The aesthetics of the cross

From the window of the flat I now live in, I can see, in the distance at night, a bright blue neon cross. And I love it, because of this passage on the aesthetics of the cross from Oliver O’Donovan’s The Ways of Judgment:

“The cross challenges the aesthetic basis of representative rules and authorities. The ugliest of sights, the humiliated and tortured figure with ‘no form or comeliness’ (Isa 53:2), has, in a decisive reversal of visual-aesthetic value, become the object of profoundest attraction. The public aesthetic of the cross has revealed new possibilities for political action, evoking compassion as a politically uniting force and empowering the martyr and the oppressed. ‘This beauteous form assures a pitious minde.’ True followers and false imitators of the cross ave between them changed the shape of earthly politics: Ambrose’s ‘tyranny of impotence’ has many victories to its score. As a visible emblem the cross has drawn men, women, and children into a universal community of attention, overreaching the bounds of their national, tribal, and family identities. Buildings that display it have become the focus of cities and the landmarks of rural communities. Its representations in high visual art command continual astonishment. A roomful of tourists in Ghent Cathedral, standing and staring with intense stillness at the Van Eycks’ Adoration of the Lamb, reenact unconsciously the very scene depicted there: pilgrims who stand and gaze at the sight of the sacrificed lamb, the goal and satisfaction of their journeys. And with the pilgrims and the hermits standing before the heavenly city we find judges and soldiers, looking on the true object of their exertions in our earthly cities. Here, indeed, is something to be seen, a sight which, for as long as it is in the world, will organise the world around itself, never eclipsed by the leering faces on election posters and television screens. The sweet cross (dulce lignum) has outshone the glamor and attraction that binds us to our political leaders; it has shown their appeal to be shallow and moody, by calling out the deepest springs of our loyalty and love. In the cross God has pronounced his ‘Ichabod!’ [see 1 Samuel 4:21] upon the limelight of human importance.”

(Let it be heard said by me: Oliver O’Donovan is one of the great theologians of our time.)

Bonhoeffer on the dangers of ministry

The greatest difficulty for the pastor stems from his theology. He knows all there is to be known about sin and forgiveness. He knows what the faith is and he talks about it so much that he winds up no longer living in faith but in thinking about faith. He even knows that his non faith is the right form of faith: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief”. Knowledge reveals his daimonism. It drives him further and further into factual unbelief. We can then have no experience of faith. Our only experience is reflection on the faith. The problem is exacerbated by our constant preaching. We have to say things we have not experientially discovered. Such “misuse” of the Word must bother us very deeply. Indeed it is our singular mission not to preach our experience but to preach from Scripture. That can be proven and justified on the best theological grounds. Everything indeed depends on the Word. But it’s a sorry state of affairs if we are not bothered that our experience lags so far behind the Word, or if we strike the pose of a martyr who, renouncing his own experience, subjected himself for the sake of proclaiming a strange Word. The peak of theological craftiness is to conceal necessary and wholesome unrest under such self-justification.

I think he’s right. But it’s pretty scary stuff.

John Zizioulas on Art

Art as genuine creation, and not as a representational rendering of reality, is nothing other than an attempt by man to affirm his presence in a manner free from the “necessity” of existence. Genuine art is not simply creation on the basis of something which already exists, but a tendency towards creation ex nihilo… (Being as Communion)

Man, wish I was an artist. Not sure, though, that I’m happy with being down on “representational rendering”. Someone who knows something about art wade in here! Theologians get away with too many comments about art.

Lewis on desire

A well known quote, but one worth repeating:

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased. (The Weight of Glory, 1949).

 

Bonhoeffer on doubting God’s grace

Another gem from Bonhoeffer’s Spiritual Care:

The person who is puzzled about faith means to take God seriously when he doubts that God is gracious toward him. But God is not taken seriously when one’s own lostness is taken more seriously than the grace of God, which is able to take away and emerge victorious over that lost condition. It is also not taking God seriously when we elevate our concept of God as divine wrath above God’s essence, namely the reality of God’s grace. God is gracious above and beyond all our sins. Those who want to take God seriously should look upon Christ. In Christ God’s wrath is revealed as nowhere else, yet at the same time God’s grace is revealed as nowhere else. If you think you are under God’s wrath, then cleave to Christ! “For his anger is but for a moment, and his favour is for a lifetime” (Ps 30:5).

Photo by supakhit73.

Bonhoeffer on conversations with the indifferent

Here is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the mid 1930s, on talking to people in the parish who are not that interested:

There are three different modes of indecision which we should not confuse with one another:
First mode: there are people who receive such fulfillment through vocation and family that they lack nothing. They are satisfied, content, and fortunate. They attend church sporadically when it suits them or they feel the need for some celebration. They live alongside the church.
Second mode: these are the educated and cultured folk who are above ecclesiastical things. As one is above school and teacher, so is one above church and pastor. They are angry with the narrow-mindedness of the church and the partial education of the pastor. They deem some bits of knowledge from the philosophy of religion worthwhile. The educated stand, on the one hand, next to the church, and on the other, over the church. Perhaps today they feel that they will never again find their way into a real church.
Third mode: these are the callous, the discontented, the disappointed, who miss no opportunity for anger against church and pastor. They stand against the church. (Spiritual Care, Fortress, 1985)

Of course, everything is different these days:)

Mindful of an absence

Over summer, I read Marilynne Robinson’s terrific Absence of Mind. It is a great book and I highly recommend it. With precision and flare, Robinson tears into the “parascientific literature” of today which smugly proclaims that we now finally understand human beings, and guess what — they’re just animals and the whole consciousness, spirit, soul, mind thing is all a bit of a mistake. Here is Robinson:

The schools of thought that support the modernist consensus are profoundly incompatible with one another, so incompatible that they cannot be taken collectively to support one grand conclusion. That they are understood to have done so might reasonably be taken to suggest that this irresistible conclusion came before, perhaps inspired, the arguments that have been and still are made to support it. I propose that the core assumption that remains unchallenged and unquestioned through all the variations within the diverse traditions of ‘modern’ thought is that the experience and testimony of the individual mind is to be explained away, excluded from consideration when any rational account is to be made of the nature of human being and of being altogether. In its place we have the grand projects of generalization, solemn efforts to tell our species what we are and what we are not, that were early salients of modern thought. Sociology and anthropology are two examples. (p22).

Two particular highlights of the book include Robinson’s pointing out that the concept of a meme in parascientific literature in fact opens the door to the concept of mind beyond genetics, and her suggestion that Freud’s theories must be understood as a culturally-embedded reaction to European anti-semitism.

A Sabbatical Happiness

In his article on “Beatitude” in the Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (2005), Jean Yves Lacoste criticizes the eclipse of the category of beatitude in favour of discussion of happiness. Yet he also suggests a way that happiness can be productively reconceived by Christian theology:

“Criticizing happiness does not amount to denying it, but would well and truly permit the establishment of the conditions for a Christian eudaemonism. The experience of the world, taken in the strict sense, is perhaps the pathetic experience of precarious joys lived under the rule of death. But if the world is not the Creation and nothing more, it is not the opposite of Creation either, and it maintains enough of its created reality for the desire for happiness not to be contemptible (or impious). The Old Testament representations of the happy life lived in the land given by God must therefore maintain a certain validity after the work of undermining to which they were subjected by the New Testament promises of beatitude. The experience of happiness must involve an element of discomfort, for happiness is only happiness. This experience, however, must be able to take place without the hope-for beatitude giving a taste of ashes to the happiness possessed. Happiness has its theological secret, which is to stand as a memory of Creation in the history of the world. This memory cannot claim to erase the world-becoming of the Creation, or put in parentheses the eschatological challenge of happiness by beatitude, but its right to exist is incontestible. The world is not man’s homeland, and any logic of dwelling stumbles against the more primordial quality of nondwelling, Unzuhause (Heidegger). It is possible, however, in the world or at least at its edges, without shame, and without the suspicion of a touch of any kind of ‘inauthenticity,’ to have the experience of a well-being there. Thus defined, happiness no longer stands in opposition to beatitude as a secular reality to a theological reality; the tension between happiness and beatitude is in fact an intratheological tension. Happiness, therefore, no longer appears as a denial of hope; it is a sabbatical experience, in which man lives from the blessings pronounced by God in the first days of the work of his hands.”

To my mind, this is a remarkably helpful piece of theological thinking.

Happiness, according to Augustine

In Book thirteen of De Trinitate, Augustine articulates an argument about happiness that he used and developed in many other works (e.g. City of God 19.1–4). In it, he comes to the conclusion that despite the furious disagreements about it, in some limited way, we all actually understand what happiness involves. And it is this: happiness is having what you want when you want what you ought to want.

Oscar Wilde once said that “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” What do you think of Augustine’s view?

Barth on the hesitancy of Christian ethics

“Theological ethics should not in any way try to say directly what God’s command is. It should not make appeal to the truths supposed to lie in nature as creation of God, nor appeal to this, that, or the other text in the Bible. such ethics has to serve the Word of God, even as theology should. It must not anticipate that Word, nor may it obstruct that Word by setting up a human law. The particular thing incumbent upon such ethics is to take the Word of God as being God’s Word, and to point out the way whereby the relative necessities of our existence as creatures can become the Word of God’s revelation to us. This duty must be discharged by ethics in the light of what scripture proclaims. But it is not called upon to determine to what extent they are his, for this is solely the business of God’s Word. An ethics that thinks it can know and set forth the command of God, the Creator, plants itself upon the throne of God: it stops and poisons the wells and is more fraught with peril to the Christian life than all cinemas and dancing-saloons piled together.” (The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, Louisville, 1993, 9–10.)

Hmmm.

What Barth is anxious to oppose here, and throughout this section of his lecture, is a view in which natural law is perspicuous. Such a view is connected to an understanding of the analogy of being to imply that we have a created capacity or feature of our constitution (some kind of substantive understanding of the image of God) that links us, in some way, to God. Barth sees this as undermining the absolute distinction between creature and Creator. Any knowledge we have of God through creation is not something there to be discovered, but a gift continually given by the Holy Spirit who animates creation, not simply as a predictable force, but as the personal presence of God himself.

I think this is, at one level, a really good point. We don’t know what creation means apart from God’s active revelation to us (and that means we don’t fully understand it apart from Christ). We’re kidding ourselves if we think that moral order can just be read-off creation without difficulty. The knowledge of its meaning and significance is a gift of grace that we should not “take for granted”.

That said, I’m not happy with Barth’s total hesitancy. For while it preserves against an overconfident natural moralism, it seems to deny the faithfulness of God. Barth’s parallel thinking in relation to Scripture helps us. Just as we might feel uncomfortable with the sense that we can’t depend on Scripture in the sense of “taking it for granted”, so we may, I think, feel uncomfortable with the sense that we can’t rely on the stability and meaningfulness of created moral order.

We ought, I think, to distinguish two senses of taking something for granted. On the one hand, we shouldn’t take either created moral order or scripture for granted in the sense that we shouldn’t forget that we are, in fact, talking about revelation, we are talking about a gift of knowledge that is not simply “native” to us. But on the other hand, there is a sense in which we should take both scripture and natural moral order for granted, in the sense that they have, in fact, been granted, and God is faithful to his gift. I am not sure Barth’s insistence that we should never imagine we can “know and set forth the command of God” is not in fact ultimately a failure to accept what God has in fact given.

Could someone who understands Barth better tell me why I’m wrong?