Museum studies, meet Biblical studies. I’m sure you’ll get along just fine. At Public Discourse, my case for casing up the world-famous marbles at the British Museum. “[N]othing cuts through red tape like grace.” (Amazing to think that the Apostle Paul would have seen the Parthenon Marble in situ.)
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| The Acropolis Museum in Athens awaiting the Parthenon Marbles, photo: Louis Dalibard |
Commonweal was kind enough to publish a piece that pushes my thesis in Mother of the Lamb in new directions. It's called An Unintended Icon?, and it regards architect Santiago Calatrava's accidental Virgin of the Passion. The collage below might give an additional sense of what I was getting at. The article is also my tell-all confession about growing up in New Jersey. I held nothing back.
Essentialists believe maleness is real, but (generally) that there’s one way to be a man, and THIS (insert masculine ideal here) is that way. Constructivists believe "maleness" (they love scarequotes) is a cultural invention, and so we should discard the category completely. I count myself a Strategic Essentialist (I borrow the phrasing from theologian Serene Jones, who offers a very helpful critique of Judith Butler's hyper-constructivism). This means I believe there IS such a thing as the masculine (and feminine), and that these are not pure social constructions; instead they are parts of the mystery of God who transcends both categories (see Gen. 1:27); AND no single culture, even Christian cultures, gets them exactly right.
This means I believe maleness is real, there is a variety, albeit a finite variety, of ways to be a man; you don’t have to own a pick up, you don’t have to be married (Jesus wasn't), you don’t have to like football, you don’t have to listen to Joe Rogan – you can do those things, but you might find yourself fulfilling genuine masculinity in other ways as well (like, say, being an art historian who writes books about Mary, heh). So there's freedom for men to be men in Christ, yes; but freedom not to escape authentic manhood but to realize it.
Once you believe that masculinity is a real thing (and I assure you it is, and this truth is denied at great peril), there are five truths that surface, truths that hypermasculine "machismo" or hypomasculine "effeminacy" (I can use scarequotes too) are actually seeking to avoid. These truths show up in a lot of masculinity literature. These truths are as follows (I borrow them from the book Adam's Return, which was an attempt to Christianize the men's movement of the 1990s launched by Robert Bly's Iron John):
1. Life is hard
2. You are not important
3. Your life is not about you
4. You are not in control
5. You are going to die
Though of course all these truths also apply to women, generally speaking it is uniquely difficult for men to receive these truths (which is why global male initiation rituals have long attempted to impart them). Biblical manhood, in my view, does not deny these truths, but nor is it satisfied with them. And so (again, borrowing from Adam's Return)....
1. Life is hard, but "[Christ's] yoke is easy" (Matt 11:28)
2. You are not important, but "your name is written in heaven" (Luke 10:20)
3. Life is not about you, but "it is not [you] who live but Christ who lives in [you]” (Gal. 2:20)
4. You’re not in control but “can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life span?” (Luke 12:26)
5. You are going to die, but “neither death nor life… can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39)
I hope you all agree that these five truths go far deeper than another internecine "complementarian" or "egalitarian" debate.
I've learned a lot from Carl Jung, but I am not a neopagan Hillmanian Jungian, as many contemporary proponents of masculinity are. James Hillman unfortunately de-Christianized the Jungian tradition, and for that reason I don't think he's that helpful. For such persons, manliness might evoke the licentious debauchery of Dionysus, the erratic philandering of Zeus, the blinding mental clarity of Apollo, or the cuckolded industriousness of Hephaestus, or all at once. No thanks.
Instead my view of manhood is shaped by reading the Gospels, which confirms the good in the pagan masculine archetypes and corrects the worst. Poseidon never said, “The greatest among you shall be your servant" (Matthew 23:11). As Chaplain Wilson suggested this morning, the Christian tradition radically revises pagan understandings of masculinity, counseling service, selflessness, sacrifice and surrender instead. If this is one's view of masculinity, of course I fall short, and will continue to fall short, over and over again. Thank God for grace!
I've written before about what happened to me after I read a good amount of the now traditional men's literature, namely Moore and Gillette's fascinating series of books (the summative volume is here, but they are all of interest). Then I tried to meet Moore and realized he died in a murder-suicide. I realize this was a tragic circumstance, but it is a reminder that the Christianization of the 90s men's movement is not exactly optional, in my opinion. It's a process we're witnessing all over again with Jordan Peterson. Those who don't take him seriously, I believe, are deluded; those who stop with him are as well (I expect Jordan Peterson would agree).
In essence, I believe the four masculine archetypes uncovered by Gillette and Moore—Warrior, Magician, Lover and King—are not simply replicated by Christ, but they are instead baptized, transformed, even transfigured.
Not all agree. Books from the 90s men's movement like Aaron Kipnis's Knights Without Armor took a different approach to transfiguring masculinity, and I think charts such as the one below remain instructive, to a point.
(HYPER)MASCULINE: Patriarchal // (HYPO)MASCULINE: Matriarchal // (INTEGRATED)MASCULINE: Trinitarian (but this, of course, would apply to the integrated feminine as well).
But really, a critique of the polytheistic model is itself embedded in Kipnis's book. He describes going to a goddess festival where masculinity was trashed - torched in fact. A wicker man was lit on fire as shirtless women danced around it, the statue's phallus blazing amid the shouts and screams. Kipnis was revolted, as were most men present:
The road of my initiation into Earth Mother mysteries had ended. It is no better to burn wicker men than it was to burn witches. Suddenly I no longer found amusing the antimale bumper stickers I had seen on women 's cars as we hiked in. They said, "if god created men, who can you trust" "The more I get to know men, the more I love my dog," and , more ominously, "Dead men can't rape."...The Goddess showed a dark face that night, which felt as just as dangerous as the so-called patriarchy.
At this festival, they then put some kind of communion bread in the mouths of the men who had joined the proceedings, and Kipnis says he spat it out. I'm glad he did. Goddesses, I've argued elsewhere, don't get anyone very far. What Kipnis is looking for is a meal that brings men and women genuinely together as men and women; and the only meal I'm aware of that consistently does this (in an amazing array of different global conditions), is the Eucharist.
...comes the history, present, and future of the theologically resonant image. So I attempt to explain in my review of Thomas Pfau's magnificent book Incomprehensible Certainty at The Hedgehog Review.
It really is the case that in each of theses articles and conversations a new dimension of the Virgin of the Passion surfaces beyond what is on offer in the actual book. Meaning tends to proliferate like that, as explored in Our Lady of Everywhere at CT:
When the city of Rome was sacked in the fifth century, Christians like Saint Augustine responded by exalting what he called the City of God over the City of Man. But what if the capital of a Christian empire collapses? The Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire had to ask that question when Constantinople (now Istanbul) fell to the Ottomans in 1453. I would argue that the Virgin of the Passion icon provided the same service for that disaster that Augustine provided in his famous book City of God. But this time the answer came not in writing but in paint.
Here are five new podcast/youtube conversations:
1. Regeneration on The Everlasting People and Mother of the Lamb
2. Grail Country on Valentin Tomberg's letter on the Devil from Meditations on the Tarot (okay, not really Christmassy)
3. Yale Center for Faith and Culture on Mother of the Lamb.
4. Crackers n' Juice on that very same book.
5. A discussion with John Drury about the upcoming lectionary texts.
I have an Advent piece on Eckhart's refreshingly direct (and not heretical) Mariology at Comment today.
Here's a wonderfully kind article at the Wheaton Record, a followup podcast from the kind Jason Micheli following my piece at The Bulwark, and an interview with Nate Hile at Grail Country below. If you'd like to discuss Mother of the Lamb by podcast or any other way, please let me know.
Being a talk tying Mother of the Lamb to current (tragic) events at the wonderful Wheaton Public Library.
I have an article up at Comment today reviewing a show at The British Museum entitled "Feminine Power."
My fantastic editor had me push all the academic discussions, art historical and theological, to the endnotes, so I hope it is accessible to anyone, while also being a resource for scholars. She also helped me keep the cost down. Please consider purchasing a copy wherever books are sold.
