greek art had the sense of moral force that is of the essence of the person but basically saw it embodied in the human type. Roman art had, in its portraiture, one of the most intensely individualized of all arts but with rare (but important) exceptions did not infuse the individual shapes with the moral gravity of true personality.
The Christian artist could not make his forms fit his faith immediately. He used inherited forms and developed a symbolic speech of remarkable flexibility and authority. Byzantine art built up a symbolic vocabulary that could make manifest a wider range of states of the soul than had been present before. The emotional range did not, however, pass beyond the range of the soul in devotion or sacred act even in the extraordinarily passionate works in Mistra and the Kharie Camii.
Individuality in Western art was not the work of the Italians but the great, anonymous sculptors of the French Gothic cathedrals. But there each individual participates in the peace of God radiating from the Christ figure of the trumeau.
Even so great a work as the Bamberg Rider is defined more nearly as a role than a person. He is the embodiment of one of the greatest dreams of the Middle Ages, the Christian king. The great Florentine, Donatello, also showing a warrior, demonstrates by contrast the possibility of complex humanity as identical with role and status. The two heads most vividly show the difference. The Bamberg Rider lives in the vision of his purpose, his role not simply on earth but in the final dream of God's order. The Gattamelata lives in his own authority and offers, therefore, something more nearly like completeness as a person.
My concern here is not genetics so I will not linger over the origins of artistic personality in the masters of the Isaac and St. Francis stories of Assisi nor the debt owed to Pietro Cavallini, Giovanni Pisano, and Cimabue. What I want to see, rather, is the full development in Giotto and Duccio, for there we find, for the first time in the history of art, the fully developed person acting to some moral purpose toward coherent and understandable ends.
Artistic drama is not the imitation of the externals of an action, which is no more than illustration. It is making manifest, for good or evil, the moral purpose of human acts. To this end several artistic instruments are available to the artist. With both Giotto and Duccio the basic instrument is gesture, the expressive act and attitude that reveals the inner moral purpose. Procedurally this means the most intense, the most precise, observation of human conduct and attitude. True gesture is unattainable as a general idea, a general principle. It depends rather on the most intense immediacies of relation to life as it is experienced.
In both men the sensitivity of gestures is such that they could and, in the order of humanity, should constitute a lifetime of study. Anna, with infinite tenderness, touches the face of Joachim returning. Equally, too, the great arch encloses the figures, the circle wraps their upper bodies together. Gesture is Giotto's principal dramatic instrument but composition serves as well.
Joachim is expelled from the temple with the coarse repelling gesture of the priest's inverted hand, Joachim resentfully looking back while lovingly holding the rejected sacrificial lamb. But he is also thrust into emptiness, an emptiness so unprecedented that historians were convinced for years that there must have been a figure painted there but which undeniably is Giotto's speech for the loneliness of rejected man.
Or one of the finest of all, the "Noli Me Tangere," with Mary's infinite longing of reach, Jesus simultaneously moving away, holding her off, blessing her with infinite compassion and love.
Duccio's gesture is every bit as precise, every bit as revealing. Judas avidly grasps after the money and the whole group huddles conspiratorially, the only such congestion of a group on the whole Maestá. Or Joseph braces himself on the ladder while he holds the limp dead body which falls out of the sorrowful emptiness above the cross.
Yet it is perfectly evident that the figures making these gestures are very different and in that difference lies the clue to their differing purpose and the seed of the further development of theological work in Tuscany.
Our normal (and proper) analysis in class as well as professional discussion is to present the difference in terms of the greater density of Giotto's figures, the fuller space, the greater range of the action. These are indeed proper subjects of pedagogy but they do not go far enough for these are means and not ends, language but not what is said by means of the language, forms but not the content that is inherent in, inseparable from, the form. It is not even enough to point out the intense awareness of the human drama in each one for this again is pedagogy and not a complete analysis. For these works function so differently that the same dramatic material, even a concern for the same issues, takes up in very different directions.
Giotto's interest is not in tangibility as such. It is, indeed, a startlingly new world he offered for contemplation, a newly imagined world that changed the optics of the Western imagination. But there is no evidence to suggest that such formal matters were at the center of his concern. Rather be seems to have sought to translate the drama into the statics of our body's existence as well as the dynamics of its interrelations. The tangibility of this gesture and action is such that our body responds in kind. The weight is our weight, the action is a disposition of our own flesh. Therefore, since in the painting both weight and action, the proportion and rhythms of the event are manifestations of the moral relation inherent in the event, then our participation in the structure and dynamics trains us to the motivating act. Devotion is not contemplation but participation. It is thus active and not passive, transformative and not simply confirmatory.
Duccio, on the other hand, starts not only with as profound a grasp of the dramatic structure but as great a sensitivity to the physicality of the acts; no man is truly a Tuscan if he does not have these two as fundamental to his imaginative language. But be does not seek the tangibility that compels the worshipper into participation. He seeks a visual form that is the symbolic equivalent of the action. The grasping hand is placed with absolute precision exactly where the hand should be placed but it does not truly grasp. It is an abstract curve that is the visual equivalent, or the symbol, of the grasp. The figures are disposed in positions proper to the participation in the action but the rhythm of their placement makes a counterpoint to the drama. Rhythm in Giotto is always submissive to the drama, an enhancement of it as well as instrumental to it. Rhythm in Duccio is appropriate to the drama but independent of it, thus establishing a personality for the picture that is other than the immediacies of the event. The event is transfigured into something else.
Every visitor to the museum of the cathedral of Siena will testify to a further quality of Duccio's painting. It has one of the richest surfaces to be found anywhere in painting. It would be flattery to jewelry to refer to it as "jewel like" in the ancient cliché. The gold background is the setting, the deep rich colors set into it. The colors are absolutely pure, subdued in saturation to be sure that no color is detached from the integral surface. The enclosing lines are fine and sinuous like the intricate wires of the jeweler.
There is no atmosphere, which is to say in a narrative that there is absolute clarity of atmosphere. Where earlier works occupy only a symbolic space, Duccio's has a real sense of space, so the clarity of forms, the unimpeded and unqualified clarity of color, can only signify an absolute purity of atmosphere. Since each form in this purity of atmosphere has complete clarity, each form becomes a jewel for entranced observation.
Thus, the moral drama, the pure Tuscan element of the work, is not, as in Giotto, reproduced in the body of the observer. It is transfigured into a different realm of being. The coherence and intensity of rhythmic structure, the quality of color and line transfigure the intensely realized moral act. Instead of the transformation of the worshipper's life on this earth, the worshipper is caught up into a new realm. He does not see the vision of the heavenly city. Rather it is his own life that is figured in the sacred drama, the emotions, the motives, the physical response of a life on this earth that is held away from the solidity of the earth and so becomes a true ecstasis that is of the substance of a genuine mysticism.
What Giotto and Duccio share, then, is the concern for the life of man in its moral dimension and the expressive attitude of the body - the gesture - that is revelatory of the quality and character of the moral act. They share, too, the analytical and calculated intelligence that makes them so responsive to the particularities of human acts as well as able to construct a work of art that makes their grasp of the dramatic moral act manifest.
This, with Dante at the headwaters of the Florentine enterprise, is the same intelligence that made possible the other Florentine achievements, precise observation, yet penetration through surface appearances to the forces that give structure to the elements of surface appearances. The Florentines created the study of history and politics, not because they chronicled information but because they understood what held that information together.
Thus they established the context in which Tuscan theology worked 'out the problem around which later solutions congested. Where they differ is the direction in which they took this moral drama. Duccio moved it into the realm of the mystic vision, Giotto into the dimensions of this earth.
This kind of statement is rhetoric made possible only by the fact that Giotto's spatial vision dominated Western thought till the end of the nineteenth century and the reformation we identify with the name of Cézanne.
Because Giotto so shaped our imagination we take that shape of space as normative just as we take as normative those structures of systematic propositions that have been built in the intellectual framework that Giotto designed.
What most decisively differentiates Giotto from Duccio in the Tuscan enterprise is the designated choice of artistic instrument. Duccio worked in the traditional medium of egg tempera, Giotto primarily in fresco. Tempera made possible the extraordinary richness that is so important to Duccio's vision. Fresco provides something else again.
These differences are not simply two ways of making a painting. They are two fundamental modes of thought, two ways of being-in-the-world. Fresco does not happen to be just a painting on a convenient and relatively permanent support. It is the energizing of a wall which is itself a determinant of the imagination. Even in his tempera panels (made inevitable by the realities of the market) Giotto so ordered his colors that his painting had the breadth of form characteristic of fresco, where his basic thinking was done.
What I have pointed to already is enough for a theological revolution: the transformation of figures from being symbols of pathos, pointers to devotional response in the worshipper, into figures of moral density and muscular control with gestures as revelation of inner feeling and moral relation. Yet this is not specific to fresco. The substance of fresco is the congestion of weight onto the surface of the wall.
A wall is an act of the imagination, not simply when it is enclosure, but when it encloses and gives shape to meaningful space. A wall is the boundary of our private selves and can take the shape of our image of order. It is also the shaping edge of corporate space, giving body to the image of the common self held by the community whose vision, through the agency of the masterbuilder, has shaped the space. When such a wall is fittingly frescoed, its meaning has been translated into human drama and the emotional life which was contained by the walls is caught up onto the sustaining surface of the wall to be transfigured in the sacred story. The wall is two dimensional. The great achievement of Giotto (himself a builder) was the energizing of this two-dimensional plane by affirming it and then extending it back into the represented space. The drama is enacted at the juncture of the real space and the represented space. It was the taking up of the third dimension into thought.
It is not just the third dimension that Giotto uses; it is the third dimension cut to the measure of man. The space is clear and intelligible, movement in it is free and orderly. The pictures are unprecedentedly large thus relating the pictorial space closely to the actual space of the spectator. The mystery and magic of Duccio is wholly absent. The worshipper, his imagination stunned and overwhelmed by Duccio, here feels a different exhilaration. He stands apart from the picture at what can later be called "the point of view." Icons are objects in our world, lacking depth and a spatial existence of their own. Giotto's paintings go back from a fixed surface and create a new world which the worshipper now contemplates from within his own space. Thus is the worshipper's individuality clearly established while it is enhanced by his participation in the dynamics of the picture. The worshipper is over against the world of the picture. With Giotto there is never any separation of the two, since it is the life of the worshipper that is taken up onto the wall and there transformed. But when, as it were, the worshipper took a step or two back from the wall and became the spectator rather than the worshipper then the attitude was secularized. The spectator became detached from the world with the result that science became possible as did the form of theology which finds its work possible in detachment from that which is being accounted for by an uncommitted and uninvolved technique.
If this is the final end of Giotto's work it is by projection along one road only of the spacious area that he created. In Giotto the several movements of the spirit are muted into harmony and for this reason so many who come to the Arena Chapel have the sense of coming home. This is the shape of our corporate lives before the modern revolution. Only a few people have been able to respond deeply to the entranced vision of Duccio. Rather it is the radiance of the moral act in Giotto that shaped the European theological imagination, but the moral act is radiant not just in itself but on the surface of the wall. Attention to the moral act alone eventually produces the novel and then a secular psychology. With Giotto the integrity of the wall is never lost even when it is simply the sustaining context of the moral drama.
At this point one final dimension of the analysis is required. Duccio's space is clearly very unlike Giotto's but it is not sufficient simply to identify this difference. Let us, therefore, look comparatively at Giotto's and at Duccio's representation of the same subject, the "Entry into Jerusalem."
Giotto's handling of the subject is in harmony with his general structural principles. The spatial setting is three dimensional but decisively cut off immediately behind the figures and thus subordinate to the action. The city gate is too large to be merely symbolic but too small to be a true gate; after all, people are more important than gates. Jesus is high to the left of center; the ass's neck and bead lead across while the blessing gesture is isolated in the open center. The congested rhythm of the apostles crowds in from the left. The receiving crowd spills out of the gate in a falling rhythm that ends in the prostrate figure spreading his robe, a rhythm characteristically syncopated by the figure drawing back in awe. Nature is present but instrumental only. All is concentrated on the drama, fairly simple in this case but nonetheless profoundly realized. The act of the entry is made manifest and the variety of responses but the dominant element is the majesty of the figure of Jesus.
With some complexities, Duccio's space in some of the panels is relatively straightforward, clear, cubic, concise and adequate without being obtrusive. Where the emotional tone of the subject suggests a different treatment, space is treated in unusual ways. The most remarkable of all is the panel with the Entry.
Unlike Giotto's treatment, space here is not simply instrument but is an actor. The painting is formally flatter than Giotto's but symbolically much deeper. The road zigzags up the surface of the panel rather than back into depth but the symbolic movement begins in a field, goes across a road, another field, an expanse of city to a cathedral dome.
In Giotto's painting the point of view is low, moving toward the actual position of the spectator in the chapel and enhancing the majesty of the central figure. The point of view in Duccio's is manipulated in a shockingly sophisticated manner. Essentially it appears to be high, somewhat above the middle of the panel. We look down on the road and at least partially into the orchard beyond the road, and up to the arches of the gate. But we also look up to the lower surface of the lintel of the doorway in the foreground. Actions of all figures are as intelligible as they would be were we standing immediately in front of them at whatever level they are.
Scale is manipulated to the same purpose; the figures just in front of the gateway are larger than the ones close to Jesus, their heads as large as the head of Jesus himself who is much closer to the spectator's position. Thus in moving from left to right the spectator moves from the foreground into the group at the gate and is prepared to enter.
At this point I become aware that I am no longer dealing with the vagaries of medieval perspective construction or even the emotional manipulation of space in the Byzantine icon. Instead there is a highly sophisticated manipulation of surfaces for a peculiarly devotional purpose. Objects and persons equally are defined into faceted surfaces that are angled against each other in a complex pattern that can remind the modern observer of the structured facets of cubism. But instead of the profound structural purpose of cubism, ordering is here a trap for devotional meditation. The glance of the spectator slides from plane to plane, back into the symbolic space to the temple, out again to the figure of Jesus who is crowned by the temple, yet reaches it only through the life of the city.
Since the picture is full of allusions to the experienced world, the circumstance of our common life, the origin of the response is the awareness of this world. But appearances are embedded into the intensity of color structure and the complexity of spatial organization so the common life is transfigured into the uncommon life of a spiritual event. There is no weight to figures or tangibility to stone so the holy event floats like a mystical vision; yet the entrapment of vision is so complete that the serious spectator cannot extricate himself from his participation in the event. Thus the icon to which Duccio is so closely linked is carried still further away from its appointed task and into a distinctly Western vision. This is no longer the occasion for prayer or the instrument of prayer. It is itself an act of devotion trapping not only the conscience but the optical consciousness of the spectator into a singular act of involvement with the deepest structures of the faith. From this the worshipper returns into his own circumstances not so much better informed about the nature of the common life as prepared to see the ordinariness of things radiant with the faith.
It is, perhaps, symptomatic of the special nature of this work that it appears on the back of the great altarpiece and ordinarily was seen only by the priests. Giotto's is on the walls of a chapel, accessible to all who came. Here there is no entrapment but complete openness. Space is structured without ambiguity. Movement is measured and weighty, determined by the mechanisms of the body so the worshipper participates in both adoration and blessing and learns in his own flesh, not in his argumentative mind, what it means to bend in adoration of the holy. As he slowly moves through the chapel he experiences in his own bodily dynamics a full range of human acts incarnating the holy history. The event is distant from him and independent of him, resting serenely in the shallow space carved by the paint on the clear and integral wall. Simultaneously it is working in his flesh and the rhythm of his movement. Those who take Giotto seriously do not go back into their world like the disciples blinking on their return from the Mount of the Transfiguration or from the Museo del Duomo of Siena. They go back into a clarified world, a world of weight and substance, of intelligible relations among things, where people move in the integrity of intelligible moral purpose, whether good or evil. The response of Duccio is ecstasy. The response to Giotto is joy.
It is perhaps not surprising that Duccio's work was so unfruitful. A few visionaries could follow him and Siena was a city of visionaries rather an intellectual solidity. The occasion was not Duccio's but Giotto's. There as a formal range to Giotto that created problems still alive in the early years of the twentieth century. There was a moral complexity and depth hardly yet available to intellects formed on philosophy and literature rather than art.
Yet, even so, the world since Cézanne has moved away from him. Space is no longer so clearly rational nor morality so intelligible. The spectator must participate in the art work, trapped into its ambiguities, making arts of it in his own entranced response. Thus surprisingly, Duccio, ineffective historically since the sixteenth century, becomes again a leader by making manifest the process of involvement of optics with devotion. There is enough debased Byzantinism in contemporary "sacred" art not to urge a Duccio revival. He remains a Sienese of the fourteenth century. But he outlines the process whereby intelligence is itself transformed into prayer.
II
I concluded the previous section with certain statements that must not be left to rhetorical assertion but supported by such argument and evidence as might be brought to bear on the problem. But, before turning to that task, I want to review some of the implications of what I have tried to do.
The second of these implications will have to do with the critical job that I undertook to do. But prior to that I will have to examine some of the enforced limitations of that job.
While the mode of analysis is not entirely unprecedented in contemporary historical criticisms, it is sufficiently new to require conscious attention. But in one respect at least it is in a perfectly traditional mode of intellectual work. I have operated (so far) on the unexamined assumption that it is possible for a twentieth-century critic to discern and define what is going on in a fourteenth-century art work.
I do not intend here to append the whole debate on the problems of writing history. "Exactly as it happened" is an ideal that historians once held but few are naive enough to hold it any more and much scholarly attention is given to the problems of history. While acknowledging that debate, what I prefer doing is to come at the problem from a different direction for it seems to me that the various treatments of it share one basic fallacy.
That fallacy may, indeed, be a consistent outgrowth from Giotto's achievement. I have tried to describe the way in which he works on the sensibility of the spectator; he does so by making the work of art something other than the spectator, although related to him in a distinctive way. In doing so be created a pictorial world that impinges uniquely on the world of the spectator but is nonetheless a different world which the spectator observes. The history of Western art (what I referred to as "the optics of Western imagination") is in part a history of the various modes of that relation and observation. It is an extra-ordinarily complex subject, and the study of it has hardly yet begun so I will keep close to my account of Giotto's style.
Giotto's figures have weight and density, they move according to both anatomical and psychological logic, and they act in the context of discernible moral purpose. Whatever Giotto's intention, whatever the experience of the original participants in his work, it was inevitable that the work of art develop an increasing distance from the spectator and, finally, even from the artist. It is one of the clichés of modem criticism that the art work must be understood in its own right apart from both the spectator and the artist (Roland Barthes speaks of "The Death of the Author," Aspen Magazine, no. 5-6).
Clearly this separation is essential to the writing of true history as true history has been defined since the time of the great Florentine historians. Clearly, too, it is false to the world. There is no sense in which "I" can be defined as over against my world; I am a part of it, shaped by culture and environment.
This detachment of the "I" from the world, the subject from the object, was the indispensable first step in the Western intellectual enterprise and because of it all sorts of things have been accomplished that could not have been accomplished otherwise. But the price had to be paid and we are beginning to pay it now.
The price was the reifying of process. All human experience is ebb and flow. In the moment we are involved in it by an intricate network of relations, in time we are involved in it as change, flow, process. To objectify any part of it is to excise it from the web and from the flow. Where, "exactly as it happens," everything is an inextricable part of its act and relations, in the reifying of process, things or events are cut loose from relations, fixed permanently in the amber (or plastic) of scholarly language. This works in the Arena Chapel; part of the extraordinary power of the paintings is to be located precisely in the suspension of the moment, compelling the entranced attention to absorb somatically the moral structure that is the supporting skeleton of the painted forms. It no longer works.
So far as Giotto is concerned (or any artist) this is both liberation and limitation. Giotto did not paint for me. He painted for men of the fourteenth century. This either has nothing to do with cultural relativism or it is the only true meaning of cultural relativism. The besetting sin of the modem intellect and, as a result, modern pedagogy is the conviction that the thing divorced from this relation and suspended in scholarly plastic is "in fact" the thing itself. Where pedagogy should be set on putting the student into the process it concentrates on the presentations of these mythical things.
Again, this should not be read as polemic (although polemic it must be if it is permitted to continue to rule our pedagogical procedures). It is the inevitable result of the assumptions established early in the enterprise.
Giotto was a particular man, shaped by a particular culture and working within it. Those who participated in his work were trained to the same cultural speech as Giotto. They were not twentieth-century men; they knew nothing of Rembrandt or Picasso or, for that matter, Niels Bohr.
Consequently, and I want to emphasize that "consequently," what they saw in the Arena Chapel and what I see are two very different things.
Historiography takes into account the physical changes in the paint, the cultural differences illustrated in the meaning of symbolic and narrative vocabulary and so on. What it does not take into account is the fact that consequently, we are different people. The art work is not a thing working in a certain way on equally objectified persons so that once we have corrected the aim by the degree of paint damage, shifts in the understanding of symbols and so on, we can come to a conclusion about the nature of the work with the calm, if somewhat presumptuous assumption, that we are defining the work as it was and is and ever more shall be. The art work is a term in a relation that involves the artist and the participant Change the participants and, while the physical substance of the work is not changed, it is not just a manipulation of language to say it is a different work. In a cultural speech still dominated by positivism that way of speaking is an offense but it is the only way I know to establish in the argument that the work of art is not a thing but a function and a relation. The rela-tion originates in the physicality of the work and is shaped by the material structure of the work and is inseparable from it (I would not care to be thought an idealist) but the physical separability of the material should not suggest that it can be separated in our understanding.
Thus I can never be sure that the work of art worked as I have described it. Equally I am liberated from the obligation to assume that the way it worked then is authoritative now. It certainly works for me as I have described it and my description, placed in the public domain, can be checked by the experience of others. Once I am freed to experience the work as though it had been done for me, for our time, I can then experience it in the knowledge that fourteenth century men were not only profoundly different from me but profoundly the same; they are men with bodies shaped as mine, responding to the world as mine does. Thus my dialogue is not only with Giotto but with them. I cannot know that they responded according to my analysis, neither can I know they did not.
Thus the paintings are not a function and relation simply in one dimension. Rather it is a three-way relation: Giotto and his spectators (or, as I prefer to call them, participants); Giotto and us; the fourteenth century participants and us. The error, the false step, in traditional criticism is the presumption that somehow the work can be isolated from this functional relation and presented in itself. It is these relations, it is not simply a thing that functions differently in different situations.
Therefore, I can now reflect on my own procedure as a preliminary to addressing myself to the modern enterprise. No man is competent to define his achievement but he can at least speak to his own intentions and my intention is to make a real shift in the mode of criticism. "Shift" is not a complete transformation; I undertook a reasonably straightforward formal analysis in a reasonably traditional mode. It was, rather, that the context of this analysis was changed. In traditional formal analysis the unstated assumption is that the analysis is directed toward the "being" of the art work, that this is what the art work "is." What I have tried to define is how the paintings "work." Participation in a painting is not a mystical, visionary, undefinable experience. A painting works in a certain way because it is made in a certain way. My response to the way it is made is in good part a consequence of my history and nature so I can never extract myself - or better, my self - from the analysis. Analysis is not laboratory work but reciprocation, dialogue, discourse, intercourse where the self, or all the participant selves, and the work of art are mutually defined.
A history of Western art (or any art, for that matter) would be and must be an intricate, careful thing and a most consequential thing, for it would be a history of consciousness. Art does not simply reflect consciousness but shapes it. Such a history is the task of several careers, not one paper. What is needed here is the sense of the continuous line of Giotto's heritage: whatever the several modes, a painting from Giotto to Cézanne is an illusory world over against the spectator (at some point in the development, no longer a participant). Such pictures functioned very differently at different times (which is the work of the history of art) but they shared the character of being on the other side of the painting surface, a created world that was other than the spectator and - vital point - in various ways subservient to him.
The objectivity of nature was vital to the growth of science. Now science itself comes to know that the resulting scientific knowledge is not simply part of the truth but a misshapen truth. Not only art but mystic communion gives another part of the truth but also a different modality of truth, which is not different from science to be added to it but, in ways we do not yet know, inseparable from scientific truth. The question really is, whether the Western scientific enterprise is to be denied and reversed or whether it can be restored into wholeness. This is a metaphysical question but also a methodological one and therefore political and social.
This is only in part a digression. At some point along the way science became the determinant of men's consciousness and it is important to the argument to know what took place. But, risky as it is to make such an analysis, I think science grew out of the consciousness shaped by art and, as science falters in face of its own destructive products, art may be the only resource for putting the divided consciousness together again (I am tempted to say "art informed by religion" but I do not want to be held responsible at the moment for demonstrating that assertion so I will exile it to a parenthesis).
All this is the background against which "modern art" (which I define as including everything from Cézanne to our own day) must be understood. As is true with all developmental artistic styles, the whole development is implicit from the beginning and what artists successfully do is two-fold: they develop the implications of the original stylistic idea and they translate the original form into the new vocabulary in order to maintain the purity of the original effect. The first of these tasks is no concern of the present paper but the second is. Every act shapes the consciousness of those who participate in it. They become, therefore, different persons no longer able to receive the originating work in the same way, Preservation of the canonical effect requires a new form that does for the new consciousness what the originating form did for the old. This process can be truncated by the appearance of an overpowering new idea, or it can be exhausted in the failure of the rejuvenating imagination or the changing forms can modulate into a distinctively new effect.
Cézanne stands, as all such men including Giotto do, as the fulfillment of the old tradition as well as the initiator of the new. The pictured world is still palpably three dimensional and solid. Yet it is no longer beyond the picture plane but translated into it. Nothing is permitted to disrupt the surface of the painting; the wall that Giotto energized into drama returns as the controlling plane of painting. Suddenly the painting is no longer subservient to the spectator but is an object in his presence. Much, if not most, of the intensely emotional protest against modem art arises from offended pride at loss of this subservience and from a sense of being crowded. A modern work of art is not over there beyond the frame but obtrudes into the room.
The drama that was the substance of Renaissance painting and a constant presence in post-Renaissance art has been ruthlessly excised from the painting. But it has not been excised from the painting act, the painting relation. This is where most criticism of modern art goes wrong, for. the drama is very much present but quite transformed. The painting is so clearly the product of a high intellectual act that to experience a Cézanne is not simply to experience an encounter with Provence or an encounter with a painting. It is to experience the creative intelligence of the artist. It is perfectly obvious to anyone who knows art that there is a creative intelligence behind every work of art but usually that intelligence is absorbed into the work. It is very nearly only in Western art that the intelligence of the artist is so publicly present and so clearly at work solving an artistic problem. With Cézanne this extraordinary presence of the artist in his dramatic interaction with his material becomes one of the factors participating in the extraordinary complex of relations that make up a Cézanne painting.
The surrealistic-expressionistic tradition owes little to Cézanne but the rest of modern art is a working out of the themes he designated. The relative emphasis on the participating factors varies widely. The cubist tradition pursued the problem of interaction between represented space and the integral picture plane. Nonrepresentational art pursued the same problem while sacrificing the assistance or freeing itself of the burden of association with the world of our common life. That world appears, violently and obtrusively, in the badly labeled "pop" art style. The presence of the artist is variously established, from the cool remoteness of Mondrian to the passion of the action painters, who make of their own creative art both the subject and the occasion for the painting. But constantly the painting is an object established in the intimate presence of the spectator, carrying intensely the dramatic presence of the artist (even when, as often happens, that presence is trivial, frivolous or indulgent).
Within this development, one of the more remarkable stages has been reached in our own day. One of the major movements of the sixties (I am reluctant to speak, as some do, of "the art of the sixties" as though the most original movement is so automatically dominant), comprises a series of works that go apparently to the other extreme. All signs of the artist's personality are effaced. As nearly as possible all action and all hierarchy within the work are abolished. Sculpture becomes pure geometric forms, color is brought to the same value level to prevent any effect of space or modeling, space and drama are expelled. The work of art is reduced to pure objecthood, often without any inherent interest at all. Indeed, the artist works hard to cancel out "interest," that is any sensuous quality or any complex of internal relations that can give pleasure or direct attention in time. The work is totally manifest in the instant of first viewing, it deliberately eschews anything that can bold the attention of the spectator.
At the same time, the work functions in the attention of the spectator for it is very difficult to ignore it. These artists are given to big works that cannot be evaded, or things like cascades of felt, or various materials scattered on the floor that are so bizarrely out of tune with their setting that they intrude inescapably into the consciousness of the spectator.
This is so unlike anything that has gone before that some critics (notably Sheldon Nodleman) have interpreted it as the beginning of a new style and therefore a new consciousness. This is a serious and responsible position and it is hard to be confident of any interpretation while in the midst of a volatile situation. Nevertheless, I do not hold to this interpretation; a style (or any human attitude) is human through its negations as much as through its affirmations. These new works do not appear at some generalized period of the history of man; they appear in the context of a culture in which men are surfeited with moral or structural exhortation. They appear precisely in a culture that has worn out the work of Giotto. They so exactly reverse everything that Giotto and his successors have tried to do.
They deny inherent interest and involvement. They are ostentatiously anonymous, They avoid all drama, all development, space and three dimensionality, everything in short that has concerned Western artists. And by the denial, they affirm the absence of what they are denying.
It is the artistic statement of the death of God.
I do not much like making parallels of this kind. As every reader of Spengler knows they are not difficult to do and, if they are false, they can be painfully misleading. Even so I think this one may help.
"The death of God" is more serious than its faddishness and slogan-like quality would suggest (significantly, the art movements have the same inclination toward faddishness and slogans). As theological statement it has grievous weaknesses; in any usable definition of "God" it is as blasphemous to say "God is dead" as to say "God is alive." Either is a statement of undemonstrable faith quite irrelevant to the "being" of God or any other such meaningless statement. I should think the "death of God" theologians, who are not incompetent or silly men, must weary of reading condescending statements that God is not dead, it is only our concept of God that is dead, particularly when this statement is invariably followed by a reformulation of some outmoded concept. It is, obviously, quite true that our concept of God is dead but these theologians are much too serious to attempt to exploit so unexceptional a statement as that. Something much more important is going on.
I can say with any certainty only this much: it is not "a" concept of God that has died, it is the very concept of having a concept of God that has died. There is no point in trying ingeniously to reformulate a concept of God; there is no language left to do more than make an idol in memory of the lost God. "The death of God" is as good an idol as any other but it is no more than that. Despite the dogmatism of some of the theologians (but not all) the statement has no status as history or description. It is no more than a working instrument to contend with the particularities of a situation. It does, however, have a use that, say, Billy Graham's idolatry of a social order does not have: it does make us conscious that something, call it what you will, has died and that "something" has been essential to the sustenance of the human spirit.
The minimal art of the sixties, the color painting of Stella, Louis, Olitski, the art of many others, makes this same affirmation. They are not affirming vacuity or meaninglessness. To do that would be to stop altogether making art (as, indeed, Marcel Duchamp very nearly did). They are affirming that something once alive is now dead. In so doing they are work-ing very precisely in the methodological tradition of Western art.
It should be clear that there has been a fundamental shift in the manner of my treatment of this material. The whole point of the first part of the paper was to elucidate the way in which two great artists controlled the consciousness of worshippers to particular, if different, devotional ends. In the minds of Duccio and Giotto this appears to have been a conscious (if probably not verbalized) purpose. There was no question of whether God did or did not exist. It was a matter of shaping consciousness to the proper (orthodox?) reception of God. It is possible, even necessary, to speak of this body of material as "Tuscan theology," with the full intention of making clear that both the language and the issues are those of painting, not propositional systems.
No such "theological" interpretations can be offered of the modern material for its use is very different. Yet its procedures are not all that different for its explicit (now at least partially verbalized) intention is to have an effect on the consciousness of the spectator. "Have an effect" rather than "shape" because to shape something is to be in a moral or dramatic relation to it, a relation and a responsibility which these artists have rejected. Rather consciousness is thrown back on its own resources, undetermined by the work of art. This art is (as, of course, all art is) unintelligible outside its own history. It is the affirmation of the death of that history or (if we avoid prophecy) the present exhaustion of that history.
What it can mean to a man of another culture, unaffected by the malaise of our culture, I cannot say. It is often useful to remember that when cultural analysts speak of "modern man" they are speaking only of the educated classes of Western Europe and the United States with their cultural provinces. But I speak with some confidence of this group, at least for this moment. And for this moment the history of Western art is exhausted and some of the most creative artists are giving themselves over to the task of doing more than denying that tradition or affirming its death. They are compelling consciousness to be aware of itself in a way that man has never achieved before. I have always felt that "the world come of age" was a singularly arrogant phrase as though even the greatest of our predecessors was a child as against our maturity. Many of our predecessors have been a good deal more self-aware than that. What is, however, granted to us or imposed on us is, so far as I know, unprecedented - the consciousness of consciousness itself; the awareness of the instruments of our awareness, even the instruments of that self-aware awareness; the symbolic means men have used for the construction of their own integrity.
The history of man has been a history of his generation of symbolic structure for coping with experience and his eventual defeat in the failure of his structures. We are involved now in the common and traditional process of the collapse of inherited structures. Yet, history is not cyclical; there is something to be salvaged from that process and the first thing to salvage is the understanding of the process itself. Understanding is more than description. It remains, therefore, essential to grasp the human reality within the process.
Conclusion
Hovering behind everything I have said, and occasionally emerging into summary statement is a position in historical analysis that cannot be demonstrated but only asserted here. Our criticism (including art history, which is simply criticism in a particular mode) is fundamentally positivistic: the art work is an object which is accessible to the appropriate technique. This is not a pejorative description. The techniques and their application obviously vary widely in quality but good art history has proven itself as a flexible and human instrument, going a long way toward reconstructing the reality of the life work of many hundreds of men. Nothing I can propose, here or elsewhere, is conceivable except as an outgrowth of what these men have done.
Nevertheless, I would make the general analytical statement: the art work is thought of as over there and it can in its essentials be encapsulated in our techniques. The inescapable corollary of this (and all positivism) is that my "self" is encapsulated in me. "I" exist as a distinct entity, detached from all the other selves and objects of the world.
Against this I have proposed that the art work is a functional relation. It is, indeed, a structured object; the inherited techniques of criticism need not be superseded for they are the means for defining the structure and it is the structure that determines the character of the relation. The art work is not instrumental only; it is a participant in a complex of relations.
Hence, what I have had to say is both incomplete and distorted if it is isolated from the "human reality" or, to use the divisive academic jargon, psychology. If the art work functions in a peculiarly complex web of relations among persons and things, then the person is no longer the isolated and inevitably alienated individual but the kind of person who is defined within, literally exists only within, such relations. If so, the art work is not peripheral or incidental to the human enterprise. It is one of the means, perhaps the central and generative means, for the creation of the human personality.
Thus it remains, finally, to move back from the particular to the general and try to define where this introduction, necessarily schematic, moves to. The major enterprise of the modem mind has been set the task of a redefinition of the self and its mode of working and knowing; I want to suggest where I think this investigation belongs.
I take my text, not from the canonical Germans, but from a Spaniard and then an Englishman. I have several times used the word "circumstances." Without acknowledgment, I was each time quoting Ortega. It is Ortega who made what I judge to be the complete statement of the modern mind, having the merit of unambiguous as well as unhyphenated succinctness and, for whatever it is worth, the further merit of chronological priority: "I am myself plus my circumstances."
The verb "to be" is the most dangerous of all philosophical terms; it is the easiest (because we always think we know what it means) and the most difficult (because we seldom do know what it means). It is both seductive and traitorous. Our thought, even our manhood, founders on this word. We cannot take it as descriptive but as an act of faith.
As such it transforms my relation to my world. I am not "in" or among" the things of my life. I am those things in addition to whatever else "I am." The consequences of this are extraordinary. The world of my circumstances is made up in part of what I am thrown into, but in part it is world of my choice. It is never a world of final objects which I can describe as fixed and determined. They are part of me, changing as I change just as I change with the changes in them. But they are not just art of me; I do not create my circumstances. They are a part of other people as well and my circumstances interlock with other people's circumstances. I am not just obligated to all these circumstances or responsible for them. I am inalienably, often intolerably, locked into them. Thus those who use that admirable tool, intellectual analysis, to detach me from my circumstances, do not simply impoverish my experience. They alienate me from myself, they divide me into a schizophrenia the therapists so inadequately tinker with. Thus the work of Descartes was not just a faux pas. It condemned man to an unfruitful narcissism, an autoeroticism. that has brought considerable intellectual pleasure but now little else.
It is not enough to say I am myself plus my circumstances; it is required of us to seek to know how we are related to our circumstances. We would be no more than vegetables if we were content to live in our circumstances in the recurrent pattern of the plant that grows in nature. It is rather that our humanness inheres in the tone and rhythm, the range and depth, the insight and interval of our involvement with our circumstances.
More than one hundred years ago, Samuel Taylor Coleridge made a great statement that I pair with the Spaniard's, "...it is the fundamental mistake ... to suppose that words and their syntaxes are the immediate representatives of things, or that they correspond to things. Words respond to thought, and the legitimate order and connection of words, the laws of thinking and to the acts and affections of the thinker's mind...". (J. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., 1935), p. 122.)
Thus words are quite immediately deposed from their inherited authority. "Knowing" is not a matter of the right order of words. It is the right ordering of the processes, the acts and affections of our minds. Insofar words do point to those processes they are surrogates for knowing when e talk, they are agents of knowing. But they are not that knowing, which an intercourse - a word which, like the biblical "know," has its significant sexual reference - an intercourse with circumstances, the self and things in communion.
The force of truth, then, is in that relation, not in the words that haltingly and inadequately describe the relation. Decisive influence belongs to those forces that determine the relation, not to the words that, following, attempt to account for the creativity of those forces. This is not the occasion to try the full analysis of those forces and the relation between men and their circumstances; my earlier statement must suffice: "Our humanness inheres in the tone and rhythm, the range and no depth, the weight and interval of our involvement with our circumstances."
But these are the terms of the arts' involvement with our lives. They are the most general terms of the work of the arts, which are nothing if not the working out of our destiny in the pure weightiness of material substance. But, being general, they have the widest reference and thus emphasize the assertion that is the foundation of my case. The words we use, even propositionally rather than artistically, do, in the economy of our brains give access to these relations and help shape them. But the definition of them, the root and origin of being human, is first in geometry, then in the shaping of space, then in the shaping of matter, sound and motion.
I do not propose even a schematic history of this extraordinary process but only a rapid movement from these generalizations to the concreteness of a particular body of material. Thus I do not now go into the question of priority, either in time or value, between the work of the arts and the work of the propositional languages in the discussion of fundamental issues. This is not a very old question. So long as it could be assumed that our words applied to things, then naturally the science of the highest reality - God - could rightly claim to be the highest of the sciences. If, however, our words apply to our ideas about things then the center of gravity shifts to the ability of our nervous systems - the origin of our ideas - to respond to that highest reality. Any language, then, is testable only against the power of the person to respond to reality since it is that response which is the revelation of a reality otherwise entirely inaccessible to our languages.
Further, since this responsive self is made up not only of the conscious self but of the self's circumstances, it is in the intricate, the infinitely complex web of the self's involvement with its circumstances, its entanglement with the specificity and the materiality of the world, that the decisive act of human thought takes place. It is not required of the arts to validate their role in human experience for this network of involvement is the very substance of their work. It is rather for the propositional arts to validate their ancient claim to authority by demonstrating that in their responsible attention to the rhythm and tension, the weight and the spacing of their own structures they are adequate to the treatment of this, the central concern of being human.
The issues as defined here are central to the Tuscan enterprise but they are not the only ones that concerned these two Tuscans much less the great men who came after them. Nor can it be said that the Tuscan theological structure is normative any more than any other such structure is no more than a partial and tentative answer to the problem of being a man and being a Christian. Rembrandt worked within certain of Giotto's basic assumptions: his figures move coherently in an intelligible space and to the rhythm of moral purpose. But they occupy a space radiant with a light that places personality in the context of infinite purpose and this was no part of what the Florentines did. Thus is Christian destiny worked out in a range of imaginative structures that respond to the range of our entrapment in different circumstances.
Yet what the Tuscans defined has been so dominant, in the economy of history, that it has become very nearly canonical for our culture. It is only partially to the point to affirm that man is thus-and-so unless there are present the structures of the imagination, spatial models of action that can make it possible for men to translate affirmation into action, The Tuscans, specifically in the forms generated by Giotto, provided the patterns by which men moved on the earth and in the midst of earth's things for 500 years.
Equally the issues they raise provide in themselves another issue pressing for our time. It is an inclination virtually become a habit to judge that theological structures now outmoded can be discarded in favor of new orderings of life's passions. I have presented the work of Giotto and Duccio as theological systems and I have tried to define the principles that are central to their work and that govern the details that space does not permit me to display here. Comparably it is true that few in our day seem able to order their lives in the patterns of Tuscan theology. Yet only a fanatic few would press the logic of this to the point of indifference to what is there on the walls. While Giotto's vision of human order is increasingly distant from us as a possibility of human action, his paintings are increasingly cherished as imperishable possessions.
The reasons are not, perhaps, difficult to find and they carry the discussion into issues that lie even deeper than the issues that concerned the great Tuscans. Art works are the model of fulfillment, of men working out their destiny within the immediacies of their circumstances. However differently, it has been possible for the intricacies of this relation to be discerned and meaningfully ordered, the experienced world brought within the intelligibilities of human fulfillment. Thus, the museum becomes a demonstration of human hope. The same museum that contains the great Madonnas of Cimabue, Duccio, and Giotto also contains great works by Rembrandt and Rubens, imaginative structures of very different weight and rhythm. They, too, are no longer truly available as guides or models yet again we can respond to them in all the integrity of their contention with the complexities of their experience.
Thus we see continuously the new modes of being "in" the world born in varying debt to the old, in turn giving way to newer modes yet never finally losing their essential integrity or their relevance to us. A complete history uncovers the despairing moments that occur in the intervals between the collapse of older models as living paradigms and the birth of, the new. But it also chronicles the constant renewal of images. It has seemed necessary very often in the past that the renewal be made at the expense of the old, even with the active repudiation of the old, as when Renaissance men said that medieval architecture was an architecture of' barbarians, the Goths. But this does not seem required of us. That greatest of our modern arts, the sense and the structures of history, make all styles accessible to us. This can obviously nourish the dilettante but it can also nourish constructive hope.
Those things that remain alive to us are then seen not only as affirmations of the human spirit but perpetual possibilities of the human spirit. Our spatial image and our spatial experience are more complex than Giotto's but he who has truly seen Giotto's work not only knows what once was possible in a given circumstance but his own flesh is trained and disciplined to a particular order. Giotto is no longer part of an exhausted order but has become part of our circumstances, one of the means by which we know our own experience. It may be that Duccio's mystical vision is not available to us, but the precise intricacies of his blending of figure and space can bring us to the more technically intended - spatial researches of our own day with a deeper sense of their possibilities in the devotional life.
Thus hope is less grounded on abstract argument than it is on the fulfillment of history.
Coda
When I was invited to contribute an essay to this symposium it was under the rubric "Emerging Images in Teaching Religion and the Arts." At this writing I do not know if that title still holds but it represents the general intent of my participation.
Consideration of that subject has at no point been overt in the essay. Having left it implicit, I might do my readers the courtesy of assuming they can grasp the educational consequences of such an argument as this, rather than adding the anticlimax (or, at best, the postclimax) of any formal consideration of the implications of the main body of the essay.
Unfortunately, observation has taught me that the work of greater men than I has been ignored even while used. The work of Freud and Marx, for example, is far from unknown in the academy; their books are read and taught as among the major creations of man's mind. If this work were to be taken seriously, the process of education would be revolutionized. Obviously they have not, in that sense, been taken seriously.
What has happened is exactly what I have described as happening with works of art. The insights of Freud and Marx have been turned into objects. Objects of great interest and elegance but, for all of that, objects to be seen and studied from without.
I do not suggest that the proper conclusion would be to design "Freudian" or "Marxist" universities. In so far as the devotees of these systems have made them into intellectual tools, they too make the systems into objects. Worse, they make them into idols. At least the liberal academy has a lot of these systems-objects to look at whereas a consistent ideological academy would make one of the touchstone of all systems.
Sadly, however, I must say that, for all its claims to liberality the liberal academy is, at base, equally ideological, only its ideology is more of method and attitude than of system. The essential objecthood of all achievements is the unspoken dogma of the academy. Under the only real statement of its scholarly objectivity, it is rigorously forbidden to enter into profound commitment to the objects of study.
To deplore this is futile but also inhumane. This procedure has given a range and comprehensiveness to the intellectual enterprise that could not have been achievable in any other way.
Nevertheless, the malaise of modern man called so commonly "alienation" is not just a by-product but is built into this system. If, as I have stated, man forms his person, his "self" in his intercourse with his circumstances, to reduce his circumstances to "the other," to make of them an "it," is to leave him naked, a stranger and alone in the world of his habitation.
In so far as it makes any human sense to say "God is dead," education, and theology as a part of education, killed him. They "killed" him by destroying the process, the structured and operative relation by which God can be manifest among men.
It is not that I can say confidently what the new images of teaching ought to be. If they are, in fact, emerging, I am not aware of it. So far as I know none of us is in a position to be sure what these images can be or ought to be. I can offer only a procedure out of which new images might emerge. At the beginning of this paper I assumed an obligation of making a contribution toward this procedure and what I have done is offer a variety of analyses in fulfillment of that responsibility.
If, then, we reappropriate our history in this mode there should "emerge a surer sense of what our history has been as changing process rather than as fixed and objectified achievement. If I am right in this mode of analysis, then we should not, at this point, specify a pattern but inaugurate a process. The new work of education should be a total art and no longer an affirmation of the disembodied intellect.