Art and Spiritual Experience

David Greenwood is an engineer and theologian who has been involved in the Alister Hardy Trust researching religious and spiritual experience, especially in relation to art – here he explores how works of art and particularly landscapes in the romantic period can trigger an awareness of the transcendental. He begins with an interesting analysis of the development of aesthetics in Germany with Kant, Schiller, Hegel and Schelling, moving on to the less well-known but important figures of Runge and Carus. He uses a framework developed by Michael Podro, especially his criterion that the artist 'engages with the state of mind of the viewer to achieve an elevated state or heightened emotional response to the work of art which may suggest a transcendence that lies behind the objects depicted' (p. 7) Goethe's science of participation and contemplation is mentioned in this respect but arguably deserves more extensive treatment. In addition to art, the author refers to significant music, including that of Bach, and I can endorse his suggestion that elevated states can be touched here, recalling Bach's Passacaglia in King's College Chapel and his Dorian fugue in Notre Dame de Paris.

After a discussion of the ideas of Rudolf Otto, William James and others, the author embarks on his main task of examining the life, background and representative paintings of Samuel Palmer and Caspar David Friedrich – here we encounter a major drawback that, apart from Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog depicted on the front cover, there are no illustrations of the paintings covered, not even in black and white. The diligent reader will have to source these on the internet while reading. The approach is captured in a quotation from Schlegel: 'the universe we can neither explain nor conceive, but only contemplate and reveal' (p. 89) – this is knowledge of Schelling's intellectual intuition, and the complementary perspectives of rational and intuitive are extensively treated by Iain McGilchrist, whose work does not feature in the bibliography. There is no doubt, as the author suggests and elaborates – for instance with icons – that art can be sacramental, as also experienced by Paul Tillich, Michael Ramsey and John McQuarrie. This book is a significant interdisciplinary contribution to the relationship between art and spiritual experience.