I have a favourite biblical metaphor: ‘in the shadow of the Almighty’. It comes from a reading of the meaning of the name of one of my heroes, Bezalel – the character in Exodus who was ‘filled … with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs’. All the dictionaries make ‘in the shadow of’ synonymous with ‘under the protection of’. But why limit the metaphor?
Anyway, creativity consists of bringing often disparate ideas into conversation to see what emerges, and so I decided to try out an unlikely symposium. I read The Dark Night of the Soul by 16th century Spanish monk and mystic St John of the Cross alongside In Praise of Shadows by 20th century Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. What might emerge?
Aesthetic and Religious
The 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard charted a philosophical progression from the aesthetic life (a life of youthful sensuality and surface beauty), through the ethical life, to the religious. If these categories are used as a framework for textual critique, our two authors immediately appear to fall into separate camps.
Tanizaki’s work makes no bones about being a thorough-going work of aestheticism and he wouldn’t, I think, see anything pejorative, as Kierkegaard did, about the aesthetic life.
John’s work is a thorough-going religious ascetic exposition that has the ultimate vision of freeing the reader from earthly realms and into unity with God.
Tanizaki relishes the sensual deliciousness of the shadows, while John notices the distinct sensual bitterness (even horror) of darkness.
And yet, there is an aged wisdom in Tanizaki and a profound appreciation for beauty that defies Kierkegaard’s stereotype of shallow, merely hedonistic youthfulness.
And John embraces fleshy and aesthetic metaphors (in all his writing, influenced as he was by Song of Songs), to a degree that seems to verge on the spiritual erotic, that point to a profound (trans-sensual, as it were) deliciousness being found through the darkness, beyond the purgation of the basic human senses.
A Dark Mise-en-Scène
Both Tanizaki and John begin their excursions grounded in an architectural sense of space, with an evocative, mysteriously dark mise-en-scène.
I.
In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed,
O, happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest.
II.
In darkness and safety.
By the secret ladder, disguised…
says John.
Meanwhile, Tanizaki situates his essay within the traditional Japanese home with its shadowy interior.
John uses his mise-en-scène metaphorically, as a launchpad for his leap of faith, his foray into the realms of spirit (he wishes to leave his house), while Tanizaki tends towards the concrete, grounded in his material (he wishes to stay). Nonetheless, there is something evocative in Tanizaki that seems to hint (unless it’s just my eager imagination trying to make connections) at a kind of poignant presence:
And yet, when one gazes into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquillity holds sway.
And (in a passage that I think St John would have appreciated, at least metaphorically):
On the far side of the screen, at the edge of the little circle of light, the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as from a black wall. I wonder if my readers know the colour of that ‘darkness seen by candlelight’. It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each article luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes.
The Religion and Dynamic of Light and Dark
Later, Tanizaki remarks on the Western preference for light, makes a true observation, tries to explain it, but misses noticing that it is, to a significant extent, a religious situation.
Western Christianity, and therefore culture, is steeped in the metaphors of brightness. Western art loves chiaroscuro – the interplay of shadow and light – but the eye ever draws to brightness. This is what makes John of the Cross, and a few other Western Christian mystics, so remarkable… they notice the treasures of darkness, peer into it and treat the dark night as being a normal season in the life of faith. (This is their major gift to the church.)
In this way, they connect round to a more Eastern understanding (it is held in Orthodox Christianity as well)… the one alluded to (I think) in the above quotes from Tanizaki. Darkness is an inevitable fact of life, and there can be, and is, beauty and presence there.
It’s a presence-absence dynamic, a paradox in which the two interweave into some kind of quantum whole… an ultimate unity. I think our worded mindset wants to run the presence-absence dynamic parallel with speaking-silence. But the two are not strictly synonymous, though that second paradox also ends up interweaving into unity. Whoops. For a minute there I lost myself.
Emergence
Perhaps I’m not doing either author full justice by trying so hard to find them common ground (in reality they are very different works), but – the shared themes of the two essays?
The night and shadows bring their gifts which, if we are content to sit where we find ourselves and watch (behold) and see (a contemplative / mindful posture), forms of beauty will appear, emerge.
As for our third conversation partner, Kierkegaard sneaks in with the final word. For now. What becomes of aesthetics when all things flourish in the religious life, the life of Presence, when darkness is not simply darkness but the shadow and shade of the divine? A place of protection (sanctuary), yes, but also the space and ground of transformation, creation, and so much more.
Everything in its right place.
As far as the aesthetic stage of existence is concerned what is preserved in the higher religious stage is the sense of infinite possibility made available through the imagination. But this no longer excludes what is actual. Nor is it employed for egotistic ends. Aesthetic irony is transformed into religious humour, and the aesthetic transfiguration of the actual world into the ideal is transformed into the religious transubstantiation of the finite world into an actual reconciliation with the infinite.
Aesthetics with a capital A, our leaps of faith being like the dancer’s leap, both upward and grounded. Embodied but/and transcendent. Sacramental and complete.
That being the case, spare me the extremes of the body disconnection, excessive ascetic tortures and horrors of John and the fundamental materialism of Tanizaki but, partaking in something of their imagination, let me into the shadow of the Almighty.
Notes
The Darkness
Night cancels the business of the day;
inertia recharges the mind.
Then the day cancels the night,
and inertia disappears in the light.
Though we sleep and rest in the dark,
doesn’t the dark contain the water
of life?
Be refreshed in the darkness.
Doesn’t a moment of silence
restore beauty to the voice?
Opposites manifest through opposites:
in the black core of the heart
God created the eternal light of love.
The Sacrament of Breathing 