‟“a kind of metaphysical dizziness.” tillich‟s theology of culture and the encounter with...

8/3/2019 A kind of metaphysical dizziness. Tillichs Theology of Culture and the Encounter with non-art - for Danz 2011

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A kind of metaphysical dizziness. Tillichs Theology of Culture and the Encounter with

non-art

Russell Re Manning, University of Cambridge

A kind of metaphysical dizziness grasps us1

Introduction

In 1965 at the University of Santa Barbara, California, Paul Tillich delivered what was to be

his last ever lecture on the relation between theology and art. Americas most prominent

public theologian, the seventy nine year old Tillich took as his title Religious Dimensions of

Contemporary Art.2 After sketching out his understanding of the concept of religious

dimension and his theoretical framework of the three defining elements of works of art

that make possible the discernment of religious dimensions within artworks (all of which is

familiar Tillichian material, even if the precise details of its expression vary slightly), Tillich

turns his attention to the most recent stage in the development of the visual arts.3

He refers

here to the following works: Willem de Kooning, Woman I (1952)i, George Segal , The

Dinner Table (1962)

ii

, Roy Lichtenstein,Engagement Ring (1961)

iii

, Tom Wesselmann, StillLife #30?(1963?)

iv, Robert Rauschenberg , Inside-Out(1963)

v, Jasper Johns, Out the Window

(1959)vi

, Clau[e]s Oldenburg, Interior (1962?)vii

, Jos De Rivera, Homage to the World of

Minkowski (1954-55)viii

.

He asks: What are we to think of such works? which he clearly finds unsettling.4

For

Tillich, these works are something new and require new concepts to make sense of them,

including his own.

Reality is encountered today in a different way. Our artists, in their honesty, show us

that. They express a sense of something uncanny, something unfamiliar.5

1P. Tillich, Religious Dimensions of Contemporary Art, in: J. Dillenberger/J. Dillenberger (Hg.), On Art and

Architecture, New York 1987, 182.2 Ebd., 171-187.3

Ebd., 180.4Ebd., 181.

5 Ebd., 182.


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In this paper I want to explore why Tillich is so ill at ease with these works and what this

disturbance might teach us about the limits of Tillichs project of theology of art and of the

prospects for future work in the theology of culture.

My paper has two main sections. In the first, I outline the interpretative strategy of Tillichs

theology of art; in the second, I examine how the new developments Tillich refers to in his

1965 lecture threaten to pose a serious challenge to this enterprise.

The Two Absolutes as the Basis ofTillichs Theology ofCulture

I begin with two bold claims. Firstly, I find that the basic intentions and core assumptions of

Tillichs theology of art are consistent from his earliest writings through to his last lecture,

even whilst the specifics of his terminology differ. Secondly, and following from this, I

identify the essence of Tillichs Kunsttheologie as grounded in the fundamental problem that

his theology is framed to address, namely the problem of the two absolutes (Two Types of

Philosophy of Religion (1946)). This Tillich describes as

the problem in all problems of the philosophy of religion6

Sounding unsurprisingly Schellingian, Tillich describes the two absolutes as two ways in

which Western humanity has overcome its old-age bondage under the powers, those halfreligious, half magical, half divine, half demonic, half superhuman, half subhuman, half

abstract, half concrete, beings who are the genuine material of the mythos.7

The problem of the two absolutes is the problem posed by the interrelations between the dual

subjection of the mythological powers: religiously to the absolute God (theos) and

philosophically/culturally to the absolute principle of being (esse). According to Tillich, the

problem finds its sharpest expression in the simple statement: God is.8

Perhaps surprisingly to those of us for whom Heideggersnot dissimilarworries about the

ontotheological constitution of metaphysics have become canonical,Tillichs answer to the

problem of the two absolutes is to affirm what he calls the Augustinian solution, over

against what he calls the Thomistic dissolution. Thus, interestingly, whilst their concerns

are, in this sense, similar, Tillichs response differs markedly from Heideggers call to

separate out theology and ontology to enable a purified fundamental ontology of Being and

6

AT, 290.7Ebd., 289.

8 Ebd., 290.


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a distinct theology as the positive science of revelationa dynamic echoed in many ways by

Karl Barth.

In spite of his well-known insistence upon the denial of the existence of God, Tillich is clear

that the way to overcome the destructive Doppelheit of the two absolutes is via their

solution in the recognition of their coincidence in the nature of truth.9

Following Augustine,

Tillich affirms deus est esse. By contrast (and via a somewhat controversial reading of

Aquinas), Tillich identifies the Thomistic dissolution as answering the question of the two

absolutes in such a way that the religious absolute has become a singular being of

overwhelming power, while the philosophical absolute is formalised into a given structure of

reality in which everything is contingent and individual.10

To get to the bottom of Tillichs Kunsttheologie, it is, I propose, necessary to recognise this

fundamental character of Tillichs overall project of Kulturtheologie, indeed of his overall

project of theology itself. For Tillich, theology of culture is never the application of religious

criteria to non-religious cultural phenomena: it is precisely not a theological or religious

reading of secular realities. Instead, it is descriptive in essence of the task of the

Augustinian solution of the problem of the two absolutes, understood as the coincident

subjection of the mythological powers (or in Tillichs more usual terminology the

Unconditional) in the statement deus est esse.

Kulturtheologie is, then, the attempt to expose via general and specific analyses the

always already coincidence ofdeus and esse in those philosophical/cultural subjections of the

Unconditional in which the subjecting authority of the absolute principle of being

predominates. By comparison, Kirchentheologie concerns itself with exposing the

coincidence of the onto-theological in the religious subjections of the Unconditional in

which the absolute God is definitive.

In both cases, what is fundamental is that neither religion nor philosophy/culture are (to

misapply a more recent term in the philosophy of religion) properly basic. What is properly

basic are the original mythological powers (remythologised as the Unconditional) which

unremittingly push against their subjection to religious and cultural forms. It is the common

goal of both Kirchen- and Kulturtheologie to bring to clearer expression the subjected

Unconditional that both enables and exceeds the phenomena of church and culture.

9Ebd., 30.

10 Ebd., 294


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Although Tillich does not use these terms, it may be helpful to clarify the distinction here as

that between revealed and natural theologies. For Tillich, both the religious and the

philosophical/cultural responses to the mythological powers/Unconditional are theological.

That is to say, both are responses characterised by ultimate concern. For the religious

response God becomes the object of ultimate concern; for the philosophical/cultural

response it is the principle of being that occupies this position. Both however, only function

as discourses of ultimate concern to the extent to which God and being respectively are held

to stand for and defer to the true object of ultimate concern, namely the original

Unconditional: the God above God of true religion and the power and depth of being and

meaning of true philosophy.

Hence, religious theology or what I am calling revealed theology is the attempt to bring

to clearer and systematic expression the theological content of religious discourses and

practices. The analysis of this revealed theology is what Tillich names as Kirchentheologie.

Alongside this stands Kulturtheologie: the analysis of philosophical/cultural theology or, in

my terms, natural theology, namely the attempt to bring to clearer and systematic

expression the theological content of culture.


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Kirchentheologie Kulturtheologie

analyses analyses

revealedtheologies (religious theologies) natural theologies (philosophical/cultural

theologies)

which describe and systematise which describe and systematise

religious discourses and practices cultural discourses and practices

which are expressions of the religious (i.e. in

terms of the absolute God) responses

which are expressions of the

philosophical/cultural (i.e. in terms of the

absolute principle of being) responses

to to

the mythological powers / the Unconditional the mythological powers / the Unconditional

The crucial point here for the purposes of this paper is that all developed reflection on the

human condition is theological (either revealed or natural), against the tendency of some

Barthian, and more recently Radical Orthodox thought to interpret (and condemn) the

philosophical/cultural discourses and practices as non- or a-theological.

A further point is that in Two Types of Philosophy of Religion Tillich recognises that the

revealed and natural theologies that he proposes to analyse can both take two different forms:

what he calls the ontological and what he calls the cosmological. In the case of the

ontological, the religious and/or cultural discourses and practices recognise the immediacy of

the response to the Unconditional and its radical intimacy to all else. In traditional theological

language this is, of course, designated by the notion of immanence. In the case of the

cosmological, the religious and/or cultural discourses and practices stress the mediated


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character of the response to the Unconditional and its radical difference from all else; in other

words, the notion of transcendence.

To conclude this section, I simply want to recognise one important consequence of this

interpretation of Tillichs fundamental theoretical framework, namely, that for Tillich,

genuine atheism is simply impossible. All religion and all culture is in essence derived from

the basic (humanising) grappling with the mythological powers/Unconditional; and hence all

religious and all cultural discourses and practices, no matter how avowedly secular or nihilist

they may appear to be, are all expressions of ultimate concern.

Tillichs Theology of Art

So, from the deep structural foundations of Tillichs Kulturtheologie, to the architecture of

his Kunsttheologie, understood as his analysis of the ways in which the problem of the two

absolutes is expressed in artistic discourses and practices, either directly by engaging with

artworks themselves or via an engagement with the second-order reflections or

systematisations of artistic phenomena, namely art theory, or what I would call the natural

theologies of the arts.

For Tillich, art is that aspect of culture in which the origins of culture itself are most

immediately apparent. In other words, art is culture in its most self-aware. As such it is

culture in its purest form: discourses and practices in which the original shock of the

mythological powers in manifest anew. This is what Tillich means by his frequent references

to the way in which art and the artists who create it express the spiritual situation of a

particular period. For Tillich, the very act of artistic creation witnesses to the

philosophical/cultural response to the Unconditional: in artistic creation the artist attempts to

subject the mythological powers to the absolute principle of being in a specific form. S/he

attempts to contain in a conditioned form the uncontainable excess of the Unconditional. Just

as the photographer may be thought to attempt to capture mobile reality in a frozen image, so

all artists, for Tillich, re-present the fundamental human endeavour to overcome its old-age

bondage to the mythological powers of God and being.

Artworks are thus understood to be constituted by three elements: their form (the way in

which they re-present), their subject matter (that which is presented), and their substance,

depth-content or Gehalt (that which is re-presentedi.e. the answer that they give to the

threat of the Unconditional).


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Famously, of course, Tillich is remarkably relaxed about the subject matter of artworks: the

presence of religious content (religious in the narrow sense) in no way guarantees the

vividness of the re-presentation of the subjection of the Unconditional that is definitive of

great art. That instead is shown forth for Tillich by his final category, namely style. Style

for Tillich is what determines an artwork as an artwork and thus, its importance for cultural-

theological analysis. To put it rather flippantly, only if an artwork has style is it really and

artwork; and some styles are more genuinely artistic than others!

Hence the burden of Tillichs art-theological analyses is to identify and evaluate the different

artistic styles. To some extent this is a rather mundane exercise, given the obviousness of

stylistic differentiation within the arts and art theory. At the same time, however, it is a

strikingly bold endeavour. Effectively, Tillich is re-interpreting the notion of artistic styles as

themselves alternative approaches to the fundamental cultural task of the subjection of the

Unconditional to the conditioned discourses and practices of culture. Thus the difference

between Impressionism and Expressionism, say, is not, for Tillichs theology of art, to be

found in their different treatments of light and colour, nor in their different use of distorted

proportions, but rather in their different attitudes of ultimate concern. Artistic style,

interpreted art-theologically, is in effect, equivalent to a theological stance towards the

Unconditional.

Equally, although this is under-developed by Tillich, the art-theological interpretation applies

to theories of art, as much as it does to individual artworks or artists. Theories of art, in this

view, effectively make explicit the character of the artworks they describe and thus are

themselves expressive of a particular style. Hence, it is not surprising that Tillich not only

interprets German Expressionist artworks as embodying a particular art-theological

significance, but also interprets the Expressionist theory of his friend Eckhart von Sydow as

itself exemplary of the expressionistic style.

This last point is, I think, of particular relevance to those critiques of Tillichs theology ofart

that find Tillichs interpretations inadequate in the face of the authoritative art -theoretical

interpretations. If it were the case that Tillichs art-theological interpretation of say

expressionism were simply offered as an alternative interpretation to be placed alongside

other art-theoretical accounts, such as those of the practicioners of expressionism or their

authorised interpreters, then Tillichs account would indeed be vulnerable to the criticism that

it fails to do justice to the artworks themselves as opposed to the more technically competent


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interpretations. And yet, this is not what Tillichs account intends to do. Tillichs art-

theological analysis is the attempt to do something quite different from that attempted by

theories of artistic style. Theories of art aim to express more clearly the ways in which certain

art functions as art. By contrast, Tillichs theology of art, aims to analyse the character of the

artwork or movement or theory at hand as a response to the fundamental theological question

of ultimate concern. In brief, art theory is concerned with the ways in which a work of art

attains the quality of being an artwork; Tillichs Kunsttheologie is concerned with how, as

such, it re-presents the origin of culture.

Another way of putting this same point is to return to my table: for Tillich, theories of art are

natural theologies in the same way that theories of big bang cosmology or biological

evolution by natural selection are natural theologies. As elements of the

philosophical/cultural strand of our basic human response to the Unconditional they are,

appearances notwithstanding, expressions of ultimate concern no less that the religious

theories of reincarnation or justification by faith alone.

Of course, none of this implies that there are no difficulties with Tillichs conception of the

task of theology of art, nor that the structure of theology of art as he conceives it is without its

problems, nor even that Tillichs particularart-theological analyses of artistic styles are

necessarily particularly convincing. Far from it. However, my aim here is not to explore these

difficulties: although this is something that I hope to develop further in future work. Instead I

want to return to where I began, namely Tillichs final lecture on Religious Dimensions of

Contemporary Art.

The Threat of non-art

As noted earlier, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the way in which Tillich set

out his theoretical framework in his last lecture. True he does endorse the language of

dimensions rather than layers or sectors and he collapses the third constitutive element

of an artwork (Gehalt) into the notion of style, both of which are modifications to his

previous expositions. However, the basic assumptions and the essential character of his

approach to artworks remain unaltered. But there is something new in this lecture: or at least

an indication of something far more significant than simply a minor tweaking of Tillichs

terminology. This is his creeping concern that a cultural shift has taken place in the course of

the twentieth century that marks a decisive break with our cultural past. In the seeminglyunremarkable set of late 1950s-early 1960s artworks that Tillich lists as exemplars of the


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most recent stage in the development of the visual arts, he clearly senses something more

decisive than simply the emergence of a new artistic style, which in itself would be rather

remarkable.11

Instead he finds himself responding to these works not with an art-theological

analysis of the way that their style exhibits ultimate concern, but with a profoundly disturbing

worry. He asks:

Is there something creative, original, andbrilliantly new in these works?12

And follows with a barrage of further questions:

What is the meaning of art itself? Are we now in a period in which not only

encountered reality has become unfamiliar to us, but in which even the concepts with which

we have dealt with reality have become impossible? Is this new art an art of nonart?13

In short, these recent works seem to have given Tillich cause to question the fundamental

framework of his Kunsttheologie itself.

Of course, these may simply be the confusions of an old man confronted with the bafflingly

unfamiliar world of a younger generation, or the disappointment of a cultured German

intellectual with a rather high-brown mandarin taste for serious expressionist art in the face of

the flippantly shallow aesthetic of pop art.

Or, may be Tillich has sense something more interesting and more disturbing. They key I

think is in his use of the term nonart. He continues in a powerful passage that seems to

anticipate many of the themes of what will later be term the postmodern:

there are fascinating, artistic elements, expressive elements in this new art; but at the

same time, one finds an element of style that is nonart. In other realms of culture, similar

phenomena are emerging. There is a religion of nonreligion, a religion that has nothing to do

with the religion of individuals or groups in the traditional sense. There is a theology that

makes use of a language without God...we now seek to speak of God without speaking of

God. Or consider psychology. This word means the knowledge of the soul, psyche, but today

the word soul is almost a forbidden word. Or philosophy, which derives from philia loving,

and Sophia, wisdom, now seeks to avoid the question of wisdom, that is, dealing with the

principles of reality and the meaning of life, and instead concerns itself with logical and

11

Vgl. J. Dillenberger, a.a.O. (Anm. 1), 180.12Ebd., 181.

13 Ebd., 182.


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semantic calculation. Even music now ignores the muses, the goddesses of art, and seeks

simply to combine noises together.14

Here Tillich in the mid 1960s identifies a puzzlingly paradoxical religious and cultural

situation, marked apparently by the emergence of that which Tillich had previously deemed

to be impossible: nonreligion, nontheology, nonart, nonpsychology, nonphilosophy,

nonmusic. In short, nonreligion and nonculture: religion and culture that have no relation to

the Unconditional, no concern whatsoever. Religion and culture, in other words, that refuse

their own essence. This is the situation of the end of religion and the end of culture: genuine

atheism, achieved not through the passionate denial of the existence of God nor by the

establishment of the incoherence of theism, but rather through complete indifference.

In a way that surpasses even the empty formalism and narcissistic self-introspection of the

doctrine of art for arts sake, these latest artistic developments indicate to Tillich that during

the course of the twentieth century art itself seems to have come to an end. The works he

refers to are, in Tillichs sense of the term, without style. They are without meaning beyond

even the meaningful declaration of their meaninglessness. Unlike all other works of art, they

have nothing to say; they are transparent to nothing, the re-present nothing, they just simply

are. In short, they are artworks that are not artworks at all but simply objects.

As such, none of Tillichs categories can apply, with the result that he is left lost and

bewildered in the face of this apparently uninterpretable reality. He finds himself with

a whole cemetery of dead categories. And this certainly is a situation which makes us

dizzy: A kind of metaphysical dizziness grasps us.15

He then it seems that Tillichs theology of art has finally run its course; he has nothing to say,

can have nothing to say. However, he continues:

Yet we must encounter it.16

Tillich here confronts the possibility that none of his interpretative art-theologicalcategories

can obtain any purchase on this radically new phenomenon of an art that is a nonart within a

culture that is a nonculture. And yet nevertheless his final word is not one of defeat, but one

of hope; hope that in spite of appearances there is a future for the Kunst-/Kulturtheologisch

14

Ebd., 182.15Ebd.

16 Ebd.


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task and that somehow and here he defers to a younger generation of theologians of art

this nonart and nonculture will show itself to be, in fact, a new art and a new culture

expressive of a new manifestation of ultimate concern and not the mindless inhuman(e)

refusal of concern. As he puts it in the final paragraph of his final lecture on this topic:

We cannot look at our world as if it were the familiar one from which our generation

came. For the younger generation the present arts are not unfamiliar. They know that

contemporary art is more adequate to the world that has been transformed by the sciences and

by technical processes. From the standpoint of the religious dimension of reality, let it be that

way, because this period of history and the changes in which we find ourselves are a

manifestation of the inexhaustible character of the creative ground of all reality.17

Of course, whilst it would be nice to leave the last word here to Tillich, his final lecture was

followed by a question and answer period (reproduced in On Art and Architecture) and

indeed important questions remain. Primarily: why do these works of (non)art affect Tillich

in this way? What, more precisely, is it about these works that causes them to escape all the

categories of Tillichs Kunsttheologie? Is Tillich in any way correct in his discernment of

something radically new about these works, or at least elements of something radically new

within them? And finally, is Tillichs courage to encounter these uncanny works itself

justified, or ought we really to accept the limitations of Tillichs project of theology of art and

recognise its particular cultural embeddedness?

I begin with the first two questions: what it is that provokes Tillich to the radical suggestions

and whether he is correct to be so provoked. To answer these questions we must pay close

attention to the works that Tillich refers to themselves.

Here I must make two cautionary points. Firstly, whilst Tillich refers to eight specific works

by eight different artists, it is clear that it is not just these eight works in themselves, or

indeed these eight artists in particular that are significant. These are rather exemplary works

characteristic of what Tillich designates as recent developments. Exactly why he refers to

these particular eight works is less clear, although given Tillichs preference for referring to

works that he has seen himself in person, we might speculate that these works, predominantly

located at the time in New York galleries, are simply those that Tillich is best acquainted

with. Similarly, the extent to which these works can really be said to be exemplary of the

17 Ebd., 182-183.


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latest trends in art in the mid 1960s must also be questioned. They are, apart from anything

else, an eclectic bunch, ranging from the messy neo-expressionism of de Kooning and Johns

to Lichtenstein, Wesselmann and Olderburgs pop art,and from the frozen stillness of Segals

mute figures to the fluid geometry of de Rivera. Perhaps, at least part of the reason for

Tillichs difficulty in identifying and analysing the style of this art lies in the over-abundance

of different stylistic elements in the works he has chosen to consider? There are also, of

course, significant notable absences, although this is always easier to see in retrospect than at

the time.

A second, more mundane, point is that it is not in every case clear exactly which works

Tillich is referring to. Most of Wesselmanns works are entitled Still Life and many of

Oldenburgs are Interior. I have not been able to find exact reproductions of either

RauschenbergsInside-Outor de Riveras Homage to the World of Minkowskiin spite of

Google!

With these cautions in place, we can nonetheless follow Tillich in his attempt to attend art-

theologically to these representative works. As Tillich notes, these works need to be located

historically after the dominant style of the early twentieth century, and that style with

which Tillichs analysis is particularly conducive, namely, of course, expressionism. Here

then is the first clue to Tillichs unease in front of these works: that they are interpreted as

explicit reactions to the most art-theologically interesting style of expressionism. As Tillich

writes:

an artistic revolt against the disruption of the surface reality is taking place. Artists

are attempting to attend to the conventional aspects of experience again....It is a desire for

concrete meaning, for filling the everyday reality with the discoveries which have been made

by the expressionistic ventures into the depths below thebroken surface of nature.18

Here Tillich notes de Koonings attempt to return to the human figure and the human face,

Lichtensteins use of comic-strip figures that are all surface and bring the most vulgar daily

reality before our eyes, Wesselmanns desire to remain in the midst of everyday reality and

Oldenburgs use of contingent, casual elements of nature.19

18Ebd., 180.

19 Ebd., 180-181.


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But what differentiates these works from those of that other post-expressionist movement that

Tillich encountered first hand in Germany in the 1920s, namely neue Sachlichkeit, which

Tillich confidently interprets art-theologically as belief-ful realism? For example, in his

1929 essay Religise Verwirklichung, Tillich endorses neue Sachlichkeitas a new realism

[that] tries to point to the spiritual meaning of the real by using its given forms producing an

art that is driving toward a self-transcending realism...which should be understood and

supported by Protestantism because it has a genuinely Protestant character.20

Why, in short, are the works of George Grosz and Otto Dix representative of a style of

belief-ful realism whereas the art-theologicalsignificance of Segal, Lichtenstein et al is so

puzzling and resistant to analysis?

Both movements (if we can call them that) Tillich emphasises are attempts to drive forward

beyond expressionism to the undistorted surface reality of things without returning to the

comfortable bourgeois capitalist realism of pre-expressionist art. And, he also stresses that

neither make a clean break from expressionism. So what is the difference? Tillich gives no

clear answer; but perhaps he gives us two clues.

Firstly, in trying to account for the success of pop art, he notes perhaps with some surprise

the fascinating power they have exerted with many people.

21

So perhaps something of thedifference here is to be found in the very popularity of pop art? Its very accessibility and its

undemanding immediacy, mean that this work attracts widespread popular admiration and is

strikingly resistant to any analysis whatsoever; not only Tillichs! Here perhaps Tillich is not

so far from the established theorist of this type of art, Arthur C. Danto, who, in effect, affirms

that the art works themselves are not to be subject to interpretation or analysis, our attention

is instead to be directed to their setting (the fact that they are exhibited as art) and the

concepts that they enact.22

In other words, the difference between the new realism of the

1920s and the return to the figural world of the 1960s is that whilst the former demand

patient and careful attention, the latter do not place any such demands on timeof neither the

creator, the critic, nor the audience.

The second clue that Tillich gives us as to the difference between these two movements is his

repeated references in his 1965 lecture to the transformative effects of the sciences and

20

Ebd., 71.21Ebd., 182.

22 A. C. Danto, After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton 1997.


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technical processes.23

With Heidegger, Tillich recognises technology as fundamental to the

existential situation of humanity in the modern era. Technology, understood as a mood

(Stimmung) or attitude towards reality, reduces encountered objects to things available for our

manipulation and use and in so doing refuses to recognise the stubborn otherness or integral

autonomy of the objects of our world. Perhaps Tillich is implying that the difference between

the 1920s and the 1960s lies in the triumph of technology, that in the latter context is valued

for its own sake and accepted and celebrated as what seems to be natural. It is perhaps then

no accident that the superficial banalities of everyday life that characterise pop art are

manufactured items masquerading as natural, given or found objects. Whilst it may be true to

say that neue Sachlichkeit purged expressionism of its romantic elements, it nonetheless

retained the expressionists ambivalence towards technology. Not so pop art, whose embrace

of the naturalness of the technical sits perfectly at home with the technological consummation

of the post-war American consumer boom. Once again the result is that the works of the pop

artists and their contemporaries simply do not ask to be interpreted . Just as the products they

depict, these works are presented as productions that require nothing other than to be used.

This production line conception of art, of course, echoes Walter Benjamins famous question

of the status of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Again, this is art which

paradoxically does not demand to be treated like art: it does not require attention, indeed it

positively discourages it.

So much for the possible reasons for Tillichs unease; it is now necessary to ask further

whether Tillich was right to sense that the attempt at an art-theological analysis of these

works will only result in a kind of metaphysical dizziness.24

To put this another way, is

Tillich selling his own interpretative framework short in his apparent concession of defeat?

Might it not afterall be possible to stage a Tillichian art-theologicalanalysis of pop art, even

if Tillich himself seemed reluctant to do so?

Well, in one sense, the answer has to be yes, of course! Even if we accept the outlines of

Tillichs tentative descriptions of pop art as a nonstyle, this surely could be interpreted

precisely as its style. In the same way that many would deny that abstract art is without

content because it has no definitively identifiable subject-matter, so it could be with pop art.

Indeed, Tillichs own comments all but confirm this: the style, as yet unnamed, of the recent

developments in the visual arts in the mid 1960s is surely none other than that of a post-

23Vgl. J. Dillenberger, a.a.O. (Anm. 1), 183.

24 Ebd., 182.


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expressionistic return to the figural world of objects and people as products of a hurried

technological consciousness. As such, this art is a clear exhibition of the new situation of the

late 1950s-early 1960s: it both illustrates and is itself caught up in the incessant business of

everyday life dominated by a just-in-time, pre-packaged, one-use-only consumer culture.

Rich material indeed for a (neo-)Tillichian art-theologicalanalysis.

This style, which we can now recognise as postmodern is indeed distinctive and yet equally

parasitic upon other styles, which it playfully makes use of, often ironically, for its own

purposes, namely the celebration of the hyper-abundant presence of the now. Postmodern

artand Tillichs examples are in this sense well chosen does not aim to delve back behind

or beyond the appearances of things to locate their mysterious essence or foundation of the

superficial here and now in some hidden depths or transcendent ideality, instead it proclaims

the immediacy and opacity of the given moment as an end in itself. Segals frozen

conversations, like video stills or CCTV frames, aim surely to capture and to preserve the

newness of an ordinary moment, not to body forth the Platonic form of dialectic. Likewise,

Lichtensteins cartoon-strip works take us to the very moment of a particular narrative,

normally decontextualised, to give us the feeling similar to that of overhearing a snippet of

conversation of a passer-by. Similarly, Wesslemanns Still Life, the work that most explicitly

celebrate the consumerist present, shows us the overabundance of products arrayed before usin all their best-before freshness.

The style of the postmodern is then as Tillich perhaps intuited but did not develop the style

that refuses to be positioned alongside other styles within the historical canon. Unlike artistic

styles that attempt to penetrate into the secrets of our world and to lift the veil of Isis to

expose the hidden truth behind the appearances, postmodern arts is content simply to re-

present the here and now precisely as we live it. This is its style: art en direct.

Of course, ironically, precisely in this stance against its own ossification into an artistic style

amongst others, postmodern art thereby defines its own style. Hence, far from causing the

collapse of Tillichs project of Kunsttheologie, this development of postmodern art, and of

the postmodern turn within culture generally, demands exactly the kind of art-theological

analysis that Tillich applied to the then radically new (and in some respects proto-

postmodern) art of the early twentieth-century avant garde.

That Tillich himself did not see this perhaps says more about him and his own limitations inapplying his Kunsttheologie beyond his own cultural Heimat than it does about the


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limitations of his Kulturtheologie per se. Indeed, the contours of a Tillichian art-theological

analysis of the postmodern style often unwittingly expressing its ultimate concern with the

experience of the Unconditional are already indicated in my comments above. Again, the full

development of such an analysis requires further work, including engagement with those

contemporary theologians of culture, such as Mark C. Taylor, who make use of what are

recognisably modified versions of the framework ofTillichs theology of art.25

But finally, to conclude, I want to return to Tillichs metaphysical dizziness. For most of us,

of course, the experience of metaphysical dizziness is most likely to be produced by reading

Parmenides poem, BookLamdaof AristotlesMetaphysics, or Wittgensteins Tractatus. But

this is surely not what Tillich a master performer on the high-wire act of speculative

metaphysicshas in mind. Instead, what disturbs Tillich is the threatening sense that what

this art really demands is not simply a new theological interpretation but a new

Kunsttheologie in toto.

And here, finally, I want to suggest that there may be some truth in this suggestion. Not only

Tillichs personal artistic taste, but also his overall theological project was deeply and

perhaps irredeemably shaped by his immersion in the revolutionary cultural context of post-

World War I Germany. Others have noted in greater detail the ways in which Tillichs project

of theology of art is determined by the very cultural situation that he sought to analyse: a fatal

over-embeddedness that strips Tillichs art-theological analyses of any power of critical

distance.26

If these interpreters are correct, and Tillichs programme of theology of art is

definitively determined by the expressionist culture from which it emerges, then an

expressionist culture-theological analysis of a genuinely post-expressionist culture can only

ever fail. More specifically, it is, as Tillich rightly emphasised, a defining feature of

expressionismbe it in culture or theologythat it is seriously concerned with metaphysical

questions, the most basic of which of course is that of the Unconditional. Thus, Tillichs

confidence that all cultural phenomena express, albeit implicitly, a natural theology of

ultimate concern is derived as much from his cultural expressionism as it is from his

theological presuppositions. Post-expressionist, or postmodern, culture is by contrast

markedly post-metaphysical in its interests. Beyond the great anti-metaphysical struggles of

both post-Carnapian analytical philosophy and post-Heideggerian continental thought, the

25 Vgl. M. C. Taylor, Disfiguring. Art, Architecture, Religion, Chicago 1992.26

Vgl. P. Steinacker, Passion und Paradox - Der Expressionismus also Verstehendshintergrund dertheologischen Anfnge Paul Tillichs. Ein Versuch, in: G. Hummel (Hg.), God and Being. The Problem of

Ontology in the Philosophical Theology of Paul Tillich, Berlin 1989, 59-99.


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postmodern consensus is one in which philosophy is profoundly (or should that be shallowly)

indifferent to metaphysical concerns. Hence, the question of the Unconditional is one that is

just not posed at all; more that this: it is neither repressed, nor avoided, nor resisted, nor even

deferred. It is just not even noticed. It is in this sense that we might say that it is the

postmodern triumph of the now that represents the true death of God: a death by neglect,

inattention and ignorance.

This then, is the metaphysical dizziness that Tillich feels when faced with the nascent works

of postmodern culture in 1965; the feeling that quod impossible esthas come to pass and that

a sacred void is taking hold at the centre of humanitys cultural and religious life. No longer a

series of implicit natural theologies, whose concealed theological commitments can be teased

out via Tillichs careful cultural-theologicalanalyses, instead the discourses and practices of

this new reality transformed by the sciences and by technical processes are just blankly non-

theological. This is the new face of secularism and Tillich recognises it will require a new

theological response. This then is the future ofKunsttheologie:

yet we must encounter it.27

27 Vgl. J. Dillenberger, a.a.O. (Anm. 1), 182.


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i

Willem de Kooning, Woman I (1952).


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ii

George Segal, The Diner(1964-66)

Not the work Tillich refers to, but similar. See Dillenberger, On Artplate 60

for the work Tillich refers to.


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iii

Roy Lichtenstein, Engagement Ring (1961).

iv

Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #20 (1962).


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Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #30 (1963)v

No image available.

vi

Jasper Johns, Out the Window(1959).


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vii

Claes Oldenberg, InteriorGreen Gallery, New York (1962).viii

No image available.

Jos de Rivera, Construction #6.


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Kinetic sculpture (1945)

‟“a kind of metaphysical dizziness.” tillich‟s theology of culture and the encounter with...

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