Norman J. GirardotEnvisioning Howard Finster: The Religion and Art of a Stranger from Another World

I liked this book very much. It took me back to the beginnings of my studies in history of religion in the 1960s. Myth was celebrated, not as a fiction but as an important narrative which illuminated individual lives and shaped various societies and cultures. We were told that our method of study was phenomenological, and at the time I had no clear idea of what that might mean. Husserl, yes, but so many possible meanings even within his philosophy. I finally took its meaning in a rather commonsense way: we students should look at religious phenomena with utter seriousness and care, without bias, without preconception, and the phenomena in question would then speak, revealing their essence or nature to us. And as the decades passed, and the flood of deconstruction and other post-modern criticism was published, these early tools and methods seemed naïve and impossible to achieve. Myth was the tool of the powerful to control the powerless, or some subaltern group, and it was impossible to observe phenomena without preconception, shaped as all of us are by our race/ethnicity, our class, our gender, colonial status and other conditionings that make unbiased observation impossible. If I am not mistaken, Norman Girardot, who is clearly aware of all those intervening critiques, has given us a convincing interpretation of his “phenomenon,” Howard Finster, the Appalachian man from N. Georgia, the kid whose formal education ended in the sixth grade, the Baptist believer, the evangelical preacher, the mystic, the manically busy maker of art, the creator of a paradise sculpture garden, the entrepreneur, the self-promoting salesman. Not the easiest phenomenon to “envision” and interpret. As he proceeds with the study, Girardot straddles a meandering line between the objective and the subjective, the detached observer and the engaged participant, the skeptic and the believer. He looks at Finster carefully, self-consciously, from all these perspectives. The result is a masterful study, full of sometimes surprising insights, guided by thorough scholarship (he knows the literature, in both art and religion), ethnological detective work, a gentle sense of irony and humor, and throughout a disarming personal engagement with Finster, his family and his works. Girardot is at once curious, respectful, and non-judgmental as he encounters of a sort of religion least understood and appreciated by contemporary academics: evangelical Christianity.The guiding myth in Finster’s life, according to Girardot, is the conviction that he is from another world, a stranger in this one, divinely chosen to save people who have lost their way. His was a prophetic call, a mission from God. Thought his outsider art was prized in the studios and museums of New York, Atlanta and elsewhere, Finster consistently rejected any praise of his creative imagination—he insisted that everything he produced had come through divine inspiration.I think that the book got to the heart of the matter: the interplay of art and religion, giving rise to a mythic understanding, what the author calls the “armature of myth,” that guided and integrated Finster’s life, most clearly represented in the iconic figure of Noah (pp. 103-107), God’s agent to save the best of a dying world from destruction. Finster took on the process of entropy, thinking of himself as a second Noah, creating and re-creating through his artistic messages “within this rugged realm of clock time, multiple refreshingly peculiar alternative worlds for sinner folk to inhabit,” as Girardot puts it. In the same spirit, the author might be considered a third and academic Noah, stashing the old hermeneutical concepts into the hold of his ark and preserving them in the flood of post-modern deconstruction, then offering them once again as tools for revitalizing the study of religion in a new context.Envisioning Howard Finster at first glance seems to be very limited in scope, devoting an enormous amount of time and energy to the study of a man whose evangelical efforts have ceased and whose art, though held in many museums and galleries, may be less and less remembered in the course of time. Though a small portal, it opens, I think to a greater horizon, having important implications for the wider field of religious studies. It says that traditional methods and themes—phenomenology, the study of myth and ritual, shamanism and prophecy, paradise gardens and such still have their uses in understanding religion. In our time, when so many scholarly studies seem to diminish religion and diminish those who practice it, this book does the opposite. I wish it could be required reading in our graduate schools of religion, both because of its subject matter and its judicious use of the traditional categories of analysis. I recall, many years ago, visiting the Lehigh campus of Dr. Girardot where he won many accolades for his teaching and scholarship. Having a cup of coffee in the student center, I happened to read a story in the campus newspaper about an upcoming event during which Dr. Girardot had promised to levitate one of the campus buildings. Lifting an airy chapel might be conceivable, I thought, but an almost windowless building filled with plodding, earth-bound academics? Still, the hagiographic literature indicates that for a levitation to succeed the saint needs only to rise a few inches off the ground. Maybe the same is true for a building. Did it happen? I would like to think it did. Remind me to check the archives.

NORMAN GIRARDOT, Envisioning Howard Finster: The Religion and Art of a Stranger from Another World. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015: 262 pages, and 15 color plates of paintings and other artwork by Howard Finster, plus one color plate of "Blue Boy Collage in the Spirit of Howard Finster" by Norman Girardot.[Reviewed by Theodore Walker Jr. (12 November 2015), Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275]Girardot’s book is an important scholarly contribution to a renewed appreciation of Finster’s work. It also contributes to a renewed appreciation of comparative methods and postmodern trends favoring interdisciplinary research and reenchanted science. Moreover, the first-person story of Girardot’s adventures with Howard Finster (including the story of Girardot’s own Finster-inspired artistic creations) is itself an inspiring work of art and religion.Comparative MethodsFrom among the many websites, videos, news reports, articles, and books about the nationally celebrated self-taught contemporary folk artist (outsider artist) and preacher-prophet Howard Finster (born 1915 or 1916, died 2001), Girardot's book is distinguished by, among other distinctions, a comparative approach.Among university scholars studying religions, comparative methods (such as advanced by Mircea Eliade, Charles H. Long, and other historians of religions) have been largely replaced by specialized study of a single religious tradition. This is because modern research-oriented universities demand specialization. Accordingly, Professor Norman Girardot is renowned for contributing to the specialized study of religion in China, especially early Daoism. For instance, see Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (Berkeley: University of California Press, c1983; revised edition by Three Pines Press, c2008) by Norman Girardot.Nevertheless, against the prevailing trend away from comparative methods, and returning to his early training in comparative history of religions,Girardot comparesmyth and meaning in Finster’s northwest Georgia-Baptist religion and art tomyth and meaning in early Chinese-Daoist religion and art.Girardot includes comparisons to the Tibetan Buddhist Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso (26-27), and “the ancient Chinese stranger from another world, the Daoist sage Zhuangzi” (212-14).The positive value of comparative methods is indicated by this new and insightful appreciation of Finster’s religion and art.Finster’s Religion and ArtGirardot finds that for Finster, preaching was a performing art; and painting was “simply a more image-based, colorful, and effective form of preaching” (10).As a preacher, Finster lived in “a land of snake handlers, glossolalia [speaking in tongues], strychnine drinking, and other spectacularly unusual Pentecostal and holiness practices, but Finster trumped traditional evangelical strangeness by boldly proclaiming his career as an extraterrestrial visitor, a prophet, and the Second Noah, who had a divine mission” (14).Finster described himself as a “Man of Visions” and as “a Stranger from Another World” on a divinely inspired mission to get “God’s words and images out to the world” (14); and through preaching and painting, Finster emphasized “need to discover the inner artist in all men and women, or what he also called the ‘hidden man of the heart’” (19).In a section on “The Hidden Man of the Heart,” Girardot says:“For Finster this expression referred to each person’s hidden destiny and promise. To know the hidden man (or woman) was to discover one’s true self or story.” (207)Girardot quotes Finster as saying, “if the people on this planet Earth would bring out the hidden man of the heart, there’s no tellin’ what’s in some of ‘em” (208). Envisioning our lives within a cosmic drama inspired by the Creator inspires creativity and art.Shamanistic VisionaryOf course Finster was not a shaman. Comparative history of religions recognizes a type of religious visionary typologically labeled shamanistic. Accordingly, Giraradot says: “From the standpoint of the comparative history of religions, it is especially illuminating to consider Finster’s self-proclaimed master identity as the Man of Visions as shamanistic in nature” (135).The New Postmodern ReenchantmentGirardot’s interpretive study of Finster connects religion with art in a reenchanting way that witnesses against the modern disenchanting separation of religion from other disciplines. In a section called “Prophetic Reenchantment,” Girardot notes “how Howard Finster and his visionary ‘sacred art’ coincided with a growing general convergence of art, religion, and spirituality that challenged many modernist assumptions about how elite art, along with science, would necessarily and triumphantly replace religion” (62). Rather than our post-Enlightenment modern world relentlessly becoming even more secular/‘disenchanted’ (as predicted by Max Weber and other modern academics) in the 21st century, Girardot finds that “Reenchantment is in the air these days …” (62), and that we are now witnessing the beginning of “the new postmodern, or more accurately … the post-postmodern …” (62-63).Girardot’s Finster-inspired new postmodern reenchantment is consistent with the Whitehead-inspired “constructive postmodernism” advanced in Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance (2007) by David Ray Griffin and in The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals (1998) edited by Griffin. Constructive postmodern science inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1925) and Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1927-28) is now encouraging the convergence of various scientific disciplines via interdisciplinary researches converging with philosophy of nature, natural theology, metaphysics (metaphysics of nature and metaphysics of morals), and art, including graphic art and poetry.Girardot’s book is an important scholarly contribution to a renewed appreciation of Finster’s work. It also contributes to a renewed appreciation of comparative methods and postmodern trends favoring interdisciplinary research and reenchanted science. Moreover, the first-person story of Girardot’s adventures with Howard Finster (including the story of Girardot’s own Finster-inspired artistic creations) is itself an inspiring work of art and religion. [][][][]

Howard Finster was an itinerant Baptist preacher and jack-of-all-trades handyman in a backwater town of northern Georgia when he suddenly received a vision (embodied in a smudge of paint on his finger) that commanded him to create sacred art. Over time, teaching himself the techniques of painting and sculpture, he produced a voluminous body of work, including the Paradise Garden, a sculptural environment made of concrete and found objects, and thousands of paintings and prints (all carefully numbered and dated) featuring written messages and a private vocabulary of images that included angels, Coke bottles, Elvis, and space ships. Discovered by dealers in “outsider art,” he became something of a celebrity during his most productive years in the 1980s and early 90s. During that time Norman Girardot, a professor of religion studies at Lehigh University, made frequent trips to visit Finster, and came to know him well. In this remarkable book, Girardot reflects on his long association with Finster and on the meaning of his work. Girardot is an excellent writer, and his rich, hypnotic, and almost incantatory prose is the perfect vehicle to get to the essence of Howard Finster in the context of an extended meditation on the intersection of art and religion. This is a deeply thoughtful book, and a fascinating read.

This is an wonderful book written with great detail by Mr Norman Girardot, who combines intelligent insight with first-hand experience of knowing Howard FInster. Mr Girardot describes Finster with a keen analytic eye. The Finster story is one of extreme contradictions, is he a fraud…or the real deal? Does Finster’s life and artwork deserve attention, or is he just a manic nut-case? Throughout the book, the author, never lets you forget these opposing elements. Mr. Giradot could have easily swayed his reader in one direction or the other. He does not. He describes Finster’s complex life’s story and egocentric artwork, and leaves the reader to make their own decision. When I purchased this book, I wished to know a bit more about Howard FInster. Due to Mr. Girardot’s skillful presentation of his subject, this book had me evaluating my own belief in what makes a person truly holy. And that is always a wonderful journey.

This teacup carnival ride of dizzying proportions paints an amazingly comprehensive vision of Howard Finster's life and art. Girardot's engaging story weaves nebulous connections between art and creativity, myth, religion, the human condition, and uncanny Americana. Packed with insight and wit, this book reads as though told by your favorite college professor, wandering extensively but not irrelevantly and provoking deep thoughts certain to linger long after the last page. Grab a cup of coffee and sink your teeth into the fascinating stories of this unusual, charismatic stranger from another world!