Friday, October 3, 2008

Family Life and Asceticism

"Cooper identifies two developments that dramatically reshaped how individuals in the Western Empire understood family and household as social institutions. The first, a frequently mentioned argument that reaches back to Gibbon, is that the Christian regard for asceticism (and especially sexual continence) deterred Romans from marrying and creating households, thus weakening the institutional cornerstone of the classical civic sphere. Here, Cooper deftly analyzes a persistent cultural debate among Christians to show that, while the vast majority of lay and clerical writers did recognize the potential tension between asceticism and marriage, many also attempted to reconcile the two by classifying family life as a second-tier form of asceticism. The second development, which has been less studied by previous scholars, is the emerging theological perception of marriage as an eternal bond: not simply a relationship that ideally should not be ended, but a spiritual union that could not be dissolved. Cooper argues that these two developments contributed to a distinctly Christian vision of marriage as the creation of a new family unit founded on a unique conjugal bond rather than as the manifestation of a reproductive contract between two families"

From a fascinating book review of a scholarly work on the emergence of the Christian family in the late Roman empire.

Reading Images In Depth

"Until well into the 20th century, when artists began to despair about the possibilities of communicating through language of any kind, a painting, whether a portrait or the depiction of a scene, whether religious, allegorical, historical or private, was meant to be read. This was an essential feature of the aesthetic act: the possibility of communication, through a shared vocabulary, between the viewpoint of the artist and the viewpoint of the audience.

A picture could be venerated for its craft or its matter, but beyond veneration was the promise of something to be learned, or at least recognised. As early as the 6th century, Pope Gregory the Great had declared: "It is one thing to worship a picture, it is another to learn in depth by means of pictures, a venerable story. For that which writing makes present to the reader, pictures make present to those who cannot read, to those who only perceive visually. Especially for the common folk, pictures are the equivalent of reading."

Taking away the hierarchical tone of the pope's statement, it is obviously quite true that pictures tell stories. But paradoxically, in our time, when images are once again given priority over the written word, when advertising and the electronic media have privileged the image because it can, we are told, deliver information instantaneously and does not even require time for reflection, we lack the shared iconographic vocabulary to read it."


- Alberto Manguel, from a lecture given at Tate Britain.


I originally heard this idea from a lecture given by Manguel on the Big Ideas program, which has an audio podcast I listen to occasionally, and which I highly recommend. His lecture was on Picasso and the sad duality of his art and his life. The most interesting aspect of the lecture was the unintentional way in which Manguel reveals Picasso's work to be an aesthetic disaster. While admiring Picasso's craft and the breadth of his vision, Manguel hints at the abyss that lies at the center of the modern aesthetic. If images are fundamentally a representation of the Self, if the poetic vision of the artist is the controlling dynamic of artistic representation, then what is to prevent the neuroses of a Picasso from being a valid basis for art? The contemporary art world has responded to this question with an answer of "nothing". Art is purely self-representation. The created order is simply matter to be manipulated for the purposes of self-expression. The duality of Picasso that Manguel finds so perplexing is simply a product of his aesthetic assumptions, and one can walk around any art gallery today and find his aesthetic children working out the dynamics of those assumptions, see Wenda Gu et al.

Most "conservative" art critics react strongly to the artistic dissolution that is the natural outworking of the modern aesthetic, but often struggle to locate the precise source of the disorder rampant in contemporary art. Roger Kimball published an essay in First Things this summer that comes the closest to diagnosing the problem, but he seems uneasy with the natural conclusions that follow from the problems he identifies. Although his entire essay points to it, Kimball fails to explicitly draw the fundamental conclusion that his essay points to - namely that all true art is religious art, at least in its most basic dimension.

Aesthetics is the study of the Beautiful, and by extension the True and the Good. Only insofar as a work of art attempts to represent the Good does it succeed aesthetically. Such a statement would be relatively trite and uncontroversial, were it not for the fact that there is a critical question that remains unanswered by such a statement - how are we to gain knowledge of the Good? The answer to this question is where I believe many conservative art critics such as Roger Kimball go wrong. While agreeing that good art should represent the Good and the Beautiful, many artists remain bound by the notion that knowledge of the Good comes primarily through the Self. Hence, one often hears admiration of various Baroque, Romantic, and Renaissance masters because their work is supposedly more beautiful, but there is never any critical evaluation of their underlying aesthetic. Their works are reputed to be beautiful because I, the Self, think they are beautiful. They are beautiful because they appeal to my senses in some extraordinary way, because the Self is elevated to some higher plane of experience by these works. In such criticism, the dynamic of the Self, whether that of the artist or viewer, remains central to understanding and experiencing the art. While I can find agreement with such views in admiring the artistic values of such non-contemporary styles, I find them to be ultimately unsatisfying. The underlying aesthetic error in this approach is never addressed, and its intimate relation to modern artistic nihilism is never fully examined.


There is of course, another answer to the question of how one can know the Good - namely, that knowledge of the Good comes only from knowledge of the Sacred. Manguel's quote from Gregory the Great highlights this - true art tells a venerable story. Interestingly, Manguel's focus is on the narrative aspect of Gregory's statement, as if Pope Gregory were emphasizing the word "story" in the quote. I would argue, however, that were Gregory here, his real emphasis would be on the word "venerable." Art only succeeds insofar as it gives us some knowledge of the sacred order of the world. The ability to read images in depth, as Manguel exhorts us to do, can only succeed insofar as those images reflect the true Image through which the created order was made. When the study of the image becomes the study of the Self, there will only be the inevitability of non-existence. Theologians remind us that there is only One Being that does not draw its existence from another, and that any being which ceases from dependence on this One Being will immediately become nothingness. So also the world of art and images. When images cease to draw their existence from the true Image, only the abyss will remain. Picasso's tragedy was not the duality of his life and his art. Rather, the duality existed because of the deeper tragedy of his aesthetic non-existence.