Better than Pilgrims

Millinerd is almost 10 years old (update: 21 years old!).  It's all very exciting and I'm trying to take it in stride, even though it is an absolutely massive deal.  I mean some people started blogs and migrated to Beliefnet, Patheos, or who knows else where?  Some started newsletters or substacks. But despite countless offers (countless because there were none), I stayed put. My (and your!) reward is the internet equivalent of localism. I never left for the big city. I stuck to my hometown address. And even while the strip malls of Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook Meta drain the old-growth economy, millinerd is still here. Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your Internet Protocal address. 

One millinerd tradition has been an attempt to reclaim - make that claim - Thanksgiving as Jeudi Gras (Fat Thursday). For the real details of the holiday head to my colleague Tracy McKenzie's new book (with video to boot). But I prefer to co-opt the day liturgically. Advent, which starts soon, is a fast season, and because in the Christian economy, fasts draw their meaning from feasts (and vice versa), one always has to feast before a fast, making Thanksgiving Mardi Gras without the beads (which would be weird with family around anyway).

But as Jeudi Gras is not catching on (the downside of internet smallville), let me pursue this further.  Advent used to actually be as long as Lent, and the pre-fast indulgence when that was the case took place on the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours (November 11th). His is a sainthood to savor. You can find him depicted in Chartres Cathedral hugging the disfigured long before Pope Francis, not to mention St. Francis, did the same; and there he is at the right, cutting off a piece of his own cloak to give to a beggar (who turned out to be Christ). That cloak (cappa Sancti Martini) is where we get the word for chapel and chaplain, by the way.

When examining the history of Christianity, a frequent question tends to be: "So, what about all those people executed by Christians?" It's a good question if there ever was one, and it was Martin's long before it was ours. The person with the unfortunate distinction of being the first to be executed by Christians for heresy was Priscillian of Ávila (d. 385), and the killing was (unsuccessfully) opposed by Martin. Although he disagreed vehemently with Priscillian's position (Martin's mentor was the great Trinitarian theologian Hilary of Poitiers), Martin nevertheless thought swords were better used for dividing cloaks than killing the confused. Hence, alongside Hugh of Lincoln (who confronted mobs of English Christians out to slaughter Jews), Martin is one of those saints without which we'd have reason to be all the more depressed about the failures of Christian history, regarding which - after a season of overlooking them - I'm learning to be more forthright.

To the left is another clip from the same massive image, The Wine of St. Martin's Day (Pieter Bruegel's largest). It is humorous, to be sure; but it would be shortsighted to see Bruegel's paintings as a mere caricature, let alone mockery of peasant life. We have in Bruegel "not class ridicule," writes T.J. Gorringe, "but an essentially comic understanding of the world." The hazy church in the background, dispensing the true vine, is the sponsor of this vinous last hurrah, as is Martin in the very same painting, who gives of his excess (actually, no - he gives to excess). So happy Thanksgiving, Fat Thursday, and belated St. Martin's Day, from everyone's (well, certainly someone's) smalltown American website.  Cheers!

Modernity = The Middle Ages

\ One of Caroline Walker Bynum's frustration with her fellow historians, past and present, is their inability to inhabit the vast contours of medieval thought, choosing instead to pass off the later Middle Ages as either a hyper-spiritualized or overly-materialized milieu.  The former casts the period as the "Age of Faith" (in contrast to some presumed "Age of Reason"), and the latter see the medieval as a mere set up for Reformation critique.  But for Bynum, it is a paradox between the spiritual and material that "lies at the heart of medieval Christianity." To have not perceived that paradox is to have not let the past adequately work on the present.  It's all very anti-Hegelian:

Paradox... is not dialectical.  Paradox is the simultaneous assertion (not the reconciliation) of opposites.  Because of the paradox not just of Christ's incarnation (God in the human) but also of divine creation (God's presence in all that is infinitely distant from him), matter was that which both threatened and offered salvation.  It threatened salvation because it was that which changed.  But it was also the place of salvation, and it manifested this exactly through the capacity for change implanted in it.  When wood or wafer bled, matter showed itself as transcending, exactly by expressing, its own materiality.  It manifested enduring life (continuity, existence) in death (discontinuity, rupture, change).  Miraculous matter was simultaneously - hence paradoxically - the changeable stuff of not-God and the locus of a God revealed (34-35)

In this sense, medieval history can never be properly "understood" as much as experienced. Bynum continues:

Paradox is by definition impossible to explain in discursive language.  One cannot simultaneously assert contraries.  Rude, other-denying facts such as identity and annihilation, or the haunting presence and yet utter beyondness of ultimate meaning, cannot be spoken together. Yet together they must be lived. Their simultaneity cannot be stated; it can only be evoked - and even this only inadequately.

Henri de Lubac takes this even further.  "It is deplorable," he complains in Corpus Mysticum, "that a
theology that sets out to be strictly historical and 'positive' should sometimes commit the historical nonsense of lending its own state of mind to an age where a quite opposite state of mind pertains" (255-56).  De Lubac grew frustrated with historians who had impressive command of medieval source materials, but still failed to understand them because "the spirit in which they were composed has [in modernity] been partly lost" (220).  De Lubac then claimed to have comprehended the very spirit that so many in his time did not.  This involved being, in his words, "seduced" by Christian antiquity.

This cloud of minor witnesses, attesting to the vigour of a flourishing tradition by its sheer mass, more than any great name on its own could have done, threw me into a sort of amazed stupor.  This was our family inheritance, and many people had hardly a suspicion of it!  Some had even come to despise it, for want of having properly explored it!  It was a matter, then, of restoring to it its proper value, and that could not be done without sharing as deeply as possible the same perspectives as the age that was being studied.  I would have failed utterly, had I not at least been tempted in some way to induce a nostalgia for that lost age!  But that was in no way to urge an imagined return to its methods or its ways of thinking.  My only ambition was to bring them to light and, if possible, to inspire a retrospective taste for them; and I continue to believe that such a result would not be without a certain profit for the theological project of our times.  Because, without ever wishing simply to copy our forebears, a great deal can be gained from a better knowledge, not only of the fruits of their thinking but also of the interior sap which nourished them (xxiii-xxiv).

The preface to said volume connects de Lubac's perspective on the past to Hans Georg Gadamer's use of the wonderful German word Horizontverschmelzung - the fusion of horizons - a fusion which does not just question the past, but permits oneself to be questioned by it as well.  The alternative (see Reno's review of The Swerve) is to refuse paradox, to soberly resist de Lubac's "sort of amazed stupor," to stave off seduction and remain quarantined in the present.

This is the road most traveled, hence the historians who handle the past with protective gloves lest they get infected, and hence the terms we are stuck with such as "Gothic," "Dark Age," "Byzantine," or - worst of all of them - "the Middle Ages."  But as your scribe stated elsewhere, future historians may very well cast modernity as the dreary "Middle Age" between medieval metaphysical wisdom and its recovery.  So why wait?

The Mystical as Political: Illustrated Version

Below is a teaser slide from an art history paper I'm presenting this weekend at the Modern Greek Studies Association at Indiana University. I'm taking on the anarchists (and should have packed more black).  It's essentially an art historical supplement to Aristotle Papanikolao's The Mystical as Political, based on research I did in the on the island of Corfu in those relatively carefree years as a gallivanting graduate student. If you're in Bloomington (which I realize is highly unlikely), and if you have no compunction about invading conferences you haven't registered for, well then come on by!