Doing Away with Darkness”

Walking into First Presbyterian Church in downtown Tallahassee, Florida, one is struck by the beauty of the emptiness of the place—the walls are completely bare, the glass unstained, not a crucifix in sight.1 Here is the telos of Reformed iconoclasm. But it isn't only the lack of painted icons, of crucifixes, or of painted glass that's so striking.2 It isn't, in other words, merely the absence of something that one finds to be aesthetically moving at First Pres., Tallahassee. The interior of the church is positively beautiful. It's beautiful despite the lack of any art form or the presence of any color altogether. The gleaming brightness of the whitewashed walls is made brighter by the abundant sunshine that pours in through clear-glass windows, with contrast provided by the black-painted trim on the pews and railing. The grayish-blue, carpeted interiors of the churches of this reviewer's youth did not conjure any such aesthetic response, or really any response whatsoever.3 Theological proclivities aside, Zwingli's 1524 proclamation after the interior walls of the churches in Zurich had been stripped of icons and whitewashed (“The walls are beautifully white!”) becomes understandable here. And it is the response evoked by the sheer whiteness of the Reformed church interior—the fact that it is aesthetically and, perhaps, emotionally affective—that Victoria George is attempting to explain in her book Whitewash and the New Aesthetic of the Protestant Reformation. The purpose of the book is to add a new chapter to the long-standing narrative of sixteenth-century (particularly Reformed)4 iconoclasm, which narrative tends to reduce the movement to just that: iconoclasm—namely, that the Huldrych Zwinglis and John Calvins of the Reformed movement argued only that the adoration of icons in worship is deleterious to Christian piety and that the subsequent whitewashing of walls (a primary mode of covering over painted images) served as a way of simply “painting out,” of image obliteration. George, however, argues that the use of whitewash “is a representation in its own right” (xx), a “painting in” as well as a painting out, and that to understand it only as a cost-effective way of hiding a high-liturgical past is to leave out a significant aspect of the story.Because there is basically no direct evidence that the major thinkers of Reformed iconoclasm imagined whitewash to be a theologically loaded, symbolic expression of various things the color white might be associated with theologically,5 the author employs a sort of kitchen sink approach6 in an attempt to provide sufficient cumulative evidence to convince the reader that there are decent reasons to think that the use of whitewash was a virtually inevitable consequence that followed from the “color-thinking” of Protestant theologians like Zwingli and Calvin, whose respective cities (Zurich and Geneva) carried out the earliest and most thoroughgoing iconoclastic raids. But, as is often the feeling of those on the receiving end of the kitchen sink approach, this reviewer has come away somewhat uncertain about the ultimate success of the venture. The book certainly has its virtues: the primary question itself, that is, whether we might imagine Protestant whitewash as its own form of iconography7—despite its obviousness to anyone acculturated with the common inversion tactics of postmodern critique—is an interesting question, and one that has apparently hardly been asked before, much less received book-length, scholarly attention. There are good and detailed descriptions of the decision-making processes (including documentary evidence of memoranda from various “councils” and “disputations”) revolving around the question of images in the major centers of Reformed Protestantism (especially Switzerland, the Netherlands, and England).8 By the end, the reader has a pretty good hold on the sixteenth-century iconoclastic controversies continent-wide, including all major events and figures. Chapter 3, “An Historical Overview of Whitewashing,” provides a broad and informative history of the process and employment of whitewash in a religious context from the ninth to the twenty-first century. To this end, the book is also replete with some seventy glossy images of white-interiored churches, Renaissance paintings that employ white in a theologically significant manner, etchings, engravings, and a Saab campaign.9 One even learns the ins and outs of the chemical process of making and using whitewash. (And who knew there was a journal called Concrete Quarterly!?)Probably the most important contribution, and really the heart of the matter for George, is the treatment (in the final two chapters) of Zwingli's and Calvin's theologies as they relate to color. No doubt they represent the first attempts to tease out the “color-thinking” of these two sixteenth-century giants. Fundamental to these chapters is the contention that Zwingli's and Calvin's radical transcendentalism, combined with their appreciation of the color white as symbolically representative of (for example) divine light, on the one hand, and proto-Puritan this-worldly asceticism, on the other, is directly linked to the Reformed tendency to whitewash the interior walls of their churches. Whiteness, the argument goes, is the closest approximation of a representation of God's inscrutable nature in material form. “In the context of religious faith and the worship of God,” George writes, “the whitewashed wall represents two things anagogically: first, the immaterial state of God's being in virtue of its being ‘not-colour’ and, therefore not of the corporeal world. Simultaneously, in virtue of its imagelessness, it represents the transcendence of God's being” (403–4). Color is deceptive; it's a cloak. But white (a noncolor, for the author's purposes) is honest and true. The argument rests on the author's further (perhaps more problematical) contention that there is an “intuitive connection between the concepts of immateriality, transcendence and spirituality, and the colour white in the context of representation” (404). If one is willing to grant this “intuitive connection” then the argument running through these two chapters makes a certain amount of sense;10 namely, there is a theological and not merely economic basis for painting church interiors white. However, the “radical transcendentalist” reading of Calvin's theology, which is a sine qua non of the book's central argument, lacks a certain kind of nuance that recent Calvin scholarship has sought to provide.11 The author's insistence that the slogan finitum non est capax infiniti12 is the key to understanding Calvin's thought places her firmly on a Barthian trajectory in terms of Calvin's twentieth-century interpreters. And while I'm not given, as are many Calvin scholars and Calvinist theologians of recent decades, to denounce altogether Barth's reading of Calvin,13 there have been several important advancements in Calvin studies that complicate it, many of which bear on the question of images and the role of sight in Calvin's thought. To be reckoned with in particular, but nowhere mentioned in George's book, is Randall Zachman's 2007 Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (Notre Dame Press), which mounts a sustained critique of Barth's reading of Calvin and argues that a weak form of natural theology might be salvaged in Calvin's thought.14 Zachman's distinction between “living” and “dead” images in Calvin's theology, the former of which—being created by God, or which are manifest as God's works in the world—do have significance for the Christian's knowledge of God (especially after the Christian has put on the “spectacles of scripture”), while the latter (human-made icons, etc.) do not, would seem to pose problems for George's repeated insistence that nothing material or visual or in color15 can contribute to meaningful theological knowledge.16The book has other problems. Take the minor first: it could have benefited, especially, from a heavier editorial hand. Structural and typographical problems force the reader to do some unnecessary heavy lifting.17 In general these might be a mere nuisance, but occasionally organizational issues affect the coherence of parts of the book and the ability to discern and follow the arguments therein. Chapter 2, “A Short Trip Through Colour Theory,” for example, is a bit disorienting: the reader is led through 2,500 years of color theory, but not necessarily in chronological order. Alberti, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Newton, Wittgenstein, Plotinus, the early Church Fathers, the Oxford English Dictionary, Cicero, and finally the Bible are all on offer here. Objections to the kitchen sink approach aside, the author is never quite clear on why modern thinkers like Newton and Wittgenstein matter, or why it's helpful to invoke them in a study primarily on the sixteenth century.18 The Bible eventually also gets a chapter all to itself, where much material is repeated, but not until three chapters later.19 Equally frustrating, and arguably more problematic, is the way the author uses/does not use primary languages. In the chapter on color in the Bible, for example, sometimes the original Greek of the New Testament is given, sometimes it isn't.20 The original Hebrew is never provided in discussions of Old Testament passages.21 Confusingly, when the King James Version is quoted the author always also provides the Vulgate original alongside, as if the KJV were a translation from the Latin. (It isn't.22) Moreover, the KJV is a seventeenth-century translation, and the Vulgate was rejected by Protestant humanists like Zwingli and Calvin as a useful Latin version in the wake of corrections provided by, especially, Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples and Erasmus.23 Why do either figure in?24German isn't provided in the chapter on Zwingli's thought, nor is there any Latin given in the chapter on Calvin's. This is problematic not on account of this reviewer's admitted penchant for the Romantic, but because many of the author's arguments are language oriented; to wit: “The suppression of colour in order to transcend the material is evident in Zwingli's thought. Where the Good is ‘painted’ [Zwingli says], it is painted ‘with clear strokes.’ Purity, which is the absence of admixture (pollution), is ‘untaintedness’, a colour term in origin” (332). The author uses such examples (which are in fact few) to argue that Zwingli's interest in color is linked to his interest in purity. But what is the word Zwingli is using here for clear? It's not obvious that he's talking about color at all, at least in English. “Clear” might mean “colorless” or “transparent,” but it might also very well mean “evident” or “obvious,” or even “adept” if referring specifically to the painter's strokes. And what is the word Zwingli is using for untaintedness? Is it a “colour term in origin” in Zwingli's Swiss German? Or in English? What is the author referring to here? We, the readers, have no idea. But, given the insistence on the part of the author that Zwingli doesn't very often use color language at all, and given the author's stated recognition that extrapolation is therefore a tenuous venture, it would seem to be paramount that in those few cases where he possibly uses “color” language we have a very clear idea what he means; and this would involve, to this reviewer's mind at least, some mention of the original language.25Trivia aside, the author has a tendency to hedge when dealing with the crucial arguments of the book, which can be disconcerting. She oscillates between admissions of speculation regarding the reasons for whitewashing walls in Zurich and Geneva and much stronger claims that Zwingli's and Calvin's theologies demand the outcome of whitewash, writing at one point that the theologies of both thinkers “essentially mandate the use of this color” (412). She wants to insist, simultaneously, on the novelty of Protestant attitudes toward the symbolism of the color white, and its well-entrenched nature in the history of Western thought. She writes, “The aesthetic values introduced by the Reformers radicalized the architectural interiors of the ecclesiastical world” (332). But basically the entire book up to this point has been an attempt to demonstrate that the Reformers' aesthetic values weren't novel at all: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas—all these fellows held the same position regarding the equivalence of white with (divine) light and black with darkness (= evil). Indeed, the connection between white and purity is occasionally described as an “a priori fact.” I can imagine an argument that suggests that Zwingli and Calvin more fully appreciate the symbolic values of whiteness or that they invest in its significance through practical application, but no such argument is given; nor is the evidence of their associations of whiteness with relatively significant theological import overwhelming enough for the reader to comfortably infer something along these lines (indeed, the author readily acknowledges that the evidence isn't quite there).More convincing is the argument, which appears in various forms, that Neoplatonist26 understandings of beauty in immateriality drive Zwingli's and Calvin's sentiments against pollution, admixture, and so on and might thus be thought to undergird their appreciation of whitewashed walls.27 But strength is relative here, and there is, admittedly, some difficulty in discerning precisely what it is the author wants to accomplish with these arguments vis-à-vis the “color question” and the use of whitewash. In the introduction, the author claims two purposes for the book, each of which brings along its own methodological baggage. The first (call it quasi-Weberian), wants ideas to do some work in terms of social/historical change: Zwingli's and Calvin's theologies demand that the walls be whitewashed (as opposed, say, to being painted blue), and the inexorable logic of their theology has resulted, in some sense, in the perpetuation of white interiors in Reformed churches.28 The second (call it quasi-Marxist) wants material culture to do a similar sort of work, such that “whitewashing becomes as much a proselytising agent of change as it is a form of discipline and a critical element of emerging identity” (7). The first turns out to be quite prevalent, especially in the later chapters (on Zwingli's and Calvin's thought), but the second is never really dealt with at all after the introduction, and one wonders whether it appears only as a kind of obligatory nod to reigning academic tendencies. A second-order form of wavering, but one that reveals itself as central, arises from the author's tentativeness regarding the central question of the book: whether whitewashing walls can be necessarily linked to theological sensibilities, or whether it was simply cost-effective.29And, again, the general paucity of evidence regarding when and why churches were whitewashed, especially in the sixteenth century, makes this tentativeness stand out. The move from aniconism as an ideal to whitewash as a necessarily linked positive aesthetic value, it would seem, needs a bit more historical work done before we refer to “the aesthetic values introduced by the Reformers” as that which legitimates the removal or obliteration of images in sixteenth-century churches. We might wonder, then, given the long-standing symbolic importance of the color white, why such forms of iconoclasm didn't occur sooner.30 And because the author keeps mentioning (to her credit) that whitewash was, after all, the cheapest way of repainting a wall, perhaps it's better to point to the ongoing radical appeals to destroy things “made by human hands” when trying to account for iconoclastic tendencies.31 I don't deny the validity of the book's weaker argument, namely, that the choice of whitewash (as opposed to some other color) didn't come free of aesthetic, or even aesthetico-religious, consideration. But I find unconvincing the stronger argument, that a preliminary identification of whiteness and holiness accounts for the subsequent destruction of images used in worship—that is, that whitewash and iconoclasm are inextricably and necessarily linked (by dint of some kind of unexplained intellectual-symbolic-aesthetic logical coercion) in terms of an overarching theological motivation.Arriving at the conclusion, it's frustrating to find the author asking the same questions that were posed in the beginning, and with seemingly no confidence that they've been answered over four hundred pages later: “Was the coat of whitewash purely a practical matter, or was it a political act? An act of violent, purposeful destruction directed at the Papacy, or an opportunistic form of graffiti committed by an enthusiastic sector of the public? Was it incidental to the elimination of representation within the church along with other ‘externals’, or did it signify theological meaning according to a generalized sense of impetus to reform?” (424). The author doesn't seem to know the answers to these questions, and neither does the reader. The book then concludes with the following (note: inconclusive) sentence: “A primary goal of this study was to discover whether a theological basis for whitewashing existed, and whether a particular way of thinking about the colour white might be discerned which could be said to have motivated certain precedent-setting reformers to arrive at this particular solution or even to have demanded it of them” (429). It certainly could be said that there exists a theological basis for whitewashing, and it could be said that this theological basis motivated reformers in their whitewashing, but given the author's own palpable insecurities about whether it's been shown to be the case, we don't know whether we shouldsay it or not. The symbolic identification of the color white with intellectual enlightenment, made metaphorically at the beginning of Calvin's Institutes, is invoked by the author for its import in the context of whitewash. Given the subject matter of the book, it's difficult to ignore a certain irony attending Wittgenstein's question, placed as an epigram to the second chapter and as an epitaph here: “Isn't white that which does away with darkness?”

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