Transcendentality and Gestalt

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Transcendentality and Gestalt Hans Urs von Balthasar Every beautiful Gestalt has this openness, which expresses more than the sum of its components. No metaphysics of Being as such and its transcendental qualities can be separated from concrete experience, which is always of the senses. “The True,” the disclosure of Being in its totality, only becomes visible where a particular thing is adjudged true. The goodness of Being is only visible where one meets with some good thing which both brings “the Good” near and—through its finitude, fragility and relative “badness”—causes it to retreat again. And we know that there is beauty from the sensible experience which presents and withdraws it, reveals and again conceals it, evanescent, in myriad layers: it is most obviously visible as an attractive individual form or as the striking illumination of a landscape or a particular atmosphere or receptivity. Beauty is visible less obviously when the unremarkable— for example, the face of an old man or a mother’s quiet, suppressed pain—suddenly reveals an arcane beauty. It is most hidden of all where in certain experiences even the coarse, the downright ugly, the near meaninglessness of pain, even the humiliating exposure to vulgarity, can appear comprehended within a totality which demands to be affirmed and can be affirmed as it is, unsweetened. 4

It would be unworthy of us to dismiss the ancient and modern versions of this world-affirmation in their attempt to comprehend in one ultimate, peaceful harmony the extreme tensions of the world, suspended above the abysses of death and guilt—e.g., tragedy, or in Heraclitus and Empedocles. Great tragedy—for example, King Lear— compels the spectator to include even the most terrible and excruciating elements in that affirmation. There is no “classical” art without this open wound in the heart of Being and in the heart of the man in whom Being is transparent. In the very middle of our era Paul Häberlin succeeded in putting forward this point of view in his Allgemeine Ästhetik (1929), according to which the philosophical act is identical with the aesthetic, and hence religious, affirmation. Here, where, with greater or lesser clarity, the totality of Being radiates within the individual being, the concept of Gestalt suggests itself. It signifies a coherent, limited totality of parts and elements perceived as such, yet which demands for its existence not only “a” context, but “the” context of Being in its totality. In making this “demand,” Gestalt is, as Cusanus says, a “contracted” representation of the Absolute, in so far as it too, in its restricted field, exceeds its parts, governs its members. This concept, inherited from Plato and Aristotle (as eidos and morphē), was at the heart of medieval ontology (as species and forma) and also of the nature doctrine of Herder (against Kant) and Goethe. It was tentatively but successfully enough rescued from the havoc wrought by atomistic association psychology and reinstated by Christian von Ehrenfels (Über Gestaltqualitäten, 1890; Kosmogonie, 1916; Das Primzahlengesetz, 1922). Subsequently the concept was once again contaminated by Berlin Gestalt psychology (M. Wertheimer, W. Kohler, K. Lewin, W. Metzger), since, for the sake of the measurability of the “exact sciences, “Gestalt here was treated as a “unity of correlations” of psychic “elementary functions.” These shared the same Gestalt as their physiological and physical substrata only through interposition of the “theory of isomorphism.” This view betrays the very governing center which forms the core of the concept of Gestalt “Every existing thing . . . has its existence (Dasein) in itself, and hence also the consonance according to which it exists,” says Goethe, and he goes on: “the measuring of things is a crude business which can only be applied in a highly imperfect manner to living bodies. A living existing thing cannot be measured by anything outside itself; if it were to be measured at all, the thing itself would have to provide the norm—but this latter is highly spiritual and cannot be discovered by the senses.” In 5

unity with the great tradition, Goethe can only think of the individual Gestalt as “participating in infinity” or in “perfect existence” (in the actus essendi illimitatus of Scholasticism), so we “cannot completely grasp the concept of the existence and perfection of even the most limited living thing”; thus Goethe arrives at his ontological version of the concept of the Sublime: When the soul becomes aware, as if in germ, of a relation, the harmony of which, fully developed, it could not completely comprehend or savour, we call it sublime; it is the most glorious impression a human soul can experience.

We can see from this passage why it was necessary to introduce the concept of Gestalt in the first volume of Herrlichkeit. All instances of the real partake of Gestalt in analogical degrees. The degree of elevation of Gestalt is adjudged according to the greater unitive power of assembling like manifolds (Ehrenfels) and relating all intellectually perceivable Gestalten to that complete and perfect Being which is beyond itself and which, according to Goethe, “cannot be conceived by us.” Thus the light which breaks forth from the Gestalt and opens it up to the understanding is both (and indivisibly) light of the form itself (splendor formae in Scholastic terminology) and light of Being in its totality, in which the form is (and must be) bathed if it is to have real (seinshaft) Gestalt at all. As the degree of immanence is raised, so is the degree of transcendence. In aesthetic terms, the higher and purer a Gestalt is, the more light springs from its depths, and the more it indicates the mystery of the light of Being in its totality. In religious terms, the more spiritual and autonomous a creature is, the more interior knowledge it has of God, and the more clearly it points to God. It is impossible for the biblical revelation to be an exception to this fundamental law of metaphysics, for God acts in human history, taking on human form (Gestalt) and through this human Gestalt grafting humanity on to himself in the Church. In this way absolute Being, in order to manifest itself in the unfathomable depths of its personhood, makes use of mundane Gestalt in its twofold language: that is, the unalterable finitude of the individual Gestalt and the way this Gestalt points unconditionally to, and transcends towards, Being in its totality. If this inescapable truth were kept in mind, the endless battle between biblical orthodoxy (nowadays in the guise of a judaizing species of exegesis) and liberalist Hellenism (nowadays dominated by general historical or systematic sociology of religion) would not be of such mediocre quality as it now is. Then it would be possible to retain the metaphysical and religious meaning of the individual Gestalt as it points 6

to “the Perfect” which is its ground, still recognizing the uniqueness of the biblical Gestalt over against all others. It would be possible to “become aware” of it in germ, in the Goethean sense, and hence to believe in this “harmony, fully developed” (eschatologically)—all the more since what is offering itself in germ is the Word of God graciously manifesting himself in sovereign freedom. The dispute over demythologizing the biblical revelation would correspondingly be carried on in a less narrow-minded manner, more in the lofty manner of later Schelling, by collating all the logoi spermatikoi of human and world destiny, these partial Gestalten scattered throughout the mythos, and summing them up in the final revealed Gestalt of Jesus Christ. This would create a more relaxed relationship between genuine art (rooted in mythos) and Christian faith, for there is no reason why the revealed Gestalt should not shed a guiding and clarifying light on art’s significant Gestalten which point to the Totality. Conversely, we can see how questionable it is to exclude a metaphysics of the Gestalt and try to confront modern scientific criticism and functionalism directly with the biblical revelation. The fact that the one has the total “invisibility” of pure calculation, the other of pure faith, is a spurious similarity, deceptive because it is purely negative. In such a case Christian faith would have to renounce all visibility, all Gestalt in the world, all human credibility, making all mission activity impossible. Ehrenfels discovered his “Gestalt qualities” primarily in connection with melodies; he only began to understand spatial Gestalten by analogy with those of time. This points back to the aesthetics of Augustine (and further back to that of the ancient drama), proving that the Gestalt concept is by no means closed to the notion of history and event. It is true that art has inherited this character from its mythical origins (G. Nebel),1 but nothing prevents us from viewing the revelation uniquely written by God into history— as Irenaeus does—as a work of art, a Gestalt, which, precisely in its main articulation, in the transition from Old to New Covenant, from promise to fulfilment, from law to gospel, is uniquely and unsurpassably history and event. In the biblical revelation we have a limited Gestalt, in motion yet definitively fixed, which not only points to the Absolute but declares it substantially and authoritatively: this marks it out as God’s work of art, utterly beyond man’s grasp. It is not 1

Das Ereignis des Schönen (Klett, 1953). 7

only art in the medium of time, however, that exhibits this “event” quality; great spatial art evinces it too: the image of the god recalls his epiphany and somehow causes the observer to look forward to it . It makes present the Eternal by reminding him. (anamnēsis) of what has been and revealing what is to come (elpis). Pillars and triumphal arch recall Caesar’s victory and cause the spectator to hope that his influence will remain present. Like the arts of time—music, dance, theatre—they commingle different times, very far from trying to give to an abstract moment the appearance of timeless eternity. The only way an “eternal” content is made present is by “letting go” (fahren) an enclosed moment in order to bring into being (into “experience,” Erfahrung) what is absent (what is past and to come). Thus one can speak of a protological, paradisal/eschatological aspect of beauty hovering around the beautiful thing and lending it, if it will receive it, a further openness to the biblical revelation, provided that this openness is not understood as pre-empting the Word of God. Virgil’s chief opus is a particularly impressive example of this kind of commingling of times, not annihilating temporality but on the contrary demonstrating that man exists in memory and hope. Thus the Aeneid became the model of the great Christian epic. It portrays an historical Gestalt of grand proportions, namely the Augustan empire, yet leaves many issues and themes open, rendering it a kind of artistic simile of Old Testament faith—going back to the Covenant and reaching forward to the Messiah. Every beautiful Gestalt has this openness, which expresses more—even where the Gestalt is most complete and definite—than the sum of its components. This “more” is the infinity of glory (Herrlichkeit), and it means that the Beautiful, as such, can be used as a Gestalt for the purpose of revelation. We cannot anticipate here the extent to which it can be so used. It will be indicated in outline at the end of the third volume of Herrlichkeit, at the point where it is seen that Western culture moves from the practice of art to the reflex theory of the Beautiful and gives birth to a “science of aesthetics.” This science will be ambivalent, tending to reduce transcendental glory (Herrlichkeit) to the intramundane (even categorial) Beautiful. But even in this restricted form it will distinguish more clearly certain basic themes of beauty which will be of service, in this form, in understanding better the basic themes of divine revelation. The more correct the analogies appear, the wider, in the end of the day, will yawn the gulf. This applies not only in the case of the objective structures of beauty which are governed by concepts of 8

“form” (Gestalt), “harmony” (proportion) and “radiance” (claritas)—the three elements of beauty in Thomas Aquinas—but even more in the case of the subjective structures which have come into the foreground since the Kantian metamorphosis of the concept of transcendentality. For where beauty is concerned—as Bonaventure had already observed —the relation of subject to object is decisive. In his late period Schelling saw and reflected upon these analogies. We shall have to inquire how far, in terms of a Christian perspective, he was right.

This “scientism” is, however, already a thing of the past. In matters of beauty as in other areas the twentieth century pursues new paths of its own, more and more self-assured and less and less anchored in tradition. Crumbling structures are swiftly and painlessly demolished. Abstract configurations arise out of the void. Gestalten handed down by tradition, deprived of their context, seem merely museum-pieces, looked after by curators and photographed by unseeing tourists. Where, on all these blind paths, is the Christian to walk? If the 2,000 year-old pact between metaphysical and theological aesthetics is now to be terminated, what then? When things become serious are we to say goodbye to this inheritance and cling to the naked rock of the Bible? Or—which is even more difficult—is the Christian, from the vantage-point of this naked glory, to endeavor to discern and distinguish a beauty which has become tarnished and neglected, and to cultivate it, since there is no one else to do it? Is such a thing possible? It would only be possible provided that no ideological compromise were involved. Compromises are made against the background of false equivalences: univocity is assumed where at most there are irreducible analogies. Here are a few such cases which are of significance historically: first, it is common knowledge that theology and philosophy arose out of a mythical origin in poetry, that Orpheus, Musaeus and Linus were the first prophet-poets. But to conclude from this—as the moderns have done, from Boccaccio, via the Baroque, to Herder and Creutzer, and on to Guénon and Leopold Ziegler—that theology and poetry are at root the same thing, is a monism which leads to a false sacralizing of art and a false aestheticizing of religion. 9

Second, Catholicism espouses the visibility of the Church and the theological authority of tradition. But this does not justify anyone’s absolutizing its historical and cultural Gestalt and attributing to it such an importance as under certain circumstances could exceed the importance of the biblical revelation (Ch. Maurras) or equal it (the Catholic Romantics and many modern integralists). The relativity of all the Church’s forms vis-à-vis Christ has already been discussed in Herrlichkeit (vol. 1, pp. 535f.). The same applies far more to all the artistic and cultural consequences of revelation. Third, as a result one must beware of openly or covertly equating the “mythical thought-form” with “sacramental thought” (G. van der Leeuw), or of making a monopoly of the concept of mysterion (O. Casel). It is difficult to apply the requisite analogy stringently here, because while the similarity must be emphasized (against the attack of theological rationalism), the greater dissimilarities must be emphasized (against the danger of aestheticizing the mystery of Christ). Fourth, the modern tendency is towards eliminating the Gestalt: Bultmannites, anthropocentric transcendentalists, philosophical functionalists, pure “rhythmics” (like E. Przywara), Teilhardian evolutionists—all these, irreconcilable to one another, follow the trend towards that which is without Gestalt. We must be anti-modern enough to oppose their strange univocity by maintaining that revelation has Gestalt qualities. For the infinite dimensions of Pneuma can only be understood as the glorification of the Logos (John 16:14) and not as his dissolution, upon the premise of the once-and-for-all incarnation of the Logos. Even dialogue with Asiatic forms of metaphysics—which avoid all Gestalt—will not succeed in changing this. The history of the Western spirit (which will be outlined in the rest of the third volume of Herrlichkeit with a view to our particular inquiries) by no means lacks instances of inner dialogue with the Orient. I am thinking less (with J. A. Cuttat) of the Patristic-Byzantine mysticism of the “ascent” than (with R. Otto) of the spirituality of indifference, developed consistently since Eckhart: in the perfect Christian love this approach, apparently beyond all Gestalt, reaches what the Asiatics tried to attain primarily through gnosis. As early as Plotinus and Dionysius, too, we find exhibited other elements of the East-West dialogue, and again in the ultimate attitude of great founders like Benedict and Francis. Fifth, the theology of kenosis leads up to this last. It would seem lacking in taste to apply aesthetic concepts to it, for its path leads into 10

God’s utter concealment, not as the hiddenness (as Dionysius understood it, as kruphiotēs) of the God who is always greater, not only as the veiling of the spiritual Word in inert, transitory flesh (as the Alexandrines saw it), but as concealment under the form of its opposite, opposition to God, namely sin (as grasped by Luther). Here the only purpose of Gestalt is to be crossed out, distorted and disfigured. And yet, however true this is, is not precisely this concealment the conclusive revelation of the hidden God of wrath and love? And what does revelation mean but unveiling, making visible in some shape or form? And does not God show the victory of his shaping power (Gestaltungskraft) in the very chaos of sin by encompassing even the most hideous form (Ungestalt)? Does he not achieve what all tragedy was attempting to do with human and ultimately unsuccessful means, namely, reconciliation in ruin? And might it not be (as Ferdinand Ulrich tried to show2 ) that the ultimate mystery of God’s kenosis in Christ has an analogy in the metaphysical mystery of Being, which radiates both light and death, which mediates the radiance of the divine but at the same time points forward to the extreme humility of the Cross? If that were the case, a metaphysical history of aesthetics would reveal a wealth of lasting, highly seminal theological decisions, since Being in its totality, in its elusive transparency, lets us glimpse either God or the void, depending on the particular light man throws upon it.

We glimpse the void wherever man imagines he can master Being on the basis of his own transcendental reason. For then the heavens “praise the glory of man,” and the glory they seemed to be praising goes out like a light. To that extent no transcendental is as demonic as the kalon. As the last of the four (after the One, the True and the Good), the Beautiful is only an appearance (Schein) breathed over the transitory: who knows whether it is the shining light (Scheinen) of God or the plausibility (Scheinbarkeit) of the void? But where Being is conceived in a scientific/neutral way—a hackneyed notion—a decision has already been taken deep down, in favor of the void. The last of the transcendentals, Beauty guards and sets her seal 2

Homo Abyssus. Das Wagnis der Seinsfrage (Einsiedeln, 1961). 11

on the others: in the long run the True and the Good do not exist without this luminosity which is both graced and gratis. And if Christianity, following the modern trend, were to embrace merely the True (faith as a system of correct propositions) or merely the Good (faith as the subject’s greatest advantage and benefit), it would have fallen from its true eminence. If the saints interpreted their existence as being for God’s greater glory, they were also always the guardians of the Beautiful. The history unrolled in what follows (in my third volume) will be shown as the history of a continuing submerged decision which comes to the surface inescapably at particular points: for example, in the original decision to pursue philosophy; in the search for the sum of meaning bequeathed by the world of antiquity (in Virgil and even more clearly in Plotinus); also in the issues of Aquinas’s circle and the collapse of metaphysics after him; in the symbolic figure of Cusanus, to the extent that the basic decisions of the modern age are taken here. For it is the free, thinking spirit which makes history; its fundamental decisions, once made, have repercussions and re-echo through the following centuries. In this way history is the apocalypse (i.e., the “revealing”) of the human spirit’s decision for or against God.—Translated by Graham Harrison3

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This article is a translation of Fr. von Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit III/I (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1965), pp. 29–39. The English edition of Herrlichkeit I is now available through Ignatius Press (Distribution, 15 Oakland Ave., Harrison, NY 10528). Volume II will be available soon; Volume III should be available within the year. Author’s address: Arnold Böcklinstrasse, 42; Basel, Switzerland 12