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Art and the Sacred Final Art and the Sacred 1 Karsten Harries Art and the Sacred Seminar Notes Fall Semester 2013 Yale University Art and the Sacred 2 Copyright Karsten Harries Art and the Sacred 3 Contents 1. Introduction 3 2. Religious and Sacred Art 17 3. The Modern Divorce of Beauty and the Sacred 36 4. Religious Kitsch 52 5. The Golden Calf 67 6. The Legacy of Alberti 83 7. Formal and Material Transcendence 96 8. Beauty and Aura 111 9. Beauty and Hope 127 10. Beauty and Love 146 11. Beauty and Faith 165 12. Nostalgia 183 13. Conclusion 200 Art and the Sacred 4 1. Introduction 1 The title of this seminar is Art and the Sacred: Untimely Meditations on the Need for Sacred Art. Especially the subtitle needs explanation. It is meant to recall Nietzsche, who wrote his four untimely meditations to challenge the dominant spirit of his age. He was not telling his readers what they expected or wanted to hear. This, to be sure, is not to say that he was not telling them something they needed to hear. In that sense his untimely meditations were timely indeed. What I have to say in this seminar may well strike you as similarly out of touch with the world we live in, which, it would seem, has relegated the sacred to the periphery of our modern lives. Art, too, has distanced itself from the sacred. Challenging that distance, I want to insist on the continued need for a sense of the sacred and for sacred art, especially for sacred architecture, and this indeed in a twofold sense: I want to claim that the sacred needs art, and especially architecture, if it is not to wither and that similarly art and architecture need the sacred. Untimely as they are, both claims invite challenge. In this seminar I shall develop that challenge to show how difficult it is to get around it. But despite so much that speaks against them, in the end I hope to develop some considerations that support my two claims. 2 Let me begin by saying a few words about what led me to offer this course now. I have reached a point in my career where I feel a need to gather together what I have thought over many years on various subjects. One of these subjects is the relationship of art and the sacred. The topic has been with me since my student days. But perhaps it all started when I was 7. That was in 1944. The war had made Berlin a rather unpleasant place with almost nightly bombing raids. An incendiary bomb fell on our house, without doing much damage. My father was good at dealing with this sort of thing. By then he had decided that he wanted us to be conquered by the Americans. So he found us a place to await the end of the war in the Franconian Königshofen, Outside that small town is a small rococo pilgrimage church: Mariä Geburt, in the village of Ipthausen. It made a Art and the Sacred 5 deep impression, although “magical” may describe it better than “religious. ” We were not at all a religious family, although (or perhaos rather because) my mother was the daughter of a Lutheran minister. Be this as it may, that church was the beginning of a life-long love affair with the Bavarian rococo. That love affair invites the charge of nostalgia. There does indeed seem to me to be a profound connection between religion and nostalgia that I shall explore in the closing sessions of this seminar. But let me return to the church in Ipthausen. The impression of that first encounter with a rococo church was reinforced when after the war we settled in Munich and the religion teacher in the gymnasium I attended hiked with me and some of my classmates to another, this time much better known pilgrimage church, the Benedictine abbey church of Andechs. I was twelve at the time. My fascination with the rococo shows itself in two ink drawings I did at the time of the interiors of two rococo churches. Karsten Harries, Rott am Inn (1950) Art and the Sacred 6 I must have been thirteen or so at the time. They are among the very few things of this period that I kept. Many years later that fascination led me to write The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism (1983), supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship. It has established itself as the standard work on the subject, at least in the English speaking world. I reworked and expanded that book a bit a few years ago in a German version, which appeared in 2009 as Die Bayerische Rokokokirche. Das Irrationale und das Sakrale. The Bavarian rococo church continues to shape much of my thinking about the relationship of art and the sacred, as will become evident in the course of this seminar. In this connection the subtitles of my two books on the rococo church are of some interest. I see the eighteenth century as a century in which the aesthetic understanding of art that came to preside over modern art definitively triumphed over another understanding that would tie art to religion. In the Bavaria of the eighteenth century this threshold becomes especially perspicuous. Counter-reformation and Enlightenment here collide in unusually illuminating fashion. Hence the subtitle: Between Faith and Aestheticism. The crossing of that threshold is intimately connected with the Enlightenment, which had to dismiss the religious art of the rococo as surrendering to irrationality. The Enlightenment’s strident critique of the irrationality of the rococo is particularly instructive. Hence the subtitle of the German edition: Das Irrationale und das Sakrale — The Irrational and the Sacred. Enlightenment reason has no place for the Baroque sacred, as demonstrated so theatrically by the decision, made at the behest of Chaumette, the president of the French commune, to place, on he occasion of the festival of reason celebrated on November 10, 1793, the Goddess of Reason, personified by one Sophie Momoro, wife of the printer Antoine-François Momoro, another committed revolutionary, on the high altar of Notre Dame. But my interest in art was not limited to looking at rococo churches. I had always been interested in drawing and painting. Art had long fascinated me. As a Yale undergraduate I thus took a course in free hand drawing with Josef Albers. So it is not surprising that soon after I begun teaching here at Yale, I should have taught a course on the philosophy of modern art. The notes for that course evolved into my first book, The Meaning of Modern Art (1968). Art and the Sacred 7 My interest in the relationship of art and the sacred was shared by another philosopher here at Yale, Louis Dupré, who then was a member of the Religious Studies department. Many discussions with him followed, in the course of which some fundamental differences concerning the relationship of art and the sacred emerged. To work out these differences we decided to teach a joint seminar in the spring semester 1975. That seminar already had the title “Art and the Sacred”. Many years later I summed up some of the results of that seminar in an article I wrote for the Festschrift for Louis Dupré and which I called "Art and the Sacred: Postscript to a Seminar."1 But rereading my by now rather ragged notes for that seminar I decided that much here deserved reconsideration and a more careful working out. I spoke of disagreements Dupré and I had concerning the relationship of art to the sacred. These disagreements will be apparent to anyone who attempts to reconcile what is asserted in my The Meaning of Modern Art2 with Dupré's magnum opus, The Other Dimension. 3 Let me briefly speak to these disagreements. Many years have passed since I wrote my book on modern art, which, although still in print, in several ways now seems inadequate. Continuing work on Hegel and Heidegger has helped me to gain a clearer understanding of the "modern world" (an expression that, like "modern art," names here not so much the world we actually live in as an illuminating construct) ,4 and of the difficulties involved in any attempt to assign art a significant place in that world. If that "new realism" called for by the book's last chapter is to become a reality — and I continue to think it important that art, and not just art, move in this direction — it must be possible to take a step beyond the "modern world" as here described and leave behind the project that supports it, a project Sartre then helped me to interpret. But such a step becomes impossible, if we agree, as I claim to do in that book — a claim I retracted a few years later in my introduction to the Japanese translation of the 1 Karsten Harries, "Art and the Sacred: Postscript to a Seminar,” Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modern: The Thought of Louis Dupré, ed. Peter J. Casarella and George P. Schner, S. J. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 189-203. 2 Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical Interpretation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 3 Louis Dupré, The Other Dimension (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972). 4 Cf. Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. xiii, fn 4. Art and the Sacred 8 book5 — with Sartre that the fundamental human project is to become like God, that "fundamentally man is the desire to be God," a claim that Sartre thought followed from "an a priori description" of human being.6 That description now seems to me deeply flawed and while I still think that Sartre's understanding of the fundamental project helps us understand the "modern world" and the progress of modern art, the renunciation of that project seems to me to be a precondition for a full self-affirmation and to hold the key to that new realism towards which the ending of the book gestured uncertainly — although today I am more likely to speak with Nietzsche of the need to overcome "the spirit of revenge," "the will's ill will against time and its 'it was.'"7 It is this ill will that speaks to us in Sartre's description of the being of the for-itself as lack, vainly desiring to become God.
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