Your friends are not religious; they are only pew-renters. They are not moral; they are only conventional.
                                                        Don Juan to the Devil in Shaw’s Man and Superman

A sense of the holy brings with it a sense of taboo. We tread cautiously in the tenting place of the ineffable. A Presence abides. We dare not profane.

The Vatican’s recently announced Art for Charity initiative directed toward high profile corporations raises a question: Is the Sistine Chapel still the sacred space it was built to be? Or has it slackened into a world class exhibition hall, a Renaissance monument FOR RENT?

The elasticity of the line between sacred and profane can last only so long. At some point pliancy gives out, things stiffen, and choice falls at one end or the other. The initiative’s inaugural event, this past October, suggests that the elastic has dried and begun to crack.

Organized by the Vatican Museums, Art for Charity is a fund raising scheme that invites proposals for swank events sponsored by corporate donors. October saw the first of these commercial transactions. Porsche Travel Club arranged a four-day, €5,000-per-head [ArtNet’s figure] tour of Rome, featuring a private concert in the Sistine Chapel. The concert was performed by the venerable Accademia di Santa Cecilia, founded by Sixtus V in 1585. This was followed by a gala dinner “in the midst of the Vatican Museums,” leaving it unclear whether dinner took place in the chapel or elsewhere in the complex. Proceedings included a visit to Castel Gandolfo and a drive to Lake Garda in the latest Porsche models.

Msgr. Paolo Nicolini, managing director of the Vatican Museums, rejected the word rent: “The Sistine Chapel can never be rented because it is not a commercial space.” Making the chapel “visible” is the preferred term. He told the press:

It is an initiative which will support the Pope’s charity projects. It is aimed at big companies which, through the payment of a fee, can contribute to charity activities.

In other words, the Vatican is poised to solicit cash in exchange for permitting private access to the Sistine Chapel for exclusive corporate patrons. The vulgar word rent need never apply. Good manners demand phrasing appropriate to a premier cultural institution. The Vatican could have no better tutor in this than New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its downloadable pdf. on the delicate matter of “unique entertaining opportunities and special access” is an exquisite sample of elevated locution:

Entertaining at the Metropolitan Museum is a privilege reserved for its Corporate Patrons and eligible non-profit organizations. For its Corporate Patrons, membership benefits and entertaining opportunities reflect the level of a company’s gift to the Museum.

Privilege. Eligible. Gift. It is in word dances like this that distinguished brands—cultural and commercial—curtsy to each other.

The Vatican is simply adopting fund-raising techniques used by museums around the world for several decades. Its arrangement with Porsche indicates public embrace of the entrepreneurial culture already at play in museums around the world. Museums are desirable, high-status venues for corporate entertaining. Large or small, they compete to attract corporate sponsors, offering sponsorship opportunities contracted for a fee. And that is fine. Less congenial, however, is the inclusion of the Sistine Chapel in such transactions. Did the Sistine, intimately bound to the life of the Church, debase its sacral status while enhancing the identity of Porsche in the marketplace of brands?

Reading between the lines of official comments, it is not difficult to discern anxiety to deflect the question. According to CNNMoney, the Vatican hopes other companies will follow suit with similar events. The single proviso is they be art related.

Vatican Museums director Antonio Paolucci dips into the warm bath of contemporary art pieties. Vatican Radio quotes his explanation of the impetus behind the initiative: “Art, too, is charity and love.”

No, it is not. Art bears no relation to caritas; it is incapable of agape. The only aspect of love—if that is the word—that might feasibly be associated with art is eros. If we must, there is no shame in admitting that something erotic lives in the drive to make it, the pleasure of looking at it, the ache to linger in its company. But that is hardly the spiritually redemptive love that Vatican Radio intends.

Rendering a pragmatic decision in terms of a mystical or virtue-producing superstructure falsifies the enterprise and art as well. It is also dangerous. Ours is an age in which museums make claims for themselves that mimic religion and art is seen as a signal of transcendence. In contemporary culture art is the preferred Real Presence, free of all obligation and no cross in sight. By clothing art in the mantle of religion—a gathering current that predates the present papacy—the Vatican sanctifies its own secular replacement.

Leave the last word to Louis Bouyer:

We see many Christians attempting to make an alliance between Christianity’s ways and those of the world; and we see Christians who are even tempted to believe that the salvation offered by this world is the true one, and that Christianity needs only to encourage it, to bless it with a cheerful acknowledgment of its worth.

Note: The image above is some wag’s Photoshop comment. Worth 1,000 words.

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A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.
                                                                       Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

Of all the modern substitutes for religion, it is the aesthetic sense which is the most esteemed.
                                                        Edward Norman, Entering the Darkness

That quote above by then-Cardinal Ratzinger leaves me fidgety. I would rather hear about the potential effect on theology of his pilot’s license—he does have one—than appeals to art, music, nature, the expected perfumes. The guidance system of the papal helicopter, in its ordering of objective elements, bears closer resemblance to religious truth than the emotional promptings of the aesthetic sense.

Marcel Gromaire. The Pilot (1928). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

And where does love of nature take the theologian except into the eco-mysticism that installs a shine to Gaia in the cathedral of St. John the Divine? Contemporary nature piety is the springboard for re-sacralizing the natural world, reversing  Christianity’s historic de-divinization of it. 

Nature is to be respected. But loved? Nature kills. We can love nature only to the degree of our control of it, our protection from it. (Look in your medicine cabinet for simple cues to your fidelity to nature.) Yes, a sunset is beautiful; but only because the sun is far enough away not to incinerate us.

Tacitus stated it for the ages: “Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.”

Tornado over Oklahoma City area.

Three centuries into the ongoing displacement of religion by aesthetics, talk of beauty is much in the air these days. It ranks among the finer pastimes of polite climbers. On a more significant level, it has thickened into an arena in which Christians struggle to align beauty with salvation history. We speak of beauty now in tones reserved for salvific virtue. Accent on it leaves me wondering if we have strayed off our own turf. We seem to be playing an away game, no longer on home court.

Does Christianity subvert itself by embracing the revelations of an Enlightenment discipline? Are we adapting ourselves to a secular, and secularizing, frame of mind? Is the imperative of beauty a new bondage, this time to the strategies and structures of the world’s source of transcendent meaning? Is emphasis on beauty a surrender—disguised by religious language—to forces that distance us from the plenitude of own wellspring: the Galilean Jew we greet in the Creed?

Georges Barbier. Incantation (1923). Illustration for an Almanach.
 

We can doxologize beauty—its value, its boundless variety of forms—until the clocks stop. But, in the end, we are still left with that bothersome business of how to recognize it, how to achieve it. When talk is done and the table cleared, are we any further along than Justice Stewart Potter on obscenity? He admitted it was impossible to define but “I know it when I see it.”

Aestheticism as Ariadne Waving Goodbye to Oscar Wilde (1882). Punch.

When it comes to visible beauty, I definitely know it when I see it. No doubt about it. Not sure, though, I see it where you do. Besides, do you really know when you see it? Or do you just think you do? Is there a gene for telling the difference? Might taste be shaped by natural selection? Is bad taste an acquired characteristic or a hereditary predisposition? And while we are at it, why are you wearing that ugly tie?

Anonymous. Beautiful Longhorn, Prize Cow (19th C.). Oxford Agricultural College, UK.

It all gets sticky very fast. No conscientious writer on art can offer absolutes, though the temptation to try is great. Authority attaches to schema; honor accrues to pronunciamentos that nail it all down. Art presents a bewildering array of choices. How to pick the right one, the one that speaks well of us? Freedom of choice is risky. Wary of taking our chances, we want beauty clinched in an unequivocal canon. We look for a fixed set of properties applicable from now to kingdom come. It is the lure of the infallible.

Only it does not work that way. Tastes change with the times. Think of the doyens of eighteenth-century taste who despised the Gothic that we so prize today. Besides, it is not a critic’s job to mimic the labor of philosophers and psychologists of perception. The best a critic can do is offer an eye—which is to say a sensibility, that j’ne sais quoi of things rooted in a life and a conscience.

Mark Tansey. The Innocent Eye Test (1981).

It is impossible to look at fetal photography without astonishment. One of the most exhilarating things about it is its testimony to the sovereignty of our eyes. They are not separate members that grow on their own. The eye is a very organ of the brain! Emerging out of it, an eye is the brain’s emissary to the light. It comes into the world with its own way of knowing, wordless and immediate.

The eye, like friendship, seeks its own society. It functions according to its own principles, likes, and demands, each molded by temperament and circumstances. And it loses its innocence as we all do.

Paulus Potter. The Young Bull (1647). The Mauritshuis, NL.

Mark Tansey’s wonderfully witty The Innocent Eye Test takes aim at the notion of a critic as one who views art through a clear crystalline lens, unclouded by a priori biases or wayward concepts. But in the real world, no such innocent eye exists except—just maybe—in a cow. Tansey’s earnest research team brings a placid milker to gaze at Paulus Potter’s The Young Bull. Does she recognize her Dutch predecessor as the real thing? Did Potter get it right?

Golden Age livestock leaves no mess. Not so the barnyard participant in this investigation. (Note the man ready with a mop on the left.) Viewed from the detached distance of art, Potter’s idyllic livestock is lovely. Less so, its modern avatar.

Tacitus, again.

What has happened to Ash Wednesday? Is the wearing of ashes in decline everywhere? Or only in New York City, a sanctuary city for people of every faith or unfaith? Or was I just in the wrong part of town at the wrong hour?

Francisco de Goya. Lent (c.1794). Academia Fernando, Madrid.

I took an early commuter train into the city this morning, and was on the subway to Columbus Circle between 8:30 and 9:00 am. Coming up out of the station, I passed a young woman with ashes—the first I had seen since I left the house. Walking west one block to St. Paul the Apostle, I saw only a single man marked with ashes. A trickle of people were going into the church for ashes. I followed in for mine, turned around, and doubled back to Broadway. On the way, no one else passed me with their foreheads marked. 

I was headed for the Museum of Biblical Art for a press briefing by Monsignor Timothy Verdon, director of the Office of Sacred Art and Church Cultural Heritage in Florence. He had no ashes either; and neither did anyone else attending.

Three people took note of the black smudge on my forehead. Over coffee, a public relations woman greeted me with “Oh, I love your . . .” I thought she was about to say “haircut” but, after a pause, she came up with, “mark.”  

A second woman tapped me to say—in the hushed tone women use when they tell another that her slip is hanging or her dress label is sticking up—”You have something on your forehead.” She thought she was being helpful. So I smiled and said, “Yes, it’s Ash Wednesday.” She gave me a quizzical look that suggested she had no idea what Ash Wednesday was. Such is the level of ritual  comprehension in the press. 

Pieter Breughal the Elder. Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559). Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna.

It was heartening to have a third woman tell me that she had not yet had a chance to get her ashes. But relief did not last long. In the next breath she confided that she was up from Virginia where she lives in an ashram and is used to all kinds of ashes. In all kinds of colors. For all kinds of reasons.

Press business done, I headed back down into the subway, back to the shuttle, and over to Grand Central. Along the way, I scanned the morning crush, looking very hard for ashes. I counted only three more people in the crowd. (Believe me, I was really, really looking.) A total of five in one of the most heavily trafficked—foot traffic—parts of the city.

Maybe it was just too early in the day. Maybe Catholics will stop in a church at lunchtime or their way home. Still, on this Ash Wednesday, more than any other day in a very long time, I felt bereft. 

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What made Christianity so dangerous [to imperial Rome] was its uncompromising, radical de-divinization of the world.
                                                    —Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics

Early Christian thinking, like the biblical thinking of the Jewish culture which informed it, was a sedition against the entire pagan world of the sacred. It abolished nature gods: the moon goddess, the gods of thunder, of the hunt, of fertility, the harvest, the waters, all the deities of pagan cosmology. It denied Flora and Faunus sacred status. It cut down the sacred oak, climbed sacred mountains, and built atop the sacred moss.

William Blake. Ancient of Days (1794). Pierpont Morgan Library, NYC.

The radical desacralizing process of nascent Christianity held to the biblical polemic. Jacques Ellul  summarized that vision with brisk economy:

God speaks his word and things are. This is all. What this means is that God is truly outside the world, that he is totally transcendent. He is not enclosed in any part of this creation. He is beyond it. He has established a Creator-creature relation, but this is a relation of love, not a sacral relation. . . . The Christian God makes himself known in Jesus Christ and not elsewhere.

Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff’s evolutionary euphoria, in full feather in his Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, undoes all that. Jesus’ roots, like ours, are in the Milky Way. “His homeland is the solar system, and his house is planet Earth.” Jesus is no longer the totality of the Word but, more modestly, its “peak.” The incarnation extends to all humanity who will “also be verbified” by the Word. From this perspective, the biblical intuition of a hidden God—inaccessible apart from Jesus Christ—is obsolete. It is an androcentric archaism blind to the grand drama of cosmic progress to which ecology is key.

Boff’s dream would re-sanctify planet Earth, reconstitute a pre-modern and non-Christian sense of the sacred. Reported adviser to Pope Francis on the coming climate encyclical, the ex-Franciscan brings to his task the cosmic orphism of Teilhard de Chardin and giddy embrace of the noosphere—that notional final stage of evolution from which is thought to emerge, in Boff’s words, “a common consciousness around the Earth, and which would function as the Earth’s brain.”

Artist Unnamed. God the Father Measuring the Universe (13th Century). Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

The Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation issues from the same linear, patriarchal mind as modern scientific cosmology—that ”rationalist and dualist” system at the root of modern man’s assault on “God’s extended Body.” It has wreaked “massive destruction of the many-colored universe of polytheism and its anthropological significance.” To counter the devastation, Boff exalts the myths of deep ecology:

All the living and nonliving elements are interconnected and make up an organic whole in dynamic equilibrium: the great living being, Earth. It is indeed, as the indigenous peoples and the mystics have always called it, the great and good Mother, Nurse, and Pacha Mama.

Boff would relax emphasis on monotheism. However valid it might be philosophically and theologically, emphatic monotheism is damaging psychologically and politically. Christianity’s struggle against polytheism failed “to safeguard the element of truth” in it:

That truth is that the universe with its variegated beings, mountains, fountains, forests, rivers, firmament, and so forth, is permeated with powerful energies and hence is the bearer of mystery and sacredness.

Entranced by hybrid eco-spiritualities buttressed by Jungian psychology and scavengings from modern physics, Boff argues for “recovery of the aspect of truth in paganism, with its rich pantheon of divinities inhabiting all the spaces in nature”:

Indeed, human beings are inhabited by many powerful energy centers overflowing them on all sides and with the universal Energy shaping the cosmos for billions of years, centers that impart a profound meaning to existence. Throughout history, these transcendent forces have been hypostatized in the form of male and female deities. . . . The deities functioned as powerful archetypes of the depths of the human being. The radicalization of monotheism, as it battled polytheism, closed many doors of the human soul.

. . . To cure humankind of its polytheism, early Christianity subjected the faithful to a violent and harsh medication. . . . A rigid monotheism is not salutary for the soul—as if all spiritual riches could be reduced to a single principle. 

Venus of Willendorf (Upper Paleolithic). Natural History Museum, Wien.

By their very bodies, women are superior to men in overcoming “the dualisms introduced by patriarchal and androcentric culture.” They are natural bearers of a redemptive cosmology that yields ecological wisdom and “cosmic fellowship.” The insights of eco-feminism are crucial to Boff’s insistence on a new covenant with nature. Women are instinctive beings who refuse rule by reason alone. Hence, they are closer to the “archetypal universe of the personal, group, and cosmic consciousness.”

Boff leans on that rickety epistemology popularized as women’s way of knowing. By the “wholeness of female experience,” women are attuned to “planetary and cosmic sacredness.” Christianity’s assault on female deities disrupted the world’s “gender balance” and created “a break in social and religious ecology.”

Boff is fond of referring to women as generators of life. But strictly speaking, it is men who generate life. Women incubate it. Given the agenda Boff’s rhetoric serves, the distinction matters. So does his revival tent scaremongering. He preceded Al Gore with threats of environmental catastrophe and extermination:

If Gaia has had to rid itself of myriad species over its life history, who can assure us that it will not be forced to rid itself of our own? Our species is a threat to all other species; it is terribly aggressive and is proving to be a geocide, an ecocide, and a true Satan of the Earth.

Our theologian does not like “the species Homo.” Certainly not the Western male variety. He exempts only indigenous peoples and the Eternal Feminine from the dock.

The “imperial and feudal” Church, with its popes and bishops, has been corrupted by the same “linear logic” that has brought humanity to the point of immanent ecological collapse. While there is still time, a new paradigm must be forged. The Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth (1972) points the way. Christian conscience must acknowledge the Gaia hypothesis: humanity is not entitled to hierarchical dominance in the sentient super-organism called Earth. It is “the great cosmic community,” not merely man and woman, that is made in the image and likeness of God.

For anyone seeking exercises for initiation into eco-spirituality, Boff suggests K. Keyes, Jr., Handbook to Higher Consciousness; A. LaChance, Greenspirit: The Twelve Steps of Green Spirituality; and some others.

Celestial Globe Drawn on a Flat Sheet  (1729). Reiner Ottens, mapmaker. Amsterdam.

First published in 1995, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor remains a vivid witness to the ecotopian vision at the heart of Boff’s advisory role on environmental matters. His recent Francis of Rome & Francis of Assisi: A New Springtime for the Church (2014) repeats the twenty-year old mantra. His exultant doctrine of Woman-inflected “cosmic fellowship” still stands:

There are many people who say that the twenty-first century will be the woman’s century. Life is threatened, and they who generate life will know how to take care of all life forms and of our sister Mother Earth herself, as Saint Francis called her. She is alive, she is Pacha Mama, she is Gaia, she is the Great Mother who gives us everything we need to live. Pope Francis will need to strengthen this mission entrusted to women and to all of us.

Boff’s refrain—“everything is spiritual”—echoes Teilhard’s “everything is sacred.” It is a doctrine that Dietrich von Hildebrand had repudiated decades earlier in his essay “Teilhard de Chardin: A False Prophet.” However sublime the principle sounds, von Hildebrand argued, it bristles with “nihilistic denial of low and high, of good and evil.” Like Gaian dogma, it denies hierarchy to the structures of reality. In seeming to exalt everything, it “results in denying everything.”

St. Hildegard of Bingen. Man as Center of the Universe (12th C.). Biblioteca Statele, Lucca.

The line between the crackpot and the mystical is not at all narrow. It is broad and deep. But the chasm can be obscured with rational-sounding phrases (e.g. “crisis of the social paradigm”) and magpie assemblages of scientific and scholarly references woven together with christological language. Doubtless, it is camouflaged most significantly—and insidiously—by incontestable concern for the poor.

You will decide for yourself whether to welcome Boff’s environmental counsel to Francis of Rome. Or dread it.


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This morning’s broadcast from Sandro Magister lists the names of our twenty-one new Coptic saints. The essay “Saint Milad Saber and His Twenty Companions” can be read in full here. But let me list their names for you. They died whispering prayers, some calling upon the name of Jesus at the moment of decapitation. By knife. We honor them by name:

Milad Saber Mounir Adly Saad, bachelor
Sameh Salah Farouq, married, one child
Ezzat Boshra Nassif, married, with one son of four years
Kyrillos Boschra Fawzy, bachelor
Tawadraus Youssef Tawadraus, married, three children
Magued Soliman Shehata, married, three children
Mina Fayez Aziz, bachelor
Samouil Alham Wilson, married, three children
Bishoi Stephanos Kamel, bachelor
Samouil Stephanos Kamel, brother of the latter, bachelor
Malek Abram Sanyut, married, three children
Milad Makin Zaky, married, one daughter
Abanub Ayyad Ateyya Shehata, bachelor
Guerges Samir Megally Zakher, bachelor
Youssef Shukry Younan, bachelor
Malek Farag Ibrahim, married, baby daughter
Mina Shehata Awad
Louqa Nagati Anis Abdou, 27 years, married with infant
Essam Baddar Samir Ishaq, bachelor
Hany Abdal-Massih Salib, married, four children
Guerges Milad Sanyut, bachelor

There can be no question that it [religion] has lost the organic relations with culture which it possessed in the great religion-cultures of antiquity and the Middle Ages.
                          Christopher Dawson, Religion and Culture

Art Be With You
                                Slogan on website of the Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo

Of all the forces that bind Western civilization, no anchorhold has been stronger than the Bible. It has been a monumental, creative driver of Western culture. Scripture provides the vaulting under literature and history; it has inspirited majestic visual art. Our own national identity is indecipherable without understanding the centrality of the Bible in the emergence of modern Britain in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and of the Puritanism which suckled America at birth.

Abraham Lincoln’s claim that the Bible is “the best gift God has given to man” finds little purchase in contemporary culture. Since the 1960s banned it from public school classrooms, Christians themselves—particularly the young—no longer know what it might mean to grow like a cedar in Lebanon or dance, like David, before the ark. Bereft of a common fund of metaphors and allusions, believers and unbelievers alike are displaced from the civilization that housed us.

To counter this diminuendo the American Bible Society established the Museum of Biblical Art (MoBIA) in 2005. It began bravely as a gallery within the American Bible Association headquarters, overhead of a Bible sales room. Location, off Columbus Circle and near Lincoln Center, seemed ideal. And its fifty-plus exhibitions have been small, imaginative, often splendid jewels.

Luca della Robbia, The Art of Dialectic (1437-39).

Yet attendance lagged. Christopher Dawson’s contention that “religion is the dynamic element in culture” does not play well at the box office.   After a time, the Bible showroom was swept out of sight and MoBIA sought distinction from its parent. Still, traffic never rose to the quality of exhibition. Now, the ABA is moving to Philadelphia; the building has been sold; and MoBIA—living rent-free these ten years—is scrambling to relocate to an economical space.

To date, the museum’s crucial support has been the generosity of the ABA.  Come June, MoBIA will be dispossessed, a concept in search of affordable housing. (Why concept? Because MoBIA, like many non-profits using the word museum, has no collection, nothing to store or conserve. It exists as a Kunsthalle, a vacant hall that displays revolving installations of borrowed art works.)

MoBIA needs money. On the eve of displacement, the museum’s new director and fundraiser-in-chief Richard Townsend has responded by expanding the bureaucracy. He hired more staff, enlarged the Board of Trustees, introduced a Director of Finance and Operations, and inaugurated partnership with Florence’s Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. While the Duomo’s museum is undergoing refurbishment, it has loaned MoBIA works removed from the baptistry, the bell tower and the cathedral in the course of alterations. It is hoped that the prestige of the Duomo will raise the profile of MoBIA.

Enter Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral. 

Nanni di Banco, St. Luke the Evangelist (1408-13)

Expensive to crate, transport, insure, and install, this showcase occasion is oddly disappointing. Its mix of grand and lesser (including badly damaged) works, together with skittishness about the religious basis for the work, has the air of a pre-auction event at an architectural warehouse.

Isolated from their liturgical setting, the art on view bespeaks a Church submissive to secular pretensions. Without intending to, the Duomo and MoBIA collaborate in late modernity’s view of Christianity as a spent tradition, one that requires injections of museum prestige. Museumization allows Christianity to linger as an historical phenomenon, no longer a creative cultural force but compliant with the conceits of a post-Christian culture. 

MoBIA follows the reigning practice of translating enhancements for a sacral setting into museum stock on shelves in the cultural pantry. Struggling for mainstream recognition, the museum declares itself a neutral, demilitarized zone that has ceded claim to any investment in the religious substance of the art on display:

The Museum takes a secular perspective on the Bible’s pivotal role in art history, and looks at how this text impacts artistic practice in both familiar and surprising ways. MoBIA is inclusive and non-sectarian . . . .

A pivotal role in art history. There you have it. Not a pivotal role in civilization, but in artistic practice and its revelatory harvest of artifacts. The imperatives of art history form a magisterium tolerable for our times. Every item is presented in standard art historical terms: stylistic affinity, artistic identity, authorship, the like. What they affirm—and why Donatello’s name tops the cast list—is modernity’s conventional reverence for the cult of individual genius.

Donatello and Nanni di Barolo, known as Rosso . Sacrifice of Isaac or Abraham and Isaac (1421).

That said, there are several magnificent sculptures here. The Sacrifice of Isaac, by Donatello and Nanni di Bartolo, is chilling to look at. The biblical incident is depicted in gestures evocative of what we watch now on YouTube: the knife at the neck of kneeling innocents. The work is on show as the stunning technical achievement that it is, carved from a single block of marble. But what commands attention is the contemporaneity of the image. The full impact of Abraham’s fidelity—the ferocity of it—arises from what we bring to the sculpture from life. In Isaac, we see Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach and shrink from the sight. 

I came away from the exhibit in love with Nanni di Banco. Outstripped by Donatello and Ghiberti in the art historical sweepstakes, di Banco was co-equal in introducing the expressive realism that is the hallmark of Renaissance sculpture. His monumental Luke the Evangelist, evocative of a Roman consul interrupted in his reading, transcends the era of its precedent and of its making. We know this man. We have met him at conferences, on faculties, on institutional boards. Or perhaps in tweeds in one of David Lodge’s academic romances. That face, that posture—you ache to ask him something.

Across the room are two youthful, standing figures each labeled simply profetino, small prophet. One is attributed to Donatello, the other to di Banco. The Donatello is an all-purpose set piece, useful for filling architectural gaps. But the di Banco is a rhapsody of boyhood on the cusp of manhood. This round-faced boy has the power of life, of breath and movement. I welled up with an urge to bring him food—a pizza, or a home-cooked meal—and listen to him talk. (MoBIA flattens him into “a clear instance of stylistic variety” in the cathedral’s decorative program.)

By any measure, MoBIA has staged fine exhibitions over the last decade that would honor MoMA or the Metropolitan. Biblical themes are indivisible from our cultural history and need not be relegated to an independent institution. MOBIA’s very existence concedes a hidden starting point: that motifs drawn from scripture—and without irony or disdain—have become a world apart from contemporary culture.

Thus, the Duomo’s self-abnegating publicity slogan: “Art be with you.”

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Children were lifting their tunics for each other before pants ever existed. You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine. It is an ancient dare, a forbidden game, played behind bushes, in stairwells, or in rumpus rooms with the door shut. In secret.

But when a grown woman plays it by herself in the Musée d’Orsay, under lights, and in full view of other grownups, we know we are not in a playroom anymore. Not even one in Sin City. We are somewhere close to the Central London Hatching and Conditioning Center. (The d’Orsay is in what we still call Paris but one part of Huxley’s World State is just like another.)

On Ascension Thursday last May, Luxembourgian performance artist Deborah de Robertis went to the Musee d’Orsay in a gold sequined mini-dress. Barefoot. No panties. She sat down in front of Gustave Courbet’s famed Origin of the World (1866)—that peerless beaver shot—spread her legs, her labia, and showed the world her own smiling orifice. She titled her performance Mirror of the Origin. Her cameraman videoed the stunt for broadcast later on Vimeo.

Ms. de Robertis abjured any hint of exhibitionism. She told Le Monde:

I behave in a very natural manner, which is why even when there are guards around, sometimes they don’t say anything. They see something in my demeanor that isn’t shocking. I always try to convey something very pure, with my feminine sensibility.

Out of delicacy, she exposed not herself, you see, but rather a wanton gap in art history. Missing until then had been the “point of view of the object of the [male] gaze.”

In his realist painting, Courbet shows the open legs, but the vagina remains closed. He does not reveal the hole, that is to say, the eye. I am not showing my vagina, but I am revealing what we do not see in the painting, the eye of the vagina, the black hole, this concealed eye, this chasm, which, beyond the flesh, refers to infinity, to the origin of the origin.

You have to suffer higher education to learn to talk—to think—like this. Set aside the pathetic fallacy that grants to body parts the consciousness required to have a point of view. Disallow even the prank itself. What matters most is the ruined intellect behind it.

Thomas Couture. Romans of the Decadance (1847). Detail. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

We can only mourn the spoiled intelligence that devises an apologia for a blue movie caper, and enshrines it on video—Ave Maria playing on sound track—in mockery of high seriousness. Yet, in a crooked sort of way, the artist’s faux-solemnity is comical. The true barbarism of Mirror of Origin lies less in its vulgarity—there is always room for one more custard pie—than in the timid, almost deferential, response of authorities.

Add the applause of onlookers rooting for shamelessness raised to a principle. (Which principle? Try female empowerment. Or gender expression.) You listen to the clapping and understand how it came to be that our politicians and newscasters feel free to lie to us: We admire their cheek, and envy them for getting away with it. It is the temper of well-behaved grownups who wish they had spilled their porridge when they had the chance.

If you feel up to it, you can watch the age-restricted video here.

Most startling was the reaction of the guards. Too intimidated to respond assertively, they tried—unsuccessfully—to shoo cheering gallery-goers out of the room. Not one of them risked lifting the prankster to her feet and pulling down her skirt. Or simply throwing a jacket over her knees. Instead, a female guard stationed herself in front of Ms. de Robertis in a feeble effort to block the view.

Eventually, police arrived to escort the artist away. The museum and two guards filed a complaint against her for sexual exhibitionism. But the prerogatives of art carried the day. Charges were dropped.

Imagine if a male onlooker, in the spirit of participation, had unzipped and given the artist’s “eye” something to look at. Quite likely, guards would have acted more energetically. The man would have been carted off to 36, quai des Orfèvres while women’s groups demanded his comeuppance for a priapic insult. But Ms. de Robertis is a woman. Women cannot be flashers. And, of course, Mirror of Origin is an artwork. Who would challenge that? Inarguably, it is an act of self-expression to which we are each—artists above all—entitled. 

Bettina Heldenstein, art historian at the Casino Forum of Contemporary Art, Luxembourg, strode forward to declare Ms. de Robertis’ performance one of those catalysts “which change the perspective on the relationship between men and women, artists and gallery owners, or even artists and models.” Mirror of Origin entered cyberspace as a ground-breaking art historical intervention.

•     •     •     •

That was last year. What brings it to mind ten months later? Here in hand are recent articles in the Canadian press detailing Ontario’s brave new world of sex education. Beginning September, 2015,  pre-pubescent children will begin immersion in explicit information about sex. By the time they are Ms. de Robertis’ age, they will have marinated in Ms. Heldenstein’s changed perspectives. And they will be well groomed for what sexual liberationists call the orgasmic imperative.

First graders will learn to “identify body parts, including genitalia (e.g., penis, testicles, vagina, vulva), using correct terminology.” By third grade pupils study such topics as sexual identity and orientation. In grades 6 and 7 they will be introduced to terms like “anal intercourse” and “vaginal lubrication.” 

Wally Wood. Disneyland Memorial Orgy (1967).

Pete Baklinski, at LifeSite News, expands on the sixth grade curriculum:

When asked about what is “normal” development, teachers are to respond: “Exploring one’s body by touching or masturbating is something that many people do and find pleasurable. It is common and is not harmful and is one way of learning about your body.”

Children are taught to dismantle “what is ‘normal’ or expected for males and females” since such “assumptions .  .  . are usually untrue, and they can be harmful.”

Children will hear nothing of courtship or tenderness. Instead, there will be much about prophylactic measures to avoid pregnancy and HIV. Brian Evoy, president of the Ontario Association of Parents in Catholic Education, tells The National Post that “our organization is very much in favour of the curriculum and all of the changes that will be made.”

By the time Ontario’s little scholars reach puberty all reticence will have been vanquished. Steeped in government run sex-ed, they will understand sex as a value-free, mechanical activity, a recreational choice like any other. They will know all about the social construction of “gender” but nothing of morals, self-control, or commitment. Any lingering sexual shyness will have been coaxed out of them. Sexual shame will be the only sin left. Children will enter adulthood as the free, consenting, rutting species that Huxley anticipated. 

And performance pieces like Ms. de Robertis’ will be obsolete. No taboos will be left to violate. The culture will be on a soma holiday of another kind.

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The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.
                                William Burroughs, Introduction to The Naked Lunch

That book seethed up from forgotten shallows while I watched a recent episode in the third season of House of Cards. Robin Wright’s character, Claire Underwood, wants to avenge her herself on a male diplomat who has slighted her. In a previous scene, he scanned her body, and told her how good she looked in the dress she was wearing. It was no compliment. It was a sneer: she was a woman playing at a man’s game.

Scorned, Mrs. Underwood—First Lady and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—determines to act like a man. She invites the offender into the ladies’ room to negotiate just the way real men apparently do, at the urinal. Unequipped to stand, she sits on the toilet with the cubicle door open, conversing all the while. Door still open, she pulls up her pantyhose and smooths her skirt. Dead pan. Unselfconscious. After all, urinating is just another one of those natural things women do, like dressing well.

Denise Colomb. Student with Chamber Pot (1954). Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimone, Paris

A pillar of sang froid, the First Lady walks to the sink to wash her hands and dismiss the embarrassed man. The scriptwriter intends us to cheer the bold Mrs. Underwood, who looks as good with her pants down as up. She humiliated the smug s.o.b., did she not?

The scene made me wince. I had just watched something corrupting, something not meant to be seen. I felt like washing my own hands and was grateful to be watching it alone. The sense of violation was visceral, a spontaneous and instinctive recoil. The last time I flinched so reflexively to a filmed moment was when I saw Luis Buñuel’s camera slide a razor across an eyeball in the silent classic Un Chien Andalou.

Now, this morning, I read Marilyn Penn’s review of Map to the Stars, the latest film by Toronto director, David Cronenberg. Amid other vignettes crafted for us sophisticated moderns, Julianne Moore appears on the toilet. She defecates while bellowing instructions—just like a man?—to her assistant.

Max Beckmann. Medea (1949-50). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

When Medea sought revenge, she killed. Modern woman takes to the potty. One was tragedy; the other .  .  . travesty? low camp? We are meant to witness the second as an advance for women. An empowerment. The sight levels the playing field between men and woman. It is a liberating assault on regressive sex distinctions. I want to think that Ms. Wright and Ms. Moore have given us anomalous spectacles, a freak coincidence, not signals of a looming trend. But I am not so sure.

We have been watching men at the urinal on TV and in the movies for years now. We have become quite used to it, forgetting that an earlier generation of actors would never have been filmed at a toilet. Rarely does any plot require a men’s room scene. (Dinner Rush, with murder on its mind, was an uncommon exception.) Yet, somehow, male characters are routinely viewed, back to the camera, at a urinal. American Standard tethers good guys to bad, shoulder to shoulder. A plumbing fixture reduces hero and anti-hero to the same bodily reality, the same exposure. Here’s looking at you, kid.

Is it girls’ turn now? We cannot imitate the male stance but we can shed our mortifications. Stuffy relics of prudish, bourgeois attachment to privacy are the last obstacles to full surrender of shame. There is no getting back to Eden until we rid ourselves of taboos of concealment that every society until our own enacted and secured to mark the boundary between man and animal.

Pier Ghezzi. Monk with Carrot & Woman with Chamber Pot (18th C.). ©Metropolitan Museum of Art

In her groundbreaking study, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), social anthropologist Mary Douglas took the techniques of research into non-Western cultures and applied them to her own. Dame Douglas, a practicing Catholic, warned against modernity’s lust for the abolition of taboos that accompany a sense of the sacred. Building on a vibrant body of anthropological material, she argued for the social necessity of boundaries between what is public and visible and what demands to be shielded from view.

Not only is that separation fundamental to an ordered society—the crux of social justice as the term was traditionally understood. To Douglas, it is also the bedrock of meaning itself:

An unstructured society leaves us prey to every dread. As all the veils are successively stripped away, there is no right or wrong. Relativism is the order of the day.

Her essay “Environments at Risk” acknowledges that relativism is the summons offered by our times. It is an “invitation to full consciousness” that we cannot avoid. We are compelled to accept:

But we should do so knowing that the price is William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. The day when everyone can see exactly what is on the end of every one’s fork, on that day there is no pollution and no purity and nothing edible or inedible, credible or incredible, because the classifications of social life are gone. There is no more meaning.

In a world bereft of reticence, intimacy vanishes together with shame. And alongside them both, goes all coherence in our common life. At the end of our forks is disarray. And absurdity.

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You would not pass a dollar bill on the sidewalk without picking it up. Maybe not even a quarter. I am sure of that. But a penny? Do you stoop for that? I do. 

Thomas Rowlandson. Two-a-penny Buns (1799). Museum of London, London.

And I just did this morning. Two at time were lying by my car in a local lot when I ran out for groceries. That makes three so far this week. The first was lying on Lexington Avenue outside of St. Jean Baptiste earlier in the week. As I bent to retrieve it, a passerby saw me and admonished: “It’s not lucky, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” I told him. “But it’s unlucky to leave it there.”

And I believe that. It is the one superstition I permit myself. Never mind black cats, Friday the thirteenth, or pressing #13 on an elevator. Walking under ladders does not faze me. And where I live, a bat in the house is not uncommon. But the smallest coin, even a penny, cries to be picked up. 

Thomas Rowlandson. London Penny Post (c. 1800). Museum of London, London.

Why? Perhaps because it seems too complaisant, even arrogant, to leave it there. If I snub so much as a penny, abandoning it to be stepped on, am I not tempting the gods to put me in my place? Won’t the gods of the purse pay me back in some unwelcome way? I can hear them: “She’s too flush to bother over pennies, is she? We’ll show her.”

In day-to-day transactions, I do not trouble over pennies or any change at all. But a coin on the ground is different. You have to break your pace, bend down, and get your fingers dirty. And be seen doing it. In its way, all superstition aside, bobbing for a penny is a small genuflection made in gratitude that I do not need the very thing I stoop for.

Domenico Fetti. Parable of the Lost Coin. (17th C.). Berlin

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. . . millions of Americans now regularly eat French-fried potatoes with their fingers. We have sunk, anthropologically speaking, beneath the level of the fork. The daily, unrecorded habits of a people are measures of its values. A disintegrated civilization shows not only in the low level of the arts, but in its pop entertainment and its lunchbox.
                                                   John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture

Nothing is more exhilarating than counting oneself an accomplished spotter of cultural decay. We relish the frisson of it even while we wring our hands. So I know what you  think when you hear that the world’s first art museum catering to selfie mavens has opened in Manila. You say to yourself: We have descended from finger food down, down, all the way down to wanton flippancy in a temple of art. Worse, a pretend temple—a garish, tacky, tongue-in-cheek anti-temple.

Quite right. Yet despite that, there is something endearing about this goofy, impertinent, interactive sacrilege. We have enough vulgarities to purse lips over. This does not have to be one of them. Let me try to explain.

Previously tagged the social network capital of the planet, the Philippines have now been anointed the selfie capital to boot. According to research by Time Magazine, Manila, followed by three other Philippine cities, averages more selfies per 100,000 people a day than anywhere else in the camera phone world. You can tunnel into the sociology of this on your own. What interests me is the museum itself, Art in Island.

The whole point of Art in Island is to let people pose for selfies in front of the art on the wall. They can even touch it. And they are exempt from the absurd hush that we museum-goers adopt to prove ourselves pious appreciators of strict observance. Visitors to Art in Island can hold up their selfie-sticks, open their Instagram app, noodle the image, add a caption, and send it giggling into the wide world. It is Everyman’s catchpenny variant of the hoary old message in a bottle tossed on the high seas.

What is the message here? It is in code, but bear with me. I think it is this: that we, in our First World affluence and leisure, have made a fetish of art. The gift that it is has swollen like a puff-adder into a dogma. And a moral tonic. The Philippines, by contrast, have not had the same history of grand acquisitions that find their tax-advantaged way into public collections. Art in Island is a poor nation’s finger in the eye of the cult of art. It is an antidote to the peculiar twist taken by modernity’s bent toward idolatry.

We are a happy band, we aesthetes. We tell ourselves that art awakens the faculties by which we perceive God.  Yet, quite possibly, it runs the other way around. It is the religious mind—quickened but still restless—that grants to visual art its status as a locus theologicus. (Gilson was terse: “There is no necessary connection between the fine arts and religion.  .  .  . Religion exists in religious men.”) We distill art from the labor of its making, and quarantine it from the boundless variety of human creativity. Thereby, we raise it to an object of devotion.

Once we dematerialize art and make it a springboard for other interests, philosophy and theology among them, we hardly have to look at it. Much art-and-beauty discourse is less about art—the thing seen—than a display of the observer as an acolyte of the beautiful. Often as not, the true object of consideration is that golden panorama visible from the piazza of one’s own sensibility. It becomes a selfie of another kind. Behold the beholder.

Christianity decreases while art-consciousness intensifies and spreads. More than half of American art museums were founded after 1970. New ones continue to open; older ones renovate and expand. Meanwhile, church attendance shrinks. Table 75 in the 2012 U.S. Census shows those who self-identify as having “no religion” more than doubled between 1990 and 2008. Upsurge in the authority of art is a useful index of the atrophy—or displacement—of faith in Judeo-Christian sources of revelation. On the evidence of Art in Island, Filipinos have ducked a First World god. 

The Mediterranean after the beheading of twenty one Copts. Photo: Universal News & Sport.

While Christian circles contemplate the redemptive power of beauty,  a conquering Islam reasserts itself. It advances in defiance of our trust in art’s contribution to “the good.” The Cross was bloody awful. Harrowing. Few of us can bear to look. It is easier to repeat the mantra—unearned by you and me—that beauty will save the world.

Our beguiling but deceptive stress on art and beauty brings to mind The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Vittorio de Sica’s 1971 film about a sophisticated Jewish family in Italy during the rise of Mussolini. Their ease and cultivation obscured the magnitude of the threat marshaling against them. In the end, they walked politely to their extermination, the refinement of their upbringing no stay against barbarism. It was annihilated with them.

Art in Island could not have come at a better time. Join me in praying for franchises to open in Paris, New York, Berlin, Florence, every art capital in the Western world.

Note: Art in Island has no website but the museum does have a Facebook page.

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For all the anecdotes recorded in the Passion chronicle, there seems a lacuna at the heart of it. Something goes missing. Something in the text lacks explication. The politics of it are plain enough. But is there not a rupture in the psychology of the crowd, an unaccountable fickleness? Why the discontinuity between Jesus’ reception into Jerusalem and the calls to crucify him days later? Were the Jews that mercurial and unstable?

Anonymous. Fresco (14th C). Basilica of San Abbondio, Como.

Romano Guardini anticipated the question and answered it in The Lord. A magisterial reflection on the Gospel story, the book revivifies our grasp of Jesus within the contours of his time. One chapter, “The Trial,” abolishes all thought of a breach in the behavior of the multitude. In Guardini’s retelling, those who spread their clothes under his feet and, in Luke’s words, “came early in the morning to him in the temple, for to hear him” were not the same ones who cried “Crucify him:”

Pilate is skeptical but sensitive—possibly also superstitious. He feels the mystery, fears supernatural power, and would like to free the accused. He counts upon the masses to demand Jesus’ release. There is a man in prison who has been really seditious—and in addition committed murder. His name is also Jesus, Jesus Bar-abbas.

Pilate: Whom shall I give free, Jesus the Bar-abbas, or the Jesus called Messiah? But the Procurator has reckoned falsely. The crowd outside is no real cross-section of the masses composed in the main of serious, hard-working, long-suffering, honest men and women, but mob, plebs. The High Council has seen to that, and its agitators are busily and successfully spreading ‘public opinion’ among them. So they yell: Bar-abbas!

Pilate tries to placate them: “What then am I do do with Jesus who is called Christ?”

All: “Let him be crucified.”

It is a stunning passage. So convincing. Why did we not see it before? Through Guardini’s words we understand the complexity of pressures on Pilate. And we recognize that mob. It is the poison fruit of a political machine, one as old as politics itself. It lives among us. We meet it in the news, in our own streets.

Flash points change; sources of ignition differ with time and place. But from Sennacherib’s day to our own, the mob is the same: angry and relentless. From the banks of the Tigris to Crown Heights in 1991 or Ferguson last summer, resentments smolder, poised to catch fire. The Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ day operated no differently than today’s party apparatchiks. Agitators, zealots, militants, monomaniacs, young Turks, influence peddlers, race-baiters, community organizers—plus ça change .  .  .

Guardini presents Pilate as a man who understood mob psychology as we do: The mob will not be satisfied until it inflicts pain. Blood must flow. Send an innocent to the flogging post, if only to quiet things down. 

One might suppose that Pilate was simply without conscience. But this would not explain his behavior during Jesus’ trial. Had he really lacked integrity, he could have directed the trial or have let it direct itself so that the sentence against Jesus would have been inflicted as against a dangerous agitator. Actually, he does nothing of the sort. He insists upon the defender’s innocence—repeatedly, to the end—and then, fully conscious of the illegality of the decision, pronounces the sentence of death, and what a death! We are likely to overlook the contradiction, or to explain it away with Pilate’s ‘weakness.’ This is insufficient. The procurator is sucked into the depths of “the powers of darkness,” into a confusion so dark and deep that he is no longer sensible of the gruesome and ignominious folly he is committing.

Guardini passes on to Calvary by reminding his readers that they should not retreat “before the horrors recounted here, but should read them through, will all the concentration of his heart, remembering that they were suffered for him.”

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It has been some time since I gave thought to the day my soon-to-be husband and I bought our wedding rings. But the spectacle over RFRA—all the panting hysteria of a predatory media and toadying politicians aided by timorous clergy—brings it back with great clarity. And even greater poignancy.

Our wedding date was set. It was time to pick a ring. But where to look for one? How to shop? The two of us were young, broke, and scrappy. It would be some years yet before we could afford to pay retail. Besides, my intended was a combative shopper, born to hondel. He did not believe in fixed prices. There were only asking prices begging to be negotiated.

We started in Manhattan’s diamond district in the west Forties. No diamonds were on our shopping list. But 47^th Street was a place to haggle, draw swords, dicker away until the doomed asking price dropped in exhaustion. His ring was easy. A plain gold band was all. It was mine that took hunting for. I wanted something chaste and spare, low keyed but rich with symbolism. No glitz. Modest but not severe. It had to be unembellished but eloquent—a sort of Grail for my ring finger.

I had no idea what my adjectives might look like in the concrete. So we trooped from stall to stall in the Exchange scouting for . . . what, exactly? Then, finally, there it was. In the showcase of an older jeweler, forearm tattooed with his identification number from a concentration camp, were simple gold bands embossed with phrases from the Tanakh. They were cut in the identical ancient block script familiar to Jesus of Nazareth, who grew in wisdom and study of Torah.

James Tissot. Jesus Teaching in the Synagogue (c. 1897). Ann Ronan Picture Library, London.

The graphic beauty of the Hebrew characters—heightened by our inability to read them—seemed a visible link to Him in Whom we would marry. One square letter followed another, spacing calculated to encircle the band with no marked beginning or end. The indissolubility of marriage seemed imprinted in the very design. Add the romance of indecipherability. This was my ring!

Next came the contest over cost. The groom-to-be went into gladiatorial mode. The seller was good at the game. It was a lengthy, spirited match. Eventually the two settled on a price. All that was left was to decide on the phrase from a sheet of suggested lines. My heart set on a passage from the Book of Ruth that reads in full:

Ruth said: “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest I will go, where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.

Only the central portion (“wither thou goest . . .”) could fit around the ring but the entire antiphon is implicit in the fragment. Ruth’s pledge to Naomi is the purest and most stirring statement of friendship I have ever known. I ached to claim it for myself and wear it for the rest of my life.

Marriage. Illustration from the Maciejowski Bible (13th C). Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City.

Was one of us Jewish? The jeweler wanted to know. Was either of us leaving another religion to become Jewish? No, we were not. Well then, he was sorry but he would not give us that particular quotation. The point was non-negotiable.

The rebuff was a sore let-down but we did not press. We deferred to his prohibition because, in some unspoken way, we understood. The story of Ruth is one of conversion that affirms the Jewish nation. It testifies to peoplehood. The intensity of this man’s concern to honor the sacred core of the text moved us. Here was a man who had suffered the unspeakable for no other reason than he was part of the people Ruth pledged herself to.

There was grace in his refusal. Had he granted me the words I craved, he would, in conscience, have violated the grandeur of them. Ruth’s commitment was not simply to another person but to a covenanted community bound together since the call of Abraham. Her words were his inheritance; he was not free to extend them to us.

Disappointed, I settled for words from the Song of Songs: “I found him whom my soul loveth.” Over the years, my second choice proved to be the better one. The ring is dearer to me than anything else I possess. But I did not feel that then.

                                                                               •     •     •     •

What innocents we were. It never entered our minds to challenge the denial. We took for granted the man’s moral right to refuse us; any legal issue, then, was irrelevant. But by today’s lights, we gave in too readily. We could have raised a stink. Demanded our rights as consumers. Bullied the vendor with accusations of anti-Christian bigotry. We did not have to submit to the discomfort of being told we were ineligible for what we desired.

“Something there is that does not love a wall, / That wants it down.” Pace Frost, not every barrier should be cleared away. Not everything is permeable. A nation cannot survive without borders; no culture endures without limits. Walls provide a bulwark against chaos and dissolution. That day in the Diamond Exchange, we stumbled against the very wall a man had clung to in the camps. It was the same one that had kept Jewry from disappearing centuries before modern nation states existed.

Had we been noisy enough, I might have gotten the thing I wanted at the time. But at what price to the commonweal?

Anonymous engraving. Riot in Saint-Omer, 1780s (Incitement over a lightening rod placed atop a house.)

How to discern which walls, like dikes, have to be maintained, and which left to crumble? Aggressive shows of grievance are meant to deflect discernment, not advance it. The nervous response of the five Roman Catholic bishops of Indiana cooperated with the machinery of deflection by rushing forward with anodyne assertions of the dignity of all people, all genders, as if that were in the balance. It was not. The bishops were anxious to appease malcontents whose agenda trumped conscience and the rule of law. If the bishops could not attend to the specific content of the bill—which provided standing in court for anyone substantially burdened by demands counter to their religious beliefs —better to have kept quiet.

The way to protect religious liberty is not to bleat for it but to expose the distortions, conjectural ploys, and rabble-rousing used against it. It requires tooth. By contrast, the bishops’ bridge-over-troubled-waters approach signaled to RFRA antagonists that self-serving outbursts really do work. It cooperated with bootlicking politicians in ceding ground that was never in play. Reassurance misapplied is a sentimental concession to demagoguery. 

Enough.

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The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of heaven, too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish.
                                                     Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

A great many of our attitudes and principles which we adopt as Christian are nothing but products of our subjection to the world.
                                                     Jacques Ellul, False Presence of the Kingdom

Marxism thought itself to have progressed from Utopia to science. Environmentalism makes a corresponding claim for itself.

Dimitri Stakhevich Moor. Have You Volunteered? Poster, 1929.

In his 1981 foreword to The Captive Mind, written some thirty years earlier, Czeslaw Milosz observed that the West, no less than Eastern Europe still in the Soviet bloc, was burdened with ideological pressures to conform. But he cited one essential distinction between them: “The difference is that in the West one may resist such pressure without being held guilty of a mortal sin.”

Some thirty four years later, that distinction is close to disappearing. Growing mightily all the while is the cult of environmentalism, a burgeoning state religion summarized in the catechism of sustainable development. It is the ascendant idol of our time, as magnetic—and totalizing—as the Leninist-Stalinist doctrines were to Milosz’ contemporaries. What the poet referred to as “the magic influence of the new faith,” is replicated among ourselves with a new, seemingly benign, identity.

Orthodox environmentalism is about very much more than saving giraffes or cleaning up the Hudson. The faith we are asked to embrace is the holy cause of building a new social order—a just, sustainable, and harmonious global society—by means of messianic environmentalism. We are pressed on all sides to shun skepticism and align ourselves with the ectopian gospel.

A populist pope, Peronist by culture and inclination, is preparing to lend magisterial heft to the Green creed. In the minds of the faithful, assent will become a quasi-infallible demand. Cached in theological language designed to legitimize a premature, scientifically unsettled judgment, a politicized—essentially materialist—agenda will assume the mantle of God’s will.  False knowledge, already given sanctuary in academia and the press, will receive immunity to criticism on high moral grounds. Agnosticism toward the diktats of climate-change evangelists will be further marginalized. Its tincture of depravity will deepen. Catholics will find themselves pressed to enlist on God’s side in the cosmic war against demon unbelief.

Francis’ encyclical will arrive as a call to conversion.

Conversion here is key. Redemption is of ultimate significance, too urgent to be left to the reasoning mind and the risks of frank, unfettered argument. It is far, far too pivotal to wait for the raw data on which conviction rests. Empirical results might not come soon enough. Or at all. The only thing that can save is a prompt change of heart and habit: pre-emptive metanoia.

A.R. Golenkina. The Torch of the Third International Inflames the Whole World. Porcelain Plate, 1922.

On November 10, 2014, Václav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013, spoke in London at an event commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. Standpoint published his address under the title “Communism’s Comeback?” Klaus lamented a post-Communist lessening of democratic and economic freedoms in his homeland:

It was caused partly by the victory of social democracy in our country and partly by the importing of the European economic system, with its over-regulation, high taxation and redistribution, welfare state, and fascination with all kinds of anti-market measures, connected nowadays mostly with environmentalism, with its anti-democratic social ideology which successfully hides its real substance while pretending to care about nature, the environment and our Blue Planet. We may be oversensitive in this respect because of our long Communist experience but we see many similar phenomena, tendencies, ambitions and arguments around us today.

Gustav Klutsis. Let Us Fulfill the Plan of the Great Project. Poster, 1930. Russian State Museum, Moscow.

There is little need to wait for the climate encyclical to know which way this trolley is headed. On its website, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences announces an April 28^th conference: Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: the Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Humanity. Its mission statement is steeped in the received wisdom that enchants today’s collective mind. Discernible within the Academy’s rhetoric, buoyant with exalted intention, is the will to dominion that drives the global environmental movement:

The goal of this workshop is to raise awareness and build a consensus that the values of sustainable development cohere with values of the leading religious traditions, with a special focus on the most vulnerable; to elevate the debate on the moral dimensions of protecting the environment in advance of the papal encyclical; and to help build a global movement across all religions for sustainable development and climate change throughout 2015 and beyond.

John Heartfield. Capitalism Robs You of the Last Piece of Bread (1932). Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich.

The Vatican’s slouch toward salvation-by-ecology did not begin with Pope Francis. Daniel Stone, writing in National Geographic in 2013 stated that one lasting legacy of Benedict XVI, dubbed the “Green Pope,” was how he steered the global debate over climate change:  ” . . . the pontiff has made environmental awareness a key tenant of his tenure.” In Caritas in Veritate (2009), Benedict signaled his hope for a “world political authority.” This global political body—a Brussels universalized and sacralized—would dictate procedures governing multiple global issues, environmental among them.

World political authority. It is a chilling phrase, one that runs counter to Christian understanding of the limits of politics. It is also an odd one, coming from as astute and subtle a theologian as Benedict. The mission of the Church is to keep man mindful that he has another life to live. When the Church maneuvers to be counted a player among the principalities and powers, the subversion of Christian truth and charity has begun. The true object of Green globalism is not human needs, but those of the planet. The culture of death wears many guises. Among them are the anti-humanist assumptions of environmentalism.

Yesterday’s Gospel reading (John 6: 28-29) hovers over this discussion:

Then they said unto him: What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?

Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he hath sent. 

All the rest, with its time-bound, tragic burdens, is the work of man. And men of good will, in their God-given freedom, differ in definitions of the common good and in means to achieve it. Turning stones into bread is not a work for the Pontifical Academy.

Trufim Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin, 1935.

Remember the Lysenko affair. It was the twentieth century’s most notorious instance of the scandal—and tragedy—of politically correct science. By stacking the deck in favor of a manufactured “consensus” over the still-contested issue of man-made global warming, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences risks comparison with the ideologically driven postures of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. 

You might not like the comparison. But it merits consideration.

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Propaganda posters are a fascinating genre in their own right. Early Soviet posters are graphically compelling, and among my favorite works of art. It is a topic to come back to on a later date. But let me just touch on it for the moment in response to readers who emailed to comment on the reproductions in the previous post.

The earliest, ranging from 1918 to 1929, were heady with exhilaration for the fledgling workers’ state, and the aspirations of Bolshevik internationalism. The monarchy had been toppled, tsarist Russia disintegrated, and the air was thick with revolutionary fervor. It is palpable in the posters of that first decade. 

Soviet art began to flourish on posters in the months following the revolution. Initially, the Soviet agencies relied on publishing proclamations. Illustrations accompanied some of them, but there was little worth remembering. Midway through 1918, things began to change. The Red Army, founded by Leon Trotsky in April of that year, became a generous patron of graphic artists. Some of the finest work of that first decade was ordered by the military and dealt with military themes. Social motifs, such as literacy and health care, carried the same militant charge. 

Later, in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky described the young workers’ state:

[It] had a seething mass basis and a perspective of world revolution; it had no fear of experiments, searchings, the struggle of schools, for it understood that only in this way could a new cultural epoch be prepared. The popular masses were still quivering in every fiber, and were thinking aloud for the first time in a thousand years. All the best youthful forces of art were touched to the quick.

The poster was an ideal medium for reaching a population that was largely illiterate and suffering the after shocks of civil war. Few could read; paper and printing presses was in short supply. Posters were vivid, inspirational, the graphics fully intelligible apart from text. 

Soviet art degenerated during the rise of Stalinism into the stock commonplaces of socialist realism. But that early generation of poster art remains stirring apart from politics. It radiates a certain martial beauty, estimable as art no less than as historical record.

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. . . the fraudulence of Silent Spring goes beyond mere cherry-picking or discredited data: Carson abused, twisted, and distorted many of the studies that she cited, in a brazen act of scientific dishonesty. So the real tragic irony of the millions of deaths to malaria in the past several decades is that the three central anti-DDT claims made by Carson and other activists are all false.
                                                   Robert Zubrin, Merchants of Despair

To only a few chemicals does man owe a great debt as to DDT.
                                                   National Academy of Sciences, 1970.

In a sober world, Earth Day would be stripped from the calendar. It is closer to a Day of Disrepute than the high holy day it has become. Its founder, Ira Einhorn, was a homicidal crackpot. Its patron saint, viewed in retrospect, was a muckraking technophobe who bent data to an activist mission. High intentions notwithstanding, Rachel Carson did untold damage to millions of the world’s poor.

She was a gifted writer who brought to her passionate assault on pesticides—most tragically, DDT—the moral urgency of a Puritan preacher. Robert H. Nelson, an economist formerly in the U.S. Department of the Interior, wrote of Carson’s Calvinism-without-God:

While superficially a work of popular science, Silent Spring was ultimately a religious treatise. It called on Americans to reform their ways, to renounce their false worship of the dominant secular religion of progress of 20^th century America.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring came at just the right time. Through the 1950s, into the 60s, cataclysm was considered likely. Civil defense drills were a familiar routine. School children practiced crouching under their desks, arms around their heads, until the all-clear sounded. President Kennedy approved an initiative to install fallout shelters around the country. The population-destroying neutron bomb, developed in 1958, awaited testing in Nevada. 

Nevil Shute’s convincing, post-apocalyptic novel On the Beach proved a popular triumph that lasted decades past its publication in 1957. Two years later came Stanley Kramer’s harrowing movie version. It chilled the generation that watched. Deluge was in the air. Eco-catastrophe was the next lap in the doomsday marathon of the Cold War era.

The Cold War waned. Apocalyptic imaginations sought intimations of calamity elsewhere. Nature writing with strong environmentalist leanings was widely read in the post-World War II era. It was a short walk from inheritors of nineteenth century nature cults—such as John Muir and Also Leopold—to an indictment of industrial civilization. The end of humanity was still in sight, if not from nuclear fallout, then from—in an over-heated quote that Carson threw against DDT—“diabolical means of insect control.” 

In the terrible wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Carson rose to declare “the parallel between chemicals and radiation is exact and inescapable.” It was neither. Nevertheless, Silent Spring warns that genetic deterioration through chemical agents “is the menace of our time, the last and greatest danger to our civilization.”

Carson’s zealotry tipped into mendacity with momentous consequences. Even Mark Lytle’s sympathetic biography The Gentle Subversive admits:

Carson was not always neutral in her use of sources and . . . she was sometimes driven by moral fervor more than by scientific evidence. Indeed, her use of evidence was selective.

Her vilification of DDT and other pest-control chemicals in agriculture exceeded warranted criticism of spraying methods. She aimed further: to rid the world of betrayal by chemistry so that humanity could return to an imagined state of harmony with nature. But that golden age never existed; pre-industrial peoples modified their environments throughout history. Precluding the public health benefits of DDT has had a toxic legacy, the burden of it borne on the backs of developing nations.

The best way to observe Earth Day is to inquire into Carson’s disfiguring prose, eloquent in its misuse of science. At your fingertips is Robert Zubrin’s “The Truth About DDT and Silent Spring,” (The New Atlantis, September 27, 2012). Available online, it summarizes Zubrin’s arguments, developed in detail and fastidiously documented, in Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Cult of Antihumanism (2012).

Lola Alvarez Bravo. Homenaje (1949). Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.

Zubrin points beyond Carson’s health scares and failed apocalyptic prophecies to the ascent of Malthusian population control agendas within the environmental movement. [Jeffrey Sachs, invited to address the Vatican workshop this week on climate change, is a key evangelist for salvation by population control.] In sum:

As a literary work, it [Silent Spring] was a masterpiece, and as such, received rave reviews everywhere. Deeply moved by Carson’s poignant depiction of a lifeless future, millions of well-meaning people rallied to her banner. Virtually at a stroke, environmentalism grew from a narrow aristocratic cult into a crusading liberal mass movement.

While excellent literature, however, Silent Spring was very poor science. Carson claimed that DDT was threatening many avian species with imminent extinction. Her evidence for this, however, was anecdotal and unfounded. ... In terms of DDT specifically, in her chapter on cancer she reported that one expert “now gives DDT the definite rating of a ‘chemical carcinogen.’” These alarming assertions were false as well.

Zubrin examines in turn each of the false claims made by Carson herself and by the crusade launched after her death by Charles Wurster, co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund. Wurster claimed that DDT in seawater threatened all higher marine life and possibly human life as well. Paul Ehrlich, frothing prophet of eco-doom, seized the claim and predicted the end of the oceans in 1979. Zubrin concludes:

For the record, 1979 has come and gone, and life in the world’s oceans has continued to flourish gloriously. But, as a result of the mendacity and actions of Carson, Ruckelshaus, Wurster, Ehrlich, and their allies, DDT has been banned, and hundreds of millions of people who might have lived to enjoy those oceans, to sail on them, fish in them, surf in them, or swim in them, to play on their beaches or write poems about their sunsets, are dead.

At the End of the World, the Sea Will Burn. Codex of Predis (1476). Royal Library, Turin.

Charles T. Rubin, in The Green Crusade (1994), compared some of Carson’s claims to the original studies she cites as sources. In analyzing the juxtapositions, he found a pattern of misrepresented studies or claims taken out of context in order to exaggerate the dangers of pesticides, making them “seem greater, more certain, or more unprecedented than the original source indicates.” Fear-mongering trumped data.

The Cato Institute published The False Crises of Rachel Carson: Silent Spring at Fifty (2012), a collection of carefully researched essays to mark the half-centennial of Carson’s parables of reckoning. It examines the science on which Silent Spring was built, together with the policy consequences of its alarms. Included is an insightful discussion of the pernicious repercussions of the “precautionary principle” spawned by Carson’s book. A strategy for coping with scientific uncertainty, the principle pushes the sensible axiom “better safe than sorry” to crippling, and illusory, zero-risk extremes.

Perhaps the kindest way to view Carson’s influence was stated by Gary Marchant, a professor of life sciences, emerging technologies, and environmental law at Arizona State University:

While Carson’s error [re: the precautionary principle] might be excused or at least understood, what cannot be forgiven or fathomed is the continued influence of her outdated zero-risk paradigm today. The unfortunate legacy of Silent Spring is the series of statutes that incorporated her premises.,,,

These statutes continue to foster an illusion that is resurgent in the rise of the precautionary principle and the growing chemophobia among consumers who flock toward “natural” and “organic” products they mistakenly believe are purer and safer than anything man-made. As Martin Lewis has written, the time has come “to recognize such thinking for the fantasy that it is. We must first relinquish our hopes for utopia if we really wish to save the earth.”

Entomologist J. Gordon Edwards, in “DDT: A Case Study in Scientific Fraud” (Journal of Physicians and Surgeons, Fall, 2004), offered this illustrative nugget:

On the first page of the book widely credited with launching the environmental movement as well as bringing about the ban on DDT, Rachel Carson wrote: “Dedicated to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who said ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.’

She surely knew that he was referring to atomic warfare, but she implied that he meant there were deadly hazards from chemicals such as DDT. Because I had already found a great many untruths in her book, I obtained a copy of Dr. Schweitzer’s autobiography to see whether he even mentioned DDT. He wrote: “How much labor and waste of time, these wicked insects do cause, but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us.”

Edwards follows other critics in rejecting her “dramatically false” conclusions and clarifying the science on which they were based. Most interesting is his discussion of the effect of the DDT ban on science itself. He viewed the ban as a watershed in which science compromised itself by sacrificing disciplined scientific methodology to advocacy.

By now, in the the climate change debate, that compromise has metastasized into a canonical imperative.

Note: 

Martin W. Lewis, referred to by Marchant, is a geographer currently teaching at Stanford, and author of Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (Duke University Press, 1992.

William Rucklehaus, mentioned by Zubrin, was head of the newly formed (1971) Environmental Protection Agency. He overruled the scientific findings of the seven-month long EPA inquest which found no valid reason to ban DDT.

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A few days before the last of the Vatican’s three climate workshops, the Italian parliament sped up the divorce process. The new law cuts the time Italians have to wait for a divorce: from three years to six months in uncontested cases; one year in contested ones. It was approved with a breathtaking vote of 398 for, 28 against (6 abstentions),

Until now, Italians in a hurry to decouple had to be clever. Resourceful mates could establish false residences in other EU countries, and file for divorce where strings were looser. (Romania, a favored spot.) Back home again, their round-about quickie would be recognized in accord with EU regulations. Now, Italy has extended that courtesy to the unresourceful as well.

Rorate Coeli translated Sandro Magister’s blog comment on parliament’s latest repudiation of Church teaching on divorce:

This, in a parliament crammed with Catholics; in a government where numerous ministers and the Prime Minster are Catholics and the proposer of the new law, Alessia Morani, a lawyer specializing in marriage law, defining herself as a “mature, democratic Catholic.”

Philip Pullella, writing for Reuters, quotes Church historian Alberto Melloni: 

The Church really didn’t even put up a fight this time because they realized that it was a lost cause and did not want to fall flat on its [sic] face with a useless act of heroism.

Useless act of heroism. Like submitting to crucifixion? Like walking to one’s own decapitation whispering Jesus’ name in anguish and terror? Like resisting the siren call of some imagined institutional triumph—a renewed Christendom—built, this time, on an environmentalist creed?

Climate march in Toronto. Photo: Milan Ilnycky, Toronto350.org.

What to do with an inconvenient cross? Closet it. Pragmatism is, arguably, a derivative of prudence, a virtue. Better to align with the ascendant orthodoxy of the day. Better still if alignment crystallizes in traditional religious language and the principled rhetoric of compassion for the poor.

Italy’s expedited divorce law speaks eloquently of the Church’s loss of credibility in sexual matters. Can the collapse of the Church’s power of moral suasion in sexual and marital matters be compensated for—if not downplayed altogether—by going Green? Does the climate summit staged by the Vatican, at papal invitation and under the seal of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, represent an ex oficio capitulation to the New Faith?

People’s Climate March, NYC, September 21, 2014. An estimated 311,000 people participated.

Eco-spirituality is embraceable by all, no matter one’s sexual practices, marital entanglements, race, class, or gender preference. Franciscan in its seductive embrace of all things great and small, eco-piety discourages fertility in the name of future generations who will need room for themselves. It woos the Vatican into granting a platform to two of the world’s most influential promoters of population control: abortion evangelists Ki-ban Moon and Jeffrey Sachs.

Moon uses his position as UN Secretary-General to support abortion rights around the world and proselytize for more abortion facilities in conflict zones. Sachs, a global development guru at the UN, is the darling of that other world-improver George Soros. Fertility reduction is a holy cause. In “Bursting at the Seams,” his 2007 series of Reith Lectures, he insisted on the need to “stabilize fertility.”

Rebecca Oas, writing for LifeNews in 2013, discussed Sachs’ contribution to the U.N.’s “Sustainable Development Goals,” which go into effect this year. These goals recast earlier Millennium objectives and institute a global scheme that ties development aid to a nation’s commitment to reducing population. Ms. Oas described Sachs’ statement of his priorities:

Sachs . . . spoke of “a world that has become very crowded” with people who are increasingly “trespassing on fundamental planetary boundaries.” He had in hand a report proposal of the president of the 67^th General Assembly recommending ten broad goals that included “rapid voluntary reduction of fertility” in countries with total fertility rates above 3 children per woman (only Africa has fertility that high), and anywhere where fertility rates are above replacement level. [She adds that very few countries outside Africa have above replacement level fertility. But according to 2013 CBS report, the birth rate of Muslims, while declining, is 3.51.]

Sachs ran a global campaign to have abortion language included in the Millennium Development Goals when they were first developed and again at their five-year review. His effort was rejected.

Sachs expressed the hope his new ten goals would be taught in schools around the globe. He repeatedly compared them to the Ten Commandments.

Trespassing on planetary boundaries. Listen, and you can hear the ghost of Margaret Sanger crooning, “Well done.” Keep listening. From somewhere deep within the static comes an echo of Lebensraum. The National Socialists aspired to clear Eastern Europe of its human vermin. Today’s world-improvers would clear the globe.

The crowning document to emerge from the Vatican summit was co-prepared by Jeffrey Sachs. 

Ponder that. 

Facebook cover photo. Available for uploading.

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Publicity is meaningless for an artist. If the pictures are good, it doesn’t matter who took them, and if the pictures are not good, it also doesn’t matter who took them.
                                                              Lu Nan

Our point-and-shoot culture is awash in photographs. The reigning snapshot aesthetic has grown threadbare,  exhausted by its own success. What began decades ago as a “Kodak moment” has metastasized into an infinity of banal images. The snapshot is modernity’s visual correlative to lives measured out in coffee spoons.

But there are other means of measurement. Lu Nan, China’s foremost documentary photographer, uses his camera to gauge the distance between the misery of the body—the transience and fragility of it—and our hopes for it. In these photos, the agony of existence burns with a lyricism and a reverence that sear the soul. Here is the mystery of man laid bare by poverty and illness. Even here on the margins of despair come sudden, brief illuminations of man’s orientation toward the eternal.

Lu Nan. Mental Hospital, Sichuan, China (1990).

Born in Bejing in 1962, Lu Nan was fourteen when Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ended. Like others of his generation, he was raised to survive within a culture lethally antagonistic to religion. Yet the work of this non-religious man is infused with a rare sense of the holy. All of it, from Myanmar prisons to Tibetan homes, brings urgency to Jean Mouroux’s 1948 prophecy: “What is at stake in our civilization is whether man shall remain—or re-become—a sacred thing.” Res sacra, homo.

Lu Nan. Mental Patient.

Lu Nan’s great trilogy—three distinct portfolios totaling 225 photographs—took fifteen years to complete. The first set depicts patients in China’s mental hospitals; the third surveys the life of Tibetan peasants. The middle set (On the Road, 1992-98), about the prohibited devotions of Chinese Catholics, was dangerous to create. Like his subjects, he risked arrest and prosecution as he worked. In 2009, he spent three months photographing the inmates of Myanmar prisons.

Lu Nan. Prisoner Trying to Dress. Myanmar (2009).

He rejects assertions that he is interested only in the underprivileged and the marginal. He answers that he is interested in man, in the shared human predicament: “Human lives should not be labeled. Labels cover our eyes and make many things invisible to us.”

Lu Nan. Yunnan Province (1993). Miao tribe Catholics visiting the grave of a relative.

Protective of his private life, Lu Nan rarely attends public occasions, and often refuses to be photographed himself. He also has a habit of signing his works under different names and has been know to surrender his copyright claims on some works. Contrary to art’s pretensions, and alert to the vanity of celebrity, he says he would be satisfied if his photographs were appreciated by five people in the next twenty five years. A member of the elite Magnum Photos, Lu Nan has earned far wider acknowledgment than that. 

Note: Text that appears under the photographs below is Lu Nan’s own identifying comment.

Lu Nan. Shaanxi Province (1992). Han Ying Fang, 71 years old, is a fifth generation Catholic in the family. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Army raided each Catholic home, confiscating bibles and other religious references. If the order was not obeyed during a given period, they were severely punished at town meetings. At the time, Han Ying Fang’s husband hid this crucifix in the ceiling, and it has survived to this day.

Lu Nan. Shaanxi Province (1995). Li Hu is 82 years old. He is a faithful believer. He made a coffin for himself five years ago. On the coffin is written: I BELIEVE IN THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. He says, “I believe in eternal life. this coffin is a hut for my rotten body, but my soul is offered to God.”

Lu Nan. Yunnan Province (1993). The funeral of a Tibetan Catholic girl, 4 years old, who had died of a sudden illness. This village is located in the heart of the mountains, and it takes two and a half days to reach the nearest hospital. Children with an illness cannot often get cured, and on average, one or two die very young each year.

Lu Wan. Shaanxi Province. Duan Yuxin, 82 years old, has been suffering mental illness for mor than 60 years. She recites the rosary throughout the village day and night. From 1966 to 1976 when religion was not allowed, she was the only person who could publicly say the rosary. During that period, many church members spent nights with her on her bed saying the rosary together. Today, she is seen as an important member of the church and is treated with respect.

Lu Nan. Shaanxi Province (1992). In China, the number of the ordained is far smaller than the Catholic population. Sometimes a Father has to hear nearly a thousand confessions.

Lu Nan. Shaanxi Province (1995). Mass is offered in a Catholic’s home in a village with no local church. Mass in a family house is officially prohibited by the government. But “unofficial churches” take the risk.

Lu Nan. Inner Mongolia (1992). Sister Maria, 70 years old, with an orphan she has adopted. The baby must have been a “Chaoshengzi,” the second child of a one-child-family policy. In this village, if a Chaoshengzi is found, the parents are fined 3000 Yuan. Those who have adopted a Chaoshengzi are also fined. Sister Maria helplessly hid the babies in a sheep barn, or left them in the care of distant families, but authorities still did come to investigate her upon catching a rumor. The Sister kept insisting that the babies had died, and she was finally released. Sister Maria is a Sister in laity [sic], and she looks after the villagers who are ill, baptizes villagers, and devotes herself to other religious activities voluntarily.

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Those old sayings stay with us for good reason. Our bones absorb them in childhood; we can never outgrow them. Later, as adults, we find ourselves forever surprised by the truth of them. No small part of our initial moral education is owed to Aesop. His bestiary brought warnings against all kinds of vanity, thick-headed mischief, and unkindness. His dictums came to us together with our first prayers.

Let us not fret here over his status as an historical figure or, as some surmise, a legendary one. What matters is that, writing three centuries before the author of Ecclesiastes, the creator of these tales remains our first catechist. Much on my mind recently have been two aphorisms we owe to the body of work identified as his: You are known by the company you keep and, alternately, Birds of a feather flock together.

Walter Crane. Title Page. The Baby’s Own Aesop (1877). The Pierpont Morgan Library, NYC.

Antiquity did not shy from the reality—the necessity—of bringing judgment to bear on character. No dithering non-judgmentalism addled Graeco-Roman wits. A swift, irrevocable act of judgment is central to two familiar Aesop’s fables. In The Donkey and the Purchaser, a shrewd farmer knows immediately the character of the animal he has bought by its beeline to the laziest, least productive of his barnyard companions. 

Moral: Man is known by the company he keeps.

In The Farmer and the Stork, a net spread over newly seeded ground traps a stork amid pilfering cranes and geese. The stork pleads for his life. He is, he insists, a worthy stork, a bird of excellent character and not to be confused with that riff-raff caught in the net. Besides, he had no idea those fellows were stealing seeds. But the farmer will have none of it. Sorry, stork.

Moral: Birds of a feather flock together.

Anonymous. Agricola et Ciconia, Translation by Hieronymous Osius (1574).

Appropriate to contemporary power struggles in the Vatican, with its factions and shifting alliances, the fables are a useful guide to the complexion of Francis’ tenure. The sanity of the ancient fabulist cuts through obfuscating decorums that grow by accretion, like a coral reef, around the papacy. In Aesop’s day as in our own, men can be known by the company they keep. And Francis keeps close to two curious birds: Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodríquez Maradiaga and Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernández of Argentina.

Walter Crane. The Farmer & The Stork. Illustration in The Baby’s Own Aesop (1877).

Vatican-watcher John Allen, writing on Crux, recently dubbed the cardinal a “vice-pope,” plausibly the second most powerful man in the Church:

He’s the leading symbol of an entire cohort of center-left churchmen who seemed marginalized not so long ago, but who today are clearly back in the game.

Among factors in that earlier marginalization were a tendency to malapropos statements plus an unwelcome whiff of anti-semitism. Allen reports that he likened criticism of the Church over the child abuse scandal to persecution under Nero, Diacletian, Hitler and Stalin. Moreover:

He went as far as to suggest that the American media’s obsession with the scandals was a way to distract attention from the Israel/Palestinian conflict, hinting that it reflected the influence of a Jewish lobby. . . .

In the years to come, there was whispering that Rodríguez’s rhetoric wasn’t matched by a command of policy details, including affairs in his own country.

Head of Caritas Internationalis, Maradiaga is on record insisting that the freedom to immigrate is a human right. He does not trouble to note that one nation’s moral obligation to permit emigration does not obligate any other nation to suspend its requirements for legal arrival by accommodating illegal entrants. With the absence of rule of law driving havoc in the cardinal’s own Honduras, it is unclear how the poor can be served for any length of time by suspending the bedrock of civil society elsewhere.

At a recent press conference in Rome, the cardinal was back in the news with Manichean denunciations of critics of Francis’ climate ambitions:

The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that does not want to stop ruining the environment because they [sic] don’t want to give up their profits.

The pathetic fallacy inherent in ascribing a malevolent want to complex market systems is demagogic. Personification is a poeticism, not a means of critique. Applied here, it is as misleading as it is sentimental; it reveals the demonizing temper of old Soviet tracts. An ideological position that echoes leaflets from the October Revolution, the cardinal’s dime store bolshevism reduces Christianity to a political movement that conforms to the dominant trend among left-leaning elites.

Capitalism’s imperfections are real. No one denies that; nor does anyone deny the validity of reasonable regulation. At the same time, the never-fully-free market has produced sustained growth in living standards for more people than any other system ever devised. It has taught nations that prosperity is not a zero-sum game. Even Thomas Piketty, the best-selling French economist touted by Maradiaga last year, has since walked back his now-famous prediction that capitalism will generate “unsustainable inequalities” in this century.

How else does the cardinal propose that nations organize mechanisms for the creation and distribution of those goods, services and opportunities for initiative that make possible the alleviation of poverty? Central planning? Five year plans? The Venezuelan model or the Cuban one? Maradiaga suggests no alternative to the capitalism he vilifies. But we can gauge the nature of that unspecified vision by looking at the aims of the Global Catholic Environmental Movement, of which Caritas Internationalis is a critical part. The movement seeks to insure that the climate does not warm more than 1.5° Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels.

Think through the implications of that to gain purchase on the quality of mind counseling the man elected to guide a Church consecrated to Truth. We are left to pray that more heedful and substantive advisers assert themselves.

Milo Winter. The Ass & His Driver. Illustration for The Aesop for Children (1919).

Then there is that other trusted adviser, Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernández of Argentina. A native of Buenos Aires and member of the pope’s inner circle, he worked closely with Jorge Bergolio drafting the then-archbishop’s major speeches and letters. Fernández was crucial to the composition of Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium and ghost-wrote the (now postponed) encyclical on climate change.

Postponement is the consequence of disapproval—on theological grounds—by Cardinal Gerhard Müller of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. Vatican scuttlebutt has it that the eco-encyclical will be downgraded, emerging simply as a statement. We will see. What matters at the moment are the archbishop’s dispositions and cast of mind. 

Who is the theologian behind two papal encyclicals? One hint might be the book he wrote twenty years ago: Sáname Con Tu Boca: el Arte de Besar (Heal Me With Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing). The choice of nouns is telling. A kiss can have ritual significance. But the word mouth, a body part, conjures up other behaviors. It certainly did for the producers of an Argentinian television drama Esperanza Mia, the saga of a priest and nun secretly engaged in a love affair. The script called for display of Fernández’s book and the reading of passages from it. Clearly, the archbishop is a versatile writer.

I do not know what year this photograph of Fernández was taken. All that is obvious is that it is a staged shot. It is impossible not to wonder what prompts a priest to pose for the camera in this attitude. Possibly it is an Argentine commonplace that loses—or gains—too much in translation. But the instant I saw it I thought of Mann’s Death in Venice. Here is Gustave Aschenbach pining wistfully for Tadzio. 

It is hard to know what to say. Let me leave the last word on this pair of papal intimates—Maradiaga and Fernández— to Aesop. In The Fox & The Toad, also called The Quack Frog, a well-tailored toad comes to town passing himself off as a learned physician and promising cures for ailments. A skeptical fox pipes up to ask, “How can we believe you if you cannot heal yourself of that ugly wrinkled skin?”

Arthur Rackham. The Quack Frog (1900).


Moral: Those who would mend others, should first mend themselves. Or, as we are more used to phrasing it: Physician, heal thyself.

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I raked a grave last evening.

It was twilight when I got there. Little time was left to work. It was just enough. The race against sunset and total darkness was a welcome distraction from the ache of tending a grave that had to be dug too soon. Ground was opened before the actuarial tables approved and assented to it.

I brought two rakes with me. The steel one is hardy, needed to scrape away pebbles and the imbedded straw of winter’s decay. A bamboo one has delicate tines, better to smooth the packaged top soil I carried along. My blend of grass and clover seed would take more readily if it were raked lightly into fresh dirt. A small-leafed, low-growing perennial, this mini-clover makes a good helpmate for ordinary turf grass. It fixes nitrogen in the soil, a favor to lawns left pretty much on their own. I was pleased with the mix, glad to be getting it down before an expected rain.

Anonymous. Illustration for All Saints’ Day. Le Petite Journal, Paris, 9 November 1902.

Friends ask: Why do you bother? Is there no groundskeeper who can look after things? There should be a maintenance contract, you know. You really ought to have one.

Yes, I suppose so. But a modest little country cemetery is not up to offering the lawn services attached to the price of that peculiar piece of real estate: a burial plot. There is a groundskeeper. He lives on site in an old white frame house just beyond the Civil-War-era graves. Now and again, he rides a tractor mower around and is careful to put flags by the headstones of veterans. But that is the limit of his gardening.

I like it that way. A few towns over from mine, a sprawling, popular Catholic cemetery announces its landscape policy in tones better suited to leasing a safe deposit box:

For reasons of uniform beauty as well as safety and insurance concerns, only employees or licensed contractors with permits from cemetery management may cut, fertilize, and add chemicals to the landscape.

So wooden. Such an absurd curtsy to liability. And, as night follows day these days, environmentally exquisite. Please, no illicit daffodil bulbs; no unlicensed doses of Miracle-Grow.

Spare me the embrace of the managerial mind. Uniform beauty be damned. This is not Arlington, not a military cemetery honoring the collective bond of service that exacted its price. Each gravestone here is an emphatic marker of a singular death; each one declares the mortal dissolution of a distinct individual. Every grave holds a specific, dappled history, one that ended in its own particular suffering. Polite, homogenized uniformity would not keep faith with the separate griefs solemnized here on a road into town.

Alexandru Neacsu died four years ago. No headstone yet. Someone left a votive candle last autumn.

I can no more abandon a dead beloved to a licensed contractor than I could the living person. I resent the thought of a nameless, impersonal caretaker. The final consequence of a mechanical custodian is the forfeit of any dread of that inexorable slippage into the void signaled by a headstone. Besides, it is good to put your hands in dirt from time to time. It is the stuff we are made of; the stuff that one day reclaims us—an elemental memento mori superior to all others.

At every Mass we pray for the dead. Yet only a grudging second is allotted to them. Time is gone before we can summon more than a single name. How do we call for heaven’s eye onto Grandpa Powey himself, toward Great Aunt Kitty, Uncle Jack, a dear sister-in-law, all those many others who once were close? No length of silence is left for them. We must hurry to get on with things. The dead we remember today—a quick phrase for an abstract category.

The dead are a write-off at morning Mass.  Their names are a deflection from the unctuous litany of petitions drawn from last evening’s news. How kindly of us to take note of distant victims of the universe’s disinterest: the plane crash here, the hurricane there, a train derailment somewhere, earthquakes half a world away. By contrast, the dead at our own doorstep are too stern a bewilderment to linger over.

Little Giles, in my parish, wanted to be The Little Engine That Could. But he could not.

We purchase Mass cards, send names to the Purgatorial Society, enter the names of the deceased in perpetual enrollments. These are good and gracious things, precious in themselves. Too often, they are all that is available to us. But it is not our own knee that touches the ground to beg, “Forsake not the work of thine own hands, Lord.”

Hands. The labor of remembrance requires more than memory. Our hands want something to work. We need to know what to do with them, how to give them loving purpose. It matters to have something to touch, to stroke or knead. We crave anything that might transfigure memory into sweet solidity.

Writing of his life as a widower, Julian Barnes recalls rubbing oil on his wife’s back. She had had dry skin and could not reach around herself. Retrospective now, and in mourning, he rubs oil into the oak of her grave marker to keep it moist and protected against the weather. It is something.

There is still work to do for those we have loved. The effort does not end with death. Only the texture of it changes.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Visitation (1969). Banque d’images, ADAGP.

H. L. Mencken was fifty when he married Sara Haardt in 1930. After not quite five years of marriage, she died of meningitis. Five years later, Mencken wrote:

It is a literal fact that I still think of Sara every day of my life and almost every hour of the day. Whenever I see anything she would have liked, I find myself saying I’ll buy it and take it to her, and I am always thinking of things to tell her.

Four years into his own widowhood, Barnes, an admitted atheist, could still confess:

What those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but it doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

He adds:

So I talk to her constantly. This feels as normal as it is necessary. . . .  Outsiders might find this an eccentric, or “morbid,” or self-deceiving habit; but outsiders are by definition those who have not known grief. I externalize her easily and naturally because by now I have internalized her. The paradox of grief: if I have survived what is now four years of her absence, it is because I have had four years of her presence. And her active continuance disproves what I had earlier pessimistically asserted. Grief can, after all, in some ways, turn out to be a moral space.

•   •   •   •

Oh, remember that you fashioned me from clay! Will you then bring me down to dust again? Did you not pour me out as milk, and thicken me like cheese? With skin and flesh you clothed me, with bones and sinews knit me together. Grace and favor you granted me, and providence has preserved my spirit. (Job 10)

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Decadence was brought about by .  .  .  the surfeit of fine art and the love of the bizarre.
                                                     Voltaire (1748)

Chris Burden died last month, close to Caitlyn Jenner’s birth on Wikipedia. Timing is everything.

Burden gained world fame as a performance artist in the genre’s heyday. Self-wounding was integral to the act. Two years before Bruce Jenner won an Olympic Gold Medal, Burden starred in his own crucifixion. In 1976, he had himself nailed, Christ-like, to the back of a Volkswagon in a performance piece called Trans-Fixed.

His body was his canvas, body parts his material. Throughout the Seventies, he crawled on glass, suffered electric shocks, starved himself, arranged to be shot, kicked down stairs, dropped from heights, and almost drowned. No athlete endured more pain than Burden. He could easily have taken for himself Jenner’s own comment on the agonies of training for the decathlon: “I’ve got the rest of my life to recover. Who cares how much it hurts.”

You see where this is going, don’t you?

Call him Bruce or call him Caitlyn, you cannot deny the pathos of the man. At the end of the day, are there any of us who have not toyed with one fool’s paradise or another? His is more public and spectacular than most. Still, Jenner himself earns mainly pity. So does his ex-wife of twenty-four years, abandoned to a culture that mistakes support for acquiescence. Leave this melancholy pair to their mirage.

Save scorn—store it up in spades—for Vanity Fair, a fancy dress peep show for the bored and witless. It trumpets a troubled man’s delusional lust for self-mutilation as a heroic epiphany, part fashion statement, part civil rights coup. No matter the falsity. Curdled realities sell copy.

The 2015 ESPY Awards are hooked to the same pop culture drip feed. On the trot to present the Arthur Ashe Courage Award to Caitlyn Jenner, they have played a trick on themselves. They conjured away the screaming fact that the transsexed, sixty-five year old ex-athlete has more in common these days with Emma Bovary than Arthur Ashe. All Caitlyn shares with the gracious Arthur Ashe is a Y chromosome. But Flaubertian irony is lost at the party. 

William Merritt Chase. Keying Up - A Jester (1875). Pennsylvania Academy of Fine, Philadelphia

What fascinates me is the celebratory tenor of this parade into bedlam. Brass bands on the networks. Confetti everywhere. TV anchors appearing in full intellectual motley. They rear up like Lewis Carroll’s Caterpillar to give us a sentimental education in pronoun protocol—inhaled, it seems, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s LBGT Resource Center:

You can’t always know what someone’s PGP [preferred gender pronoun] is by looking at them. Asking and correctly using someone’s personal pronoun is one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their gender identity.

When someone is referred to with the wrong pronoun, it can make them feel disrespected, invalidated, dismissed, alienated, or dysphoric (or, often, all of the above.)

Such delicacy over grammar. It belies the ruthless surgical and pharmaceutical assault that sexual reassignment—aka sexual affirmation or confirmation entails. Procedures slice, pluck, and segment a person into an imitation of the opposite sex. Anyone with the stamina to withstand the violence to their anatomy and endocrine system, together with customary facial modifications, should be able to cope with mere pronouns.

Transwomen are yoked to a life-long regime of vaginal dilation. That strikes me as significantly more alienating than having to hear an occasional “him” instead of “her.” Besides, we used to have a rhyme that came in handy against irksome language: “Stick and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” (That one little verse trumps years of sensitivity training.)

Christine Jorgensen went the full monty in the 1960s. He was castrated and vaginoplacticized. As far As far as I’ve heard—not exceedingly far—Caitlyn still has the family jewels. Mainstream media greeted the unveiling of breast-augmented, Adam’s-apple-and-jaw-reduced, depilated, and hormone-saturated Caitlyn Jenner as if he were a long-awaited work of art. Which, in truth, he is. Glamorous in the 1970s, the aging Jenner has made himself glamorous again in a vulgar, fifteen-minute sort of way. He has become the apogee of performance art.

How long the performance can last is anyone’s guess. Time and gravity are ineluctable.

Polyclitus. Amazon in Combat (5th C. BC). Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Last thought: Once was a time young people read stories of mythical Amazons, warlike women who cut off a breast, better to draw a bow string in battle. Fearless, they conquered territories, founded cities, fought with Hercules. It was stirring stuff even for boys. Perhaps especially for boys. Today’s young read of—and are asked to applaud—men who maim themselves to seek their identity in pantyhose and synthetic cleavage.

Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins, pioneered in sex-reassignment surgery in the 1960s and subsequently disavowed it. He wrote last year:

“Sex change” is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.

Is this what happens when regard for the virtues of warrior culture whittles down, splinter by generational splinter, to a surfeit of regard—intoxication, really—for art and artifice? Subjectivity goes rancid. And culture decomposes on the cutting room floor in a fetid puddle of feelings.

Anonymous Illustration. A Dahomey Amazon Warrior (19th C.). Smithsonian.

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