Snow Angels at Sinai

I decided to take the millinerd show on the road to defend icons, but it's good to be back. I used the original Iconophile terminology, briefly quoting the most helpful encapsulation of the icon debate that I'm aware of, and then I simplified the matter, admitting that I was doing just that. In the comments, I was both accused of simplifying (which I had already conceded), and of using overly subtle terminology. "The anatomy of a blog makes serious conversation all but impossible," said Alan Jacobs, and sometimes he's right. What makes it worse, is that peppered amongst such comments were some very insightful ones. Alas, I can commiserate with Dan Siedell's recently expressed frustrations.

Rather than churn out another post to defend this position abroad, I've decided to pick up my ball and go home.  It should be easier to keep up with the comment volume here.  Now, let's take a deep breath get a few things straight about icons:

1. The Iconophiles who defended icons in the Iconoclastic controversy used complex terminology to defend against the complex terminology of the Iconoclasts, but their aim was to vindicate the instinctive Christian piety of the laity. When faced with charges laced with complex terminology, clients - however guileless - better hope their lawyers are equipped with equally complex terminology.

2. Protestants who refuse to engage this terminology and cling to their distrust of icons are not dissimilar to Protestants who refuse to read the Catholic Catechism, continuing to insist that Catholicism teaches that Mary should be worshiped, faith is by works, or tradition trumps Scripture. Those who cling to these caricatures will only attract and keep the ignorant (no small crowd).  But there are better reasons to stay Protestant.  I look forward to reading Sarah Wilson's.

3. The most advanced form of Byzantine Iconophile thought is very limited in its claims. Instead of continuing to refer to my article that makes this case (a strategy wearing thin even on me), instead I'll quote another Byzantine art historian who makes the exact same point. In her contribution to The Byzantine World, Bissera Pentcheva explains:

Byzantine Iconoclasm (726-843) challenged [the] understanding of eikon as a site of pneuma dwelling in matter. So far, we have viewed this crisis through the prism of the sixteenth-century Reformation, imagining the destruction of churches, murals, mosaics and panels. By contrast, the Byzantine phenomenon appears to have been more of a process of narrowing of the meaning of eikon: from an identification with a body (an essentialist theory manifested in the stylite cults) to an eikon understood as the imprint - typos - of visual characteristics on matter (a formalist, non-essentialist theory).

While the Iconophiles used the image of the seal to illustrate these limited aesthetic ambitions, Pentcheva compellingly equates this non-essentialist theory of icons with snow angels. As a snow angel is not the child who made it, so an icon of Christ does not claim to "capture" Christ's divine nature.

4. Of course such sophisticated theological justification was not always kept in mind, but this is no reason to dismiss it. The Byzantines were relatively vigilant. When the practice of icons was abused because clergy or laity put too much faith in matter itself, Byzantium would sometimes have itself small Reformations. Emperor Alexios I Comenenos, for example, had to remind his subjects, in a 1095 decree, that an icon was only a likeness.

5. There is nothing about icons, properly understood, that violates the command to not make graven images.  Such images, most people seem to understand, are not worshiped. A fine - perhaps the finest - illustration of this fact comes from the place where the command was originally given: Mt. Sinai. Pentcheva, again quite perceptively, explains that the icon collection at Sinai was, in a way, most consistent with advanced Byzantine Iconophile opinion. There are no metal or ivory icons at Sinai, material features which attract attention to the icon itself.  All Sinai icons are painted on humble wooden panels. There are no miraculous icons at all at Sinai, which tend to take the focus away from the prototype. In contrast to the glittering, bulbous, sometimes promiscuous icons of Constantinople, the ascetic icons of Sinai are devotionally chaste, especially conforming to the commandment given just a short climb away. It is fitting, therefore, that these are the icons to have mostly survived.

6. It is not absurd to suggest that the Iconoclast par excellence John Calvin is therefore in agreement with the most advanced Byzantine justification for icons. Calvin knew only of the first (essentialist) defense of icons made by John of Damascus.  While this was not necessarily wrong, it was improved upon. Calvin cannot be faulted for failing to consult sources that he did not have. It is ecumenically serendipitous that the Genevan Reformer had no opportunity to refute the most advanced Byzantine argument for icons.  In fact, he made points similar to those made by the later Byzantine Iconophiles. This is why it's such great news that Wheaton chose a Reformed president (who gave an illuminating interview here).  Icons will festoon Blanchard Hall in a matter of months.  I'm sure of it.

Flamingo Season

Flamingo Season
Originally uploaded by millinerd
Wildlife photography: All thrill, no kill.

keeping us all safe

With the help of a great photo from lapeeler, I wrote about ugly babies at North American Churches, and crossposted at evangel. This makes for two powerful post streams aimed at the Stay Puft Marshmallow monster of North American church ugliness. I'd have crossposted here as well, but an unprecedented triple crosspost holds too much risk of crossing the streams.

Moynihan Rising

Ash Wednesday is supposed to be sobering, even a bit depressing; yet this one has been inappropriately buoyed by news of resurrection. Clearly my New Prometheus post has guilted the authorities into belated activity.  To keep up the pressure, I hope to make Release Rea! t-shirts and mugs available soon.

Why the Picture of Florence Above?

A friend has requested that I post my full review of New York's latest show on icons, The Origins of El Greco, which is a bit longer than the New Criterion version.  Who am I to deny this friend?  The full review might shed some light on the photograph above, taken in 2009, where I saw a saw a menacing raincloud that read "millinerd.com" raining on Giorgio Vasari's Florentine parade:

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“Do you know what you’re looking at?”  The monk’s question, spiked with condescension, annoyed New York Times review, I looked with frustration as gallery visitors attempted to wring aesthetic messages from these irreducibly religious images.  Against my better judgment, a question stirred within me, silently directed at a gallery of innocent art-lovers:  “Do you know what you’re looking at?”
me.  I had endured the expense and bureaucratic hassle to secure entry to Mount Athos, and I, so I thought, knew exactly what I was looking at.  It was a fresco in the portico of the Great Lavra Monastery depicting the Seventh Ecumenical Council (at which the veneration of icons was vindicated), and I fired this information back to the inquiring monk.  He was unimpressed.  Years later, visiting the current exhibition at the Onassis Center, an exquisite assembly of post-Byzantine icons, I sympathized with the monk.  Standing amidst a gaggle of admirers drawn by the validation of a favorable

It is a legitimate query, because when viewing icons, we educated viewers rarely do.  The problem is not our lack of education, but the nature of the one most of us received.  Giorgio Vasari, the father of art history, was right about many things.  But he began his Lives of the Artists by slaughtering a sacrificial lamb, the “incompetent…  crude, stiff, and mediocre…  dead tradition of the Greeks.”  Which is to say, the very aesthetic insemination that gave us the Renaissance was, for Vasari, blank sterility.  We know better now, and need no longer indulge Italian ex nihilo fantasies. In the last several decades, Byzantine art historians have permanently altered our understanding of neglected Eastern contributions to Italian art. To say this is not to denigrate undeniable Tuscan accomplishments, but only to contextualize them.  Recently studied Byzantine frescoes and the discovery of icons at St. Catherine’s Monastery show that Byzantine painters in fact anticipated Cimabue and Giotto’s innovations centuries beforehand; but historical circumstances permitted these images little chance to condition the late-blooming discipline of art history, an opportunity which fell instead to Vasari.  Hence, his primordial murder of the icon festers beneath this most enchanting of disciplines, and Byzantine blood, like the blood of Abel, repeatedly cries out from the art historical ground.

New York City has not been completely deaf to the sound.  In 1944, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was surprised by the popularity of a show displaying copies of the mosaics of Hagia Sophia, one of which still quietly overlooks the medieval sculpture gallery.  Since, the museum has been periodically clothed itself in Byzantine splendor:  The Age of Spirituality (1977), The Glory of Byzantium (1997) and Byzantium: Faith and Power (2004).  Sensitive to the religious nature of these items, the opening of the latter even featured the blessing of an Orthodox priest, incense and all.  But what makes this next tryst in New York’s Byzantine affair so unique is its chronology.   Most previous shows have, generally speaking, cauterized the Byzantine aesthetic with the end of the Empire in 1453.  But The Origins of El Greco:  Icon Painting in Venetian Crete bursts these academic bonds – the Vasarian vise grips - entirely.  1453 may have marked the end of the Byzantine political power, but it was a new beginning for the icon.  Recent research in Venetian archives has revealed how thousands of icons were pumped into Western territories from Crete, pouring into Venice at the height of the Renaissance, flooding into Florence under Vasari’s very nose.  The icon, we now know, never disappeared; it was ignored.  

Some of the best of these icons are located in Heraklion, Athens, St. Petersburg, and Corfu, whose museums have generously ensured this exhibition contains some of the finest and most representative examples of such imagery.  As art objects from American museums hasten, by threat of lawsuit, back to Europe, it is assuring to see the temporary reverse, thanks to magnanimous loans extended to this particular exhibition.  There are far too many surprises here to relate, but each shows the persistence of the icon in an age when it was supposed to have gone away:  Andreas Pavias’ crucifixion gives Northern Renaissance detailing a run for its money; Georgios Klontzas’ illustration of a Marian Hymn rivals the torque of the Baroque; a snowball of souls swells in the hand of God above an icon of David and Solomon; Arius, the fourth century heretic who confined the divine nature of Christ, is himself confined in Michael Damaskinos’ icon of the Council of Nicea; what may be a long dispersed triptych of El Greco’s is here reunited for the first time.

Some of the most sumptuous holes in the history of art are on offer in this exhibition.  In a sixteenth century Virgin of the Passion, scuffs have afflicted the simple wood surface, clustering to create gold-flecked craters that no artist, however inspired, could have conceived.  In a fifteenth century Noli me tangere, these wounds of time appear again, like benign gunshots in the resurrected body of Christ.  We rehearse the evolution from wood to canvas and from tempera to oil, and for good reason.  But the icons on display here show us what was lost in the transition.  Canvas cannot age the way these wooden panels have.  As with wine, so with icons:  Far sweeter now than at the hour of inception.

Holes are one thing, lines another, and it is the linear quality of the late Byzantine and Cretan icons that give them their tender severity, and one can trace the gradual loss of this arresting linearity in the show.   Again, we weren’t supposed to think this.  The exhibition itself refers to how one Cretan artist “distance[s] himself from the rigidity of the Byzantine style.”  On the contrary, we might suggest he succumbs to Venetian softness.  Compare the two Virgin Lactans in the exhibition  - the intentionally juxtaposed Eastern and Venetian styles – and see for yourself which of them contains more power.  The Venetian Mary hints at San Sulpician sentimentality; the Eastern Mary, bare breast notwithstanding, is still the Theotokos, the all-holy bearer of God.  But not for long.  As Italian prints saturated the Mediterranean, late icon painters were hypnotized by Bronzino and Parmigianino, and many could not help but yield.  Thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Bronzino exhibition, one can walk uptown in the same day to fathom this appeal.

And what of El Greco?  He is not the point of the show as much as the bait.  A similar strategy was employed this season with the opening of the spacious post-Byzantine wing of the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens.  A temporary, and not terribly impressive, Andy Warhol exhibit was displayed in conjunction with a very impressive collection of later icons, simply because recognizable names are the only way to lure a population conditioned by art history inside.  If you want full blown Spanish era El Greco head to the Met or the Frick, but at the Onassis Center one can currently see something arguably better:  Where he came from, and where – towards the end of his life – he returned.  Here is the El Greco who complained, in the margins of his copy of Lives of the Artists, that Vasari (and generations of art historians after him) misunderstood the Byzantine style.  Only here can we see how El Greco’s whirling western skies were persistently haunted by golden ones, just as art history is haunted by her hidden foundation:  The icon, her Byzantine ghost.

Christ in the Concert Hall: A Hypothetical Controversy

Imagine, for a moment, that there was a great struggle in the ancient church regarding whether or not music was conducive with Christian worship.  Thankfully, church history records mercifully few instances of this particular debate, but imagine that there was a great one.  Then imagine that an entire wing of the church succeeded in outlawing music.  Imagine next that those who (rightfully) argued that music was consistent with Christianity triumphed, and that following that hard-won victory, an entire stream of Christianity - a very prominent one - arose around the victorious musicophiles, becoming in turn a tradition that emphasized music in a unique and unrivaled way.  This would all be quite natural, as often only when something is threatened do we realize how necessary it is.

Next, imagine that a 21st century music historian, seeking to shed new light on the importance of music in today's church and in the secular concert hall, wrote a book about music and Christianity entitled "Christ and the Concert Hall." The author, appropriately enough, found the aforementioned musically-focused ancient Christian tradition to be a dominant inspiration.  Finally, imagine that in a review of "Christ in the Concert Hall," a gifted musician/author came along and pointed out that the author focused on "only one current" within the diverse river of Christianity.  The reviewer then went on to criticize the author of "Christ in the Concert Hall" for not focusing on other aspects of Christian history. The reviewer, furthermore, seemed to charitably imply that the author was not enough of a Barthian (because the author used abstract principles) or not enough of an N.T. Wrightian futurist (because the author didn't focus enough on hope).  This review would, I hope you agree, be quite peculiar.  After all, when writing a book about music and Christianity, why wouldn't one bother to emphasize that great tradition of musically-focused Christian faith, drawing upon the resources which, in God's providence, that tradition alone could provide.

And yet, when the gifted musician/author Jeremy Begbie reviewed art historian Dan Siedell's book God in the Gallery in the current issue of Image, Begbie appeared - ever so subtly - to take issue that Dan Siedell, in a book about art, limited himself to "one particular current within the Nicene river, the Eastern Orthodox tradition... and the council of Niceae (787 CE), the conference which established the orthodoxy of icons."  Well of course he did!  Especially seeing that this tradition has a history of American neglect, Why wouldn't he?   No wonder Siedell, at his blog, seems a bit miffed about the limitations of the Reformed perspective on art and the necessity of engaging the untapped art historical resources of the Orthodox Church.

I certainly hope the Protestant aesthetic [band]wagons aren't going to circle on the issue of Christianity and art.  The Reformed, among others Protestants, have much to offer in this particular conversation.  They've been contributing, thankfully, for centuries, and especially so in the last few decades (thanks in no small part to Jeremy Begbie).  But the Orthodox have been doing likewise for far longer, and they're far more experienced, and successful, in this volatile arena.  To limit oneself to Protestant resources when it comes to art may bring a satisfying sense of intellectual consistency, but it is also to ensure things get very boring, very fast.  Not as boring, mind you, as when one limits oneself (as does most of the art world) to strictly secular resources, but still pretty boring.

[crossposted at evangel]

Miller Chapel

Miller Chapel
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Crunchy Compromise

A fine post from Rod Dreher about the "uneasy middle" in which most of us find ourselves.  The original Crunchy Con has helped me understand why my mass market Triscuit Box is advocating for the Home Farming Movement, complete with a plantable Basil seed card.  He has done nothing to help me understand my desire to combine blue cheese and buffalo wing sauce on said Triscuits, but it's really good.

North American Churches has been roused from its winter slumber.

not a glimmer, but a gift

David Schaengold's fine first post at The League fills me with the urge to visit a cathedral/skyscraper hybrid like the Tribune Tower or the Woolworth Building. His heartening and refreshingly original insight that there are many ways in which "modernity is actually more Christian than the Middle Ages" does not, however, require positing that "nothing like the scientific method was found in antiquity, and what glimmers of it appeared in the Middle Ages were feeble." Or so it seems to me. Here's the wonderful Edward Grant on the matter:

The idea, and the habit, of applying reason to resolve the innumerable questions about our world, and of always raising new questions, did not come to modern science from out of the void. Nor did it originate with the great scientific minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries... It came out of the Middle Ages from many faceless scholastic logicians, natural philosophers, and theologians... It is a gift from the Latin Middle Ages to the modern world, a gift that makes our modern society possible, though it is a gift that may never be acknowledged.

But this is only to bolster Schaengold's point that the "civilization of the modern West has privileged and encouraged joy in the way the universe works more than any civilization in history." We've made good use of the gift.

The New Prometheus

Herewith a nomination for our most hideously vindictive piece of public statuary, the Samuel Rea monument in Manhattan's Penn Station. The 1910 sculpture by Adolph Weinmann is fine enough. What makes it unbearably cruel though, is the backstory.

Samuel Rea had been working for the Pennsylvania Railrod since he was 16. He rose up in the company, and under his Vice-Presidency glorious Old Penn Station was completed in 1910, the crowning achievement of American architectural trinity McKim, Mead and White. Rea's likeness, and that of a previous railroad President Alexander Cassat (brother of painter Mary Cassat), were installed in niches of the newly built architectural wonder. When Rea assumed presidency of the Railroad two years after the station's completion, it was his job to defend this superb American accomplishment from those who called it a wasteful extravagance. Rea succeeded. Visually speaking, we can imagine this was not that hard to do.

But the conceits of architectural modernism combined with the triumph of the automobile (which had supposedly "eclipsed" the train), led inexorably to the destruction of Old Penn Station in 1963, resulting - because trains turned out to be not so outmoded after all - in our freakishly hateful present replacement. The new Penn Station brings certain Bible verses to mind. As Vincent Scully famously remarked, "One entered the city like a god. Now one scuttles in like a rat." Other worthies testify to their extreme dissatisfaction as well, hoping for the success - may it be granted! - of Moynihan Station.

I spend a lot of time at the current Penn Station, and I often see people screaming and fighting, cursing and hitting each other. Would the old terminal have prevented such spiteful behavior? Not necessarily, but I wouldn't rule out the fact that overwhelming grandeur has an ameliorative effect on public behavior. And yet, as disturbing as it may be, there's something appropriate about snubbing one's neighbor in such a hellish setting. New Penn Station makes it feel right to be rude.

Following the destruction of Old Penn Station, the two aformentioned statues were preserved and placed on the new sight. Alexander Cassatt has since been mercifully removed, but not Rea. He is there today, and every day, forced to witness our undoing of his life's work. Once his likeness looked upon Roman grandeur, now it stares at an ATM console. Decades have passed - he cannot look away. Had I the choice between this fate and eagles picking at my regenerating intestines for all time, I'd be on the fence.

Complicating Localism

"I'll take the falafel with Thai sauce over curry with a side of jambalaya sushi and a Brooklyn Lager, please." This is what I imagined myself ordering at the Giraffe Restaurant at Heathrow airport, which promises "international cuisine." In a fit of localist conviction, I "protested" the well-marketed but pretentious Giraffe and ate, full of self-satisfaction, at the same terminal's "English pub." Even if Heathrow was barely recognizable as London, I was going to be true to place. I was then served my Fish n' Chips by a Checkoslovakian. On the next trip through, too tired for my principles, I surrendered to the superior menu of Giraffe, and it was a decent meal. Such a restaurant, I realized, can actually highlight local foods worldwide that might not otherwise have been noticed. Considering the people coming through Heathrow airport, Giraffe may have been being most true to place. I'm glad, however, for the sake of non-airport localities, that the chain seems to be limiting itself to flight terminals.

Similarly, consider celebrity American chef Bobby Flay. At first glance, what could be more destructive to localist principles than Flay's show Throwdown. He's the perfect villain set on assaulting America's neighborhood variety - and he hits where it hurts: in the stomach. American towns may have cultivated their own, culinary oddities: Texas chile, Kansas City Barbecue, Maine lobster sandwiches, Buffalo wings, etc. But here comes the big city chef with network executive back-up, sexy assistants, and a film crew to beat these local chefs at their own game. The aim of this program - so it would seem - is to humiliate. Flay and his crew roll in to show those silly non-New Yorkers that there's nothing they can cook up that iron chefs can't just as easily accomplish with their razor-sharp mandolines and ten-thousand dollar ovens.

Problem is, that's not what it's like at all. The actual result of Flay's show is to highlight American localities, who might not get the attention otherwise. It certainly helps that Flay is not a jerk. Often he just can't top local recipes, and he's a good sport about it. Even if he does top the recipes, the result is a new level of attention to a worthy hometown chef. Flay's show, furthermore, is his own kind of localism. Born and raised in NYC, this is one way he seems to have grappled with the country coming to him.

When American urban elites, in the tradition of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, mock the ideals of localism by caricaturing small town America, they are rightfully criticized. But Sinclair is one option among several. In the case of Flay, the potentially oppressive apparati of the big city media machine does not minimize localism, but magnifies it. In fact, Flay, and Heathrow's Giraffe, are dependent upon vibrant localism for their success. The word for this is not "colonialism," but symbiosis.