Reinhold Marxhausen

Reinhold Marxhausen and Finding Beauty
Reinhold Marxhausen

I am currently leading an adult learning group on the theme of Art, Beauty, and Transcendence. Some wonderful observations were offered by my fellow learners at our first session. After inviting our participants to introduce themselves and share a recollection of a memorable encounter with Beauty, I provided a discussion prompt: Is Beauty essential, or is it a luxury? We seemed to share a consensus that it is an essential part of our lives. And then a participant said, “I find Beauty everywhere!”

Hearing this, I thought of Reinhold Marxhausen, a remarkable artist and teacher who had a vision for how we all might approach our daily encounter with our ordinary, everyday circumstances. His captivating approach to life impacted many people beyond the classroom and studio – me among them. Here is one way to sum up the vision he shared with others: “Beauty can be found everywhere – you just need to look for it!” So simple is this message that I am sure it has more often been dismissed than pursued as a practice. 

Marxhausen in his studio workshop

Reinhold Marxhausen did not just send folks away to try this on their own; it became his mission to show people how to do it. This is made clear in a video of his appearance on the David Letterman show, with the interviewer doing a great job of giving rein to the artist’s creative spark and communicative abilities. Marxhausen‘s Letterman show appearance can be found on YouTube.

Reinhold Marxhausen on the David Letterman show, March 25, 1986

I continue to be intrigued by what Marxhausen’s abiding belief implies- that Beauty is found, in addition to how we are led to it by others, or more simply that it is something we just designate for ourselves. These are three different ways that we might encounter Beauty as a feature in our lives, if not as something even more profound for how we view our lives and the world.

Readers of my posts in this space will be familiar with the parallel I have discerned between the three principal forms of jurisprudence (or theories about the source of Law, and three main sources for our concept of the Good in our understanding of ethics. Found, received, and or made, are the three terms I use to summarize these three approaches to where Law comes from, as well as for sources of our notion(s) of the Good. In offering this summary, I do not exclude the possibility of other sources for Law and or the Good.

More expansively, according to the first view (1), Law and the Good are entities written into the structure of ‘reality.’ As such, these things are ‘there’ for us to find. Another possibility (2), sees Law and the Good as worthy principles we receive from those who have come before us, as things commended to us by longstanding traditions. We sometimes describe them as things that have stood the test of time. A third possibility (3) is that Law as well as the Good are sets of principles about which we come to agreement, or decide upon and enact for ourselves and others. Hence they are things of our crafting, things that we ‘make,’ as we project our preferences outward upon the world. Formal labels for these three approaches include natural law or Creation order (1), historicism or common law (2), and positivism or civil law (3). 

Here is something I want to stress: we are rarely consistent in how we think, perceive, and understand important aspects of our lives. We should therefore anticipate an overlap between these several conceptual categories for how we think about Law and about ethics.  In other words, a ‘both-and’ approach regarding them may be much more appropriate than seeing them in an ‘either/or’ way.

So, is Beauty amenable to a similar analysis? I think it is. For Beauty is found (1); we also discern Beauty in the company of others and through their guidance (2); and we surely fashion notions about what is beautiful through personal preference and decision-making (3). 

If you believe you have ‘found’ Beauty at some or at many points in your life experience, would you be content to accept the proposition that your encounter with Beauty is actually reducible to the social impact of others upon your perception, and or that it was and is merely the result of personal preference and choice?

The Beauty of ‘the Question’

 

Having experienced and embraced an adult conversion to the Christian faith, I transferred to a new institution of higher education for my third year of college. This allowed me to switch my ‘major’ from art to classics and medieval studies. In the process, I benefited from the teaching of several professors trained primarily in philosophy. My favorite among them frequently called attention to a large sign placed high above a nearby freeway. The sign said this: “Jesus is the answer.” In relation to it, our professor would ask, “but what is the question?”

Later, when I was pursuing doctoral studies in philosophical theology, I became aware of the dialectical relationship between two theological ways of understanding Jesus. Each of these two approaches to understanding Jesus’ life and ministry can be summed up in a phrase:  ‘Jesus is the answer to all our best questions;’ and or, ‘Jesus is the question that prompts all our best answers.’

From an historically Anglican-Catholic perspective, we can say that recognizing Jesus as both ‘our best question’ as well as ‘our best answer’ enhances our spiritual growth.

Henry Ossawa Tanner captures the spiritually dynamic moment of one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It is Jesus’ night conversation with Nicodemus on an upper terrace.* In it, John’s Gospel presents us with a conjunction of compelling personal narrative interposed with mystical spiritual reflection. How can we not wonder about how the venerable and trusted Nicodemus approaches the upstart rabbi in the safety of the nighttime darkness? And how can we not remain thoughtful about Nicodemus’ challenging questions, as well as how artfully Jesus turns them back upon the man who appears to ask them so sincerely?

An aspect of the historic rabbinical tradition within Judaism is its respect for the power of previously unanticipated questions. As applied to Scripture, the generative power of such questions may surpass the importance of our previously arrived-at ‘answers.’

Tanner’s painting of John’s evocative scene prompts us to consider the power and beauty of questions posed by Jesus’ teaching. Questions help us to grow. Asked and pursued with integrity, they lead us to discernment and learning. Recognizing that new insights can be gleaned from them, we begin to realize the potential within us to perceive greater beauty, live into more genuine goodness, and know fuller truth.

A contemporary approach to personal and organizational development, Appreciative Inquiry, complements this emphasis upon the positive power of questions to help us see, live well, and know what is real. The artist, Reinhold Marxhausen, as well as the photographer, Dewitt Jones, exemplify this approach in their engagement with the world around us. Marxhausen is remembered for having constantly encouraged his students to look for and then see beauty in everyday life, even in contexts like factories, side-alleys, and in ‘ordinary places’ like a nearby farmyard. Dewitt Jones, a former National Geographic magazine photographer, encourages the same approach through his videos and published material. Celebrate What’s Right with the World is both the title of one of his videos, and also a persistent theme in his advocacy for being open to finding new and unseen possibilities in ‘what is there,’ all around us. David Cooperrider’s book, Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change, provides a succinct and helpful introduction to how asking better questions can help us to see, live, and know better!

 

*See John 3:1-15 in context. More about the art and approach to life of Reinhold Marxhausen as well as Dewitt Jones can easily be found through a google internet search. See, for example, the Marxhausen Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Marxhausen); as well as Dewitt Jones’ TEDx Talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_1Eh6rqf8), and his teaching project, The Habit of Celebration (https://celebrate-whats-right.teachable.com/p/the-habit-of-celebration1). My 2017 homily reflection on the Nicodemus conversation in John can by accessed by clicking the following link: (Lent 2 A 17_PDF).

 

Unexpected Beauty

He Qi The-Road-to-Emmaus

In the mid 1970’s, I had a short stint as an art student in Wisconsin. Through those studies I met the remarkable professor, Reinhold Marxhausen, who was skillful at teaching others to see. Like the more recent work of Dewitt Jones, Marxhausen embodied a calling to help others discern unexpected beauty in everyday places and people.

The vocation of the artist is to see and help make apparent the beauty that surrounds us. Theologians have the same vocation. For artists and theologians share an interest in beauty, goodness and truth, and their common divine source. A saying from the early Egyptian Christian monk, Evagrius, may help us here. He said that a theologian is someone who prays. Someone who prays acquires logos about theos. He or she gains wisdom from God and, in the process, receives a fuller vision of beauty, goodness and truth.

On Sunday, we will hear one of my favorite Gospel stories ~ the road to Emmaus. This story prompts an Eastertide question, of interest to both the artist and the theologian: Where do we find the resurrection? In what unexpected places or people do we find the risen Jesus? The inverse question is more perceptive: Where does the resurrection find us? In what quite unexpected place or part of our lives are we found by the risen Jesus?

The Gospels help us see the answer, in darkened tombs and in our darkened hearts. Resurrection finds us on our life journeys as we are joined by our often unrecognized Companion on the Way, and at table when we break bread together. He helps us see the big picture, and how “every story whispers his name.” *

Encountering and then seeing true beauty, we find our hearts burning within us.

 
The painting, The Road to Emmaus (1997), by He Qi (He Qi,© 2013), is used by licensed permission. The Emmaus story can be found in Luke 24:13-35.  * This is the evocative subtitle of the commendable book, The Jesus Storybook Bible (Zondervan).