art history strikes back

Da Vinci decodings are getting (today's WSJ) much (Wright's "post-modern fantasy" article) better (even the archbishop of Canterbury weighs in). I'm beginning to think God commissioned Dan Brown in order to spur Christians onto more effective catechism.

The key in responding is to have that illusive light touch, as the book is, after all (while claiming to be fact-based), still a work of fiction. I used to link to Bart Ehrman's excellent lectures on the subject. This was rhetorically effective because no one (including Ehrman) would accuse Ehrman of being a defender of the faith, and he did such a nice job of showing Brown's "fact-base" to be also fiction. But alas, the T.C. took 'em down (though there's still his book).

But now U of Chicago and U of Bologna trained art historian Elizabeth Lev lets Brown have it Renaissance style.

And speaking of art history - Princeton Chapel tour tomorrow (Sat.) at 2:30pm (with an organ recital before at 2pm). If Dan Brown fans come expecting to hear that Gothic is "a secret pagan tribute to a woman's womb [and then some]"(326), they should anticipate disappointment.

original deconstruction 3

Three? Yes. Don't you remember one and two? The theme of this provocative series (called "fiendishly clever" by Important Magazine and "millinerd at his table-turning best" by Reputable Source Weekly) is that deconstruction is not new. It began when Omnipotence went and got crucified circa 30AD, and it continues as inflated humanity humbles itself before that ego-shattering (and ego-transforming) truth. In other words, it's not that the late 20th century brand of French academic deconstruction is threatening, but that it's not nearly threatening enough. Postmodernists deconstruct ideas. Christians deconstruct themselves.

For my third example of original deconstruction, pardon me if I raise some eyebrows by turning to eastern spirituality... that is, the eastern Christian monastic spirituality of John Climacus' Ladder of Divine Ascent (the preeminent spiritual classic of Eastern Orthodoxy). For a selection from this monastic boot-camp, click here. If you'd like to play it safe however, stick with Foucault.

Writes Climacus regarding pride:

"I once caught this mad imposter as it was rising in my heart, bearing on its shoulders its mother, vainglory. Roping them with the noose of obedience and thrashing them with the whip of humility, I demanded how they got access to me. At last, when flogged, they said: 'We have neither beginning nor birth, for we are progenitors and parents of all the passions. Contrition of heart that is born of obedience is our real enemy; we cannot bear to be subject to anyone; that is why we fell from Heaven, though we had authority there.

In brief, we are the parents of all that opposes humility; for everything which furthers humility, opposes us. We hold sway everywhere, save in Heaven, so where will you run from our presence? We often accompany dishonours, and obedience, and freedom from anger, and lack of resentment, and service [i.e. the activities of successful Christians]. Our offspring are the falls of spiritual men: anger, calumny, spite, irritability, shouting, blasphemy, hypocrisy, hatred, envy, disputation, self-will and disobedience.

There is only one thing in which we have no power to meddle; and we shall tell you this, for we cannot bear your blows: If you keep up a sincere condemnation of yourself before the Lord, you can count us as weak as a cobweb. For pride's saddlehorse, as you see, is vainglory, on which I am mounted.' But holy humility and self-accusation laugh at both the horse and its rider, happily singing the song of victory: Let us sing to the Lord, for gloriously is He glorified: horse and rider hath He hurled into the sea (Exodus 15:1) and into the abyss of humility" (23:37).

No doubt this text would be anathematized by many pomo-theorists for its use of the forbidden word "obedience." And no doubt Climacus would have responded that a refusal to countenance obedience should itself be deconstructed to reveal the underlying power-play of pride and self-indulgence that such a phobia can ingeniously conceal. Certainly legitimate ecclesial structures can and have been abused, but a refusal to submit (gasp!) to them might also be due to a prior, and perhap unconscious obedience to a different (and much harsher) master.

And notwithstanding the fortune cookie and/or Yoda associations it may call to mind, this bit on humility is a keeper:

"The natural property of a lemon tree is such that it lifts its branches upwards when it has no fruit, but the more branches bend down the more fruit they bear. Those who have the mind to understand will grasp the meaning of this" (25:48).

Though admittedly more appropriate to Lent than Eastertide, Climacus' Ladder rewards the significant effort it requires to read... Let alone actually climb.

Events

Nicholas Wolterstorff is speaking here tomorrow (Friend 101, 4:30). If, as it is so fashionable to do, you disdain the "foundational evidentialism" of modernity (i.e. the mistaken notion that all rational beliefs must have rock solid foundations of certainty and be somehow verbally "provable")... and if you think the possiblities opened by that disdain, rather than leading to an abandonment of reason, can instead lead to a long overdue reexamination of the rationality of the Christian faith that the Enlightenment so recklessly discarded... and if you think that seriously presenting such a cheerfully modest epistemology in the hallowed halls of academe is an entirely worthwhile pursuit... then Nicholas Wolterstorff is your man.

Someone please go and tell me about it because I cannot.

But I will be at yet another millinerd PU chapel tour this Friday April 21st at 3:30. It's for pre-frosh, but do feel free to tag along.

Scandalously Doubtless

Allow me to get personal here at millinerd.com. I don't do it very often, but hey, it's almost Easter. Why should Christmas be the sole instigator of undue emotional display?

At the Good Friday service of my wee 'lil church, which is, like all churches, not without its troubles, I had a bizarre and disconcerting experience. I lost my doubt.

Doesn't that sound awful? I imagine some might even be offended. Don't worry, I assure you that doubt will creep back in my weaker moments, resuming our 'til-death-do-us-part arrangement... but during the service, after two stunningly read Scripture lessons (which when read well can vastly exceed a sermon in illuminating power), and as our sublime choir sung the Passion narrative (so hauntingly executed that it itself contained 50 sermons), I looked up at the stripped cross with a sliver of black cloth slung over it as it if it were the brazen serpent... and lost, if for only twenty minutes, all doubt.

What's interesting is that I am quite sure that it I was not "out of my mind," entranced by the fasting and the liturgy, such that when I return to it in the "real world" I'll be "back to normal." No. The liturgy is much realer than the real world. Furthermore, I was unusually clear headed during the service, such that there were some purely practical matters that I had been struggling with for some weeks that found themselves resolved. Even academic arguments I had been mulling around became clearer. And while this is indeed evidence that my mind was wandering at times during the rather long service, it's also evidence that I was most definitely in my mind, not in some impossible to describe "other state." I never once left Jersey. In fact, after the service, Denise and I got mozarella sticks and cheeseburgers from Hoagie Haven and downloaded an episode of Lost. Hardly the activities of bona fide mystics (or ascetics... but fasting - it makes one hungry).

What doubt did I lose? The doubt that this Man who was crucified for the sins of the world was in fact God, and that the act did in fact affect the salvation of the world. Whether the salvation is realized or resisted by that world is another story, but I did realize it, if for another fleeting moment, last night. Nietzsche's faith-seeking missiles from Human All Too Human (which had given me some trouble this semester) became like dead flies to be flicked off the shoulder. The most laughably absurd proposition in the world became the idea that this Man was not who He said He was, and that this service did not put us in touch with that reality. The release of Barrabas was recounted in our service, but it was not Barrabas. It was me. Of course Christianity is in fact true, the question is (as always) what will I do about it. How will I love more? How will I stop betraying Christ thousands of little times as this service made it so very clear that I had in fact done?

What may sound additionally odd to modern sensibilities is that my "experience" on Good Friday did not approximate some vague religious "sensibility" shared by all religions. It was specifically Christian. It did not gloriously exceed the contours of dull dry dogmatic "orthodoxy," but rather peacefully rested within them, just as a painting is not compromised, but assisted, by its frame.

One reads in some books that such "spiritual experiences" are in fact a deep sense of mystic unity with "God," a.k.a. the worldsoul. Pantheism? Positively unsexy. Take for example a great white shark. Such a ferocious and terrifying animal - silently swimming, instantly killing. It is a tempting thought that God is realizing Himself through the evolutionary process, experiencing the joy of actually being the shark. It would be fun - to actually be the shark, giraffe or volcano... and then to slowly realize yourself more clearly through humans and human culture. If I was God I might do it that way, but there's so little love in it. Much more exciting is the idea of a creation that is separate from God, that God gives birth to, ex nihilo, in love. (Ex nihilo by the way is Latin for "God is not co-dependent.")

Furthermore, the merit that the Pantheist intuition does have (which is not insignificant), is in fact realized in the notion that God did become creation once... in Christ (and concomitantly in the Eucharist, but that's another post). And He did so not for amusement, but for the salvation of the world that is not God. And now, through the third person of the Trinity, He seeks not to be us, but to be in us, working with us, through us, in and by the One who became one of us, for us.

But those are all words, and the attentive reader will sense them buckling under the weight of the reality they are trying to express. Much better are the ordered sounds, silences, processions, images and actions of the Good Friday liturgy. Sermons? They're really barely necessary. Sometimes they even get in the way.

Triduum

"It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return" (52).

That was Annie Dillard in a quote you may have heard before. It leads one to lament domesticated Christianity, but then again perhaps we need it that way. Who among us could stand ten minutes of the real thing? In the meantime Nick Cave gets pretty close to about five. His song Hiding All Away strangely expresses (I think) that terrifying quality of Christian faith, which is highlighted in the Triduum, but, perhaps for our sanity, is often glossed over. Here's a sample (that does little justice), and here are some of the lyrics.

Hiding All Away

You went looking for me, dear,
Down by the sea
You found some Iittle silver fish
But you didn't find me
I was hiding, dear, hiding all way [2x]

You went to the museum
You climbed a spiral stair
You searched for me all among
The knowledgeable air
I was hidden, babe, hiding all away
I was hidden, dear, hiding all away

You entered the cathedral
When you heard the solemn knell
I was not sitting with the gargoyles
I was not swinging from the bell
I was hiding, dear, I was hiding all away [2x]

You asked an electrician
If he'd seen me round his place
He touched you with his fingers
Sent sparks zapping out your face
I was hidden, dear, hiding all away
I was not there, dear, hiding all away

You went and asked your doctor
To get some advice
He shot you full of Pethidine
And then he billed you twice
But I was hiding, dear, hiding all away [2x]

You searched through all my poets
From Sappho through to Auden
I saw the book fall from your hands
As you slowly died of boredom
I had been there, dear,
But I was not there anymore
I had been there, now I'm hiding all way

Some of us we hide away
Some of us we don't
Some will live to love another day
And some of us won't
But we all know there is a law
And that law, it is love
And we all know there's a war coming
Coming from above

There is a war coming [2x]

postmodernity and totalitarianism

Boy is my face red. Earlier I mentioned, contra postmodernity and in defense of reason, that totalitarian governments usually don't endorse, but attack reason. My admittedly fictional illustration was from Orwell's 1984. My undue assumption however was that postmodernity was against totalitarianism. Turns out the truly postmodern position (If Rorty and Foucault can be considered truly postmodern) is that totalitarians are not entirely suspect, being as they are such effective brokers of irony. Explains Carl Rapp,

"...In Rorty's interpretation, the point Orwell is trying to make in 1984 is that the worst thing that can happen to one is that one's capacity for doublethinking (or supreme fiction making) should be disrupted. That doublethink, in Rorty's view, should turn out to be a good thing after all, and that the spirit of Greek philosophy should turn out to be fully employed in the Ministry of Truth (and thus a bad thing after all), was a brilliant piece of virtuoso irony and a perfect demonstration of irony's power to make every determinacy waver and dissolve, not unworthy of the Ministry of Truth itself.

For his own part, Foucault admitted to Trombadori that the coherence of his own project of being always other than himself had not been incompatible, at least for a time, with Stalinism. The attractiveness of Stalinism for Foucault, during his brief stint in the Communist Party, had been the very fact that it required continuous and unremitting doublethinking in order to stay abreast of official Party policy and thus permitted one to be constantly changing" (chp. 2).

For details, see 175-6 (Rorty) and 52 (Foucault).

I've spent a lot of time on this blog assuming that the postmodern ethos was unequivocally opposed to totalitarianism. It was an unfair assumption, and I am sorry to have mischaracterized my opponents.

Happy holy week everybody.

It is certainly Spring in Princeton. That's Nassau Hall in the background, which when constructed was the largest building in the Colonies. There's even Revolutionary War cannon damage on the South side. But you'd know all that had you come to the Chapel Tour today which covers Princeton history to boot! Fear not, there's another one this Friday April 7th at 3pm.