"works of art cannot save us. they can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired." terry eagleton
I have a few works of art that have had significant influence upon my theological life and Breughel's Fall of Icarus is one of them. Icarus, as you probably know, attempted to fly with feather wings held together with wax, made for him by his father Daedalus. Icarus ignored his father's warnings and flew too close to the sun which melted his wings and he fell from the sky into the sea and drowned. Breughel (although some dispute this) painted the myth into a medieval landscape and you can see the legs of icarus in the bottom right-hand corner or the painting behind the ship. The myth, written by Ovid, speaks of a ploughman, shepherd and angler, all of them amazed that the gods would approach them from the sky, but the painting takes a different attitude and seems to have the three figures simply gpoing on about their business, life as usual, even though a man with wings has fallen from the sky into their world. The shepherd does appear to be looking to the sky, but he is facing the wrong direction and is leaning against his staff in a restful posture. Apparently there is an old Flemish proverb, part of which says, "the farmer continued to plough," which references our indifference to the sufferings of our fellow humans. A moment of spectacular and tragic failure, captured in the bottom corner of a painting, the moment of death, lost in the immensity of the landscape and the nonchalance of those portrayed in the work.
It's said that story of Icarus is about hubris and failed ambition (his image is used on the Bankruptcy Court at the Amsterdam Town Hall), but I am taken by Breughel's additional angle, that the failed ambition is over-looked rather than taken into account by the by-standers. They are not moved by his failure, life just goes on, and they completely ignore this moment.
W.H. Auden references this painting in his work, Musee des Beaux Arts (names after the Brussel's museum where the painting is displayed)
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."
Auden wrote this right before the Second World War and seems to address the subject of the approaching war through art and uses Breughel's painting to give voice to his concerns that perhaps people would not hear otherwise. He compares the old world with the new and essentially says that in both cases life goes on and we are immune to the suffering of others. Auden seems to see signs of impending disaster that nobody else is voicing and he uses his encounter with the poem to highlight his concern. He is worried about the course toward war that has been set, and names the suffering it will undoubtedly cause.
I'm saying all of this with Syria in mind. However, I think in this case, the suffering of people is being used to justify hubris, in calling for military action against the country. It feels like 'flying too close to the sun to me,' there is so much unexplained, or at least, that I haven't heard explained in a way that makes sense. 'Assad' must go, well sure, he seems to be yet another dictator/leader who controls and manipulates his country, causing suffering, hardship and fear. But then what? There doesn't seem to be a unified resistance movement or opposition party. There have been those terrible images of rebel fighter brutality. Then there is Iraq, Afghanistan etc. etc., have we not yet learned the lesson? I get the feeling that there is a 'we are right this time' attitude, and I think it is dumb. I dont think we should be like the ploughman, shepherd and angler, leaning into spring while others are locked in a 'winter of discontent,' but I'm not sure that bombs are the answer. What is? I don't know, I truly don't, but not bombs, not again.
Slavoj Zizek had some interesting things to say in today's Guardian newspaper Comment section. Syria is a pseudo-struggle, is the title of his op-ed piece which he ends with this rather enigmatic paragraph,
"So what is happening in Syria these days? Nothing really special, except that China is one step closer to becoming the world's new superpower while its competitors are eagerly weakening each other."
Now, Zizek has his own stuff going on and lately I find myself parting company with him more often than not, but I do share his belief that there is a pseudo-struggle here and I fear that there is a tendency to get drawn into things because of a desire to fly too close to the sun.
I don't know what I'm talking about exactly, I'm just trying to give words to some things I'm feeling, so apologies if this post feels fragmented and incomplete...it is.
There is a great piece in the New Inquiry by Teju Cole on the recent destruction of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu. I was already drawn to this story for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because Timbuktu, well, the environs of Timbuktu, are on my travel list--I want to go to the Festival of the Desert some time (i.e. when I have the cash!), and Timbuktu is the jumping off point to reach it, I love Malian music, and I have a general fascination with all things African. The second reason I was drawn to the story, was because when I came across it in the Guardian the other day, it mirrored, in my mind, a similarly tragic event in Afghanistan when the Taliban destroyed centuries-old Buddhist statues. What struck me about this story, and this is something Cole hints at in his telling, is that this time the destruction was not of artifacts and symbols of another faith, but of another way of practicing the same faith--it's a Muslim shrine, but not a form of Islam acceptable to this particular group of Islamists. In this regard, the story parallels the Catholic/Protestant conflicts that marked and marred the Reformation.
On one level I think what we find, what I find, most disturbing, is that it is as much the loss of the history associated with these shrines that we mourn as much as the present--I admit that I don't particularly need a shrine or site of remembrance, but the beauty of them, their distinct character, the artistry and what they mean to the local community, and perhaps what they mean to the world in terms of human self-understanding, that's another matter.
Of course, what this raises once again is violence done in the name of god--any god. You can understand the resistance of so many to ideas about the sacred, when there seems to be so much associated violence and aggression. Religion is not the only ideological position that can be accompanied by aggression, but in our minds, it seems incongruous for those two to travel hand in hand, and yet, human history seems to underscore the fairly easy way that these two elements find each other. One group calls another's form of worship 'idolatry' and away we go--'our way' is the right way and all that. It's tragic.
We just finshed Simon Critchley's book, The Faith of the Faithless, which explores, just that, whether or not it is possible to identify and embrace a 'faithless faith'--one of our questions at the end of our book group discussion was whether or not, such a faithless faith could inform the faithful--a question Critchley doesn't address but one I wish he would.
After describing the present acts of destruction Cole turns our attention to Europe in the 16th century and to similar acts of destruction as angry Calvinists attack a church in Steenvoorde, in what is now Belgium, and how this violence spread to other towns--Ghent, Antwerp--essentially the same mentality at work.
I have a book, 'Religion' and the Religions in the English Enlightenment by Peter Harrison, a fascinating exploration of the way in which the world of comparative religion came to be. He explores how concepts of 'religion' and 'the religions' emerged out of a very specific set of questions that were prompted by the times--by exploration, by science, by 'new' knowledge, and how these things essentially led to our modern understanding of religion. It occurs to me that we are witnessing another moment, one in which perhaps, our understanding of religion is once again being redefined. "In the projection of the West's religious fragmentation onto the whole world was created the intellectual problem of global religious pluralism." Harrison argues that the Reformation transcended the theological and opened up new ways of thinking, ways that reverberate to this day. I think, as I said, that we are in one of these moments. it seems to be particularly true for Islam. I am no scholar of Islam, but it would seem that it is experiencing twists and turns not previously experienced within the horizons of that religion, at least not to this degree. On a similar plain, Christianity seems to be undergoing another shift, which has momentous implications for it, but I might want to argue that the Reformation initiated a view of faith and religion that has 'change' inscribed into it, even though for many, change is the devil, whereas Islam has yet to experience this dynamic and consequently it is in the first wave of global change?
Fear lies at the heart of all this as far as I am concerned--we destroy, because we are afraid it is the only way to justify our beliefs about ourselves--if we are not right, then what? They believe in the idols they destroy as much as those who claim to believe in them--we want to destroy them, because we believe they actualy have the power to destroy us. Cole writes much more eloquently of iconoclasm that I can so read him on this.
There is another option to destruction--let these silent witnesses speak, let them do their work. Let them destroy our faith, our beliefs, our fears, because, as I read Christianity at least, in the collapse of all of that we don't lose God, that's where we discover (Jesus).
It was perhaps fitting that the final gathering of our Simon Critchley book meeting took place yesterday. June 28th, was the tricentenary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the influential philosopher. As Terry Eagleton wrote in a piece in The Guardian,
"Much of what one might call the modern sensibility was this thinker's creation. It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere. Gentlemen begin to weep in public, while children are viewed as human beings in their own right rather than defective adults."
Rousseau figures heavily in the beginnings of Critchley's book, Faith of the Faithless. In fact, our initial discussion was around our distinct lack of knowledge of Rousseau beyond bullet point ideas about his works. But upon reflection it seems that this 'maverick intellectual' as Eagleton called him, was the perfect foil for Critchlety's maverick work about the role of faith amongst those who hold no belief in religion or metaphysical gods. I liked Critchley's book on many levels. I was particularly struck by his take on St. Paul--a man whose thinking many continental philosophers seem to be exploring these days. I really liked his view on Paul and mysticism-that he essentially thought there was something more--of course, I would like this given my own post-metaphysical and post-mystical theological meanderings. Anyway, hats off to Rousseau, hats off to Eagleton's lovely little commentary on him, and hats off to Simon Critchley, who once again demonstrated that sometimes the best theology happens in places where you'd least expect it.
Something more to add to the ever-expanding reading list. it's been said that if you read a book a month for the next decade that is only 120 books, so it should count. I'm one of those people who has four or five books going at a time, but nonetheless the point is well-taken, and I am trying to make full use of reading opportunities. As I have noted here more than once, I am a big fan of Vattimo's and I am currently reading Farewell to Truth, which is living up to expectation. I'll write about it soon, i just want to get in a little deeper first and think through what he is saying. I am also re-reading After Christianity with my grad-reading group-(unofficially called The Experimental Theology Club-we just finished Clayton Crockett's Interstices of the Sublime), which gave me some framework for some of my recent thinking about religion/church/christianity.
I also prefer Vattimo's critique of communism to Zizek's, it could be that it is simply a familiarity with western approaches to socialism as opposed to Zizek's eastern bloc version, but Vattimo is a more nuanced and gentle thinker, at least for me. Zabala has done a lot of translating of Vattimo's work, so it is nice to see a colaboration in the works. Hermeneutical Communism is the title and here is part of the pre-publication blurb.
"Communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism, having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall.
Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings—in technology, empire, and industrialization—are buckling. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, but Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance, drawn from the hermeneutical thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty, that relies on interpretation rather than truth and is more flexible in different contexts. "Hermeneutic communism" leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution. It motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities, yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala's well-known weakening of religion, Hermeneutic Communism realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought."
So this is on the list, one more for the Amazon addiction.
An interesting link from curiositycounts charting Internet searches for God and free gay porn state by state from 2004 until the present.
I have just started reading Gianni Vattimo's latest work, A Farewell to Truth. I really like Vattimo's work. Zizek tends to get more traction with many people, but to be honest I find him dogmatic and ideologically on an entirely different page than I am. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy his work, and some of his ideas have really helped me in thinking through my own questions and understandings of how the world works, but more in terms of prompting the questioning process than in direct influence. Vattimo on the other hand, has been deeply influential. His concept of weak thought was a lightning bolt for me when I was finishing up my doctoral work. Caputo put a theological face on that concept, but I was already there in terms of grappling with how this idea plays out in the theological realm. I also like the fact that Vattimo is a person of faith--in a less than usual approach-for him secular society is the result of Christianity rather than the enemy and his project involves rethinking Christianity as a secualr venture rooted in hospitality (I would recommend After Christianity as a sort of primer to this idea if you are interested). The cover flyer offers up these words, "Vattimo continues his reinterpretation of Christianity as a religion of charity and hope, freeing society from metapysical dogmatism," which is something to which I am committed, so there is immediate resonance--perhaps that is why I find his ideas easier to grasp than some of the other continental philosophers. Anyway, it looks to be a good read so far.
In the Theology and Culture class this week we began our journey deeper into the issues facing us. The conversation was meant to frame the subsequent conversations in a larger grid, by using some key evetns/issues as starting points for where we might travel thereafter. Our conversation was rooted in some major threads around theolgy, church and culture, and somewhere along the way the issue of text and interpretation came up. I referenced a quote from an article in the latest Vanity Fair from Christopher Hitchen's latest piece on the King James Bible(like many non-believers he is a fan of that version). He was talking a bit about how things are translated, and were translated with particular emphasis in the KJV to underscore the aims, intentions and desires of the King. He offered up the following piece of information that I thought aptly pointed to the challenges of reading scripture.
“This is my Commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you. / Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Here is how the verse read when first translated by Tyndale: “This is my Commandment, that you love together as I have loved you. / Greater love than this hath no man, than that a man bestow his life for his friends.”
Hitchens implies that William Tyndale's earlier translation(the first in English) of that verse is devoid of the sacrifical/death element the more familiar translation contains. Personally, I like Tyndales, it seems, as Hitchens also noted, to offer th eidea that extending friendhsip toward others is as important as self-sacrifice. It would be interesting to know how a Christianity shaped formatively by an entirely different translation of text would unfold, my sense is that it would produce a remarkably different manifestation of what a life of faith might look like.
Of course, Tyndale wound up burnt at the stake for his efforts--his translation of that particular verse seemed to have little impact pon those for whom protecting the faith was a bloody business.
Earlier this week, the designer John Galliano was summarily fired from his job at the House of Dior over his arrest for drunkenness and for making racist slurs and threats against a couple he encountered in a bar. He has been notified of the plan to try him and he faces a fine and up to six months in prison if convicted of these hate crimes. It was a swift fall from grace for a remarkably talented but seemingly deeply troubled human being.
While these events unfolded in Paris, a different event, also over hate words, was unfolding in the U.S Supreme Court. The Westboro Baptist Church, had filed a suit with the SC over the decision made by lower courts to ban them from protesting at the funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, based on a suit brought by the family of one marine whose funeral they picketed. Their basic premise is that God is punishing the U.S. for tolerating homosexuality, so they feel obligated to protest at soldier's funerals, to alert America to God's wrath. Now, you would think that this would be a no-brainer--bile-spewing, hate-filled words shouldn't be tolerated in the U.S. as they are increasingly not tolerated in countries around the world. Think again. The justices voted 8-1 in favour of the Church's suit, declaring that the right to free speech under the constitution allowed them the same opportunity as anybody else to say what they want, however bilioius that may be. So their protest signs, "God hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11," "America is doomed," "Don't pray for the USA," "Thank God for IEDs," "Thank God for dead soldiers," "Pope in Hell," "Priests rape boys," "God hates fags," "You're going to hell" and "God hates you," are permissible under the first amendment according to the justices. I heard the lawyer for the Church, Margie Phelps, daughter of church leader Fred Phelps respond on the radio, basically spewing her hate, and later read some qotes from her about the victory,
"I read the decision and it's 10 times better than I ever imagined," Phelps said. "They did not meddle in our religion. They kept their mitts off it. ... There's no shutting up the church of the Lord Jesus Christ...This is not my victory," Phelps said. "This is God's victory."
God's victory indeed. With victory's like this, who needs defeats? That a church would find any solace at all in hurling insults at grieving families is beyond me and why anyone would think any God worth following or even acknowledging would be happy with this kind of action is simply beyond me. I think it is personally completely and totally fucked, and I think it is yet one more example where the letter of the law kills the spirit.
Galliano gets the potential of jail, these people get protection for the their hatred--something is out of whack here. And yes, I get the intricacies of the First Amendment, but I don't support this in any way, shape or form.
Our viewing of Frida, the biopic about Mexican artists Frida Kahlo, threw up a number of issues that framed a fairly long discussion in our class this past week. One of the students wanted to know how it was possible to dialogue with a film that expressed ideas about communism, atheism and sexual or gender issues. I think that it exactly why it is ripe for a conversation but not everyone is on the same page, so we took a stab at exploring these issues with a view to some theological grapplings.
"Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritualess situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions."
We began with the full quote from Marx that is usually truncated and turned into something less than its true content. What Marx addresses is the condition of society as much as he addresses the problem of religion. That is not to say that he doesn't critique religion, but his lens is a societal one first and foremost. I am often surprised at the lack of engagement with marxist theory in some theological circles given its pervasive use in other disciplines--it would seem that a bare bones understanding of marxist theory and even marxist critique of religion would be a must--but I guess not.
Our discussion was fruitful in that it managed to put some things on the table that seem to have been largely ignored by many of these students, funny how a film about art became a catalyst for conversation about everything but that topic.