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Thomas Dalzell
Balthasars
presupposed and perfected in the encounter with Gods own work of art, Jesus Christ.
the demise of the beautiful from the high arts, philosophy,
Western religion, the plethora of
new works on theological aestheticsZ - and even the success of the recent
Seeing Salvation exhibition at the National Gallery in London - would
suggest that beauty is making a comeback. It seems that it is no longer
necessary for theology to renounce its natural interest in aesthetics.
Indeed, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has remarked, for it to continue to do
so, whether consciously or unconsciously, out of weakness or forgetfulness, or because of false scientific rigour, would entail its giving up a good
part of itself, if not the best part. Doing aesthetics, therefore, as Frank
Burch Brown has urged, is not so much a theological option as a theological necessity.5 While beauty has been important to other theologians
such as Karl Barth and Paul Tillich,6 this paper will focus on von
Balthasars theological aesthetics and attempt to bring it into dialogue
with the insights of psychoanalysis, especially as enunciated by Jacques
Lacan in his return to Freud. It is hoped that psychoanalysis will shed
Despite
belles lettres, cultural studies, and
1. See Edward Farley, Faith and Beauty. A Theological Aesthetic (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001)
1-12.
2. See, in addition to Farley, Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, The Community of the Beautiful. A
Theological Aesthetics (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999); Richard Harries, Art and the
Beauty of God. A Christian Understanding (London: Cassell, 1993); George Pattison, Art,
Modernity and Faith: Restoring the Image (London: SCM, 1998); Patrick Sherry, Spirit and
Beauty. An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Gesa
Thiessen, Theology and Modern Irish Art (Dublin: Columba Press, 1999); Richard R.
Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics. God in Imagination, Beauty and Art (Oxford: Oxford
4
some
light
which is
on
what is
at
stake
not
just
in aesthetics but in
an
aesthetics
specifically theological.
I. Hans Urs
von
Balthasars
Theology of Beauty
analysis possible.
In Herrlichkeit, Balthasar isolates two moments in his conception of
beauty: form and splendour. Regarding the former, he notes that the language traditionally associated with a beautiful object is form (Gestalt) or
figure (Gebilde) and that the adjectives formosus (from forma) and speciosus (from species) derive from the first moment.9 But then there arises the
question of what changes the species into speciosa. This refers to the second moment, and, for Balthasar, it is the splendour which radiates from
within the form. In the beautiful object, according to Balthasar, we are
confronted with two moments at the same time. We encounter not only
the form but something else - splendour - which evokes rapture which,
for Balthasar, is a matter of transport. 10
That Balthasars theological aesthetics, while interested in Gods
beauty, remains an aesthetics as such, is clear from his view that the radiance of Gods glory reveals itself within the radiance of Being. In other
words, the inner life of God revealed in the beautiful form of Christ sheds
light on the mystery of Being. But this has implications for the
human subject. If the divine glory reveals itself within the structures of
natural aesthetics, this means that human perception must play a mediating role in the appreciation of the divine mystery. Hence Balthasars
claim in his dialogue with Karl Barth, that, since Gods revelation has to
take place within the structures of metaphysics if it is to be perceived at
new
7. I
am
Institute of
all, Barths analogia fidei must contain within itself the analogic entis.ll
That having been said, Balthasars own distinction between the natural a
priori (philosophical faith as openness) and the theological a priori
(theological faith) confirms his position that what faith perceives is more
than the beauty of Being. In other words, for Balthasar, there is only an
analogy between aesthetics and an aesthetics which is specifically theological, one which is interested in Gods own beauty, the beauty of Gods
Trinitarian love. Yet, as such, his theological aesthetics has to remain an
aesthetics, because he recognizes that the natural structures of the human
subject have to be respected, if Trinitarian beauty is to be perceived at all.
Our question is whether psychoanalysis can help us understand those structures.
2.
11.
und
177-181.
12. Balthasar, Herrlichkeit I, 113.
13. See ibid. 157.
14. See ibid. 151 (Heideggers text
not
cited).
theological perception
act.
3.
so perception and
aesthetics
not
rapture go together. 16
theological
only includes a theof
but
also
a
of
the
elevation
or transport so as
vision,
ory
theory
subjects
to participate in the glory of God made manifest in Christ as the form of
forms. Just as Heidegger included rapture (Ent-zucken) in his conception
of the philosophic act, Balthasars aesthetics, unlike much aesthetic theology which concentrates on revelation alone, contends that the revelation of Gods beauty is not art for arts sake, but intends the rapturous
transport of the subject who perceives it. Of course, for Balthasar, the rapture in question does not carry one only to the heights of Being. Rather,
the Holy Spirit is understood to draw or transport the believer in rapture
into the sphere of glory inside the Trinitarian God. But, as we have seen,
if this is what happens in faith, such theological rapture is thought to
respect and perfect philosophical rapture. Can psychoanalysis shed any
light on the latter? Is such rapture not the awakening of desire which is
never satisfied and hence can be understood - theologically - to carry the
subject to the threshold of faith?
For Balthasar, faith and grace are complementarily structured so that
one culminates in the other. Faith is understood as the act of acceptance,
the obedient opening oneself to the revealing God who calls the believer
to a graced relatlonship.&dquo; But this gracing of the human subject will not
bP at the expense of his or her humanity. Balthasar does not accept that,
when the finite subject is drawn into relationship with the God of Jesus
Christ, his or her natural capacities are brought to nothing or replaced.
On the contrary, his argument is that God perfects those capacities for a
His
Psychoanalysis
representation but in the effect it has on the viewer. While one might
think that a painter, like an actor, wishes to attract the eye of the viewer,
Lacan thinks not, and he distinguishes the eye from what he calls the
gaze. In Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoanalysiS, he
associates the eye with the looking proper to the register he calls the
stage;
Selection, tr. Alan Sheridan [London: Routledge, 1999] 1-7). However, according to Lacan,
the painting is not a mirror; it does not reveal the illusory completeness of the Ego, but the
division of the subject.
19. See ibid. 74.
20. Ibid. 101.
21. In reference to the theft of the Mona Lisa, Darian Leader has suggested that our looking for things once we have lost them might give us a clue to why we look at visual art.
The crowds that flocked to the Louvre after the theft demonstrate the true function of the
work of art: to evoke the gap between the artwork and the place it occupies. As Leader
points out, for Le Figaro at least, that place was an enormous, horrific, gaping void. See
Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa. What Art Stops us from Seeing (London: Faber and
Faber, 2002) 7; 66-67.
22. Ibid. 108.
gaze.23 The
2. The Ambassadors
Anamorphosis
is
an
to
give
which, when viewed from a certain point, shows what is represented in its
proportions. While the earliest examples appear in the notes of
Leonardo da Vinci, a classic example is to be found in The Ambassadors
(1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger. 14 This painting depicts two characters : the ambassadors Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, but it is
known for a curious object in its foreground. If, according to Lacan, a
painting looks at us, and even makes us into a painting, 15 it is not the
ambassadors, in his opinion, that look at us. It is, rather, this strange
oblique object that can be apprehended as a skull, but only, perhaps, as
one turns around on leaving the room. The picture looks at us from the
deaths head and captures us. We are, according to Lacan, drawn into the
picture and represented there as caught.26 But as such, this painting is a
trap not for the eye but for the gaze.27 What the elongated skull manifests
is the gaze, what we put in place of the lost object.&dquo; It confronts us with
our loss. It is this that both fascinates and disturbs. It confronts us with
the lack that causes our desire. For Lacan, it makes visible for us the subject as castrated in the sense of having given up an imaginary unity with
the mother. It reveals the imaged embodiment of what is called in
Lacanian algebra the minus phi of castration where phi represents the
phallus that is understood to be the symbol of desire.29 In other words, a
painting confronts us with the primal separation, which causes our lack,
which causes our desire. This, in Lacans opinion, is the value of a painting ; it is not a representation, of the ambassadors, for example. What it
manifests - the gaze - is a representative of what remains absent.
true
scopic drive
to
an
Hans Holbein:
Painting,
Prints
http://museoprado.mcu.es/visitas.html
Las
For Lacan, it demonstrates well the subjects relation in the scopic field to
the objet a, cause of desire. The title refers to the young court companions
the maids of honour - of the daughter of Philip IV and Marianna of
Austria, the Infanta Margarita. Given this name in the nineteenth century, it was known as The Family of Philip IV at first. Las Meninas disori-
the viewer; there is, we might say, too much going on. If this is a
in that each of the figures is looking somewhere Lacan observes in Seminar XIII, The Object in Psychoanalysis (1965-66),
that the looks are lost on some invisible point. Apart from the look of one
of the figures, Maria Agostina Sariente, no other look fixes on anything.&dquo;
Even the figure at the back, Don Jos6 Nieto Veldzquez, who is leaving, is
said to confuse us.
How was this masterpiece accomplished? Did Velazquez use a mirror to
paint the gathered personages behind him? Did he employ a stand-in for
himself while painting the meninas in front of him? Is the artist is painting the King and Queen? Are they standing in front of the painting and
being reflected in the mirror at the back and, if so, why does the perspective not work? These are the kind of questions, as Lacan remarks, that
give viewers a headache as they try to work out the trick of the paintings
construction. According to Lacan, the heart of the problem is: what is the
ents
painting of looks -
painter painting?32
Since the artist includes himself in the painting, it has been argued by
Jonathan Brown that Velazquez wanted to make it known that his declaration of the nobility of his art - as a liberal art whose guarantor was perspective - was endorsed by the king.33 But that is to enquire about the
intention of the artist. Lacan is more interested in the effect the painting
has on the viewer and the painting demonstrating that effect. Once
again, Lacan draws our attention to an absence. He disagrees with Michel
Foucaults view that this painting is the representation of representation.34
Since something is lost, Lacan thinks it can only be the representative of a
representation which remains absent (V orstellungsreprsentanz). 35
Foucault highlights the dialectic of visibility and invisibility in Las
Meninas. The painter, he notes, is visible in the painting; as he emerges
from behind the canvas, his torso and face are halfway between the visible and invisible. But, Foucault points out, what is on the canvas is invisible to us as well as what he is looking at, although we can place ourselves
at that point occupying the same position as his subject. Furthermore, he
adds that there is another invisible point exterior to the painting: we
31. See Lacan, Seminar 17 (11.05.66), Seminar XIII (1965-66). The Object of Psychoanalysis. Unpublished tr. Cormac Gallagher, 1-17 at 14.
32. See Lacan Seminar 17 (11.05.66), Seminar XIII, 10.
33. See Brown, Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978) 101; 96-7.
34. See Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London:
Routledge, 1970) 3-16.
35. See Lacan, Seminar 17 (11.05.66), 11; 9.
10
dont see where the painter is painting from. For Foucault, it is invisibility
that the painting makes perceptible, the invisibility of what is on the
other side of the canvas, of where the subjects are standing, where the
spectator is, where the painter is painting from.36 For Lacan, on the other
hand, the problem with the painting is not one of visibility. The difficulty,
Lacan argues, is not that the gaze is invisible; the issue is that it cannot
be visualized at all because it is not a gaze that is seen.
Like The Ambassadors, Lacan speaks about Las Meninas capturing us;
the one who looks at it is fastened on it (y est boucl), is caught into its
space.37 More importantly, he highlights the dreamy look of the figure at
the back who is leaving. He contends that this is the point where the
lines of perspective come together, the point of capture and of the action
the painting exercises on the viewer. While Foucault thinks the dreamy
figure may be about to enter the room, Lacan proposes that Velazquez
himself is leaving us, leaving us with his painting for our eternal interro-
gation.38
Later in Seminar 2~III, we find Las Meninas contrasted with the mirror.
The picture-subject relation is said to be fundamentally different to the
mirror-subject relation because the former refers to the lost object and to
the subject as divided.39 If a mirror offers the completeness of representation, the picture is, for Lacan, but the representative of a representation.&dquo;
In other words, the subject is positioned by Las Meninas by being sustained in his or her lack - not illusory completeness - in relation to the
objet a, cause of desire, made manifest by the painting. Hence Lacans
pointing out that if Velazquez responds to the Infantas let me see with
you do not see me from where I am looking at you, he does not say 4there,
from where I am looking at you, because the there is elided. In other
words, it is a gaping place, an unmarked interval, an absence.41 In short,
if Las Meninas incarnates the gaze,42 Lacan believes it demonstrates that
the gaze is not a seen gaze but a gaze in another register.
In all this, Lacan would seem to be right in not attempting to analyse
the artist since, if the artist did not tell us his or her story, this would be
in the imaginary. The importance of Lacans contribution, rather, is his
showing us the effect the work of art can have on us in awakening our
desire. The work of art confronts us not with an image of our own
36.
37.
38.
39.
11
completion but with the lack that causes desire. Psychoanalysis, therefore, is not primarily interested in the artist, despite Freuds reflections on
Leonardo da Vinci;43 it is concerned rather with the effect art has on the
viewer. Nor, according to psychoanalysis, is art about representation; its
function and effect are elsewhere.
III. Balthasar and Lacan:
1. An
Convergences
Analogous Perception
Both theological aesthetics and psychoanalysis are concerned with perception and transport. For Balthasar, Jesus Christ is Gods representative.
God is revealed in him and that revelation is given for faith-perception.
In addition, as the manifestation of Gods Trinitarian beauty, he is
thought to enable Christian ecstasy or transport. Lacanian psychoanalysis, as we have seen, is also interested in what is perceived in a work of art
and has its own way of understanding what the work of art provokes. But
Lacan will not reduce its idea of perception to the visual. Just as Balthasar
includes
cannot
a moment
see. 41
43. See Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, Art and Literature,
Penguin Freud Library 14. (London: Penguin, 1990) 143-231.
44. See Herrlichkeit I, 10.
45. Hence if the German priest-artist Sieger Köder has suggested that the figures in Las
Meninas gain their importance from the unimportance of their environment and that,
apart from them, there is almost nothing to be seen (see Köder, Ein Fest der Narren? Zur
Geschichte meines Bildes Das Mahl mit den Sündern (1971-73), Geist und Leben 2 [2002]
135-141 at 140), it can be argued that what is incarnated in the painting cannot be seen.
46. See Balthasar, Herrlichkeit I, 450-451.
47. See Preface of Christmas, I in The Roman Missal (cited Balthasar, Herrlichkeit I, 120).
12
But
have
seen
it maintains
to a
Lacanian
2. An
objet a.
Analogous Rapture
Like a work of art, or any instance of worldly beauty, Balthasar understands Jesus to cause rapture or transport as the believer is caught up in
love of the God they cannot see. Is there not a certain similarity between
the work of art manifesting the subjects lack and so awakening his or her
desire, and Gods work of art enabling such transport? Is such graced
transport not grounded in the human metonymic movement which characterizes the desire of every subject? Just as Balthasars theological aesthetics is guided by the principle that grace does not destroy nature, but
perfects it, does not the displacement effected by the Christ-form not
respect and perfect the natural structure of human desire?
48. See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 207.
49. This dual function is important to Balthasar who bases his argument for the restriction
of priestly ordination to males on the basis that while all Christians continue the redemptive work of substituting (Stellvertretung) for sinners, only males-like Jesus- can represent
Gods active paternity in the world. On this, see Robert A. Pesarchick, The Trinitarian
Foundation of Human Sexuality as Revealed by Christ According to Hans Urs von Balthasar.
The Revelatory Significance of the Male Christ and the Male Ministerial Priesthood (Rome:
Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2000).
50. See Balthasar, Herrlichkeit I, 18.
13
Desire is
Spinoza, Ethics, tr. A. Boyle (London: Dent 1910); Lacan, Seminar XI, 275
(cited Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London:
Routledge, 2001, 36); Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard,
1947); cited in David Maceys Introduction in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psycho-analysis, vii-xxxiii at xix.
52. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits. A Selection, 287.
53. Ibid. 175.
54. By Blondelian shift is
meant
an
self-transcending dynamism in human beings before they make an act of faith. See
Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence. A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism
innate
14
existence of
56. See Freud, The Future of an Illusion, Penguin Freud Library 12 (London: Penguin,
1991) 179-241 at 212.
57. See Freud, Totem and Taboo, Penguin Freud Library 13 (London: Penguin, 1990) 43224 at 203-205.
58. See Tom McGrath, SJ , The Illusion of the Future: Freuds Anxiety and Religion, The
Letter 6 (Spring 1996) 79-90.
59. The English word enjoyment does not include the sexual connotations of the French
original. Initially used by Lacan as a term for sexual pleasure, jouissance comes to designate
the subjects enjoyment of desiring as such, since desire cannot be satisfied by any object.
It is later distinguished from desire as its aim and also from pleasure as its opposite. For a
much fuller treatment, see Dylan Evans, From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience: An
Exploration of Jouissance in Dany Nobus (ed.), Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
(London: Rebus Press, 1998) 1-28.
60. See Lacan, God and the Jouissance of the Woman, Encore. tr. Jacqueline Rose (cited
in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality. Jacques Lacan and the école
freudienne [London: Macmillan Press, 1982] 137-148 at 146-147).
61. See Helen Sheehan, The Jouissance of the Mystic, The Letter 1 (Summer 1994) 111116 at 113.
62. See Teresa of Avila, The Life of Teresa of Avila, by herself. tr. J. M. Cohen (London:
Penguin Classics, 1957) 136 (cited in Sheehan, ibid.).
63. See Thomas Dalzell, The Dramatic Encounter of Divine and Human Freedom in the
Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Bem: Peter Lang Verlag, 2000) 51-58.
64. See De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural. tr. Rosemary Sheed (London:
Chapman, 1967) 72.
15
65. Balthasar, Der Zugang zur Wirklichkeit Gottes, Mysterium salutis, Grundriß heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik II (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1967) 15-45 at 21.
66. Ibid. 24.
67. See Joel
1980) 301.
16
Conclusion
not
that