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The Controversialist's Temptation

2013-05-14T10:54:00.001-05:00

“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

2013-05-11T09:39:00.000-05:00

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?

2013-05-11T07:29:00.000-05:00

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

2013-05-08T17:31:00.000-05:00

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.

Natural Bodies

2013-04-29T23:58:00.002-05:00

That the following is more provocative, not to mention truer than secular, Butlerian gender theory goes without saying. What makes it especially noteworthy is that it is more interesting than most serious theological reflection on the body I've come across as well.

Tim Hawkinson, Totem, 2004
The body of the historical Jew from Nazareth, born of the virgin, crucified and buried, is a natural body. The body of that same one, raised by the Father and Spirit, materially continuous with and materially transformed beyond the body that was crucified, is a natural body. The Church - body and bride of this same crucified and risen one - composed of men's bodies and women's bodies, is a natural body. The body offered on the table of that Church, broken and consumed, is a natural body. These sentences describe the body of Jesus Christ as he has granted us access, availability, to it, and these sentences must then be the starting point for our understanding of the nature of bodies. We do not begin with out bodies as we think we know them - in the bed, in the chair, at the table, in the grave - and then proclaim that the ecclesial body, the Eucharistic body, the resurrected body must only be bodies metaphorically as they do not correspond to the way we usually understand our own bodies.

God's revelation to humanity is given to the senses, given in the body of Christ. So, we begin instead with the access the Spirit has granted us to the body of the Son and accept that here we encounter the natural body. Only then can we invoke nature with proper care (Marks of His Wounds, p. 100).

Orthodox Christian reflection on the body, at least as expressed by my colleague Beth Felker Jones, makes body-bending artists like Tim Hawkinson look comparatively tame.

The End of the University (I'm sure of it)

2013-04-22T19:46:00.000-05:00

It's over - the entire enterprise. Begun in the Athenian groves of Akademos, reconvening in Paris to become what Newman called the glory of the Middle Ages, and surviving until 2013... but now it's done. The University as we know it is finished. What killed it? The internet. So just before I submit my job application to another industry (all of which are doing splendidly), I'm offering you one last declaration of doom, so you can't say you weren't warned:

The typical liberal arts college... is obsolete. Its sovereign isolation, its protected students, the one-track careers of its faculty, its restricted curriculums and teaching and its tepid purposes make it unsuited to the needs of the decade ahead. To have a bright future, private colleges must struggle to surmount these defects in a context of significantly altered purposes.

To my embarrassment I now realize that said paragraph, perfectly mirroring the rhetoric of 2013, was published nearly half a century ago, and the University (curiously enough) survived. But don't let a mere clerical error of mine throw you off. It's over. For real this time.

Evangelical Gothic

2013-04-20T17:39:00.001-05:00

Firestone on Fire by millinerd

"Our Aim in the Undertaking is to promote the Interests of the Redeemer's Kingdom," explained Jonathan Dickinson, the first President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). A refusal to deal seriously with such university origins is not dissimilar to the refusal to deal seriously with the origins of the universe: the six day creationist's naive hope that present realities magically dropped out of the sky. In College, What it Was, Is and Should Be, Andrew Delbanco puts it this way:

To anyone even glancingly acquainted with the history of American education, it is hardly news that our colleges have their origins in religion, or that they derive their aims, structure, and pedagogical methods mainly from Protestantism... Many academics have a curiously uneasy relation with these origins, as if they pose some threat or embarrassment to our secular liberties, even though the battle for academic freedom against clerical authority was won long ago. If you were to remind just about any major university president today that his or her own institution arose from this or that religious denomination, you'd likely get the response of the proverbial Victorian lady who, upon hearing of Darwin's claim that men descend from apes, replies that she hoped it wasn't so - but if it were, that it not become widely known.

This is a pity and a waste, since there is much to be learned from the past, including the clerical past, about the essential aims and challenges of college education. We tend not to remember, or perhaps half-deliberately to forget, that college was once conceived as a road to wealth or as a screening service for a social club, but as a training ground for pastors, teachers, and, more broadly, public servants. Founded as philanthropic institutions, the English originals of America's colleges were "expected," as Morison put it, "to dispense alms to outsiders, as well as charity to their own children (pp. 7-8)

That these founding ideals might ameliorate the present crisis in higher education is one suggestion of Delbanco's book. What W. Barksdale Maynard's Princeton: America's Campus accomplishes (among many things) is to show that Collegiate Gothic architecture once did just that. By replicating the English Gothic of Cambridge and Oxford, Princeton resisted the secular German research ideal (Wissenschaft over Bildung) that had overtaken American education starting with Johns Hopkins, and renewed its original commitment to the liberal arts:

[One] plus for Gothic at Princeton was its religious tinge: a churchly, monastic quality suggested a bulwark against secularism, especially appreciated by the many ministers on the faculty and among the alumni (fully one sixth of the graduate were ordained). "Princeton's crowning merit," said a reporter [in Harper's Weekly, 1887], "is that it can keep pace with all the learning and progress of the age without yielding to the encroachments of modern unbelief." Parents could trust that their sons would learn the most advanced subjects and approaches "without sacrifice of those principles which are inculcated in the Bible... Its founders and upholders have pledged themselves and their successors to be true to that religion which has been faithfully taught here from the beginning." Tigers celebrated their "loyal adherence to the sturdy, unsectarian, evangelical Christianity which is synonymous with the name of Princeton." No style could better connote this time-honored and pious approach than Gothic (p. 82).

But if one can't afford, or does not prefer, the Gothic - another tack would be to simply reexamine founding ideals as one ingredient to present renewal - perhaps by reasserting Dickinson's motivation with a motto like (to choose one college at random) For Christ and His Kingdom.

(More on this subject to come, by the way, in a forthcoming issue of Books & Culture.)

VIDEO: Daughter of Thy Son

2013-03-26T17:41:00.000-05:00

I gave a talk at Wheaton College chapel this Monday (the traditional Feast of the Annunciation). It can be viewed here. The contemporary art of Martin Creed, an obscure Byzantine church, Luther, Dante's Paradiso, T.S. Eliot, and - most compellingly - the provocative imagery of my Wheaton Art Department colleagues... all in one place!

update: This link seems to work better.

Endless Knowing of the Victorian Origen

2013-03-13T12:58:00.001-05:00

Ben Myers has a charming reflection on Origen as the consummate teacher and the eternal prospect of learning. A similar case was built in the Victorian era by Thomas Cooper, a self-educated shoemaker, who had served a prison sentence for once sparking a workers' riot, and who rose to prominence in Victorian intellectual culture - even becoming a respected freethinking lecturer - before returning (as as a strangely high number of secular leaders did) to Christian faith.

Tim Larsen explains how Cooper was interested in everything:

He lectured on European political development and on injustice in Ireland. He lectured on the life and genius of Milton, of Burns, of Shakespeare, of Byron, and others. He gave a ten-lecture series on the history of Greece and seventeen lectures on the history or Rome. He gave addresses on Cromwell and the Commonwealth, on the French Revolution, on George Washington. He gave an eight-lecture series on Napoleon, and four on the duke of Wellington... He gave fifty-one lectures on the history of England. He did a series on seven schools of painters: Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, French, and English. He gave six addresses on Russian history. He lectured on musicians, including Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven. His lectures on discoverers and explores included Columbus, Newton, Cortez, and Pizarro. He helped his hearers understand Mohammed and Swedenborg. He lectured on slavery, on the national debt, on the age of chivalry, injustice in Poland, the gypsies, the conquests of Alexander the Great, on ancient Egypt... the philosophy of Bacon and Locke. His efforts to educate his hearers in a range of sciences included addresses on vegetation, astronomy, geology, and natural history. This, moreover, is not even close to an exhaustive list of the specific subjects that he addressed.

Thomas Cooper

It was this catholicity of interests that initially led Cooper to the secular viewpoint, his youthful faith having been eroded by D.F. Strauss' Leben Jesu. But it was also this catholicity that caused Cooper to think his way through Strauss, finally offering an answer, "counter[ing] well-reasoned skeptical criticism with well-reasoned believing criticism." Unlike the surface responses of most Victorian Christians, Cooper actually gave Strauss' argument the respect of an honest and thorough response (which required mastery of original languages). "Someone really interested in the latest thought in the field of modern biblical criticism," explains Larsen, "would have been better off going to hear Cooper at the London Hall of Science than an Oxbridge lecture."

Cooper continued his lecture circuit after his reconversion, often denying the flashier (and better paying) speaking venues to prioritize lower class audiences. It is no wonder that his voracious appetite for learning caused him to offer an intellectual riff on the argument from desire. As Cooper put it:

And do we not all know that the more we learn to know, the more we thirst to know? It is only sheer ignorance that has no desire for knowledge... Is the wisdom of God so abortive as to make a being of boundless desires for knowledge, only at the end of a few years to put him out of existence? .. The Progressive Nature of Man - if I use the most circumspect language - is a strong presumptive argument for a Future Life for Man.

What Myers says of Origen could then equally apply to Cooper. He "knew scripture and the mysteries of the faith better than anyone. But he knew that all the learning of this life is only preparation for the life to come."

The Enduring Age of Eliot

2013-03-10T18:34:00.000-05:00

In a review of the latest publication of Eliot letters (1926-27), The New Republic offers the standard academic explanation for why interest in T.S. Eliot is (presumably) at low ebb:

Eliot’s criticism, with its probing of individual passages and its fixation on a specifically literary tradition, predominantly European and Christian, is out of key with current academic approaches based on such “contextual” categories as race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, post-colonialism and social class. Eliot’s poetry, with its learned footnotes that themselves require footnotes, reeks of the “elite.” Influential critics of poetry, including those who do not subscribe to the prevailing critical fashions, have not rallied to Eliot’s defense.... [Harold] Bloom (whose view of literature as a ruthless competition among individual writers closely resembles Eliot’s) has been dismissive of what he calls Eliot’s “churchwardenly” criticism.

But as said passage momentarily concedes, there is reason to think that Eliot's legacy is more present than is frequently presumed. What reeks of the "elite" today is not an admiration for Eliot's poetry, but its carefully curated academic disdain.

Harold Bloom recollected that as a young student he had been “virtually enslaved” by Eliot’s “preferences and prejudices.” If Eliot had dethroned the Romantic poets, Bloom reinstated them, even reading Eliot as the Romantic he claimed not to be. And where Eliot had stated the importance of influence in his famous early essay, Bloom upended this benign proposal in The Anxiety of Influence, offering six patterns for how literary influence functions almost perversely. “Poetry is the enchantment of incest, disciplined by resistance to that enchantment,” claimed Bloom, adding a sinister tint to a process hitherto deemed positive.

But reading The Anxiety of Influence today with full knowledge of Bloom’s career is to be faced with an irony. The sixth form of negative influence he describes is termed apophrades, or “return of the dead,” evoking the unlucky days in Athens when the dead inhabited the houses where they once lived. Having sought to avoid the influence of his precursor, the later poet – Bloom tells us - now seems as if the one he sought to avoid inhabits him. “It seems to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.” Curiously enough, Bloom’s relation to Eliot is a fitting example of apophrades.

How can we read Bloom as anything but an extension of Eliot’s critical legacy through the literary heyday of deconstruction? Faced with assaults on the literary tradition, Bloom responded with a furious defense:

Without the Canon, we cease to think. You may idealize endlessly about replacing aesthetic standards with ethnocentric and gender considerations, and your social aims may indeed be admirable. Yet only strength can join itself to strength, as Nietzsche perpetually testified.

Bloom, furthermore, made a sharp turn to what he termed religious criticism, even if he did so as a “Gnostic Jew,” loyally opposed to his Jewish tradition. Beyond celebrating the KJV, he even went on to dispassionately advise an Augustinian revival amongst traditional Protestants and Catholics. Bloom’s critical style also clearly echoed Eliot. “Over time,” writes Sam Tannenhaus, Bloom’s “notion of influence has become more orthodox, growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics." Eliot, according to Bloom, “remained a Whitmanian poet, despite all his evasions of Whitman.” And so has Bloom remained Eliotic despite his evasions of Eliot.

But if Eliot’s understanding of influence is correct – which is advantage not anxiety – this is no condemnation of Bloom. “If we approach a poet without this prejudice [toward unexamined originality]," wrote Eliot, "we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” So yes, Eliot persists, and one reason his legacy is continually denigrated might be because his detractor's sense a threat, as the subtle perpetuation of Eliot's legacy would make it easy to revive. (Hence the tired appeals to accusations from Julius's now dated book instead of bothering to take account of nearly two decades of conversation on the matter since Julius, a common note of which is serious attention to faith).

While there have been obvious critical gains (and losses) since the high water mark of Eliot adulation half a century ago, his legacy has been perpetuated by critics like Bloom, has lately inspired a new journal, Fare Forward, and new waves of artistic production, the Qu4rtets project. It would be easy to overplay this evidence, but also to underestimate it. Call it, if you like, apophrades - return of the dead.

QU4RTETS from Pilar Timpane on Vimeo.

Brutal Unity Hangover Cure

2013-03-08T16:29:00.000-05:00

I'm serially cheating on millinerd again (with these last four posts at First Thoughts).

Also, my review of Ephraim Radner's 500-page act of penance is in this month's Books & Culture (and can be read here). So far as I know, the only way to recover from reading the book (which presses Christian complicity in Rwandan genocide, among other things) is by watching this. Fifty times.

And even that won't do it really.

Update: Come to think of it, perhaps my colleague David Hooker's latest project, covered in this week's Chicago Trib, is the perfect encapsulation of and response to Radner, with Hooker emphasizing "...the Christian message that God loves us in spite of our sins."

Electric Education

2013-02-25T01:06:00.001-05:00

For the futurist edpunks of Do It Yourself University, the foundation of education in this country was a "pallid imitation of the fourteenth-century English and European curriculum, which itself was a shallow error-riddled reconstruction of the intellectual achievements of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates." Perhaps that's why colonial colleges produced dimwits like James Madison.

But Andrew Delbanco, in College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, actually bothered to learn something about Puritan education, and sees it as a way to renew our own. Delbanco even identifies the root of critical thinking in American education in the "Puritan principle that no communicant should 'take any ancient doctrine for truth until they have examined it.'" And then there were the professors.

Puritans spoke almost indistinguishably about teaching and preaching. Consider John Cotton, arguably the leading minister of New England's first generation. In his history of early New England, the Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Cotton Mather (Cotton's grandson), portrays him as a man whose religious faith and scholarly attainment are essentially one and the same. A "universal scholar, and a living system system of the liberal arts, and a walking library," he was the ideal to which every studious young person should aspire. His reputation as a preacher was that of a man not merely erudite and eloquent but also able to inspire young people so they might "be fitted for public service." By his voice and arguments, but most of all by his manifest commitment to the impossible yet imperative task of aligning his own life with models of virtue that he found (mainly) in scripture, he was mentor to his student in the same way that he was pastor to his flock. In his theological writings, which were largely concerned with what we would call moral psychology, he explored the mystery and contingency of learning, which, he believed, sometimes proceeds in steps, sometimes by leaps, sometimes by sheer surprise in the absence of exertion, sometimes by slow and arduous accretion through diligent work... [but] the moment of electric connection between teacher and student cannot be predicated or planned.

But education merely through an electrical connection avoids the electric connection here described. Puritan pedagogy may have (in Delbanco's words) effectively dismantled the "limits of jealous self-regard in which [the student] has hitherto been confined," but MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) tend to leave those limits intact. The "mystery and contingency of learning" becomes as predictable as a playlist. Professors like John Cotton, whose lives might have spoken alongside their lectures, are kept at manageable distance, safely streamed to 10,000 students at once.

Twentieth Century at a Glance

2013-02-10T21:01:00.001-05:00

Fisher Building/Harold Washington Library, a photo by millinerd on Flickr.
Burnham's fabulous Fisher Building (1896) flanked by a Harold Washington Library acroterion (1993). A modern architectural revolution happened in the space between.

Two Upcoming Talks

2013-02-02T11:49:00.002-05:00

If you're in the Chicagoland area, my friend Nikos Bakirtzis is giving a talk on Byzantine monasticism at the Wheaton College Art Department this Monday Feb. 4th at 4:30pm in Adams Hall (3rd floor). And I'm giving one at the University of Chicago's Workshop on Late Antiquity and Byzantium on Tuesday, Feb. 5 at 4:30pm (Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 156), where I'll demonstrate with overwhelming persuasiveness how Byzantine art solves all our contemporary problems. Come on by to one or both.

Ruskin: Beauty: Justice

2013-01-31T11:41:00.003-05:00

A student walks into my office and asks "What is beauty?" I reached for Roger Scruton, but better perhaps to have reached for John Ruskin's Modern Painters.

[Beauty] is either the record of conscience, printed in things external, or it is a symbolizing of Divine attributes in matter, or it is the felicity of living things, or the perfect fulfillment of their duties and functions. In all cases it is something Divine, either the approving voice of God, the glorious symbol of him, the evidence of his kind presence, or the obedience to his will by him induced and supported (MP 2:378).

The typical objection to such exalted, theological takes on beauty is that they (presumably) neglect justice, and this critique has legitimate targets. "Whatever the surrounding evil, for the artist the sun is always at the zenith," wrote the abolitionist Unitarian minister Moncure Conway. "The reformer's zeal, much less his discontent, admirable elsewhere, is inconsistent with the repose of the spirit which wins beauty to the side of the artist." So much for artistic justice.

But Ruskin was different, and to think his aesthetic ambitious were out of touch with the spirit of reform requires no knowledge of his writings whatsoever. On the contrary, it was just this Ruskinian take on beauty that was used to attack frivolity. As the unjustly forgotten Yale art historian and minister James Mason Hoppin put it.

Since [Ruskin’s] prophetic voice has been heard art has risen from its degraded position as the slave of luxury, as a bourgeois conventionality, as a mere decoration of life however brilliant, and its true nature is seen that it has a vital and eternal beauty belonging to divine things (The Early Renaissance, p. iv.)

Yes, this scrambles tired dichotomies. Phil Ochs' admirable suggestion that "protest is your diamond duty... ah, but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty," is not some wisp of 60's inspiration, but a return to indigenous American Protestant aesthetic theory (whether Ochs realized this or not), and boy do we need it now. American art history, fortunately, is far more deeply rooted in the other bearded London economic theorist than in that Jewish prophet who lost religion (to borrow Mackay's formulation), Karl Marx. But don't tell that to anyone who cherishes the myth that things only got serious with Meyer Schapiro.

2013-01-26T08:51:00.004-05:00

Week of prayer for Christian unity slips by largely unnoticed, but at least I got two posts out of the deal (one and two). Strangely, despite my blogging prowess, the churches still appear to be divided.

The Image Strikes Back

2013-01-17T17:23:00.000-05:00

One of the curiosities of having been born towards the end of the twentieth century is the parallel - artistically speaking - to having born towards the beginning of the ninth. Just as those approaching middle-age today have grown up with the end of modernism and the reassertion of the image in both painting (Pop art) and architecture (postmodernism), so would Eastern Christians have seen the end of iconoclasm and the reassertion of images of Christ, the saints, and Mary after the final lifting of the imperial ban in 843.

This is the subject of an essay I wrote (alongside many superior writers) in the journal Image about the word "image." I'll leave the details (such as the Chicago mascaroni and its raging acroteria) to those who subscribe (my earlier essay in those pages can be found yonder). But I'll post here an excerpt from the theoretical side of things, where I try to put Hans Belting and German image theory in conversation with "the Damascene," as I like to call him:

Not to be outdone by the artists whom they study, art historians have taken this return of the image as an occasion for intensive labors of their own. Ambitious tomes have attempted to widen the stylistically driven history of art to accommodate the far-flung history of images. Islands of “fine art” are becoming less interesting to many art historians than the ocean of general visual culture that surrounds them. “An image,” writes Hans Belting, a chief navigator of this bewildering sea, “often fluctuates between physical and mental existence. It may live in a work of art but does not coincide with it.” One senses almost a spiritual aspiration in this level of art historical reflection, which is becoming more and more difficult to ignore. Image theory is like the calculus of art history – frustratingly complicated, but worth struggling with for being true.

But even the most daring of these new perspectives, in their most advanced Teutonic manifestations, are not nearly daring enough. The traditional religious response to this disciplinary direction should be not confusion but relief, not “Where are you going?” but “Welcome back.” For among our more recent image theorists, none are as irreducibly wild as the image theorist par excellence, John of Damascus. Rarely do those who cite this eighth-century defender of images communicate the breadth of his full-orbed justification. John lived in a time, not unlike Modernism, when images were banned – a ban backed by the authority of an Emperor, not just fashion. And unlike many modern image theorists, John knew that if one attempts to answer the question, “What is an image?” without getting metaphysical, the question never actually gets asked.

How does John do it? First, like a roller coaster operator strapping in a terrified ten year old, John defines his terms: “An image is a likeness and pattern and impression of something, showing in itself what is depicted.” And then he pulls the brake release. When, John wonders, did images begin? Did they start with the earliest artists? Had John known of the first of cave paintings at Altamira, Lascaux or Chauvet, might he have referred to them? This would be far too tame. “The first natural and undeviating image of the invisible God is the Son of the Father, showing in himself the Father.” Which is to say that for this John, in the beginning was the Image.

Before the inauguration of time and matter as we know them (as if a word like “before” can even function at this level of discourse!), the Trinity itself was swimming in exquisitely accurate images – the Son imaging the Father, and the Spirit imaging the Son. This teeming wellspring then overflowed - no, it burst - into a glistening cataract of additional images. First, for John, came the images in God’s mind of everything that would ever come to be ever – everything from electrons to elephant trunks (including, we could add, those swirling pillars of interstellar gas that astrophysicists call “elephant trunks” as well). All of these, before they were made, were initially images in their artist’s divine mind. And when there were made – here is a tricky part – they continued to be images, for creation itself is an infinite network of images, each of them “intimating to us dimly reflections of the divine…”

In John’s great chain of images, humans came next. Genesis, after all, begins with reverse idolatry, not humans making images of false gods, but the true God making images of humans. “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” goes the famous verse, which Paul Ricouer considered so inexhaustibly rich that it had to be freshly interpreted each century. John drew upon the best of those interpreters – the early church fathers who preceded him. They pointed out that according to this famous passage, “image” is one thing and “likeness” another. “Man received the honor of God’s image in his first creation,” writes Origen, “whereas the perfection of God’s likeness was reserved for him at the consummation.”

That consummation, it will come as no surprise, is offered in Christ – the original image - the true likeness of God in our midst, perfect without remainder. But this is no static perfection! The image of Christ is so attractive that it endlessly replicates itself, steadily summoning we lesser images to contribute a hitherto unknown coloration to its ever widening spectrum. The human journey is therefore from image unto image. “Just as we have born the image of the man of dust,” writes Paul, “we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:4). Or, more famously, “For those whom he foreknew he predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29).

It is only after all this – after the metaphysical work that climbs to the highest heavens and back again – that John gets around to making his case for images that are made with human hands. But because that justification for human made images – art – is freighted with such metaphysical force, it succeeds. Although he did not live to see his cause vindicated, John’s arguments - providentially made possible by Muslim political asylum - carried the day. Icons reasserted themselves in the life of the Eastern Christian Empire, just as images have recently emerged from a time of modernist censure as well.

It's all in the current issue of Image along with other explorations of the faith/art lexicon, including one on freedom by a painter who has long been creating his own chain of meticulous and absorbing images, Joel Sheesley.

Notes Towards a Visual Ecumenism

2013-01-10T15:23:00.001-05:00

The following is an excerpt from an essay of mine entitled "A Curse Reversed: Towards a Visual Ecumenism" in the current issue of CIVA's journal, Seen:

The year was 1858. The place was Turin, Italy. The person was John Ruskin, the great evangelical art historian and social reformer – but he was not to be evangelical for long. Ruskin’s evangelical formation is what causes to the Bible to be referenced in almost every page of his voluminous works. But exposure to higher biblical criticism and studies in geology threatened that youthful faith. The most effective threat, however, came from his aesthetic education. Ruskin’s travel with his family to Europe, especially Venice, inaugurated what we might call (riffing on Mark Noll’s publication) the scandal of the evangelical eye.

To be sure, Ruskin translated the glory of Venice into a language evangelicals could understand. “Never had a city a more glorious Bible,” he told his British readers, describing Saint Mark’s Cathedral. “The skill and the treasure of the East had gilded every letter, and illumined every page, till the Book-Temple shone from afar off like the star of the Magi.” But then came the showdown in Turin, and it happened before Paolo Veronese’s sprawling canvas, The Queen of Sheba before Solomon. Here is how Ruskin related the experience:

I was sill in the bonds of my old Evangelical faith; and, in 1858, it was with me, Protestantism or nothing: The crisis of the whole turn of my thoughts being one Sunday morning, at Turin, when, from before Paul Veronese’s Queen of Sheba, and under a quite overwhelmed sense of his God-given power, I went away to a Waldensian chapel, and there a squeaking idiot was preaching to an audience of seventeen old women and three louts that they were the only children of God in Turin…

Imagine the scene for a moment: Ruskin bathes in aesthetic glory on a Sunday morning before Veronese’s cataract of color. He is amazed at the artist’s God given power. But, it being Sunday morning, he reluctantly extracts himself to fulfill his Sabbath obligation, which – of course – means attending a Protestant church. However, the Waldensians (a proto-Protestant sect was the best Ruskin could do) were so aesthetically barren, and the sermon so hopelessly narrow, that the contrast between Ruskin’s art experience and his formally “religious” one is unbearable. The only way that Ruskin could protest that soul-crushing disjunction is to renounce evangelicalism. He called it his “unconversion.” Which is to say, his eyes outgrew his soul.

To be sure, as Michael Wheeler’s Ruskin’s God persuasively argues, it was too late for Ruskin. He could not neatly “unconvert” because his evangelicalism was too deeply rooted. Wheeler sees too many references to faith in the later Ruskin, and the leitmotif of Ruskin’s lifelong faith, furthermore, is the Biblical glory of Solomon, as reflected by Veronese. We might also add that Turin is an ironic place for an aesthetic unconversion, it being the city that hosts the ultimate warrant for aesthetic practice: The Shroud of Turin, a proto-photographic replica of the face of infinitude itself. But for Ruskin, the Shroud must have been too Catholic. “Whoever loves beauty,” lamented the Protestant theologian Gerhard Nebel, “will, like Winckelmann, freeze in the barns of the Reformation and go over to Rome.” But Ruskin’s evangelicalism had instilled in him a virulent strain of anti-Catholicism. Love of beauty therefore doomed Ruskin to theological and aesthetic limbo: Too visually sophisticated to be evangelical, and too suspicious of Popery to be Catholic.

The part I'm leaving out features a reversal of Ruskin's curse through the career of the evangelical art historian John Walford, and a critique of Reformed and Orthodox aesthetic hubris, all of which leads to the thrilling conclusion....

New directions of research emerge when one goes to the art historical record not to defect because of a perceived inadequacy (as with John Ruskin), or to artificially prove the differences among the traditions (as with Pavel Florensky), but to lovingly respect one’s own tradition, to abide within it (as with John Walford), but also to joyfully indicate commonalities when they appear. Just as there is, according to our Bibles, “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” so perhaps there is also one variegated yet unified Christian aesthetic, to which the different traditions, at their utter best, ascend. Full maturity (which for evangelicals has been a long time coming!) is not to see with Protestant, Orthodox or Catholic eyes - but with the eyes of Christ.

Good news for me is you can't effectively disagree until you hear my entire case by reading the whole thing.

More Secrets of Art History Revealed!

2013-01-02T17:18:00.000-05:00

Hugo Ball at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, 1916

If Preziosi only takes us to the frontier of post-secular art history, what would it mean for a younger generation to enter in? Consider that supposed stronghold of religionless resistance, that well-defended fortress of secular subversion, forever issuing impious phalanxes of the atheistic avant-garde, the Dada. Certainly they can be trusted to keep the cult out of culturati. But in Leonard Aldea's hands (The Implicit Apophaticism of Dada Zurich: A Spiritual Quest by Means of Nihilist Procedures), Dada is less a vehicle for nihilism than a chapter in the history of apophatic theology.

Just like apophatic theology, the apophatic art of the Dadaists deﬁnes its object of knowledge exclusively by saying what the object is not, never by stating what the object is. In doing so, each negative deﬁnition is a step forward toward that ﬁnal afﬁrmative statement, although it never carries positive information about it.

This is not a case of theology retreating to the tame suburbs of critical theory, instead it is the elevation of theory to a highrise loft in the City of God. For theology is evidently the origin (paging Holsinger) and destination of theory's restless striving. Dada's apophatic art, however, needs be nestled within a cataphatic, declarative moment (an essential lesson for theologians and artists alike). Even Marcel Duchamp, suggests Aldea, was an inconsistent nihilist, for "he never actually stopped explaining that nothingness... never stopped using this very nothingness to create with." To say nothing of the founder of Dada, Hugo Ball, whose diary for July 31, 1920 insists that “the great, universal blow against rationalism and dialectics, against the cult of knowledge and abstractions, is: the incarnation.” Aldea sees Dadaism as not an attack on meaning, but "the bastion of human dignity in an age when humanity was extremely devalued and reduced to the empty carcasses of the many theoretical systems that saw their failure in the reality of the First World War."

Once the nihilist stamp is removed from our perception of Dadaists, and their techniques are looked at and assessed from an apophatic perspective, future research into the intrinsic theology of this most proliﬁc artistic movement can address a number of other, more in-depth questions.

Aldea's article is just a beginning, and his thesis is confirmed - as he alludes but does not explore - with Ball's conversion with his wife Emmy (let's not forget her!) to Catholicism (a bit more on that from me here). Aldea points to the need for further research, and indeed the most immediate necessity is for someone to increase the accessibility of Ball's writings on Byzantine saints (the original avant-garde) by translating Byzantinisches Christentum: Drei Heiligenleben (1923). Furthermore, if religion necessarily muffles resistance (as Preziosi assumes), then why does Ball's attack on German nationalism only increase after his conversion, as evidenced by his 1924 Die Folgen der Reformation (reminiscent, incidentally, of Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation).

Some German theologians have made these connections already. Notably, however, Aldea concludes his exploration of Dada not by exposing art history's limitations, but theology's.

Almost a century after Dada appeared, modern scholarship has failed to investigate these intriguing connections between the art, theology and philosophy of the beginning of the twentieth century. Even more frustrating is that, outside the world of art historians, the theological and philosophical ideas behind Modern Art are still being read with the interpreting tools used for representational art, although we quite clearly deal with an entirely new phenomenon. Art is still expected to be, and interpreted as if it were, merely the visual reproduction of previously formulated theological or philosophical thought, and not a source of original thought in its own right. The Avant-garde brought to the foreground the discrimination between two theological methodologies, the written and the visual, and also the idea of a theology developed and expressed through the arts. The risk of such discrimination against Modern Art, especially among theologians, is that by our refusal to at least consider art as a proper methodology for original theological investigation, we may in fact reject an authentic source of revelation.

Which returns us to that previous question: If (according to Preziosi) "Art [is] the very esperanto of European hegemony," then why perpetuate the odious oppression of art history? Because while Preziosi is right to have exposed art history as a hegemonic tool of the West - it is not only that. Should the discipline reach back to its repressed origins far before the Enlightenment or Renaissance, the icon's role in resisting such a narrative emerges. Art reveals itself as theology (paging Andreopoulos). And while this may long have been so, only recent developments in the (not hopelessly hegemonic) discipline of art history have permitted such ocular epistemology to unfurl. Only with the grinding of this particular lens of investigation has art's theological dimensions to come more fully into focus.

This is where the "theology and art" genre - a laudable venture to be sure - goes wrong, with its chiefly philosophical, as oppose to art historical, conversation partners. It frequently fails to familiarize itself (as do many visual theology enthusiasts) with the disciplinary vehicle that most privileges the noblest of the senses. How many theologians, for example, have even heard of Alois Riegl?

That said, the visual cannot remain disjoined from the verbal anymore than can apophatic from cataphatic theology. “The word and the image are one," wrote Hugo Ball, who knew his New Testament and ecumenical councils well enough to percieve Christ as both logos and eikon. "Painting and composing poetry belong together. Christ is image and word. The word and the image are cruciﬁed.” For this reason, as awkward as neologisms can be, we might call the territory being described here as theography, because in Byzantine Greek, the verb graphein encapsulates both writing and drawing. Art history, an admittedly verbal discipline that nevertheless serves the visual, exploits this symbiotic insight. There are innumerable theological questions that would be recast - if not resolved - through a rigorous, up to date art historical investigation alongside more routine verbal ventures.

Theography, for lack of a better term, is not the only future of art history, but it is one of them - and to foreclose this possibility would be to artificially limit the interpretive dilation that critical theory and the visual culture debate of the nineties allowed. If it can be done with Dada, it can be done with myriad artistic movements more. Make no mistake, art's theological potentialities also mean that art has, does and will operate as very bad theology too. But the grander point is that the secret of art history, or at least another of them, is that the discipline does not take its place under the queen of the sciences, but participates in her reign.

The Secret of Art History

2013-01-01T23:38:00.003-05:00

Oh how that brief list of theologically inclined, post-secular art history could be expanded. The second edition of the standard grad student intro to the discipline, now ends - you may be surprised to discover - on a decidedly religious note. "What has continually haunted the discourse of art history is its foundation role, beginning most forcefully in the Romantic era, as a secular theology or coy religiosity..." Donald Preziosi (we assume the editor to be the author of the book's unattributed coda) concludes half a thousand pages of historiography by identifying:

[The] (re-)emergence of the problem of religion in art and art history... There is a differential intricacy of and an obverse complementarity between artistry and religiosity, art and religion, which, pursued in all its implications, would necessarily lead to a fundamental recasting of our entire understanding of both art and religion: a recasting wherein both these nominally and institutionally distance practices are more importantly understood as different perspective upon a common concern - the nature of representation or signification as such.

This is evident enough. Hence the inadequacy of art historical genealogies (like the one here being quoted!) that begin with Giorgio Vasari, or (even worse) Johann Joachim Winckelmann, instead of the iconoclastic controversy, not to mention the book of Exodus. What is far less evident is the truth of Preziosi's metaphysical claim casually embedded in said coda in the form of an insistence that religion is pure construction without remainder. "Religion," proclaims - no, preaches Preziosi, "is a mode of artistry which is in denial of (or is duplicitous regarding) the fabricatedness of its own inventions, commonly attributing that artifice to the 'design' of an immaterial, and (for sectarian believers) a pre-existent and originating force of being." Faced with such a colonialist caricaturization, why not let the subaltern (a "religious" person like David Bentley Hart, for example) speak?

Religion in the abstract does not actually exist, and almost no one (apart from politicians) would profess any allegiance to it. Rather, there are a very great number of systems of belief and practice that, for the sake of convenience, we call 'religions,' though they could scarcely differ more from one another, and very few of them depend upon some fanciful notion [as Preziosi seems to assume] that religion itself is a miraculous exception to the rule of nature. Christians, for instance, are not, properly speaking, believers in religion; rather, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his church as its Lord. This is a claim that is at once historical and spiritual, and it has given rise to an incalculable diversity of natural expressions: moral, artistic, philosophical, social, legal, and religious.

So no, there is no necessary conflict between acknowledging fabrications and having faith, between, for example, knowing that the gospels were actually written (how could they not have been?) and believing that God speaks through them truthfully, or between acknowledging an icon was actually painted and that the dead saint that said icon refers to lives. God, of course, is not a cause, not even a big cause - he is instead the premise of all causality, and his mysterious influence within the infinite network of causality that he inaugurated (even to the point of choosing a nation and donning human flesh) is called providence. "He is in essence outside everything," writes Athanasius, "but inside everything by his own power." So until Preziosi can produce a satisfying explanation for why there is something rather than nothing (he is welcome to try), his instinctual assumption against the possibility of immateriality will be no different in kind that an assumption for it.

This is not to dismiss Preziosi as much as to point out an unfortunate inconsistency. He is, you see, one of the discipline's most deft deconstructors - a veritable suicide bomber embedded in one of art history's privileged professorial perches. In what is surely one of the better sentences of art historical writing in the last two decades, he writes that "Art [is] the very esperanto of European hegemony." Preziosi admits that "the brilliance of this colonization is quite breathtaking: there is no 'artistic tradition' anywhere in the world which today is not fabricated through historicism and essentialism of European museology and museography...." Yes, art is hegemonic, and the world's teeming international network of monolithic museums prove it so. "Art history makes colonial subjects of us all."

Why then continue to perform art history? That's a good question for another post. The point here is the unintentionally humorous one that an author who has (brilliantly, in my opinion) exposed art history's shallow roots in the stripped soil of the European Enlightenment, is tethered to that same Enlightenment's assumptions about "religion." "The essential 'secret' of religion," writes Preziosi (wait for it... drum roll please...) "is that there really is no secret at all that is separate from its alleged 'expression.'" But all this statement tells us, a statement so blithely broadbrush that the paint gets very thin indeed, is the essential secret of art history. This being that that the discipline's colonialist, European (and yes, white male) Enlightenment secularity has gone so blissfully unquestioned that it has survived two decades of deconstruction without so much as a scratch.

Until now. Hence the recent publication string that questions such secularism; and hence Preziosi's need to (grudgingly?) acknowledge religion in the sweetspot of the discipline's chief initiatory document (the grad school reader). Donald Preziosi, then, is like a Moses of sorts. He has traced art history's repressed consanguinity with religion, and has traveled far enough to see the mountains of post-secular art historical research. The future (or at least one of them), he tells us, is in those hills. And yet, Preziosi is sufficiently hindered with his discipline's secular presumptions to be able to enter that land himself. As a result, even as he emblazons we religious people with a scarlet "R"... we still thank him.

The Icon at Renaissance Ground Zero

2012-12-15T11:28:00.001-05:00

If what I am saying (with qualifications) about academia's "religious turn" is correct, it would have to be demonstrable in one of my discipline's most central questions. I attempt to make this case in a paper published in Art as Spiritual Perception. Here's the abstract:

Attribution of Florence's Brancacci Chapel frescoes, a chief catalyst of Renaissance perspective, was once dubbed the most important question in the history of art. An earlier study (1997) that traced the history of this connoisseur's dispute was so vexed by art historical contradictions that it concluded with fin de siècle subjectivist despair. The latest study of the Chapel (2005), however, show a renewed interest in the sacred and liturgical dimensions of the structure, focusing especially on the Chapel's overlooked icon. This both places an icon at ground zero of Renaissance perspective, and is further evidence for what has been called academia's "Religious Turn."

The book, full of similar essays that unearth art history's spiritual dimensions, is hard and rectangular, so by using it to stuff the stockings of all your loved ones (especially young children), you can save money.

Have Yourself a Neo-Pagan Advent

2012-12-13T14:19:00.001-05:00

Mayan apocalypse has been well-trodden, even overly trammeled millinerd territory. But why not one last time around the ballcourt? After all, we only have one week left. I wrote an article called "How the Neo-Pagans Saved Advent." Yes, it's at the Huffington Post; but, for good measure, I link to First Things twice and talk about hell.

The Rising Stock of Visual Exegesis

2012-11-24T14:58:00.001-05:00

Byzantine Job manuscript, c. 1200

Theological interpretation (an old concern 'round these parts) is here to stay not because it is new, but because it is normal. One of the testimonies to its normality is the abundant evidence for the method in art history. A hot-headed art historian might even go so far to say that theological interpretation of the Bible is primarily a visual phenomenon, in the sense that it constitutes the earliest form of Christian art, and that art is a remarkably more immediate and effective way of "spiritually" reading the Bible. Consider, for example, Jesus appearing to Job on the right.

Herman's visual typology

This is less known than it should be, but one sees the marks of a rising academic stock worth investing in now. An intriguing session at the Society of Biblical Literature in Chicago this year thoroughly scratched the surface of this enormous topic. There, one contributor wisely suggested that "visual criticism" should be added to the more familiar repertoire of redaction, comparative, or canonic criticism of the Bible. Though some scholars consider this kind of thing "Bible criticism on holiday," such scholars themselves seem to have been on holiday, failing to notice that the De Gruyter's Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception includes a visual arts section (to which I've contributed), and Blackwell's "through the centuries" commentary series is incorporating visual art as well, not to mention a growing number of studies, and an Emory University postdoc to boot. So let me throw down here: Criticize historical criticism all you want, but if your interpretive method still unthinkingly limits itself to text, you're still beholden to the historical critical paradigm.

There is little discussion of visual exegesis in evangelical circles, despite the exciting talk surrounding theological interpretation (so well introduced by Dan Treier). However, one could suggest that the phenomenon first happened visually in the evangelical arena as well, as evidenced by Bruce Herman's typological paintings made in collaboration with the Old Testament scholar Gordon Hugenberger, on offer long before theological interpretation caught on more widely.

All this is by way of bringing up the current issue of Comment, edited by Peter Leithart (who has written in this area himself). Therein your humble scribe has penned an introductory article to the phenomenon of visual exegesis, concluding with a meditation on what is probably the most interesting Byzantine fresco I've ever seen. To poke fun at the Anchor Bible commentary series (that bastion of historical criticism), the article is entitled "Anchors Aweigh! The Neglected Art of Theological Interpretation." If that's not enough of a motivation to purchase the issue, consider the lineup of contributors, including Marilynne Robinson, my colleague Lynn Cohick, Matthew Lee Anderson, Dan Siedell, Mako Fujimura, and other worthies. It's more like a book than a magazine actually, and definitely worth ordering (but I'm biased).

update: I've put up the full article at academia.edu

Ut Pictura Poesis

2012-11-22T09:45:00.001-05:00

I've got an essay on the poetry of T.S. Eliot as it relates to the art of Philip Guston and Bruce Herman in this gorgeous (if I may say so) publication available for purchase here. The exhibition will be making its rounds at Yale, Gordon, Duke, Baylor, and will be in Wheaton as well. It's easy to write about work when it is this good!

Well, easier.

The Cult of Art's Last Stand

2012-11-13T15:20:00.002-05:00

Jacques Barzun's death brought to mind his Mellon Lectures, The Use and Abuse of Art. There he explains that art cannot function as religion. Art is unable “to reach the divine center from which redemption comes, and is punished for its presumption… Art cannot be ‘a way of life’ because… it lacks a theology or even a popular mythology of its own; it has no bible, no ritual, and no sanctions for behavior. We are called to enjoy but we are not enjoined.” Indeed, a huge swath of art since 1960 might be explained as the relentless insistence that art cannot save.    

Strangely enough, there might be one place that didn't get the message - a place where art continues to perform, or at least approximate the pseudo-religious function assigned to it by Romanticism. An essay by Roger Lundin written nearly thirty years ago explains that the evangelical attitude to the arts is “the product of a union of specifically American attitudes toward social tradition, romantic aesthetic notions, and fundamentalist view of culture." Hence the curious correspondence between evangelicals and Romantic notions of artistic creation:

Because of its skepticism about the relevance of history and the historical process, because of its desire to assign to art a special separate status, and because of its sense of alienation about both unadorned nature and mass culture, romantic theory has offered an appealing sight to those of us whose aesthetic lenses have been ground, whether we appreciate it or not, in the shop of American fundamentalism (“Offspring of an Odd Union: Evangelical Attitudes Towards the Arts,” in Fundamentalism and Modern America, p. 138).

Perhaps this is why holy hipsters, or "Christian creatives," have arisen as a separate ecclesial class, even starting their own churches (or thinking they can save the ones in which they remain). I like to think that at the evangelical art department where I teach we avoid this particular pitfall, but just to be sure, here's an idea for the next Christian art conference: A series of dazzling speakers telling us not what art can do... but what it can't.   