Trinity Sunday

St. Louis, a photo by millinerd on Flickr.

The Controversialist's Temptation

“Certainly nothing jolts us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet but for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible ourselves.” So wrote Blaise Pascal concerning original sin.  In his book on the subject, Jacobs explains that one of the reasons it became so jolting was the doctrine's unfortunate appendages, results of the late Augustine - not at hist best - getting cornered into debate with the hotheaded Julian of Eclanum. This is familiar territory, but I've never seen it put quite this way:

And so, because a brilliant and devout old bishop could not resist the controversialist’s temptation – to take even a caricature of his views and defend it to the death, rather than show dialectical weakness – the whole doctrine of original sin, in Western Christianity anyway, got inextricably tangled with revulsion toward sexuality and images of tormented infants.  And there has never been a full and complete disentangling.

Or to put it otherwise, the unnecessary accretions onto the doctrine of original sin offer some of its most convincing proof.

Warburg's Wish

Legend has it that art historian Aby Warburg famously gave up a considerable inheritance to his younger brother on condition that said brother would buy him any book he ever wanted.  So the Warburg library was born.  Such a love of books makes it curious that Warburg dreamed of an art history without texts.  Because words are gifts as much as pictures, I'm skeptical of the project; but I will say that an image replication made by sophomore David Wainwright for my Art 101 class at Wheaton College this semester (using self portraits) outdoes many textual commentaries on Hieronymus Bosch that I've read.

Left: Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross (1515) Right: David Wainwright's Wheaton College replication for Art 101 (2013)

Why Not Just Pop It?

If Jeff Koons (left) was outdone by Paul McCarthy (right) in this year's Frieze fair, isn't that the next step?  I'll even volunteer.

Not Angles but Angels

The wait for the soon to appear biography of one character in the Anglican drama is occasion to explore another.  To read A.M. (Donald) Allchin's obituary is to read a life well lived.  His description of Anglicanism (written before present woes) makes it sound almost worth a try.

A faith which recognizes our hopeless ignorance before the mysteries of God, and does not pretend to find answers when it has not got them.  It recognizes at every point ‘the mysteriousness of our present being.'  It 'takes the side of faith and patience against the attractions of completeness and security and achievement and repose' [Eliot]. A certain tentativeness and humility before the affirmations of theology… which corresponds very closely to the apophatic elements, the awe and the reserve, which characterize the teaching of the great Fathers of East and West alike. This characteristic does not imply refusal of knowledge, any turning away from God’s gift of himself.  It is rooted rather in an experience of the limitations of man’s language and man’s concepts, and expresses a humility before the immensity of the divine.

Needless to say, said program has been occasion for pandemonium - for the very "refusal of knowledge" Allchin counseled against.  But at least he pulled it off.  Allchin's was an Anglicanism as serious as Eliot's, who once audaciously suggested that "Individual Conscience is no reliable guide; spiritual guidance should be imperative, and it should be clearly placed above medical advice" (141).

While Allchin was overwhelmingly indebted to Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Greg Peters suggests that one of his greatest contributions to ecumenism was to remain Anglican.  It sure helps when one lives in a town where it's possible - but there might be something to that.