Abstract
There is a widespread belief that John Calvin was hostile toward the arts, and especially the visual arts. This is mostly due to his strict interpretation of the Biblical prohibition against idolatry and the depiction of the divine. However, there is a striking similarity between his ideas about the experience of the divine through the contemplation of nature and the development of a modern form of aesthetic experience based on the pursuit of the divine through communion with nature – as expressed in sublime landscape paintings of the Romantic era. Calvin’s repeated insistence that the faithful should be overwhelmed, astonished, and left utterly speechless by the revelation of God’s glory when contemplating the beauty and magnificence of nature is of particular interest here. The possible relationship of Calvin’s ideas to this development in the modern age is the main topic of this article, which uses a multidisciplinary literature study to investigate this issue.
This will be treated in stages to investigate the possible connections between all the relevant threads. First, the history of the sublime in Western culture will be briefly reviewed, not only to dispel widely held assumptions about the recent history of the modern sublime, but also to consider possible mutual influences between Calvin’s thinking and this history. It emerges, for example, that, contrary to widespread belief, Peri Hypsous, the classical text on the sublime that inspired the Romantic sublime, was already translated and published in Western Europe during Calvin’s lifetime and that an application of this treatise on rhetoric to the visual arts, published early in the following century, had an extensive impact on the discourse around fine art throughout the whole of Europe.
After that the development of the Romantic sublime and modern culture in relation to Protestantism will be discussed in broader terms, showing the fundamental role that Protestant thought played in addressing the challenges of modernity and the extensive Protestant underpinnings of modern secular culture that resulted from this. The development of modernist abstract painting forms an important part of this. The transvaluation of medieval mystical experience into modern secular aesthetic experience through the influence of Protestant thought is then discussed as part of this broader development.
Then Calvin’s own ideas, which align with those of the sublime, will be examined more closely to highlight both the similarities and the differences between his thought and the thinking that underpins the Romantic sublime. The differences are most clearly evident when one looks at the Sturm und Drang movement, which sheds a clearer light on the research question regarding possible connections with Calvin. Medieval writers who derived their language of sublimity from the Old Testament rather than any Classical source (which inspired the Romantics) are then considered as precursors to Calvin’s approach to this topic. Next, it is argued that Calvin’s indirect aesthetic approach to the perception of the divine logically leads to abstraction in visual art, since the divine can be represented visually only by indirect, that is, abstract means. Robert Rosenblum’s argument about the expression of the divine through the abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman and others, is employed here to make the point.
After that, the actual influence of Calvin and Luther on painting in their own time and the following century is examined through the historical record. Luther’s use of the direct depiction of the divine is compared with Calvin’s indirect depiction of it, as manifested in 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. The possibility that the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich are, in a certain sense, continuations of this Dutch landscape tradition, by way of the landscapes of Jan van Goyen, is briefly examined. Next, Friedrich’s work is discussed in relation to his Lutheran background and the thinking of Calvin respectively. The significant influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theological approach on the development of the Romantic sublime is referred to, pointing out his strong Calvinist standpoint and the strong correspondence between his highly influential aesthetic-theological approach to nature and that of Calvin as well as the concept of nature as God’s artistic masterpiece, a notion that he shares with Calvin.
Next, the iconoclastic and seemingly anti-aesthetic tendencies in Calvin’s thinking are examined more deeply, using primary as well as other sources, to argue that they are fundamentally part of his “alternative” aesthetics. The different manifestations of his iconoclasm are used to show a stronger connection between his thinking and Romantic landscape painting and modernist abstraction respectively. The influence of the Protestant reformers on the thought of Immanuel Kant is pertinent to this argument: The reformers brought an end to the confident rationalism of the Scholastics. They severed the very close link which the Scholastics had established between knowledge and faith, between human intellect and divine revelation, between the temporal and the eternal. This separation of heaven and earth was echoed by Kant with his absolute separation of the noumenal from the phenomenal. By denying philosophy the power of penetrating into the essence of things, Kant and his disciples followed in the footsteps of Calvin, who denied that the essence of the divine can be penetrated by humans while in their earthly state. Accordingly, Kant’s theory of aesthetics which was fundamental to Romantic and modern aesthetic experience, resonates strongly with Calvin’s indirect approach to the divine. Both Romantic landscapes of the sublime and modernist abstract paintings by Mondrian, Newman and others are shown to accord well with Calvin’s aesthetic approach. Finally, Calvin’s relationship to aesthetic experience in the modern secular period is discussed, first in terms of Robert Nelson’s concept of implicit Calvinism and then more broadly.
Considering the prevailing view of Calvin as hostile to the visual arts, it is ironic that aesthetics plays a central role in his theology. He was clearly deeply aware of the void that the removal of sacred images from the church would leave in the aesthetic and spiritual life of the worshippers and developed an alternative form of worship through aesthetic experience to compensate for this, with nature taking the place of the Catholic image of Christ as the vehicle for contemplation of the divine. Regardless of his actual historical influence, this indirect aesthetic approach to the perception and experience of the divine should be seen as a significant precursor of modern aesthetic experience and thought. Worshippers conditioned by Calvin’s theology to perceive and experience God indirectly/abstractly via his beautiful garment, nature (as Calvin puts it) effectively pave the way for the aesthetic approach manifested in the Romantic sublime and subsequently in a major tradition of modernist abstract painting, in which the divine is experienced in just such an indirect or abstract way. The landscape is enjoyed, not for its own sake, but as a vehicle for the aesthetic experience of something beyond, which is inaccessible to empirical perception and the material world.
Keywords: abstraction; John Calvin; Immanuel Kant; modern aesthetic experience; nature; the sublime
- This article’s featured image contains the painting An avalanche in the Alps by Philip James de Loutherbourg, which is in the public domain (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philipp_Jakob_Loutherbourg_d._J._003.jpg).
Kommentaar
An eye opener for me in the whole field of art appreciation. Thanks.