Slow Read: Week 6
Abstraction & Wondering at Transcendence
Who is Like the Lord? (Nobody)
It’s become quite popular in art and faith circles to talk about transcendence. The best art, we are often told, points to something beyond itself, awakening a sense of awe and wonder that cannot be adequately conveyed in language or logical propositions. Sometimes, though, it can also sound like the goal is to divest ourselves of our finitude and materiality, that the “otherness” of transcendence is necessarily a denial of the stuff that makes us human.
This week’s chapter, “Wondering at God’s Transcendence: Abstract Art” and the following one, “Delighting in God’s Presence: Representational Art,” are inextricably connected. But instead of imagining them as opposing poles, I think of them more like the warp and woof of a textile. As I write, “We need a notion of transcendence that acknowledges God’s uniqueness and his particular care for and relationship to this world.”
Also, to be frank, this was an opportunity to write about one of my favorite spaces in Rome, Italy: the San Zeno Chapel in the gorgeous church of Santa Prassede. I’m including more images and video of the space here and on Instagram. They still can’t convey how transportive of an environment it is, but they can help spark your imagination. The jewel-like mosaics, the flat, stylized figures with their big eyes and hard contours, and all the glittering gold…the space is so beautifully unlike our everyday world. My students I have spent so long staring at the ceiling that we got cricks in our necks.
But if we think that the chapel mosaic is just about an escape from our physical world, we’re missing something.
Something I don’t dig into explicitly in the chapter but that was very much in my mind is how abstraction can be incarnational. The the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and if we are anticipating the restoration of this world, not an escape from it, then our longing should be oriented towards that mysterious commingling. We desire not what is “beyond” but Who has already come down and promises to return.
The content of the San Zeno mosaics makes it clear that the point is not God’s distance from us, but his engagement WITH us. One of my favorite moments is the depiction of the Deësis on the east wall of the chapel. The Deësis is the Byzantine tripartite icon of Christ enthroned between Mary and John the Apostle. But in the San Zeno chapel, we actually just see Mary and John flanking a window. Where’s Jesus?
Jesus IS the light streaming through the window, the light that activates the space and becomes material. The Light of the world enters into our world.
As I explain further in the chapter, it’s not just the content but also the form and the physical experience of the chapel that reiterate this reality. It’s truly stunning.
I also use Vasily Kandinsky’s Painting with Green Center to help us. I’m indebted to the work of Bill Dyrness and Jonathan Anderson who make a compelling argument for how Kandinsky’s non-objective paintings still draw from his Russian Orthodox upbringing. The painting is not representational, but it is insistently material. It points beyond what we can see while remaining tethered to this world.
To Kandinsky, everything in the world had a vibrating energy. He marveled at the unique beauty of seemingly mundane phenomena like a lost button in a puddle and a piece of bark being carried by an ant. Instead of simply replicating the visible world, art—Kandinsky thought—should seek to create its own, resonant experience, striking and amplifying an “inner sound” in the soul of a viewer. In this way, visual art can enliven our experience of the world, adding rich texture like a musical chord.
The strange paradox of the San Zeno Chapel and Painting with a Green Center is that while they do not represent our world, they activate us in it.
Can you recall an encounter you had with an art form (visual art or music, dance, theater, etc.) that you would describe as transcendent? Now, try to remember how your body felt in that moment. Did your fingers tingle? Did your heart race? Did your eyes blink back tears? Did your shoulders soften? Because we are embodied, we touch the strange with the familiar.
Looking up in the San Zeno chapel
