I am very much enjoying Phillipe Aries The Hour of our Death, a magnificent and thorough study of the history of how western civilization dealt with death from its founding in the Middle Ages until now. The book has many virtues, perhaps chief among them is how illumines the vast gulf he points out between the medieval and modern world in how they dealt with death. I look forward to commenting more on Aries’ wisdom another time.
For now, however, two minor gaffes on Aries’ part can’t get out of my head. So with apologies to Aries. . .
He begins talking about death in the Song of Roland, a good place to start as 1) the story comes from the early middle ages, 2) it has the hallmarks of fully developed civilization (unlike the histories of Nottker and Einhard), and 3) it has a lot of death. He makes excellent points about how the rituals that (spoiler alert) Roland, Turpin, and Oliver perform before their deaths have the effect of “taming” death and reducing its sting. So far so good. But then he asserts that, “thoughts of reunion on the other side of death,” or even the vitality of the afterlife, had no part in their consciousness because they do not mention it. Aries quotes from Roland’s wistfulness at losing the land’s he conquered in death as evidence that early medieval man did not think much of the next life in death. We might respond that the argument from silence does not convince very much, or perhaps, that it is good evidence for how Roland felt, but perhaps not necessarily the whole of the middle ages. We could also debate the extent to which literary evidence should count as historical evidence.
In a fascinating segment Aries discusses how over time the place of burial mattered more and more. Eventually, burial within the church itself came even to supersede burial within church lands, or the church graveyard. He cites one example,
In the 17th century the parochial mass was said at the altar of the blessed sacrament. “Beneath this altar lies the body of Claude d’ Aubray, knight. Having had on this earth a wholehearted and singular devotion to to the precious body of our Savior, he desired that on his death he be laid to rest and buried next to the Blessed Sacrament, that he might obtain mercy through the prayers of the faithful who prostrate themselves before the very holy and venerable sacrament and be born again with them in glory.”
Granted, such burials did not come without a fee. But it is here that Aries, I think, misinterprets the purpose. He views the special burial as a kind of exchange — the deceased do ‘x’ so that they get ‘y,’ and thus descends into a legalistic understanding of spiritual concerns. Though throughout the book Aries offers implicit criticism in how the modern world deals with death and admires much of how the early modern world handled things. He seems to have particular admiration for the early medieval world. But, alas, he cannot escape his own modern, scientific outlook and assumes the same about the past.
We might say in response that, yes, such burials brought a certain cost, but funerals today cost as well, and likely cost more. Regardless, proper burial requires work and workers need paid.
But we can go a bit further. Aries assumes that such burials were seen as beneficial to the dead in the way that buying milk with a few dollar bills benefits the consumer. But our relationship with God, let alone our relationships with people, do not work this way. We don’t buy flowers for our wives to earn their favor, but for other, less concrete reasons. Parishioners do not cross themselves, for example, for God, but for themselves. Ritual acts proceed primarily from devotion, not duty. So too, burial within the church or within church lands has nothing to do with any kind of “exchange” for salvation, but as a way for the dead to plant their flag in the “City of God,” represented by the church. Thinking differently about death requires us to change our perspective on many other issues.
Others in earlier centuries share in Aries’ misunderstanding. He writes,
Erasmus finds [belief] in the virtues of the last rites superstitious for the same reason [as other 17th century writers]: because they seemed to designed a dissolute life to be saved ‘in extremis.’
Heaven forbid that someone be saved in their last moments after a dissolute life! That would upset the whole notion of righteousness as a kind of exchange. This legalistic understanding is not limited to our modern times.
Aries’ book illumines much, and even his modern understandings reveal the vast gulf between the modern and early modern worlds.
As the American History class reads through some excerpts from De Tocqueville, questions about the nature of equality have arisen consistently, especially in regards to the recent Supreme Court decision on marriage. The students (and to a somewhat lesser extent, myself) seem plowed over by the speed of how things have changed. In 2004, some argued that the issue of homosexual marriage helped mobilize conservatives to defeat John Kerry. Ten years later many acted as if the high Court’s decision was an inevitable byproduct of the times. The shift came swift and sure, and in some ways out of nowhere.
What happened, and why?
One could advance many reasons and theories. An extended treatment of the topic would involve an in depth look at theological and cultural shifts, and so forth. Pierre Manent’s De Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy helped me see one piece of the puzzle in stark clarity. In discussing De Tocqueville’s general political theory, he writes,
Tocqueville draws distinctions between three types of regimes: those where power is external to society (absolute monarchies), those where it is both internal and external to society (aristocracies, who reside outside the people, but reside there due to custom and tradition, thus from within the culture), and finally, the United States, where the society “acts by itself on itself,” because “there is no power except that which emanates from within.” He paints the picture of regime where the social bond is immediately political.
Aha! Here we have it, as he asserts that democratic governments have no guidance from “the state,” rather, it comes from everyone, or no one in particular. This is why we don’t always see these changes coming.
Manent continues to enumerate two main characteristics of such regimes.
Invisibility — De Tocqueville writes, “In America the laws are seen, their daily execution is perceived, everything is in movement around you, but the motor is discovered nowhere.”
Omnipresence — This invisible power is present and active. “In the New England states, the legislative power extends to more objects than are among us.” “In the United States, government centralization is at a high point. It would be easy to prove that national power there is more concentrated than it has been in any of the ancient monarchies of Europe.” De Tocqueville referred, of course, to the 1830’s — not today.
This means that, among other things, we cannot blame the courts, the media, Hollywood, or any other particular entity in society. If we don’t like something we have only two choices: blame everyone, or no one at all.
Tocqueville thought in the 1830’s that this power still mainly operated through legislative bodies and elections. Today, I can’t think of a strong legislative body in any particular state, let alone Congress itself. Change now, even more so than Tocqueville’s day, comes from the mist of the air. It concentrates quickly and becomes universal. “The social bond is immediately political.” One can debate whether or not the Supreme Court’s decision truly reflected the “average American.” But we cannot deny that the “spirit of the age” gave the Court’s decision that feeling of inevitability. We didn’t see it coming because American politics truly operate from the people, not even from our elected officials — hence the enormous power of this force. We can elect new leaders. Even kings die eventually. The people will always remain. Our institutions. then, even our guaranteed rights, should not be seen as natural byproducts of democratic government, but foreign agents sent to sabotage this unseen motor. Tocqueville believed that the insertion of the Bill of Rights checked democratic feeling, and proved the wisdom of the founders.* In general, he predicted that the massive power of the people would run through every possible crack in the Constitution and widen it immeasurably. One only has to see how we have used the commerce clause** for good and ill as yet another exhibit of Tocqueville’s keen perception.
As we might imagine, this “motor” must derive its primary source of energy from a passion for equality, not liberty. Tocqueville pointed out often that at some point these two governing principles become mutually exclusive and cancel each other out. “Liberty” might produce more individual works of great genius, but equality will give us “immediate pleasures” and a more equitable foundation for democracy. He predicted that equality would rise in prominence as the years went by and he predicted accurately.
We might think that the idea of “marriage equality” shows that we have reached the apotheosis of this democratic idea, but if we look at the culture at large I have my doubts. Movies like “Elysium” and “Snowpiercer,” tv shows like “Mr. Robot,” broader trends like the “Occupy” movement — all show that we may not be done with “Equality” just yet. This in turn made me think about a comment A.J. Toynbee made about a link between capitalism and communism. He writes in Volume Five of his A Study of History,
However that may be, the modern Western World seems to have broken virgin soil in extending the empire of Necessity into the economic field — which is indeed a sphere of social life that has been overlooked or ignored by almost all the minds that have directed the thoughts of other societies. The classic exposition of Economic Determinism is of course Karl Marx; but in the western world of today the number of souls who testify by their acts to a conviction that Economic Necessity is Queen of All is vastly greater than the number of professing Marxists, and would be found to include a phalanx of arch-capitalists who would repudiate with horror any suggestion that were fundamentally at one, in the faith by which they lived, with the execrable prophet of communism.
Many of us grew up with Democracy and Communism as bitter enemies. But Tocqueville and Manent have made me wonder, if in communism we simply have democracy’s final and untenable form.
Dave
*Though the Bill of Rights was not in the original Constitution, we can agree with Tocqueville if we interpret “founders” more broadly.
**Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” We have used the commerce clause as the basis for labor laws, farm subsidies, gun control, etc., etc. in ways I’m sure the framers of the Constitution never imagined.
In his magnum opus, The City of God, St. Augustine wrote how people define themselves not so much by what they do, or even what they believe, but by what they love. This penetrating insight led him to develop a whole theory about how the church and state operate and what goals they pursue.
St. Augustine had a classical education and certainly Plato influenced him a great deal. In fact, Augustine may very well have had the last few books of Plato’s Republic in mind as he developed his theory. For Plato argued essentially the same thing, that every form of government results from the accumulated desires of the people it governs. In other words, every society gets the kind of government that reflects their “soul” as a nation, or every nations gets the kind of government they deserve.
Plato spends the majority of The Republic laying the groundwork for the perfect state. His vision contains much that we should admire, and other aspects we should utterly reject. He had far seeing and radical ideas for his day, ideas that would remain radical for many centuries (such as the equality of men and women, and his goal to educate women the same as men). He had others that map out a modern plan for the worst state tyrannies, such as his proposal to have the state erode the family as a vital part of the state.
Some accuse Plato of living too much in an imaginary play-world, but by the end of the dialog Plato discusses the visible imperfections of governments. We would approach the issue likely by looking at the structures of governments and the distribution of powers. Plato starts with the soul, and believes that each form of government, be it oligarchy, democracy, monarchy, or the like, has its roots in souls of the people in the state. In other words, an oligarchic state will have a preponderance of “oligarchic souls” that comprise it. I suppose Plato might say that each state gets the form of government it deserves.
He starts by discussing what he calls a “timocracy,” a state where people dedicate themselves to honor. Most of these societies (Sparta and Macedon serve as examples) find that achieving honor comes most quickly in war. Thus, their drive for honor makes them a warlike state. Socrates describes the timocratic man,
He should have more of self-assertion and be less cultivated, and yet a friend of culture; and he should be a good listener, but no speaker. Such a person is apt to be rough with slaves, unlike the educated man, who is too proud for that; and he will also be courteous to freemen, and remarkably obedient to authority; he is a lover of power and a lover of honour; claiming to be a ruler, not because he is eloquent, or on any ground of that sort, but because he is a soldier and has performed feats of arms; he is also a lover of gymnastic exercises and of the chase.
Timocracies have the main advantage of dedicating themselves to something “spiritual,” beyond mere material gratification. But, as is often the case, this kind of intense dedication and shunning the world has its consequences. First, due to the intense desire to preserve honor, powerful timocratic men will not want to “put themselves out there” for fear of failure and loss of face. More significantly, his heirs likely will not take satisfaction in his purely “spiritual pursuits.” His descendants will want honor to translate into something more tangible, and so timocracy generates into oligarchy, where the souls of men seek the accumulation of wealth. Plato penetratingly blames the avaricious nature of timocratic man — he is avaricious of honor itself — for creating the more common form of avarice in his descendants. The timocratic man cares not for the education of the soul towards eternal beauty, so he is more apt to succumb to the temptations of avarice in the first place.
The defects of the oligarchic soul, and thus the oligarchic state, are many. . .
The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is ruin the of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do they or their wives care about the law? And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.
Likely enough.
And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls. And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State, virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.
Clearly.
And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is neglected. And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man. They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work. And this, speaking generally, is the way in which oligarchy is established.
Yes, he said; but what are the characteristics of this form of government, and what are the defects of which we were speaking?
First of all, I said, consider the nature of the qualification just think what would happen if pilots were to be chosen according to their property, and a poor man were refused permission to steer, even though he were a better pilot?
You mean that they would shipwreck?
Yes; and is not this true of the government of anything?
I should imagine so.
Except a city? –or would you include a city?
Nay, he said, the case of a city is the strongest of all, inasmuch as the rule of a city is the greatest and most difficult of all.
And here is another defect which is quite as bad, namely, the inevitable division: such a State is not one, but two States, the one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.
That, surely, is at least as bad.
Another discreditable feature is, that, for a like reason, they are incapable of carrying on any war. Either they arm the multitude, and then they are more afraid of them than of the enemy; or, if they do not call them out in the hour of battle, they are oligarchs indeed, few to fight as they are few to rule. And at the same time their fondness for money makes them unwilling to pay taxes.
How discreditable!
It is the lack of harmony, the lack of balance (which carries us back to our discussion about music), which brings down the oligarchic state. The pursuit of money leads to grossly top-heavy state with no guiding principle other than the accumulation of property.
The timocratical soul loves honor, the oligarchic loves money, and the democratical soul loves the empowerment of choice. The oligarchic soul fails to pursue wisdom, so he passes no guiding principle down to his children to help them govern the desires his own accumulative practices enflamed. He despised the poor, so he never bothered to train them either. The door now stands wide open for democratical man. Plato writes,
And then, again, after the old desires have been driven out, fresh ones spring up, which are akin to them, and because he, their father, does not know how to educate them, wax fierce and numerous.
Though Plato has some praise for democracy, he believes that democratical soul may be the poorest of all, for in the end he pursues nothing outside of himself, nothing outside of whatever he desires at a given moment. It is this passion for choice that Plato believes guides democratic man — a passion ultimately for “the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.” He writes,
Yes, I said, he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he-is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.
The democratic state, then, can have no harmony, because democratic man himself has no internal harmony. He pursues many things, but none of them well, none with any depth. The virtues of patience, moderation, and deliberation stand as enemies to “Choice” — they impede choice because they slow down “Choice.” Thus, democratic man eventually dispenses with them, and with him the state. Finally the disharmony and competition engendered by “Choice” becomes unmanageable. At this point, we crave the end result of choice, self-gratification, more than what attained us this gratification, which was Choice itself. We will then want a tyrant to control the conflict and make sure we can still attain the life of pleasure that Choice brought us.
Plato’s harsh critique of democracy should give us pause and have us consider a few points. A quick glance seems to show that the decline of the Church in the west has brought about the rise of the god “Choice.” We spend much time, money, and resources developing technology to enhance our seemingly limitless ability to choose. Policies like abortion and homosexual marriage receive their justification from the concept of choice itself: we chose it, and that fact trumps all others. Christians may rightly object to such practices, but must realize that “Choice” stands as a fundamentally different god. Death has also come under the dominion of Choice, as some states now legalize assisted suicide, which allows for us to exit this life on our terms.
Our founders certainly had awareness of this problem. In the Federalist #10 Madison ingeniously turned Plato’s argument somewhat on its head. He claimed that the multiplicity of choice would create a multiplicity of factions. So long as none gained too much of a majority they would cancel each other out, and preserve liberty thereby. Whether this has proven true in the long run remains to be seen. Plato would surely argue that a government with disharmony actually built into the system (as opposed to it being a by-product in timocracies and oligarchies) could never have any real stability. Without this stability, tyranny could not be far away.
We will have to wait until later to consider a defense of democracy. For now, I hope that Plato’s critique will sink in to the students and help them see the strengths and weaknesses of democracy more clearly.
My disclaimer to all my posts is that I am strictly an amateur historian, and perhaps no more so than in the post below . . .
A frequent topic of conversation among historians is the nature of decline and fall. Is the collapse of a particular civilization essentially inevitable, or can a civilization continue unto the end of all things? Others nuance the dilemma a bit by stating that decline and fall remains eminently likely but possible to stave off.
Discussion about decline in the ancient and medieval world involved the concept of Fortune. For the ancients, Fortune could often have the sense of arbitrary incoherence. Troy must fall — Hector knows this. As to why or to what end, he has no idea and seemingly cares not to know. Not even Zeus seems to know why Troy must fall. Fate, that awful word, never strayed far from the mind of the ancients.
Medieval thinkers sought to have a generous spirit and wanted to give Fortune a place in the Divine scheme. Dante describes Lady Fortune as one of God’s servants. She dispensed with blessings and setbacks indiscriminately, yes, but not for an unknown purpose. God always wants to show forth his kingly munificence and have that imaged on Earth for all to see. At the same time, all must learn humility, for without humility, who can be saved? Blessings and rewards (in Fortune’s kingdom) not so much because of sin or righteousness but to teach grand lessons about salvation. That is why Fortune is “Lady Fortune,” for the same reason St. Francis called death “our Sister, Bodily Death.” Both have the gentle, nurturing female touch despite the pain they bring.
Eric Voegelin’ s treatment of Polybius in his Order and History intrigued me. Perhaps the most famous section of Polyblius’ work is in Book VI where he discusses the cycle of rise and fall that preys upon all civilizations. What makes this section of particular for me is that Polybius writes about Rome’s rise from ca. 270-200 B.C., but writes himself around 140 B.C. when cracks in the Republic started becoming evident. It gives Polybius an unusual vantage point.
Voegelin, a notable critic of “disembodied” interpretive methods of history, makes two points worth noting in his treatment of Polybius.
The first surrounds the idea of cause and effect. At times Polybius, like his fellow Greek Herodotus before him, has a tendency to extend the cause beyond comprehensible reason, placing the fulcrum for events he discusses have orgins long before anyone living at the time can recall. Of course Polybius distinguishes between direct and distant causes, but the question is one of proportion. If everything can be a cause, then nothing is a cause. If the real cause has roots beyond the knowledge or experience of anyone living, then things “just happen.” Both practices could be described as gnostic because both encourage us to live in a world without responsibility, in a state disconnected from creation.
The second concerns Polybius’ ultimate failure to find a true cause. This leads him in turn to focus first on the bare reality of Rome’s practices, how they built forts, how they made laws, and so on. He pays little attention to whether the laws be good or bad, or what particular advantage the forts might have given them. This focus on the pure “physics” of things likely explain his drift into explaining everything with the Wheel of Fortune, which has in his mind an arbitrary quality. Polybius quotes from the last Macedonian king with evident approval, who said,
If you take not an indefinite time, nor many generations, but just the last 50 years, you will see the cruelty of Fortune. Fifty years ago do you suppose that the Macedonians or the Persians, if some god foretold it, would have believed by the present time that the Persians, who once ruled the world, would by now have ceased to be a name, while the Macedonians, who were then not even a name, would be rulers of all? Yet this Fortune, who never keeps faith, but transforms everything against our reckoning . . . has lent him these good things until she decides to dispose differently of them (XXIX, 21).
Later Polybius, with Scipio in at the destruction of Carthage he records Scipio’s foreboding that now that Persia, Macedon, and Carthage had been destroyed, perhaps Rome would now be next. But just as with the king of Macedon, no intelligible cause would exist. Fortune does what she wills, leaving mankind ‘not guilty’ for whatever happens.
Of course others took up this idea before Polybius, notably Plato himself in The Republic. Some accuse Plato of gnosticism and he can drift in that direction at times, but his analysis has its roots not so much in disembodied fate but in the lives of individuals. When thinking about the transition from oligarchy to democracy he discusses the choices and desires of individuals. So the “oligarchic man/men” lead the transition from timocracy to oligarchy. The “democratic man” in turn brings about democracy, and so on. The city-state contains the accumulated souls of its inhabitants, thus the city too might be said to have a “soul” in aggregate. It too chooses. It too has responsibility. A brief excerpt discussing “democratic man” shows his method:
Yes, I said, he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he-is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.
Plato refuses to submit everything to “Fortune/Fate” and this makes hima greater thinker, and in another sense, the greater historian (see — this is why you read this blog, so you can find out shocking things such as, “Plato was a more profound thinker than Polybius.” Thank goodness for A Stick in the Mud!).
Sometimes the meaning of Jesus’ words, and their application, seem entirely obvious once you read them.
Sometimes He confounded His audiences both then and now. He did not always seek to give answers. It seems to me that sometimes He wants to draw us deeper into a Mystery.
His command to be “wise as serpents, and innocent as doves” (Mt. 10:16) has always perplexed me. Do we have to be one or the other, or can we be both wise and innocent at the same time? The command to be “innocent as doves” seems easy to understand, but of course hard to achieve. The first part apparently asks us to mimic the cleverness of the Devil, which might seem easier to our fallen selves but surely more dangerous. And how to apply this first admonition? I have no idea.
I thought about this saying of Jesus during one particular section of Kyriacos Markides The Mountain of Silence, a series of interviews with one particular monk from the monastery on Mount Athos. I strongly recommend the work, not because of the author but because for most of the book he simply allows his subjects to speak at length. Early on in the book the author tells of two events in the life of the monastery.
In W.W. II the Nazi’s began to overrun Greece and the monks on Mount Athos wondered what they might do. The monastery is located at the very edge of one of the Chalcedonian peninsulas and remains somewhat isolated territorially. As a pre-emptive strike of sorts, they decided to ask Hitler to put the monastery under his personal protection. They correctly deduced that Hitler would be flattered to do so, which might have spared the area damage from bombs, or at least allowed the monks to stay. They then proceeded to use their privileged position to hide many Jewish women from the Nazi’s, the only time in their long history that they have allowed women within their walls.
Turkey invaded Greece in 1974, which again endangered both the physical structures of the monastery and its spiritual independence. This time the monks made a special appeal to Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union to have the monastery put under his personal protection. Perhaps they hoped to hearken to Russia’s own special monastic tradition. Or perhaps they hoped to appeal to Russia’s rivalry with Turkey in the late 19th/early 20th century over the fate of the Balkan Orthodox Christians.
Both instances, and especially the appeal to Hitler, did not at first impression sit well with me. But then I reconsidered. In neither case did the monks side with their protectors. They stood above the purely national aspects of the wars — but not the moral ones. They had the foresight to use Hitler’s vanity for good. In the second instance they may have exhibited real foresight in standing above the national aspects of that conflict. Alas, based on what very little I have read, it appears that many Mediterranean churches use the events of the 1970’s as a rallying point for Greek nationalism and ignored deeper spiritual aspects. The monks on Mount Athos avoided this.
Might we consider these actions as correct applications of the Jesus’ words cited above? Perhaps.
One can springboard from thoughts about these incidents to speculations about the relationship between the church and state, something the church in the west may have to reconsider in light of recent events. In western thought the classic exposition of the issue came from St. Augustine’s City of God where he outlined the nature and purpose of the “City of Man” and the “City of God” — in simplistic terms — the state and the church respectively. Augustine seems to advocate cooperation between the two when it appears that interests genuinely align, even though they may seek to achieve the same ends for very different reasons.
This sounds entirely reasonable. It looks like something along the lines of what the monks of Athos did in the circumstances cited above. But I wonder about its applicability in modern democracies, a context Augustine did not envision.
A monarch or emperor has the sum total of political power in his hands. He may share power with unofficial advisers or an an official council like a Senate. But whether an absolute ruler or no, the power remains with him. In these situations the Church can easily stand aside and say, “This is good king, we can work with him, ” or the opposite as the case may be. Whether they cooperate or no, they stand outside the power structure and can detach themselves (in theory) from it with ease.
But in democracies power coheres with the amorphous “majority.” Cooperation in the sense Augustine entails with a democracy would likely mean the need to become part of the power structure itself. Standing outside said structure effectively puts you within the minority. Influencing government would then involve not cooperation with the City of Man but joining the City of Man. Of course in a monarchy all are equal because everyone is in the minority.
We shall need great wisdom to navigate this dilemma in the coming years.
I always enjoy musicians who can talk intelligently about their music. Glenn Gould combined his brilliant technique with a brilliant mind, and thankfully, availed himself of many opportunities to speak.
The video appeals to me on a number of levels. For starters musician and filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon almost parodies the speech and approach of a rather stuffy French intellectual (though I would never assert that’s what he actually was). What really intrigued me, however, was their discussion of whether or not one can truly play Bach on a piano instead of a harpsichord, which leads then to other digressions.
Gould breaks down composers into two types:
The first seek to create the “ultimate” piece that can only be played in very specific ways, in very specific settings. Such composers, he argues, concern themselves primarily with the reception of the music rather than the music itself.
The second (whom he clearly prefers) concern themselves with the structural integrity of the music itself. Gould always admired Bach for his “vertical and horizontal” integrity. That is (I think) the piece went somewhere definite (vertical), but never at the expense of the relationship of the notes to each other (horizontal).
Certainly Bach has been a much more enduring composer than either in the first group Gould mentions. Who can think of Paganini without the violin, or Liszt without some long-haired guy playing the piano? But Bach shows up everywhere, with mandolins, saxophones, organs, and in different genres like jazz and even some heavy-metal. His structural integrity allows then, for improvisation and modification.* The fact of his endurance and applicability must give us hints as to how to operate in other areas of life.
Historian Arnold Toynbee talked about the traps that civilizations fall into that bring them down. I appreciate that Toynbee often gave a spiritual focus to this topic, and focused on “idolization” of ephemeral techniques or institutions as one key problem. In other words, at some point in the past a particular institution or method helped achieve some great good. The solution to our present concerns then, means returning to some point in the past. Toynbee comments,
We can see that this nemesis would bring on social breakdowns in two distinct ways. On the one hand it would diminish the number of possible candidates for playing the creator’s role in the face of any possible challenge . . . On the other hand . . . these ex-creators, by virtue of their previous work, will now be in positions of power and influence. In these positions they will not be helping the society move forward any longer; they will be “resting on their oars.”
Classical education, it seems, can easily fall into the temptations of the first category of composers above. We, perhaps unlike others, seek the “perfect” for all time in our educational content and methods. This in turn can lead us to idolize the past, freeze it, and bring it forward to today. But if we do this we forget that education involves primarily the transmission of certain experiences and beliefs from one generation to the next. For it to transfer, it must have life, which means it must have some degree of wiggle-room and applicability in different contexts. Athens’ own history is an example. With their curiosity and passion for eternal things they might have created the idea of classical education. But eventually they became a parody of themselves. “For the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21).
But then one might counter — isn’t that what public schools essentially do? They have a curriculum that is essentially interchangeable and standardized. This curriculum, based on the standardized test, can then be easily transferred from one teacher to another. In many classical schools, curriculum seems much more teacher-centric and would not transfer nearly as easily.
However, such approaches to curricula are essentially gnostic. They have no incarnation. Without a definite incarnation of an idea or method in the person of a particular teacher, there can be no power, no application, no life. The Spirit could not descend until after the Son had come.
Perhaps we can conclude by saying that if one ever writes curriculum, pay extra attention to its structure instead of its sound. When we play Bach, let Bach be Bach. But be sure to put something of yourself into your own performance. I have never understood objections to those who say, “But Bach wouldn’t have played it that way.” We do not go to concerts to hear Bach play, after all.**
Dave
*I remember reading one musician who said something like, “If Bach was alive today he would be a jazz musician.” For those interested I include here part of an interview with the famous jazz pianist Keith Jarrett conducted by fellow piano player Ethan Iverson, on the subject of Bach.
EI: Do you play the piano every day?
KJ: Now I do, yeah. There was a long time in my life (when I was ill) when I didn’t practice really at all regularly, but now, yes, I do. It really depends on what I am working towards or away from or both. Sometimes I have to slowly erase one thing and move towards another.
I was just working on Bach over the last few months, and now I have to shelve that and pretend that I know how to do a solo concert, and while I’m pretending that, that’s practicing. But! I thought I was going to shelve the Bach, but now I’m playing the Bach, and for the last twenty-five minutes I do the other thing and it works very well. Because by the time I do the finger-work that Bach requires, and the control thing, my fingers are ready to be completely out-of-control and in-control at the same time. I didn’t realize that it was helping me improvise until Gary Peacock looked at me between sets and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”
EI: So, at one point, going between jazz and classical felt like more of an embouchure change than it does now? Is it beginning to even out?
KJ: It really depends. When I was getting ready to record Mozart I couldn’t have mixed both. And in general, that’s the case. I generally don’t mix things. But I’ve seen how it seems to work this time, and I’m just taking advantage of it. Probably I’m in better shape than I was before, due to some of the patterns Bach forces upon you. The jazz player doesn’t ever play these patterns: they don’t come up; certainly not in the left hand. And working on the fingering puts you in a hypnotic state, playing the same phrase down one half step at a time or down a scale, and you’re doing the same fingering but it isn’t the same fingering, depending on how many black keys are involved. And Bach has this crazy ability to change key in the middle of a scale. So you’ve changed harmonic center in the process of playing what you thought was a simple scale so you can’t take your eyes off the music. And even with the bass line, if you stop looking you think you know what it is, but he always thought it out so well that it’s not always not predictable, but his note is always better than yours.
EI: Do you work out your fingerings early on, or keep experimenting?
KJ: I’ve had all kinds of experiences. With the Shostakovich, I just played it and played it and played it. When I realized I was going to record it, I had to say to myself, wait: I’ve got to find an edited version of this with fingerings! Because what I normally do is find different fingerings every time I play, probably. I just improvise that part of it. It works sometimes, but it doesn’t work in the studio, when you don’t want to do a second take. So I went through three different editions of the Shostakovich and ended up with absolutely no fingering: theUrtext, with no fingerings at all, and that’s always what I prefer in the end. With the Bach, I’ve been able to stick with that. I don’t even like making a mark on the page…
**If you listen to Glenn Gould recordings of Bach you will usually hear him humming faintly in the background. Some object to this, but I like it. It reminds me that the music I’m hearing doesn’t come to me disembodied, but from a real person in love with the music he plays. Thus, Gould recordings can nearly achieve the immediacy of a live performance.
Thanks to Marginal Revolution once again for sharing a fascinating but perhaps not surprising article about ethics professors. The upshot is, apparently, they do not act any more ethically than the rest of us.
So the natural question arises then, what good are professors who teach ethics? Would it be possible for an ethics professor to live badly and teach ethics well? What about other disciplines?
Of course 99% of ethical questions seem perfectly obvious to answer. So, as a friend pointed out, professors of ethics have to make their hay in the disputed areas where debate exists and the classroom might get a bit more interesting. The article states,
An ethicist who feels obligated to live as she teaches will be motivated to avoid highly self-sacrificial conclusions, such as that the wealthy should give most of their money to charity or that we should eat only a restricted subset of foods. Disconnecting professional ethicists’ academic enquiries from their personal choices allows them to consider the arguments in a more even-handed way. If no one expects us to act in accord with our scholarly opinions, we are more likely to arrive at the moral truth.
In other words, there lies the implicit belief that to teach well one must distance oneself from the material so as to be more “even-handed.”
This gets at the whole purpose of teaching and education in general. What follows below attempts to reproduce a conversation I had with a good friend and colleague.
If we hope to arrive at satisfactory conclusions regarding ethics or other subjects, we must start first with theology, the “queen of the sciences.”
One can take two basic approaches to God:
Know something, believe something, then finally love something, or
Love something, believe, then know
Scripture and the history of God’s people clearly endorse the latter option, though in modern times we tend to prefer the first. In the Psalms we see numerous examples of something like this:
The author struggles with evil
Doubts God’s presence, His goodness
Goes to worship God, then
Arrives at the right knowledge and understanding of who God is
So too in the Gospels, Jesus rebukes the people when they ask for a sign. We shouldn’t interpret this so much as Jesus saying, “You’re so weak and impatient!” but more like, “That’s not how you can truly know me,” which is what He wants for all of us.
The idea of establishing some kind of clinical distance from God and taking a piece of him out to examine is utterly absurd. Surely even skeptics would agree that such an approach would not allow us to know God, and if it could, what kind of God would we have? So the best theologian would have the best prayer life, whatever form that took.
In an ecumenical environment the Bible teacher might need an even-handed approach with certain topics. In teaching baptism he may need to give arguments for and against infant baptism. But his goal should be to have students love baptism. If a student came to the said teacher privately and asked, “Which do you believe?” we would rightly be aghast if he said, “I have no commitment either way. It’s all the same to me. I baptized one of my kids as an infant and another as an adult.” The teacher would not love baptism. For him, the discussion he led remained a mere game. He would not teach his students to love baptism, but to think of baptism as a mere game.
So “detachment” from a particular conclusion may have its place at times, but knowing how and when depends. The idea of “analyzing” God is absurd for so many reasons. He is mystery and entirely transcendent. Perhaps the level of analysis we apply has to do with the degree of mystery and transcendence in our subject. A music teacher hears a piece of music and thinks, “What a great song. I love it.” This love then might lead them to analyze the piece and its tempo, chord changes, and so on. But who would begin with analysis? No one says to themselves, “This song has ‘x’ tempo, ‘y’ chord changes, and ‘z’ meter, so therefore I love this song.” The transcendent qualities of great music, and the mysterious nature of its effect on us, renders that approach almost meaningless.
Indirectly the study of History should lead us to the love of God, just as in any other subject. But that’s not the first port of call, but the second. Directly History involves the study of people. Most of us know that we remain a mystery to ourselves. What of our perception of others, and how should this impact our methodology? Music has transcendent qualities, but do everyday people? The question is difficult. In biology the need to lead with “love” over “analysis” gets much reduced because we have dominion over matter. As Pascal stated, matter might crush us, but we know it does so, while matter has no consciousness. We should analyze the bacteria before deciding whether or not to “love” it.
For the relationship between love and analysis for the History teacher, let us imagine three different teachers numbered 1-3:
This teacher has a passionate love and identification with the colonial cause and the American Revolution. With just as much passion, he also teaches his students that Nazi fascism is evil. His students absorb his passion and his conclusions in both subjects.
This teacher has no firm conclusions about the American Revolution and feels it a “tough call either way.” He teaches both sides of the argument well. When teaching W.W. II, however, he also teaches the evil of Nazi fascism. His students split on their opinions about the Revolution. On fascism they come out of his class with a more full understanding of evil.
This teacher has no firm conclusions on either the American Revolution or W.W. II. When it comes to the Nazis he remains “objective” and even-handed, giving arguments for and against the merits of their world view. Some of his students take the British side, some the American. Some of his students take the Allied side, some identify with the Axis powers.
Teacher ‘3’ should never teach. His teaching would lead people either to cynicism or evil living. No good history teacher should consistently produce students who apply their knowledge to live evil lives.
But would we prefer teacher ‘1’ or ‘2’?
Theology has two basic approaches to God. One is the way of affirmation — what we can truthfully say about God (Dante stands as the greatest master of this “way” still today, in my opinion). Apophatic theology stresses that we can know God best by stating what He is not. God is so fundamentally “other” from us that our affirmations will always remain deeply inadequate. Both approaches have their place. In the discipline of History I think the way of negation safer.*
We can say with certainty that God is not “in” the Nazi regime. We lack the same certainty when discussing the American Revolution. In History in general I think we can more often say what God is not than what God is.
This should not mean that we should have a goal of the “detached” teacher. When we think of great teachers we had in the past we probably think of teachers that had a definite point of view. They loved something about their subjects. The key to teaching History well must lie in deciding what the proper object of love is in the study of History.
If we attach our love too heartily to particular people, eras, or civilizations we will likely obscure their faults and not teach them truly. But a worse fate would mean becoming one of those historians that loves to point out everything bad about everything and seems to enjoy nothing at all. The first teacher would wrongly order his love but at least love something. The second has only cynicism and no sympathy for anyone or anything.
Nor should we say that what we love the process of investigation or method in the study of history. We can use the term “love” in this case to mean “I find a certain process of investigation useful.” But who can truly “love” a process? What good is the process? Where does it lead?
So to return to our question above . . .
I lean towards teacher #2. Teacher #1 has the distinct advantage of communicating a clear passion (of course the American Revolution is just a stand-in for other events/people, political parties, that involve moral grey areas, etc.). It’s easier to have a passionate dislike as opposed to something positive, so he gets credit there as well. But teacher #2 can still have passion and communicate a love for much more than a process even if he has more caution in what he attaches himself to. Applied rightly, the method he uses extends his sympathy and his humility. This humility goes beyond intellectual humility. The historian sees the complexity of a situation and realizes that salvation cannot come in this world and that failure inevitably comes. We would not necessarily have acted more wisely had we been in their place.
What we love through this method, finally and hopefully, involves a vision and a desire for the Kingdom of God made manifest. This should not preclude us having a warm attachment to certain people and places in history. It might protect us from the danger of idolatry inherent in the “Way of Affirmation.”** It seeks our own redemption as we identify with those in the past. It seeks the redemption of others as we see their need for transformation of the fallenness of the world.
The dance between idolatry and detachment will always remain delicate, but we should understand that we’re near the truth when we see this tension. Such tension lies throughout Christianity. God is One God in three distinct Persons. Christ is God and man, and so on. When faced with such a dilemma we affirm both equally and finitely hold them in tension as best we can.
The time has come to end this rambling before I exhaust any more of your patience.
“Too late!” say my kids.
Dave
*The way of affirmation usually involves metaphors or similes. The potential problem with this is our reference point which inevitably involves our own experience. For a few centuries we said God designed the universe like a clock maker makes a clock. Now that the clock has gone out of fashion, we no longer use this metaphor. Did God create like a clock maker? Maybe, but probably not? How can we be sure? Perhaps we can see some faint or very basic connection between creation and the clock, but I think it safer to say God did not create the universe like a clock.
**The danger of the “Way of Negation” would probably involve a safe detachment that precluded practicing love. Taken to extreme, could such an approach prevent one from loving even oneself? If that happened, we could not love others either.
I like some jazz music, but have always regretted not appreciating the so called golden era of jazz from the late 50’s – early 60’s. The prevalent pattern of 1) Introduce idea/theme, then 2) Long solos from every member of the group, and 3) Resolution with reprise of theme never grabbed me. I prefer a more melodic approach, and a more band/team oriented approach. No doubt much exists in the music that I do not understand, but there you go.
My favorite “all-time jazz great” has always been Miles Davis*, but his music sometimes fell into the above mentioned pattern. Then I heard this:
Wow. The first time I heard the music, I was so blown away I didn’t notice that the song is still basically, theme/solos/theme. After I noticed, I didn’t care. The song is so fun, funky, jazzy, so “everything” I no longer thought about structure at all. It takes us beyond structure and into play, into freedom.**
At about the same time I heard this song I read Michael Weinreb’s thoughtful and entertaining defense of college football, A Season of Saturdays. In one section of the book he discusses the fact that “free-spirited” play calling tends to work much more effectively in college than in the pros. You can have a wishbone offense, a spread offense, a pistol offense, and so on. You can have coaches that take a more laid-back approach to the game with great success, i.e. Steve Spurrier, or “gambling” coaches like Les Miles. But . . . these coaches don’t succeed in the NFL.
When thinking about the possible surprise elation inherent within college football, one has to think of Boise-State vs. Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl a few years ago. First the 4th and 18 play for to tie the game:
And to win the game, the most old-fashioned of crazy trick plays . . .
I realized the possible connection between Miles Davis and these Boise State plays when I had the same reaction as the announcer of the hook and ladder at the .07 mark as I did to “Directions” at about the 6:05 mark. Both moments take you out of yourself entirely. And while certainly pro football can have those moments, I agree with Weinreb (with no empirical backing, just an impression) that they happen more often in college football. Going from 300 or so Division I programs down to 32 NFL teams narrows the field of talent to such a degree that so much depends on meticulous execution over crazy inspiration. Perhaps these kinds of wild, unexpected moments link together jazz and college football, two quintessential American creations.
The question I asked myself as I read was whether ultimately I agreed with his premise that college football should stick around and continue to have its place in the American consciousness. Weinreb writes well, and I especially appreciated his soft touch — he doesn’t force his point. But in the end, disagree. College football can exist, sure, but needs scaled back drastically. One caveat is that I fall into a demographic that Weinreb admits will probably not understand his book. I grew up in an area dominated by professional sports, and I attended a Division III liberal arts college where maybe 500 people showed up for football games on Saturdays.
But still . . .
Wienreb focuses on his strongest argument, how college sports in particular bring us together in unexpected ways, and this gives college football (more than college basketball, I would agree) a kind of transcendence. I don’t deny this — rather, it’s because I do agree agree with Weinreb on this point that I think we should try and bring college football back to earth. One of the great aspects of music is that it can serve as a vehicle for transcendence, but music appreciation never (or hardly ever) devolves into tribalism. Something always goes a little bit wonky when music gets involved with competitiveness, but college football can’t exist without it. The rivalries can in certain places define one’s whole existence (Auburn-Alabama, Ohio St.-Michigan, etc.). Such tribalism usually has a detrimental impact on us, giving us real animosity based on purely invented and artificial reality — i.e — there is no real reason for students at Notre Dame to hate USC.*** This transcendent tribalism leads to a kind of worship. Weinreb attended Penn St., and in one chapter recalls a time when after a dramatic football win on the road, students stormed the stadium, took down a goal post, paraded to Joe Paterno’s house, and deposited it on his front lawn. Weinreb uses this story to support his argument, but I think it supports mine. This presentation of the “sacrifice” on the “altar” looks a lot like worship of a false god to me.
The partial unreality of college life as a whole gets magnified exponentially in “big-time” college football. Many of the best players on many of the best teams do not really attend the university. Their classes, living situations, facilities, their treatment in general on campus gives them a life totally apart from other students. The logic works like this:
We must have football because it creates such wonderful communal moments
But these communal moments are predicated on ultimately on winning
So — we must attract the best players to win
So — we have to create an additional unreal world apart from the actual campus community to attract players — some of whom don’t really belong at the university academically anyway — in order to foster this communal experience.
We then give ourselves to this imagined community, which involves imagined hatreds
The academic scandals involving fake classes, fake grades, and so on should not shock us in the least. After all, in some places college football is a god, and gods need appeased. Plenty of evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, exist to show how athletics tilt and twist universities in weird, unnatural ways.
I’m certainly not against sports in general. God made our bodies to do wonderful things. And, as our bodies are a form of revelation, the exuberant moments we experience in athletics are genuine, true pointers to Ultimate Reality. I also don’t blame people desiring such communal transcendence and their willingness to sacrifice for it. Again, we were made for such things.
The more we strip everyday life overtly of the sacred, the more we will seek to find it in other, perhaps less obvious ways. But seeking it in college football, as Weinreb admits we do, will in the end not give us answers, but instead, much to answer for.**** We will defend and sacrifice for the tribe to achieve it, making idols of our parochial communities.
Dave
*Miles Davis must surely rank as one of the great, if not the greatest bandleader of all time. Of course he was a legend, but he helped turn countless sidemen into legends, like Ron Carter, John Coltrane, Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett — this astounding list goes on and on.
**Being beyond structure doesn’t mean that one is anti-structure, anymore than being beyond rationality means being anti-reason. Of course the song has a structure and abides by certain rules of music, but one is not conscious of the pattern — therein lies self-forgetfulness.
***I loved my college experience as have many others, but I think one reason for the appeal of college is its fantasy-like existence. In some ways our K-12 years have many more roots to “reality,” with family, age diverse community, and so on.
****I.e., the Penn St. scandals
Toynbee, “The Idolization of the Parochial Community”
Unhappily, Polytheism begins to produce new and pernicious social effects when its domain is extended from the realm of Nature-worship to a province of the realm of Man-worship in which the object of worship is parochial collective human power. Local worships of deified parochial communities inevitably drive their respective devotees into war with one another. Whereas Demeter our common Mother Earth is the same goddess in Attica and in Laconia, the Athene Polias of Athens and the Athana Chalcioecus of Sparta, who are the respective deifications of these two parochial communities, are bound to be rival goddesses in spite of their bearing the same name. The worship of Nature tends to unite the members of different communities because it is not self-centred; it is the worship of a power in whose presence all human beings have the identical experience of being made aware of their own human weakness. On the other hand the worship of parochial communities tends to set their respective members at variance because this religion is an expression of self-centredness; because self-centredness is the source of all strife; and because the collective ego is a more dangerous object of worship than the individual ego is.
The collective ego is more dangerous because it is more powerful, more demonic, and less patently unworthy of devotion. The collective ego combines the puny individual power of each of its devotees into the collective power of Leviathan. This collective power is at the mercy of subconscious passions because it escapes the control of the Intellect and Will that put some restraint on the individual ego. And bad behaviour that would be condemned unhesitatingly by the conscience in an individual culprit is apt to be condoned when it is perpetrated by Leviathan, under the illusion that the first person is absolved from self-centredness by being transposed from the singular number into the plural. This is, however, just the opposite of the truth; for, when an individual projects his self-centredness on to a community, he is able, with less sense of sin, to carry his egotism to greater lengths of enormity. ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’;5 and the callousness of committees testifies still more eloquently than the fury of mobs that, in collective action, the ego is capable of descending to depths to which it does not fall when it is acting on its individual responsibility.
The warfare to which parochial-community-worship leads is apt to rankle, sooner or later, into war to the death; and this self-inflicted doom is insidious, because the ultimately fatal effects of this religion are slow to reveal themselves and do not become unmistakably clear till the mischief has become mortally grave.
In its first phase the warfare between deified parochial states is usually waged in a temperate spirit and is confined within moderate limits. In this first phase the worshippers of each parochial god recognize in some degree that each neighbour parochial god is the legitimate sovereign in his own territory. Each local god will be deemed to have both the right and the power to punish alien human trespassers on his domain who commit a grievous wrong against him by committing it against his people; and this consideration counsels caution and restraint in waging war on foreign soil. It tends to prevent war from becoming total. The bashful invader will refrain, not only from desecrating the enemy’s temples, but from poisoning his wells and from cutting down his fruit trees. The Romans, when they had made up their minds to go to all lengths in warring down an enemy community, used to take the preliminary precautions of inviting the enemy gods to evacuate the doomed city and of tempting them to change sides by offering them, in exchange, honourable places in the Roman pantheon. When a local community has been exterminated or deported in defiance of the local divinity and without regard to his sovereign prerogatives, the outraged parochial god may bring the usurpers of his domain and scorners of his majesty to heel by making the place too hot to hold them except on his terms. The colonists planted by the Assyrian Government on territory that had been cleared of its previous human occupants by the deportation of the Children of Israel soon found, to their cost, that Israel’s undeported god Yahweh had lost none of his local potency; and they had no peace till they took to worshipping this very present local god instead of the gods that they had brought with them from their homelands.
Thus the conduct of war between parochial states is kept within bounds, at the start, by a common belief in the equality of sovereign parochial gods, each within his own domain. But this belief is apt to break down, and, with it, the restraint that is imposed by it. They break down because the self-worship of a parochial community is essentially incompatible with the moderation commended in such maxims as ‘Live and let live’ and ‘Do as you would be done by’. Every form of Man-worship is a religious expression of self-centredness, and is consequently infected with the intellectual mistake and the moral sin of treating a part of the Universe as if it were the whole—of trying to wrest the Universe round into centering on something in it that is not and ought not to be anything more than a subordinate part of it. Since self-centeredness is innate in every living creature, it wins allegiance for any religion that ministers to it. It also inhibits any living creature that fails to break away from it from loving its neighbor as itself, and a total failure to achieve this arduous moral feat has a disastrous effect on social relations.
A further reason why it is difficult to keep the warfare between parochial states at a low psychological temperature is because parochial-community-worship wins devotion not only by ministering disastrously to self-centredness. It wins it also by giving a beneficent stimulus to Man’s nobler activities in the first chapter of the story. In the histories of most civilizations in their first chapters, parochial states have done more to enrich their members’ lives by fostering the arts than they have done to impoverish them by taking a toll of blood and treasure. For example, the rise of the Athenian city-state made life richer for its citizens by creating the Attic drama out of a primitive fertility-ritual before life was made intolerable for them by a series of ever more devastating wars between Athens and her rivals. The earlier Athens that had been ‘the education of Hellas’ won and held the allegiance of Athenian men and women, over whom she had cast her spell, for the benefit of the later Athens that was ‘a tyrant power’; and, though these two arrogant phrases were coined to describe Athens’ effect on the lives of the citizens of other Hellenic city-states, they describe her effect on the lives of her own citizens no less aptly. This is the tragic theme of Thucydides’ history of the Great Atheno-Peloponnesian War, and there have been many other performances of the same tragedy that have not found their Thucydides.
The strength of the devotion that parochial-community-worship thus evokes holds its devotees in bondage to it even when it is carrying them to self-destruction; and so the warfare between contending parochial states tends to grow more intense and more devastating in a crescendo movement. Respect for one’s neighbours’ gods and consideration for these alien gods’ human proteges are wasting assets. All parochial-community-worship ends in a worship of Moloch, and this ‘horrid king’ exacts more cruel sacrifices than the Golden Calf. War to the death between parochial states has been the immediate external cause of the breakdowns and disintegrations of almost all, if not all, the civilizations that have committed suicide up to date. The decline and fall of the First Mayan Civilization is perhaps the only doubtful case.
The devotion to the worship of Moloch is apt to persist until it is too late to save the life of the civilization that is being destroyed by it. It does break down at last, but not until a stage of social disintegration has been reached at which the blood-tax exacted by the waging of ever more intensive, ferocious, and devastating warfare has come palpably to outweigh any cultural and spiritual benefits that the contending parochial states may once have conferred on their citizens. . .
Peter Brown is one of a few scholars for which one must simply stand back and let them pass. Decades ago he published a seminal biography of St. Augustine that made his name in the field of late antiquity. Since then he has done nothing flashy, contenting himself with “staying in his lane” and doing what he loves. He keeps churning out new and interesting things about the transition from Rome to the medieval period, and his latest book, Through the Eye of the Needle is no exception. I did not read anywhere close to all of the book’s 600 pages, but found what I managed to take in eye-opening.
The title references the famous verse in Matthew 19:24, and the subtitle of the book indicates Brown’s purpose of showing how the Church dealt with the idea of wealth. His chosen dates of focus (350 – 550 AD) foreshadow a surprising assertion. Most understandings of the early church take one of two paths:
The growth of the church within Roman society happened primarily in 2nd and 3rd centuries AD as a result of persecution. Constantine’s “Edict of Milan” granting toleration and preference to Christianity did not create something new so much as confirm an already existing reality.
Or . . .
The “Edict of Milan” represents a key and decisive turning point in the history of the Church. The growth of the Church as a “power” and distinct social force begins because of Constantine.
With this standard dilemma, Brown both “splits the horns” and creates a new way of understanding the growth of the Church.
Obviously the church grew significantly from its roots in Palestine in the century following Pentacost. But at the time of Constantine Christianity still occupied fringe status in Rome, perhaps akin to Moslems in America today. This means that, among other things, we cannot chalk Constantine’s adoption of Christianity to political reasons. Something dramatic really happened in Constantine’s life that led him to shock his contemporaries and side with a distinctly minority faith. Just imagine the reaction the country might have if a newly elected president suddenly declared he was Buddhist. But the church remained a side-note within the empire. However the church prospered between the years of 312 – ca. 370, they had little impact on the wider Roman culture. This may have been because the era of Constantine and his successors was the “era of gold.” The stability Constantine brought returned economic prosperity to Rome in general and might have reinvigorated faith in Roman civilization. As time marched on, however, the wealth remained even as Rome began to lose its grip. When the wealthy began to enter the Church. The Church needed to decide what to do with “real money” for perhaps the first time in its history.
If we think about money we need to consider it with a wide lens.
Genesis 1 shows us God creating all things good as a gift of His love. God meant for Adam and Eve to enjoy the world he made. As Alexander Schememann commented,
Man must eat in order to live. He must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats. and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life.
Just as God created man soul and body, so too there need be no conflict between the physical and the spiritual. We shouldn’t even have the categories in the first place.
An ancillary question might be, “Does money aid in our enjoyment of creation?”
In early Biblical history we might see a link between physical wealth and spiritual well-being. We see this with Job, with Abraham, and with Jacob. As the nation of Israel forms and grows roots, we certainly see it in the life of Solomon. But after the division of the kingdom between the northern and southern kingdoms we have the age of the prophets, when God sought to “afflict the comfortable.” Now physical blessings come particularly to those outside Israel’s physical and ethnic boundaries, like the widow of Zarephath (Luke 4).
Jesus talks a great deal about money in the gospels, but never with one absolute message. At Cana He blessed marriage, wine, and a general sense of “a good time had by all.” He urges the rich young ruler to sell everything. Zaccheus shows his repentance by giving away half of his fortune. The rich will have difficulty entering the kingdom (the “through the eye of the needle” passage), but His “render unto Caesar” may indicate a laissez-faire approach to money in general. Clearly Jesus Himself had little money, but Matthew may have been wealthy. We are told in no uncertain terms that, “the love of money is the root of all evil,” and this might make us think of Ananias and Saphira. But in the epistles we have the encouragement/command to generosity of giving, but not the abandonment of wealth.
Many writers accuse the Church of abandoning gospel simplicity in favor of “worldliness” in the late 4th century, but Brown rightly critiques these voices. The Biblical evidence presents a complex picture, and ignores the Roman cultural environment in which the Church worked.
The Romans built their civilization around the idea of civic love. One could say that they worshipped the idea of Rome, or the actual city/cities of Rome, as their true gods. The patrons of Rome were in fact the “patricians,” the aristocracy. The patronized Rome with their service to the state, and with their money. Spending large sums came with the territory, and it could take the form of buildings, religious festivals, and the like. St. Cyprian in the 3rd century takes this idea and transmutes it. All Christians, but especially wealthy Christians, should patronize the City of God. This took the form of providing for the poor (especially or sometimes exclusively to the Christian poor), building churches, and providing for religious feasts. These were Christian “civic” projects. In contrast to the “earthly” giving of those in the City of Man, money given to eternal purposes got redeemed, in a sense.
This approach helped give direction to the giving of the wealthy and helped build a distinct physical identity for Christians apart from the Roman monolith. Christians have a home “not of this world.” The approach of the early Church, however, gave Christians a physical manifestation of the heavenly city.* Augustine would use this line of thought to develop his monumental City of God, and he proved pivotal in changing the Church’s attitude toward wealth.
The presence of wealth in the Church for the first time in large numbers brought up the question of the place of wealth. Wealth may present temptations and problems, but is it evil? Some believed that no one could claim both wealth and the gospel. Pelagius, who heretically affirmed the near absolute autonomy of the will, thought that only a grand gesture of giving away everything at once could give proof of true faith. Augustine disagreed. He believed foremost in the need for the unity of God’s people. The rich should receive the same welcome as the poor. Pride, not wealth, posed the real problem for the Christian. Naturally Augustine pushed the need for generosity. Unlike Pelagius, he thought with a longer lens. Wealth need not be given dramatically all at once, but steadily over time and with a distinct purpose. Their giving should seek to help build another kingdom, the “alternate reality” of the City of God.
With this line of reasoning, the Church could possess wealth, but not individual clergy. Clergy could use wealth for the Church, but never own it directly. The line would inevitably be gray and abuses came and went over time, but the principle remained the same.
We think of Augustine as a Platonist, and certainly he had more Platonism in his thought than St. Thomas Aquinas centuries later. But his ideas gave the Church an idea of a concrete, visible community on Earth. The idea of making the Kingdom of God manifest in the here and now, comes from Augustine — who may not have been quite the Platonist that we might imagine.**
The concept of using wealth to redeem our experience of creation and to create a “City of God” has many possible consequences and gray areas up for debate. I thought of Brown’s thesis when thinking about the late Renaissance and the monk Savanarola, who railed against what he saw as the frivolous use and abuse of art, jewelry, makeup, and so on. That conflict did not end well for anyone or for the city of Florence. We can begin by stating the obvious — too much attention to adornment risks skewing our priorities, while no attention to at all to appearance honors neither the image of God (in the sense of honoring maleness or femininity) or one another. The question arises, then — is some degree of focus on our appearance our Christian duty, or perhaps our Christian privilege? It can be fun to look nice, after all. And if we should adorn ourselves to some degree, should we not adorn our churches, our “cities of God?”
From this line of thought we can see why priests, bishops, and so on would also want adorned. If king’s and their counsellors wear finery to show forth the glory of England or France, should not God’s representatives and ambassadors also have a chance to show the glory of their city? Some would argue that doing this would mean merely mimicking the world. But one could flip this — maybe the world has in fact mimicked what the Church should be.
Sometimes I think modern Christians are uncomfortable with such baubles for the right reasons, such as avoiding waste and maintaining proper priorities. But I wonder if we might also fear creating truly separate identities for ourselves within the Church. Sometimes I if we fear creation itself.
Dave
**Brown points out that St. Augustine did not invent the idea of a “City of God” entirely on his own. It had roots in African Christianity going back to at least St. Cyprian in the 3rd century. But St. Augustine does give the concept its fullest expression.
This week we continued our look at Renaissance art through two main lenses and questions.
As Umberto Eco once argued that the Renaissance was a society made by merchants, made by money. The influx of money into Italy would surely change society in many ways. Fashion changed, art certainly changed, customs and mores changed, and morality changed. You cannot have one without the other.
How should Christians react to this, and how did they?
Of course many Christians went along happily with the changes, some of them quietly resisted them in their own ways. Few had stronger criticisms that the famous/infamous monk Savanarola. Some see him as a saint, a man of the people, a forerunner of the Reformation. Others saw him as a man filled with anger and bitterness, a man far from God, who, if not a heretic, certainly was a model for no one. Artists of his time had the very same differing opinions.
For him, we can say the following:
He was a strong opponent of the D’Medici family, who had transformed Florence from a republic to an unofficial dictatorship by the eminent Lorenzo D’ Medici.
He took an uncompromising stand against the incessant corruption within the Church, and fearlessly took on all comers, even the Pope himself.
Against him, we note that
His sermons seemed to consist of diatribes and anger. He judged, condemned, and warned from the pulpit. But rarely did he show compassion or sympathy, rarely did he speak of grace.
He believed that God spoke to him directly, which may or may not have been true. But this sense of divine guidance led him to drift into occasional self-righteousness.
He is perhaps best known for the “Bonfire of the Vanities,” when he encouraged many of society’s elite to burn their dresses, jewlery, and yes, much art deemed “unholy.” Renaissance art not only involved nudes, but also used subject matter from mythology, which many felt betrayed art’s true purpose of glorifying God. This led to a discussion on the question, “What makes art Christian?”
Let us take a famous Renaissance work by Botticell, The Birth of Venus, as an example:
One can argue that this is not a Christian work because it portrays a scene from pagan mythology. We know that Venus does not and did not exist, so how can the art declare truth? At best, it’s a meaningless diversion, at worst, a seductive lie.
The other side could argue that the painting does proclaim a Christian message through myth. Botticelli does not make Venus an object of lust. Rather, Venus, sees her inadequacy — she covers herself and is about to be covered more fully. The myth’s meaning gets transformed into the message that for lust to be love it must be conquered with virtue and modesty.
Another aspect of this discussion is the role of myth itself. Are pagan myths lies in the sense that declaring the sky to be green is a lie? While Christians disagree on this, I would not agree with this. I think J.R.R. Tolkien’s view of myth deserves consideration. As C.S. Lewis neared conversion to Christianity, he had a crucial conversation with his friend Tolkien about the nature of myth. . .
Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were “lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.”
“No,” Tolkien replied. “They are not lies.” Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic “progress” leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.
“In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology,” wrote Tolkien’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, “Tolkien had laid bare the center of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of The Silmarillion.” It is also the creed at the heart of all his other work. His short novel, Tree and Leaf, is essentially an allegory on the concept of true myth, and his poem, “Mythopoeia,” is an exposition in verse of the same concept.
Building on this philosophy of myth, Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality. Whereas the pagan myths were manifestations of God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using the images of their “mythopoeia” to reveal fragments of His eternal truth, the true myth of Christ was a manifestation of God expressing Himself through Himself, with Himself, and in Himself. God, in the Incarnation, had revealed Himself as the ultimate poet who was creating reality, the true poem or true myth, in His own image. Thus, in a divinely inspired paradox, myth was revealed as the ultimate realism.
So — does the painting convey a Christian message or not? Is art “Christian” if it conveys truth about ourselves, the world, or God? Then certainly non-Christians could create Christian art, just as non-Christians can know true things. Some students felt that this mean that any art could qualify as “Christian.” Surely, they felt, we must have another standard, but if we do, what should it be?
Or — let’s say that we agree with Tolkien. We may say that this gives Christians great inspiration to continue to create great stories, like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and so on. Does that mean, however, that we should use pre-Christian myths as a reference point now that “the truth has come?” Or now do we have all the more reason to use those myths as they can be truly understood even more in the light of Christ. Renaissance art gives us much to consider.
The issues go beyond art to the idea of Truth itself. What makes something true? If we say that 1 + 1 = 2 for reasons that do not involve God, then we assume that a realm of Truth exists that exists apart from God’s existence. If Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life then all thing cohere in Him, even 1 + 1 = 2, or the meaning inherent in a photograph of a tree.
But back to the Renaissance. . .
I have always believed that one of the best ways to know a culture is through its artistic expression, whether that be in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and so on. How we look interpret Renaissance art will determine a lot of what we think of the Renaissance itself.
One school of thought sees the Renaissance as glorifying mankind, of making man the center of all things. Scholars like Francis Schaeffer see mankind portrayed in outsized, godlike fashion, with no sense of sin or humility left. He pointed to the outsized hands on Michelangelo’s “David” as exhibit “A” for his argument:
Others see it differently. Some see the Renaissance making man aware and responsible for his time in creation. Art now places humanity in a real context, with real consequences, as opposed to what some might call the “over-spiritualization” of man in the Middle Ages. They point to the Brannacci Chapel, and the painting of Adam and Eve. Here we have feet planted firmly on the ground, and real people in a real world. Having a portrayed them in reality, they have to do deal with the consequences of their sin. The skeletal nature of Eve’s face foreshadows her death and ours as well. One commentator suggested that the angel does not drive out Adam and Eve so much as their sense of sin and shame motivates them to drive themselves out of the garden.
These two competing views of the Renaissance might each have their place — the Renaissance was multifaceted. But in the end the students will need to choose what they see as the dominant spirit of the time, and what primary influence the Renaissance will pass onto the era that follows.
Finally, we looked at this magnificent 3-D image of the Sistine Chapel, surely one of the greatest artistic creations of the last 500 years. Use the cursor and fly around it, and try and not make yourself dizzy, as I did to the students!
Like most great artists, Johann Sebastian Bach created his immortal works amidst uncertain times and an unusual amount of philosophical and cultural upheaval. One could sense a perceptible shift away from theology as “queen of the sciences” towards the dominance of abstract reason and scientific methodology. James Gaines chronicles one particular episode in Bach’s life representative of this shift in his Evening in the Palace of Reason. Bach, the great Baroque composer, received an invitation to visit Frederick the Great of Prussia, the great Enlightment monarch. Their brief meeting led to Bach composing “A Musical Offering,” considered by some to be his greatest instrumental work, and a definitive statement of his theological and musical convictions.
Gaines’ book is serviceable, if unremarkable. It certainly is more accessible than other works on Bach I’ve attempted. On the other hand, Gaines’ background is in magazine editing, so as one might expect, the books lacks expertise and depth. Life presents us with many such trade-offs.
Reading the work did spur on a few thoughts and questions in my mind . . .
To best understand Bach and the shift in the sciences taking place during his life, Gaines briefly describes the cosmological beliefs Bach inherited from his contemporaries. Gaines has a difficult job with this material. On the one hand, his book seeks a more conventional and conversational tone and such information bogs down modern readers in a mass of unfamiliar material. But Gaines needs to cover the material to properly understand Bach. Unfortunately Gaines gives a dismissive rendering of the information, interspersed with parenthetical comments such as, “This will be over soon,” and “There will not a quiz on the forgoing.” Gaines seems to find the pre-modern scientific beliefs absurd and embarrassing, despite his frank admission that such beliefs had a direct connection to music of the period. As one contemporary of Bach commented, “. . . an individual is both inwardly and outwardly, spiritually and physically, a divinely created harmonic being,” (emphasis mine) reflecting the divine harmony of the cosmos itself.
Some regard Bach as perhaps the greatest composer Western civilization has produced. Everyone agrees that at bare minimum he’s one of the all-time greats. Is it possible then, that such great music could come from theological and scientific foundations (in Bach’s day these two naturally went together) utterly removed from the truth? Bad trees produce bad fruit, but the scientific tree of the Baroque era gave us something else entirely (for an extended look at the transition between Galileo and the past, please enjoy my friend Bill Carey’s post here).
Asking this question leads one into the deep waters of the nature of scientific truth, waters too deep for me. The real problem, I think, is that the modern view of truth (in science or elsewhere, but perhaps especially in science) has very little to do with poetry. Or to take a different approach, the scientific tree of the baroque period produced fantastic music, but less than able surgeons. Can science do both equally at once? This is a question science must answer.
With the transition to the Enlightenment, Bach’s music and convictions fell out of favor. People no longer sought complex harmony, they wanted more “pleasing” — and easier — melodies. The purpose of music and art shifted from lifting us up to the divine to meeting our needs here and now. This was not merely a matter of taste. These different ideas about music arose from a shift in cosmology and theology.
When we think of the solar system, we probably think in a horizontal rather than vertical fashion. We also likely think of each planet “doing it’s own thing” floating around in space. Space between planets is empty and cold. In the medieval conception of the universe the planets descended hierarchically, with the movement between the planets forming a glorious celestial harmony — the “music of the spheres” — which in turn reflected the eternal “perichoresis” (the Greek word used by early church fathers meaning “circle dance”) of the Trinity.
Whichever we prefer, we should note that modern and medieval choices in regard to the cosmos are theological and poetic in nature, not strictly scientific.
This theological and poetic shift impacted musical opinions of Bach’s later years. His critics believed that emphasizing harmony (as Bach did) made the music too difficult. What’s more, harmony itself was “artificial” and “unnatural.” Music should instead focus on singable, “natural” melodies, which we can “perform” as individuals.
Baroque harmony and counterpoint, then, came from a theological perspective that emphasized the importance of the trinitarian community, and scientific perspective that emphasized the “community” of planets. So we might only think of harmony as “artificial” if we believe that either
The spheres have no music, or
If they did, it would be irrelevant as it would not be part of our daily experience.
Of course the medievals believed both that the spheres make music, and that their motion had an impact, however indirect, on our lives. Thus, celestial harmony for them occupied a very real place in creation and could hardly be called artificial.
So once again we see the intersection of science, poetry and theology in musical theory, and we see the stark difference the Enlightenment brought to many aspects of our life and thought. The legion of trickle-down effects on poetry, music, church architecture and like are everywhere present.
This week we began looking at tort law and its relation to the democratic process and democratic values. As the year winds down and the seniors focus on their thesis presentations, I think this unit works well at dealing with some interesting concepts in a lighter and more relaxed classroom atmosphere.
Tort law deals with the realm of damages and liability in civil courts. No one goes to jail in tort law cases, but they can still generate a great deal of controversy. Many of us may have some familiarity with tort law through the famous (or infamous) McDonald’s “Hot Coffee” case from 1992, when 79 year old Stella Leibeck spilled coffee on herself and eventually had a jury award her about $175,000, though the actual settlement amount remains unknown.
The actual facts got lost in the hype surrounding the case, and the internet does a good job of giving us the story we may not be aware of. On the one hand, it seems ridiculous that McDonald’s should be responsible for a customer spilling coffee on themselves. But on the other hand. . . .
By company mandate, McDonald’s kept its coffee at around 185-190 degrees, about 50 degrees hotter than coffee is normally served. At this temperature, serious burns can result within 2-7 seconds on continued skin contact.
Over period of several years, McDonald’s had received several hundred complaints from customers stating that they had been burned by their coffee.
Mrs. Leibeck’s burns were extensive. She required a long hospital stay that involved skin grafts over a large area (the internet has pictures of the burns, and they are extensive).
The case ended up being the subject of a documentary, and spurred on debates surrounding tort reform in various law schools.
The multiple layers of issues make these cases intriguing.
Product Liability
If a product injures you, company liability depends on how you used the product. If you are mowing the lawn with your lawn-mower in a normal fashion and it blows up and injures you, the company has liability. If it blows up while you try and use the lawn-mower to chop down a tree, the company has no liability.
In this case, jurors believed that Mrs. Leibeck used the coffee as McDonald’s intended it to be used. Nothing strange or out of the ordinary happened.
Knowledge
If a product injured someone due to a flaw in the design and the company had no prior knowledge or suspicions, the company will have less liability than if they knew everything and covered it up. Of course all kinds of grey area exists in between these extremes. On the one hand, 700 complaints about burns is a large number. On the other hand, 700 complaints represents about .0001% of all the coffee they sold during that time. How we see the 700 previous complaints will be crucial for how we assess fault in the case.
Time
In a grocery store, if an employee drops a few bananas by mistake and five seconds later and breaks a hip, would the store be liable? Perhaps, but that liability would increase dramatically if it had been on the floor for an hour, with customers complaining about them, and the store doing nothing about it. We had a good discussion over whether or not the number of complaints over time increased or lessened McDonald’s liability.
If a court finds a company liable a jury assesses damages, which come in two forms.
Compensatory damages literally compensate the victim for whatever they lost. Some aspects of this kind of penalty are easy to assess, like doctor’s bills, time missed from work, and so on. Here the wealth of the person injured is not a factor. Just as we return stolen property from mansions, so a wealthy person deserves just compensation.
But very quickly compensatory damages enters murky waters. If one is physically scarred from an accident due to negligence, how much is that worth? Would it depend on where the scar was? Would we compensate a woman more for a scar than a man? What about emotional scars? What about lost opportunity? The subjective nature of these judgments can result in very different jury verdicts (Mrs. Mathwin has a friend who served on a jury in a liability case a few years ago. The jurors disagreed wildly, with some wanting to award the plaintiff a few hundred thousand and others nothing. Eventually they simply took the average of what each of the 12 jurors thought the plantiff should receive, and that dollar amount — about $25,000 — became their ruling).
Punitive damages punish the company for their wrongdoing, and should deter the company from acting in a similar fashion in the future. Here the wealth of the company does need to be a factor, for hypothetically if the company had enough resources, the fine might be so small that it would be more profitable for them to continue the negligent behavior. This is part of the reason why punitive damages can far exceed compensatory damages.
We live in a deeply confused age regarding sexuality and the body. We can understand Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it,” concept regarding pornography in terms of necessary legalese, but especially in this day and age, Christians (and the world) need more specific guidance. How are we to understand how the body can be used in art?
I wish I had the time and theological understanding to devote to John Paul II monumental Man and Woman He Created Them, where he developed a full-fledged “theology of the body.” Though I read only very small portions of the text, those few parts have made a huge impression on me.
First, he makes the observation that nakedness is mentioned in a spousal connection, which means that nakedness is a kind of gift of one to the other — a revelation, in fact. For this can rightly be called a gift because it involves a kind of mutual possession of one another — “I am yours and you are mine.”
These ideas of possession and gift lead to another truth, that the body itself is a form of revelation. I had never realized this before, but of course it makes perfect sense. We talk often of how the beauty of flowers, or the variety of the birds, or the majesty of mountains, reveal something about God Himself. But we (or perhaps just I) forget that the body of course is part of that same creation that will reveal something of the Creator. And perhaps the body may reveal more than mountains or flowers, as He made humanity of all creation in His image.
These truths deserve more contemplation than I can give them. But I do think that John Paul’s wisdom can give us profound guidance on the nature of the body and how the body can or should be used in a “public” way. He writes,
Artistic objectification of the human body in its male and female nakedness for the sake of making of it first a model and then a subject of a work of art is always a certain transfer outside this configuration of interpersonal gift that belongs originally and specifically to the body. It constitutes in some way an uprooting of the human body from the configuration and a transfer of it to the dimensions of artistic objectification specific to the work of art or the reproduction typical of the works of film and photographic technologies of our time.
In each of these dimensions, and in each of them in a different way, the human body loses that deeply subjective meaning of the gift and becomes an object destined for the knowledge of many, by which those who look will assimilate or even take possession of something that evidently exists (or should exist) by its very essence on the level of gift–or gift by the person to the person, no longer of course in the image, but in the living man. To tell the truth, this act of “taking possession” happens already on another level, that is, on the level of artistic transfiguration or reproduction. It is, however, impossible not to realize that from the point of view of the ethos of the body, understood deeply, a problem arises here. It is a very delicate problem that has various levels of intensity depending on various motives and circumstances, both on the side of artistic activity and on the side of knowledge of the work of art or its reproduction. From the fact that this issue arises, it does not at all follow that that human body in its nakedness cannot be the subject of works of art, only that this issue is neither merely aesthetic, nor morally indifferent.
Towards the end of the Peloponnesian War Athens had to fight for its very life. Their catastrophic defeat in Sicily in 411 B.C. meant that their survival depended on maintaining their lifeline of supplies from allies in the eastern Aegean Sea. This meant in turn that Athens would have to win virtually every naval battle to stay afloat.
At the battle of Arginusae in 406 B.C. the Athenians got a decisive victory over the Spartan League. Athenian custom and religion dictated bringing home the bodies of the slain to give them proper burial. Unfortunately a storm arose in the aftermath of the victory, and in the ensuing confusion the Athenians retrieved just a fraction of their dead.
You might think that the Athenians would rejoice in the victory and shrug off the failure to retrieve the dead. After all, they might not have survived as a city-state had they lost. Instead, (due in part to a confluence of unusual circumstances described expertly by Donald Kagan in The Fall of the Athenian Empire) they put the eight victorious generals on trial for impiety and dereliction of duty. They found all eight guilty, and executed all eight that same day.
A few days later the Athenians lamented their actions and believed they had committed an injustice. Such an injustice needed rectified, so they put the prosecutor on trial for inciting them to murder. He was found guilty, and he too was put to death.
This unfortunate incident no doubt deeply impacted Socrates, and in turn Plato, and from there the whole attitude of western political thinkers toward democracy. In the modern era, ardent defenders of democracy like I.F. Stone argue that such ancient and early-modern critics cherry-picked their objections to democracy and took certain incidents out of proportion. I wonder, however, whether or not the above incident isn’t symptomatic of democracies in general, and if the essential critique offered by Plato and his followers might have merit.
I thought of the Battle of Arginusae when a friend sent me a fascinating graph of the speed of social change in America in the 20th century. With the Supreme Court hearing arguments on the constitutionality of gay marriage it seems appropriate to consider our history of seismic shifts [note to the reader–this post was written originally a couple of months before the courts made gay marriage the law of the land. We have seen since then how fast it has gained traction, and how quickly the marriage issue has spilled over into transgender issues. The speed of the change is all the more remarkable considering that in 2004 many states voted to try and prevent gay marriage from becoming law, and in 2008 President Obama supported what I believe he called “traditional marriage”].
Of course the ability to change quickly is in itself neither good or bad, as with speed we can adopt either good or bad courses of action. What we should consider, however, is what this means for us as a democracy, and where this puts us relative to other democracies at other times.
Change began to accelerate in the 20th century, and this coincides with two other shifts in American life. The first was the rise of the prominence of the U.S. internationally, and along with that the inevitable rise of executive power. With a few exceptions, the 19th century saw congressional dominance, the 20th executive dominance. No one president or party can be blamed for this, if blame is what you seek. As with Rome, the growth of power inevitably centralizes power. Add to that, the Constitution puts foreign policy mostly in the hands of the executive. The centralization of power in the executive makes change come more quickly, if for no other reason than efficiency.
But this in itself can’t explain the radical leaps noted above in the graph, because changes in Civil Rights and gay marriage have not come primarily from executives, but from the courts, which are supposed to be more immune to the whims of the people, be those whims good or bad.
We might also recall that De Tocqueville astutely predicted that modern democracies could create an unstoppable force when the idea of equality joined with the idea of majority power. This force, when mobilized, created magnificent massed armies (think Generals Sherman, and Patton). But this same power could apply to our social lives and our moral compass. Democracies, De Tocqueville argued, would not create tyrants in the traditional sense. They would leave the body alone. Rather, they can at times kill the soul through enormous and unseen social pressures. So just as our military efforts could go from nothing in December 1941 to significant victory in June of 1942 ( the Battle of Midway), so too we can move with the same speed and power socially. This power would be great enough to steamroll even the supposedly resistant-to-change court system.
But this won’t work entirely either, for it presumes that the courts were the last domino to fall during these seismic social changes, whereas with abortion, civil rights, and gay marriage, they have spearheaded change.*
With this realization we get pressed beyond typical right/left categories and our modern, narrow vision, beyond arguments about activist courts and the like. This should let us know that we may be nearing our prey.
I have two possible explanations to suggest:
The first deals with the fact the courts interpret the Constitution. While the founders no doubt positioned the courts as above the political process to make them slower, this very position in many ways allows them to move faster. They have no Congress to lobby. But I still think this fact leaves out part of the explanation. If the founders set up the Constitution to greatly reduce the power of mass democracy (and the fear of “mob rule” runs throughout the Constitutional Convention debates as recorded by Madison) then we might wonder whether or not we live under a different Constitution altogether. Of course the words remain the same, but how we interpret and stretch it (note how the commerce clause experienced this in the 20th century) changed over time. The founders hoped for the Senate to dominate our government. Now we have powerful courts, an extremely powerful executive, and an almost exclusively reactive legislature that asserts itself only when it stands in the way of what the executive wants to do
Thus, when the courts interpret the Constitution today, they in fact interpret a different constitution then the one the founders set up. That explains the significant and rapid social changes.
The second hypothesis . . .
I think that the Constitution sought to create a senatorial democratic-infused oligarchy based on the Roman Senate of old.** If true, at first glance we obviously have a different constitution than the founders envisioned. But a second glance might suggest that not a great deal has changed. If polling data that suggests most Americans are pro-life and not in favor of gay marriage is correct, then we still can say that an oligarchy rules us. This oligarchy no longer resides in the senate, however, but in other places, be it media, the courts, and so on. If correct, then at least some of the fundamental guiding principles of the Constitution have not changed, but how we apply them has.
Finally, we have the idea proposed by Christopher Ferrara in his thought provoking book Liberty: The God that Failed.Ferrara suggests that for Americans, the idea of liberty never had connections to tradition, religion, community, and so on but always stood for individuals defining themselves against them. Liberty means power, power to do as one wishes, whether that be to own slaves or change the definition of marriage. As to the good Americans have done (civil rights and racial equality, a relatively open immigration policy, etc.), one could argue that we often do these things irrespective of law, or stretch existing laws beyond recognition to justify them. Good laws, bad laws, traditions, all become very inconvenient and discarded in a pinch when we decide we want something else. Historically we have remarkable consistency on this score, whether Washington bypassed Pennsylvania’s laws on slavery, or Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court against the Cherokees, or the modern explosion of executive orders from both parties, and so on, and so on. Washington the Federalist is supposed to be the conservative, while historians speak of the “Jacksonian Revolution.” But perhaps they had a lot more in common than we might suppose.
I still think the first possibility above the likeliest by a slight margin, but I waffle, and like many of us, I am confused, overwhelmed, and ultimately not quite sure what’s going on.
But those really in the know have another theory . . .
Dave
*Incidentally, one look at the graph shows that there must be a strong connection between women voting, prohibition, and equality. I think we can tie prohibition to the idea of equality in ways akin to laws about motorcycle helmets and seat-belts, i.e. we’ll all be safe and healthy together — instead of liberty (I’ll smoke and drink and ruin my life if I want to — it’s my life after all — and you can’t tell me otherwise).
**Before we pass judgment, consider that the Roman Republic must surely rank as one of the most successful governments of all time by most measurements. They had roughly 350 years of relatively problem-free yearly elections and created an empire rooted in concepts of law that last to this day. So strong were Rome’s institutions and ethos that they still held it together long into its “empire” phase, despite some ridiculously bad emperors along the way.
At this point in the school year different classes I teach touch on a similar theme . . .
Why did the French Revolution happen to such a nice guy as Louis XVI?
Obviously answering this question involves many factors, but one clearly is the problem of the mixed message and the tension that creates. Louis worked hard to reform much of France. He spent less money, he spent less time at Versailles, he believed in the power of science to transform the country, etc. etc. In his excellent Citizens, Simon Schama points out that Louis’ scientific passions helped undo his regime. He uses the example of ballooning. Louis invited many not in the nobility to come to Versailles to witness some of the first hot air balloon experiments. Again, we see Louis the nice, modernizing king at work. But as Schama points out, ballooning meant
The presence of “commoners” at Versailles, previously the exclusive stomping grounds of the nobility
The mingling of commoners and nobility
The commoners traipsing over the hallowed Versailles grounds to follow the balloon, ignoring traditional boundaries in the immaculately kept gardens
Absorption in the “boundary-free” nature of flight itself (this last one might be a stretch, but perhaps he’s onto something).
A few years later when the Estates General wanted to “modernize” and merge the three estates into one “National Assembly” dominated not by the nobility, but by the “everybody else,” Louis protested. “That’s not how we do things. We should preserve the ancient and inviolable traditions of France.” One problem Louis had, however, was that he had been subtly changing those inviolable traditions. He could not ride the tiger of the changes he helped bring about, and it cost him (and France) dearly.
A less overt, but no less impacting tension of “mixed messages” got introduced into Rome’s Republic ca. 200 B.C. One can’t help admire the stability and effectiveness of Rome’s government from the founding of the Republic ca. 508 B.C. through the 2nd Punic War. They had new elections every year, with new people in new offices most every year, and they thrived. Part of the reason for this lay in the conservative nature of its society. A society of farmers values stability and cohesion. You see this cohesion demonstrated in this brief clip of how they fought. In Rome’s prime, no barbarian horde of individual warriors ever stood a chance against a disciplined Roman maniple.
Naturally such a well-run state would have success and expand. This expansion, however, threatened the very social cohesion that made them great in the first place. The governing structure of Republican Rome had no idea how to navigate the dramatic change from its agricultural rustic roots to its “Mediterranean Empire” status, and even if they did, the Republic was built largely to prevent change. Rome grew great by preserving its identity through preserving their traditions. This tension between Rome’s success and Rome’s identity helped lead to a century of intermittent civil war and the eventual collapse of the Republic between 44 and 27 B.C.
I have always enjoyed college basketball, and the men’s “March Madness” tournament is usually my favorite sporting event of the year. I did not pay as much attention this year, partially due to business, and partially because watching college basketball has become much more a chore than I remember. The pace of the game gets mangled by constant fouling (the Kentucky v. West Virginia game averaged more than 1 foul per minute of play), and constant timeouts (in televised games coaches get five timeouts plus eight mandatory tv timeouts). While one might expect that constant fouling would mean more easy points in the form of free throws, in fact scoring is down across the board, no doubt due in part to the fact that no offense can ever establish a rhythm with continual game stoppages.
If this were professional basketball the solution would be relatively easy in the form of rule changes to make the game more entertaining. But there lies the rub for the NCAA, because their sports don’t exist, in theory at least, for entertainment. The players are “student-athletes.” They play the game to learn (hence, a mountain of opportunities for coaches to pound whiteboards and teach during timeouts),not entertain. Charles Pierce lays some of this out expertly in his recent Grantland column here. Pierce writes,
What’s fascinating to me, though, is not how to fix the problem [of scoring]; it’s how the problem doubles as the perfect expression of the current state of the NCAA and the amateur model itself. Because neither of college basketball’s twin personalities came into being spontaneously. They both exist by design, and whether the outcomes of that design are deliberate or not, the principles underlying it are deeply bound up with the contradiction at the heart of the NCAA’s idea of itself.
Here’s what I mean by that. Men’s college basketball has to be entertaining, because the NCAA, which derives most of its annual revenue from the tournament, wants it to make a lot of money. But men’s college basketball can’t prioritize entertainment too openly, because then the commercial motive would be obvious and would threaten the NCAA’s supposed reason for being.3 “We refuse to admit that we are selling it,” as Bilas recently said. This is how it’s possible to devote a tournament engineered for maximum fun to a style of basketball that elevates pseudo-moral qualities like instruction, teamwork, and sacrifice over carnal indulgences like, I don’t know, jumping, or the ball occasionally going into the basket.
The tension between basketball as revenue stream and the student-athlete model have been stretched to the breaking point. The NCAA will have to make a difficult choice, and have boxed themselves in. They can choose between . . .
Basketball is primarily entertainment/revenue driven and so we make rule changes based on that principle, which sacrifices the student-athlete principle, or
Basketball is about being a student-athlete and not money, and so changes will only be made that enhance the “student” aspect of the athletes. Time-outs will stay, and money will disappear.
I suppose a third option exists, one the NCAA will likely take. They will make rule changes, but under the cloak of improving the student-athlete experience. They may believe this story. Whether they believe it or not, they will increase the volume of their mixed message much further that I would think possible. The NCAA as we know will be living on borrowed time.
