A Glory of Colors

• In Event: Raging Pain, Radiating Glory: Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece in German-Jewish Thought

Abstract

“From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my big brother,” declared Martin Buber in Two Types of Faith (1950). This statement, read as an assertion of Jesus’ Jewishness, has helped turn Buber into a symbol and source for Jewish-Christian dialogue. In more recent years, however, scholars have also noticed that alongside the appropriation of Jesus came a critique of the gnostic and Marcionite tendencies in Christianity. In doing so, they have made helpful connections between Buber’s writing on religion, Bible translation, and dialogical philosophy.

Mostly neglected in these discussions of Buber and Christianity has been the nexus in Buber’s thought between art and religion. I contend that a key to understanding this connection, especially in Buber’s early, so-called mystical period, is the Isenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. A close reading of Buber’s short text on this masterpiece contributes to a better understanding of Buber’s early thought, his perception of Christianity, and his aesthetic theory.

“The Altar” (1914) is a strange text, even by Buber’s standards, and it is meant to be read as an expressionist work. Grünewald’s altarpiece is a celebration of the “miracle of becoming color.” Color for Buber is the hermeneutic key for reading artwork and for understanding human existence: In analyzing the crucifixion scene, he suggests that the colors show the plurality of the world and the inability to reach the source of its emanation. Buber finds the counterpart to this scene, in a classical Christian fashion, in the depiction of the resurrection: the “becoming one out of the many.” The resurrected one in Grünewald’s work is more than the Jewish Jesus or the Christian Logos, even though he is both. The text is an analysis of a Christian artwork that argues for its transcendence of both Judaism and Christianity. The altarpiece is about man as such insofar as it embraces the world, purifies its colors and shapes it into unity. The resurrection, in this sense, is not an end but a starting point. To celebrate the glory of colors means to act in a unifying manner in this world.

Author

• Yaniv Feller, Wesleyan University