SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 2 OF GEORGE PATTISON: 'CRUCIFIXIONS AND RESURRECTIONS OF THE IMAGE'

Summary of Chapter 2 of Pattison. G. Crucifixions and Resurrections of the Image: Christian reflections on Art and Modernity'.  SCM.  2009.

Chapter 2.  Art, modernity and the Death of God.

The Second Commandment has long had an effect on Western culture that is deeper than the puritan’s hostility to images.  The Second Commandment was broken at the outset, and ever since worshippers have found it difficult to worship that which is not represented.  Battles in Christian history arising from iconoclasm show, after Nietzsche, that ‘the spilling of blood lies at the basis of all great cultural phenomena’.  The iconoclast affirms the power of art

But iconoclastic controversies also have positive outcomes because they heighten cultural sensitivity about the way in which images of God function.  And Christianity has shown that there is a limit to the extent to which it will accommodate iconoclasm: the church needs to speak about Christ as the image of God; Genesis 1 tells us that humanity is made in God’s image. 

The complexity of the Gospel’s portrayal of Christ poses its own challenge: the ‘image of God’ who was Christ was himself destroyed on the cross.  The Death of God is therefore a profoundly Christian theme but it is difficult to distinguish what is authentically Christian from what is secular or nihilistic.

Pattison presents the reality of the dead Christ as a mutilated cadaver and asks, after Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ (1869), Holbein’s ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ (1522) and Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ (1864), whether the disciples of Christ would have lost their faith before the dead body. 

Edouard Manet

Pattison extols Edouard Manet as the originator of modern painting. 

Manet makes paintings that have abandoned the attempt to present an illusion of reality and instead makes paintings that are knowingly two-dimensional artefacts.  Manet’s paintings are made so that they can stand alone.  His works are statements of fact and they eschew sentiment.  This emphasises the significance of Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’. 

Pattison reviews Manet’s career and the role that Charles Baudelaire played in recognising Manet’s talent and encouraging him.  Baudelaire saw as early as 1860 that Manet recognised the necessity of engaging with the ‘here and now’ of the present: ‘its fashions, its morals, its emotions’.  He wrote that art must show the ‘quality of modernity’: ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’.  Baudelaire also observed that the ‘uniform’ for men of the age was the ‘frock coat’ because ‘all of us are attending some funeral or other’.  Thus, Manet’s ‘The Concert in the Tuileries’ of 1860 shows the hubbub of the crowds in the Tuilerie Gardens in the centre of Paris: a scene of jollity, shot through with death by the presence of the many men in funeral attire. 

The critics considered Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ to be ‘audacious bad taste’.  Pattison considers other representations of corpses painted by Manet.  He concludes that Manet approached death in a ‘matter of fact’ way: his corpses were only corpses; his everyday scene of promenading was attended by men on their way to a funeral. 

Pattison considers Manet’s portraits: he considers that in the way in which Manet painted their eyes Manet has the ability to paint ‘metaphysical shock’: Tillich’s ‘shock of non-being’.  This is the deep understanding in all people that ‘the possibility of death, extinction, oblivion’ is our constant companion’.   In Baudelaire’s words: ‘modern man’ is no longer sustained by religion but is an ‘infinitely suffering being’ in the midst of the mundane modern urban world.  

Manet shows this by his depiction of death and by the ‘inner shock’ shown by the eyes in his portraits.  Manet should not be understood as a ‘religious’ painter, but in his ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ Manet shows us – after Baudelaire – ‘the funeral we are all attending’.  Manet therefore confronts modernity’s unspoken assumptions. 

'The Death of God’ is not a negation of Christianity and neither is it a death that closes a chapter.  The ‘unbearable secularity’ of a world without God carries its own memory and grief for that which has been lost, and it is this which both sustains an awareness of God and provides a remedy for despair.  

Pattison compares Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ with his ‘Olympia’ of 1865.  The prostitute Olympia gazes back at the viewer.  Pattison writes, after Sartre, that Olympia’s gaze conveys resentment and indignation: she has been handed over to an existence that denies her a ‘higher life’ of ‘beauty, truth, goodness or religious transformation’. 

Pattison again considers the characters and plot dynamics in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’.  He concludes that comparison of Manet’s ‘Dead Christ with Angels’ with his ‘Olympia’ is valid because Dostoevsky also uses contemplation of  Holbein’s ‘The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb’ and a portrait of a ‘fallen woman’ to ‘mark out the metaphysical space within which the action moves’. 

Pattison concludes that Manet’s choice of these two subjects and his treatment of them in his two paintings ‘establishes a force-field of extraordinary metaphysical potential’.  Through these two works the ‘Death of God’ is ‘obliquely reflected’.  Manet’s presentation through his paintings of ‘statements of fact’ - without any attempt to construct the illusion of a world within the painting - strips away any pretence that the divine can be visualised. 

In the words of Simone Weil, Manet asks us to ‘refuse to believe in everything that is not God’.

Godlessness as an ‘indirect and ambiguous moment of encounter between faith and modernity’.

Pattison then gives several examples of response to the Death of God in modern art ‘that we might also call a loss of belief in everything that is not God’.  

He reviews the artists: Vilhelm Hammershoj (1864 – 1916); Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967); and Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987).  These artists’ works show that the world is godless, but they do so in a way that reminds us that the world is godless and ‘not simply a neutral or value-free surface’.

We may either see Godlessness as a sign of complete secularization, or as a way of presenting Christianity’s own narrative of the death of God on the cross.  The latter mode is an ‘indirect and ambiguous moment of encounter between faith and modernity’.

Vilhelm Hammershoj was a Danish painter whose works are becoming better known outside his native country.  His most frequently painted subject is the interior of his home in Copenhagen.  Although the interiors are enclosed from outside, they are always lit by an unseen source within.  In his works God is absent but signs of God are glimpsed.

Edward Hopper’s world has ‘pitted itself against the vastness of the North American continent and installed 24 hour a day lighting to keep its ancient darkness at bay’.  The characters in his paintings are ‘living in a situation that exceeds their power of comprehension, and yet they know it’.  Hopper is painting Kierkegaard’s ‘anxiety and nothingness’.  Pattison writes: ‘How could one depict nothingness?  Perhaps by painting what there is to see in modern urban life – and nothing more’.

Like Edouard Manet, Andy Warhol was obsessed by death.  Car crashes and the electric chair are part of his oeuvre.  These, and other aspects of his works, was a presentation by Warhol of modern life being governed by death and no longer with a link to God who is the source of life.

Conclusion

Pattison concludes that ‘the God of Death’ was successively ‘unmasked and critiqued’ throughout the Jewish scriptures and that the cross enacted the ‘final exposure’ because a God of Death can only exist in concealment. 

The Death of God theme in modern art likewise draws the God of Death out of his hiding places within contemporary culture.  Art shows that the gods that are worshipped today are ‘no-gods’.  Even nihilistic art prompts us to consider what it is that ‘truly belongs to life and so to God who first truly begins to live when death begins to be undone’.   Nihilism may in fact be iconoclasm.

Christian theology asks of any work of art: “does this work reveal death in such a way that it make us more powerless before the God of Death, or does it help us name the God of Death for what he is and so open up the possibility of the God who, through the cross, comes to us as the God of life and of the living?”