In the Beauty of Holiness: Art and the Bible in Western Culture

By David Lyle Jeffrey

  The Academy of Parish Clergy’s 2018 Top Five Reference Books for Parish Ministry

Beauty and holiness are both highly significant subjects in the Bible. In this comprehensive study of Christian fine art David Lyle Jeffrey explores the relationship between beauty and holiness as he integrates aesthetic perspectives from the ancient Hebrew Scriptures through Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant down to contemporary philosophers of art.

From the walls of the Roman catacombs to the paintings of Marc Chagall, visual art in the West has consistently drawn its most profound and generative inspiration from biblical narrative and imagery. Jeffrey guides readers through this artistic tradition from the second century to the twenty-first, astutely pointing out its relationship not only to the biblical sources but also to related expressions in liturgy and historical theology.

Lavishly illustrated throughout with 146 masterworks, reproduced in full color, In the Beauty of Holiness is ideally suited to students of Christian fine art, to devotees of biblical studies, and to general readers wanting to better understand the story of Christian art through the centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Oct 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781467448598

David Lyle Jeffrey

David Lyle Jeffrey, author of People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (1996) and Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture (2003) is Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Book preview

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IN THE BEAUTY

OF HOLINESS

Art and the Bible in Western Culture

David Lyle Jeffrey

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive NE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505

www.eerdmans.com

© 2017 David Lyle Jeffrey

All rights reserved

Published 2017

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 171 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN 978-0-8028-7470-2

eISBN 978-1-4674-4872-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jeffrey, David Lyle, 1941– author.

Title: In the beauty of holiness : art and the Bible in western culture / David Lyle Jeffrey.

Description: Grand Rapids : Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017027355 | ISBN 9780802874702 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and art.

Classification: LCC BR115.A8 J44 2017 | DDC 246—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027355

This book is gratefully dedicated to my Baylor

Honors College students and Crane Scholars,

whose lively questions, fides quarens intellectum,

have inspired every chapter.

Contents

List of Images

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1

Art and Worship to 1500

1.Beauty and Holiness as Terms of Art

2.The Paradoxical Beauty of the Cross

3.Beauty and Proportion in the Sanctuary

4.The Beauty of Light

5.The Beauty of Holiness Alfresco

6.Beauty on the Altar

PART 2

Art and the Bible after 1500

7.Beauty, Power, and Doctrine

8.Beauty and the Eye of the Beholder

9.Romantic Religion and the Sublime

10.Art after Belief

11.Art against Belief

12.Return of the Transcendentals

Epilogue

APPENDIX A: Ecclesial Architecture in the Protestant Tradition

APPENDIX B: Sources for Iconography

APPENDIX C: Medieval Manuscript Illumination

Bibliography

Index

List of Images

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX C

Acknowledgments

The project reflected in this book began more than forty-five years ago. During that time I have been preoccupied with literary aspects of biblical tradition, then with its spiritual history in meditative religious reflection and biblical commentary. My interest in the biblical sources of Christian art has been focused intermittently on articles and chapters in collections, beginning with a lecture at the Free University in Amsterdam on an altarpiece by Hieronymus Bosch, his Hooiwagen triptych, which was later published in Viator in 1971. This essay was subsequently revised and reprinted in my book Houses of the Interpreter (Baylor University Press, 2003). But the slow, deliberate preparation of the present book has been more largely shaped by the research I have done directly in connection with a course on art and theology in the Christian West that I have taught over the last twenty years, beginning at Augustine College in Ottawa and then since 2006 here at Baylor University. This course has been concerned with the long experiment in western European Christendom to dedicate beauty to worship, and art to the development as well as communication of doctrine, and this book is a reflection of those interests. Only three chapters borrow and rework material that has appeared previously in articles. I am most indebted in that regard to Nova et Vetera (2014) in chapter 2, additionally to the University of Edinburgh Press for permission to reprint a portion of a chapter of the volume edited by Stephen Prickett, The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts (2014; reproduced with permission of Edinburgh University Press via PLSclear). The germination of chapter 8 began with a short essay for Seen (2000) and a longer essay for the University of Toronto Press volume Sacred and Profane: Essays in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature (2010), edited by Robert Epstein and William Robins. And in chapter 12 my discussion of Marc Chagall draws on my essay published by Religion and the Arts (2012). For these borrowings from my own earlier work I wish to acknowledge the graciousness of those publishers. I also wish to thank the Green Collection and Museum of the Bible for their permission to include three images from their collection by courtesy, and one image by courtesy of the Israel Museum.

I have been richly blessed by the friendship and collegial criticism of many scholars in whose shade I gratefully stand. Among those who have provided me with both critique and encouragement over the years, some have passed on to a higher view, including Hans Rookmaaker, E. H. Gombrich, Lynn White Jr., D. W. Robertson Jr., Rosalie B. Green, and Alan Gowans. But my indebtedness to still-living colleagues and mentors is to a larger company: perforce I must be brief. In addition to Bruce Cole, former director of the National Endowment of the Humanities with whom I team-taught a course at the University of Rochester in 1972, and Anthony F. Janson, whose historical scholarship has long been an inspiration, and who graciously acknowledged my modest return on his massive investment in the sixth and seventh editions of his History of Art, others whose wisdom is invisibly subsumed here include my former mentor at Princeton, John V. Fleming; former fellow undergraduate student William A. Dyrness; and current colleagues Alexander Pruss, Jeff Fish, Daniel H. Williams, Michelle P. Brown, Mikeal Parsons, Heidi Hornik, Jeff Levin, Tom Hibbs, Elizabeth Corey, Phillip Donnelly, Rod Stark, Byron Johnson, Philip Jenkins, Darin Davis, and Gregory Jones. Colleagues now farther afield who in various ways and to varying degrees have encouraged me thoughtfully over the years include Graeme Hunter, Dominic Manganiello, Michael D. O’Brien, Robert C. Roberts, Eleonore Stump, Jeremy Begbie, Makoto Fujimura, Cameron Anderson, Stephen Westerholm, Stephen Chapman, Reinhardt Hütter, Holly N. Flora, Amy Neff, and John Wilson, the editor of Books and Culture. To these I must add the practical help of four of my graduate assistants in philosophy, Karl Aho, Mengyao Yan, Ryan West, and Caroline Paddock; of my daughter Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, who introduced me to the work of Arcabas in France; and of my honors thesis student Kirsten Appleyard El-Koura, now a curator at the National Gallery of Canada, from whose excellent thesis on Arcabas I have continued to profit. I have been blessed with an attentive and learned editor, James Ernest, and his patient and resourceful associate editor, Jenny Hoffman. Greater than all these thanks, nonetheless, are due to my beloved wife and most persistent intellectual friend, Katherine Bentley Jeffrey, who reads everything I write perceptively and correctively as an act of charity to all my other readers; without her my congenitally Celtic weave of words and thought could easily obscure what most I would clarify, as both kith and kin can well attest.

***

I wish to dedicate this book to my students over the years in the Honors College at Baylor University, a finer lot of lively and engaging minds than I could have wished for or hoped to deserve, and among them especially the Crane Scholars.

DLJ

Introduction

HOW to keep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere

known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce,

latch or catch or key to kéep

Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty . . . from vanishing away?

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

For as long as we have evidence, generations of poets and other artists have noted this paradoxical character of beauty, that while mortal beauty arouses in us an infinite longing, we are painfully aware that the sources of such beauty are themselves most finite. The sense of beauty’s transience is therefore a recurrent theme in the art that honors it, the work of art itself often an attempt to hold on to beauty, or as the poet puts it, to keep it . . . from vanishing away. The epigraphic opening of the poem cited above is thus an epitome, its question timeless. In The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (1882), Gerard Manley Hopkins poses it in the form of a maiden’s lament, sung by her as she first perceives herself to be showing the faintest signs of aging. In Hopkins’s epigraph her lament is set at St. Winifred’s Well in Wales, a healing spring visited by Christian pilgrims since the seventh century. There, the legend has it, a beautiful girl was mortally wounded as she sought to escape the predatory assault of a man whose advances she had rejected. The backstory captures an ageless theme, namely, that the human desire to seize and possess mortal beauty is often deeply disordered and consequently can become ugly, destructive of the beauty to which it was attracted; we may recognize in this Celtic story an affinity with Ovid’s Latin tale of Daphne’s flight from the lustful ardor of Apollo, an image made memorable by Bernini’s extraordinary sculpture. Hopkins’s poem superimposes upon this theme its equally perennial counterpart, a lament over the inevitable decay of all mortal beauty, come what may and despite all that human art may do, and therefore the futility of any imagination that we can suspend time or somehow stave off decay. All flesh is grass, as the prophet says, and wisdom accepts that reality. Calypso’s proposition of immortality to Odysseus in Homer’s great epic is seen by him at last as chimerical. On this point, too, the poets of biblical and classical tradition agree: all such wishes are both illusory and self-defeating.

There is, however, a perspective on mortal beauty, on the persistence of our desire for it, and for a discovery of what our desire itself may signify, on which artists in the biblical tradition have something else to say. As I shall endeavor to show in this book, artists both Jewish and Christian, though fully aware of the evanescence of beauty in the world, characteristically point us toward possibilities and meanings that substantially extend the horizon and heighten our appreciation of mortal beauty while we have it.

What I intend in this book is an exploration of some of the ways in which a biblical imagination is tutored to receive all beauty as a gift, a gift with a Giver, and thus to refer it, in forms of gratitude that are themselves beautiful, back to the source. This giving back, as we shall see, has created some of the most beautiful art in Western culture.

Hopkins’s image for the first and universal recognition, that beauty is impermanent, is an echo from the well of our common human self-reflection: he calls it a leaden echo. This echo is perennial, repeated over and over in song and story, because we are beings who love life and long to keep it, yet are sometimes filled with nostalgia and even remorse because we know full well that such keeping is impossible.

Happily, says the poet, there is another echo. It, too, is repeated distinctively in the painting, poetry, sculpture, and art of biblical tradition. Hopkins calls this echo golden because it is luminous and inspiring, transmuting our wistfulness and regret into joy and hope:

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.

We should acknowledge that the impulse to give beauty back to God may also be universal, though clearly it can take quite different forms. In this Welsh tale the beautiful maiden was not turned into a tree; rather, her deadly wound was miraculously healed by the monk Saint Bueno, to whose chapel she was fleeing as her would-be lover struck her with his sword. Bearing a large scar on her neck for the rest of her life, she nevertheless lived to enter a convent, there to devote her beauty to holiness in a life of prayer. Hopkins, as a student and teacher of classical literature, was keenly aware of both the parallels and the divergences in classical, Celtic, and Christian tales of metamorphoses such as this one.

If we pursue this line of reflection a little further, we may observe that in the ritual of many religions in past centuries the dedication of virgins to the god or goddess has been a developed form of communal piety, although a closer examination of some ancient practices—in fertility religions especially—will reveal actual rites that seem to turn the ostensible dedication inside out. The offering of infants and young virgins to the gods in sacrifice, so deeply disturbing to a biblical perspective, is likewise found in many places, and not always with the sense of horror that attends the Greek story of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his beautiful daughter Iphigenia in a supposed exchange for favorable winds to sail into battle. Still more horrible was the ancient Canaanite practice of passing children through the fire to Moloch; yet this too is recognizably a deviant way of offering beauty—in this case the beauty of innocence—back to the gods.

If we wish to locate biblical sources for a transmutation of sacrifice to the deity, then long before the formal worship of tabernacle and temple we find a hint of it already in the early story of Abraham and Isaac, and an almost-sacrifice of a horrible, Moloch-like nature. How can Abraham offer on the altar, as God has asked, the very apple of his eye, the promised son of his old age on whose life the entirety of God’s promise depends? The Akedah (binding of Isaac for sacrifice) narrative is charged with tension at least as acute as that in the Iphigenia story, although the tension is released with a last-second substitution, the lamb provided by God. Divine intervention becomes an exemplar, and substitution in many species becomes thereafter normative in biblical tradition.

In biblical tradition, when beauty is given to God it undergoes a metamorphosis, but it is quite different from the metamorphoses we associate with tales of Ovid such as the myth of Daphne and Apollo. Rather than fear and frustrated desire, followed by a dramatic decay of the original beauty as it is absorbed into the vegetable world, in New Testament stories the transformation, at first blush invisible, does not annihilate the original beauty in any way. Strikingly, the love of God for mortal beauty is consummated; in the story of the annunciation, God enters with consent, and as a result of the divine marriage human beauty takes on a far greater radiance than it could otherwise have known. In his poem The Garden, Andrew Marvel seems to juxtapose the Ovidian and Christian story, deepening the irony: The gods that mortal beauty chase / Still in a tree did end their race. Here the love is more than erōs, the identification so complete that the god will die that mortal souls may live. In the passion, even the ugliness of sin and death is transformed into the beauty of holiness and a promise of new life. A form is transformed, re-formed, in such a way that beauty is not lost but magnified, or to use the biblical term, glorified. Eventually the whole creation is to share in this metamorphosis: Behold, the Master Artist says, I make all things new (Rev. 21:5).

In Christian tradition, gratitude for the new metamorphosis produces a new art and a new worship, characterized by what I am calling here the beauty of holiness.¹ From the beauty of the qodesh ha qodeshim in the tabernacle and later the splendors of Solomon’s Temple, it is echoed again in the high vaulted arches, altars, and stained glass windows of the magnificent cathedrals of the Middle Ages, and beyond that in a multitude of expressions: manuscript illumination, painting, the art of the jeweler as well as the architect, and the collaborative arts of poets and musicians. This is the first story I wish to tell, at least in précis: the story of the flourishing of the arts of the holy in Western Christian biblical tradition, and the evolution of ideas and representation of holy beauty over time.

We begin with definitions of the biblical terms for beauty and holiness in chapter 1, in the context of the earliest extant Christian art; the biblical language for beauty, especially in its relation to holiness, will give us indispensable conceptual understanding of the Jewish foundations of Christian aesthetic theology. In chapter 2 we consider the way in which Hellenistic ideas about the place and meaning of beauty are transformed by Augustine of Hippo through his comparative reading of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures into an aesthetic focused not merely on the beauty of objects but, more fundamentally, on beauty as self-giving action. In chapter 3 we come to one of the central ideas in this book, namely, that the marriage of beauty and holiness in late medieval art and aesthetics produces a deeply satisfying sense of the harmonious coinherence of mortal and eternal beauty in the actions and sacred settings of Christian worship. Through medieval commentaries on the tabernacle and temple, and a biblical aesthetic infused with an appreciation for mathematical symbolism, we can gain a much better sense of the radical dedication of medieval architects and theologians to identify medieval sanctuaries with the new Jerusalem; it turns out that the structure of complex poems such as Dante’s Commedia and the Middle English Pearl can compose in the imagination an analogous temple. Chapter 4 turns our eyes upward to the stained glass windows of medieval churches and chapels, and to the light metaphysics and theological symbolism of light developed in the thirteenth century, much of which is both anticipated and echoed in early hymns of the church. Chapter 5 explores the impact of the revolution in affective spirituality associated with Saint Francis, the Meditations on the Life of Christ, and the great style change of the thirteenth century, a spiritual revolution in art reflected especially well in some splendid alfresco wall paintings by Giotto by which medieval worshipers came to know the contours and major episodes in the biblical narrative as intimate participatory drama. Chapter 6 takes us, so to speak, to the altar itself, to the medieval place of thanksgiving for the coming of immortal beauty into the corporeal world; we shall consider altarpiece paintings by van der Weyden and the van Eyck brothers as celebrations of the archetype of celestial and holy marriage, and the great Isenheim Altarpiece of Matthias Grünewald as a summation of the biblical narrative of salvation.

The second story I wish to tell is of the gradual dislocation of the artistic idealism reviewed in the first half of this book. Here we consider with considerable empathy the uncertainties of post-Reformation artists. What happens to the artist when, little by little, whether for sacred or secular venues, there is a visible divorce of beauty from transcendence, from its hitherto secure home in relation to the true, the good, and holy Being? While holiness, like beauty, is what Rudolf Otto calls a category of interpretation, it is distinctively pertinent to religious understanding of a kind now distant from us. Until the Renaissance beauty and holiness were intimately conjoined in art for worship, evoking the presence of the holy for believers, offering an encounter with the mysterium tremendum. Through representations of the Divine in majesty, literally sacer/hagios/qodesh, art could signal the presence of the Wholly Other, prompting largely uncritical contemplation and worship. After the rise of realism, the cult of virtuosity, and competitive patronage, this conjunction became increasingly strained. Chapter 7 takes us to a point of critical tension, even fracturing of the older vision, driven in large part by the temptation to acquisitiveness, to hankering after beauty for the sake of carnal gratification and political power, especially in Rome. The spectacular achievements of artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, and Titian are discussed in the context of the burgeoning criticism of Reformation and Counter-Reformation voices alike, the latter as seen especially in the Council of Trent and in subsequent episcopal treatises on the place of art. This chapter concludes with the artistic responses to Luther’s teaching made visible in the painting of Lucas Cranach and his son, as well as some reflection on the role of Albrecht Dürer in forging a more realist northern style. Chapter 8 considers some signal works of art from the late medieval to the early modern period in which biblical subjects and narratives, especially stories with erotic potential such as the narrative of David and Bathsheba, become occasions for an indulgence in beauty for beauty’s sake, often an explicit encouragement to the commodification of sexual beauty and voyeurism. Special attention is given here to Massys, Rubens, and Rembrandt. Then in chapter 9 we consider the related efforts of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich and the English poet William Wordsworth to relocate holy beauty in nature. Romantic artists in search of the sublime, in their indebtedness both to pietism and to the critical thought of such figures as Schleiermacher, Herder, Hamann, and Kant, lay the foundation for a post-Christian aesthetic. Chapter 10 explores select works of the postimpressionists Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, for whom beauty becomes the end of art, a substitute for traditional religious experience, Catholic and Reformed respectively. Others in this vein include Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the other Pre-Raphaelites, with their Art-Catholicism, the Nazarenes, and the Nabis, who in various ways share with the postimpressionists their desire to make art itself the place of the holy. Chapter 11