Caspar David Friedrich's Artwork in the Context of Romantic Theology

Journal of the Oxford University History Society 1 ”Kristina Van Prooyen, 2004 The Realm of the Spirit: Caspar David Friedrich’s artwork in the context of romantic theology, with special reference to Friedrich Schleiermacher by KRISTINA VAN PROOYEN (St. John’s College, Oxford) The religious attitudes represented in the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and the theological writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) are strikingly similar. Both of these northern German figures played prominent roles in the Romantic movement, which dominated Western culture from approximately 1789 to 1848. In an effort to free the human heart from the overbearing ratiocination of the Enlightenment, the Romantics revealed the frailty of reason, which the philosophes had emphasized, and revived the force of passion, which they had discounted. In rebellion against what they believed was the myopic worldview of the Enlightenment, the Romantics, such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich von Schlegel, Friedrich von Schelling, François-Auguste-René Chateaubriand, and Madame de Staël, among others, underscored the sovereignty of subjective knowledge and rejected the supposed superiority of universal standards of cognition. While these figures stressed individuality and diversity, they also argued that variations coexisted within an infinite unity. They worshipped a synthesizing spirit residing behind the sublime beauty of nature, which produced a sense of terrified awe among those in communion with the power of divinity, and which moved a finite yet mystical world. With this approach, many Romantics, including Friedrich and Schleiermacher, depicted visions of God as active in everyday life. Both men were persuaded that His divine immanence could be felt through absolute dependence, or an awareness of the Creator residing within His creation. At the same time, they stressed the necessity of individualism in religious thought and contended that this type of religious experience, which was entirely personal, could often be ineffable because it was particular to the individual. Schleiermacher and Friedrich also rejected the overly rational religious formulations of many Enlightenment thinkers, including William Paley, which were used to prove or disprove the existence of God. Rather, they claimed, in words and in paint, that their innate sense of the divine was proof in itself. They were unashamed to proclaim that their personal awareness of God, often stimulated by the sublime landscapes of untamed nature, was more important than the dogma-influenced religious experience that was common to all. JOUHS, 1 (Hilary 2004) Journal of the Oxford University History Society 2 ”Kristina Van Prooyen, 2004 It is important to note that Romantic figures, like Friedrich and Schleiermacher, did not absolutely refute the utility of reason touted by the philosophes but, following the example of proto-Romantic intellectuals like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they furthered the notion that the heart could be the rightful companion of the mind. To present the Romantic Age as one that rejected the ‘arid intellectualism’ of their predecessors is to misrepresent the vitality of the speculative thought produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the more overtly spiritual sensibility of the Romantics did set them apart from the outlook of the Enlightenment, they did not wholly repudiate the ideas of their forbears. They yearned, instead, to broaden the intellectual strictures of the philosophes to embrace greater diversity in modes of thought and feeling. It is true, nonetheless, that whereas Enlightenment thinkers looked to reason for guidance in intellectual matters, the Romantics relied more heavily on emotion. As Norman Hampson writes, after the 1760s the Age of Reason seemed to come to an impasse, and Sentiment came to be accepted as the source of a kind of knowledge to which intelligence could not aspire and as the arbiter of action.1 In this new intellectual atmosphere the Romantics protested that, although the rational mind could be used to probe into the greater mysteries of life, it was only through a combination of objective analysis and imaginative interpretation that genuine knowledge could be achieved. In this manner, Schleiermacher and Friedrich attempted to combine empirical knowledge and subjective spirituality to produce treatises and paintings that would demonstrate an acute sense of mystical meanings. Many scholars, such as Brian Gerrish, refer to Schleiermacher as the ‘father of modern theology.’2 Concurring, James Livingston writes: Schleiermacher can justly be called the Kant of modern theology, both because of the new beginning which his work marks in the history of theology and because the issues which his theological reconstruction posed are issues which are still at the very centre of theological discussion today.3 He is considered such an important figure in modern theology partially because his theological formulations, although Christian, were constructed outside the bounds of the time-honoured doctrines of the Church and were truly innovative. His conception of spirituality was founded upon the sovereignty of personal worship and, while tied to traditions of the faith, it went beyond the confines of orthodoxy. In a similar fashion, Friedrich’s artwork evoked transcendental feelings but was devoid of traditional, allegorical scenes from the Bible. The artist infused his canvasses with a sense of the divine, yet at the same time rejected the didactic religious iconography of his neoclassical predecessors. Instead, he converted the previously secular category of landscape painting JOUHS, 1 (Hilary 2004) Journal of the Oxford University History Society 3 ”Kristina Van Prooyen, 2004 into a new form of religious art. Writing on the artist’s ability to translate the awe- inspiring forms of sublime nature into canvases with ambiguous yet powerful religious meanings, Robert Rosenblum claims: That [Friedrich] achieved what were virtually religious goals within the traditions he inherited from the most secular seventeenth-century Dutch tradition of landscape, marine, and genre painting is a tribute to the intensity of his genius.4 Like no painter before him, through his breathtaking landscapes, Friedrich was able to communicate the mystical elements of life in a poignant but tacit manner. In these ways, Friedrich and his Romantic colleague, Schleiermacher, rejected the outlook of both the Enlightenment and orthodox Christianity, and in so doing, they reconstructed the realm of the spirit in an original manner. Through art and theology, these two German figures reformulated Christian ideas, coinciding with the evolution of religion attitudes induced by the Enlightenment and catalyzed by the French and Industrial Revolutions. Both Friedrich and Schleiermacher were responding to the need for a reinterpretation of religion in the aftermath of the rational criticisms that Enlightenment thinkers had heaped on Christianity. Theology had come under attack from thinkers who were committed to the Age of Reason, such as David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many philosophes had rejected historical Church doctrines, believing, for example, that the dualist conception of Christ, which contends that the Saviour can be simultaneously human and divine, was nonsensical.5 This was a widespread attitude by the late eighteenth-century but it was, in many ways, inherited from the secularizing spirit of previous epochs. During the Renaissance, the fortress of Christianity, virtually impenetrable during the medieval period, was increasingly bombarded by aggressive intellectual assaults. This facilitated the growth of humanism and cultivated the empirically oriented natural philosophy of Francis Bacon and Galileo, and the mathematical rigour of Isaac Newton and René Descartes. Secondly, the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther challenged the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Under these conditions, the absolute truth of Christianity was quickly slipping away like an ebb tide.6 During the Enlightenment this trend was furthered. Some thinkers, such as Paul-Henri d’Holbach, became atheists, but most, such as Voltaire, became deists. Deists argued that by rejecting supernatural revelation and concentrating on reason, religion could become more strongly grounded. They contended, for example, that a coherent account of evil in the world made it necessary to describe a perfect God as a remote First Cause. This materialist approach invaded many Protestant countries, including England and Germany, where the Reformation had undermined belief in authoritative Catholic doctrines. JOUHS, 1 (Hilary 2004) Journal of the Oxford University History Society 4 ”Kristina Van Prooyen, 2004 Across Europe, however, after the French Revolution, which revealed the role ‘irrational’ passion could play in human affairs, Romantics increasingly attacked the Enlightenment and its exaggerated emphasis on ‘rational’ thought. Romanticism is hard to define; it was a multifarious movement composed of different expressions by different individuals in different regions. Nevertheless, an undeniable characteristic of Romanticism was the struggle to produce a spiritual anchor for modern culture. This religious renaissance of the Romantic movement came to fullest bloom in the Protestant soil of northern Germany. This was partly because, although there was enmity towards

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