Contemplating the Stations of the Cross

During the course of Lent, it is a very Anglo-Catholic tradition to dwell upon the Stations of the Cross. 

These offer a devotional way of “walking” the Passion of Christ and move sequentially through key moments of his suffering and death in prayerful contemplation. The practice derives as a form of local re-presentation or imitation of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem that marks the final journey of Christ to the Cross.

Traditionally the Stations comprise fourteen images or “stations,” placed around the walls of a church as we see in ours. As a form of devotion, worshippers move from station to station, pausing to meditate on the event depicted from Jesus’ condemnation, walk to Calvary, crucifixion, death, and burial thus creating a kind pilgrimage enacted in miniature.

In our various online postings during Lent, we have been using photographs of our own Stations of the Cross from this church. These images and our interaction with them prompt some very interesting questions that stand adjacent to the process of spiritual meditation that comprises liturgical observation of the Stations themselves. 

These are questions about the relation of works of art – be they visual, audible, or even in the form of poetry to matters of truth and our understanding of disclosure and even revelation. 

As we think about such questions we can distinguish (a) what an artwork shows or discloses, (b) what can be said about that disclosure in propositional form, and (c) the specific ways different genres or forms of art (music, painting, poetry, etc.) make such disclosure possible. 

But first we might ask what we mean by “Disclosure?” There is the broad phenomenological sense, where a world is “opened up” to us or “unconcealed.” As Heidegger understood, art is not just decoration added to an already-known world, but rather a mode in which aspects of the world, of our experience, and even of ourselves (and of others), are brought into view that would otherwise remain latent or unnoticed. Understanding this brings home a key point, in that works of art can be said to derive their warrant potentially from the fact that they make available to us thus what otherwise would not be. And we can also express this by saying they make available aspects of meaning we would not otherwise encounter or discern.

Gadamer spoke of such works of art as a “presentation” (Darstellung) in which a world happens, as Ricoeur did of the “world of the text,” that is projected in front of the work. Moreover, in such perspectives a work does not just represent an already-given set of facts, it configures elements: such as those of narrative, color, rhythm, perspective—into a whole which we find meaningful, and that makes new possibilities of seeing and inhabiting reality available.

Thus can a work of art be understood to articulate a “take” upon reality, that is uniquely valuable because it is not ultimately reducible to a list of propositions, even though the work is something from which propositions can be abstracted. It will also make manifest to us dimensions of our own affectivity, memory, and moral sensibility, and can thus help us to understand what one feels or values in and through the encounter. And then again, to be even bolder, one may claim that such works give access—even if only obliquely—to the perspectives and interiorities of others, and can do so in narrative and dramatic genres but also in music and visual art.

In terms of “propositional content,” we may mean at least two things:

1.      Content that can be articulated in declarative sentences that can express truth claims and 

2.      Content that is actually encoded somehow in the work which deploys interpretive conventions and symbols in such a way that understanding the work requires, and may even upon occasion facilitate our grasping such propositions. (Even though this prompts the question of what governs or constrains the body of proposition which can thus be generated as must the case if specific meaning is to be conveyed). 

Poetry or a novel very directly, by virtue of the medium used, invites the audience to see the world under certain descriptions, but the propositions alone do not adequately capture the aesthetic or revelatory value of the work. Moreover, what is stated discursively does not exhaust or capture what is given in the actual moment of encounter with the artwork itself. 

Hence as Goodman, Langer, Danto, Nussbaum, Gadamer and others have argued, artworks are cognitively significant—and thus may be said to bear on truth and understanding—without being reducible simply to bundles of propositions. And that is indeed central to their value. But to recognize irreducible, non-translatable components as present raises again deep questions as to what can constrain the discourse from within the works of art themselves, that is adequate to allow them to convey particular truth.

These are large questions for further deliberation, yet ones we also do well to ponder as we experience the compelling power of such works as the Stations of the Cross to bring us in unique ways to understand and experience matters that are deep and central to the drama of our salvation in Christ.  

Let us pray that we can each do this well as we make our journey of faith and hope through Lent.