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Man's Extremity And the Modern Artist
By Finley Eversole

THESIS: The current idiom, "the death of God," may be taken as either defiant atheism or as modern man's way of articulating his own extreme lostness. If the absence of God is more celebrated today than his presence, what would it mean for Christian thinkers to examine such nihilism as a clue to man's extremity for which, hopefully, the gospel may come as good news? Modern abstract expressionism in art provides some interesting clues. But the Christian "Yes" to despairing man's "No" must come through the agony of nothingness. Who knows? Man's talk about the death of God may even be God's way of preparing us for his reappearance in our midst.

"CAN one be a saint without God?" This question, asked by Tarrou in Albert Camus' novel, The Plague, constitutes the religious question for the great majority of modern men¹ for whom God's "death" is an accepted fact. The old Platonic-Thomistic metaphysic, in terms of which Christianity has traditionally interpreted itself, can no longer be assumed. The mysteries of contemporary experience have at best a "secular transcendence." Thus it is that Jean Cocteau's characterization of Chirico as "a religious painter without faith," "a painter of the secular mystery" (le mystére laic) gives us the most illuminating definition of the situa-

¹ It is important for our purpose to note that one is not a "modern man" merely by dint of living in the present; the truly modern man is such by virtue of a particular consciousness which may be called contemporary. Carl Jung says, "I must say that the man we call modern, the man who is aware of the immediate present, is by no means the average man. He is rather the man who stands upon a peak, or at the very edge of the world, the abyss of the future before him…. The man whom we can with justice call 'modern' is solitary. . . . The values and strivings of those past worlds no longer interest him save from the historical standpoint. Thus he has become 'unhistorical' in the deepest sense and has estranged himself from the masses of men who live entirely within the bounds of tradition." (Modern Man in Search of a Soul: Harcourt, 1955, pp. 196-197.)

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tion out of which the contemporary artist must create his art. If there are saints in our time, they are the heroes of the "secular mystery" who, like Camus, create their existence and their art out of a commitment to truth and freedom and a compassion for man oppressed.

It is not, however, the question of sainthood but the assumption of the death of God and its cultural manifestation² which calls our attention to the extreme or boundary situation of contemporary man and the contemporary artist. Whatever else may be said by way of distinguishing modern man, in the last analysis it is the fact of God's death which separates him finally and absolutely from his medieval and classical ancestors. God's death is the "continental divide" which separates the present age from the age of the gods. The "twilight of the gods" which one first encountered in the novels of Dostoevsky and which might still be felt in the poetry of Hölderlin has turned to midnight in the stories and parables of Kafka. God's death, as a cultural phenomenon, is associated with such names as Nietzsche and Feuerbach, Spengler and Marx, Darwin and Freud, Jean Paul and also the Marquis de Sade. Yet it is the spiritual experience of God's death, behind the cultural phenomenon, which defines the nature and limits of the extreme human situation of our time-the experience variously described as "cosmic exile" (Slochower), "ontological solitude" (Nathan Scott), "metaphysical exile" (Camus), "existential finitude" (Tillich), and "exile in the imperfect" (Baudelaire). Whatever the terminology, the experience being described is that of modern man's alienation from the ultimate ground of being and meaning. Contemporary man is cut off, alone, estranged, absurd. Nor is alienation the experience of a few lonely, sensitive artists. It is the fundamental fact about all contemporary experience and an element in any description of la condition humaine.

God's death and the consequent spiritual situation receive poignant dramatization in John Osborn's play, Look Back in Anger, in which Osborn places on the stage a frenzied young man who, at the sound of church bells, gives free reign to his neurotic compulsion to blasphemy. God is dead. Yet the very violence with which we declare this fact suggests that the matter is not yet closed. Rimbaud wrote in A Season in Hell, "Hell has no power over pagans." By

² Cf. Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: Braziller, 1961.

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the same token, God's death and the agony of our spiritual inquietude suggest that we have not yet done with the "death of God."

"All of us, among the ruins, are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism," says Camus. Yet Camus himself backed away from the nihilist question about suicide before constructing his philosophy of revolt. It is my conviction, however, that we must come to terms with the full import of God's death, that we must take with absolute seriousness the nihilism which lurks within the modern soul and threatens us with its satanic eruption, before any reconstruction is possible. In other words, we must ask: What does God's "death" mean for the possibility of experiencing God's presence? So far as I know, this question has not yet been asked. But until it has and until an answer is in sight, all talk of "sainthood" and "reconstruction" is but dangerous face-lifting. Neither the church nor society, when faced with so radical a possibility as God's death, can, as Kierkegaard put it, content themselves with cribbing the answers from the back of the book. Those of us who still claim some validity for the Christian faith must be the first to put aside our honored traditions and dogmas and ask whether God may indeed be dead. As Stanley Hopper put it, we must exercise a " 'willing suspension' not of disbelief but of belief in order to let go of a security system that no longer sustains."³ Acting on this principle I have chosen in this essay to take my identity not with the theologians but with the early Camus who said:

The malaise which concerns us is that of an entire epoch from which we do not wish to separate ourselves. We want to think and live in our history. We believe that the truth of our century cannot be reached without going all the way to the end of our own drama. If the epoch has suffered from nihilism, then it is not in ignoring nihilism that we shall find the ethic that we need.⁴

The chief artists of our epoch, because they possess the courage to face a world threatened with nihilism and meaninglessness, speak to us more compellingly than preacher or sociologist of the "terrible aboriginal calamity" which threatens to undo us. If we do not like what we see, it is not the artist who should be judged, for the artist has done nothing to the image of man that man has not already done

³ "On the Naming of the Gods in Hölderlin and Rilke" in Christianity and the Existentialist, Carl Michalson, ed.: Scribner's, 1956, p. 154.
⁴ Actuelles: Chroniques 1944-1948: Gallimard, 1950, p. 112; quoted by Thomas Hanna, The Thought and Art of Albert Camus: Henry Regnery Co., 1958, p. 21.

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to himself. Yet it behooves us to look at the painful images given to us in contemporary art, for, says R. G. Collingwood, "Art is the community's medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness."⁵

I

Contemporary art is the dramatic expression of the most radical cultural and spiritual revolution in human history. We may be helped to an understanding of what is involved in the revolutionary expressions and abstractions of modern painting if we return first to Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. In this study of the Apollonian-Dionysian duality of Greek tragic drama, Nietzsche interprets the deep warring forces of order and revolution which underlie the making or unmaking of every culture. The Apollonian will, so called for the Greek god Apollo, is the will to order, control, selection, condensation, synthesis, and moral law. The Apollonian will is synonymous with culture and is identified at the aesthetic level with the plastic arts of sculpture and architecture. The Dionysian ecstasy, so called for the god Dionysus, is the expression of a titanic and barbaric intoxication, of a surging, frenzied ecstasy in opposition to all rational and moral order. The Dionysian exuberance is synonymous with creativity, spontaneity, and freedom and is identified at the aesthetic level with the dynamic arts of music and dance. Greek tragic drama, according to Nietzsche, consisted in an Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian powers and insights, and with the eruption of the Dionysian from the bounds of the Apollonian, Greek tragic drama came to an end. Thus the Apollonian demands for self-control, self-knowledge, and moral obedience seem ever unable to hold back the equally fundamental demands of the Dionysian spirit for freedom from artificial controls. Says Nietzsche, "Wherever the Dionysiac voice was heard, the Apollonian norm seemed suspended or destroyed."⁶

The Apollonian and Dionysian forces, the will to order and the revolutionary spirit, belong to every phase of man's history and art. Even among today's abstract painters, Mondrian might be said to represent Apollonian order and Jackson Pollock, Dionysian ecstasy. Such classifications, of course, are only partially accurate, but they

⁵ The Principles of Art: Oxford, 1958, p. 336.
⁶ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals: Doubleday Anchor Book, 1956, p. 35.

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serve to point to the presence of these contrary forces even in contemporary painting. Nevertheless, it is clear that we have entered an epoch in our history and art which is decisively Dionysian. V. Ivanov, writing of Dostoevsky-whose tragic novels first revealed to us the "underground" of the modern consciousness-says, "Only some unprecedented Dionysiac form of art [such as Dostoevsky's] could tell how chasms of the soul call to one another."⁷ No simple analogy to Greek art is adequate, therefore, if we are to understand fully what is caught up in the constellation of modern movements known as romanticism, existentialism, expressionism, and surrealism -for we have entered a period that is far more radical and revolutionary than anything which has gone before.

Surrealism provides us with an excellent point of departure for understanding the nature and extent of the modern art revolution. Often interpreted as a conflict with classicism, surrealism, says Sir Herbert Read, "resolve[d] the conflict . . . by liquidating classicism, by showing its complete irrelevance, its anesthetic effect, its contradiction of the creative impulse."⁸ The anti-classicism of surrealism is perhaps better expressed by Jacques Rivière: "To grasp our being before it has yielded to consistency; to seize it in its incoherence, or better, its primitive coherence, before the idea of contradiction has appeared and compelled it to reduce and construct itself; to replace its logical unity, which can only be acquired, by its absurd unity, which alone is innate."⁹ If I were looking for a single definition of surrealism which would throw light upon its revolutionary nature, I would take it from the psychology of Carl Jung. Jung writes:

The experience that furnishes the material for artistic expression is no longer familiar. It is a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland of man's mind-that suggests the abyss of time separating us from prehuman ages, or evokes a super-human world of contrasting light and darkness. It is a primordial experience which surpasses man's understanding, and to which he is therefore in danger of succumbing. . . . It arises from timeless depths: it is foreign and cold, many-sided, demonic and grotesque. A grimly ridiculous sample of the eternal chaos-a crimen laesae majestatis humanae, to use Nietzsche's words-it bursts asunder our human standards of value and of aesthetic form. The disturbing vision of

⁷ Vyacheslav lvanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: Noonday Press, 1957, p. 6.
⁸ Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art: Meridian, 1955, p. 112.
⁹ Quoted in Marcel Brion et al., Art Since 1945: Abrams, 1958, p. 318.

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monstrous and meaningless happenings that in every way exceed the grasp of human feeling and comprehension makes quite other demands upon the powers of the artist than do the experiences of the foreground of life. These never rend the curtain that veils the cosmos: they never transcend the bounds of the humanly possible, and for this reason are readily shaped to the demands of art, no matter how great a shock to the individual they may be. But the primordial experiences rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a glimpse into the unfathomed abyss of what has not yet become. Is it a vision of other worlds, or of the obscuration of the spirit, or of the beginning of things before the age of man, or of the unborn generations of the future? We cannot say that it is any or none of these.¹⁰

Could anything be less Apollonian? or more surrealistic?

Surrealism succeeded the futurist and dadaist movements with their rejection of the neo-classicism of cubism and their search for images "to express the vortex of modern life-a life of steel, fever, pride and headlong speed." But where dadaism cultivated meaninglessness and contradiction for their own sake, surrealism absorbed and passed beyond crime and violence to proclaim man's basic innocence and atheism (as does Camus). The surrealists, unlike the dadaists, knew that they could not escape history. But they found history in an unprecedented place, man's unconscious. They explored the illogicality of dream images and gave expression to an irrational arrangement of natural objects. The surrealist's wedding of dream and reality gave rise to a new creative freedom whose very openness, groundlessness, and basic indifference to the choice of being or nonbeing presented to the creative imagination gave it a demonic character and depth. Here, in this strange metamorphosis of dream into reality and vice versa, light and darkness, the sacred and the profane reveal their affinity for one another.

One final observation about surrealism is in order. Under no condition should we regard surrealism as the expression of mere subjectivism or individualism. Unlike existentialism, surrealism is concerned with those unconscious, primordial experiences which are the universal possession of mankind, which, indeed, man shares with nature herself. "This 'self' [of the artist]," says Sir Herbert Read, "is not the personal possession we imagine it to be; it is largely made up of elements from the unconscious, and the more we learn about

¹⁰ Carl Jung, op. cit., pp. 156-157.

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the unconscious, the more collective it appears to be-in fact, 'a body of common sentiments and thoughts . . . universal truths,' such as Grierson assumes to be the exclusive concern of the classical artist. But whereas the universal truths of classicism may be merely the temporal prejudices of an epoch, the universal truths of romanticism are coeval with the evolving consciousness of mankind."¹¹ Both Nietzsche and Baudelaire saw in the individual expressions of the artist a link with the universal, with the ground of being itself. One may wish to ask, however, whether it is being or the approach of non-being which one encounters in the works of surrealism.

Before leaving these comments on the modern art revolution, it is appropriate, I think, to take note of the political, economic, and religious significance of the surrealist revolt. Classicism, against which surrealism asserted itself, is the aesthetic counterpart of capitalism and political tyranny. Since classicism is concerned with equilibrium, a balance of forces and the uniformity of ideas-and regards all forms of revolt as "degenerate"-it is the natural ally of the ruling class, of the aristocracy. Surrealism, on the other hand, with its shattering of classical forms and its preoccupation with what Thomas Wolfe called "the buried life, the fundamental structure of the great family of earth to which all men belong," is the voice of a genuine democracy. We are duly warned of the dangers of classicism by Nietzsche's remark, in keeping with his own classical, aristocratic spirit, that it is "blasphemous" to look for a " 'foreshadowing' of constitutional democracy" in the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Surrealism is a revolt not only against classicism and political absolutism. It is also-and just as profoundly-a revolt against social realism, with its political and economic totalitarianism. This explains the intolerance of fascist and communist states for nonrepresentational art. The Marxist preference for social realism in art, dedicated to the ideals of the revolution and the portrayal of "the man of labor," betrays an antipathy for creative freedom and a mistrust of the artistic imagination which rejects the world as it is for the unity and beauty of the world which may be. The Marxist, furthermore, rejects "pure art" (an indulgence of the privileged class) which, by way of a concentration upon a single facet of reality (an apple or an old pair of shoes), seeks to illumine the whole of reality. If one worker is not preferable to another, there is no logic

¹¹ Herbert Read, op. cit., p. 115.

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in selecting one over another as the subject of a painting. Ideally, the Marxist's canvas should be infinite so that he might portray all workers. Says Camus: "Realism is indefinite enumeration. By this it reveals that its real ambition is conquest, not of the unity, but of the totality of the real world. Now we understand why it should be the official aesthetic of a totalitarian revolution."¹² Social realism is thus the aesthetic counterpart of a political totalitarianism which seeks to bring the whole world under its domination.

The theological significance of the surrealist revolt against classicism lies in its rejection of rationalism and philosophies of substance. The theological significance of the revolt against realism lies in Surrealism's rejection of the secular premise. The new romanticism, which spawned surrealism, is, in Baudelaire's words, "intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts."¹³ Unlike classicism and realism, which are "closed" to the spirit, surrealism is "open." The dilemma, however, encountered by this new spirituality found expression in Rimbaud: "We are going toward the Spirit. . . . I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I'd rather remain silent."¹⁴

II

Earlier we argued that the universal expressions of surrealism are those of the evolving consciousness of mankind. Yet, just as Sir Herbert Read argued that classicism is the expression of a particular culture, it has also been argued that the metaphysical anxiety of the expressionist movement is but the expression of a particular regional temperament. In 1912, art critic Wilhelm Worringer put forth this argument in his book Form in Gothic, in which he argued that "the transcendentalism of the Gothic world of expression" is the style of Northern man as distinct from the classical expression of Southern or Mediterranean man. Environment, it seems, is a decisive factor in the determination of metaphysical anxiety; fear and insecurity are the products of a dark, austere, cold world. Baudelaire had put forth a similar thesis in "The Salon of 1846."

While there is a measure of truth in this thesis, it must finally be

¹² Albert Camus, The Rebel: Vintage Books, 1956, p. 270.
¹³ Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art: Doubleday Anchor Book, 1956, p. 44.
¹⁴ Arthur Rimbaud, "A Season in Hell" in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, ed. by Joseph M. Bernstein: Citadel, 1962, p. 175.

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argued that metaphysical anxiety is not simply a matter of geography but fundamentally a matter of human experience. If the scorching sun of Algeria is responsible for the calm, clear style of Camus' writing, it nevertheless failed to deprive him of an overwhelming sense of modern man's metaphysical exile. In America also, pragmatism, self-assurance, and gregariousness are regarded as typical of our attitude. Existentialist anxieties are thought of as post-war European imports, but such a view neglects two facts: (1) that existentialism is not a post-war phenomenon at all; its origins go at least as far back as Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard; and (2) that metaphysical anxiety is as natural to America as to Europe. Harry Levin's book, The Power of Blackness-a study of the "vision of evil" in Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville-makes it abundantly clear that Americans suffer as much from "an ambivalence of anguish" as do Europeans. In his opening chapter, entitled "The American Nightmare," Levin says that "having been relatively free from those political calamities which Europeans have borne, we [Americans] seem to face our conflicts internally."¹⁵ The recent publication of Mark Twain's long suppressed Letters from the Earth is but one more example of America's anxiety.

Finally, however, the metaphysical anxiety which pervades expressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism is much more than the expression of Northern man or the American nightmare. No race of men is immune to the crisis of faith and culture which defines the extreme situation of modern man. Paul Tillich's brilliant analysis¹⁶ of the breakdown of classical, medieval, and modern cultures shows that anxiety is present in every major cultural crisis. Sir Herbert Read, moreover, has pointed to the universality of anxiety in the modern period: "One has merely to look for a moment at the modern world to realize that the frontiers of the Middle Ages no longer exist. Metaphysical anxiety is now a global condition of mankind."¹⁷ When one adds to this the growing awareness that we now face "the end of the modern world"¹⁸ itself, the prospects of release from our anxiety seem slim indeed.

¹⁵ Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Vintage Books, 1960, p. 6.
¹⁶ In The Courage to Be. Yale University Press, 1956.
¹⁷ Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting: Praeger, 1959, p. 222.
¹⁸ Cf. Romano Guardini's The End of the Modern World: Sheed & Ward, 1956, and Geoffrey Clive's The Romantic Enlightenment: Meridian, 1960.

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III

Let us turn now to an analysis of the work of a number of contemporary American painters-limiting ourselves to the chief abstractionists of the past twenty years-whose work expresses the metaphysical anxiety of our time. Art critic Sam Hunter sets the stage for our analysis with his description of abstract expressionism as "this latter-day artistic theology without a God." This is not simply to say that modern art does not exhibit some "image" of God as did the paintings of Michelangelo and Blake. The presence or absence of the image of God in a work of art has little to do with whether a painting is religious. A Christ by Rouault or an abstract by Mark Tobey may be religious, while a Christ by Sallman is merely Lil' Abner with a beard. Tillich has provided us with a typology for determining the religious nature of a work of art.¹⁹ This typology, however, is satisfactory neither as a means for appreciating the work of art before us²⁰ nor as a way of understanding the religious nature of contemporary painting. A work of art is not religious or irreligious, depending on whether it is open or closed to the power of being. Were this the case, most of those artists whom we shall be discussing would have to be termed "irreligious," for they are the metaphysical exiles whom we have been mentioning. These are the "absurd" artists whom Ionesco has described as "devoid of purpose. . . . Cut off from [their] religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots . . . lost."²¹ If these painters are to be thought of as religious, it must be by virtue of their inversion of religious symbols and religious experience, because of their religious irreligiousness which chooses damnation²² in order freely to explore those depths of human depravity and greatness, light and darkness, which reason and morality falsely separate.²³

The first artist to concern us is Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). Pollock's work, in his early days, showed the influence of surrealism and an interest in Greek and Roman mythology. But his mature paint-

¹⁹ Paul Tillich, "Existentialist Aspects of Modern Art" in Christianity and the Existentialists, ed. by Carl Michalson.
²⁰ Baudelaire's categories of the exact or absurd, the naturalistic (idealized) and the imaginative are far more helpful; these categories correspond roughly to realism, classicism, and romanticism. Cf. The Mirror of Art, pp. 59 ff.
²¹ Quoted by Martin Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd: Doubleday Anchor Book, 1961, P. xix.
²² Thomas Mann once said, "I am filled with awe in presence of the religious greatness of the damned."
²³ Cf. Carl Jung's Psyche and Symbol: Doubleday Anchor Book, 1958, esp. pp. 36-60.

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ings belong to the art genus known as action painting or abstract expressionism. Pollock approached his canvases-which were usually stretched out on the floor or tacked to a wall-with sticks, trowel, brushes, and hands dripping with paint. Immersing himself in the work at band, he swirled the paint with intense speed and force, forming a veritable network of arabesques (which Baudelaire called "the most spiritualistic of designs"). Each of Pollock's paintings is a masterpiece of sensitivity and balance; each canvas possesses a marvelous, almost classical uniformity, at the same time that it gives the impression of extending beyond the canvas into infinity. (This potential infinity of Pollock's canvases, unlike that of social realism with its totalitarian aspirations, is the infinity of freedom!) The mythic power of She-Wolf (1943), the psycho-sexual symbolism of Male and Female (1942), the warm tranquility of Autumn Rhythms (1950), the almost-classical order of Number I (1949), and the torrid heat and frenzied passion of Number I (1948) show something of the great range of Pollock's creative talent. However, it is the Dionysian frenzy of Number I, 1948, which brings us to the heart of Pollock's particular creativity. The electric speed of Pollock's marvelously sensitive, swirling lines of light and dark, the ice-blue terror of the infinite, strike terror to the heart. Apropos of Pollock is Picasso's statement that every time he begins a painting, he feels as though he were throwing himself into the void. The bloodstained hand prints along the edges of the canvas reveal to us the full extent of the agony and terror, the tragic suffering, of the painter in the act of creating. Number 1, 1948, exhibits the feverish mood of crisis, the fierce mood of nihilism, of much contemporary art. The painting itself is without a center or horizons, thus making it impossible for us to get our bearings. The result is a sense of vertigo and an overwhelming sense of God's absence. W. B. Yeats wrote:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . .

Pollock's is the art of the broken center par excellence. And it is so by virtue of God's absence. As Aristophanes put it: "Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus." Or as Dostoevsky says, "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted."

Pollock's canvases reveal to us his anguish, the lure of the infinite, a nostalgia for brute violence, and an acceptance and affirmation of

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accident. The linear violence of these paintings is the voice of our tragedy, for ours is the metaphysical tragedy of nihilism-the possibility of nonbeing or the tragedy of never choosing to realize ourselves.²⁴ Pollock's vision is foreboding; his paintings are a warning against impending doom.

Our second artist is Arshile Gorky (1904-1948). Not an action painter like Pollock, Gorky might be called an abstract surrealist. Whereas Pollock's art may be that of a Dionysian frenzy, Gorky's art is more refined and given to the melancholy and brooding which characterizes many German and Russian artists. Pollock's sense of infinite freedom is at times almost lyrical, while the weightless suspension of objects in Gorky's art (a technique learned from Miró and Matta) is accompanied by a sense of agony and nausea. Gorky is to painting what Dostoevsky is to literature-the explorer and uncoverer of a new, psychological space. The beautiful and tragic painting, Agony (1947), suggests an interior context. Its lines and shapes-part human, part animal, part mechanical-form a fearful specter, a primitive fetish. The grays and running pools of black speak of anxiety and despair, the cold yellows of nausea, and the smoldering and feverish reds of an internal fire which burns without destroying. Incoherence and meaninglessness, solitude and despair, are the chief characteristics of Gorky's art. His also is the truth of the void, of the end.

Our third artist, perhaps the most influential of the recent moderns, is Willem de Kooning (1904- ), whose art is related to that of Pollock and Gorky at the same time that it moves beyond in search of the human image. It is the metaphysical crisis of modern man which has destroyed the human image in art itself. The modern man who would assert his freedom absolutely, who would usurp the empty throne of God, can do so only by an act of suicide---committed not from despair or the anguish and fear of death but in the full acceptance and affirmation of life. For only by an act of suicide can

²⁴ Richard Sewall has defined tragedy thus: "The tragic vision is in its first phrase primal, or primitive, in that it calls up out of the depths the first (and last) of all questions, the question of existence: What does it mean to be? It recalls the original terror, harking back to a world that antedates the conceptions of philosophy, the consolations of the later religions, and whatever constructions the human mind has devised to persuade itself that its universe is secure. It recalls the original un-reason, the terror of the irrational. It sees man as questioner, naked, unaccommodated, alone, facing mysterious, demonic forces in his own nature and outside, and the irreducible facts of suffering and death. Thus it is not for those who cannot live with unresolved questions or unresolved doubts, whose bent of mind would reduce the fact of evil into something else or resolve it into some larger whole."-The Vision of Tragedy: Yale University Press, 1959, pp. 4, 5.

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he assert his radical independence; self-deification is possible only through an act of self-destruction. I say this by way of suggesting that the disappearance of the human image in contemporary painting is, as it were, the act of "suicide" required by the radical freedom of the contemporary artist. "Alas! if every soul be its own creator and father, why shall it not be its own destroying angel, too?"²⁵

Unlike Pollock and Gorky, de Kooning seeks to save the human image from the boundary situation. He would rescue this image the moment before it vanishes into the primal chaos. Thus, the environment in which de Kooning places his women (his favorite image) is no-place, no-environment. The background image is distorted or destroyed-as in the case of the window in the upper right corner of Woman I (1952)-giving the impression of ambiguity: the window may be a window or a mirror or a picture; the background may be inside, outside, or nowhere. The anatomy of the women themselves is ambiguous: a neck and a thumb change places; a knee or a shoulder is salvaged from the chaos of paint just before it vanishes altogether. Letters and numbers are often introduced to create the double illusion of meaning and meaninglessness. Reintroducing a technique from cubism, de Kooning employs the technique of "sliced drawings." The line, for example, which separates the lips of de Kooning's women possesses a power so absolute that no visual transition from the upper lip to the lower is possible. The distance between the lips is "infinite," which leads me to suggest that this "sliced image" has something to do with the breakdown of language and communication in our time. Some years ago, I made an unsuccessful attempt to write a play entitled Death of a Poet in which I visualized words as trapeze artists. These "flying" performers, however, were haunted by the terrible fear that a day might come when they would fail to connect and would be killed or that they might survive only as grotesque figures of their fall. De Kooning's women, it seems to me, are just such grotesque figures. A painter friend once remarked to me that she found de Kooning's women too personal and too terrible to endure. Here is the human image-depicted, however, with a sense of horror and brutality, of tragedy and hopelessness. Yet at the same time the horror of these images is lightened by a sense of comedy; these are the cheerful guys and dolls

²⁵ Jean Paul, "Dream of a World Without God," quoted by Helmut Thielicke, Nihilism: Harper, 1961, p. 130.

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of Hollywood, the cheese-cake goddesses of the American billboard. The tragedy of self-loss, in de Kooning's hands, becomes tragicomedy not unlike that of a Jules Feiffer cartoon. De Kooning, like Pollock, paints with Dionysian frenzy, but it is frenzy defined by Nietzsche as "the tremendous drive to bring out the main features." "Through his poetic creation," says Sam Hunter of de Kooning, "the artist is enabled to transcend meaningless experience, and, in a sense, redeem existence. His work seems to represent a heroic attempt to assert himself in the region of the nihil."²⁶

IV

We have seen in the art of Pollock, Gorky, and de Kooning something of the extreme situation of despair and nihilism which defines the limits of modern man's existence. Here is the American nightmare, the "long day's journey into night." In one way or another, as Eliot says, "We all go into the dark." Yet it is my conviction that the very power of blackness, agony, and despair which threatens our existence is also our hope of making the journey to the end of night. I do not believe with Kierkegaard that the way out of the extreme situation is a "leap of faith" which affirms God's radical otherness to our cultural situation. Nor can I share Camus' withdrawal from the boundary situation and his affirmation of a redefined humanism. The way out of the extreme situation is the way of Dante-through hell and beyond! If we are to be ready for God's return, we must first live through-preferably in the realm of the imagination-the nihilist possibilities of our time-if for no other reason than that no faith or culture can stand which is not open to the radical "No"! Dostoevsky asked, "Whence come the Nihilists? They come from nowhere, for they have always been with us, in us, and among us." We can survive the onslaught of nihilism in our time only by acknowledging its rightful place in psychological and cultural experience. We are not saints, nor are we likely to be in this world. Light and shadow, joy and tragedy, good and evil are ambiguously joined in this existence, and it was the genius of a Mozart that he was able to hold the two in tension without courting his own damnation. Christianity has long affirmed ambiguity without comprehending its significance in its belief that death is given in life and

²⁶ Art Since 1945, P. 289.

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life, in death. Separate the two and Christianity is no more. Thus it is that I believe myself to be affirming an essentially Christian attitude when I argue that modern man must not back away from nihilism but must pass through hell itself if need be for the sake of his spirituality.

At this point we do well to seek a clearer understanding of the nature of God's death.

Modern man, because he is exiled and cut off from God, assumes that God is dead. This assumption, however, involves a judgment about metaphysical realities which cannot be made by men who acknowledge their own finitude and metaphysical estrangement. If I am in exile in the South Pacific, I cannot conclude from the fact that I do not receive the Saturday Review that, therefore, the Saturday Review has ceased publication; I can know only that I am not receiving it. My first comment, then, about the extreme situation of metaphysical exile is that it is a human situation, from which no conclusion about God can be drawn except that he appears not to be present with us in our anguish. There is a story told on Mark Twain-that once, when Twain was on an extended trip to Europe, a newspaper reporter got it into his mind that Twain had died and so reported in his paper. The news was immediately picked up, and when Twain learned of it, he wrote back to the American editor, saying, "Dear Sir, the reports of my death are somewhat exaggerated!" A similar situation exists, I believe, with regard to the "death of God" literature, psychology, philosophy, and art of our time.

If, then, we cannot conclude that God is dead, we are in a position to ask whether he may be revealing himself through the very reports and experiences which we have of his "death"? It is my thesis that the capacity of modern man and modern culture for damnation is the occasion for our hope that God may reappear. In a remarkable passage in his essay on Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot says:

So far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing; at least, we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation, it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned.²⁷

²⁷ Selected Essays: Harcourt, 1950, p. 380.

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The modern artists of whom we have been speaking have shown themselves men enough to be damned, and this is their religious greatness. For in their damnation, they have given to our nihilistic age a kind of spiritual underground. If our artists have been incapable of religious faith, they have at least shown us that modern man is incapable of unfaith. Erich Heller's comment on Kafka's art would apply also to that of Pollock, Gorky, de Kooning, and many other contemporary painters-namely, that "in Kafka's work the symbolic substance, forced back in every attempt to attack from above, invades reality from down below, carrying with it the stuff of Hell," thus showing "two things at once, and both with equal assurance: that there is no God, and that there must be God."²⁸

Now, we must ask, what is the religious significance of the demonic as our age has experienced it and expressed it in its cultural creations? Carl Jung holds that the Antichrist is the inevitable consequence of Christ's incarnation. "Psychologically," says Jung, "the case is clear, since the dogmatic figure of Christ is so sublime and spotless that everything else turns dark beside it."²⁹ Why is this? Because, Jung answers, "in our field of experience white and black, light and dark, good and bad are equivalent opposites which always predict one another."³⁰ Indeed, it is possible to argue that the bloody atrocities of modern warfare owe something to Christian piety and asceticism.³¹ Hence, if the dialectic of experience and of history is such that light evokes dark and good evokes evil, may we not also conclude that darkness and evil may evoke light and goodness? If modern man has been plunged into his dark abyss in part as a result of Christianity, may we not expect the abyss of modern nihilism to yield some light in turn? Which is to say that if the old metaphysical realities are closed to us, perhaps there is yet a metaphysical "underground" of which we are hardly aware.

There are a number of contemporary painters whose work seems to me to constitute an engagement with this metaphysical "underground," notably Clifford Still, Mark Rothko, and Philip Guston.

²⁸ The Disinherited Mind: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957, pp. 206, 214.
²⁹ Psyche and Symbol, p. 40.
³⁰ Ibid., P. 50.
³¹ War is, in theory as in fact, the correlative of religion. The Christian religion in its Calvinistic rigor induced the bloodiest epoch in the world's history. Piety and asceticism are inevitably accompanied by masochism and sadism, and the more religion has been deprived of a ritualistic and occult indulgence of the senses, rationalizing itself in the form of moral precepts and social conventions, the deeper the world has plunged into compensatory orgies of hatred and bloodshed."-Sir Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art, p. 119.

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The paintings of these men reflect the threat and shock of a world which transcends the flat surface of the canvas. Rothko, for example, has said that "Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama." Rothko's own early work depicted the single human figure, alone and immobile, incapable of human communication. In an effort to break this "silence and solitude," Rothko turned to surrealism and finally developed his own unique means of purifying the pictorial content. His latest and most important work consists of an elaboration of linear and rectangular color bars of brilliant chemical reds, blues, yellows, and oranges. The edges and backgrounds of these color bars are indistinct, thus exhibiting an ominous quality as of the sun seeking to break through layers of fog.³² "The lack of a clear point of termination in the boundaries of shapes creates an ambiguous interplay of advance and recess, and a multiple logic of movement; Rothko's flat color masses can be read, alternately, as foreground plane or background void."³³ Black Over Reds (1957) is a supreme example of the black void which pulls the spectator into its dark abyss while overpowering him where he stands. Rothko's vision is simultaneously angelic and demonic. Clifford Still and Philip Guston are closely related to Rothko. These painters suggest to us the unity of being and the revelation of transcendent mystery. The intense spirituality of their art together with its revelatory qualities make it significant as a potential revelation of the Underground God.

V

If there is significance in the development of a mode of painting whose chief characteristic is its revelatory power, there is significance also in the myth-creating power of art. Returning to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes:

It is the sure sign of the death of a religion when its mythic presuppositions become systematized, under the severe, rational eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a ready sum of historical events, and when people begin timidly defending the veracity of myth but at the same time resist its natural continuance-when the feeling for myth withers and its place is taken by a religion claiming historical foundations. . . . It was through tragedy that myth achieved its profoundest content, its most expressive form; it arose once again like a wounded

³² The image is Sam Hunter's.
³³ Art Since 1945, p. 308.

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warrior, its eyes alight with unspent power and the calm wisdom of the dying.³⁴

The rationalization of religious or cultural myths strips them of their life-power, after which no reasoned defense of the importance of myth can restore its vitality. It is only as the creative imagination works upon the content of personal and cultural experience (usually tragic) that new myths are born, freely, having the life-power of a first vision of the world.³⁵ Myth, without which we are at the mercy of our own limited comprehension, cannot be fabricated by philosophers or theologians. For this we need seers and artists-poets, painters, musicians. Among contemporary painters whose work is significant for its mythic power, Picasso (1881- ) is possibly the greatest. No other painter of our century has exhibited so fertile an imagination. His mural, Guernica, surely the most powerful painting of the twentieth century, is a masterpiece both in its simplicity and in its use of myth or allegory. Picasso himself says, "The mural is for the definite expression and solution of a problem and that is why I used symbolism." The "problem," of course, upon which Picasso was working was that of how to express the outrage which he and millions of Europeans felt over the saturation bombing of the little market town of Guernica in April, 1937, by German bombers in Franco's pay. Guernica is a monument to the disillusion, despair, and destruction of modern warfare. More than that, "it shows the human situation without any cover."³⁶ Space will not permit the detailed commentary upon this mural which it deserves,³⁷ but I would not pass without calling attention to such things as the hidden third eye of the bull (with which the better to watch for the enemy-who in some sense transcends the existential realities of the painting); the woman in the window whose outstretched arm holds

³⁴ Op. cit., P. 68.
³⁵ "It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are fantastic and 'unreal'; they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs. Even when the legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds of victory are rendered, not in lifelike, but in dreamlike figurations; for the point is not that such-and-such was done on earth; the point is that, before such-and-such could be done on earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we all know and visit in our dreams. The passage of the mythological hero may be overground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward-into depthswhere obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world." Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Meridian, 1956, p. 26.
³⁶ Paul Tillich, op. cit., p. 138.
³⁷ For a more detailed commentary, cf. Roland Penroses's Picasso: His Life and Work: Schocken, 1962, pp. 265-276.

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the light of truth over this terrible nightmare; and the sun (reminiscent of the vesica piscis which was used in Byzantine art to make a transcendental frame around the image of Christ) which is now rolled over on its side, empty except for the artificial electric light which has been substituted for the sun's former brilliance. Guernica is the work of a powerful mythmaker whose protest against the inhumanity of our time has something in common with the prophets of the Old Testament. If Picasso's vision has more in common with that of de Kooning than of Rothko, nevertheless a wedding of Picasso's mythic power and Rothko's metaphysical awareness is what is needed before contemporary painting can become an adequate vehicle for the revelations of the Underground God.

By now it should be evident that I believe God's death and the nihilism of modern history to be but manifestations of God's "underground activity." The images and symbols of our extreme situation which the modern artist gives us are the inverted symbols of the Spirit. Thus, the profound metaphysical anxiety which extends from van Gogh to Rothko is at once the mark of God's absence and of his presence. The anguish of unbelief which is so evident in the paintings of Pollock and Gorky evidences our inability to achieve a wholly secular culture. Thus, failing to become secular, we have become demonic. Yet evil, too, as Milton and Melville knew, has its divinity. "Through indulging a devilish sneer, uttering blasphemies, and pampering with brutish satisfactions the lowest in man," says Henri Peyre of Baudelaire, "the poet also hoped to arouse the angel in him and to incite the sinful creature to stand up and offer some justification for the world."³⁸ So it is that the dialectic of the demonic, like the dialectic of the holy, may become the occasion for God's self-revelation, and that all the more powerfully because of the power of evil against which it must assert itself. Thus, as I see it, the "death of God" is nearing its end. Dostoevsky's Underground Man, after a century,³⁹ is finding his theological corollary -the Underground God. For in this present age, it seems, God has chosen to reveal himself not in rational consistency and holiness but through the antinomies of our time, and through the mystery of evil. "Can it be," asks Hans Holthusen, "that truth no longer wishes to be recognized in the knowable, in convictions, in logical relation-

³⁸ Henri Peyre, ed., Baudelaire: Prentice-Hall, 1962, p, 25.
³⁹ Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground was first published in 1864.

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ships? Is it rather to be found in the shifting 'events' of the soul, in scandalous self-contradictions? 'Ambivalence of concepts,' Gottfried Benn has called it: 'Fusion of everything with its opposite.'"⁴⁰ The dark night of the soul through which we have been living may be witnessing a new dawn. And the light will come the more quickly when Christians themselves begin to understand what it means that the death of God was a moment in the Christian revelation itself.

⁴⁰ Finley Eversole, ed., Christian Faith and the Contemporary Arts: Abingdon, 1962, p. 99.