Nonnus

The Meaning of "Original" in St. John Damascene

The subtitle of Andrew Louth's book on St. John Damascene is Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. I expected Louth to dwell on this theme more than he did, but there were nevertheless some very interesting bits. The book's epigraph is attributed to Zissimos Lorenzatos and says: "Originality means to remain faithful to the originals." In the preface he gives the Lorenzatos quote in its context:

Originality means to remain faithful to the originals, to the eternal prototypes, to extinguish "a wisdom of [your] own" before the "common Word," as Heraclitus says—in other words, to lose your soul if you wish to find it, and not to parade your originality or to do what pleases you.

So originality becomes (or already always was) more a conduit of tradition than its opposite. Tradition is, in fact, the continuous reification of its origins.

Edward Ruscha's Artist's Books

Edward Ruscha is often thought of as an iconic California artist. His art is democratic and very American. A few of the most familiar subjects of Ruscha's paintings and photographs are Standard gas stations, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a place called Norm's Diner—all reproduced multiple times, and occasionally set on fire. He also returned repeatedly to the Hollywood sign and the 20th Century Fox logo.


Dave Hickey, a critic similarly insistent on democratising art in the '60s, points out that by figuratively setting Standard Oil, Norm's Diner and museums on fire, Ruscha's intention was to symbolically dismantle the hierarchical, institutional arbiters of "standards and norms." Ruscha, to his credit, never stated things so bluntly. His interest is in representing words, gas stations, wonder bread, palm trees, swimming pools and art museums in simple, multiple, ways.


A truly populist pop artist, Ruscha's early role models were his dad, Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell. But while he often employs a sign painter's or pinstriper's careful lettering techniques, Ruscha is not a craftsman. His word paintings have as much in common with a Lawrence Weiner as a car by Ed Roth or Von Dutch. As Hickey puts it elsewhere, "Ruscha's iconography arises from the intersection of cultural and autobiographical metaphor."[1]


The symbolic center of Ruscha's work is his series of artist's books. They, too, are modest, unimpressive objects, populist in spirit. Their subjects include the familiar, Twentysix Gas Stations (1963), and the banal: swimming pools, palm trees and "available real estate," serially presented with no explainations. His attitude seems to be "anybody can do it."


The books are meant to be flipped through, so that the reader creates his or her own sequence of photographs. Large editions and servicable, uninspired design, ensure that the books avoid being perceived as precious art objects. In this way, Ruscha follows some of John Cage's performances, the Happenings of Allan Kaprow and Fluxus events by employing the idea of going straight to the public with art that avoids the system of galleries and dealers. Ruscha has been credited with: "the idea of the book as a democratic, affordable, available multiple in which an artist is able to produce a vision and disseminate it widely."[2]


"Ed Ruscha and Photography" was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago March 1–June 1, 2008.


Ruscha on his books:

"It is not a book to house a collection of art photographs—they are technical data like industrial photography. To me, they are nothing more than snapshots.”


“I have eliminated all text from my books—I want absolutely neutral material. My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of “facts”; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.”


“All my books are identical. They have none of the nuances of the hand-made and crafted limited edition book. It is almost worth the money to have the thrill of seeing 400 exactly identical books stacked in front of you.”[3]



[1] The Works of Edward Ruscha (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2001), p.17

[2] Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists' Books (New York: Granary Books, 2004), p.78

[3] Artforum, February 1965 by way of Ubuweb


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Evangelical Incorporated

In a recent article for Harper's, Episcopalian insider Garret Keizer reported on the escalating "war for the Episcopal Church." Focusing on the gay rights debate, his account of the clash meditates at length on the evangelical camp's choice to defect from local Episcopal bishops for morally conservative bishops in the Global South. He writes: "It took no great leap of imagination for those losing the ideological war in the United States to wonder if they might fare better by forging alliances in warmer climes."

Keizer's interpretation of this expedient measure is a satisfying mix of gallantry, insight and potshot:

"Some will find the idea of American conservatives using foreign bishops to support the interest of a white male hegemony in the Episcopal Church altogether preposterous .... What would be preposterous, I think, is to see the strategic maneuvers of conservatives as motivated by anything less than the absolute sincerity of their beliefs. ... For me, it is the methods more than the motives that invite scrutiny, and the similarity of these methods to those of corporate culture that has the most to say to readers outside the church.What is 'provincial realignment,' at bottom, if not the ecclesiastical version of a corporate merger? ... This is sola scriptura with a weird appendix, Matthew, Mark, and Mega-trends."

Keizer perhaps overstates his case* when he suggests that this "reverential awe for the 'global forces' that we ourselves animate" is a kind of methodological idolatry, but his intuitive sense of the slippage between evangelical motive and method is remarkable. The dissonance he detects is between evangelicals' single-minded allegiance to individualized moral issues** and their disproportionate zeal for magical macro-commerce paradigms á la Thomas Friedman or Malcom Gladwell.

The implication here, echoed recently by Jeff Sharlet, is that evangelicals-cum-evangelicals are incapable of systemic critique, despite the "absolute sincerity of their beliefs." And it is in this context that Keizer's dissonant note bodes coming-crisis for evangelical identity.

We will not speculate about the specific character of the "crisis" here. Suffice it to say that it will call into question longstanding norms of evangelical identification which have, until now, been predicated on biblically stylized thought processes and an assortment of other insular, predominantly bourgeois, cultural cues.

*The "reverential awe" is more likely just sophomoric enthusiasm for something new. Evangelicals, after all, have only recently become comfortable with listening to secular (economic) ideas.

**This is portrayed in the article as a kind of blinkered insistence on doctrine over and against major cultural shifts in sexual identity.

.......

Jeff Sharlet & the Would-be-Elite Evangelicals

Will Wilkinson (CATO institute) interviews Jeff Sharlet about  his new book--The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. The fascinating, hour-long conversation draws on Sharlet's extensive research (much of which was done at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College) of a "network of exclusively-elite Christian activists in government, military and business." 

Forming  in 1935 as an anti-communist, anti-New Deal cohort called International Christian Leadership, this "avant garde of American fundamentalism"  has become a nexus of national and international “behind-the-scenes power brokering." The Family maintains a classic conservative infrastructure in that it's decentralized and hard to track. But it has also wittingly cast off accountability from churches, government and the public by  becoming "invisible"--they use, for instance, their international web of friends and organizations to route and disperse money. 

The group's governing purpose is finally religious in nature. Their mission to win "key men for Christ"  turns the traditional view of Christian faith and eschatology on its head, glossing over the Bible's "least of these" and "last shall be first" language for a burlier, power-elite model. The legitimacy of the model rests on totalitarian leadership principles, divine instructions given to politically-anointed men, and small weirder-than-the-Promise-Keepers accountability groups. And despite their  many "tone deaf" references to Hitler's methodological brilliance, Sharlet very graciously insists that these men are sincere in their faith.*

Sharlet's conclusions at the close of the interview are perhaps most trenchant for those of us living and breathing evangelical air. He describes how, following the "terrible defeat for conservative Christianity in America" at the 1925 Scopes trial, the fundamentalists essentially split. The majority, populist-leaning fundamentalists retreated from the public square to "build Bible colleges and para-church ministries." The small, elite group also retreated. But unlike their separatist associates, they wouldn't "stand outside the gate and pound." They regrouped in "private, off-the-record cells" and resolved to win the government for Jesus from the inside.

The old group of populist fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have come and gone. But, some eighty years after the split, the cadre of elitist fundamentalists is as vital as ever. Just how the Family can be thriving unnoticed  at such a religiously-charged political moment, Sharlet proposes, is a mystery that has at least two explanations:

1) Influenced largely by the media, most Americans are conditioned to see only "the popular front" of fundamentalism--fundamentalism as a strictly populist movement. On this level, fundamentalism is believed to be more or less yesterday's news. It died with the influence of the 70s-era "war chiefs" (again Falwell, et al). This media-driven idea has been echoed by evangelical historians like George Marsden and Mark Noll, who have argued at length that the "new evangelicals" are categorically distinct from the old fundamentalists. In this case, the academics are essentially aping the media's perennial refrain:  Fundamentalism is dead! Long live secularism and progress! Sharlet reminds us that it's the same horn the media has been tooting every five years since 1925. And even if Obama gets into the White House, the fundamentalist "revival" will happen on schedule, this time led by our generation's populist fundamentalists: the so-called ne0-evangelicals.

2) This spectacle is the second reason the Family continues to be overlooked. While the evangelicals' new, bureaucratic savvy is being marketed as a departure from fundamentalism, it's actually no such thing. It's a departure from populism: "Mega-churches are suddenly talking about economics as a Christian issue. That’s something really new. Elite ideas are moving into the lifestyle Christianity of the mega-churches." Citing the small business economics of Rick Warren and the latent politics of Joel Osteen's “your best life now," Sharlet proposes that popular, fundamentalist interests are converging with elite interests. It's a trickle down theory: the mega-church tycoons function like empowered middle-managers, carrying out initiatives long ago set in motion by the fundamentalist elite--who can now, in effect, sit back and watch. 

Because much of this is macro-level, political hypothesis, the pitch needs to be carefully calibrated, which is something Sharlet does well. Far from sounding like conspiracy theory, his politically-driven conclusions resonate all the way down the scales. After all, it isn't just the mega-church entrepreneurs who have swallowed the economic pill. Take, for example, a recent feature from the neo-evangelical flagship magazine, Christianity Today. The article, entitled "How to Save the Christian Bookstore (Hint: Stop making it so religious)," provides these concluding remarks:

"Kids are hurting, looking for purpose and direction.'They want something real,' Miller says. 'A lot of kids will never go to church, but they will go to the mall, and we can break down the barriers there.' ... Stores today, however, must rethink their ministry models to survive and thrive as competition increases ...."

When did ministry become a synonym for business?

.......

* Sharlet's generosity is no doubt a product of his all-in journalistic style--he went and lived with these guys. Read his original 2003 Harper's report here.

Cormac McCarthy's Cosmos & the Weight of Negative Presence

The other night a friend who had recently watched No Country for Old Men asked me where Cormac McCarthy is "coming from." I stumbled around a little bit and made a few stabs at the idea that "fiction lives in the mind" and it's impossible to distill the essence of a novel from the text itself (this almost directly from Terry Crabtree in Wonder Boys), and although I think this is partly true, I eventually came around to a better, less evasive answer. My friend actually just wanted to know if he's a Christian (he's not). But Cormac McCarthy doesn't simply not believe in God. McCarthy's universe, rather than simply being empty, has been vacated. There is a palpable absence of the divine in Cormac McCarthy's world, a negative presence weighing on the characters. I want to develop this idea a little bit.

Some of the church fathers, particularly the Cappadocian fathers, appropriated the Greek philosophical term cosmos to refer to the universe. They refer to the world not as a cosmos "of its own initiative or by some ananke, [Greek for necessity or determination] but contingently, because of the free and sovereign will of God."* In other words the cosmos, for the Fathers, is a world charged with divine presence. The reality of the divine, of God, animates physical reality while remaining ontologically separate from it.

I think Cormac McCarthy's universe is a cosmos. But it is a vacated cosmos, one still given shape by at least the idea of the divine, or maybe the idea of divine absence. This creates a kind of negative copy of the Christian cosmos. The transcendent order -- which for the Cappadocian Fathers is characterized by the Aristotelian ideals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful -- for Cormac McCarthy is animated by murder, violence, and destruction.**

I'm not trying to make McCarthy a Christian lecturing us on human depravity or the evils that befall a godless humanity. For McCarthy, humanity has not left God, God has left humanity. God is the one who has done the leaving. God is dead. Whatever. For example, one of the last images in his novel The Road is that of the boy praying to his father, but it's not enough for McCarthy to have this boy praying to his father. He emphasizes that the boy specifically does not pray to God; he prays to his father because he cannot pray to God. The same is true of the almost messianic status accorded Billy Parham's dead brother in The Crossing.

So why does a good Christian boy like me love McCarthy? It's not that I couldn't love his novels simply because they are beautifully and vividly written or because they compellingly portray nonbelief in believable characters. But there are plenty of writers who do that (though few living writers who do it as well as McCarthy). The reason that I keep reading him is that I can't see the moments of beauty and meaning, the resplendent moments of each character's humanity, as simply fatalistic (aside from No Country, regularly considered McCarthy's worst novel). In fact, these moments shine all the brighter for the darkness that otherwise pervades his work. Consider this passage from The Road:

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

This is religious language. It's fatalistic but, but . . . It's like McCarthy almost (and it's always almost) can't quite write these moments off as random or arbitrary or absurd. They somehow exist as intruding or remaining elements of the Cappadocians' cosmos despite the cosmos of violence he describes (or descries). This is what I call negative presence. Moments of Real Presence that intrude upon McCarthy's vacated cosmos. In an essay on Herman Melville (one of McCarthy's literary progenitors) the critic James Wood notes that Melville's prose is "messy with metaphysics." The same phrase could aptly be applied to McCarthy. The vestiges of the Christian cosmos lay shattered and strewn across the pages of his novels, and it's almost as if his characters stumble across them providentially. Almost.

*Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 105.

**See James Wood's comments to this end in his essay on McCarthy, "Red Planet," in The New Yorker, here.

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Children & Innocence III: A Response

While most of this post will be dedicated to squabbling with Matt over little things picked up here and there in his posts, I generally agree with his overall aims. In fact, I mostly find fault with his reading and use of Alan Jacobs’s essay “A Bible fit for Children” in Jacobs’s book A Visit to Vanity Fair. It should be pointed out that Matt’s thesis in his two posts on children and innocence has little to do with Jacobs’s thesis, if there is one, in his essay. In other words, Jacobs is using the cultural history of children and their perceived relation to innocence to talk about the moral aspects of reading the Bible to one’s children, while Matt is using Jacobs’s brief cultural history to talk about the emasculated understanding of the modern person’s symbolic understanding of children. I imagine Jacobs’s new book, Original Sin: A Cultural History, just out with HarperOne, though I haven’t read it, will outline a much more detailed history of children and innocence—though it’s not likely Jacobs will win any more of Matt’s affection (but one can always hope). So let’s dialogue!

First, Matt positions Jacobs as a quintessentially modern voice by pointing out that he cites, among others, C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden. I don't see how these influences make Jacobs modern (unless that to draw on a thinker who happened to have lived in the modern period makes one modern). Lewis—whatever the shortcomings of his equation of the Tao with natural theology—was a medievalist at heart and thought the medieval worldview much superior to the modern. Auden’s poetic lineage goes directly through T. S. Eliot, who rewrote the Western canon precisely in order to excise the influence of modernity (especially the Romantics) on poetry, and to reconstruct a tradition that reflected the reality of the divine and the metaphysical (via Dante, Lancelot Andrewes, et al.). Matt mentions others, but Lewis and Auden are two thinkers who have influenced Jacobs most deeply. Second, I don't see how Jacobs’s recourse to rational discourse makes him any more modern than Thomas Aquinas. To paraphrase the angelic doctor: grace perfects nature, it does not destroy it. Given the tradition Jacobs is working in, his criticism of the Romantics—rather than reflecting the arbitrary “intramural” discussions between British Romantics and American Transcendentalists—draws on a much larger body of thought than the straw man Matt descries. Furthermore, Jacobs’s point in dealing with the Romantics in both Britain and America is that their mindset—inasmuch as it is modern with a weirdly premodern Manichean twist—is tacitly and insidiously thriving in contemporary American culture.

Later Matt says, "Jesus—whom we might assume also lacked an understanding of children as 'developmentally distinct' from adults, given his historical context—gave other teachings on humility. . . . It is a question of understanding what the premodern person thought of an innocent child." Then he immediately goes on to quote St. Thomas Aquinas to develop his idea of premodern childhood and humility. Am I to understand that Jesus' understanding of children in first-century A.D. Palestinian Judaism is “premodern” in precisely the same way as Thomas's 12th century Medieval understanding of children, innocence, and humility? That, for me, is a bit of a stretch. The modern view of children is certainly not the same as Thomas’s, but neither is Thomas’s view of children necessarily the same as Jesus’. Jacobs is drawing—I think knowingly, though I wish he would have said so—on the understanding of children in the first-century world as good or useful only in their potential worth as productive members of society. Until they came of age they were essentially useless, even a liability or a nuisance. So Jacobs’s point is more along the lines that whether or not it’s a correct view of the child, humbling yourself like one means that you are to consider yourself as useless, as nothing. It’s an ironic statement on Jesus’ contemporary society: become like one of the most undervalued members of society and you will see your true divine worth. This is a perfect reiteration of Jesus’ other teachings on humility (e.g., the last shall be first, the meek shall inheret the earth). Jesus’ understanding, Jacobs observes, is precisely in opposition to the Romantic—and Manichean—view of children as traditionless fountains of goodness and wisdom. Children as newly-embodied souls for the Manichean-Romantic means that material existence has had little time to corrupt the human understanding of the divine. As such they provide a form of divine truth unsullied by the wicked material world. Though shorn of its metaphysical framework in modern society, this mindset retains a hold on the modern imagination: wisdom passed down through the ages, embodied in a certain community and taught as ancient truth in the form of tradition, is subject to suspicion, if not outright scorn.

So while Jacobs may be criticizing a certain symbolic understanding of the child as a divine-human integrity, the metaphysical framework he actually criticizes is a perversion of the Christian tradition, particularly in its appropriation of Platonic thought. The Manichean overdualizing of body and soul (to the preference of the soul) was explicitly rejected by the church fathers, especially Augustine, who was a former Manichee himself (and, for that matter, by the pagan Neoplatonists, since primordial reality was considered the undivided simplicity of the Good). So while Jacobs’s little history of the child in medieval iconography may not serve his point well (or maybe too well—he perhaps conflates the medieval idea of “child” with that of the Romantic), his conclusions, I believe, are sound.

But enough about Jacobs. Let’s suppose, despite my above protestations, that the real issue here is not whether Jacobs is right but rather to set a context for Christian and dare I say even evangelical discussions of children and innocence. Here, I’m afraid, things get a lot less polemically interesting, for Matt has illuminated the issues beautifully, especially in his second post. Jesus’ words about becoming as children to enter the kingdom of heaven corroborate Matt’s words: “The ‘little man’ iconographic presentation of children was meant to demonstrate the symbolic integrity of the human makeup. We are all, even children, potentially divine (‘made in his image’). Why, then, represent the least among us as less than this?” Indeed. It’s difficult to improve on those words, except maybe by lifting a line from St. Athanasius: “God became man so that man might become God.”

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Children & Innocence II: "Child" as Symbol

We are right to reject the idea of children as "innocent," or without sin, when what we mean by "innocence" is little more than a projection onto children of our sense of loss. But we must also avoid confusing this low, contemporary understanding of uncomplicated "innocence" or simplicity with a premodern understanding of children (and the elderly) as complex symbols of what it means to be close to God.

From an unexamined, contemporary point of view, the world around us is interpreted literally. "Things are what they are," and a child can be both an illusory, apparent reminder of a simpler time before we experienced regret or loss, and a simple, willful, unformed egoist. From a traditional point of view, however, the world is full of meaning hidden behind the literal forms. Everything done or made under the sun—as long as it is done according to "the pattern shown you on the high mountain" (in a manner conformable to the cosmic pattern) is a theophany, a potential revelation of some aspect of the divine.

We won't get into, here, the clear difference between pantheism and panentheism. Suffice it to say they're not the same thing. As the great historian of the art of traditional civilizations, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy puts it, "transubstantiation is the rule: symbols, images, myths, relics and masks are all alike perceptible to sense, but also intelligible when 'taken out of their sense.'"[1] Saint Thomas: "Wheras in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by words have themselves also a signification . . . . The parabolical sense is contained in the literal" (Summa Theologica, 1.1.10). And Saint Gregory: "Scripture, in one and the same sentence, whilst it describes a fact, reveals a mystery" (Moralia xx.1, in Migne, Series latina).[2]

Traditional civilizations make no distinction between culture and religion. The general language of object-as-symbol, perceptible only to the initiated craftsman responsible for its making (and the uncommon wise man or traditional "doctor of philosophy"), is also applied to a more widely assimilable dogmatic (as in doctrinal) language of ritual, liturgy or worship. This latter, doctrinal language is more aptly called a "science" than an art or craft. It's "scientific" because it's fixed, limited. Open-ended symbolic meanings are "nailed down," or given strict one-to-one correspondences so that they can be transmitted consistently over time without losing integrity. The protection, or preservation, of dogma is therefore the cardinal purpose of "religious" culture. This explains why religion is so easily and often perverted into rigid fundamentalisms on the one extreme, and empty nominalism on the other. There can be no knowledge of God without symbolic understanding, and symbol is severely circumscribed—inaccessible to all but the few—without orthodox ("right" or "straight") doctrine.

There is, of course, no widely accepted Christian doctrine of childlike "innocence" or elderly "godliness." But there are deep, meaningful symbols inherent in these ideas. Call it anamnesis or oblivion, dhikr Allâh, consciousness, or awakening (as in Romans 13:11, Ephesians 5:14), such symbols are eminently worth uncovering. They are, after all, capable of revealing the spiritual potential in being more than literally "born again."

Coming soon: "Children & Innocence III: A Response," by Jeff Reimer. I, for one, can't wait to continue this dialogue.

[1] Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Traditional Art and Symbolism (Princeton, 1977), p. 177
[2] both Thomas and Gregory quoted in ibid., p. 177

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Children & Innocence I: A Proposal

Empirical Criticism? Call it Commentary.
Alan Jacobs, like most of us evangelicals, holds intellectual positions that are predictably defined (whether we know it or not) by their opposition to fundamentalism. We work entirely too hard to demonstrate that we've caught up with the Enlightenment. Jacobs's essay "A Bible Fit for Children," is dotted with references to mandarins of modernism. He's drawn to Alfred North Whitehead, Thomas Hobbes, C.S. Lewis (surprise!) and especially W.H. Auden. But when it comes to pre-modernism, Jacobs scoffs: "In this view, premodern culture lacked a sense of childhood as a state of human development with its own distinctive character, and that lack emerges iconographically." He's also stridently confident in his evaluation of "people making their common assumptions. . ." These people conjure "an idealized picture of the Innocent Little One [that] intrudes between their reflections and their experience."

Plato's doctrine of anamnesis and medieval iconography are dismissed without a chance to defend themselves. Jacobs at least takes the time to set up straw men for the Romantics. He gives decidedly more attention to these intra-mural rivals of the rational and their descendents, the American Transcendentalists than to entire traditional, pre-modern civilizations.

It's unfortunate that we evangelicals are so obsessed with demonstrating how rational we are. It has resulted in evangelical religion being squeezed of its effectiveness. The place in the intellectual life traditionally reserved for the sacred, the transcendent and the holy, is crowded with empirical litter: sociological and psychological approaches to spirituality, the scientific quasi-certainties of historical-critical methods of interpretation, and management theories applied to church "growth" and leadership.

Jacobs's approach to culture appears calibrated to come across as similarly broad-minded and worldly. He is (thankfully) no Francis Schaeffer. Jacobs's essays are, according to the book jacket, cultural commentary. "Commentary" we might guess, has nothing whatsoever to do with Schaeffer's familiar brand of Reformed cultural criticism. This is an enlightened "commentary," however, that bears the familiar stench of reductionism. No longer capable of making spiritual pronouncements, our evangelical essayist aspires to nothing more than morality. And he endeavors to limit everyone else too. In his discussion of "Cartesian rationality and foundationalism," Jacobs repeats an obvious error of C.S. Lewis's, equating the Tao with simple morality. "What characterizes foundationalism," he writes, "is the belief that morality, the Tao, can be argued for or defended in terms accessible and compelling to any rational person" (p.16). How compelling a Christian spirituality can we expect from this evangelical who willingly forces the central doctrine of another religious tradition to fit the Procrustean bed of rationalism?

Humility & Innocence
Jacobs's (mis-)understanding of the innocence of children centers on his interpretation of the words of Jesus: "Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." Jacobs focuses especially on what Jesus meant by humility. Did Jesus mean we must be humble like the child he presented to the disciples? Or did he mean that we must think of ourselves as no greater than a child? Jacobs goes on to detail an anti-traditionalist position culminating in the already quoted: "premodern culture lacked a sense of childhood as a state of human development with its own distinctive character, and that lack emerges iconographically" (these aren't, by the way Jacobs' own words, but he never disowns them). An interesting rhetorical device is used throughout the essay: on two occasions, when the reader is meant to agree with the author, he relates how his silly undergraduate students are often perplexed by the conclusion he just presented. We dutifully think: I'd hate to be like these students.

Instead of being browbeaten, however, let's look at the merit of this argument. What might the unsophisticated premodern say in his own defense? Jesus—whom we might assume also lacked an understanding of children as "developmentally distinct" from adults, given his historical context—gave other teachings on humility, and, as we will see, this is not a moral or a social question at all, but a metaphysical and philosophical one. It is a question of understanding what the premodern person thought of an innocent child before judgments based on "hard experience" clouded their reasoning.

According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, "humility demands neither that we should submit what is divine in us to what is divine in another, nor that we should submit what is human in us to what is human in another, nor still less that the divine should submit to the human."[2] The premodern child was understood to be made up of divine parts as well as human. The "little man" iconographic presentation of children was meant to demonstrate the symbolic integrity of the human makeup. We are all, even children, potentially divine ("made in his image"). Why, then, represent the least among us as less than this? As ignoble, or less dignified. "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." The difference is in premodern man's ability to discern symbolic, spiritual meanings of which we have become ignorant. Similarly, Christ asked "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God."[3] Jesus identifies the human in him with the human in, for example, a child. He is precise in his understanding of our spiritual constitutions in a way that perplexes us. Again, we're ignorant of the spiritual and metaphysical; premodern civilations were merely "ignorant" of our conclusions based on simple experience and observation. Do we actually imagine that they failed to notice strong-willed behavior in children? Or that children don't literally look like little adults?

Children & Original Sin
Just as the child is both all human and potentially divine, we are all "fallen" in our outward, human nature, but we remain ennobled by means of the "kingdom of God within." Frithjof Schuon: "This is expressed in the supreme Commandment, which, while teaching us what we must do, also teaches us what we are."[4]

A Final Accession: The Possiblity of an Empirical Symbolism (Namely, the Child as Other)
Contemporary psychology tells us that we see what we want to in children.[5] We prefer children to look simple (silent, dumb) and "cute," because we prefer to condescend. Condescension is less discordant with a literal interpretation of our experience. At the same time, the so-called "innocence" or humility that Jacobs, rightly, rejects is a real projection onto children of our sense of loss. Contemporary adults experience a deep sense of having lost something since childhood, so we simultaneously idealize and disdain the uncomplicated makeup (an amoral "innocence" having more to do with "simplicity" than sinlessness) of a burbling, drooling baby.

Next: "Children & Innocence II: 'Child' as Symbol" and Coming soon: "Children & Innocence III: A Response," by Jeff Reimer. I, for one, can't wait to continue this dialogue.

Sources
[1] Vanity Fair, p.27
[2] quoted in The Fullness of God, 47.
[3] ibid, note 14.
[4] op cit (is that it?), p. 56
[5] see "Magic Tales: Child as Other, Child as Dream," Brent Dean Robbins, Duquesne University

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Nonnus Books

Follow the progress made on Nonnus Books at the new NB web page. Chapters, entries and ideas will be updated as drafts are composed.

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Opening Day 2008

"Everywhere from Portland to Pawtucket, baseball's the same slow, sometimes stately, sometimes tedious game governed by extensive, complexly arbitrary rules, and practiced according to arcane, informal mores and runic vocabularies which compel that almost every act of play be routine. Even the great smashes, the balletic defensive turns, and the unparalleled pitching performances—by being so formally anticipated, so contemplated and longed-for by the fans—become ritual, even foregone. It's a Platonic game in this way, with all visible excellence (and even unexcellence) ratified by a prior scheme of invisible excellence which is the game itself." —Richard Ford, "A Minors Affair" Harper's Magazine, September 1992, p. 32

Richard Ford's idea is an elegant one. He sees baseball as a game without drama. It is a ritual performed for its own sake, with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy, or faithfulness to the underlying form. For that reason he claims to enjoy flawed, imperfect minor league games as much or more than Major League games performed at a high level. The simplicity of the Minors allows access to the form without flourish or distraction. It's an idea I'd like to test against the more conventional (or traditional) notion that formal perfection is the outworking of morality, the good. Without supposing that we watch baseball to be preached to, I prefer the conventional wisdom in this case.

It's why I'd like to work this season to deactivate the too-familiar notion that "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." This idea, attributed to Vince Lombardi, has a lot to do with why football has supplanted baseball as the most popular sport in this country. We're impatient for success. On the surface of it, football is less boring. But Lombardi, as every coach must, spent more time working for success than he spent actually succeeding.

As long as we describe sports as an "entertainment product," we undermine its core value. Sport is entertaining only as long as it is dramatic, and the drama of any game is a direct result of its participants need to work at success. Drama is not the result of promotional hype, generated enthusiasm or even an intense sense of vicarious participation through a rooting interest. The Red Sox success in 2004 was far more entertaining than the World Series win in '07 because the odds against it were so much greater. They had to work for it. As an audience, we were interested in the details of the team's success, and the drama was heightened.

It is precisely the boring parts of baseball that provide the spectator with time and distance enough to examine the dramatic arc of the actual contest: three-and-four hour games often played in 90-degree heat, over the course of a grueling six-month, 162-game season. Can atheletes earning annual salaries of twenty million dollars* remain motivated to work hard under such conditions?

A single-minded dedication to winning must be qualified by emphasizing the role of effort, discipline, will, and hard work. Winning must be demonstrated every day, not just in the playoffs. Whether or not an athlete has talent, we watch to see if he is capable of bringing the best of himself to the task. Has he enriched the quality of the game and himself by rising to increasingly difficult, specialized and nuanced challenges? Simply bringing one's talent to the contest at its broadest level—winning or losing—is not enough. We've all got to risk failing at increasingly higher levels. In sport and life, that means choosing one field of competition, and trying oneself at it over an extended period of time. That's what we learn from and enjoy. It's the source of excellence, whether we want dramatic "entertainment," great art, or nothing more than a tolerable quality of life and a sense of identity in our vocation, religion, family and friends.

*For the next eight years, 24-year-old Miguel Cabrera will earn an average of $19,000,000 per season playing for the Detroit Tigers. And Cabrera's is only the fourth-richest contract in Major League Baseball. Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and Manny Ramirez all earn more.

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