A Shared Pedicament

To continue the theme of theology and art (and shameless self-linking), it appears something I wrote has been taken up by the First Things blog.

Theology and the Arts

Looks like the hardworking crew at the Princeton Theological Review have unveiled their latest production. The articles get off to a shaky start but the issue improves thereafter.

Gasp! Go!

Orthodox Women

I was surprised to see one of, if not the most respected medievalists in the country shed considerable doubt on some standard Seminary mythology:

"It was not women who originated female images of God.... such language is in no way the special preserve of female writers... There is no reason to assert, as some have done, that the theme of the motherhood of God is a 'feminine insight.' Moreover it is not at all clear, although many scholars assume it, that women are particularly drawn to feminine imagery" (140).

Bynum goes on to explain that in the Middle Ages, feminine God images were occasionally employed by men, specifically abbots, "because they needed to supplement their image of authority with that for which the maternal stood" (154). Interestingly enough, women writers used such imagery much more rarely, if at all. "Jesus as Mother" can therefore be contextually explained as a response to leadership challenges in medieval monasteries, not as a long-suppressed feminine ethos.

"The theme of God's motherhood is a minor one in all writers of the high Middle Ages except Julian of Norwich. Too long neglected or even repressed by editors and translators, it is perhaps now in danger of receiving more emphasis than it deserves" (168).

Instead, what stands out in the writings of twelfth and thirteenth centry nuns of Helfta is their theological orthodoxy:

"Unlike the God of the fourteenth-century mystics (Julian of Norwich or Eckhart , for example), the God of [Gertrude's] visions is tough... There appears to have been a moment in the thirteenth century at which the growing sense of man's likeness to God - expressed not only in the later medieval emphasis on Christ's humanness and the rich variety of homey and natural metaphors for the divine but also in the new confidence about man's capacity for intimate union with God - was still balanced by older images of an awesome God, totally unlike man, who rules a universe... This thirteenth-century combination of likeness and unlikeness underlay the optimism and strength of the piety of Helfta" (255).

Makes me not feel so bad for previous reflection.

301 might have won

Unmolested pro-life propaganda playing in theaters nation-wide for nearly a month? Thanks to the remarks of a wise friend whom I saw the film with, a hidden parable emerged.

spoiler alert (even though we should all know our Herodotus).

The story begins with eugenics. Sparta: A civilization barbarous enough to allow only its flawless infants to survive (yet thinks itself supremely "civilized"). Later in the film, when faced with someone who escaped the infanticide, a disgusted captain tries to kill the "reject", but the mutant nonetheless gains the hearing of King Leonidas.

Still, the king refuses to allow the less-than-perfect soldier to fight, and as a consequence, Sparta loses the war. A more crisply articulated morality tale for the pro-life cause is difficult to conceive. The moral? Civilizations that demand designer babies lose.

An Afternoon with T.J. Clark

Those familiar with academic art history will immediately recognize the name T.J. Clark. Those who are not may appreciate a brief explanation. At the age of thirty, Clark made a splash in the discipline by visiting familiar territory - nineteenth century French painting - but in a fresh way. By considering political context over mere aesthetic analysis, Clark became a leader in the "new art history." He achieved tenure at Harvard in 1980 amidst much controversy, and significantly reshaped the field.

What is remarkable is that Clark's most recent book, which he was visiting our department to discuss, leaves politics behind to focus back on the object. Clark is still just as much of a Marxist, but the agenda barely makes its way into the pages. Instead there is what has been termed a "diaristic" reflection on one particular painting of Nicolas Poussin, which is almost the very thing Clark built his career opposing. It's not that he doesn't explain himself.

"My art history has always been reactive... In the beginning that meant that the argument was with certain modes of formalism... The enemy now is... [allowing painting to be] at any tawdry ideology's service."

And so, a long and ruminating meditation on Poussin's 1648 Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake ensues. This "free association" (his words) methodology may be dangerous for the direction of the discipline, but one must at least admit T.J. Clark has earned the right to ruminate at leisure.

As I sat in the class and listened to his reflections and our departments response to them, we stared a gloriously reproduced detail of the Poussin painting (ungloriously reproduced above). And though not much of a Marxist myself, I was unable to bracket the painting's political and social context. But not just of Poussin in 1648, of Princeton 2007.

Here we were, a group of art historians in an American academic community, the day after the Virginia Tech massacre, what was probably the worst disaster in the history of U.S. higher education. I'm not blaming anyone for not mentioning it. It would perhaps have been poor taste, even unprofessional to mention the killings. After all, we were hosting a lecturer who was here for but a day. But then again, the title of the book is "The Sight of Death," and Poussin's painting is about death and its poisonous shock.

Clark flirts with biblical imagery to interpret the painting in the book (Adam, Eve and Abel), and stops with a flirt. And though such themes were not mentioned at all in our session, as I sat listening to the leaders of the field reflect upon Poussin with Clark, biblical imagery flooded to mind. The woman screams in protest as a man is dying. Behind her a fisherman, or fisher of men, with net. Behind them in the far distance two tiny figures (barely visible) emerge from the water, as if when "the sea is gives up her dead" at the end of the age. To the left a dark cave, above a luminous city.

1648 was of course the Peace of Westphalia, Europe's truce after thirty devastating years of Protestant-Catholic infighting. Could it be that for an embittered Europe that could not stomach a direct Last Judgment scene, that Poussin was delicately suggesting the same?

What is most real in the painting is the shrieking woman, just as what is most real in this nation right now (before the political hijacking begins) are the dead at Virginia Tech and the wrenched they've left behind. It seems facile to proclaim heaven and hell in living color just after the tragedy, but it would surely be strange to avoid the topics as well. In Poussin's painting death is most real; but subtly suggested in the background is much more. The dark possibility of damnation yes, but also the glorious sunlit cityscape of the New Jerusalem, to which some souls, previously caught in the net of the gospel, will soon joyfully ascend.

Perhaps such an interpretation is yoking the painting to some "tawdry ideology's service," but I prefer to think of it as free association.

Greater love hath no man...

Aspiring academics are often asked what professor they'd like to model themselves after. With little chance of ever living up to the standard, I pick Liviu Lebrescu.

millinerd makes national headlines...

...in Greece. If this counts as my fifteen minutes then count me hornswoggled. My translation reads,

"Millinerd, famous American blogger surrounded by entourage graces the shores of Crete. Not since St. Paul's visit have we Cretans been so blessed, which was also sadly brief."

Those better at Greek tell me the translation is actually "Americans land on island of Souda," Souda being the island closed to tourists since 9/11 due to its proximity to an American military base, but apparently open to academics.

Bible as Literature, Icon as Art

It's not entirely uninteresting when Stanley Fish (arguably the nation's preeminent postmodern theorist), and Albert Mohler (arguably the nation's leading evangelical polemicist) emphatically agree.

Their converstation, sparked by Fish's New York Times editorial, regards the Bible as literature in public schools, and can be heard here (start at 11min. 11sec.).

I imagine that Pavel Florensky, also known as the "Russian Leonardo" for his cross-disciplinary genius, would have agreed with them as well. In the best one-stop book on icons available, he wrote that those seeking, from a materialist perspective, to appreciate Byzantine icons for their cultural or pscyhological significance

"entirely oust the ontological meaning of Being as found in ancient idealist philosophy, with the result that the contemporary defenders of the icon have won a victory long ago lost by the eighth-century iconoclasts" (71).

Or, to put it more tartly, "The icon - apart from its spiritual vision - is not an icon at all but a board" (64). No audio link for Florensky as his Christian conviction earned him a bullet from Stalin's henchmen in 1937.

UPDATE: Along these same lines, I listened to a haunting performance of Bach's St. John's Passion last night (Good Friday), and was overcome with the realization of how absurd, or at the very least how utterly strange it would be to listen to it for the music's sake alone.

Pagan Crete

"A post-Christian man is not a pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce," wrote C.S. Lewis. "The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the pagan past," which is perhaps why some neo-pagan efforts have, at times, a Renaissance-fair vibe of geeky inauthenticity.

"Feel Her power in holy mountains, sense Her mysteries in the darkness of caves, pour out libations of milk and honey on Minoan altars" are among the many promises on offer for Crete goddess tours, which are by no means the only efforts to resuscitate paganism from aged stones of Greece.

The desire is, one must at least admit, understandable.

The Christian affirmation of God as Father puts God at considerable distance from the world rather than immanence to it, just as a father's role in birth is less proximate than a mother's. Such is, to the dismay of many, an essential part of God's revelation; so unless God-talk is all personal or social projection, it cannot be revised. But, one might object, isn't it more interesting to think of God as Mother, or as "world-soul," and hence to seek his/her/its presence in the myriad "sacred spaces" of the world, from Machu Picchu to Crete's Mount Ida? Isn't the pagan immanence of sacred trees and our own personal godhood much more exciting the the transcendence of the Judeo-Christian God who has chosen to name himself, certainly not male, but unavoidably as a transcendent, all powerful Father?

On my first afternoon in Crete, I looked at the sunset over those revered mountains, and wondered if as a Christian I was perchance wrong. A brief sadness came over me as I considered the enchantment of the pagan alternative. But then, either by serendipity or coincidence, I realized that the very place I was having such questions, from which I was enjoying the sunset, was one of the main bastions of the old Venetian walls, this one called the "Bastion of the Holy Spirit." Christianity, the bastion's name led me to recall, not only transmits the revelation of God as Father, beyond all human understanding or approach; but also confesses God the Holy Spirit, immanent in creation, hovering over the waters, immanent in us, either to convict of sin or indwell with reassuring presence and charismatic gift.

Music difficult for the neo-pagan to face is that their ideologies were not as much murdered as they died a natural death. Paganism, one could argue, lost its grip on the popular imagination of the Roman world because in the light of the truth of Christianity, the old deities couldn't measure up. Perhaps this is why neo-pagan attacks on Christianity devolve into "burning times" rhetoric rather than serious contestation of ideas. Christians could of course do the same, pointing to the uncountable Christ-followers murdered by pagans in the first three centuries of the church, but it is a strategy to which we need not resort. Rather than a victimology standoff, Christians can point to their own teachings to condemn regrettable witch burnings, and then get onto actual engagement. We might begin with the unjustly vilified Augustine (Confessions Book 10 chapter 6 for example), vilified perhaps because his ideas are ones neo-pagans cannot afford to squarely face.

One needs the transcendence of God to keep from the puzzling implications of pagan origin myths, which over five millenia haven't been able to much improve upon the sexing and slicing of Enuma Elish. One needs the incarnation to redeem the wrong, but not entirely wrong anthropomorphic theology of the Greek pantheon. And one needs the Spirit to redeem the genuine insight of divine immanence in paganism, the Spirit being closer to us than we are to ourselves.

Such ideas are compelling not because the Trinity is a more ingenious God-construct than paganism, such ideas are compelling because they are true. A democratic society must permit neo-paganism, but it also permits healthy competition, and to the extent that Christians discover their own tradition, neo-paganism won't be able to keep up. "The times of ignorance God overlooked," Paul said to the pagans of his day, but the times of ignorance are over, and rather than a robust reinvention, neo-paganism is a watered down version of the real thing.

As was recently said of John Travolta's acting career, paganism has so enjoyed making a comeback that it seems bent on soon needing to do so again.

Other members of our group have sent me a few compromising photographs, leading to my seriously considering changing the photo on the wikipedia page.

Crete pictures with captions? If you insist.

Heraklion

I enjoyed an uncanny experience in Heraklion today. We've been sightseeing the Minoan, Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman remains of Crete at a breakneck pace. With a little time on our own today I went into the city's cathedral to see Orthodox wall paintings. The sexton was a neatly dressed, bearded Greek man who must have been about my age. He was on a step-ladder lighting the candles and asked me if I wished to light the particular one he was reaching for. I lit the candle and he began to speak with an unusual calm.

"Be careful of everyone, even be careful of me. If you want to find a good deed you must walk five kilometers, if you want an evil deed, every meter."

It seemed rather forboding counsel, Yoda-esque in fact, but I kept listening. "We must pray for everyone, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant - everyone." But the Orthodox, he wryly implied with a smile, are the ones who can see the face of God.

"Do you like this glass?" he asked pointing to a vase with a flower in it that was lying on at the base of the icon I had just lit. "If I removed the flower, this is who we are without God." I asked him about the wall paintings, and he stepped off the ladder and gave a perfect impromptu explanation of Orthodox iconography. "The saints are those who are, like the vase, filled with God," he said with his hand on the first step. "The next step, closer to God, are the prophets, then apostles, angels, Mary, Jesus, and then God." He ended with his hand on the top step.

Unabashedly I asked for a picture, and he refused.

"Why take a picture of me? I am not a saint. Take a picture with your mind. And you will remember one time that when I was in Crete I met a man who told me things. If any of these things are wrong, leave here and dismiss me as crazy. If they are right, you must remember. Trust the evangelium. Trust the holy book."

Such encounters might be termed by a traveler the "spell of Orthodoxy," and it is an enchanting one indeed. Of course, the real spell might be that of the world, which the Holy Spirit, working most especially through the Orthodox in Greece, occasionally finds a way to break.

Off to Crete

Those who followed the conversation below might be concerned to learn I'm leaving the country. Not to Gabon however, but on a research trip to Crete, where I am to trust no one. Back soon.

Still going...

It is surely the sign of a good discussion when you max-out your blog's commenting system. Turns out Daniel (and maybe others) have tried to post further responses but weren't able, so we'll keep the discussion going here. At any rate, it will be good for the comments to not be attached to an admittedly tendentious entry that, thanks to the dialogue, I feel we've gotten past.

While I have the floor, I should mention my earlier response to the John Hopkins studies, as well as one of several spurnings of Enlightenment rationalism, which has proved at least one point of Pinchbeck/Millinerd agreement.

All contributions are welcomed.