The Artistic Representation of Jesus in Hermann Cohen’s Aesthetics

Cohen deals with the question of the possibility for art to represent God or the divine in some of his works, throughout all his philosophical production, but obviously above all in his main aesthetic work, Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls (1912). We can state that in Cohen's works this problem is posed with reference to three different religious fields: Greek polytheism, Jewish monotheism and Christianity. The topic of this essay will be Cohen's thought about the artistic representation of the divine in Christianity or in Christian art through the representation of Jesus. This topic will be examined with reference both to Kants Begründung der Ästhetik (1889) and to Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls; whereas in Kants Begründung der Ästhetik Cohen devotes to the representation of Jesus just a short consideration in the historical introduction of the book, in Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls the representation of Jesus is object of far more attention. Here, Cohen's answer to the question of the possibility to represent the divine through the representation of Jesus is that Jesus' divinity, in the artistic representation of his figure, can only have a metaphorical value, the real meaning of which is that Jesus' story is the ideal story of the human being; in Kants Begründung der Ästhetik and in other writings of the 80s, on the contrary, the idea of Incarnation and of the divinity of Jesus is object of a different appreciation by Cohen. The comparison between these different stances can be a contribution to the comprehension of the changes in Cohen's view of Christianity through the years.