Nonnus

What's Wrong with Theology: A Short Case Study

Earlier today, browsing the Amazon page for Augustine's Essential Sermons, I came across this passage from the "Product Description":

The eleven volumes of Augustine's popular sermons (Sermones ad populum) . . . showcase Augustine the brilliant speaker and engaging preacher of the Word and have proven an indispensable resource for contemporary scholarship. . . . [Edmund] Hill's translation and extensive notes have received many accolades by scholars, but professors have clamored for a one-volume anthology in paperback form that would be affordable to students and that could be used as required texts in teaching undergraduates, graduate students and seminarians. . . . Students and preachers alike will discover Augustine's masterful interpretation of the Word of God and creative skills in engaging the people of God.

What's wrong with this description? More importantly, who is missing? These sermons are "an indispensable resource for contemporary scholarship," and the translations have received "many accolades by scholars," and this one-volume anthology will be useful for "undergraduates, graduate students and seminarians." But where is the layperson?There's a reason they ain't titled Sermones ad professorum. They were preached in a church to laypeople, and now they are tragically of interest primarily to scholars and students training to become scholars. The devoted layperson has been left out of the picture altogether. Language like this is a symptom of a disease — the co-opting of theology by the academy from its place in service to the church.

Augustine himself would have been unhappy with our bifurcation of theology and spirituality, or their institutional parallels, academy and church. Consider:

Factum audivimus: mysterium requiramus.
(We have heard the fact, let us seek the mystery.)

One of the maddening things about my "Christian spirituality" classes in grad school was the constant separation students fretted over between "head" and "heart." This may have been a legitimate problem, but the way they articulated it made it sound like the problem was somehow too much theology. Wrong! A bifurcation of "head" and "heart" is the result of faulty theology, not too much. Something we could learn by reading more Augustine.

(A bracing post-Enlightenment tonic for this ailment is Andrew Louth's marvelous book Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology, which Eighth Day Books has put back in print.)

Several Silences

 

Thoughts on Several Silences at the Renaissance Society

Helen Luke says: "We suffer from this noise--talk, talk, talk. In Victorian times everything was covered over thickly with whitewash and often an undercoat of hypocrisy. Now we have reacted by wanting to talk about everything in public, even the deepest, most secret things. Today, it is vitally important to know that the silence when one is alone is the only place where the final, really transforming thing may be known."*

* * *

The work of Ryan Gander, A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor, blankets the majority of the Bergman Gallery floor with 100 glass bubbles or "moments." Within each bubble an etched sheet of paper is caught in motion--a blank page suspended. The motion of the paper is still, as are the marble-like containers that hold them. The piece captures action in stillness--or is it stillness in action?

If the viewing emphasis is on the trapped sheet of paper, you have the brief sense of the potential power and beauty of a silent moment. Perhaps an individual instant of awareness is about to be revealed from the quiet. Or as Gander's title may suggest, that the artist is keen to the futile potential of the paper, a yet un-done and undoubtedly great drawing has just slipped away, and he is mourning its loss.

But what of the crystalline spheres that lie en masse around the room? The scattered placement of the large glass marbles seem to show that the objects themselves were once in motion, and perhaps as marbles are wont, were rolling and crashing about at a frenzied pace. In a culture of talking, colliding and crashing, maybe the marbles wondered, what is the point of speech without understanding? and stopped moving altogether, bringing about a serious stillness. Despite previous false transparencies, maybe the newly muted in this space find a kind of communication that can see, perhaps for the first time, that each contains the same sheet of paper within.

Gander's objects can elicit a memorial to potential and a hopeful corporate pause, creating several--or at least a few--silences of its own.

*Helen M. Luke, The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine (New York: Doubleday, 1995), chap. 18.

Further Shifts in the Balance Between Religion, Politics and Art

Notes from Matthew Jesse Jackson's August 2008 Bookforum review of Art Power, by Boris Groys:

Boris Groys was born in East Berlin in 1947 and was educated in the Soviet Union.

"Having witnessed firsthand the fall of a secular superpower, Groys takes for granted that there will be further shifts in the balance between religion, politics and art." He is uniquely positioned to comment on culture created in a "free market" system.

Groys questions whether institutional critics have it right when they assert that art made for spectacle-based markets are more a part of "real life" than art presented within the historically and critically informed space of the museum.

More interestingly, he asserts that it is the terrorist and anti-terrorist alike who practice image-making. These iconophiles attempt to shock or seduce viewers into compliance or participation by adding to "modernity's infinite sequence of images." [We would also note that free-market religious cultural production most often operates in the same way, adding to the stuff of material culture.] These image-producers can be called "radical" (acting out of, or in reaction to, political and religious extremism), but artists have functioned as a very different kind of iconoclastic radical for almost a century. "The artist is no longer a maker of images, but an expert in their unmaking."

"What would happen," Groys wonders, "if all art created within market structures were to be judged as morally suspect in the same way as the art produced in totalitarian societies?"

He compares Jesus Christ to Duchamp's readymades:

Since Christ is outwardly similar to other men, and the readymade resembles other objects, both embody a "difference beyond difference"; that is, they manifest a difference "that we are unable to recognize because it is not related to any pregiven structural code." In art, [Groys] concludes, the "new" is not merely that which is different, but that which is different in a different way.

According to Jackson, Groys's "art criticism is a work of art that unfolds through philosophical language, rather than a collection of philosophical essays on art." He quotes Groys: "Art criticism has long since become an art in its own right; with language as its medium and the broad base of images available, it moves as autocratically as has become the custom in art, cinema, or design."

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Christian America is Changing

Jeff recently summarized a bit of Robert Louis Wilken’s book The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. Our impression was how similar conservative Romans then sounded to conservative Christians today. Both fretting over the changes in the world as they know it.

Then Damon Linker helpfully mocked Newsweek's attempt to sell magazines with their over-the-top cover story headline "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." Linker's point is an excellent one. Christianity will remain, but the preferred theologies will change. Liberal (mainline) Protestantism was favored through the middle decades of the twentieth century. And now we're left wondering if we will continue to see a move toward "a synthesis of traditionalist evangelical Protestantism and orthodox Roman Catholicism, as the religious right has advocated over the past decade or so?" That synthesis has recently lost political momentum because it was seen as the religion championed by the very unpopular George W. Bush.

Mr. Linker asks "What will provide the theological content of the nation's civil religion now that the 'mere orthodoxy' of the evangelical-Catholic alliance has proven unsuitable for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people?" His vote is for the resurgence of an Enlightenment-era moralistic therapeutic deism.

We wonder if all three of America's most popular Christianities may not have had their day. The deism of the founders, the liberal Protestantism of the first half of the last century, and our own conservative evangelical-Catholicism.

Perhaps the confusion of "traditionalist" with mere conservatism will be cleared up with the re-emergence of a more visceral, pre-modern flavored religion. If we were asked, we'd say Americans are increasingly most receptive to the mystical, non-rational knowledge offered by the religions-as-wisdom traditions. It's been said (I've heard it from Dave Hickey and J.G. Ballard) that we're already in a new dark ages in which most of us are incapable of understanding the technology that determines so much of our daily experience. Our "theologies," too, will become much more intuitive, less formal, systematic and academic. Perhaps the immediate future will look something like the short-lived spiritual eclecticism of the 1970s.

It may never be the American Civil Religion, but we might consider preparing for more hippies and a healthy dose of poetic heterodoxy—especially moderate forms of syncretism capable of respecting the distinctive integrity of each faith as it is practiced.

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Cormac McCarthy, the Nature of Literature, the Natural Law, Morality, and a Host of Other Sundries

I was excited recently to find this article by Christopher Badeaux on Cormac McCarthy at a promising (new?) website called The City, which is run by some folks at Houston Baptist University and looks like a sort of evangelical riff on First Things. I’ve read a few other pieces and liked them alright, but I was pretty disappointed with the Cormac McCarthy article. I got as far as the extended quotation below (which is near the beginning) before I realized what I was in for. (I would have commented on the article’s site itself, but that function appears to be unavailable right now.) The quotation:

It is not a profound insight to say that disorder lies at the core of every modern novel: Things falling apart drive action. The truth of most literature since well before the Romantic era, however, is that disorder is made right at the end of almost every book. The villain is defeated, the damsel is rescued, the world is saved, and, in literature from the 1960s on, socially appropriate noises are made and coffee is had. Even with that, novels are a window into a safer world, one in which everything more or less turns out right in the end—where the awful consequences of life are put on hold in favor of the pleasant ones.

Put differently, only the Russians want to be depressed at the end of a good book.

This is actually slightly maddening, because a novel is a self-contained utopia in which disorder has no extrinsic effects, carries no ripples of destruction and disintegration, and in fact, suggests to the reader that an original sin is always entirely containable and repairable. One never feels the connection between the people who inhabit the bubble of the novel. They live lives as strutting, separate parts of some beautiful machine that runs precisely and predictably outside of the suspension of disbelief.

Where to begin with this comedy of errors? First, we have a thesis: “disorder lies at the core of every modern novel.” (Fair enough.) Then Badeaux takes us back to “most literature since well before the Romantic era,” where “disorder is made right at the end of almost every book.” (I think the Greeks might have had something to say about this. Possibly also Shakespeare.) But in the very next sentence, we’ve somehow been magically transported back to “literature from the 1960s on,” where at the end of every novel “socially appropriate noises are made and coffee is had.” (What this means or is referring to I have no idea.)

I mean, seriously. What world is this describing? Not the one I live in. If by “most literature since well before the Romantic era” he means “the complete works of Jan Karon,” I suppose it begins to make sense, but I may be making a bit of an interpretive leap there. There were also those “Russians,” the inevitable exception that proves the rule, who just “want to be depressed at the end of a good book,” which seems just a tad glib. (Incidentally, “the Russians”—by which I’m guessing he means, primarily, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—would more characteristically be described as modern than anything else, which should support his thesis rather than provide an exception.)

Directly following the extended passage quoted above, Badeaux launches into the following: “In the real world, sin is a pebble in a pond: It touches so much more than the sinner and, when there is one, the victim. It disorders lives and relationships in ways foreseeable and incredible.” Change “victim” to “victims” and “foreseeable” into “unforeseeable” and you practically have a thematic summary of Macbeth. But according to Badeaux’s account of the history of literature, Macbeth—produced before the Romantic era—is one of those works where “The villain is defeated, the damsel is rescued,” and “the world is saved.” I must’ve missed that Act.

In opposition to the happy, cheery world of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Badeaux posits as their antithesis Cormac McCarthy’s two books No Country for Old Men and The Road. I just can’t make things add up.

But why my disproportionate reaction? Well, I share two things in common with Badeaux: I am a fan of Cormac McCarthy, and I am a committed, relatively conservative Christian. So I feel like I have a vested interest in the outcome of Badeuax’s exploration.

The general thrust of the article is to read Cormac McCarthy (or at least No Country and The Road) as a particularly compelling illustration of natural law, especially original sin, which is fine enough. The article should be evaluated on whether or not it succeeds in its aims. But Badeaux’s understanding of the history of literature is so phenomenally and weirdly wrong (either that or I’m misreading it somehow, and I would be happy to be told so if that were the case), that it gives me serious pause about anything else that he will say after it.

And it turns out I was right to give pause. Badeaux’s interest seems not to be in literature per se but in either co-opting or rejecting it based on its adherence to or deviation from a Christian understanding of natural law. Consequently, he seems somewhat dismissive—or even ignorant—of Cormac McCarthy’s work that doesn’t fit his thesis of McCarthy as quasi-Christian auteur of original sin. (At one point he says, “for contrast [to No Country and The Road], I worked my way through Blood Meridian,” but there are no references to any of McCarthy’s seven other novels.) As an example, Badeaux reads the psychotic killer Anton Chigurh in No Country as the manifestation of Llewelyn Moss’s moral failings, which is interesting, but Moss seems less a catalyst of evil than an inadvertantly complicit protagonist on whom is wrought the furies of the novel’s bizzarely fatalistic antagonist, Chigurh, who more or less represents a concentrated manifestation of the universe’s ontology of violence. To understand Moss’s actions as catalyzing moral retribution seems not to read McCarthy as displaying the natural law but to read an explicitly Christian morality into McCarthy’s own aims for the book. These are two very different things, and the latter is a stretch at best and inconceivable at worst. And since there’s no retribution for evil in Blood Meridian, despite its being much more philosophically complex than No Country, Badeaux dismisses it as “simple.”

Two things have happened here. Art has become, first, evaluated based on its adherence to a particular morality and, second, merely a vehicle for a worldview. I don’t think art doesn’t contain those things, but to reduce art to a worldview or a morality—either in its creation or in its evaluation—destroys it.

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A Brief Titular and Structural Explication of Christianity and Classical Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan

The title and the structure of this book alone warrant a significant amount of sorting out to figure out what's going on. The full title is Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism. The book is structured in two parts: "Natural Theology as Apologetics" and "Natural Theology as Presupposition." Each part has ten chapters, and each chapter parallels a chapter in the other part. So, for example, chapter six is titled "The Universe as Cosmos," and chapter sixteen is titled "Cosmos as Contingent Creation."

But back to the title. Pelikan sees the highest synthesis of Christianity and classical culture occurring, at least in the Christian East, in the thought of the Cappadocians. The book is an exploration of how Greek thought functioned in their theology. In other words, what was the nature of the relationship between philosophy ("natural theology" or simply "reason,") and theology? As the subtitle indicates, Pelikan intuits a metamorphosis in the way "natural theology" functioned in the Cappadocians' theology. The nature of that metamorphosis is hinted at in the structure of the book.

For Pelikan, the metamorphosis of natural theology took place in that it first functioned as an apologetic against the larger Greek-speaking—Pagan—cultural establishment, hence "Natural Theology as Apologetic." But in the transition, under Constantine, from Christianity as an oppressed and persecuted religious group to the cultural and ideological milieu, natural theology metamorphosed into a presupposition for dogmatic or systematic theology. In other words, the faithful witness of Scripture confirms, completes, and transcends natural reason. Hence "Natural Theology as Presupposition." The premises of natural theology are confirmed and enhanced by the conclusions encapsulated in the language of faith. Another way of thinking about it would be that the "Natural Theology as Apologetic" model is outward-looking in its emphasis, geared toward the establishment of a Christian theological patrimony in the wider culture, and uses reason (in other words, natural theology) toward that end, while "Natural Theology as Presupposition" is inward-looking, geared toward the life and thought of the church, and uses reason in the service of the higher truths of Christian doctrine.

So the structure seems quite ingenious, demonstrating, first, the two functions of Hellenistic thought among the Cappadocians and, second, Pelikan's thesis that those two functions reflect a transition from one to the next. A simple example is that, by reason, one might be able to prove—against, say, an atheist—that there is a God (natural theology as apologetic), but reason alone cannot prove the Trinity, which must be divinely revealed and received in faith (natural theology as presupposition).

There's plenty more to think about, but I haven't actually finished the book yet.

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God's Will

A Helpful Criticism

Contemporary spiritual and religious culture rarely rises to the level of its "influences." Rather than create an addition to current movements and traditions, religious messages are packaged as advertising or propaganda. While more subtle than previous generations' fundamentalisms, this religious culture remains (often unknowingly) oppositional, apologetic or proselytizing.

When contemporary movements and extant artistic traditions are participated in, we choose popular, less-serious forms incapable of communicating complex or difficult content.

A Modest Goal in the Form of A Helpful Criticism

From a recent review in The Wire (the names aren't important):

"___ and ___ can scarcely be called the freshest of influences, but ___ finally manages to insinuate themselves into the ___ tradition rather than merely mimic its shape and form." 

. . . . . . .

Slavoj Zizek's Nuanced, Anti-Theological Materialism

Zizek calls Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens extremely vulgar, reductionist materialists. He sides with "Islam" and even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while disagreeing with Benedict XVI on what "rational" means. Then he loves Chesterton on mysticism, and loves him even more on Job. Zizek calls God a blasphemer and an atheist. If God is not logical, so much for (systematic) theology. The professor entertainingly clarifies many obfuscations and helpfully obfuscates many things that were previously clear. But best of all, he does not hesitate to offer opinions—"impolite" or otherwise.

Part 1 (wait through the silent intro)

Parts: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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Extra-Liturgical Sacred Art & the Modern World

Roger Lipsey describes Ananda Coomaraswamy's view of contemporary culture (please forgive the long quote):

"It would be useful to consider whether Coomaraswamy was a conservative, and if so, whether his conservatism impedes our contemporary strivings. Certainly his single-minded interest in traditional religious art, and the psychology of the artists and patrons who needed it, was conservative and backward-looking. He viewed the modern world as a cul-de-sac. Yet he wished very much for a bright continuation to culture. It was this that gave him so much energy to examine the artistic principles and forms of the premodern world. He had, I think, very little hope for the modern world, yet he acted as if he could contribute to a splendid new day. In this paradox is the man: his mind told him that the truth of the Vedic rishis, the severe psychology and compassionate teachings of the Buddha, the clear light of Plato, the visionary grandeur of Plotinus, the Christian insight into God's intimacy with man—that all of these, and the arts that expressed them, are dead letters in the modern world. But his writings betray hope that these things could be assimilated. In his wish that we 'somehow get back to first principles'—particularly in the disarmed simplicity of the phrase, which he used at times—it can be recognized that he did not know what sort of change it is."[1]

This must be similar to how Shakespeare understood the progress, strivings and innovations of the Renaissance. But I wonder just the littlest bit if Lispey might not be projecting modern, teleological notions about history onto Coomaraswamy. As we hope to show, Shakespeare, like the premodern practitioners of sacred art, did not concern himself with historical progression or identify with contemporary strivings. The sacred artist is, instead, concerned with microcosmic progress, sanctification, or (gag) transformation on an individual level.

First we need to clear the air of any presumed notions of historical-dialectical progress toward a pure, abstract Idea. Only then can we can begin to see what the world looked like from Shakespeare's point of view. At the turn of the 17th Century, England was desperately provincial, European power was centered in Italy, Spain and France. This afforded Shakespeare the ability to set his dramas where the action was, while maintaining a distanced, reflective introspection. Such balance is the stuff of reality. The momentary, heady sensation of power (or an association with power) is not real. Locating a solid, unmovable nobility of spirit, transcending power and poverty, in the middle of life's storms and dramas is the subject of Shakespeare's work. This nobility is premodern code (a symbol) for what we so weakly describe as "salvation," "enlightenment," "spritual transformation," or worst of all, psychological stasis (as in Freud's familiar description of therapy: turning "hysterical misery into common unhappiness").[2]

But while deification, or the intrinsic nobility of the human soul, is Shakespeare's subject, he never presents it as a didactic gospel. Unlike a sermon, a great work of sacred art balances the spiritual and the physical in order to demonstrate, to show—rather than tell, argue for, or teach—what an intellectual understanding of a physical world penetrated with spirit looks, feels, sounds and tastes like. Where a sermon or lecture is didactic, in other words, art is symbolic. Art's function, and the function of Shakespeare's art, is "not so much to define spiritual wisdom as to give us a taste of that wisdom, each according to his capacity."[3]

For example, the symbolic meaning of traditional craft under Christendom compensated for

"the unilateral pressure of Christian morality, fundamentally ascetic as it is, by manifesting divine truths in a light that is relatively non-moral and in any case non-volative: it sets up against the sermon which insists on what must be done by one who would become holy, a vision of the cosmos which is holy through its beauty; it makes men participate naturally and almost involuntarily in the world of holiness."[4]

Premodern civilizations accepted the spiritual, the holy, as a given. They accepted the next world, the next life, as real. This world was understood to be shrouded in illusion. Whether we take Christendom, Platonism, traditional Buddhism or Islam as exemplary of a traditional worldview, this world, this life, is seen as a shadow of the next. William Blake echoed a traditional perspective when he claimed that "when the windows of perception are cleansed, man will see the universe as it truly is—infinite."

A recurring theme in Shakespeare's plays is that of the banished nobleman. In The Tempest, Prospero is banished from Milan, in Measure for Measure, the Duke is banished from Vienna. Similarly, the hero of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, is caught between his murdered father, the king, and his uncle the usurper. Kings and princes throughout the Bard's work represent "the human soul on its way through purification."[5] In most cases, the king represents the old, fallen soul that has withstood the horrors of persecution in Hell. The Prince must find his way through Purgatory to his rightful throne—in symbolic terms, of course, the soul.

Since the advent of modernism in the Renaissance, knowledge has been divorced from submission, humility and ecstatic understanding. Western civilization exchanged unity and ecstasy for control and power. According to Seyyed Nasr, knowledge was always associated with ecstasy. Principial knowledge is ecstatic (as opposed to cooly rational and controlled), because it unified the knower with the known. The highest form of knowledge cannot be separated from freedom, liberation and salvation ("You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free"). So, while ecstasy was traditionally associated with carefully ritualized experiences of the sacred, the set-apart, the holy, and the transcendent, the modern world is characterized by the loss of anything sacred. Where a form of holiness is retained it's dissociated from knowledge—it becomes a matter of "faith" or "belief," but never knowledge. In the same way, the ecstatic has been secularized.[6]

The modern, rational world suppresses the mysterious, the uncontrollable, but it does not obliterate it. For evidence of this fact we have to look only as far as the Romantics, Surrealists, the psychology of Carl Jung or any other artistic or cultural form concerned with the breakdown of neat separations between reason and the irrational, interpreting dream-states or the "subconscious." One of our greatest translators of the non-rational is Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, whose masterpiece is the unfinished Arcades Project (which takes up shopping as a new source of mystery and fulfillment; the Arcades were an early form of the shopping mall), sees in the dominance of capitalism "not simply an awakening of our technological and rational powers," but also a "new dream-filled sleep." A 'commodity trance' replaced the 'ecstatic trance' known by the ancients."[7]

Similarly, William Shakespeare:

"wrote his plays as Europe was shaking off the animistic and magical beliefs of the past. Some of his most memorable moments seem like a public staging of this transition—for example, Prospero breaking his staff and giving up his powers at the end of The Tempest. 'Drama is born in the renunciation of magic,' wrote the critic Northrup Frye, 'and in The Tempest and elsewhere it remembers its inheritance.'"[8]

[1] Roger Lipsey, ed., Coomaraswamy, Volume 1: Traditional Art and Symblolism (Bollingen Series: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. xxxv.
[2] Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, Nicola Luckhurst, Rachel Bowlby, Studies in Hysteria (New York: Penguin Classics, 1952, 2004), p. 306.
[3] Lings, The Sacred Art of Shakespeare, 194
[4] Titus Burckhardt, Sacred Art in East and West: Principles and Methods (Bedfont, Middlesex: Perennial Books, Ltd.), pp. 45-46
[5] Martin Lings, The Sacred Art of Shakespeare: To Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions), 172. The entire argument about nobility comes from this wisest of commentaries on Shakespeare's work.
[6] S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).
[7] Daniel Pinchbeck, Breaking Open the Head (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), p.63. See also, Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2002).
[8] ibid, p.64.

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