Urbanism as Icon

Conor Friedersdorf has written of the tyranny of New York, leading to E.D. Kain's defense of the same where he suggests cultural influence is not a zero-sum game.  As a localist (why not?) I am tempted to give the last word on living in Manhattan to Adam Sternbergh's article on the subject, where he quotes an ex-New Yorker living large in Buffalo:  “I don’t miss my old life in New York. I only miss the life in New York I know I never would have had.”

As responses were invited, I'm chiming in from one of the more idyllic urban retreats within striking distance of Manhattan.  Is Princeton actually a city?  According to its chief architect, yes.  Ralph Adams Cram called this town "a walled city against materialism and all its works."  Granted, one might have to concede something to materialism if one hopes to afford living here as a non-student (or even as one).  And this weekend, thanks to reunions, Princeton, according to GQ, is a less a walled city against materialism than a Bacchanalian Hellscape.  But when the hangover fades, one can makes one's way to the University Museum, and get a sense of what Cram was after.

You have until June 6 to see Architecture as Icon (which that link does almost nothing to illuminate). The significance of this exhibition, which I've discussed before, is not easily understood, and even after being understood, is easily underestimated.  The art historian Slobodan Curcic, first trained as an architect, has spent his career studying Byzantine art with an eye for architecture (in addition to advising students like me).  What he began to notice, is that buildings themselves could serve the same metaphysical function as the gold background of an icon - that is, buildings symbolize transcendence, a.k.a. the aboriginal peace of the Godhead.  It's a genuinely new art historical insight that will (we can hope) begin to work its way, via the catalog, into the discipline of art and architectural history at large.  The transcendence of architecture as established by the Byzantine tradition provided (and provides) a warrant for the proximate transcendence of all beautiful architecture.  

The more time one spends with these artifacts, the more one begins to see that not only architecture functions iconically, but the cumulative effect of multiple buildings does as well: The city.  The city and its architecture, the book of Revelation tells us, is a permanent feature of redeemed spiritual life.  Architecture as Icon shows that the Heavenly City is not just an eschatological hope, but the looming backdrop of every new church construction project, and of any manifestation of urban life at its best.

Urbanism, this exhibition suggests, has iconic dimensions.  M. Francis Mannion's article The Church and the City, effectively manages both the idealism and realism latent in this compelling idea:

Babel, Rameses, and Philisita.  Two are cities; the third a pseudo-city.  These three places represent, in different ways, human deprivation in civic configuration: Babel, the city of confusion; Rameses, the city of sin and oppression; Philistia, the pseudo-city of ugliness.  Taken together, they correspond negatively to the theological transcendentals: truth, goodness, and beauty...   Over these three symbolic cities reigns the city that is their radical opposite in all respects: the new and eternal Jerusalem, the city of goodness, truth, and beauty.

To speak with a degree of transcendental bravado that might understandably exclude me from polite discussion, no city should measure itself by the Manhattan or D.C. standard - but all cities, including Manhattan, D.C. and Princeton, should measure themselves by the impossible-to-achieve, downright Blakean, New Jerusalem standard.  Whether or not its residents realize it, the fact that Cram upheld just such a standard for Princeton is a chief (and highly transferable) reason why it is now a desirable place to live.

Our hearts are restless until they find variations on overused quotations

"Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they blah blah." Unfortunately, that is probably how many hear that haunting opening citation from Augustine's Confessions. It's sorely over-quoted, and if only to preserve its power, we should either recite the original Latin, or change things up a bit.  And with all due respect to North Africa, there are North American saints as well, so here's Innocent of Alaska (an arctic Bartolomé de Las Casas, if you will) with roughly the same idea:

Kindling wood and oil can never extinguish fire; water alone is capable of doing so.  No more can the good things of this world ever satisfy the desires of the human heart, for the grace of God is alone able to quench our thirst's desires.

For a heartbreaking tale of kindling wood and oil being poured onto just such a burning heart, consider the following excerpt from Robert Hughes' autobiography, The Curse of Free Love (a link to which I might append a parental advisory).

There's a sublte similarity between that excerpt from Hughe's Things I Didn't Know and this depth-plumbing portion of Roger Scruton's autobiography, Gentle Regrets. Hughes lived hard and transformed his weary wisdom into intelligent art criticism. Scruton lived more, well, gently - but has also earned a requisite gravitas with which to infuse his cultural commentary.  There is something in both excerpts that makes one wonder how much can really be achieved, in the realm of letters, prior to one's fiftieth birthday.

Conversion Matters

James K.A. Smith's review of Francis Beckwith's Return to Rome (the best parts of which are the opening paragraphs), might on the surface appear to be a critique of Protestants who convert/revert to Catholicism.  It struck me, however, as an endorsement of just such a move. Obviously Smith disagrees with Beckwith epistemologically, and (moreso perhaps) politically, but Smith's last paragraph simply highlighted the fact that there is room for both Beckwith and Smith within the Catholic faith.  It's a spacious church, that Roman one.

Recently, Robert Jenson shed some new light on his attitude towards Catholicism.  Writing a "How My Mind has Changed" article for The Christian Century, Jenson explains why he and his wife Blanche "will not, we now think, become Roman Catholic, despite great empathy with formerly Lutheran or Anglican friends and allies who have."

I have written that all Western churches should be under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, in his role as patriarch of the West. I have written that the universal church needs a universal pastor and that Rome is the only place for this ministry. I stand by all that. But I have never believed and do not now believe that one's soul is endangered merely by lacking full communion with Rome. Nor do I believe that a celebration of the Eucharist or of other of the mysteries lacks any reality or efficacy sheerly because the celebrant has not been ordained by a bishop recognized as such by Rome. Thus individuals - as distinct from churches - who are not in full communion with the bishop of Rome can and therefore must decide for themselves whether to seek it. That such individual choices are inescapable is among the punishments visited upon a divided church.

Despite his acknowledgment of Roman primacy, Jenson concludes that his family will (for now) stay Protestant, due to a "stubborn, indeed now somewhat desperate, dedication to that original ecumenical vision and an accumulation of experiences and reflections, none decisive by itself." Which is to say, there is far more at work in the decision to convert than getting one's theological and church historical facts straight (however important that may be).  This is something which Beckwith, it seems to me, understands.  Rather than being (as Smith claims) "a litany of facts, arguments, and propositions," Return to Rome read to me as an attempt to respond to a litany of Protestant facts, arguments and propositions, offering the more mysterious, downright "Smithian," both/and terrain of Catholic dogma instead.  In addition, familial factors were especially active in Beckwith's case (which is why Smith's "where is love?" line was odd).  Beckwith's grandmother, wife and nephew - not just Louis Bouyer and Cardinal Newman - were key players in his decision.

It is hard to begrudge Protestants who convert to Catholicism, or Orthodoxy for that matter, especially when justification, the Reformation's "article by which the church stands or falls," is undergoing a very public, Protestant overhaul.  But the tragedy of a church divided can obfuscate what might otherwise be clear.  Even when conceding the superiority of another tradition, we can be bound to our own through personal history or pastoral commitments, or a bottomless sense of genuine indebtedness.  A faith formed chiefly by the New Testament will intuitively grasp the absurdity of having to choose not only Christ, but among the fragments of his broken ecclesial body as well.  But the church has been sundered, and this is our lot.

[crossposted at evangel]

Post-Revisionism at the Times?

Viewers of Robin Hood will have Russell Crowe's imperfect, but nevertheless instructive dramatization of Magna Carta in mind, which can be conveniently supplemented by a 1217 version of the real thing that happens to be in New York for another week.  Even more surprising, in my estimation, is the refreshing take on the document from Edward Rothstein at The New York Times.

We imagined our great documents and their imposing concepts emerging out of figures as grand as the ideas they devised. Then, more recently, there came an era in which, disappointed in the self-interest and flaws of human creators, we tended to imagine that ideas were intrinsically damaged by their clouded origins, the way the ideals of the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution were imagined as diminished because of their slave-holding authors. Even now, there is a temptation to be hesitant in affirming the virtues of such a history — apologizing for it instead of celebrating it — because the highest principles pronounced have not always been so nobly put into practice.

The Magna Carta, though, with its own conglomeration of small and large concerns, its mixture of particular corrections and sweeping reforms, its history of conflicted ambitions and compromises, proves how mistaken this contemporary perspective is.

The Times sounds like First Things, and Reno's South Dakota Dreamin' at First Things sounds like the Front Porch Republic.   How nice when clear insight can't be trademarked.

Translation Dispute

Beautiful Shepherd
Originally uploaded by millinerd
"I am the good [καλὸς] shepherd" (John 10:11) could just as well be translated "I am the beautiful shepherd." (Photo taken at the Vatican Museum in Rome, Spring 2009).

Missing Motive

A modern art museum director in Paris on yesterday's art theft:

You cannot do anything with these paintings. All countries in the world are aware, and no collector is stupid enough to buy a painting that, one, he can't show to other collectors, and two, risks sending him to prison...  These five paintings are un-sellable, so thieves, sirs, you are imbeciles, now return them.... 

But what if they just love art?

So you wanna study with Stan?

Somewhere between a tweet and an article is the blog sweet spot, and Matt Nickoloff just found it. You're not exactly going to read something like this in the Christian Century, though the perspective it offers is worth the price of a Seminary degree.  Refreshing posts like this justify the medium, and guys like Matt give you confidence in the church of the decades to come.

Maritain Maintenant!

But enough about Barth.  I suppose someone could hoist me on my own petard, and say:  "Milliner [for "millinerd" is not in fact my actual name], you say that Barth shouldn't be trusted because he was burned by liberal Protestantism and was over-reacting.  Likewise, perhaps we shouldn't trust you because you were burned by excessive exposure to Barthianism and are now perhaps over-reacting."  Touché, worthy opponent.

Soon to be Dr. Drury, in the comments below, has genuinely convinced me to let this matter be.  Everything I know about Barth is in those comments, and I'm moving on, with something I wrote previously serving as a closing statement (not a parting shot):

Karl Barth’s relationship to visual art seems not entirely unlike his relationship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum: Stimulating, inspiring, but for a complicated set of reasons, formally unconsummated. Saddled with tensions from an unhappy marriage and his Swiss iconoclasm, Barth proceeded on both the romantic and artistic fronts as he could. But there is no reason we need inherit Barth’s circumstantial tensions either in our private lives or in the realm of visual art.

Conversely, there is Marianne Vitale's Patron, my absolute favorite piece of art from the Whitney Biennial, which sets the stage for the New Maritainians:  Wilson, Kresser, Fuglie - unite!   Are there more rising Maritainians out there?  There are (but it was already a pretty long article).  In the meantime, can we please get these three on some kind of speaking circuit?  Spread the word folks.

Beauty and the Barthians

John Milbank was already post-postmodern in the early Nineties:

Christianity... recognizes no original violence.  It construes the infinite not as chaos, but as a harmonic peace which is yet beyond the circumscribing power of any totalizing reason.  Peace no longer depends upon the reduction to the self-identical, but is the sociality of harmonious difference [i.e. Trinity].  Violence, by contrast, is always a secondary willed intrusion upon this possible infinite order (which is actual for God).  Such a Christian logic is not deconstructible by modern secular reason; rather, it is Christianity which exposes the non-necessity of supposing, like the Nietzscheans, that difference, non-totalization and indeterminacy of meaning necessarilyimply arbitrariness and violence.  To suppose that they do is merely to subscribe to a particular encoding of reality.  Christianity, by contrast, is the coding of transcendental difference as peace...   theology alone remains the discourse of non-mastery.

Since it was written, that paragraph from the beginning of Theology and Social Theory has taken on special importance, because it contains the essence of David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite.  Hart, I expect, would admit as much.  But his project, in distinction from Milbank's, was to take just this insight and give it exquisite aesthetic form.  Beauty, after all, is that chief witness to the aboriginal peace of the Trinity, what Jonathan Edwards called "primary beauty."

In his contributions to The Beauty of God (which stems from the Wheaton 2006 Theology Conference), Jeremy Begbie acknowledges a strong debt to Hart, but expresses puzzlement that Hart could be so dismissive of Barth.  Hart is dismissive because he understands, as should we all, that a full-fledged Barthian theological aesthetics is impossible.  I don't say that lightly.  Some of my best friends are Barthians (well into their Barthian Ph.D's), so I have to be careful.  But I'm relatively confident that such a statement will not offend them, but that they will simply agree, perhaps even adding, with a smile, "Nor desirable."

Perhaps even the "primary beauty" of Jonathan Edwards was too much for Barth, who insisted that beauty in God is merely parenthetical... "not a leading concept.  Not even in passing can we make it a primary motif" (CD II.i. 641).  Barth feared aestheticism in theology.  But Balthasar, who wrote his entire theology for Barth, began with a repudiation of aestheticism, and went on to show that a Christocentric understanding of beauty is not only desirable, but can steal the theological show.  In the words of Richard Viladeseu, "Balthasar sees Protestant theology's [specifically Barth's] rejection of aesthetics as the result of its refusal of the analogy of being..." (30).  Conversely, Balthasar's affirmation of aesthetics is a result of his embrace of the analogy of being, as it is with Hart.   The analogia entis is not a section in Hart's book (as index cherry-pickers might assume) - it is the book.  Hart successfully clears himself of the exact accusations that a Barthian might deploy (e.g. the analogy posits an alternate path to God), and then makes of the analogy a spearhead for his engagement with postmodern thought, and a glittering Christocentric keystone for his Dogmatica Minora.

To use a familiar analogy, Barth managed - like some kind of theological superhero - to keep the entire train of liberal Protestantism from careening off the cliff, manfully ripping the tracks from the ground.  Thank God he did that.  He's a hero.  But in lifting those tracks, he pulled a muscle, and walked forever with a limp.  He was shaped by the grizzly incident, and was overly attuned to certain abuses.  He was fearful of the dangers of Protestant aestheticism, as we can imagine any of us would be if we had to write a Barmen Declaration.  Barth was right about so much, but not about the analogy of being, and, consequently, not about beauty.  "The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again," said Mark Twain.  "But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either."

Art Errors Avoided

1.  Louis Menand is unimpressed by Steven Pinker's evolutionary aesthetics:

One suspects that enjoying Wagner, singing Wagner, anything to do with Wagner, is in gross excess of the requirements of natural selection. To say that music is the product of a gene for "art-making," naturally selected to impress potential mates—which is one of the things Pinker believes—is to say absolutely nothing about what makes any particular piece of music significant to human beings. No doubt Wagner wished to impress potential mates; who does not? It is a long way from there to "Parsifal" [hat tip, Begbie].

2.  Art critic Jed Perl has some words for excessively self-referential art historians:

I would not want to belittle the sophistication of Fried's thought. But if you can wade through the bewildering intricacy of his approach, with its tortuous expositions of passages from Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, the argument turns out to be rather mundane....  I do not see the need for some "key” to the pictorial arts of the past two and a half centuries. And I do not see the need for an interpretation of recent photography that links it tightly to earlier developments in painting. It is a mistake to imagine that the finest thought is the most elaborate or labyrinthine thought...  I have heard people who know a great deal about painting and who know that Fried’s theories are suspect speak almost apologetically about their inability to get with his program. They worry that they are not smart enough to grapple with his ideas, when the truth may be that they are too smart to get tripped up by all his fancy footwork. 

3. and 4.  Bruce Herman, in this IAM interview, counters the idea that tradition can be advanced without having first been mastered, and that abstract painting is necessarily a subjective escape from objective reality.

5.  And, in a review of an art show at the Rubin concerning death across cultures, the The New York Times completely avoids caricaturing Christian theology:

Western works are morbidly preoccupied with the perishability of the body; Eastern works take a holistic, Buddhist view of death as a passage between states of being in nearly endless cycles of reincarnation...    A harsh dualism prevails on the Western side....  Such either-or starkness is foreign to the Eastern side.

Okay, but four out of five errors avoided is not bad.

St. Catherine's

St. Catherine's
Originally uploaded by millinerd