Is he a youth? Is she a woman?
Is she a goddess or a god?

Love, fearing to be ignoble,
Hesitates and suspends its confession.

To make this beauty maudit
Each gender brought its gift.

—Théophile Gautier, Enamels and Cameos (1852)

James Slattery aka Candy Darling, transwoman, Warholian superstar and drag queen.

Gautier, writing in French a century and a half ago, used the noun sexe. It is doubtful he would have recognized the word gender except in relation to other nouns. Gender is a linguistic signifier, not a biological one. But a modern translator, speaking to his own cultural moment, observes the protocols of his time.

In our cultural climate, almost all writers, even conservative ones, surrender to the word gender, reserving sex for mere genital mechanics. Gender is a term taken from linguistics, not biology. The gender designation is arbitrary. La tavola or il tavolo, take your pick.

In the best thinking of our savants, society assigns a gender to each child born just as it does to words. But unlike words, which have to obey their assignment, we can reject the mandated designation and pick our own. Gone is any fixed relation to biology of the masculine or feminine.

This impetus toward androgyny is not as novel a peculiarity as it seems. It is the encroachment on life and law of tendencies in nineteenth century aesthetic movements. Fervent belief in the transformational powers of art and artifice, hallmark of the Decadent sensibility, has slouched its way toward us as a social phenomenon.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Mnemosyne (detail; 1881). Delaware Art Museum,Wilmington 

I was reminded of this by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith. How ambiguous are the faces of his female portraits. Is she a goddess or a god? They could easily be the faces of drag queens, physiognomy blurred by hair and cosmetics, their beauty—if that is the word—artificial. Among the Decadents, nature had had its day. The rest is style. Or, in the words of Stéphane Mallarmé, “To suggest, that is the dream.”

Jade Starling, a pop singer and celebrated host of drag shows, phrased it less elegantly. But she meant the same thing when she said in a recent interview: “Drag queens are amazing. Their artistry, their makeup, their hair. They are always stunning.”

She would get no argument from Mallarmé. And likely none from the nineteenth century English aesthetes or their French imitators. Among the Decadents, the more artificial, the more removed from nature by the labor of the artist, the more beautiful something becomes. Androgyny, with its ideals of seductive ambiguity and sensuality, emblematizes the victory of the cult of beauty over the banality of nature. 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Lady Lillith. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

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Straightaway, a housekeeping item. Several readers have emailed to ask why there is no place to comment at the end of this blog. One reader complained, “It is a nuisance having to look up responses on Facebook.” Maybe I should explain. 

World War I spoof postcard published by Cynicus Company, 1915.

The comment box is disabled for a jumble of reasons. Chief among them is the snowball effect of comments on individual readers. Positive comments roll one way; negative ones, intimidating, roll another. It matters to me that readers respond to the content of a posting on their own, without being distracted— bolstered, diluted, or bedeviled—by other respondents.

Considered remarks that amplify and extend a posting are valuable. But they are also less common than other kinds. Comment threads tend to evolve into readers signaling to each other. Sometimes it is contention for the sake of it, a kind of antler display. Too often, comment boxes offer a pretext for plugging a reader’s own website, latest book, or line of sportswear. Previously, when my comment box had been on, I sometimes thought I was hosting a dating service. “Great comment, Joe! Where can I see the rest of your stuff?” That sort of thing. 

Pablo Picasso. Card for Guillame Apollinaire, 1916. Musee Picasso, Paris.

One popular argument in favor of a comment section runs along the lines of community-building. The comment box is thought to serve as a sort of drop-in center where locals can chat and get to know each other. That is the same rationale the CEO of Starbucks once offered for the existence of the chain. I did not believe it then, and I do not believe it now.

An online community is a mirage; an e-community is no community at all. It is a faceless, soundless collection of pixels in drag as a community of persons. Hashtag Nation.

This goes against the grain, I know. And to some extent, it is an aesthetic judgment. But it is mine. I simply do not share the prevailing assumption that blogs exist as open forums for reader exchanges. That expectation is little more than the sense of entitlement peculiar to online media. James Kalb, experienced in writer/reader protocols, is dry about it: “There is something about joining an internet discussion that’s a little like putting on a clown suit.” 

Vittore Carpaccio. Legend of St. Ursula (detail, 1495). Accademia, Venice.

I have no clue to the nature or tone of what gets passed along on social media. Something about Twitter and Facebook—especially Twitter—reminds me of stalking. I have no personal account on either; am innocent of both. Is that a fault? Not sure. I just know that I care about the words of readers who take time to write off stage and under their own name. These matter to me very much. That is why an email address appears at the bottom of every post.

If clarification or correction is in order, tell me and I will make it. Thoughtful yeas and nays are forever welcome. And helpful.

•     •    •     •

Note: One reader emailed to ask what was the point of the earlier posting on Roy Strong. Forgive me. I had thought it was clear: Strong made a choice.

He preferred marriage—to a woman he did love—to living under the strictures against homosexuality of the era in which he came of age. In other words, social disapproval contained his impulses toward homosexuality.

Moral of the anecdote: When culture puts out a welcome mat, Dionysus leaps in to the parlor.

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Whatever happened to Extreme Unction? Who are the baleful liturgists who drove a stake through the sacrament and nailed it to the ground?

No need to answer that. I know who they are. They are the same ruinous bien pensants who confused the Zeitgeist of the 1960s and ‘70s with the cooing of the Holy Spirit. Let God forgive them; I cannot.

Death of Daniel O’Connell. Currier Lithograph (1847). Museum of the City of New York. 

Unction for those in extremis was stripped of its exclusive purpose and ritual dignity in the wake of Vatican II. All astringent solemnity is gone. The reduction—a theft—is implicit in the name change: sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. If the theology has not changed, the practice surely has. Last Rites are obsolete, outmoded by cultural resistance to the awful significance of a ceremony so named.

We are all sick in some way, are we not? Sick of sorrow, sick of coping, worn down by the stresses of the lived life. We want to be healed of caring too much, or cured of paralysis in caring at all. Old injuries act up, a knee is out, iron is too low, the PSA too high. Then comes that hint of cataracts, the heart murmur, or the family history of diabetes. Count in the growing list of pathogens that make the nightly news. Lastly, and for lack of greater specificity, there is what our forefathers knew as the ague. We are only made of clay; and clay breaks down.

So my parish offers what it calls a Healing Mass. One Sunday of every year, parishioners are invited to file altarward with their vulnerabilities and complaints to receive the Anointing of the Sick. The not-so-sick, the anxious, and the out-of-sorts queue, palms up, for bodily and spiritual healing. It is this same quick, casual anointing that substitutes now for the Last Rites.

The old rubrics were strict:

The sacrament may not be given more than once during the same illness, unless after receiving the sacrament, the sick person has recovered from the danger and then has a critical relapse.

That was then. In these indulgent times, so obsessed with “wellness,” the holy anointing is closer to a spa treatment than a rite of initiation into the dreaded mysteries of death. A woman I know in California wrote to tell me that she stood for anointing monthly while her husband lay terminally ill. The sacrament was prophylactic against the impending loneliness of widowhood. All to the good, the comfort of it. But heartbreak is not a mortal disease.

From the Codex Trujillo del Peru (18th C.). Real Biblioteca del Palacio Real, Madrid.

A

precious friend died not long ago. Some weeks before the end, while he was still able to speak and take the Eucharist, the local pastor came to anoint him. In requesting the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, the family anticipated Extreme Unction as they had always known it. They were wrong.

The priest commissioned to carry out this liturgy in the name of Christ arrived in dungarees, a plaid flannel shirt, and red suspenders. He had troubled to put on cologne but not his Roman collar. Was dishabille a democratic gesture toward the demotic tastes of the times? By the look of him, he had come to help with yard work. Left behind with his clerics was any visible sign of the divine Agape that was the reason for his being there.

He offered no personal words of consolation, no talk of Jesus, nothing of what it means to pass through death to life as a child of God in Christ. After a bit of light chat about his sciatica and the hazards of an icy road, he announced his intention to get on with administering the Sacrament of the Sick.

The dying man quipped, “Well, I certainly qualify.”

It was the remark of a man fully conscious, poised for accompaniment through the concluding step of the dialogue between himself and his God. But the move never came. The family was not asked to leave the room while the priest heard the man’s last confession. There was none. After a brief spasm of blessings, the priest was gone. Bewildered by grief, and constrained by deference toward a priest in their home, the family saw him politely to the door. But the deficiency stayed behind, dangling like an unpaid debt.

Some weeks later the wife asked why the traditional sacrament of Penance had been omitted. The answer: “Unless someone requests confession, we don’t offer it any more. That would be an intrusion.”

The pity of it.

Nikolai Ge. Crucifixion (1893). Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

We call it Anointing of the Sick. But the dying are not sick. Not any longer. They and sickness are finished with each other. Sickness is a tool of mortality, a loyal servant to the germ of death we were born with. In the moribund, sickness has done its work. It has accomplished what it was ordained to do. No matter now the affliction or assault that opens the grave. Every deathbed is a slaying stone.

The dying lie at the edge of the world, at the very verge of their allotted time. In their extremity, they suffer on the margin of time itself. All flesh is grass, Isaiah tells us. It shrivels at the root; dust in the wind. Where is grass on Golgotha? The place of the skull is rock. The shadow of the Cross is sharpest there. And in that shadow mercy learns its own name.

A fatal chasm exists between the hour of death and the deluge of unwelcome conditions that overtake us. Sickness yearns for treatment; death thirsts solely for redemption. And for the last rite that escorts the dying into the fellowship of those for whom time no longer exists.

Extreme Unction has been relativized, made friendly for a generation that does not want to hear the death knell in the words Last Rites. All the while, death grins in our faces.

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Instead of the sorry and unbecoming spectacle of the priest racing with death to the bedside of the sick, the Church prescribes a devout and dignified procession from church to home, with the minister assisted by clergy and acolytes and accompanied by devout layfolk . . . .

—Rubrics of the 1962 Rituale Romanum

Liturgies change for the sake of the living. Protocols adjust to the shifting tenor and tempo of the centuries. But the hour of death is ever the same. It is now, and forever shall be, what it was for the first man. The dying of the light is the one fixed point in man’s revolving kaleidoscope of circumstances. In the face of death, our new-fashioned sacramental minimalism takes on the bearing of a demonic initiative.

Stay a moment with Aimé Perret’s Viaticum in Bourgogne. Popular in its time, this nineteenth century genre scene grows more pointed in the cultural gap that separates us from the homely dignity of its subject.

Aimé Perret. Viaticum in Bourgogne (1879). Musée du Luxembourg, Paris.

We watch a small procession heading out of the ville on its way to a home beyond the picture frame. Someone farther down the road is mortally ill. The priest has been called. He carries a chalice through the slush with ritual tenderness. Two altar boys, each with a lighted torch, lead the little group. A workaday pair of parishioners guard the priest and his sacred burden with a protective canopy. Several women trudge behind. All bend into a chill wind.

This is community, possessed of a common language and repertory of gestures deemed fitting and proper to attend the mounting desolation of death. Depicted here is that old phrase Mother Church incarnate in a handful of villagers pressing on in an act of mercy. The artist and his day have disappeared. Only the painting stays, continuing to testify to the labor of the beatitudes.

Mercy, like justice to which it clings, levies strains. One of them is the embarrassment of ceremony in an unceremonious culture. Today, priests are apt to arrive with the Eucharist in their pocket, like loose change. Our final combat now is solely with pain. Viaticum is humbled by lorazapam and the blessings of morphine.

A priest in Fall River, Massachusetts, responded to the previous post with this:

Both priests and faithful in large numbers have lost faith in the power, meaning and purpose of the Sacrament [Extreme Unction]. . . . I think the problem is part of the larger eschatological confusion: if everyone goes to heaven, the sacrament can’t be that important, can it?

Eschatological confusion . Every age selects its symbols, preferring some over others, to give expression to those unspoken inclinations of the collective soul. The signs and rituals that betoken traditional eschatology—Last Rites among them—are losing their resonance. We have given a quietus to the death knell, silenced the treble of the Sanctus bell. Altar rails, sturdy emblems of distinction between the sacred and profane, surrendered dominion to modernity’s self-confidence. The sovereignty of modern man spurns genuflection. Our clergy grow uneasy in clerical dress.

And those direful old frescoes of the damned? Their claim on art increases as their hold on lives diminishes. The damned exist for us now only in horror movies. We have lost sight of them among ourselves. Allegories of the weighing of souls ended with those generations who trembled to speak of God as a consuming fire. Now we speak only of love. Nothing hangs in the balance for us good folk. St. Michael has put down his scales and taken up guitar.

Anonymous. Hell (15th C.). Church of St. Petronius, Bologna.

•     •     •     •

Addendum: Before you leave, let me talk a little about the painting as a thing crafted.

The incident depicted in Viaticum is not fictional, however much staging in the warmth of Perret’s studio might have been necessary afterward to complete the painting. The dramatis personae were all actual villagers from Bois le Roi in southern France. The priest, Abbé Dusarger, was no stranger to calls to the bedside of a dying farmer. Perret lived and worked in Bois le Roi as well as in Paris; he knew the local priest.

I cannot resist wondering if Perret worked up the painting from an initial photograph. Note the turn of one altar boy’s head toward the viewer, as if toward a camera. Hardly conclusive in itself but suggestive in light of photography having been well established by the time Perret set to work. The British Journal of Photography had begun reviewing photography exhibitions in 1854. A quarter century later, the camera was as much a tool for working painters as an independent medium. It is particularly useful for capturing motion.

Delacroix (d. 1863) famously insisted that any artist worth his salt should be able to sketch a figure falling from a building in the time it takes to hit the ground. True. But it took artists no time at all to know that a camera is quicker. The year Viaticum was painted, the gelatin dry plate was nearly a decade old. Its invention made possible a wide range of camera designs from relatively small hand-held ones to bulky field cameras.

Admired by Van Gogh for his draftsmanship, Perret was fond of processional scenes. His best known are set theatrically in the eighteenth century. Like any parade, they are lively excuses for costumes. Audiences for the 1876 Salon were as taken with historic fashions as we are. (Think of the popularity of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute.) Salon success brought Perret a place in the sun and subsequent honors. The French government purchased Viaticum for the Luxembourg Palace where it hangs in dogged witness to France’s jilted heritage as eldest daughter of the Church. 

Note: A reader with a better grasp of French geography than mine, writes to correct me on the whereabouts of Bois le Roi. It is “not in the South of France; it lays to the South East of Paris, between the Île de France (the Paris region) in the north and Rhône-Alpes (the Lyon region) in the South.” 

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At this point, it seems opportune to recall all the primitive religions, the Animist type of religion, which puts first emphasis on the worship of their ancestors. It seems that those who practice it are particularly close to Christianity. Among them the missionaries of the Church more easily find a common language.
                                           —John Paul II, Passing the Threshold of Hope

To serve the loa [spirits], you have to be a Catholic.
                                          —Haitian peasant

The future of the Church in Europe is bleak. By Philip Jenkins’ reckoning, quoted in a 2002 interview for Atlantic: “Christianity is largely a dead issue.” But we can take heart from the explosive growth of the Church in Africa, or what is buoyantly termed the Global South.

Ram decorated for sacrifice (1950s), Senegal.Quai Branly Museum, Paris.

Or can we? When the Church’s center of gravity has completed its transit to the Southern Hemisphere, would any Catholic alive today still recognize it? It is hazardous to predict the full effect of that demographic shift on the historical practices of Christianity. Still, we ought not discount the chance that this tectonic shift could yield a syncretic, creole Christianity more congenial to animism than Thomism.

In 2000, Buti Joseph Tihagale, currently Archbishop of Johannesburg, gave an interview to The Southern Cross, a South African weekly. In it, he suggested incorporating blood libations into liturgies celebrated by African Catholics:

Sacrifice to the ancestors continues to be a very common practice among Africans. The slaughtering of an animal—cow or sheep—takes place wherever there is a funeral or a marriage feast, or in times of illness, unemployment, family feuds, or the birth of a child.

He recommended that the practice be considered within the approved orbit of Vatican invitation to adapt a culture’s special customs: “Is there a way to integrate this custom with their Christian belief as a step toward meaningful inculturation?” Disavowing any reversion to Old Testament animal sacrifices, the then-bishop begged the question of where this ritual blood was to come from, where to be drawn. Tihagale discreetly left others with the sticky issue of when and by what means fresh blood would be introduced into the liturgy.

Animal sacrifice (c. 1900), Vietnam. Adoc-Photos.

The Archbishop’s nod to animist ritual brings to mind the mix of African rites and Christian observances at the heart of Voodoo (alternately, Vodun or Vodou). A slantwise glimpse into the temper of this Catholicism aborning in the Global South can be had in Alfred Métraux’s Voodoo in Haiti, originally published by Oxford University Press in 1959. More that a half century on, it remains a stellar text—methodical, prudent, free of theoretical axe-grinding—on the transplanting of the cult of vodú from West Africa to Haiti.

A grasp of Voodoo’s beliefs, liturgies, social function, and ties with Christianity are a sobering brace against good-willed complacency and incautious optimism:

The peasant who sacrifices to the loa, who is possessed by them, who every Saturday answers the call of the drums, does not believe . . . that he is behaving like a pagan and offending the Church. On the contrary, he likes to think of himself as a good Catholic and contributes to the salary of his curé without hesitation. This “idolater” would be wretched if he were excluded from Communion or if he were forbidden to marry or baptize his children in church.

Medicine bundle wrapped around a monkey skull. Benin. Werner Forman, NY.

Anticipating Archbishop Tihagale, Métraux wrote:

Once when I asked a fervent Catholic whether he had finally finished with Voodoo, he replied that he would always be faithful to the Catholic Church but nothing could make him give up the worship of loa who had always protected his family.

Métraux continued:

The hunsi [assistant to a Voodoo priest] .  .  .  saw nothing wrong in attending Mass after dancing all night for the loa. It takes a white man’s mentality to be shocked that a hungan or mambo [priest or priestess] can march beside a curé at the head of a procession without a trace of shame.

Numerical growth tells us nothing about the blurring of religious distinctions among African congregations or among clergy themselves. A priest might preach Christianity by day and, under cover of the communion of saints, visit an animist divine at night to consult his forefathers.

S.E. Bottox. Fall of Man (20th C.), Haiti. Collection of Manu Sassoomian, New York.

Animists live in an enchanted world. It is a gyre of spirits, genies, demons, and the ritual magic to appease, bridle, or steer them:

A wood cutter about to chop down a tree will give the trunk a few taps with the reverse of his axe, so as to warn the resident soul and give it time to get out. To be on the safe side, he will even recite a prayer and invoke the Holy Spirit.

Poets, romantics, and Third World fanciers smile on enchantment. Modernity’s flawed, sometimes illusory, attachment to rationality is never enough to conjure away the realities of living and dying in the shadow of the Cross. Now comes the next Christendom, with its bewitchments, charisma, and ecstasies Christ-tinted to soothe the uneasy.

What price for this emergent re-enchantment? Who can say? Or perhaps it has already been said and we have only to remember the words. Commenting on nostalgia for the ideals of pagan nature worship—to which ancestor worship is aligned—Chesterton wrote:

He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate.

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Among the many thoughtful letters that came in response to the previous post, one in particular articulated thoughts that you yourselves might have. The one below comes from a man familiar with the founding of an Anglican Mission for Aborigines in North Queensland. Herewith: 

Animal Sacrifice. Tomb of Iti-Ibi-Iger (2190-1976 BC), Egypt. Museo Egizo, Turin.

Dear Maureen:

I have often wanted to reply to your articles, but until I read the one on why you do not allow comments at the bottom of your articles on First Things, I had never noticed your email address . . . . When I read your explanation - that you welcomed responses, but that you wanted any response to be to what you said rather than to third party interpretations of what you said - I was impressed!

So, to the topic of this week’s edition of First Things: “Lessons from Haiti”.

. . . I have a reasonable grasp of the historical dilemma faced by the church as it pushed into East Asia, and the war between the Jesuits and the Franciscans over adapting Christianity to Chinese culture. It might be argued that the Franciscan victory in this matter saved the church from “a syncretic, creole Christianity more congenial to animism than Thomism.” On the other hand it might have set the church on a trajectory that could only yield its eventual eclipse in Europe. Unfaithful in Asia to the spirit which enabled it to absorb pagan practices in Europe, it lost its resilience and failed to adapt in its own heartland to the challenge of (what would become known as) modernism from the twelfth century onwards.

I hear the concern expressed in your article. To it I reply, if you believe that the church is guided by the Holy Spirit, can you not trust the outcome of its ongoing metamorphosis? Originating as a form of Judaism, it was transformed through Hellenisation, and diverged into its Eastern and Western manifestations of Orthodoxy and Catholicism, survived Protestantism, and now we are witness to, in Walbert Buhlmann’s words, The Coming of the Third Church. Are the words of Gamaliel relevant here: “If this endeavour is of human origin it will destroy itself. But if it comes from God you will not be able to destroy it. You may even find yourself fighting against God.” Perhaps. But I expect that you might say that we cannot presume that anything in which we are engaged is guaranteed to be from God. Your scathing criticism of the changes within in the church since the Second Vatican Council would suggest that you see that particular trajectory as not merely flawed but something akin to apostasy. As someone who was a novice in a religious order that responded vigorously to the documents of the Second Vatican Council I have dwelt ever since in the experience of what we understood at the time to be a New Pentecost.

I make these points not to argue against your concern, but to absorb it into my sense of what it means to be church. Though I don’t flinch for a moment at the suggestion of the Archbishop of Johannesburg I hear your question: “where this ritual blood was to come from, where to be drawn.” But I do not let that question suggest that people embedded in that situation cannot answer that question. I am glad the question has been asked. It enlarges my sense of the task of being church in a diverse world. 

Respectfully,

Antonio de Bellis. Sacrifice of Noah (17th C.). Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Dear Paul:

Your observation about the Church’s history in Asia raises a valuable point in evaluating the wisdom or recklessness in adapting certain African practices to the liturgy of the Mass. Did Franciscan victory set the Church on a trajectory toward eventual eclipse in Europe? Possibly. Still, that is a very big might-have. Several tentative thoughts come to mind.

Straightaway, history offers us no way to know if Jesuit accommodation would have resulted in a regnant or enduring Christianity among Asians. Nor any guidance on whether a stronger presence in Asia would have provided a stay against decline in Europe. Retrospective conjecture remains just that: conjecture. Better to stay with what we can say with some degree of assurance.

Is it fair to say that in China and Japan, the Church faced more developed religious systems—a more sophisticated paganism, so to speak—than that of the Gauls, Franks, Visigoths, Celts, Norsemen, and other cultures than were subsumed under the aegis of Christendom? That shelter was reinforced by Christian powers not extant in Asia. The post-Constantinian Church was militant in Europe; the Counter Reformation Church was supplicant in East Asia.

That the Church lost resilience against the challenges of Modernism in its own heartland is undeniable. Unhappily, any exploration of paralysis is inseparable from dissection of the politics of Vatican I, the personality of Pius IX, the consequences of the declaration of papal infallibility on the papacy itself, and its etherizing effect on Catholic clergy and laity alike. That, Paul, is beyond the scope—if not the sympathies—of an artist’s weblog.

I very much like your quote from Gamaliel. Quotations are wonderful devices. The most useful—and endearing—are ones that can support either side of an argument, depending on the situation. In this context, let me offer in exchange Jeremiah 10:2-3 “Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen...For the customs of the people are vain.”

Please know that apostasy-spotting is not a pastime of mine. I simply have a serviceable eye for gall and wormwood. And an ear for cant. Nothing more.

Like you, I am not opposed to incorporating another culture’s sacred gestures into the liturgy. But which ones? So many of our rituals, from Christmas trees to cherished “smells and bells,” had their origins in non-Christian practices. Let African liturgies choreograph an offertory procession in dance if the people “embedded” in that tradition choose. Play drums, rattles, mbiras, and maracas. But an impassable line needs to to fall somewhere. If that border admits creaturely blood into the liturgy, is not the meaning of the Mass up for grabs? On every Catholic altar is sacrificed, for all peoples in all ages, the Lamb slain from the beginning of time. Adding goats and chickens waffles the tidings. The Third Church must not obscure the First.

Anonymous. Christ Crucified (16th C.). Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis, Porto, Portugal.

You are right: I would say that we cannot presume our choices come with a guarantee from the mountain top. Yes, we trust that the Spirit guides. But we are bound to speak and act on behalf of that trust with the deepest humility. The Spirit is not a magician, not a fixer. And we are wondrously inventive in discerning His breath on our own druthers. Every generation detects Him descending—with, ah, bright wings!—on its own fine programs, ambitions, and understandings. 

We have been cautioned that the Spirit breathes where He will, even in places we would rather He did not. Transcending our chronologies—guiding all the while—the eternal Spirit grants us, in our freedom, the time to hang ourselves.

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Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
                                       —Inspector Mortimer, in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori

What does our mania for bottled water have to do with memento mori? More than a little, I think. Stay with me, please, while I work this out.

Tomb in Arcadia. Illustration for manuscript by René d’Anjou (1457).

A bottle of one’s own is a token of our times. We are all hydrophiliacs now. It used to be that bottled water was the sensible alternative to tap in tourist meccas with precarious hygiene. Today, no one walks out the door to the library or the corner newsstand without their personal water bottle. Clothing, carry-alls, bikes, and belts come with loops, slings, pockets, or clips for your PBA-free, twenty-ounce promise of eternal life.

Gear junkies can even order a bottle for the terrier. Dogs need their ions charged, too. The trumpet call of perpetual hydration sounds for us all.

Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia ego (1638). Louvre, Paris.

On the subway not long ago, I sat catti-corner to a woman holding one of those ergonomically contoured, insulated, spill-proof bottles made for runners and jostled commuters. It was a Amphipod Hydraform Handheld Therma Lite, a full-service gizmo equipped with an expandable zipper pouch for an iPod, phone, energy bar, keys, and MetroCard. Essential whatnots.

This one had a lime green nipple. Its owner took a sip every so often. I could not take my eyes off her. Here was a grown woman with a nipple in her mouth. She was nursing her electrolytes, protecting the circuitry from drying out on the local between 86^th Street and Grand Central. Analogies to infancy, regression, and enfeeblement rushed to mind. Self-absorption, too, raised its hand to be counted. So did consumerism.

But those commonplaces are ready-made for so many things nowadays that the words are almost as banal as their applications. None were up to the job of capturing just what it was about this particular grotesquerie that set it apart from its cousins. There must be something else.

Egon Schiele, Death and Man (1911). Leopold Museum, Vienna.

And there was. The analogy I was groping for leapfrogged over facile correspondences and headed straight to the heart of what Jean Mouroux termed “the miseries of matter.” It was this: Our obsession with methodical hydration is sign and symbol of a sidling, furtive apprehension that mortality is a peril. 

If our toted water bottles can be said to reveal one hidden thing, one disguised tension, it is anxiety over the terrible truth that each of us is a frail cluster of cells poised for dispersion. The sorrow of our condition is felt in the carnal pull of mortality. The new mysticism of hydration keeps open the sphincters of denial.

What better badge, however cloaked, of our wayfaring state than bottled water, a thing we are accustomed to associating with travel. We are all earth-bound, all en route to a Final End that we know we must enter too soon. Always, too soon. And with no foretaste of the accounting required of us. In the instant I grasped that, the woman across from me with her hi-tech bottle transformed. Suddenly, she was no longer absurd, the bottle no longer grotesque. Something lifted. I saw only a fellow sojourner staving off the dark. 

Note: Poussin’s painting, above, might be difficult to see in a small jpg. Three shepherds and a shepherdess examine a tombstone with the legend: Et in Arcadia, ego. Death announces itself even here, in the Arcadian paradise (no less than on the Lexington Avenue line).  It is the pictorial equivalent, centuries earlier, of the words of Muriel Spark’s anonymous caller: Remember you must die.

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Writing in 1956, Romano Guardini reflected on man’s place in a world hurtling toward what we call today postmodernism. The End of the Modern World is a bleak reflection but a necessary one. Guardini, professor of philosophy and theology that he was, leaped beyond abstractions here to enter the battle for souls that theoretical formulas deflect.

Nicolas Bataille. Dragons Vomiting Frogs (14th C). Apocalypse of Angers, Tapestry Museum, Angers, F.

One stark passage alone is worth volumes of academic theology written by court theologians for fellow courtiers. He is speaking of the eschatological conditions under which modern man lives and the religious temper of his self-created future:

With these words I proclaim no facile apocalyptic. No man has the right to say that the End is here, for Christ Himself has declared that only the Father knows the day and the hour. (Matthew xxiv, 36). If we speak here of the nearness of the End, we do not mean nearness in the sense of time, but nearness as it pertains to the essence of the End, for in essence man’s existence is now nearing an absolute decision. Each and every consequence of that decision bears within it the greatest potentiality and the most extreme danger. 

Nearness as it pertains to the essence of the End. 

The Triumph of Death (15th C). Catalan fresco. National Gallery of Sicily, Palermo.

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This weblog began as First Things’ art page, so to speak. Yet I have a hazy suspicion that you are not all that interested in art. Certainly not art in the lower case. Upper case Art, yes; ART in ten point caps, yes. Art as a cover for theological and philosophical reflection, or flights of creative writing, yes, yes. Then there is art as Exhibit A in the case against contemporary culture. That is always fun. But art as the work of a hand and an eye? Not so much.

It is a great loss.

But one thing cannot wait any longer. Before it is too late, let me satisfy a nagging ache to post John James Audubon’s glorious study for his print of a Great Blue Heron. It is on view until September 7^th at the Morgan Library in A Dialogue with Nature: Romantic Landscapes from Britain and Germany.

John James Audubon. Study for Great Blue Heron. New York Historical Society, NY.

In the main, Romantic landscapes tire me. My foot worries the accelerator going past idylls, sententious ruins, and visionary sunsets. The pastoral mood is as alien to me as obligatory appreciation. This exhibition drew me in simply to see what was on show by Samuel Palmer, a British painter and etcher highly admired in the Victorian era but neglected since.

My heart stopped in front of the Audubon. I had not expected to see it. In the instant of meeting it, everything else—Palmer, too—fell away. Here is the genius of Audubon fully realized in this stunning composition. It is an exquisite conversation between meticulous observation and pure invention. In abstract terms, the image is a masterpiece—no other word will do—of graphic beauty and virtuosic design.

The Italian word disegno, common in Renaissance texts, makes no distinction between drawing and composition. The character of line itself and the rhythmic patterning of its placement on the page is understood as a unit, the single yield of a seeing hand. Audubon, largely self-taught, was gifted with such a hand.

Any standing figure—bird or man, no matter—carries the burden of stasis. But Audubon’s heron is infused with a dynamic sense of movement and immediacy. The scene gives the illusion of having been captured in the moment. Look at the tilt of the bird’s body and the arc of those wings. The bird is standing solidly on the ground poised to make a lethal strike at food. Yet the lift and billow of the wings suggests flight, as if the feet had descended to grab rock while the body was still partially alight.

That double-winged congruence, so suggestive of the bird’s aerodynamic fluency, is an imaginative device that Audubon used in other compositions. He understood that verisimilitude, untransfigured by a fertilizing intelligence, is not enough to breathe life into a subject.

The crisp silhouette of the heron’s upraised left wing echoes the curvature of its neck. The straight line of the avian leg angles in harmony with the double lines of the open beak. Marsh grass bends gently in the direction of the leg’s medial joint. Throughout, crescents and lines sing in counterpoint with each other. So much calculation; such superb illusion of spontaneous nature.

Field naturalist that he was, Audubon puts the viewer on eye level with the heron. We are there in the mire, witness to a predator intent on prey. Alert with energy, the down on the bird’s neck signals the excitement of the hunt. It would be unwise to get closer. The marsh is his, not ours.

Running through the world’s long history of bird painting is use of a bird as symbol of the soul, the Holy Ghost of things. Audubon’s birds, kissed with life, have souls of their own.

Note: The Morgan bills the image, accurately, as a study. But the word study is misleading here. This is a fully realized painting in an arresting range of techniques: pastel, watercolor, pencil, oil paint, and gouache. Even a bit of collage appears in an effort to correct the tip of a single feather. It is a study only in the sense that it was created to be rendered ultimately as a hand-colored print, sent to press in collaboration with Robert Havell, a master of acquatint.

The Havell Edition of Audubon’s The Birds of America is among the most beautiful books ever published.

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My earlier essay on Extreme Unction generated a considerable volume of mail. All of it was thoughtful. There were simply too many to quote, or to include in a single blog post. So, herewith are two that represent the tenor of much of the correspondence. Others will appear in another post.

The first, by a Lutheran pastor, is a cry of the heart. Pastor B. opens a sad window onto the dilemmas and anxieties awaiting priests at the bedside of the dying:

Lutherans might not call it Extreme Unction, but Commendation of the Dying with confession, absolution and Eucharist was historically practiced. . . . . There are two things often going on around death beds, although we can’t call them that. The first is that the bastardizers have separated us from the ancient scripts and roles. I would love to show up in Cassock. But when you show up properly dressed you are told to leave and eventually the whispers start that “Pastor is stiff”. . . . Their life and practice has not prepared them to hear the words of comfort from the servant of the Word. So you go as a friend and say what you can. You know that isn’t good, right and salutary, but it is what they can hear. And then you go and pray.

The second point: For those further away from the church, by the time the minister is called there is usually nothing that can be said. For those closer, whom you have probably been visiting, you still have to confront the “white coats” and the [adult] children. White coats is my mental slang for the medical establishment which keeps the children on the drugs of false hope as if death were an option and keeps the dying on strong drugs. This is not an argument for no pain medication, just a recognition that a good confession requires one to be in their right mind. This would usually place you in confrontation with the white coats who are easing the way and the children who often have no belief what-so-ever. Either you confront and put the dying in the position of confrontation with their kids, or you mumble a few words about sharing a meal. And then you go and pray.

The church gets what she asks for. You will know the church has turned a corner when her people start asking for the Sacrament and the Servant.

The letter throws a sympathetic light on clerical reluctance to wear clerical garb to the bedside of the dying. And I am inclined to believe that, yes, a priest who comes dressed like the yard man or a lumber jack is likely following advice from the chancery to meet people “where they are,” in the illusory cant of the day. Nevertheless, a priest is not a technician, like the appliance repair man or meter reader. He embodies the Omega of our hopes; his presence asserts it even among those who have surrendered hope and trust. Those, most especially. 

Is confrontation the sole means of bearing witness? That is not for me to answer. I can only believe that retreat in advance affirms the very loss of trust the pastor mourns. Maimonides said it well: “The beginning of all defeat is retreat.” Is not a cassock testimony in itself, a silent instrument that gives word of what we ourselves might be unable to say? It must not be put aside, mothballed for more congenial times.

Reader Jack writes in what reads like sectarian pique. Nevertheless, his point deserves note:

All of the Eastern Churches, both in union with Rome or not, have ALWAYS called it Anointing of the Sick, and it’s never been reserved for those in danger of death. Changing it to “Extreme Unction” is one of the many ways the local Roman Church fell away from the original Apostolic practices preserved by the Eastern Apostolic Churches. . .

The Roman Church has NEVER been the standard of the Church Catholic, but merely one part of it. . . . So many of the things that “traditional Catholics” complain about being innovations are standard, old, and established among Eastern Christians, Catholic or not.

Antiquarian correctness is a false issue. What Jack considers a falling away from apostolic practice could as easily be welcomed as an advance on it. It helps to remember that the sacraments were made for man, not man for the sacraments. As man’s condition changes down the centuries, the formal qualities of the sacraments—their manners, if you like—alter with it. The choreography of the Mass itself has changed in relation to the temporal facets of our existence. [Browse Joseph Youngmann’s The Mass of the Roman Rite.] 

Each generation begets its own obstacles; each seeks its own way to renewing inherited trusts. Christian freedom remains open to liturgical change. Our concern is with the character and symbolic import of altered protocols, not with the crude fact of historical adjustment. What matters is whether changed decorums achieve refinement or degradation of sacramental purpose.

 I can only repeat what I wrote earlier: The chasm between sickness, which seeks treatment, and the final stage of terminal illness is vast. The hour of death is a time unto itself, unlike any other. The conceptual framework of Extreme Unction bowed to the profundity of that distinction. Anointing of the Sick—most certainly in contemporary practice—erases the harrowing particularity of death.  

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The freedom of a weblog comes with one high-voltage hazard: the absence of a proofreader. Unsung and half-resented, a proofreader is every writer’s guardian angel, a protector of literacy and the credibility that rests on it.

Keepers of blogs are home alone with their own prose. And their own slippages. Their copy is at the mercy of their mind’s eye, a treacherous thing that insists on seeing what it expects to see instead of what is really on the screen. There is no one nearby to signal a warning like this:

Hey, you cited the author of The Mass of the Roman Rite as Joseph Youngmann. Shouldn’t it be Jungmann?

Yes, it should. Mea maxima culpa. There is no excuse. 

Manuscript of Pío Baroja, as famous for his grammatical errors as for his prose.

An eminent liturgical scholar, Joseph Jungmann, S.J., dedicated himself to writing a comprehensive history of the Mass in 1939. Beginning work on the text in earnest around 1942, he called the work “a child of war.” It was difficult during the war years to gain access to manuscripts and incunabula critical to periods under discussion. Fortunately, most of the necessary material on the primitive Church and up to the late Middle Ages, even into the sixteenth century, could be had in translation (which included Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian) or in modern editions.

Collating a great mass of material and crowded with citations, the text grew from the stringencies of what Fr. Jungmann called “a sort of scientific conscience.” Technical and precise, his history of “the Mass-liturgy” remains a consummate work of loving scholarship:

This book is not meant to serve only for knowledge—even the knowledge of the most precious object in the Church’s accumulated treasure—but is intended for life, for a fuller grasp of that mystery of which Pope Pius XII says in his encyclical Mediator Dei: “The Mass is the chief act of divine worship; it should also be the source and center of Christian piety.”

His introduction closes with this caution against antiquarianism for its own sake:

It is not the fact of antiquity that makes liturgical customs valuable, but their fullness of content and their expressive value. Even newer ceremonies, like the priest’s blessing at the end of Mass, can possess a great beauty.

[That second sentence was written in innocence of today’s dismissals that, often as not, follow the blessing with: “Have a nice day.” It is a safe bet Fr. Jungmann would prefer the ancient command: “Go, catechumens!”]

At the time of its publication, in Vienna, 1949, the two-volume text was the single most authoritative study of the origins and development of the Roman Mass. It is still in print. It endures as a fascinating and enriching study of the springs of our transmitted culture.

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The last days of August. It is time to let be. Time to lie in a hammock and take bribes. Read. Doze. Plan the rest of my life. Anything except trawl for words at a computer. 

Girl on a Swing in Central Park. New York Historical Society.

But first, let me post the last of the comments that came in on the declension of Extreme Unction into an all-purpose Anointing of the Sick. A thread that runs through them is recognition of what one respondent refers to as a lack of discernment—or faithful discharge—on the part of either priest or parishioner. Sometimes both. Let me leave you until September with someone else’s words. (Mine have packed a bag and are waiting at the station.) Each of these speaks for itself.

An Orthodox deacon treats the historicity of the Anointing of the Sick with a care that makes his letter valuable:

It seems to me that the post VCII rite, if discharged faithfully, might be more like it’s Orthodox counterpart, at least theologically. Orthodox unction has always been “healing unto salvation,” so has not had the “last rites” component, although it is nonetheless a common feature of end-of-life ministrations. Significantly, it can be done in conjunction with confession; it isn’t required nor expected, necessarily.

But it’s that “discharged faithfully” business that is the real tragedy for Catholics. I’m only a deacon and would not think of going to a hospital or nursing home in anything but a collar, and would also always have a cassock and an orarion in the trunk in case someone wants to commune.

Also, we have done our best to insulate ourselves from the solemn reality of death. We are just now, in Orthodoxy, starting to have families want cremations (nyet!), closed caskets (except due to extreme disfigurement, NYET!), and to avoid seeing the lowering of the coffin into the grave (only recently become optional). Avoiding that last one gives us, or so we think, a temporary reprieve from having to consider death in it’s entirety-but it’s only a hall pass, not an “excused.”

A priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross writes to confirm distinctions between the rite itself and way it is conducted:

A distinction certainly exists [between the sick and the dying] but it does not exist within rubrics or the rites. The distinction is in the actual praying/celebrating of the sacrament . . . as well as a detrimental lack in discernment.

Catholics have forgotten how to discern the sacraments. For example, am I properly disposed to receive the Eucharist? This question is complicated by the lamentable assumption that one’s Sunday obligation entails receiving the Eucharist rather than the truth of the matter that one’s obligation is merely in attending the Mass.

Is my illness dangerous and/or serious? From the very start, James 5:13-15 says, “He should summon the presbyters of the Church.” Implicit in that “should summon” is the discernment that a person is sick. So sick that s/he can’t go TO the presbyters but must summon them.

This lack of discernment—[thinking that] anyone goes up for communion and that a hangnail warrants anointing—is more lamentable than any sort of systematic liturgical destruction of the sacrament of anointing. There is a problem indeed. It’s not with the rite but with wise discernment and reverential prayer.

There was common agreement that the sacrament, while deservedly offered to someone facing surgery or risky treatments, has been diminished in practice. This respondent adds a rueful note that raises a question less about the rite itself than about the culture of priestly training:

It [the sacrament of Anointing] is made not so important because one can just go the sacristy after Mass and be anointed. And it is true that instead of a dignified sacrament which may also include confession and holy communion, I personally know of priests refusing to hear a confession saying it is not needed as the anointing covers everything.

Fr. E. writes to remind that the Anglican tradition recognized the gravity of the rites designed for death. He quotes the rubrics from “Communion of the Sick” in the Book of Common Prayer. Reading the passage, it is impossible not to note the gulf between the older ceremonial seriousness and today’s demotic expectations shaped, as they are, not by religious sensibility but by popular culture. As you read, notice the emphasis on the communal aspect of the sacrament (“two at the least”) and the implicit assumption that the home visited is familiar with the protocols of the rite (“all things necessary so prepared”):

Forasmuch as all mortal men be subject to many sudden perils, diseases, and sicknesses, and ever uncertain what time they shall depart out of this life; therefore, to the intent they may always be in a readiness to die, whensoever it shall please Almighty God to call them, the Curates shall diligently from time to tim . . . exhort their Parishioners to the often receiving of the holy Communion of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ, when it shall be publickly ministered in the Church . . . . But if the sick person be not able to come to the Church, and yet is desirous to receive the Communion in his house; then he must give timely notice to the Curate, signifying also how many there are to communicate with him, (which shall be three, or two at the least,) and having a convenient place in the sick man’s house, with all things necessary so prepared, that the Curate may reverently minister, he shall there celebrate the holy Communion, beginning with the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel, here following.

Lastly, a spirited letter from the pseudonymous Clay Potts. He has no patience with priests who permit themselves to be buffaloed out of their cassocks:

A soldier, especially during times of war, is required to always appear in his uniform, even in non-combat situations, primarily as to deter the soldier from desertion, from abandoning his post, from blending into the crowd; And, as to remain ever battle ready.

A soldier’s uniform also serves to instill in a military force, self-confidence and popular confidence, as well as to diminish the enemy’s popular and self-confidence. Even a soldier operating a military drone seated in at a desk a thousands of miles away from the battlefield wears the uniform. How much confidence would a soldier dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and sandals and seated at the command center with his finger on the nuclear button, instill in the public? . . . Or, a surgeon entering the operating theatre dressed in a bright gold Steeler’s sweatshirt and sweatpants? . . .

Even an off-duty cop will spring into action when he or she sees a crime being committed! They know they have a moral and ethical duty to take charge of the situation regardless of the danger to themselves. They don’t even think about it, they just react, it’s second nature. And, yet a priest is prepared to walk onto the eternal battle field of the deathbed dressed in street clothes?! Or fail to take charge of the deathbed?

All gratitude to each of you who took time and thought to respond. Enjoy this summer’s end. We will meet again in September. 

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Consider how beautiful the devil must be. A fallen angel is an angel still. Seeing him fall, Jesus likened the plunge to “lightning from heaven.” (Luke 10:18). Lucifer appears a pulsing field of light, a flash of pure spirit. All luminous intelligence, he is bright as the morning star, radiant as dawn. Were he not, temptation would be beggared. It would be too dull, too unsightly, to gain purchase on the human heart.

William Blake. Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels (c.1803-5). Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Folded within the history of art is the history of the struggle to depict moral deformity. Master of disguise, demonic cunning cuckolds the eye. In default of better means, visual art personifies the prince of lies—or, in that marvelous phrase, prince of the power of the air—with grotesque physiognomy. It is a familiar convention that incarnates disproportion and hurls defiance at canons of beauty.

The Middle Ages had a genius for monstrous iconography. Its repertory developed in fear and dismay at the conditions the son of disobedience instigates. Claws, hooves, horns, bat wings, and loathsome grimaces illustrate a culture’s recoil from his works. But what of his own self?

William Blake came closer to the apparent truth of the Rebel Angel and his divisions than did painters of misshapen monsters rising out of hot pitch to ride herd on the damned. Contra centuries of depiction, and hellholes full of sharpened bidents, Lucifer is alluring.

William Blake. Mortal Sin (c. 1805). Huntington Library & Art Collection, San Marino, CA.

How radiant, lithesome, and well formed Blake presents him. All masculine beauty, Lucifer moves with athletic grace, more dancer than demon. From a figure so fair and commanding must come a voice low, melodic and seductive. He speaks with the tongue of angels. After all, he is one.

And Lucifer is accomplished—as we need our tempters to be. Accomplishment is a magnet for those who prefer to suffer the tragedy of existence in concert halls and theaters, away from the trenches of the lived life. Might our trickster even be pianist enough to scrap his sheet music and play Mozart by heart?

However he comports himself in other times and places, in our own the hellion keeps up with fashion. With an eye on all things current, he guards a natty wardrobe of ideas. Charming at table, polished at the lectern, he talks with passion about the good, the true, and the beautiful. Like John Walsh, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum, he professes belief that works of art make “an audience of happier, wiser, more complete people.” Without a doubt, Lucifer is a patron of the arts.

Blue state all the way. 

William Blake. Moses Erecting the Brazen Serpent (c.1803). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA.

What brings on this end-of-summer reverie, you wonder? It is this: Next Monday, September 15, Cardinal Dolan cuts the ribbon on the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Center for Art and Culture, a non-profit initiative that views itself, in His Eminence’s words, as “America’s premier center for The New Evangelization.” It is an ambitious undertaking. The Cardinal continues:

Its goal is to bring practicing Catholics closer to the faith, attract and accompany “lapsed” Catholics in returning to the Church, and introduce non-Catholics to the person, message, and invitation of Christ.

Fine sentiments. But the swagger and the timing could hardly be worse. The archdiocese plays art patron on the downtown scene while parishes are shrinking, schools and churches closing under the juggernaut of an archdiocesan pastoral planning extravaganza with the Orwellian title “Making All Things New.” A more candid title would have been “Staving Off Bankruptcy.” But in our hope-and-change era, stirring, focus-grouped slogans deflect attention from somber realities.

While financial realism was turning parish pastors into corporate-style administrators, the archdiocese found means for a 25,000 square foot boost to the arts-and-entertainment economy of the Lower East Side. Sheen Center will house two theaters, four rehearsal spaces, exhibition and archival space. A chapel, too. Fully staffed, promoted, and board-of-directed by the great and the good, it will sponsor plays, opera, symposia, concerts, dance, and celebrate “momentous events and occasions in the life of the Church, the archdiocese, and community.” It promises to help us “uplift ourselves, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, intellectually, artistically, and spiritually.”

In short, a high-end clambake. Is it likely to enhance the credibility and cohesion of the Church’s teaching authority? Or will it dwindle into a white elephant like the John Paul II Cultural Center in D.C.? (Built in 2001, it was a financial disaster sold to the Knights of Columbus ten years later at a stunning multi-million dollar loss to the diocese —Detroit—that had funded it.)

I wish the Sheen Center well. But optimism is on hold. The project gives off the aroma of episcopal vanity and utopian swank. We can explore the reasons next time. For now, it is enough to hold close Vigo Demant’s caution against using a Christian idiom to capitulate to secular enthusiasms.

Canon Demant’s Our Culture: Its Christian Roots and Present Crisis is as trenchant now, for varying reasons, as it was in 1947. Thinking about the character of ambition implicit in the Sheen Center, I cannot dislodge from memory his comment on the men of antiquity “who went down under the barbarian darkness still professing their belief in deathless Rome.”

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The single New Testament reference to anything that comes close to the arts is that messy episode with Herodias’ daughter. Was it dirty dancing? Or “natural” dance, precursor to Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the pioneers of improvisational movement? Either way, we know how the program ended.

Adolph Gustav Mossa. Salomé (early 20th C.)

There are better reasons to be uneasy about the efficacy of the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Center for Art and Culture as the zenith of evangelization. History is full of mischief. The Center has already suffered two blows before the ribbons are cut.

Expensively architected and stage-designed, the state-of-the-art center lost its scheduled executive director. Msgr. Michael F. Hull—erstwhile pastor of the Church of the Guardian Angel in Chelsea, Professor of Sacred Scripture at St. Joseph’s Seminary, and ardent member of MoMA—has gone missing. The journalist who had interviewed him in March for The Wall Street Journal tells me that the monsignor “left the Church.”

To clarify, I phoned the rectory at Guardian Angel. The resident priest who answered said: “I know nothing of his whereabouts.” A call to Dunwoodie elicited only the comment that Msgr. Hull was no longer there. Was there anyone at the seminary who could answer a few questions about the Center itself? Who has taken on directorship in the monsignor’s absence? After a lengthy pause, the receptionist offered to connect me to the Center’s press office. Unable to put the call through, she told me to email. Next, I tried the phone number listed for the Center. It connects only to a ticketing service. (“Have your credit card ready. If you are calling about Ticket Mania’s Gold Club . . . .”)

Immersion in the arts can have unintended side effects. Conversion can go both ways.

Louis Boilly. The Effect of Melodrama (1830). Musée Lambinet, Versailles

Bishop Sheen, as he was known, was a great evangelist, perhaps the greatest of the twentieth century. His humanity, graceful wit, and scholarship—carried so nimbly—were matchless gifts to broad audiences. He was a captivating performer whose radio and television ministry instructed and enlivened generations. His own bearing no less than his words testified that peace of soul does not come from man himself. To this day, the Emmy award-winning priest has no equal.

Yet that is not necessarily why the Center was named after him. Other names are better known to the demographic most likely to frequent the downtown theater scene. But the archbishop, elevated to Venerable in 2012, was expected to be canonized soon, possibly as early as next year. With his remains buried beneath the main altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the new Center would serve as a fashionable annex to the shrine St. Patrick’s would become.

That could explain why the archdiocese initiated a colossal and costly cleaning project of St. Patrick’s. The interior is nearly invisible under miles of planks and scaffolding that will remain into 2015. The narthex has been outfitted with two crass dispensing machines that spit out souvenir medallions. Add a glitzy billboard for tourists too jet-lagged to recognize which attraction they are standing in. Insult follows with wee-bitsy votive candles that burn only for as long as it takes to deposit two dollars in the mite box.

It is a short walk from those vending machines to suspicion that the bazaar was triggered by anticipation of pilgrims to St. Fulton Sheen’s tomb. But there’s the rub: It was announced at the beginning of this month that the cause for Archbishop Sheen’s canonization has been suspended. It is a sad, unedifying story of clerical politics. Fr. Roger J. Landry, over at The National Catholic Register, covered the battle of the bones in detail. His commentary deserves to be read in full. 

Achille Beltrone. Theatre on a TransAtlantic Liner (1919).

Bishop Sheen was a virtuoso in distinguishing between the anodyne of his era—psychoanalysis—and the true source of the soul’s freedom from unease. His essays, particularly “The Philosophy of Anxiety” and “Psychoanalysis and Confession,” have not aged. Were he writing and speaking today, it is tempting to think he would address that other false god of our time: art-and-culture, a compound word that tallies up to money and religion at the same time. 

The Center expects to become self-supporting. Which means it expects to make a profit as an institution for rent. Described by its own in-house consultant Nick Leavens as simply “a new off-Broadway arts complex,” it will function as a hub for the circulation of tax exempt monies. Playbill quotes the press release:

Companies who have already signed on to use The Sheen Center include The New York International Fringe Festival, Strange Sun Theater, /the claque/, Terranova, Wingspan Arts, MorDance and Voyager Theater Company.

The Sheen Center will also house four spacious studios of varying sizes, which will be available for rehearsals, meetings and classes, among others. The Studios at The Sheen Center will be available for rent seven days a week. Art gallery space on the main floor will feature a full rotating schedule of exhibits. It will also be available as a space for intimate receptions.

The  complex stands on the site of the defunct parish of Our Lady of Loretto which became a Catholic Charities shelter for homeless men more than seventy years ago. The name of the Center’s largest performance space, the 250-seat Loretto Auditorium, nods to the displacement of the Bowery homeless by the city’s expanding arts-and-culture scene. In gutting the old structure, rebuilding, and outfitting it to create an arts center, the archdiocese mimics the trajectory of the country’s declining manufacturing sector.

All across the country, old mills, factory buildings and processing plants have been repurposed as some combination of studio, exhibition, or museum space for contemporary art. Think of Mass MoCA, the converted factory complex in North Adams, Massachusetts; or DIA, once a thriving Nabisco plant that supported working class Newburgh. These and hundreds of lesser known arts-related renovations stamp the landscape of post-industrial America.

Following suit, Sheen Center is the archdiocese’s monument to post-Catholicism.

Max Oppenheimer. Salomé (1919). Private collection, Milan.

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The movie Calvary is a stunning meditation on the Christian story. If you have not already seen it, you might want to save this until later. Every review is a spoiler to some degree. But this is less review than reflection on a film, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, that rises to the power of the 1951 Diary of a Country Priest. The earlier French film, adapted from Georges Bernanos’s novel by the towering Robert Bressson, has had no equal until now.

Like its predecessor, Calvary is the story of a good priest tending a hostile rural congregation. Narrative follows the diary structure, time condensed into the seven days Father James has left to live. His anguish is psychological. The attacking cancer is not within him; it festers in the maimed heart of a villager made desolate by the aftershock of sexual abuse in childhood.

The movie opens in the confessional. A man slips in to whisper the secret of his abuse: “I first tasted semen when I was seven.” Jolted, the priest responds: “That is certainly a startling opening line.” He gains his self-possession and proceeds with pastoral calm. A brief back-and-forth elicits intent from the murderer-in-waiting: “I am going to kill you because you are innocent.”

Conversations are terse, crackling with a bitter wit as hard and native to the Irish as the megaliths of Sligo. The economy and mettle of the dialogue have prompted reviews to call Calvary “a black comedy.” But it is nothing of the sort. It is mythic, not comedic. It is the primal story of innocence betrayed. Betrayal corrupts in countless ways. Here, innocence once defiled contorts in lust for vengeance. An offering must be made. The blood of a lamb must spill to atone for the wounds of a desecrated soul.

Something primeval drives this levied sacrifice. Its primordial character is underscored by a camera which keeps scanning Benbulbin (Binn Ghulbain), the mythic rock formation shaped hundreds of millions of years ago. Its high, imposing plateau rises over Sligo like a Neolithic altar, a slaying stone as old as time. As original as sin itself. This is Yeats country, the setting of Irish legends and home to “the dark folk who live in souls/ of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees.”

For all their contemporaneity, the cast of characters share resemblance with the old narrative device of personification: the Faithless Wife (aka Infidelity), the Man of Science (Atheism), the Cuckold, the Poor Rich Man, the Gay Bachelor. As types, they bind the contemporary narrative to ancient storytelling tropes. The bachelor’s rent boy is a slithering, elfin embodiment of malevolence, a deviant leprechaun. At the same time, he is totally believable as a victim-turned-predator.

Father James wears his cassock throughout. It serves as both a badge of office and a subtle gesture of defiance in the face of the scandal-induced disaffection that sundered the unity of the term Irish Catholic into two uneasy halves. Though the drama is steeped in the sour repercussions of scandal, the Church is treated with uncommon kindliness. Sympathy for this clear-eyed, stalwart priest stands bail for sympathy with the Church itself.

To short circuit any speculation, Father James’ heterosexuality is established at the outset by the arrival of his daughter. A widower and a recovering alcoholic, he entered the priesthood late. His daughter Fiona visits in the wake of a failed suicide triggered by too many failed relationships with men. She is an intelligent, winsome exemplar of the Magdalens secular culture creates and discards with casual cruelty.

The priest goes about his week ministering where he can, exploring options for escape, suffering the burning of his church and the slaughter of his cherished dog. Among the tormenters lining his Way of the Cross stands the man intent on killing him. Which one is he? Father James addresses the gauntlet of contenders with: “There is too much talk of sin and not enough about virtue.” Adapted to phrasing congenial to contemporary audiences, his words echo the merciful injunction that has followed us down the centuries: “Go, and sin no more.”

His Gethsemane is a barroom; Golgatha, a lonely stretch of beach along the wild Atlantic. Finally, the morning of his execution comes. Our priest kneels beneath a crucifix and prays silently. We do not need to hear his prayer. We know what it is. We have listened all our lives:

Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not my will but thine be done.

Walking to the beach to meet his killer, the priest flings into the sea a gun borrowed for protection. Some might call it suicide; others, obedience unto death. It is his final decisive act. In the doing of it, the man transforms into Him Whom he contemplates and serves. He calls his daughter from a public phone to leave her a last indelible word, an indirect mandate: “I think forgiveness has been highly underrated.”

Not until the final scene is the priest’s fatal decision grasped as an illumination, with nothing absurd about it. It is a moment of perfect clarity into the Christian meaning of atonement. The call to expiation is a terrible beckoning. But this priest answers it in full and bloodied trust in the works—unglimpsed behind the veil of the mystery of evil—of a forbearing God. All inklings of barren suicide dissolve in the glance exchanged between the grieving daughter and the killer—tentative now, shorn of bravado. The scene goes by in a blink. But the soundless purity of that instant holds a foretaste of redemption.

Bernanos was right: Grace is everywhere.


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Would Lena Marie and Walter still be together if they had been married by the pope?

Thomas Theodor Heine. Bride-to-be Admiring Herself in Mirror (1898). Simplicissimus. Munich.

Lena was the first of my old high school friends to marry. From wedding march to wedding cake, the nuptials were grand. Preliminaries, too, were imposing—the showers, the parties, the trousseau. Yes, a trousseau! A chest of linens with trim crocheted and tatted by Aunt Philomena, nightgowns hand-smocked and embroidered by Cousin Lucy back in La Spezia. Family silver. More.

The ceremony was moving, the homily inspirational; cast and setting were as dazzling as solemnity permitted. Bride and groom were Ave Maria-ed and Mendelssohned to kingdom come. (Though we would not have phrased it that way then.) At the reception, Uncle Anthony, a diocesan priest on Lena’s side, said elaborate grace and delivered a certificate of papal blessing—on parchment—to the new couple. With a prayerful flourish, Walter’s aunt followed with rosaries hallowed by the pope himself. Husband and wife left to honeymoon, their troth pledged in stone.

Anonymous. A Royal Marriage (c. 1850). Pictures of English History. Routledge & Sons, London.

Around the time of their first anniversary, the wedded pair invited friends over to their Fort Lee apartment. Dinner done, Lena suggested that Walter show guests the way back to the George Washington Bridge. And, while you are at it, please take out the garbage. A good-natured host, Walter obliged. While he was gone, Lena skipped out with the contractor who had installed a swimming pool on the roof of their condo complex. Their getaway had been cleverly plotted, laudably executed. The two decamped to his ancestral home in . . . Caracas or Costa Rica? I forget.

Walter never saw it coming. Last we heard, he eventually remarried. A quiet, civil ceremony in Borough Hall. He had had his fill of church weddings.

Solange Gautier. Bride Running from Toad Groom (early 20th C.).

I have not thought of Lena in years. Why do I remember her now? It is something to do with the three-ring wedding that ran for one performance at St. Peter’s last week. The press was euphoric. Here, finally, was a pope scraping cataracts off the blurry eyes of a sclerotic Church. In poetic terms: He hath abolished the old drought/ And rivers run where once was dry.

Yahoo News served the predictable headline: “Pope Breaks Taboo by Marrying Couples Living ‘In Sin.”” ABC News was giddy at witnessing a Catholic Spring sprung by a with-it, transformational pope:

In another signal that Pope Francis’ Catholic Church is not your mother’s Catholic Church, the transformative pontiff married 20 couples at the Vatican on Sunday, some of whom had lived together and one who had a child out of wedlock.

Yes, you read that right. Couples who had lived together, couples who had sex before marriage, even one with a grown child were married in the Vatican by the pope himself.

Yes, you read that right. Media Wunderkinder think something new and startling occurred at St. Peter’s. In reality, Francis did no more than is done every week in parishes around the world by nameless priests in charity toward their own parishioners. These twenty couples were each presumably shriven and eligible for marriage. No rules were broken; no protocols discarded or overruled as far as we know. What good priest would not take grateful joy in welcoming couples to marriage, most especially those who already have children?

Heinrich Aldegrever. The Wedding Musicians (16th C.) Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

Perhaps that is why this matrimonial extravaganza leaves me cold. However much the Catholic press purrs over yet another instance of beautiful symbolic action, this one falsifies existing reality. It was staged for media consumption in full understanding of how the media was likely to receive and report on it. The show encourages recognition for the generosity of working parish priests to accrue to Francis himself. It is an image-enhancing spectacle that creates a mirage of the Church by which consumers of “news” deceive themselves about pastoral clemency and concern pre-Francis.

In light of the easily anticipated press response, last Sunday’s spectacle was tantamount to theft. It was a moral theft that appropriated standing credit for compassion from legions of unrenowned, conscientious priests; and it laid the spoils at papal feet. Worse, given the way the press was ordained to recount it, the orchestrated expo can only further weaken already feeble inhibitions against cohabitation or child-bearing without marital commitment. (No big deal. The pope gets it.)

Francis is keenly attuned to the way things play in the press. It was he, remember, who let others distribute the Eucharist at Mass to avoid all possibility of being photographed giving the sacrament to a public sinner. Marrying forty strangers chosen as if by a casting director for theatrical expedience—magnified by the pomp and panoply of St. Peter’s—extends the celebrity-life of the papacy on the illusory chance that showboating is a stay against cultural demoralization.

We are all dancing with the stars now. But ultimately, that dance ends like any other, in exhaustion.

Note: Just arrived in this morning’s email is the latest broadcast from Sandro Magister’s Chiesa. It details the clash between supporters of change and defenders of existing doctrine regarding the divorced and remarried. One proposed change is to permit recourse to the sacrament of reconciliation “even without absolution.”

My assumption, then, that all the couples married at St. Peter’s were “shriven” might not necessarily be warranted in each instance. In that case, media excitement would be more justified than it had seemed. What remains, though, is the circus atmosphere surrounding the use of these couples as symbolic pawns in a contest yet to be resolved. The publicity itself serves to weaken standing prohibition against cohabitation and extra-marital child-bearing. A rule so publicly at issue does not encourage observance. On the contrary, it assists the pressures toward nonobservance.

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Among letters responding to recent posts are two from Dublin. One is from a parish priest uneasy with Rome’s Disneyfied wedding fest and its predictable press response. One of the uncountable shepherds of a stumbling contemporary flock, he writes to say:

The last two weddings I had were of couples with a child - and the vast majority now cohabit before their nuptials. The apparent attempt to spin this with details released to the press was puerile and offensive —not to mind a breach of confidentiality of those concerned.

Jan Bulhak. Evening Light. From series on Vilnius in the 1930s).

Previous reflection on the movie Calvary, prompted words from a teacher at the Scoil Talbot National School, Condalkin, Dublin. His summary of the religious temper of contemporary Ireland is bleak. And his final sentence is an unspoken indictment of the sensitivity-saturation that cripples adults in transmitting stories of a suffering redeemer:

Just to say from an Irish reader in Ireland of your reflection on ‘Calvary’ that yours is the first review I’ve seen that has noticed the obvious links with the story of Calvary!

The film came out here much earlier in the year and the mainstream film critics I read and heard and saw did not see what it was about. My guess is it’s because the vast majority of the population nowadays do not know the story of the Passion in any detail at all. I thought it was an amazing film, one that challenges everyone. . . .

I know it sounds dramatic, and I’m not a fan of making dramatic comments, but it is true. Most people in Ireland no longer go to Mass. It’s been many years since most have; and even on Christmas these days the churches aren’t packed out like they used to be. Attendance is still plummeting — older people dying, not being replaced by younger people. I’d say most people are of course aware of the [Passion] story, but definitely do not ‘know’ it.

Post-primary religious education had been wishy-washy for many years . . . . And so most adults in Ireland have relied on their memories of primary school classes and their understandings as children of the story. And since the Passion is obviously quite violent, primary school teachers may not really engage as deeply with it as they might with other stories with Jesus.

Amico Aspertini. Teacher with Students (early 16th C). Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

The writer included a link to Help With the Tough Questions, an online resource created and maintained by primary school teachers for their own use in the classroom and for as many other Christian parents and educators who might find it helpful. It is rich trove of quotations on a broad range of topics from the nature of Jesus, the saints, and suffering, to prayer, animals, and the necessity of gratitude. Much more. 

This from Fr. Eamon Devlin, CM, suggests the sensibility that informs the site’s approach to religious education in lower school:

Children do no need explanations so much as they need someone to open up their gift of wonder. All you have to do is bring God into their sense of wonder.

Jean Baptiste Greuze. Idle Boy (18th C).Musée Fabre, Montpelier.

Note: It was Fr. Devlin, Provincial of the Vincentians in Ireland and England, who intervened earlier this year to stop the proposed auction of letters between Jackie Kennedy and Vincentian Fr. Joseph Leonard. The letters, considered Mrs. Kennedy’s unwritten autobiography, have been returned to the Kennedy family.

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Christian mission is not to preach Christ, but to be Christians in life.
—Fr. Alexander Schmemann

The new evangelization is hardly different from the old. It resides, as it has from the first century, in the lived witness of individuals to a risen Lord—to the sacramental character of the world, of time itself, and of each other’s place in it. It inhabits right relations between persons. And it endures in confession of inexhaustible sorrow over failure in those relations.

Mathias Gruenwald. Head of a Crying Angel (c. 1520). Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

For generations in New York, the calling of the Church took up residence in its schools. The Sheen Center is a monumental white flag signaling defeat in the Church’s ordained mission to the young. In its place is a misnamed “mission to the arts.” By offering itself as a trendy landlord to the arts, the Archdiocese is furthering the momentum of its own displacement. Inflated reverence for the arts is something to be countered, not accommodated.

Louis Bouyer, writing thirty years ago, looked on the dilation of culture—our art-and-culture syndrome—as a symptom of deep degeneration, the herald of a “monstruous civilization” emptied of meaning. More recently, Louis Dupré expanded on the theme: “Culture itself has become the real religion of our time, absorbing traditional religion as a subordinate part of itself.” That subordination, sweetened by the word mission, is the very basis of the Sheen Center.

The pathos of prelates bent on becoming players in the art scene is disheartening. The New York Archdiocese is no reincarnation of  the Hapsburg courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Philip II is long dead. So is the character of the patronage he represented. Threatened orthodoxy will not be buttressed by an estimated $177 million renovation of St. Patrick’s Cathedral nor the undisclosed millions of the state-of-the-art Sheen Center.

St. Pat’s is no more “America’s parish church,” as Cardinal Dolan calls it, than New York is the “capital of the world.” The cathedral is a tourist attraction at the fag end of New York’s Museum Mile. And it is dressing up for the role at the expense of less glamorous, more humane undertakings.

Remember the 2011 closing of Rice High School. Run by the Christian Brothers, it served the city’s young black males with notable grace and efficacy. Bankrupted by lawsuits in the wake of the sex scandal—none having anything to do with Rice—the order was forced to close the school. A fraction of what the archdiocese has spent polishing St. Pat’s or creating the Sheen Center could have been gifted to sustain the work of Rice. The building is now a YMCA.

Vincent Van Gogh. Sorrow (1882). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The ambiguously named Sheen Center—“Martin? Charlie? Michael? Who’s this Fulton dude?”—is anxious to be agreeable to all comers. It is on record as being progressively open to performances that might raise eyebrows among those stick-up-the-spine traditionalists. It only shakes a finger at “anything that is hateful about one group of people.” (We People of the Book can trust, then, that cordiality toward the Religion of Peace will be never be shaken.)

Its own supine, politically correct courtesy puts the Church at odds with itself. It is caught, like Buridan’s ass, between two bales of hay: outreach to the religiously minded and edgey downtown appeal to the secular, liberal theatre scene. Who will ultimately evangelize whom remains to be seen.

Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, past production of the Voyager Theatre Company, a client of Sheen.

The Sheen’s plush performance space for dance and theatre troops is rationalized as a decoy to lure the faithless to the fold. We are to greet the scheme as a spare-no-expense preface to the Kingdom where heating and lighting systems come from God.

Earthier enticements, though, have already run the other way. In March, Msgr. Michael Hull was pastor of Guardian Angel and executive director of the Sheen. At the end of April, on Divine Mercy Sunday, he announced from the pulpit that he was leaving his flock to get married. According to a priest familiar with Hull, he and his young bride—formerly an intern at the Sheen—are living now in Venice.

Well, the heart wants what the heart wants. By Woody Allen’s reckoning, Hull’s sentimental truancy is just another New York story. Less neighborly, however, is the incongruity of his lavish renovation of the fourth floor rectory of Guardian Angel within the last year. The parish is small, hardly prosperous. Yet the renovation was designed by an associate at Richard Perry Architect, an upscale firm that serves deep-pocket clients. A visitor to the rectory called it “mind-bogglingly beautiful.” Did Hull acquire a taste for living large as Cardinal Egan’s protégé? All that can be said is that the renovation raises questions about funding.

Max Beckmann. The Disillusioned (1922). Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

Funding of the Sheen Center remains another mystery. Neither the Sheen personnel nor the office of the chancellor, Msgr. Gregory Mustaciuolo, will disclose the cost of the project. How much was covered by private donation? What percentage was Archdiocesan monies? What is the combined cost of the salaries of the senior staff? Will an annual report become available? The chancellor’s office, which oversees budgetary matters, refers questions to the communications division. The spokeswoman at that end stonewalls: “We have no information at this moment.”

How can that be? Surely the chancellor’s office has records from Cost+Plus, the cost management firm hired to vet proposals from the chosen team (the award-winning Acheson Doyle Partners, architects, and Harvey Marshall Berling Associates, theatre design and acoustics)? Again: “We have no information at this moment.”

The Sheen Center owes existence to the assumption that our predicament results from bad art and a failure of education. A fashionable, art-conscious version of continuing ed is the cure. (Hull had a phrase for it: “dynamic dialogue between artist and audiences.”) Pére Bouyer had a clearer eye. He understood our descent into post-Christian culture in terms of the old adage: Corruption of the best is the worst of all. He wrote:

It is not ignorance of Christianity among those who were never evangelized, nor its negation by those who were never able to accept it, but rather by the betrayal of Christianity by those who received the Gospel and were brought up as Christians.

Recognition of the mote in our own eye precedes evangelism, new or old. And it helps to stay mindful that every genuflection by the Church to secular idols—under the pretext of promoting the gospel—ends as Vigo Demant foresaw: a proclamation of secularism in a Christian idiom.

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In Painting and Reality, Etienne Gilson argued that painting should be experienced on its own terms. That is to say, aesthetically. He insisted that audiences greet art without thinking of it as something to be understood, decoded, or interpreted. A painting is not an essay, not a set of propositions. Whatever literary, philosophical, or narrative content might be claimed for a work, the art of the thing lies elsewhere and exists to be welcomed for its own sake. To do otherwise, he wrote, is to turn a work of art into a book.

Painting, like music, requires no essential bond to either imitation of the real world nor readable content. The only ideas it is responsible for as art, are pictorial ones. British-born John Walker, an artist of singular power, echoes Gilson: “In all painting, it’s not about how many ideas you have; it’s about what you do with that idea.” Significant subjects have come down to us as great paintings. But it is not subject matter than makes painting memorable.

John Walker. Tidal Touch (2014). 84 x 66 inches. Alexandre Gallery, NYC.

Now into the fifth decade of an illustrious career, Walker is in full possession of his craft. This current exhibition, his first at New York’s Alexandre Gallery, illustrates the reasons his work has been collected by major American museums and is in public collections worldwide from London to South Africa.

It illustrates, too, why my long-standing admiration for his work coincides with a certain tension between attraction and resistance. The gravitational pull tugs both ways at the same time. His painting is at once beautiful and combative. Scale is one of the determinants of mood. The larger his work, the more assertive its innate aggression, even pugnacity. 

On exhibit are seven new monumental paintings, a selection of mid-sized ones, and a lively medley of small oils on board. The appeal of them lies in their unapologetic materiality: the patterning of invented forms, balance of color, and robust laying in of paint. Before anything, painting is an earthly thing. (“Colored mud,” Walker likes to say.) The source of delight in Walker’s work is the characteristic physical richness of the surface, that furious complexity of encrusted layers of color.

John Walker, Brush Fire on the Bay (2013). 20 x 16 inches. Alexandre Gallery, NYC.

Walker’s abiding pictorial idea draws from the light and landscape of Seal Island, Maine. Following the earlier American modernists Marsden Hartley and John Marin—both drawn to Maine settings—he abstracts from the landscape, fragmenting it to emphasize inherent rhythmic qualities over natural forms. The sea coast, with its outcroppings, mud flats, and swirling eddies is a resource mined for its wildness and movement, not scenic charm. Refusal of scenic clichés lends his painting a force appropriate to the advance of the sea. In the oversized canvases, Walker’s ambition to capture the assault of tidal currents on the shoreline can move you to back up, keep clear of the offensive.

John Walker. The Sea II (2011-14), 48 x 36 inches.  Alexandre Gallery, NYC.

Over decades, Walker has won his way through to an expressiveness capable of a broad diversity of performance. Here, his distillations of landscape shapes, mapped as if from an aerial view, owe their abstract patterning to the aboriginal bark paintings he fell in love with during his early years in Australia. In place of the linear refinement of Oceanic design, Walker substitutes a gestural bravado inherited from Abstract Expressionism.

Wandjuk Marika. The Sun Rising (1959). Art Gallery of New South Wales, AU.

The patterned rhythms and repetitions of Oceanic art anchor Walker’s exuberance of invention. The swagger of gesture is contained within an schematic architecture all his own. His appetite for the grand things of nature transmitted through the paint itself makes visible George Braque’s words: “A painting is completed when it has wiped out the idea.” In other words, when it exists for itself alone.

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Christopher Columbus is the patron saint of everyone who misses the turnoff and winds up in Cleveland.
                                                                —Anonymous

The finest way to spend Columbus Day weekend is to put down whatever else you are doing and sit awhile with Samuel Eliot Morison’s Christopher Columbus, Mariner. It is the popular version of his magisterial two-volume Admiral of the Ocean Sea, which won a 1942 Pulitzer. America’s pre-eminent naval historian, Morison was a commissioned officer in the Naval Reserves, a seaman himself. During World War II, he saw active duty aboard twelve battle ships, reaching the rank of Rear Admiral by the time he retired in 1951. In a lovely assessment by James Hornfischer, writing for the Smithsonian: “For Morison, fine writing required deep living.”

The man who called himself “a sea-going historiographer,” lived his subject by leaving the archives. To research the life of Columbus, Morison abandoned the safety of the stacks for five months on a three-masted sailing ship, retracing Columbus’ ten thousand mile odyssey across the Atlantic and around the Caribbean. That radical empiricism is the hearts’ blood of Morison’s narrative. No matter how many times I have read his opening salute to Columbus, it still stirs me:

At the age of twenty-four, by lucky chance he was thrown into Lisbon, center of European oceanic enterprise; and there .  .  .  he conceived the great enterprise that few but a sailor would have planned, and none but a sailor could have executed. That enterprise was simply to reach “The Indies”—Eastern Asia—by sailing west. It took him about ten years to obtain support for the idea, and he never did execute it because a vast continent stood in the way. America was discovered by Columbus purely by accident and was named for a man who had nothing to do with it; we now honor Columbus for something he never intended to do, and never knew that he had done. Yet we are right in so honoring him, because no other sailor had the persistence, the knowledge and sheer guts to sail thousands of miles into the unknown ocean until he found land.

.  .  .  Born at the crossroads between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he showed the qualities of both eras. He had the firm religious faith, the a priori reasoning and the close communion with the Unseen typical of the early Christian centuries. Yet he also had the scientific curiosity, the zest for life, the feeling for beauty and the striving for novelty that we associate with the advancement of learning.

Artist Unknown. Columbus Showing His Crew Guanahani Island (17th C.) 

Son of a Genoese wool weaver and a weaver’s daughter, the boy took to heart the legend of his namesake, St. Christopher:

In his name, Christopher Columbus [Christoforo Columbo] saw a sign that he was destined to bring Christ across the sea to men who knew Him not. Indeed, the oldest known map of the New World, dated A.D. 1500, dedicated to Columbus by his shipmate Juan de la Cosa, is ornamented by a vignette of Saint Christopher carrying the Infant Jesus on his shoulders.

The Roman calendar has erased the great Discover’s namesake. Contemporary academicians have erased all honor due him. Entering the past from the poisonous ambitions of the present, historians such as Kirkpatrick Sale (The Conquest of Paradise) and David Stannard (American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World) reduce his life to an excuse for moral outrage: a symptom of European egocentrism and a genocidal calamity. They would have us repent one of the most significant achievements of human history. Christopher Columbus—an imperfect man of imperfect times—has been dissolved in the acid bath of the self-flagellating ideologies of our time. 

Better to leave the last word to Morison:

He had his flaws and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great—his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty, and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities—his seamanship. As a master mariner and navigator, Columbus was supreme in his generation. Never was a title more justly bestowed than the one he most jealously guarded—Almirante del Mar Océano, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

Could Morison’s sympathy for Columbus find a publisher today? I read him and tremble for a generation raised against itself, instilled with suicidal guilt, and poised to denounce protagonists of the civilization that sustains them. 

Anonymous Woodcut. Columbus Landing at Hispaniola. Historia Baetica (1494), Basel.

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