Mondrian and Neo-Calvinism

ion by Mondrian, including proportions and colours of the rectangular areas, and their relative distances and positions, will seem, when attuned, ‘justified’ in a sense analogous to the theological meaning (p. 14, italics mine). Whether readers will be convinced by the analogy remains to be seen, and Mashek’s bolder speculations tend to obscure the analogical nature of this core argument. The crucial importance of this observation can be made clearer by considering George Steiner’s parallel argument about the nature of aesthetic meaning and an objection that has been raised to it.3 In harmony with the phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hans-Georg Gadamer,4 Steiner argues that close attention to the way in which meaning is ‘incarnated’ in works of art—analogously to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist—raises questions in a theological register, most urgently, the question of an ultimate guarantor of meaning: a guarantor of the meaning of everything, the work of art included. He captures the spirit of his analogy in a parallelistic rhetorical question: ‘Is there or is there not God? Is there or is there not meaning to being?’5 Some critics have misunderstood Steiner, mistaking his suggestive argument from analogy for an abortive attempt at modus ponens. The Scottish philosopher Ronald W. Hepburn asks, ‘could one not affirm that meaning exists, without thereby affirming that God exists also?’6 The same query, with its implied affirmative answer, underwrites James Wood’s naïve conclusion that all Steiner offers, in his notion of ‘Real Presences’ in art, is ‘a hedged secularism written up religiously’.7 But Steiner is not claiming that the presence of meaning in works of art entails the existence of God. His analogy between aesthetic and religious modes of meaning suggests, rather, that questions in a theological register (but not answers) are prerequisite 3 G. Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber & Faber, 1989); idem, ‘Real Presences’ [1985], in No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), 20–39. 4 See M. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. R. C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University press, 1964), 64 cf. Richard Kearney, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Sacramentality of the Flesh’, in K. Semonovitch and N. De Roo (eds), Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion and Perception (London: Continuum, 2010), 147–66, esp. 153; H.-G. Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as Play, Symbol, and Festival’, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. R. Bernasconi (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), 3–53, esp. 35. 5 Steiner, Real Presences, 220. 6 Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Aesthetic and Religious: Boundaries Overlaps and Intrusions’, in idem, The Reach of the Aesthetic (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 96–112, on 106. 7 James Wood, ‘Toppling the monument’, prospectmagazine.co.uk, 20 December 1996, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/topplingthemonument, accessed 11th April, 2019. Book of the Month 23 to a full understanding of the meaning of artistic creation—and of meaning in general. One can foresee a parallel objection being levelled at Mashek with greater accuracy, especially against his bold claim that Mondrian’s classic works entail neo-Calvinist metaphysical ideas (pp. 14, 40). To forfend against such critique, the analogical nature of the argument should have been underscored, and Mashek should not have tried—too ambitiously—to secure additional support from the rigid logical apparatus of entailment. His argument should have been more modestly bolstered by the suggestive analogy between the aesthetic and the religious. For, if Mashek’s reading of Calvin is accurate, this kind of argument might give us good reason to think that, just as the meaning of artistic creation in general may be made more intelligible by analogy with the Eucharistic Real Presence, so Mondrian’s classic works in particular may be more fully understood by analogy with the Calvinist idea of justification. Framed in these strictly analogical terms, Mashek’s argument could perhaps have cast Mondrian as a convincing Calvin to Steiner’s Erasmus. This short volume is informative and thought-provoking. It will repay careful study by those interested in Mondrian, neo-Calvinism, and the dense network of relationships between religion and the arts.