The Continuing Dialogue: An Investigation into the Artistic Afterlife of the Five Narratives Peculiar to the Fourth Gospel and an Assessment of Their Contribution to the Hermeneutics of that Gospel

By Brian Leslie Bishop and David Hoyle

The I AM statements exclusive to the Fourth Gospel are seen as the attempt of the author(s) of that Gospel to present the nature and purpose of the earthly life of Jesus by engaging the imaginative faculty of the reader. Succeeding generations of artists are considered as undertaking a similar task by engaging in an imaginative dialogue with the text.

There are five narratives that are peculiar to the Fourth Gospel: The Wedding at Cana, the Woman of Samaria, the Woman Taken in Adultery, the Raising of Lazarus, and the Washing of Feet.

Five paintings based upon each narrative are considered in context. These are taken from the early fourteenth century (Duccio and Giotto) to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Max Beckmann and the contemporary Icon writer, Constantina Wood). A sense of the loss experienced by the western church under the sanctions of the Protestant Reformation against visual imagery is conveyed. This leads to a suggestion that a reassertion of the role of the aesthetics of Christian worship might be a unifying factor for a generation jaded by the pedantry that divides the Christian Church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jul 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498244053

Brian Leslie Bishop

Brian Leslie Bishop is a retired British schoolteacher of English, drama, and world literature. His play for young people—Bug-eyed Loonery—was published in 1985. As well as teaching in UK schools, he has taught in Singapore, Peru, and Malta. Since retiring, he has gained a master’s degree in theology (with distinction) from the University of Wales, Lampeter.

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The Continuing Dialogue

An Investigation into the Artistic Afterlife of the Five Narratives Peculiar to the Fourth Gospel and an Assessment of Their Contribution to the Hermeneutics of that Gospel

Brian Leslie Bishop

Foreword by David Hoyle

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The Continuing Dialogue

An Investigation into the Artistic Afterlife of the Five Narratives Peculiar to the Fourth Gospel and an Assessment of Their Contribution to the Hermeneutics of that Gospel

Copyright © 2017 Brian Leslie Bishop. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1847-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-4406-0

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4405-3

Manufactured in the U.S.A. November 7, 2017

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Wedding at Cana

Chapter 2: Jesus and the Woman of Samaria

Chapter 3: The Woman Taken in Adultery

Chapter 4: The Raising of Lazarus

Chapter 5: Jesus Washes the Disciples’ Feet

Concluding Remarks

Bibliography

For Jenny my loving wife who taught, loved and cared for young children.

For Sharon who follows in her mother’s footsteps.

In memory of Sheena who, when she was on what she liked to call this precious earth loved it with a passion and shared that passion with young people as her lifetime’s work.

With a prayer for Alice, Fynn, and Cai that they might discover the net within the gross.

Every man who commits his interpretation of the ineffable light to words is really a liar, not because of any hatred of truth, but because of the weakness of his description.¹

Come, see . . . is not this the Christ?²

1. Gregory, fourteenth century Bishop of Nyssa.

2. John,

4

:

29

, KJV.

Foreword

[by the Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, MA Dean of Bristol, UK.]

In Dublin, in the National Gallery of Ireland, you can go and spend some time with Caravaggio’s painting The Taking of Christ. It is a picture full of movement and muscle. Jesus is still, he is not going anywhere; Judas has tight hold of him, and so too does the stylish, sinister figure in gleaming black armour. That’s what you notice first, the kiss, the arrest, and the armed might packed into that urgent moment. Only if you linger a little longer will you begin to think about the two figures that are placed either side of the arrest. To the left John, the beloved disciple, runs into the night bellowing out his fear. To the right another young man reacts very differently; he holds up a lantern and cranes forward in order to see better what is happening. This latter figure is Caravaggio himself; it is a self-portrait.

This is great art and it is great theology. Crowds came when the picture was unveiled in the Gallery: it had been thought lost, known only in copies. They came to see a thing of beauty, and not all of those who stood in those crowds would have grasped what Caravaggio was doing. What the artist knew was that, in Matthew and Luke, we are told the crowd came to arrest Jesus with swords and staves. Only in John do we hear that the soldiers, and the Pharisees who accompanied them, carried lanterns and torches. So Caravaggio is giving us a glimpse of John’s gospel. John, of course, is the gospel that is most interested in the business of looking and seeing. It is John that starts with the fact that we have seen his glory (John 1:14) and ends with Thomas insisting that he really must see for himself (John 20:25). The lanterns and torches that are taken to the garden of Gethsemane are intended to help the lynch mob find Jesus, help them to see him. They need the torches because it is night time and dark. That said, there is a terrible irony in the arrangements they make, in the carrying of lanterns. Jesus is the light of the world; it is a shocking indictment of those who want to arrest him that they cannot see him unless they have some help. Caravaggio, who gives himself one of these lanterns in this picture, is telling us that even an artist like him can struggle to see.

Brian Bishop’s book invites us to look more closely. You may remember that another passage in John’s gospel describes two disciples coming to the empty tomb. John describes how they look in to the tomb, observe the grave clothes and finally see and believe. He plays with different verbs and reminds us that we can look without really seeing anything significant. He challenges us to look more closely. The pictures described here are beautiful to look at, but there are layers of meaning and an invitation, even a challenge, to see things that we so easily might miss.

The artists, whose works are examined here, lived in a theologically literate world, steeped in biblical imagery. They worked, very often, for patrons who had deep learning. Whilst there were familiar conventions that informed the presentation of a nativity scene, or a crucifixion, there were also powerful currents of new learning and fresh insights breathing life into art. These paintings still have things to teach us and we need wise guides to help us see.

David Hoyle

Preface

I think the really difficult question for me that prefaces try to address is, Why you, and why this book? Brought up within a Baptist Church community in London’s east end, I found the stubborn refusal to deviate from a rigid, verbally expressed code difficult to accept. The thinking and the patterns of worship of other Christian communities were at best ignored, at worst, traduced. I heard Roman Catholicism denounced as a heresy from the pulpit and dismissed by knowing laity with off-the-cuff absurdities such as, They make more of Mary than they do of Jesus. Relatives who were Methodists were rather suspect. Anglicans . . . well! What to say? And they were all under the umbrella of Protestantism! What about the acrimonious division between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism that was described to me by an Anglican Bishop just ten years ago as, top-down, fascist dictatorship? And the division between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church where something about the procession of the Holy Spirit was a problem? The devotion with which I was surrounded often seemed to be directed towards bigoted opinions rather than towards developing an understanding of and a response to the Christian Gospel. It is somewhat of a leap to go from the preachers and the proselytizers that I came across in my youth to Philip Melanchthon,³ the German Lutheran reformer. He was the first systematic theologian of the Protestant Reformation. At his death, he looked forward to being freed from the rabies theologorum—acrimony and fury of theologians. Well, amen to that brother Philip!

For most of my life, I have felt to be rather adrift from organized religious groups: but never from Christianity. I have always believed—I would say known—that Jesus is the Light of the World and regarded the Christian Gospel as encapsulating that Light. It has always seemed to me that the mission that had been entrusted to the church worldwide was to be a medium of that Light. Increasingly, it has become clear to me that far too often that focus is lost to ecclesiastical politics and sociology. That is a scandal that appalls. When the world cries out for the light of the Gospel, the church, so often, seems to be looking the other way. So the impression given is of a confusing babble of voices squabbling, contradicting, and stereotyping one another. The words of Edmund Sears directed to a warring world outside the church door one-hundred-and-fifty years ago, now are directed at the church itself by the baffled multitude:

O hush the noise, ye men of strife

And hear the angels sing.

I experienced a need for less saying and more listening, and seeing. James⁴ warned of the unruly nature of the tongue and I began to realize that it might be rewarding to explore other ways of understanding than those delivered by this unruly member. There was much more looking and seeing required than was being made available to me and those around me if we were to grow into some kind of spiritual awareness. I heard much talk of having seen the light in the claustrophobic world of my immediate environment. Why was it, then, I wondered, that we keep bumping into one another. Words are a limited and limiting diet if not served with other means of communication. The world of the arts both visual and performing arts, when eventually I became aware of them, expanded my horizon and became a lifelong pursuit. When the demands of remunerative employment were finally eased, I began afresh to look about me. I have to say that I was very fortunate in that my career as a teacher of literature and drama enabled me and hopefully some of those with whom I came into contact to develop our looking and seeing. But, nevertheless, the daily routine tended to be very demanding.

So to theology: it was 2005, I was 67 and had retired. The University of Wales, Lampeter, Department of Theology offered me a place as a postgraduate student. After two very stimulating years, I was awarded a Master’s Degree with distinction. I had along the way discovered Theological Aesthetics, a relatively new departure that encouraged the idea that art could deliver theology through seeing. My dissertation was, The Theology of Giotto’s Passion Frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. My supervisor, Professor Martin O’Kane, greatly encouraged me to develop the work into a PhD thesis which I would have been delighted to do, but the fees by now were prohibitive. I pressed on with the work, unsupervised, and personally gained a lot from doing so. But what, if anything, to do with the results? I followed the advice—for which I am most grateful—of Dr. Christine Joynes of the University of Oxford and Professor Alison Milbank of the University of Nottingham to revise it and seek to have it published, directed towards a more general readership than that of an academic thesis. So, here it is: what I have learned whilst eavesdropping on the conversation between artists down the centuries and the five narratives concerning the life of Jesus that are only to be found in the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel According to John.

I conclude these remarks by quoting the timely warning to those of us who are enthusiastic about the development of Theological Aesthetics not to get too carried away:

Theological Aesthetics needs to be delineated, or at least kept in check, by counter-realities such as evil, ugliness, and sin. Moreover theology must not lose sight of the relationship between beauty and the other traditional transcendental properties of being, unity, goodness, and truth. In short, potent as it may be, aesthetics is yet but a theological approach, rather than the theological approach.⁵

Brian Bishop

Stratford-upon-Avon, 3rd April 2017.

3.

1497

–

1560

.

4. James,

3

:

8

, KJV.

5. Gallagher, The Analogy of Beauty and the Limits of Theological Aesthetics, original emphases.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the many museums and galleries as well as private individuals who have offered encouragement and help by granting free use of the beautiful images seen in this book. Also I am grateful to those who have read and made helpful comments on my work. In particular, I wish to mention Dr. Christine Joynes, Director of the Centre for Reception History of the Bible at Oxford University UK, and Professor Alison Milbank of The Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies, Nottingham University UK. Professor Milbank is also an Anglican Priest. Both of these extremely busy people took the time and trouble to read and comment upon my work in a manner that was both critical and encouraging. Thank you. Constantina Wood the Fine Artist and Iconographer also took the time to patiently correspond with me and offer encouragement and enlightenment. Thank you to the Revd. Patrick Taylor, Vicar of Holy Trinity Church Stratford-Upon-Avon and Caitlin Carmichael-Davis for reading and contributing a creative and informed response to my work. Special thanks to Professor Martin O’Kane who made the very generous comments on my Master’s Dissertation that provided the initial encouragement that was the momentum needed to propel me forward and sustain me on the many occasions when energy was low.

I have been very careful to credit all sources from which I have directly derived ideas and words. However as the writing of this book has been subject to interruptions and long delays over a period of years due to circumstances not always under my control, and as I am subject to senior moments, I may well have been less successful in this than I tried to be. If this is discovered to be the case, my sincere apologies to those offended.

Finally, to Jenny, my dear wife: her severely-tried patience and support was, as ever, unfailing and her superior knowledge of and sensitive response to the art works that we visited together co-wrote the book.

Introduction

The proposition to be examined is that visual art dealing with biblical episodes can have hermeneutical value. It may be interpretative and it may develop understanding. Understanding is not taken as a once-and-for-all experience but seen as dynamic and subject to development and evolution. Hans-Georg Gadamer¹ and in particular his major work Truth and Method suggests that understanding is essentially dialogue. According to Gadamer, the method-oriented approach to hermeneutics misses a fundamental fact: understanding is an ontological event. It is an essential factor of our humanity that cannot be subjected to methodology.

My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.²

When a work of art takes as its focus a biblical passage, the artist enters into a dialogue with that passage. A further dialogue takes place between the viewer contemplating the work of art and the artist. Understanding is to be found not in the mind or the intentions of the artist but within this dialogue. Only when this dialogue takes place is the artwork meaningful. The attempt to equate human thinking with the methodology of the natural sciences by a rational procedure that disregards tradition and thereby opens up the prospect of arriving at objective truth is, Gadamer suggests, a chimera. We are historically embedded and unable to escape our finitude to inhabit a world of timeless truth. His refusal to reject the contribution of tradition and the prejudice, or pre-judgment, that it entails is seen as a problem by some thinkers. But Gadamer is clear: (T)here is one prejudice of the Enlightenment that defines its essence: the fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power.³

In what way can visual art contribute to the dialogic approach to truth identified by Gadamer? Balthasar argues that despite Luther’s sola scriptura, God’s original language and self–expression is Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Word, the Image, the Expression and the Exegesis of God.⁴ The author of the Fourth Gospel uses words to engage our imagination not only our intellect. The truth of the Gospel is beyond words. It is important to bear in mind the stated purpose of the Fourth Gospel:

And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name.⁵

There is theological intention in the writing and whereas the manner in which the theology is delivered, that is the story telling, is of interest, it is so only in as far as it delivers the theology. It is not best read as historical truth. The visual imagery of narrative allows for an appeal that is more immediate than that of propositional statements. It is directly accessible to everyone albeit in different ways, at different levels, and at different times. The following five episodes may be seen as illustrative of the metaphors attributed to Jesus in the I am sayings and I intend to explore this possibility:

1. The Wedding at Cana.

2. Christ and the Samaritan Woman.

3. The Woman Taken in Adultery.

4. The Raising of Lazarus.

5. The Washing of Feet.

Wassily Kandinsky, in 1913, made the following observation. "The working of the inner need and the development of art is an ever-advancing expression of the eternal and objective in terms of the periodic and subjective."⁶ Consideration, then, of the "periodic and subjective" is of crucial importance when attempting to arrive at what Steiner calls the real presence⁷ of an artwork. It is useful, here,