Using the story of Hagar and Ishmael as a launch pad for discussion. Genesis: 16.

Hagar in the Wilderness Camille Corot.

To be in the world meant for Martin Heidegger to be Dasein- be a part of the natural state of the world and nature, to be present in the world, and yet being unto oneself for the sake of the self.  Naming introduces language as a direct connection between the world, art and mankind.  Having introduced that idea, Heidegger also stated that we do not know what being means truthfully.  We can ask, “how am I in the world?” a question regarding the self, and simply answered one could reply, “I am okay”.  It’s another matter to ask, “who am I?”.

The answer would produce a reference or name. “I am so and so”.  Such an answer is what would place man in the world as a thing, or a ‘being’ in the world; to make you a part or blend of the natural landscape.  Naming can be traced back to biblical roots.  First man was named Adam and the woman named, Eve.  Adam gave the animals and things names and they all became relevant to creation.  They could be spoken about in general terms or individually.   Each thing was named and stood in the world as things.  They became things with uses to be revealed through their utility.   Each named thing appeared as beings for themselves having only ends in themselves, and only for the good in and for themselves.

Van Gogh’s painting “A Pair of Shoes” is only a representation until its worn and the first discovery falls away and it is blended with the wearer or user, to  become something else.  Observed muddy on the feet in the fields, the ‘thing’ shoes, is now a tool, a protection for feet.

Something else has been revealed about shoes.  Their use, who wears them, and the particular occupation of the wearer, etc.  We see them on Farmer’s feet in the fields, or we surmise by their gnarled looks and muddy appearance what the occupation of the wearer is.  Heidegger contends that shoes created by the artisan is only half the art work, they stand silently in their thingness as the rest of the art work, which is the true art, is concealed waiting to be revealed in their usefulness.

It is the blend of leather, earth, flesh, creativity, and usefulness, that shows us the complete merge with nature which is hidden in the spirituality of the work..  In this state of disclosure the truth or proper understanding of the thing is revealed, this truth is the art, and the aesthetic nature of a thing, in this case a pair of shoes.   Martin Heidegger contends that “the artist is the origin of the work, and the work is the origin of the artist; neither is without the other.[i] A blend of the Art work and the self.  A merge of substance matter and man”[ii]

The Divine Spirit of things such as paintings, or their sacredness, is contained in the aesthetics of the work which is revealed by the spectator’s interpretation.  Until then it hangs on a wall or packed away in a warehouse indifferent to the world as – wood, canvas, paint representation or reproductions.  Their thingnesss all concealed.   If we pair Gadamer’s position to that of Heidegger’s, we will  discovery through Gadamer another key factor to understanding a work of art; and that is through language.  Gadamer discusses three aspects of a work of art, and with regards to a painting, he stresses that it is not just a representation, instead it is a medium or pathway to a new space within being and time, that can be experienced repeatedly.  How do we do this?

In Truth and Method, he writes, “All self knowledge arises from what is historically pre-given, what with Hegel we call “substance”, because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility for understanding any tradition whatsoever in its historical alterity. This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it.”[iii]

I interpret this to mean that we do this through history which is really the language or historical consciousness of another place and time allowing  us to interpret fresh experience through works of art.  We understand through the language of past cultural styles, societal norms, religious customs, and we realize how they underpin our present determinations.  And as Gadamer explains it, “as something that supports us although it does not emerge into the light of reflective consciousness, it is something that can never be fully articulated, although it is necessary for the existence of all clarity, consciousness, expressions and communication.[iv] Language allow us to enter being and time to experience this blend of the art work and the self.

So where and how does art occur? Heidegger asks.  Hegel said that no true art exists today. It used to be he says,  in past cultures when art collaborated with societal life-styles and was presented in its full usefulness. As symbols of worship, as dramatic plays, as crafts to be used e.g. wine vats, painted utensils, wall frescoes, weapons of war, clothing for rank and file, and as icons of spiritual motivation in medieval times.   Here we take note of Michelangelo’s David which was an object of admiration and perhaps even revered in the Greek culture.  But it was not the most useful beyond representation and spectacle.   It did not provoke aesthetic much introspection.  Art in antiquity could be seen as just things involved in everyday living.  It did not seem as if there was anything special about that kind of art beyond their usefulness and the places they occupied in that world.  It is philosophy and aesthetics that liberated art through the spiritual lenses, using language as a bridge to examine the history of times past.  “ Fine Art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy, and has simply become a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature”[v]

Language it appears is crucial to understanding the relationship between man and the world, between man and the Divine.  Leaning in on the opinions of all three thinkers, the painting by Camille Corot titled “Hagar in the Wilderness”, in my interpretation is a fine example of a work of art bearing all components of – Being, Truth, and The Divine.  A look back at the history of the world, we encounter the biblical story of Hagar the Egyptian handmaid of Sara, who was the wife of Abraham the Patriarch. 

Recounted in the oral tradition of the Hebrew Priests,in the language of the era, we read the story in the book of Genesis[vi] of how the barren Sara became displeased with her servant Hagar who was pregnant with the child of Sara’s husband Abraham.  Sara petitioned Abraham to intervene in the dispute,  he in turn directs Sara to deal with the matter however she finds agreeable.  Hagar was put out of the tribe to fend for herself but was brought back through the intervention of God.  Hagar gave birth, and when her son was a boy, she was once again abandoned to the wilderness by Sara who God had since blest with her own son Isaac.  Hagar’s travails in the Wilderness was bitter and her suffering extreme.  Without food and water, Hagar must watch her young child die.   She petitioned Yahweh who answered her prayers and saved them both.  At every step the Divine was present in the language of the story.

In the painting by Camille Corot, the French Landscape painter; the spirit of the back-story is conjured up with colors depicting a dry and nonflowering desert and we see the pitiful sight of Hagar kneeling on the earth.  Her expression and body language appear desperate.  Clad in black, she waits,  anticipating the death of her only child who lay at her feet on the parched earth.  Her posture is disturbing, it is one of complete despair.  When I look at the picture in a museum as a modern-day spectator, even if I was not aware of the back story, I am mesmerized by the desperation the painting evokes.  The child appears dead or dying, a woman kneels in lamentation, her hands out stretched to the heavens in supplication.  Everything around them appears parched.  Death will surely come.  I am usually  overcome with pity, but because I know the language of the story I am relieved of my despair knowing she was miraculously helped.

Corot’s choice of bland, drab, lifeless colors depicted the wretched landscape, and without any doubt captured the anguish and the harshness of the Wilderness.  He painted Hagar in full black ready to mourn after the untimely death of her child, and her own death which would surely follow.   The brown dusty looking earth appears to claw at the limp body of the child who Corot paints in white clothing, no doubt because of his innocence.   Nothing appears to be flowering or life-giving in the landscape. Far away from all other life, their success with living appears bleak.  To look at the painting without knowledge of the back story will at all cost evoke pain, despair and many questions.  What are they doing there? and how did they get there? would be two such questions.

Camille Corot seems to know the back story of Hagar in the Wilderness as well as the Genesis myth of Hagar and Ishmael. His work show a deep familiarity with the harshness of the Wilderness of Paran.  He paints the unforgiving nature of the desert in an ashy after-glow which I find striking every time I revisit the painting.    This is the natural condition of a Wilderness as a thing unto itself.  It is as a wilderness ought to be.  I see two humans outcast in the wild, estranged from the Divine, and who in death will eventual merge with the earth; a natural progression of all life.  This painting evokes compassion and much reflective consciousness.

Hagar in the Wilderness opens up the historical language of culture, and religious beliefs of a time past.  Looking at this painting through Hegelian lenses, the Divine expression is evoked and  justified through the language of the back story.  Knowing the language of the painting’s history brings the truth and beauty of the art into the present and makes its truth not reducible.  When the truth of the work of art is grasped, the whole meaning comes to the foreground; or at least according to Gadamer a path of revelation or unconcealment opens up.  We are drawn into the world of the art work and receive disclosures, auras of a past, and a sense of dasein.

Being, Time and the Divine or Sacred is expressed in Camille Corot’s “Hagar in the Wilderness”and speaks to Life in Art,  Life and Art, a true blend of Art and Man.  In the painting, Hegel’s Divine connection with man is serenely depicted by the Angel coming to the aid of mother and child.  The cruel grip of the earth will be vanquished as life is established.  But is the aesthetic spirit of Life and Art visible in any other art form?  Can we see man and world in motion as they actively merge in other kinds of art works? I propose that we can.  We can do this looking at another type of art form, the dramatic art.  Dramatized as an act of worship, the Eucharistic Feast is a work of art each time it is celebrated like a Greek tragedy played before spectators.  A God has been killed. The God went to Sheol, the God broke the bonds of death and came back up to earth as a hero.  The God lives and offers salvation to the spectator –believers.

This historical and sacred act of celebrating the Eucharist is a living drama demonstrating a work of art which is always conveyed through the senses aesthetically.  The first act highlights the altar with all the trappings of a religion of the past.  Sacrificial altar, blood, a dead body hanging from a cross, sets the stage.  The second act is interactive in that, there must be  acceptance of a set of religious beliefs by the Priest actors and spectators, namely; that the body and blood of Christ is manifested in the Eucharistic wafer and wine, that Christ Himself is manifested among the worshipers at the precise time the priest says the invocation.  The third and most important act is invisible.  It is the metaphysical belief in the historical language of the Christian crucifixion story of Jesus Christ, his resurrection and his command to “Do this in memory of me”.[vii]

Mysterium tremendum[viii], and a bit of  the concept of magical realism[ix], is the aesthetic transport that unites this work of art in time and space and  invokes the language of the past during each celebration; is precisely how the philosophical aesthetic disclose the Spirit and Sacredness of this work of art.  I am saying therefore that every time the Eucharist is celebrated in active drama on the altar or stage before an audience in present time, altogether they produce a  work of art. The art is new every time the actors appear on stage and is witnessed by the spectators present.  Its collaborative, its communal, its useful in that it instructs, as well as it is a global event performed daily.  The stage or altar is in a different place each time, like a museum collection, the art work moves around.

The colors on the altar always change seasonally as in nature and is reflected in the liturgical calendar; the dramatists/actors may vary between one to three, but always the Eucharistic elements of the wafer and wine remain the same, those are the key elements used to invoke the historical language or consciousness of the art work.  The Eucharistic symbols represent the earth literally and scientifically.  With the use of language, man and earth are merged in a profound work of art and manifest in the spectators at the very moment of the Priest’s mystical invocation.  The miracle occurs and The Divine enters the living picture and engages Hegel’s geist and the spiritual freedom he spoke of.  This spiritual freedom is the beauty and art that Gadamer put forward in his essay, “The Relevance of the Beautiful”. The dramatic living, moving, work of art, means different things to different people.  The beauty of it is coaxed out from nature, and the emotions are experienced as the art is happening.  Not quite cinema, or having camera lucida capabilities, the Eucharistic Celebration involves spectators who are called believers in the ancient language of the Christian tenets.  It is this language of Christianity that empowers the Eucharistic work of art to be a movable feast, aesthetically propelling visions of a higher heavenly salvific feast in a future concept of time.  One has to be present in the now, and present in the past at the same time to invoke and disclose the concealment of the earth and world interplay during the enactment.  You have to believe in myths and miracles to experience  the tension between nature and the Divine.

A certain excitement comes when reading Martin Heidegger’s expositions on Being and Time.  His discussions trigger the mystical, the paranormal, the scientific and the original concept that there is a Divine first cause.  The earth and world are constantly in interplay and man as being flows from Dasein and “it does so with time as its standpoint.”[x]  Time Heidegger says “must be brought to light – and genuinely conceived as its horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it.  In order to discern this, time needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands Being”.   We today, look at time in a  different way than the way Heidegger suggests.

To understand historical time or historicity, we must find the connecting paths between the past and the present.  We have to uncover the language of the past and reconcile it with the metaphysical meaning of the present.   Language and culture offer us an arena between the two zones, where we can stand Hegel says, “because it introduces an ongoing rational project to realize freedom as an expression of beauty”.  The painting by Corot and the Art of The Eucharistic Celebration both engage thoughts out of the ordinary when we try to connect them to the dasein of Being.  The mysticism of the Eucharistic wafer and the wine, the appearance of the angel in a place of desperation, show us the tension between temporality and transcendence in both works of art;  but are the works relevant  in the modern concept of time and space?

The philosophy and aesthetic of  art will remain the same because the nature and beauty of art is valued using the same parameters of what a thing is.  Yet, when modernity is applied to both Hagar in the Wilderness and the movable feast of the Eucharistic Celebration we are faced with a modern self-consciousness of the art which has to be addressed.  A radical thinker could suggest that Corot’s painting is a case of revenge that we are presently seeing played out in Syria.  The journalistic war photographs of the Syrian destruction is as bleak as that of Corot’s “Hagar in the Wilderness” except that we cannot conjure or super impose an Angel to make the photographs hopeful.

The anthropology of the ancient Wilderness story sticks to these modern Syrian war photographs like a disease, in contrast to the Eucharistic Celebration which continues to move from stage to stage carrying the same mystical message of over two thousand years, regardless of the efficacy or impact on the world stage.  Both works of art depict a blend of art and man and the tension that is between them and the Spirit.   They must combine their past languages if we are to gain understanding about what they are ‘more than.’  This Heidegger says is that which resists meaning yet makes itself present or shows up as irreducible.

[i] Martin Heidegger. “The origin of the Work of Art”. Dec. 2006. Translated by Roger Berkowitz & Phillipe Nonet.

[ii] Martin Heidegger.

[iii] Gadamer, Hans- Georg, “Truth and Method” essay (302)

[iv] Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful”.( 78)

[v] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, “Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics” penguin Books.

[vi] The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Genesis: 21, 10-21.

[vii] The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Luke 22: 19-20.

[viii] Otto, Rudolf. “The Idea of the Holy; “The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship.  It may pass over into more set and lasting…” oxford University Press, 1958.

[ix] Magical Realism: Merriam Webster Dictionary, “an incorporation of the fantastic or mythical element into otherwise realistic fiction”.

[x] Heidegger. Page 39.