Camel at St. Catherine's

The Virgin of Predestination

If you're in the area, feel free to attend a paper I'm delivering tomorrow entitled The Princeton Madonna:  Toward a Theological Interpretation of Byzantine Art.  Here's the abstract:

In the late nineteenth century, the President of what is now Princeton University, James McCosh, rightly suspected that one of his philosophy professors was veering from Calvinist orthodoxy. McCosh suggested the professor consider teaching art, resulting in Allan Marquand (1853-1924) becoming the first professor of art history in what is now the Department of Art and Archaeology. As Marquand built up the University’s art collection, he acquired a fifteenth century Cretan example of the Virgin of the Passion icon type. It became known as the Princeton Madonna, hailed as “the finest Byzantine painting in America.” After examining this icon type’s original Cypriot context, this paper argues that the Princeton Madonna contains unsuspected reserves of Byzantine theological understanding. Still hanging in the Art Museum today, the image offers a surprising solution to what may have been the locus of Allan Marquand’s doubt: The Calvinist doctrine of double predestination.


Details:  Tuesday, March 29, 2011 6:00 p.m., Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103, Program in Hellenic Studies, Princeton University.  

Did You Read?

Light from Light

For the Byzantine architect, light operated the way pigment does for an icon painter.  Tonight, following a brilliant talk (no pun intended) by art historian Jelena Trkulja explaining how light was so manipulated in Middle Byzantine churches, Princeton Seminary's Paul Rorem asked that once in a semester question.

In essence, he suggested that the Byzantine architects who harnessed sunlight with reflective surfaces may have been evoking (intentionally or not) the Nicene Creed's assertion that Christ is "Light from Light" (φῶς ἐκ φωτός).  That is to say, the raw exterior sunlight represents the radiance of God's nature, but when it bounces off reflective windowsill tesserae, suffusing the church interior, it represents the light of Christ which mortal eyes can see.

Of course, as Trkulja pointed out, such metaphors can't be taken too literally.  (Byzantine semiotics is too interesting for that.)  But provided one is flexible enough - playful in that responsible way - Rorem's insight seemed to suggest that the building becomes a membrane, as if mortar itself represented that Eastern distinction between the Essence (sunlight) and Energies (interior light) of God.  All this is to say, when theologians encounter art historians things get very interesting, very fast.  It should happen more often.

Medieval churches were in line with the cosmos.  In the meantime, evangelical gigachurch architects might at least consider looking into which way is East.

Leo Steinberg Exits Modern Oblivion

Since his passing, I have been quoting my favorite Leo Steinberg quotes at twitter (that less time-consuming venue where much of this dissertating blogger's energy has been channeled of late, so do follow me). But Fred Sanders has posted the best piece I've seen on the occasion of the great art historian's death thus far.  Contrary to some reactions to postmodernism, it has never been a question of whether or not there is an infinity of interpretations... it's just a question of whether that infinity is the negative or beautiful kind (I challenge anyone to show me an intentionally meaningless sentence in that book by the way).  I attempted to read Steinberg as an October outsider in this piece a while back (as much as they disagreed, he was not unlike Bynum).  I can't speak for the man's soul, but his eyes were certainly well prepared for beatific vision.

Wordless Wednesday

Art History to the Rescue

The slightest amount of historical perspective on University education is often sufficient to cure graduate school griping.  Why so many in the humanities - which include historians - seem to lack such perspective is puzzling.   Peter Brooks' Our Universities: How Bad? How Good?, currently available in The New York Review of [each others'] Books, provides that necessary perspective, even if he doesn't go as far back as he might have (Self link? Don't mind if I do).

Brooks concludes his review of four of the most recent books in the "crisis in the humanities" genre (soon to have its own call number), by suggesting that a discipline like art history is not the problem, but the solution. Not without apologizing, he quotes Henry James' The Tragic Muse, where the character Nick Dormer stands before some portraits in London's National Gallery: 

As he stood before them the perfection of their survival often struck him as the supreme eloquence, the virtue that included all others, thanks to the language of art, the richest and most universal. Empires and systems and conquests had rolled over the globe and every kind of greatness had risen and passed away, but the beauty of the great pictures had known nothing of death or change, and the tragic centuries had only sweetened their freshness. 

Such is the wonder that both generated the liberal arts and can restore them. Universities do "deserve better critics than they have got at present."  Brooks is a fine start.

The Supermodel of Sorrows

It's a strange day when Richard John Neuhaus gets quoted to resolve inter-evangelical disputes (upon which I do not care to comment) at The Huffington Post.  I also have a piece currently on offer at that venue comparing Francesco Vezzoli's "Sacrilegio" with the Museum of Biblical Art's Passion in Venice.  

Altar of (not to) Color

Pillar of Salt

Thirteen Theses on Theolocalism

1. When Biblical and Nicene theological norms have been sufficiently internalized, theology can encourage unique regional developments.

2. Localist efforts to combat modern transience should therefore infect theological method.

3. If a given place hasn't yet made a distinct theological contribution, it should consider doing so.

4. Theological localism means thinking with those closest to you - a sort of 100 mile intellectual diet.

5. What theologians thought matters, of course, but so does where they are buried.

6. This is not to be nativist, but to exploit native resources for the sake of the universal church.

TEST CASE: The Analogy of Being

1. The analogy of being is not "Catholic" or "Orthodox." It is the common property of all Christians. It may be Christianity's metaphysical hometown, but it takes on different characteristics in each of them.

2. The late Barth may have developed a version of the analogy of being, but he was Swiss. His analogy of being is heavily freighted with Continental concerns.

3. Radical Orthodoxy is an effective way to recover the medieval, participatory metaphysics of the analogy of being, but is a necessarily British revenge on Scotist univocity.

4. Likewise, Bulgakov's sophiological version of the analogia entis was a response to peculiarly Russian theological problems, especially Berdiaev.

5. North American Protestants, however, initially had no Duns Scotus to overcome, no Schleiermacherian liberalism to counter, and no Berdiaev to reign in.

6. Jonathan Edwards intuitively imagined his way into a remarkably fruitful analogy of being. For example, only in Edwards do we find a theologian who sees beauty as that "wherein the truest idea of divinity does consist."

7. North Americans, therefore, have unexploited local metaphysical resources that are sometimes equal to, and at certain points exceed, the medieval and patristic traditions. We have a responsibility to cultivate these underutilized resources for the benefit of all.

Colonial Ur-Christian

Funny thing about the Princeton Plato, Jonathan Edwards, is how he transcends all later American denominational stereotypes. He promotes revival like the most enthusiastic Charismatic, accommodates secular learning like the most worldly Episcopalian, preaches hellfire like the stoutest Baptist, celebrates beauty like an Orthodox iconographer, subscribes to sovereignty like an uncompromising Presbyterian, and practices personal piety like the most earnest of Methodists. Best of all, he typologizes like a Catholic, and the way he uses nature to extrapolate about the character of God makes him thoroughly guilty of the (Christologically grounded) analogia entis. Edwards is, as Perry Miller put it, a Puritan Saint.

In his introduction to one of George Marsden's underestimated Stone Lectures on Edwards last year, the perceptive and unassuming Steve Crocco wryly asked the unanswerable: Why did God allow Jonathan Edwards to die at the peak of his intellectual powers? While his collected works fill 26 volumes, a longer life might have enabled him to complete his projected magnum opus on the history, and ontology, of salvation. But instead, Princeton's Plato died, and as mentioned, Witherspoon's Aristotelian Realism took over, which, of course, also has its strengths.

However troubling that question may be, at least it didn't bother Jonathan Edwards. Here's Marsden on this most untimely death:

Almost all his life [Edwards] had been preparing for this moment. He had often preached to others about how they should be ready for death and righteous judgment at any minute, and he disciplined himself with a regimen of devotion so that he would be prepared. In the weeks when he was wasting away he must have wondered why God would take him when he had so much to do. But submission to the mysteries of God's love beyond human understanding was at the heart of his theology. When he knew the end was near, he dictated a message to be sent to Sarah in Stockbridge, to "give the kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her, that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such a nature, as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever."

Later American denominations have divided up the Edwards patrimony like so much cake, each content with a portion, some satisfied with the cellophane container, some getting excited enough about a corner piece with extra frosting to think they have it all. The downside to this is that few there are who think as largely as Edwards did; the upside is that not only the ultra Reformed get to claim him.