Christendom's Ghost

It is sad to see the American Santa Claus making more headway in the thick Saint Nicholas country of the Orthodox Mediterranean. As William Bennett explains so nicely, the American figure was spurred by the historical explorations of the famous New Yorker John Pintard, furthered by Washington Irving, crystallized by Hebrew Professor Clement Moore's Night Before Christmas, given visual form by the cartoonist Thomas Nast, and propagated through the avenues of a burgeoning consumer society. It's a relatively thin, late-arriving tradition, and one can understand the desire to protest it completely. But a better recourse is to return to St. Nicholas himself (the St. Nick Center sure helps a lot). The answer is not to Americanize the Orthodox, but to allow the Orthodox tradition to make headway into American life.

One would not suspect a mass market American book to do that, but William Bennett's The True Saint Nicholas does so by nicely distilling an extraordinary amount of historical information. Bennett points out that the very thing so many Protestants worry about in Santa is a result of too cavalier an amendment of centuries of Christian culture by Protestants. Santa Claus, in his various guises, is a revenge on the unfortunate excesses of the Reformation.

Reformers tried to discourage the lighting of candles, exchanging of gifts, and distribution of sweets to children on St. Nicholas Day. By the end of the sixteenth century, Nicholas had been banished from religious life in much of Western Europe. But he could not be driven out of people's hearts and imaginations. He was much too beloved for that to happen. When Saint Nicholas lost his honored place in churches, something extraordinary happened. He moved into homes, where he had legions of fans, especially among children. He became a hero of the hearth.

Bennett also cleverly points out that Americans do not have a corner on consumerism:

Yes, Santa Claus is sometimes overexposed and exploited. But anything good is open to being exploited. In fact, anything good is likely to be exploited. Such is human nature. Saint Nicholas, in his heyday, was arguably just as overused and overexposed as Santa Claus is today. People called upon him to fulfill every conceivable desire, from finding a husband to conquering an enemy. The citizens of Bari went so far as to steal his bones to give their city a boost. For that matter, Saint Nicholas was well connected with commerce and materialism long before Santa Claus came along. Many a ship captain prayed to Nicholas for a profitable voyage, many a merchant invoked his name in sealing a lucrative deal. Trade guilds appropriated him in hopes of selling more buttons, barrels, and boots.

Then there's Bennett's basic cultural intuition which should be so much more common than it is: "Santa Claus is, in a very real sense, the result of a Christ-inspired goodness that has rippled down seventeen centuries, from Nicholas' time to our own. Despite secularization and commercialization, Santa Claus is a manifestation of Nicholas's decision to give to others. The history of Saint Nicholas is a kind of miracle in itself. It is a legacy that resonates with God's love."

Behind Santa Claus is Saint Nicholas, and behind Saint Nicholas is the Christ whom he defended, suffered for, and in whose name he gave gifts. Hermit crab Christians who protest Christian culture should realize they never escape culture. They just get a very bland one.

Better than the Inn

This from a Christmas letter I received:

In his book, Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes, Kenneth Bailey unpacks some of the cultural nuances of the Christmas narrative. According to Bailey, the setting for Christ's birth was probably not a cold and lonely stable but rather a warm and bustling peasant home.

Bailey theorizes that this misunderstanding may have originated in a Western tendency to associate a "manger" with a barn or stable. He also speculates that Western readers' unfamiliarity with strict Middle Eastern codes of hospitality helped perpetuate the assumption that when Mary and Joseph looked for "a place to stay," they appealed to a local commercial inn and not a private home.

Bailey suggest that the Greek word for "inn" in Luke 2:7 probably more accurately refers to a "guest room." A lack of space in the guest room would have given the family no other choice but to invite Mary and Joseph into the middle of their personal living space - an area adjacent to where the household livestock were kept.

It's a thought: Jesus born not in a lonely stable, but welcomed into the chaotic midst of the most intimate family spaces. If God is not (as too many would have it) splendid isolation, but primordial love itself, the eternally differentiated trinity in whom there "is no inward, unrelated gaze, no stillness prior to relation" (185), he must have felt right at home.

Wordless Saturday

Monsul Head, England
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Wordless Tuesday

Famagusta Gate, Nicosia
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Wordless Monday

Not Switzerland
Originally uploaded by millinerd

Does God have all the best art?

Shirley Dent responds to that question with a "Yes," adding "I detest the cynicism about humanity that clings to the conceptual nooks and crannies of secular, ironic, postmodern art." She declares the best art to be religious, even Christian. She lists some awful examples of contemporary art, and sounds the praises of a Christian altarpiece. Dent is not writing for a conservative religious publication, but participating in a forum sponsored by Britain's famously secular newspaper, The Guardian. Of course, Guardian readers will require from the author a few disclaimers lest she be deemed too religious herself, and here they are, three firm knocks on a wide open door:

1. no god of any shape, size or hue owns those great works.

2. Religious art may be framed by the iconography of a Christian tradition but its starting point is human.

3. This is not art simply in thrall to an abstract divine but art working through the Christian narrative to transfigure and transcend the confines of lives that were for the most part "nasty, brutish and short".

Somewhere, there may be a religious person who thinks (1) a god of some particular size, shape and hue "owns" an art collection, (2) Christian art just drops from the sky - no human participation is involved, and (3) Christians worship an "abstract divine" that has no bearing on the difficulties of human life. Wherever they are, they can consider themselves soundly refuted.

It's a shame that the irreligious ethos of Britain requires Dent to attach such tortured disclaimers to her straightforward and refreshing observations. There is, in fact, no contradiction between Christian faith and a thorough celebration of human dignity (with all the happy artistic consequences), for the best kind of humanism naturally springs from belief in the God who became human. As for contemporary art, yes, things are bad, and we should not hesitate to say as much. But for a more nuanced analysis, one might have better luck with conservative religious publications, or Dan Siedell's God in the Gallery.

Writing Well

C.S. Lewis provides some advice to children on writing, which adults should find equally helpful.

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the clean direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."

4. In writing, don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers "Please, will you do my job for me."

5. Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

The cogitations of mine that follow from this beneficial inventory of pointers lead me to deem the aforementioned list an infinitely delightful one.

The Swiss Solution

Free Fall
Originally uploaded by millinerd

I don't know why the Swiss are getting all bothered about minarets. Nicosia, Cyprus (where I am currently) has the solution: A happy fun park next to each one! Failing that, ensure the presence of jolly ol' St. Nick nearby.

Please note: This post is intended to be humorous.

Reclaiming Fantasy from Geekdom

What's so exciting about Caldecott's Beauty for Truth's Sake is that he's not alone. As I tried to point out, his work is a gateway drug to a series of thinkers who are picking up Lewis' discarded image, polishing it up, and looking through it again. Among those Caldecott might have mentioned is the erudite Alison Milbank, who is up to something very similar in her book subtitled The Fantasy of the Real. Let's face it: A lot of us are sick of the Inklings. (Incidentally, this is only because we see them as some clever modern authors among others, not what they were - medieval conduits.) But like Planet Narnia, this latecomer adds something genuinely new to the discussion:

Because of Tolkein's membership of the Inklings group, we are accustomed to thinking of him as a writer of pure fantasy, like Charles Williams or C.S. Lewis. Interpreting his work through Chesterton, I hope to show that he is equally concerned with realism and with writing fictions about real things, or at least in using fantasy and the fictive to restore our true relations with what Auden called "those wordless creatures who are there as well."

There's also a wonderful interview with Milbank in the current Mars Hill Audio, to which one simply must subscribe (I resisted far too long). How refreshing to consider fantasy not as an escape, but as a means of helping us engage the concrete, objective, articulate cosmos that has weathered the subjective storms of modernity. Fantasy: Smelling salts to awaken us from the Kantian dream.

changeup

For you RSS readers who don't click over, millinerd has some new clothes on. It was my compensatory freshness maneuver after I decided, largely thanks to this post, not to bother switching from blogger to Wordpress. Blogger is not perfect, but it has stuff too, and migration is a massive pain.

I added some new categories to the right for assistance in plumbing the hidden depths of my most formidable insights, and if anyone knows how to fix the new "share this" feature at the bottom of posts so that it links to actual posts and not the website at large, please let me know. Any other improvement suggestions are [always] solicited. Enough about the medium itself. Back to substance shortly.

Theological Book of the Decade

Remember postmodernism? How quaint it all seems in retrospect. In those days - I speak of the early 2000's - we used to think Lyotard had the best summation of the idea, "incredulity toward metanarratives." Now we know that the most concise and pithy definition comes from David Bentley Hart: "Pagan exuberance tempered by gnostic detachment."

In those days the efforts of Jack Caputo were actually somewhat interesting. Here was a thinker engaging Derrida, showing that he wasn't so bad as his knee-jerk critics suggested - Derrida actually talked about ethics! It was an important point to make, and profoundly liberating if one's alternative was "postmodernity ooga booga!" (which for many it was.) But then Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite came along in 2003.

Postmodern evocations of "responsibility" were, in Hart's words, "no doubt quite genuine, but probably also quite absurd," mute to protest the "creative jeu joyeaux of, say, fascism." Each were shown to be unsuccessful attempts to escape the post-metaphysical implications that only Nietzsche fully embraced ("The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philosophy.") Claims to produce an ethical mandate from the raw material of postmodern thought was like the Alchemist's promise to bring gold from lead. Hart laid bare the dogmatic certitude of Foucault, where "the will to power occupies a position of transcendental authority, prephenomenal, prepersonal, and prehistorical." He pointed out the oddity that Deleuze and Foucault "tend to be somewhat oblivious (or indifferent) to the ways their account of the will to power can easily turn into an endorsement of, quite precisely, a will to, quite precisely, power." Hart explained how the contorted, very un-Jewish gnosticism of Levinas "might just as well (and just as blamelessly) be taken as a provocation to kill the Other." Derrida's more enduring appeals to "undeconstructible justice" were shown by Hart to be a nostalgic retreat to Kant's categorical imperative, absent the comforts of reason. In a word, unsustainable. In seven? Krazy Salt sprinkled on the post-metaphysical rot.

Indeed, Hart's 2003 tome was the theological book of the decade, a postmodern elegy, and it has taken the rest of the decade to percolate down. Sure self-professed postmodern Christian thinkers persist, but to those who have read Hart, they are like ghosts in the land of the living - barely even there. Is this overly-privileging one man's take on a complicated, multifaceted movement? No. There were many thinkers to whom one could have gone for similar perspectives, it's just that Hart encapsulated them. The book emerged from a community of thinkers, but was delivered with an individual panache that took up the postmodern invitation "for theology to respond in kind." A beautifully written book about the primacy of beauty.

In hindsight, those early, pre-Hart theological engagements of postmodern thought look like sixteenth-century maps of the Americas, with vast swaths labeled "terra incognita." No one can blame those first explorers for inaccuracy. As they engaged the (then) new and (then) popular modes of thought, they found patches of vegetation in what was supposed to be pure tundra, and they excitedly pointed out the green. But now, thanks to Hart, the cartography is nearly complete. We know what the landscape actually looks like. Both the "Thar be dragons" of the fear-mongers and elephant graveyards promised by progressives have been exposed. There were dragons, but they're sickly now, and not so terrifying. There was little ivory to speak of. Postmodernism has been mapped, flood-lit by Cappadocian light and declared unfit for settlement. Emboldened by his confidence in analogy, Hart moved us on to the welcoming, fertile Nicean fields.

Pass the word on, will you, to those who are still seated in the parked roller-coaster at the postmodern theme park, thinking there will be another loopity-loop. Whisper kindly in their ears that they should at least read pages 35 - 93 of Hart's book, surely a manageable chore. Gently point out to them that there is no longer a ride-operator in the booth. In fact, they're shutting the place down for the season. The clown is wiping off his make-up. The funhouse mirrors have been bubble-wrapped. The cotton-candy stand is all boarded up. It was quite a ride, but it's time to go home to the classic Christian tradition, where ethics is underwritten by the mandate of a living God and where not the sublime, but the beautiful is real.

the post-evangelical impossibility

So a musician who builds a successful career on the backs of evangelicals, gives up on evangelicalism, but then does an evangelical gig. Why? The more cynical take could be summed up by misquoting Bono: "The evangelicals I know aren't short of cash, Mister." But in this case the cynic would be both witty and wrong. Helen Rittelmeyer takes the more charitable angle, and certainly the more accurate one. In short, "Bazan couldn't run away from evangelicalism even if he tried." Good blog, hers.

You'll recall that D.G. Hart tried to get at this as well:

How can something like evangelicalism, which looks so real and has so many apparent outlets, be so difficult to leave? How does one, even if qualified as a card-carrying member, receive the membership card? And if an evangelical decides... to become something other than an evangelical, to what address does he or she return the card?

Evangelicalism is sort of like quicksand. Try to get away through adjusting it to your newfound political or philosophical tastes, converting to something else or even apostacizing, and you often just sink in deeper. Better course of action: Relax.