Faith and Flags

In the last week, I've seen a British flag placed on the high altar at Westminster Abbey, and a host of Greek flags packed into a major Cypriot church for a liturgy. The context for the first was a celebratory vespers for some of the last surviving veterans of the Normandy invasion. The context for the second was a remembrance of Greek resistance to Nazi rule ("Oxi" day).

Aside from challenging the assertion that Christendom is over (cue the weeps and gnashes), these twin instances have something to teach American theologians and popular Christian writers who deplore the stars and stripes being placed in, or anywhere near, Christian churches. While such thinkers may sound savvy, they in fact betray a notable lack of theological and political imagination. The flag-near-altar move can be understood less as a religious endorsement of anything a country might do, and more as gratitude for the blessings a country has enjoyed, and as a plea for mercy - an entreaty to make the given country more virtuous by bringing its chief symbol into a holy place. In other words, the flag isn't there to give, but to receive.

Similarly, how unnecessary it is to protest one's child having to say the "pledge allegiance to the flag." Why not instead interpret the mandatory hand-on-heart as a cap on legitimate affections? The gesture can be understood as a reminder to keep proper patriotism in perspective, and to never let the heart get too attached to an inevitably imperfect homeland. Semiotic subtlety can go a long way.

Christ Dead in London

As I strolled through London thanks to a felix culpa of a missed flight connection, I saw a truck that had a grizzly close-up photograph of a bleeding, crucified Christ who looked out intently, accompanied by the words, "Look what he did for you! Don't go to hell!" It's just the kind of thing that the sophisticated Londoner would balk at - except that it isn't. The Sacred Made Real at the National Gallery made the truck - and even the inevitably two dimensional canvass of Mel Gibson - look somewhat tame. Though they couldn't have planned it, this exhibit turns out to be a sort of complement to the Vatican initiative to welcome Anglicans. It's as in-your-face Spanish Catholic as an exhibit can get, but rather than recoiling, onetime Cromwellian London - from the reviews I read - seems to love it.

It was difficult not to. If art shows got Oscars, this show would get one for lighting. Walking through the exhibit is like inhabiting a chiaroscuro dreamscape. These images hover on the edge of kitsch, nevertheless, they somehow avoid the charge, at certain points only barely. If, as Oscar Wilde remarked, sentimentality is having an emotion without paying for it, then these sculptures and paintings - despite potentially saccharine themes like Bernard of Clairvaux's erotic visions - definitely extract a fee.

In a brilliantly defiant essay to introduce an exhibition on crucifixes, Leon Wieseltier once remarked in admiration, as only an unbeliever can, "What would art have been without religious nonsense?" I imagine he, and many unbelieving viewers, might be brought to a similar place by this exhibit. But, Martin Gayford at the Telegraph issues an important reminder:

Christ Carrying the Cross (1619) by Montañés is still carried through the streets during Holy Week on the shoulders of 30 men.... the realism was not intended as an artistic sensation, but as an aid to the religious imagination.

In a meditation on Irving Kristol's passing in this month's First Things, Jody Bottum wrestles with the charge that Kristol saw religion as merely useful.

[Kristol] had an utter conviction of the social utility of Judeo-Christian religion, but the rebuttal of social utility arguments is easy: The good social effects of religion are not gained when people practice religion for the sake of its good social effects; those effects come, instead, only when people practice religion for the sake of itself.

Replace the word "social" in that paragraph with "artistic," and one has a gentle retort to those who, with alleged magnanimity, applaud the aesthetic utility of Christian faith.

Oh, Canada

That being both an "Oh" of both reverence and exasperation, the latter which I am permitted because I married a Canadian. The occasion for dual sentiment was a magnificent exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Had you asked me what the best landscape painting show I could imagine might be, and had I thought about it hard enough, I would have said a contextualized juxtaposition of America's Hudson River School with Canada's Group of Seven. And it is just this that Vancouver has amply provided in Expanding Horizons: Painting and Landscape Photography of American and Canadian Landscape 1860-1918. The exhibit was organized chronologically, beginning with an early innocence, followed by domination over nature, and then a return to that original innocence, which is where North America's best kept artistic secret, the Group of Seven, came in.

The Americans Georgia O'Keefe, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent all made dignified appearances in the show. But as an American, I can flat out admit that when one factors in Tom Thompson et alia, Canada far outpaces American landscape painting, and that's alright. Art is not a zero-sum game, and the paintings are there for the entire continent to discover and enjoy.

But then Canada had to get political, or rather, aggressively apolitical. To be fair, I should have expected this. At the impressive Anthropological Museum, a best case scenario of modern architecture, my co-traveler (and mega-blogger) Bill and I were struck with the oddness of the museum's commentary on Bill Reid's marvelous sculpture - carved from a solid block of Cedar - which is placed over previous defensive fortifications, fortifications which the exhibit referred to as "dubious," as if there was an inherent problem with Canadians trying to defend themselves during the Second World War. Such self-negating commentary was amplified at the landscape show.

While the American/Canadian juxtaposition was fascinating in and of itself, the curators decided to take the opportunity to unfurl that unofficial Canadian motto: "Not America." America, we learned, exploited their environment, and Canada (it was implied) wouldn't dare rearrange a distant Yukon stone. America, we learned, believed in Manifest Destiny, God and all that, as expressed, for example, in Moran's much-less-cheesy-in-the-original Mountain of the Holy Cross. Canada, the exhibit implied, had no such metaphysical ambitions, a move which requires ignoring, for example, the profoundly religious, admittedly theosophic, influence on the artists such as Lawren Harris.

If Canadians want to believe this about their history then so be it. They are at liberty to be wrong. Problem is, the City of Vancouver is not yet fully on board. Just as the visitor is about to leave the city through the main rail station, one sees this sculpture by Couer de Lion MacCarthy, commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was built to commemorate the workers who gave their lives in World War I, men "called by King and Country," only to "pass out of sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice that others might live in freedom," freedoms which Vancouverites, I can assure you, take full advantage.

Railroads realizing continental British ambitions, and then commissioning art about soldiers giving up their lives for Canadian sovereignty and liberty? It all sounds so less than dubious; so stridently Amer.... I can't bring myself to say it (lest an embarrassed Olympic Welcoming Committee tear the beautiful thing down). Can such ideals be abused? Of course they can, and have been. But to tell only the abusive side of the story is as revisionist as a history book subtitled "My country right or wrong." This is why public sculpture, such as America's own Augustus Saint Gaudens, is so important. It offsets the tyranny of the living, and permits the dead to get a word in edgewise.

But what about the aboriginal perspective? Don't get me started. Even First Nations artist Bill Reid is too much of a believer for the present generation. In the contemporary, supplemental installations at the Bill Reid Gallery, Reid's tour de force at the Anthropological Museum is mocked with a Campbell's soup can and chainsaw spinoff which are clever, but only clever. Reid's sculpture, on the other hand, was ambitious, serene, reflective of the finer First Nation ideals, and exponentially more difficult to create.

The Group of Seven were painting for Canada, not against America. Say what you will about the ideals - Royal or aboriginal - of previous generations. At least they gave us beautiful art. Conversely, my generation has given itself to one of the most seductive, ambitious ideals imaginable: The mistaken belief there are no ideals. Consequently, the art we have to offer is, far too often, parasitic at best.

update: Incidentally, to take this perspective further, the scholarship of Canadian historian George Rawlyk (not to mention Mark Noll) has done much to correct the Canadian tendency to edit out its own religious history.

Sister Wendy Among the Art Historians

I've got a review entitled Iconic Vision in the latest First Things that's currently available online.

Farragut Memorial

Farragut Memorial
Originally uploaded by millinerd

R.R. Reno graciously permitted me to infuse some of my photographs onto his current First Things piece on the American sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens. It is a hopeful article with a closing point that, I like to think, is illustrated by the hopeful photograph seen here.

Dispatch from Hiptopia

Greetings from Hiptopia, otherwise known as Vancouver, with a dramatic natural setting, walkable urbanism notable enough to have inspired a neologism, some best case scenario postmodern architecture, and a music scene both vigorous and hospitable enough to approximate transcendence (or at least the show I saw did). There's a reason this city is a creative class, not to mention a drug-addicted underclass, Mecca.

My guidebook glibly suggests that people don't attend church here, but if non-white people qualify as people, then my experience stopping in at three separate packed Catholic services suggests otherwise. Still, the guidebook has a point. Hipsters, many with babies now in tow, come to cosmopolitan Vancouver to, more often than not, leave the Christianity of their provincial hometowns behind. It must, therefore, be disconcerting for them to pick up a copy of the ubiquitous Georgia Straight and read the article on Nick Cave's new novel, The Death of Bunny Runmo. The book depicts a sex-addict growing conscious of his own damnation, lost in what Cave calls an "epic flight away from love." The article provides some unexpected insights into Cave's somewhat Marcionite and Arian, but nevertheless illuminating, exegesis:

"[The] element of the absurd is crucial to Bunny Munro's balancing act, given that the story has roots not only in the darkest chapters of Cave's life but also in weighty literary sources that have long inspired him. One of these is the Gospel of St. Mark, the oldest and briefest of the Bible's four accounts of the life of Jesus. As Cave noted in a foreword he wrote for a 1998 edition of the gospel, he first encountered the text following years of obsession with the Old Testament and its 'maniacal, punitive God'. The central figure in Mark, he explained in the essay, 'had a ringing intensity about him that I could not resist... The essential humanness of Mark's Christ provides us with a blueprint for our own lives so that we have something we can aspire to rather than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences rather than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy.' And as Cave says in conversation, he's been gripped ever since by Mark's story-by what he calls 'the energy of it'.

'If you compare it to the other gospels, there's an urgency about it that I really like,' he says. 'And I like that in other novels. I like that in crime literature and in certain poets. It's a kind of rapid-fire delivery. You know, the gospel of Mark reads like James Ellroy, to me. Everything's happening super-fast...'

[The Gospel of Mark] is in the foundations of Bunny Munro, Cave says. Mark's gospel 'rockets through the story in order to get to its absolute preoccupation, which is with the death of the protagonist,' he points out. 'And it's episodic in a similar way to my novel. From the title of my book and the first line of my book, you are preparing for the death of the central character. So structurally it's actually quite similar...'"

As I barely made it through The Proposition, I'm not sure this book is for me. Still, Cave at his best functions as a sort of apostle to hipsters - perhaps now even as an answer to those who complain that there are no contemporary Flannery O'Connors.

Desert Liturgy

Desert Liturgy
Originally uploaded by millinerd

George Weigel: Crunchy Con

A few quotes from Letters to a Young Catholic, sent to me by a percipient plumbliner. First, here's Weigel on communities:

We ought to reconsider the "communitarian individual," in my friend Michael Novak's neat formulation. Yes, we're individuals who have ideas, create things, and enjoy inherent "rights." But none of that means much of anything without vibrant communities, whether that be family or professional group or guild... For an individual to grow into a truly human maturity requires a sense of responsibility for others, a commitment to working with others in society, and a sense of social solidarity. That's the "communitarian individual." A society that absolutizes the common ends up crushing individual creativity and initiative. A society that absolutizes the individual will, sooner or later, comes apart at the seams."

And on the necessity of culture:

Beauty prepares us for, even as it anticipates, life in the kingdom, life with God forever. As Hans Urs von Balthasar once wrote, the more we know and love and understand a great work of art, the more we recognize that we can't, in the final analysis, 'grasp' its genius. That's why we never "outgrow" a beloved work of art. And that inexhaustibility prepares us to "contemplate God in the beatific vision, [when] we will see that God is forever the ever-greater." ...Beauty is something that even the most skeptical moderns can know...

He even throws in a word for the Princeton Chapel, noting how its "Gothic beauty... played a considerable role in breaking [one student] free of the rationalistic atheism he had adopted as a teenager..."

Weigel may not mention slow food or the transect; still, such passages from a traditional neocon could prove unsettling to a new generation of conservatives who were supposed to have pioneered such emphases. Accordingly, keep it secret, keep it safe.

Bear Market

Perhaps I'm reading things into a guileless documentary, but the subtext to PBS's The National Parks: America's Best Idea seemed to be: "Look what big government (in this case FDR and his bulldog Ickes) did for us, and look how foolish, in retrospect, populist resistance to such massive government initiatives appears." Please don't misunderstand me - I'm quite the National Park enthusiast and I'm glad they were created - but PBS's not-so-subtle attempt to use the Ken Burns effect to endorse our current political arrangement was difficult to ignore.

Inadvertently, however, the same documentary provides one of the finest fiscal analogies on offer, one that very nicely illustrates the danger of unnecessary government intrusion. In one episode, we learn of the young George Melendez Wright:

In 1930, he persuaded his superiors to let him and two colleagues conduct a four-year survey of wildlife and plant life conditions in the national parks, funding the ambitious program with his own funds. His first-of-a-kind survey resulted in two landmark reports that urged the Park Service to change ingrained practices such as feeding bears at dumps and killing predators, in order to allow nature to take its course in the parks.

Wright was ultimately successful in his campaign to stop well-meaning but harmful interventions, and his policy caused wildlife to flourish. After all, survival of wildlife in its natural habitat was more of a likelihood thanks to the newly established boundaries of the National Parks.

The analogy to free markets is, I hope, an obvious one. Socialism is like the city zoo. Animals (in this case, businesses), having lost the instincts gained in their natural habitats, are deadened beasts waiting for the daily dole. On the other extreme, capitalism, unfettered by any kind of government regulation, is like Jurassic Park, where T-Rexes rip down electric fences and raptor twins consume any token Australian actors who try to stop them. But the ideal fiscal environment is like a National Park after George Melendez Wright's necessary reforms. Government in this arrangement is very involved, establishing and enforcing the boundaries wherein businesses can flourish; but not so involved as to, for example, incentivize a loan company to reckless decisions by guaranteeing a payday.

Should the nutshells and excrement of the fiscal zoo prove unappealing, perhaps our government will one day return to doing for businesses what we do for bears.

Et Verbum Caro Factum Est

Et Verbum Caro Factum Est
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Bowery Street

Bowery Street
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Colonial Ur-Christian

Funny thing about the Princeton Plato, Jonathan Edwards, is how he transcends all later American denominational stereotypes. He promotes revival like the most enthusiastic Charismatic, accommodates secular learning like the most worldly Episcopalian, preaches hellfire like the stoutest Baptist, celebrates beauty like an Orthodox iconographer, subscribes to sovereignty like an uncompromising Presbyterian, and practices personal piety like the most earnest of Methodists. Best of all, he typologizes like a Catholic, and the way he uses nature to extrapolate about the character of God makes him thoroughly guilty of the (Christologically grounded) analogia entis. Edwards is, as Perry Miller put it, a Puritan Saint.

In his introduction to one of George Marsden's underestimated Stone Lectures on Edwards last year, the perceptive and unassuming Steve Crocco wryly asked the unanswerable: Why did God allow Jonathan Edwards to die at the peak of his intellectual powers? While his collected works fill 26 volumes, a longer life might have enabled him to complete his projected magnum opus on the history, and ontology, of salvation. But instead, Princeton's Plato died, and as mentioned, Witherspoon's Aristotelian Realism took over, which, of course, also has its strengths.

However troubling that question may be, at least it didn't bother Jonathan Edwards. Here's Marsden on this most untimely death:

Almost all his life [Edwards] had been preparing for this moment. He had often preached to others about how they should be ready for death and righteous judgment at any minute, and he disciplined himself with a regimen of devotion so that he would be prepared. In the weeks when he was wasting away he must have wondered why God would take him when he had so much to do. But submission to the mysteries of God's love beyond human understanding was at the heart of his theology. When he knew the end was near, he dictated a message to be sent to Sarah in Stockbridge, to "give the kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her, that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such a nature, as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever."

Later American denominations have divided up the Edwards patrimony like so much cake, each content with a portion, some satisfied with the cellophane container, some getting excited enough about a corner piece with extra frosting to think they have it all. The downside to this is that few there are who think as largely as Edwards did; the upside is that not only the ultra Reformed get to claim him.