The Controversialist's Temptation

“Certainly nothing jolts us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet but for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible ourselves.” So wrote Blaise Pascal concerning original sin.  In his book on the subject, Jacobs explains that one of the reasons it became so jolting was the doctrine's unfortunate appendages, results of the late Augustine - not at hist best - getting cornered into debate with the hotheaded Julian of Eclanum. This is familiar territory, but I've never seen it put quite this way:

And so, because a brilliant and devout old bishop could not resist the controversialist’s temptation – to take even a caricature of his views and defend it to the death, rather than show dialectical weakness – the whole doctrine of original sin, in Western Christianity anyway, got inextricably tangled with revulsion toward sexuality and images of tormented infants.  And there has never been a full and complete disentangling.

Or to put it otherwise, the unnecessary accretions onto the doctrine of original sin offer some of its most convincing proof.

Warburg's Wish

Legend has it that art historian Aby Warburg famously gave up a considerable inheritance to his younger brother on condition that said brother would buy him any book he ever wanted.  So the Warburg library was born.  Such a love of books makes it curious that Warburg dreamed of an art history without texts.  Because words are gifts as much as pictures, I'm skeptical of the project; but I will say that an image replication made by sophomore David Wainwright for my Art 101 class at Wheaton College this semester (using self portraits) outdoes many textual commentaries on Hieronymus Bosch that I've read.

Left: Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross (1515) Right: David Wainwright's Wheaton College replication for Art 101 (2013)

Why Not Just Pop It?

If Jeff Koons (left) was outdone by Paul McCarthy (right) in this year's Frieze fair, isn't that the next step?  I'll even volunteer.

Not Angles but Angels

The wait for the soon to appear biography of one character in the Anglican drama is occasion to explore another.  To read A.M. (Donald) Allchin's obituary is to read a life well lived.  His description of Anglicanism (written before present woes) makes it sound almost worth a try.

A faith which recognizes our hopeless ignorance before the mysteries of God, and does not pretend to find answers when it has not got them.  It recognizes at every point ‘the mysteriousness of our present being.'  It 'takes the side of faith and patience against the attractions of completeness and security and achievement and repose' [Eliot]. A certain tentativeness and humility before the affirmations of theology… which corresponds very closely to the apophatic elements, the awe and the reserve, which characterize the teaching of the great Fathers of East and West alike. This characteristic does not imply refusal of knowledge, any turning away from God’s gift of himself.  It is rooted rather in an experience of the limitations of man’s language and man’s concepts, and expresses a humility before the immensity of the divine.

Needless to say, said program has been occasion for pandemonium - for the very "refusal of knowledge" Allchin counseled against.  But at least he pulled it off.  Allchin's was an Anglicanism as serious as Eliot's, who once audaciously suggested that "Individual Conscience is no reliable guide; spiritual guidance should be imperative, and it should be clearly placed above medical advice" (141).

While Allchin was overwhelmingly indebted to Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Greg Peters suggests that one of his greatest contributions to ecumenism was to remain Anglican.  It sure helps when one lives in a town where it's possible - but there might be something to that. 

Natural Bodies

That the following is more provocative, not to mention truer than secular, Butlerian gender theory goes without saying.  What makes it especially noteworthy is that it is more interesting than most serious theological reflection on the body I've come across as well.

Tim Hawkinson, Totem, 2004

The body of the historical Jew from Nazareth, born of the virgin, crucified and buried, is a natural body. The body of that same one, raised by the Father and Spirit, materially continuous with and materially transformed beyond the body that was crucified, is a natural body.  The Church - body and bride of this same crucified and risen one - composed of men's bodies and women's bodies, is a natural body.  The body offered on the table of that Church, broken and consumed, is a natural body.  These sentences describe the body of Jesus Christ as he has granted us access, availability, to it, and these sentences must then be the starting point for our understanding of the nature of bodies.  We do not begin with out bodies as we think we know them - in the bed, in the chair, at the table, in the grave - and then proclaim that the ecclesial body, the Eucharistic body, the resurrected body must only be bodies metaphorically as they do not correspond to the way we usually understand our own bodies.

God's revelation to humanity is given to the senses, given in the body of Christ.  So, we begin instead with the access the Spirit has granted us to the body of the Son and accept that here we encounter the natural body.  Only then can we invoke nature with proper care (Marks of His Wounds, p. 100).

Orthodox Christian reflection on the body, at least as expressed by my colleague Beth Felker Jones, makes body-bending artists like Tim Hawkinson look comparatively tame.

The End of the University (I'm sure of it)

It's over - the entire enterprise.  Begun in the Athenian groves of Akademos, reconvening in Paris to become what Newman called the glory of the Middle Ages, and surviving until 2013... but now it's done. The University as we know it is finished.  What killed it?  The internet.  So just before I submit my job application to another industry (all of which are doing splendidly), I'm offering you one last declaration of doom, so you can't say you weren't warned:

The typical liberal arts college... is obsolete.  Its sovereign isolation, its protected students, the one-track careers of its faculty, its restricted curriculums and teaching and its tepid purposes make it unsuited to the needs of the decade ahead.  To have a bright future, private colleges must struggle to surmount these defects in a context of significantly altered purposes.

To my embarrassment I now realize that said paragraph, perfectly mirroring the rhetoric of 2013, was published nearly half a century ago, and the University (curiously enough) survived.  But don't let a mere clerical error of mine throw you off.  It's over.  For real this time.

Evangelical Gothic

Firestone on Fire by millinerd

"Our Aim in the Undertaking is to promote the Interests of the Redeemer's Kingdom," explained Jonathan Dickinson, the first President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).  A refusal to deal seriously with such university origins is not dissimilar to the refusal to deal seriously with the origins of the universe: the six day creationist's naive hope that present realities magically dropped out of the sky.  In College, What it Was, Is and Should Be, Andrew Delbanco puts it this way:

To anyone even glancingly acquainted with the history of American education, it is hardly news that our colleges have their origins in religion, or that they derive their aims, structure, and pedagogical methods mainly from Protestantism...  Many academics have a curiously uneasy relation with these origins, as if they pose some threat or embarrassment to our secular liberties, even though the battle for academic freedom against clerical authority was won long ago.  If you were to remind just about any major university president today that his or her own institution arose from this or that religious denomination, you'd likely get the response of the proverbial Victorian lady who, upon hearing of Darwin's claim that men descend from apes, replies that she hoped it wasn't so - but if it were, that it not become widely known.

This is a pity and a waste, since there is much to be learned from the past, including the clerical past, about the essential aims and challenges of college education.  We tend not to remember, or perhaps half-deliberately to forget, that college was once conceived as a road to wealth or as a screening service for a social club, but as a training ground for pastors, teachers, and, more broadly, public servants.  Founded as philanthropic institutions, the English originals of America's colleges were "expected," as Morison put it, "to dispense alms to outsiders, as well as charity to their own children (pp. 7-8)

That these founding ideals might ameliorate the present crisis in higher education is one suggestion of Delbanco's book.  What W. Barksdale Maynard's Princeton: America's Campus accomplishes (among many things) is to show that Collegiate Gothic architecture once did just that.  By replicating the English Gothic of Cambridge and Oxford, Princeton resisted the secular German research ideal (Wissenschaft over Bildung) that had overtaken American education starting with Johns Hopkins, and renewed its original commitment to the liberal arts:

[One] plus for Gothic at Princeton was its religious tinge: a churchly, monastic quality suggested a bulwark against secularism, especially appreciated by the many ministers on the faculty and among the alumni (fully one sixth of the graduate were ordained).  "Princeton's crowning merit," said a reporter [in Harper's Weekly, 1887], "is that it can keep pace with all the learning and progress of the age without yielding to the encroachments of modern unbelief."  Parents could trust that their sons would learn the most advanced subjects and approaches "without sacrifice of those principles which are inculcated in the Bible... Its founders and upholders have pledged themselves and their successors to be true to that religion which has been faithfully taught here from the beginning."  Tigers celebrated their "loyal adherence to the sturdy, unsectarian, evangelical Christianity which is synonymous with the name of Princeton."  No style could better connote this time-honored and pious approach than Gothic (p. 82).

But if one can't afford, or does not prefer, the Gothic - another tack would be to simply reexamine founding ideals as one ingredient to present renewal - perhaps by reasserting Dickinson's motivation with a motto like (to choose one college at random) For Christ and His Kingdom.

(More on this subject to come, by the way, in a forthcoming issue of Books & Culture.)

VIDEO: Daughter of Thy Son

I gave a talk at Wheaton College chapel this Monday (the traditional Feast of the Annunciation).  It can be viewed here.  The contemporary art of Martin Creed, an obscure Byzantine church, Luther, Dante's Paradiso, T.S. Eliot, and - most compellingly - the provocative imagery of my Wheaton Art Department colleagues... all in one place! 

update:  This link seems to work better.

Endless Knowing of the Victorian Origen

Ben Myers has a charming reflection on Origen as the consummate teacher and the eternal prospect of learning.  A similar case was built in the Victorian era by Thomas Cooper, a self-educated shoemaker, who had served a prison sentence for once sparking a workers' riot, and who rose to prominence in Victorian intellectual culture - even becoming a respected freethinking lecturer - before returning (as as a strangely high number of secular leaders did) to Christian faith.

Tim Larsen explains how Cooper was interested in everything:

He lectured on European political development and on injustice in Ireland.  He lectured on the life and genius of Milton, of Burns, of Shakespeare, of Byron, and others.  He gave a ten-lecture series on the history of Greece and seventeen lectures on the history or Rome.  He gave addresses on Cromwell and the Commonwealth, on the French Revolution, on George Washington.  He gave an eight-lecture series on Napoleon, and four on the duke of Wellington... He gave fifty-one lectures on the history of England.  He did a series on seven schools of painters: Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, French, and English.  He gave six addresses on Russian history.  He lectured on musicians, including Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven.  His lectures on discoverers and explores included Columbus, Newton, Cortez, and Pizarro.  He helped his hearers understand Mohammed and Swedenborg.  He lectured on slavery, on the national debt, on the age of chivalry, injustice in Poland, the gypsies, the conquests of Alexander the Great, on ancient Egypt...   the philosophy of Bacon and Locke.  His efforts to educate his hearers in a range of sciences included addresses on vegetation, astronomy, geology, and natural history.  This, moreover, is not even close to an exhaustive list of the specific subjects that he addressed.

Thomas Cooper

It was this catholicity of interests that initially led Cooper to the secular viewpoint, his youthful faith having been eroded by D.F. Strauss' Leben Jesu.  But it was also this catholicity that caused Cooper to think his way through Strauss, finally offering an answer, "counter[ing] well-reasoned skeptical criticism with well-reasoned believing criticism."  Unlike the surface responses of most Victorian Christians, Cooper actually gave Strauss' argument the respect of an honest and thorough response (which required mastery of original languages).  "Someone really interested in the latest thought in the field of modern biblical criticism," explains Larsen, "would have been better off going to hear Cooper at the London Hall of Science than an Oxbridge lecture."

Cooper continued his lecture circuit after his reconversion, often denying the flashier (and better paying) speaking venues to prioritize lower class audiences.  It is no wonder that his voracious appetite for learning caused him to offer an intellectual riff on the argument from desire.  As Cooper put it:

And do we not all know that the more we learn to know, the more we thirst to know?  It is only sheer ignorance that has no desire for knowledge... Is the wisdom of God so abortive as to make a being of boundless desires for knowledge, only at the end of a few years to put him out of existence? .. The Progressive Nature of Man - if I use the most circumspect language - is a strong presumptive argument for a Future Life for Man.

What Myers says of Origen could then equally apply to Cooper.  He "knew scripture and the mysteries of the faith better than anyone. But he knew that all the learning of this life is only preparation for the life to come."

The Enduring Age of Eliot

In a review of the latest publication of Eliot letters (1926-27), The New Republic offers the standard academic explanation for why interest in T.S. Eliot is (presumably) at low ebb:

Eliot’s criticism, with its probing of individual passages and its fixation on a specifically literary tradition, predominantly European and Christian, is out of key with current academic approaches based on such “contextual” categories as race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, post-colonialism and social class. Eliot’s poetry, with its learned footnotes that themselves require footnotes, reeks of the “elite.” Influential critics of poetry, including those who do not subscribe to the prevailing critical fashions, have not rallied to Eliot’s defense....  [Harold] Bloom (whose view of literature as a ruthless competition among individual writers closely resembles Eliot’s) has been dismissive of what he calls Eliot’s “churchwardenly” criticism.

But as said passage momentarily concedes, there is reason to think that Eliot's legacy is more present than is frequently presumed.  What reeks of the "elite" today is not an admiration for Eliot's poetry, but its carefully curated academic disdain.

Harold Bloom recollected that as a young student he had been “virtually enslaved” by Eliot’s “preferences and prejudices.”  If Eliot had dethroned the Romantic poets, Bloom reinstated them, even reading Eliot as the Romantic he claimed not to be. And where Eliot had stated the importance of influence in his famous early essay, Bloom upended this benign proposal in The Anxiety of Influence, offering six patterns for how literary influence functions almost perversely.  “Poetry is the enchantment of incest, disciplined by resistance to that enchantment,” claimed Bloom, adding a sinister tint to a process hitherto deemed positive.

But reading The Anxiety of Influence today with full knowledge of Bloom’s career is to be faced with an irony.  The sixth form of negative influence he describes is termed apophrades, or “return of the dead,” evoking the unlucky days in Athens when the dead inhabited the houses where they once lived.  Having sought to avoid the influence of his precursor, the later poet – Bloom tells us - now seems as if the one he sought to avoid inhabits him.  “It seems to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.”  Curiously enough, Bloom’s relation to Eliot is a fitting example of apophrades.

How can we read Bloom as anything but an extension of Eliot’s critical legacy through the literary heyday of deconstruction?  Faced with assaults on the literary tradition, Bloom responded with a furious defense:

Without the Canon, we cease to think.  You may idealize endlessly about replacing aesthetic standards with ethnocentric and gender considerations, and your social aims may indeed be admirable.  Yet only strength can join itself to strength, as Nietzsche perpetually testified.

Bloom, furthermore, made a sharp turn to what he termed religious criticism, even if he did so as a “Gnostic Jew,” loyally opposed to his Jewish tradition.  Beyond celebrating the KJV, he even went on to dispassionately advise an Augustinian revival amongst traditional Protestants and Catholics.  Bloom’s critical style also clearly echoed Eliot.  “Over time,” writes Sam Tannenhaus, Bloom’s “notion of influence has become more orthodox, growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics."  Eliot, according to Bloom, “remained a Whitmanian poet, despite all his evasions of Whitman.”   And so has Bloom remained Eliotic despite his evasions of Eliot.

But if Eliot’s understanding of influence is correct – which is advantage not anxiety – this is no condemnation of Bloom.  “If we approach a poet without this prejudice [toward unexamined originality]," wrote Eliot, "we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”  So yes, Eliot persists, and one reason his legacy is continually denigrated might be because his detractor's sense a threat, as the subtle perpetuation of Eliot's legacy would make it easy to revive.  (Hence the tired appeals to accusations from Julius's now dated book instead of bothering to take account of nearly two decades of conversation on the matter since Julius, a common note of which is serious attention to faith).

While there have been obvious critical gains (and losses) since the high water mark of Eliot adulation half a century ago, his legacy has been perpetuated by critics like Bloom, has lately inspired a new journal, Fare Forward, and new waves of artistic production, the Qu4rtets project.  It would be easy to overplay this evidence, but also to underestimate it.  Call it, if you like, apophrades - return of the dead.


QU4RTETS from Pilar Timpane on Vimeo.

Brutal Unity Hangover Cure

I'm serially cheating on millinerd again (with these last four posts at First Thoughts).

Also, my review of Ephraim Radner's 500-page act of penance is in this month's Books & Culture (and can be read here).  So far as I know, the only way to recover from reading the book (which presses Christian complicity in Rwandan genocide, among other things) is by watching this.  Fifty times.

And even that won't do it really.

Update: Come to think of it, perhaps my colleague David Hooker's latest project, covered in this week's Chicago Trib, is the perfect encapsulation of and response to Radner, with Hooker emphasizing "...the Christian message that God loves us in spite of our sins."

Electric Education

For the futurist edpunks of Do It Yourself University, the foundation of education in this country was a "pallid imitation of the fourteenth-century English and European curriculum, which itself was a shallow error-riddled reconstruction of the intellectual achievements of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates."  Perhaps that's why colonial colleges produced dimwits like James Madison.

But Andrew Delbanco, in College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, actually bothered to learn something about Puritan education, and sees it as a way to renew our own.  Delbanco even identifies the root of critical thinking in American education in the "Puritan principle that no communicant should 'take any ancient doctrine for truth until they have examined it.'"  And then there were the professors.

Puritans spoke almost indistinguishably about teaching and preaching.  Consider John Cotton, arguably the leading minister of New England's first generation.  In his history of early New England, the Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Cotton Mather (Cotton's grandson), portrays him as a man whose religious faith and scholarly attainment are essentially one and the same. A "universal scholar, and a living system system of the liberal arts, and a walking library," he was the ideal to which every studious young person should aspire.  His reputation as a preacher was that of a man not merely erudite and eloquent but also able to inspire young people so they might "be fitted for public service."  By his voice and arguments, but most of all by his manifest commitment to the impossible yet imperative task of aligning his own life with models of virtue that he found (mainly) in scripture, he was mentor to his student in the same way that he was pastor to his flock. In his theological writings, which were largely concerned with what we would call moral psychology,  he explored the mystery and contingency of learning, which, he believed, sometimes proceeds in steps, sometimes by leaps, sometimes by sheer surprise in the absence of exertion, sometimes by slow and arduous accretion through diligent work...  [but] the moment of electric connection between teacher and student cannot be predicated or planned.

But education merely through an electrical connection avoids the electric connection here described.  Puritan pedagogy may have (in Delbanco's words) effectively dismantled the "limits of jealous self-regard in which [the student] has hitherto been confined," but MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) tend to leave those limits intact.  The "mystery and contingency of learning" becomes as predictable as a playlist.  Professors like John Cotton, whose lives might have spoken alongside their lectures, are kept at manageable distance, safely streamed to 10,000 students at once. 

Twentieth Century at a Glance

Fisher Building/Harold Washington Library, a photo by millinerd on Flickr. 
Burnham's fabulous Fisher Building (1896) flanked by a Harold Washington Library acroterion (1993).  A modern architectural revolution happened in the space between.

Two Upcoming Talks

If you're in the Chicagoland area, my friend Nikos Bakirtzis is giving a talk on Byzantine monasticism at the Wheaton College Art Department this Monday Feb. 4th at 4:30pm in Adams Hall (3rd floor).  And I'm giving one at the University of Chicago's Workshop on Late Antiquity and Byzantium on Tuesday, Feb. 5 at 4:30pm (Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 156), where I'll demonstrate with overwhelming persuasiveness how Byzantine art solves all our contemporary problems.  Come on by to one or both.

Ruskin: Beauty: Justice

A student walks into my office and asks "What is beauty?"  I reached for Roger Scruton, but better perhaps to have reached for John Ruskin's Modern Painters.  

[Beauty] is either the record of conscience, printed in things external, or it is a symbolizing of Divine attributes in matter, or it is the felicity of living things, or the perfect fulfillment of their duties and functions.  In all cases it is something Divine, either the approving voice of God, the glorious symbol of him, the evidence of his kind presence, or the obedience to his will by him induced and supported (MP 2:378).

The typical objection to such exalted, theological takes on beauty is that they (presumably) neglect justice, and this critique has legitimate targets.  "Whatever the surrounding evil, for the artist the sun is always at the zenith," wrote the abolitionist Unitarian minister Moncure Conway.  "The reformer's zeal, much less his discontent, admirable elsewhere, is inconsistent with the repose of the spirit which wins beauty to the side of the artist."  So much for artistic justice.

But Ruskin was different, and to think his aesthetic ambitious were out of touch with the spirit of reform requires no knowledge of his writings whatsoever.  On the contrary, it was just this Ruskinian take on beauty that was used to attack frivolity.  As the unjustly forgotten Yale art historian and minister James Mason Hoppin put it.

Since [Ruskin’s] prophetic voice has been heard art has risen from its degraded position as the slave of luxury, as a bourgeois conventionality, as a mere decoration of life however brilliant, and its true nature is seen that it has a vital and eternal beauty belonging to divine things (The Early Renaissance, p. iv.)

Yes, this scrambles tired dichotomies.  Phil Ochs' admirable suggestion that "protest is your diamond duty...  ah, but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty," is not some wisp of 60's inspiration, but a return to indigenous American Protestant aesthetic theory (whether Ochs realized this or not), and boy do we need it now.  American art history, fortunately, is far more deeply rooted in the other bearded London economic theorist than in that Jewish prophet who lost religion (to borrow Mackay's formulation), Karl Marx.  But don't tell that to anyone who cherishes the myth that things only got serious with Meyer Schapiro.