this can't end well

Another night on the town with the other blog.  Millinerd is getting suspicious.

I feel dirty

Because I'm cheating on millinerd again. 

Upshots

Now that I have uploaded a photograph appropriate to my station in life at my academia.edu site, I shall draw your precious attention to the recent academic paper I have there uploaded as well (downloadable at the same link). In short, the Princeton University Chapel iconography resisted liberal Manhattan Episcopalianism to preserve an evangelically grounded, profoundly ecumenical, liturgically aware Protestantism at the beginning of the 20th century, which is - of course - exactly what we need at the beginning of the 21st.

The upshot:

Historian P. C. Kemeny was right to suggest that Princeton in the late 1920s found “in liberal Protestantism a faith that was more compatible with modernity.” As I have shown, the Chapel’s insistence on the harmony of science and religion and its openness to modern thinkers such as Hume and Spinoza support this assertion. But Princeton’s liberal Protestantism was the more moderate kind. At the visual apex of the University’s defining monument, Friend managed to enshrine two notes of continuity with Princeton’s nineteenth-century evangelicalism, positions which, in fact, have traditionally been associated with Protestant liberalism’s fundamentalist opponents: the literal resurrection and the final judgment.

Problem is, I end the paper on by suggesting that Catholics may be the only ones close to realizing such a vision.  But who knows?

Another piece I wrote, this one at First Things regarding my visit to an Orthodox Monastery (or as they say in Greece, MoNAStery), seems to have been picked up by some sort of site, so read away. The upshot: "Perhaps American Orthodoxy's own intractable divisions are a gift providentially withheld." Withheld for the sake of a wider ecumenism, that is. If you, as most American Christians, are unaware of the complexity and contradictions of American Orthodox identity, you might want to start where I did (the book, and that which it depicts, is more complex than it first appears).  It's not a pretty picture, but it's an endearing one. Welcome to the mess of Christianity in America, friends.

Incepting Inception

Let's try this again:

Lord of the Subconscious

What Inception had over its peer Zeitgeist-defining films such as The Matrix and Avatar was that the camera tricks were for the most part in service to the film's guiding idea.  This idea was, in my opinion, a promising one that was at least technically realized.  I pity the jaded souls unable to be genuinely delighted by this film (or unable to at least admit that they were).  The film displayed a sort of imaginative virtuosity that merits sincere appreciation, even gratitude.

And yet, Inception's pop Dawkins ("memes" show up in the first minute) and hand-me-down Freud (daddy issues are the guiding theme) left much to be desired.  Which is to say, the film constructed the architecture of the subconscious, but seemed at a loss as to how to properly fill it.  The fine Times reviewer A.O. Scott grasped this, complaining that director Christopher Nolan did not give his characters "a rich enough inner life."  Yet the same reviewer suggests that such an enrichment might have been achieved with the unruliness of a more thoroughgoing Freudianism.  Not by a long shot.  We have more than enough cinematic ids already.

As he did for Avatar, C.S. Lewis anticipated the better components of Inception.  Not in the Space Trilogy, of course, but in The Great Divorce.   (The somewhat parallel themes of The Matrix, incidentally, were not anticipated by Lewis, seeing that they weren't worth anticipating.)  All this is to say, navigating the subconscious, and the hells we create therein, was a Christian theme long before it was a Freudian one, and Inception suffers from chronologically stunted conceptual poverty.  How much more interesting - indeed richer - might the film have been had Nolan gone beyond Borges to read Lewis' medievally-inspired limbo, some Augustinian depth psychology, or just some Dante.  We needed a Virgil or (even better) a Beatrice; we got an Ariadne instead.

Christian "apologetics" is not enough to respond to a film like Inception.  We might therefore put down Atheist Delusions for the time being (exquisite as it is), and pick up some different writers instead.  Don't get me wrong, it's not that hard Christian thinking is without pastoral function: As Ellen Charry has explained, it very much is.  But an aboriginal error of the Christian life is to think that an intellectual grasp of grace is tantamount to its experience.  Hence the seventh-century Maxiumus' maxim that "the purpose of theology is to safeguard against misunderstandings that frustrate a Christian life of prayer."

When it comes to Christian navigation of the subconscious, there's always the classics such as the not entirely user-friendly, and somewhat risky, Philokalia.  (When an Orthodox nun saw me with it one summer, she raised an eyebrow and commented, "We need a blessing to read that.")  More accessible in the contemporary sphere is Morton Kelsey who has long been cultivating Christian approaches to dreams and the general subconscious.  Nevertheless, I've found the less Jungian Jacques Philippe - a new Nouwen we might call him - to be a more consistently trustworthy guide. Philippe's writing are a needed antiserum for overeducated Christians (start with Time for God, though his best may be Interior Freedom).

Taking a cue from Inception, here is Philippe's answer to what should be contained in the safe of our deepest subconscious, and it's a truth that need not be guarded by the G.I. Joe snow crew:

This is why humility, spiritual poverty, is so precious: it locates our identity securely in the one place where it will be safe from all harm. If our treasure is in God, no one can take it from us.  Humility is truth.  I am what I am in God's eyes: a poor child who possesses absolutely nothing, who receives everything, infinitely loved and totally free.... Our treasure is not the kind that moths or worms can devour.  It is in heaven in God's hands.  It depends on God alone, his good will and unfailing goodness to us.  Our identity has its source in the creative love of God, who made us in his own image and destines us to live with him forever.

Such is the leaven, a.k.a. the gospel, that the Holy Spirit incepts in our deepest subconscious, one that leads to the freedom that permits real actions of disinterested love in physical reality that we - mercifully - do not create.  Paternal issues are of course important; but largely because they are an image of the far more determinative interrelation described by Philippe. Paraclete and Comforter have long been his.  But Lord of the Subconscious might be a twenty-first century name we should consider bestowing upon the Holy Spirit in light of the themes popularized by Inception.  Hell having been harrowed, the third person of the Trinity can effortlessly navigate the impossibly complex terrain of our own psyches (provided he is granted access). 

Please, by the way, spare me the eye-rolling for Christianizing Hollywood.  I paid close to $10 for the film and I'll do whatever I want with it, thank you.

Gambling with Beauty

Not being a pagan, I appreciate pagan art in a sadly inadequate way - for its aesthetic value alone.  While the Aphrodite of Rhodes had earned first place in my goddess roster, this summer she was ousted by a weathered Aphrodite of Rome.  I suppose a good pagan might say, "Let him appreciate her; it's the first step."  It's a risk I'm willing to take (especially seeing that such beauty was ably absorbed by the religion to which I happily subscribe).

It just puzzles me why so many venture the same gamble with Christian beauty.

Metaphysical Summer

Attempts to overcome metaphysics having been shown to be themselves irrepressibly metaphysical, metaphysics is again in the air.  Consider Dan Siedell's compelling review of Gabriel Bunge's The Rublev Trinity. Siedell quotes philosopher Jean-Luc Marion's Crossing the Visible, where he suggests that Nicaea II, the council that vindicated icons, "formulates above all and—perhaps the only—alternative to the contemporary disaster of the image." Siedell then takes the philosopher's insight into firm art historical terrain:  "The icon is the theological foundation of all painting, secular and religious."  We can hope any who missed this crucial insight from Siedell's God in the Gallery will get it this time around.

The fiercely brilliant (and if you doubt that adjectival combination, read the last paragraph of this review) art critic Maureen Mullarkey provides a remarkable testimony to just such an insight.  After years of hesitation, and despite extensive experience in New York both reviewing and creating contemporary art, Mullarkey has come around to seeing the wisdom of the Byzantine aesthetic.  Spend a considerable amount of time not just reading Patristics, but marinating in the Orthodox liturgy, and you'll likely agree.

What does this have to do with metaphysics?  Everything.  Interest in the icon is not just for those who like painting.  The wisdom of Byzantine art was not in its style but in the iconic, symbolic horizon to which that style successfully testified.  Fruitful as the icon may be for painters and art historians, it would be a mistake, one almost laughable in its small-mindedness, to limit the Byzantine iconic perspective to the realm of "art". Consider a not so familiar passage of John of Damascus:

We see images in creation which faintly reveal to us the reflections of God, as when, for instance we speak of the Holy and eternal Trinity imaged by the sun, or light, or a ray, or by a spurting fountain, or a gushing stream, or a river, or by the mind, or speech, or the spirit within us, or by a rose bush, or a flower, or a sweet fragrance (De imaginibus oratio I).

No narrow "art theory" there.  Icons are merely the fish that swim in that ocean.  (An ocean, incidentally, in which the Protestant Jonathan Edwards swims just as happily.)  The word for that ocean, following Aristotle, is "metaphysics." Like all words that have been around for a while, it's been abused and misused, but it's eminently recoverable.  Abusus non tollit usum.

The thing that Siedell is after, that Mullarkey intuitively grasps, and that Damascus and Edwards effortlessly understood, is a thick metaphysical horizon.  Make no mistake, the word is getting out on this.  In the latest Mars Hill Audio journal, Ken Meyers interviewed Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson and Thomas Hibbs to discuss the kind of realism that can sustain such metaphysical grit.  I highly recommend shelling out the few bucks to listen in, but the same idea is on offer, at considerable length, in one of Wilson's essays, entitled Saint Augustine and the Meaning of Art.  Even if symbolism and meaning have been systematically eviscerated thanks to a fashionable academic cyclone that has long since passed, there is nothing about such a turn of events that prevents the immediate recovery of the previous symbolic arrangement.  In Wilson's memorable words:

The meaning of the world that we usually describe as constituting culture, or a culture... does not depend primarily upon our social conventions. Rather, the signs of a culture are founded on natural signs, and, indeed, are themselves natural signs in whose fashioning our intellects cooperate, and for whose knowledge and joy they exist. Given how destructive the wars and social changes of the last century have been—above all the change in thought that has tried to reduce even the human person to a fungible fact for exploitation—we should take great comfort in that fact. The meaning of things, which our cultures may embrace and develop, nonetheless does not depend on us for their existence. And so, when we see a painting or some other work of art—the remnants, say, of some half-ruined memorial statue, in some empty square, at the edge of a red-light district in Brussels—we are seeing not the illegible signs of a lost culture. We are seeing a sign whose meaning has, for the moment, been lost to us, and whose intelligibility only awaits someone with reason, sense, and patience enough to uncover it.

Call them Neo-Byzantine, Edwardsian or Maritanian, there seem to be an increasing number of such someones.  But - and this is Wilson's point - it wouldn't even matter if there were not.

Greek Rainbow

Greek Orthodox Motivational Poster

(It's funny because it's Mt. Athos.)

The Italian Cougar Town

Having acquired some respect for Italian cinema thanks to Gabriele Salvatores' Happy Family, a lighthearted (and inescapably theological) meditation on authorial creation that ran circles around bloated American attempts at the same such as The Truman Show; and having recently shared an Alitalia flight with Tilda Swinton, I was spurred to don beret and summer scarf and march downtown to the Princeton arthouse with Denise, my wife partner, to see Luca Guadagnino's Italian film, Io sono l'amore (I Am Love), starring my plane friend Tilda (there was only a thin first class curtain between us).

"With its close-ups of gorgeous cooking, 'I Am Love' could easily be categorized as a foodie movie," writes The New York Times. The statement is admittedly qualified, but still, this is like suggesting that those interested in a carefree vacation in Japan might benefit from watching Hiroshima.  Such soft commentary calls for some aggressive counter-interpretation, so here goes: I Am Love is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in arthouse clothing.  If the theater had pillars, we'd have been clinging.  The film's "prawnographic" scene has generated some buzz, where the chef with whom Tilda will soon have an affair makes her an exquisite dish of prawns. How odd to watch the white witch of Narnia, who offered Turkish delight to Edmund, consume her own fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, to equally devastating effect.

This is not a film about "repression and breaking free" as wikipedia tells us (despite my futile attempt to add some nuance to the entry).  I Am Love is instead a critique of what R.R. Reno calls the Empire of Desire, not a call (like every other film) to submit to imperial demands.   Sometime in the Middle Ages, I imagine an enterprising cleric may have conceived of a sin prevention machine, in which individuals could be placed to convince them not to steal or murder. It took the technology of film to be actualized, but the anti-adultery machine has been perfected, and its name is I Am Love.  Be ye warned, the film contains some borderline pornography (in addition to prawnography), the redemptive factor being its inescapable (and perhaps intentional) ugliness. Insects pollinating flowers are spliced into one particular bout of outdoor copulation, which is not - as some might assume - an endorsement of the "naturalness" of this affair, but a mockery of humans who act like insects.

Tilda Swinton's character was reduced by the film's events (which I shall not here reveal) to a human skeleton, one that she played consummately well.  Swinton seems to be able to manage non-traditional relationships in her own life more successfully than her character did; but no matter - art, in this case, trumps life. Whereas the American Cougar Town takes affairs of older women with younger men to be a comedic setup, I Am Love employs same scenario to traumatize its sophisticated audience into respect for traditional sexual mores. We can sermonize about the deleterious social effects of Cougar Town all we want (and to little effect), but just as the only answer to The Wrestler is the parallel story of a similar man's redemption on offer in Crazy Heart, so the only proper answer to Cougar Town is a film that shows the real consequences of the same behavior, absent the laugh tracks.

Still, I Am Love offers no solution, just an instructive vacuum.  [The closing cave scene is not "resolution," by the way, but Canto V.] As the credits rolled, following ten or so minutes of silence the likes of which I haven't navigated since Requiem for a Dream, I cast off my beret and summer scarf, and asked Denise, my partner wife, "Where do I get my soul back?" Interestingly, she had a ready answer: By reading Tony Woodlief's memoir Somewhere More Holy. America may have given us Cougar Town silliness, but it gave us a Woodlief family as well, who navigated the same tragedies related by I Am Love with the help of a God who really is.

Score!

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Helpful thoughts, by the way, on DFW from Jennifer Gaertner, not to mention David Lipsky's new book.

Wordless Wednesday

Christ among the herbs

The Other Internet

Around midnight in the moon-lit cobblestone courtyard of the Prodromos Monastery at Mount Menoikeion, a student and I were sitting outside taking advantage of the wifi signal that we've managed, somewhat ambivalently, to install. A solitary nun walked by with her prayer beads, and gently asked what we were doing. After explaining what we were up to, she smiled and said in a light Greek accent, while gesturing to the sky, "I'm trying to access the other internet."

I nominate this to be placed among the top ten nun quips of the twenty-first century.

[crossposted at the Mount Menoikeion blog]

Academy meets Monastery

What is it like for a group of Princeton students to live in an Orthodox Monastery in northern Greece? Read our Mount Menoikeion Seminar blog to find out.