Fra Angelico, 1437
Last week’s highlight was a visit with a friend to a
wonderful local museum in San Diego ,
the Timken Gallery. One of the things that struck me this time is how up to a
certain point all the paintings are religious. It seems that back then whole
life turned around religion. Not until the Renaissance did art take the first
steps away from that exclusive emphasis, giving us secular works that include
Mona Lisa and The Birth of Venus. The Renaissance humanized art. Even in religious paintings, suddenly there is
realism rather than pious stiffness; there is a delight in human beauty and
subtlety of facial expression. There is sensuality.
And then after a certain point there is no great religious
art; the great painters paint landscapes, portraits, mythological scenes,
domestic scenes, still lives. Suddenly those with greatest talent in the visual
arts are simply not producing crucifixions and Last Judgments, much less Assumption
of the Virgin (that’s in the body, let’s not forget). That’s left to
mediocre painters.
Nicholas Poussin: Return from Egypt , 1627
Poussin’s painting has its virtues (ahem), but is still
mediocre in that the religious element seems tacked on, and the chubby toddler
reaching his arms toward the cross in a gimme-gimme way that anyone can
recognize as human and charming, but forced into some crazy scenario. And the
cherubs – cute, but ridiculous and cliché. John Guzlowski made a very good
observation about the piety of early works versus the clutter of angels and symbols
later on – religious clichés.
John:
Interesting painting. What jumps out at me is the blue of
Mary's robe, the crisp lines. That's what the artist seems devoted to.
Oriana:
Even a wonderful painting like the Sistine Madonna is mostly
about composition, the wonderful half-circle of the Madonna’s veil. We are
thrilled by the ideal beauty – as well as charmed by the two cherubs. This is a
triumph of art as art, a triumph of aesthetics. The stiff piety of Byzantine
icons, where beauty is sacrificed to religiosity, is quite a contrast.
In early Western painting, we see a similar stiffness and
awkwardness, the ugly, gloomy faces and misshapen, distorted bodies. Then, as
we journey from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, something amazing
happens: the bodies and faces become realistic, and the Madonna is now a
beautiful young woman. Once this trend toward realism and
humanization becomes dominant, art tends to become less religious. It is
now increasingly about composition, perspective, the harmony of colors. The
halos, once large and solid as dinner plates, become faint rings and then
disappear completely. There is less and less room for the supernatural.
Raphael: Sistine Madonna 1513-1514
A parallel to this decline in religious art may be this: early
on the church could attract brilliant minds like Augustine and Aquinas, but
later the best and the brightest did not join the clergy (or if they did – I'm
thinking of a couple of famous cardinals – they became famous for their
shrewdness in managing the affairs of the state, not for their piety). Genius
flowered in other fields. Milton
is probably the last great poet who was still centered on religion and, like
Dante, tried to integrate classical mythology into a Christian scheme. Blake,
marvelously heretical, was a religious poet only to a degree, and anyway he was
against organized religion (“Brothels are built with the bricks of religion”; “Milton was a true poet
and of the devil’s party without knowing it”).
So secularization started way, way back – I think already in
the High Middle Ages, with the cult of courtly love – and then proceeded by
degrees. Athens began winning against Jerusalem . And that’s seen
in the arts and literature more so than in the development of science, which
didn’t affect the wider public until Darwin .
Once we started seeing evolution not just in biology but in geology, cosmology,
culture, sociology of religion, etc – pretty much in everything – it was a powerful
alternative explanation, a different mind set.
It so happens that John recently sent me a poem that, at
least in part, records the transition from religion-centered worldview to the
modern mentality.
THE CARPENTER
He makes them with wood,
oak salvaged from crosses
left by the saints who've returned
to their bones to wait for the last part.
left by the saints who've returned
to their bones to wait for the last part.
He pulls the nails out,
lays the plaster figures to the side,
washes the dark blood from the boards
and erases the shadows of sorrow
and those of redemption too.
The boards are ready at last. Saved.
lays the plaster figures to the side,
washes the dark blood from the boards
and erases the shadows of sorrow
and those of redemption too.
The boards are ready at last. Saved.
He stares into the sky and knows
each plank in his hands
is an orphan and a sparrow,
a prayer in his hands to Jesus
or Buddha or his dead father,
is an orphan and a sparrow,
a prayer in his hands to Jesus
or Buddha or his dead father,
dead angels with rucksacks full
of sand and laughter on a road
that is always disappearing like snow
on red bricks in the sun.
Tomorrow he'll sit amid
apple blossoms and thunder,
among school children, and give
to each the bird feeders he’s made.
~ John Guzlowski © 2012
**
The
recycling of old crosses into birdfeeders is certainly one use that seems to
return to the earth that which is the earth’s. I love the “dead angels with rucksacks full of sand and
laughter.” The sand could be an allusion to Waiting
for Godot (Lucky with his suitcases filled with sand). And note that Jesus
and Buddha and the carpenter’s dead father are pretty much interchangeable – a very
modern element. This carpenter is “spiritual” in a broad way. We see a global
fusion here: Buddha and Jesus, and also a kind of spiritual egalitarianism: a
human being, here the carpenter’s father, is also divine, and vice versa:
Jesus, Buddha, and the dead father are all human. As for the dead angels, they
might stand for dead soldiers.
Any artist already has a religion – his art, so the subject
comes after that. We know there was also the question of patronage, of
paying Michelangelo his very high fees. And yet I do wonder – when
secular art emerged, was it that religion no longer had the previous pull, and
once the painters knew Greek mythology, they could see a certain equivalence?
Michelangelo based his God the Father on the classical representations of Zeus,
but that somehow still worked. Maybe as the knowledge of classical mythology
spread, the thought that slammed the door of religion shut for me – “It’s just
another mythology” – maybe that thought occurred to the painters as well?
John reminded me that T.S. Eliot, certainly regarded as a
great poet, could also be called a religious poet. Yes, we have this exception.
And Rilke too often deals with what might be called religious themes, but in a
way that would be offensive to the more conventional times (to the Middle Ages
for sure). In the previous post, we already have the discussion of my favorite
“heretical” poem in his Book of Hours, but let me quote again at least the
wonderful opening and the last line.
What will you do, God,
when I die?
I am your pitcher
(what if I shatter?)
I am your drink (what
if I spoil?)
I am your garment and
your trade.
When I am gone, you
lose your meaning.
. . .
What will you do, God?
I feel afraid.
(tr. Mark Burrows)
The poem is a masterpiece of role reversal: god is
the needy one, without meaning unless sustained by the human mind. Here it’s
the speaker who is taking care of god, rather than have a parental figure take
care of him – the opposite of the accepted idea. Stephanie Dowrick, in her
narrow but interesting book, In the
Company of Rilke, cites one of Rilke’s biographers, H.F. Peters: “While the
Bible says that man is lost until God’s love finds him, Rilke implies that God
is lost until man’s love finds him.”
Far from being omnipotent, this god is painfully needy. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman
says, “The old Greeks said of their gods: they ask for little, just that they
be not forgotten.”Far from being omnipotent, this god is painfully needy. This
is radical, given that the central theme of most Judeo-Christian prayers is
“Lord, have mercy.” The faithful are humble petitioners, begging for god’s
pity. In this poem we feel pity for this rather pathetic god – a lost and
lonely god whose very existence depends on having worshippers.
This is not as new as it might seem. In classical mythology, the
gods needed humans, because who else would praise
them and offer sacrifices? The gods were adored in hymns and ceremonies, but
what they especially loved was animal sacrifice; the smell of the smoke rising
from the altars was described as pleasing to the divine nostrils. (Why, if the
gods consumed only the immortality-conferring nectar and ambrosia? Animal
sacrifice probably comes from an earlier layer of archaic religion. In ancient Israel
Arch of Titus
It’s not easy to pin down Rilke’s ever-evolving metaphysics.
He had a Catholic upbringing, but later he often proclaimed his dislike of
Catholicism and all conventional Christianity. He was deeply influenced by Lou
Andreas-Salomé, who believed that all gods were created by men. Those man-made
gods, however, did influence their own makers; even if we create our own
beliefs, those beliefs, collective and individual, can have a strong impact. An
older Rilke writes in a letter:
Let us agree that since his earliest beginnings man has
shaped gods in whom here and there were contained only the dead and threatening
and destructive and frightful, violence, anger, super-personal, tied up as it
were into a tight knot of malice: the alien, if you like, but already to some
extent implied in this alien, the admission that one was aware of it, endured
it, yes, acknowledged it for the sake of a sure, secret relationship and
connection . . . Could one not treat the history of God as a part, never before
broached, of the human mind, a part always postponed, saved up, and at last let
slip . . . (Dowrick, p. 76)
I was quite affected by this paragraph. It threw me back to
my teens, when I tried to guess the real reason Catholics were forbidden to
read the Old Testament. The official reason was that “the lay person might
misunderstand” the ancient text (not even available in Polish when I was
growing up). Later, when I did manage to read it, in English (that “key to the
world”), I saw the archaic rage and violence and tribalism. It was a very
different god-image than that projected by Christ, who preached “Love thy
enemy.” The radical discontinuity pointed to “the history of God as part of the
human mind,” in constant evolution.
At the same time, both Rilke and Lou were fascinated by
religious questions. One of Rilke’s conclusions was that belief was beside the
point; one needs to experience the
divine. But even more important, in my view, is the distinction between Rilke’s
prose and poetry. In prose we get the thinker, the intellectual; in poetry, we
get Rilke’s more mystical and feeling self. Hence in the poems we encounter a
god-image that may be regarded as external and closer to the conventional concepts.
Still, it seems to me that Rilke saw god, even if it’s the god who exists only
in the human mind, as immensely lonely. And Rilke had empathy for
that loneliness.
And he obviously continued to have empathy for what might be
called the poetics of religion. The poem below the image of the angel at Chartres (a replica of the
one sculpted around 1528; the original is in the crypt – oh irony) is
another great favorite of mine:
ANGEL WITH THE SUNDIAL (II)
In the storm that rages round the strong cathedral
like a denier thinking through and through,
your tender smile suddenly engages
our hearts and lifts them up to you:
O smiling angel, sympathetic stone,
your mouth distilled from a hundred mouths:
do you not mark how, from your always-full
sundial, our hours slide off one by one –
that so impartial sundial, upon which
the day’s whole sum is balanced equally
as though all our hours were rich and ripe?
What do you know, stone-born, of our plight?
And does your face become more blissful still
as you hold the sundial out into the night?
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, tr, J. B. Leishman
(slightly modified
by Oriana)
**
John:
Interesting poem. Reminds me of Wim Wenders’ Wings of
Desire, the film about the angels who have to sit around with their sundials so
to speak, watching the crushed lives of all us, the sorrow they feel. But
some of them would give up eternity just to feel that sorrow – or sometimes joy
– because they feel nothing.
Here's a clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY8uDNkOLHM
Here's a clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY8uDNkOLHM
Oriana:
I saw Wings of Desire a long time ago, when it was first released
in 1988. It’s an amazing movie, pitying the angels for not experiencing human
joys and sorrows. What a startling change that is: pitying the angels! What an
homage to humanity, without denying our sorrows.
In German the title of the movie is “The sky [heaven] over Berlin .” Hollywood translated the movie into “City of Angels ” – a movie that had
its comic moments (“Mr. and Mrs. Plate”), but lost of the poetry of the
original.
John:
I saw the Wings of Desire fairly recently, maybe last
fall. I had seen the American version with Nicholas Cage (City of Angels ) and thought it pretty much Hollywood hokum, but
the Berlin
version really got to me. Maybe it was the sense of Berlin ’s history, the war, that shadowed the
black and white images. The film seemed to have more gravity.
Oriana:
The Berlin
setting brings in history to the movie, and thus the dark side of human
experience. This makes the protagonist-angel’s decision to become human all the
more poignant. Wim Wenders was born in 1945, so the shadow of the war hung over
his childhood. And the movie was made before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But my favorite image from Wings of Desire is the angels in
the library. That is timeless and universal. And the modern viewer can identify
with the protagonist-angel’s desire “to live not forever, but now.”
The inspiration for the movie was probably the passage in
Genesis in which some angels, finding the “daughters of men” beautiful,
procreate with them; the offspring are giants (Nephilim). The idea that angels
have sexuality is startling to us, since the Abrahamic god, unlike pagan
deities, appears to be non-sexual (Kabbala later tried to imagine a divine
consort who visits Yahweh on the Sabbath, but this never became mainstream
belief). Yet some have argued that if man was created in the image of god, then
god too must have genitals and sexuality. This is not something that organized
religion, typically sexually repressive, is willing to touch with the
proverbial ten-foot pole.)
That reminds me of my own “Angel Envy”:
ANGEL
ENVY
“What is it,” the nun
intones,
“that we envy angels?”
Angel-envying
eight-year-olds,
we all shout, “Wings!”
“No, no, no,” the nun
chides.
“Think about it: angels
can
see God.” We think about
it.
We still want wings.
“And what is it,” the
nun presses on,
“that holy angels envy us?”
We squirm on the hard
benches.
“Angels envy us our
bodies.”
We almost stop
breathing.
*
“Angels are made of
aura-like
material,” a New-Age
half-nun
gasps in an ancient
half-whisper.
“When two angels stand
close,
their wings
inter-penetrate.”
I think of Milton ’s
Easier than Air with Air,
if spirits embrace, total they mix.
That’s what I always
wanted –
blind Milton , how did you
divine – beyond the
startling
rose of genitals,
entirely
entering each other.
*
If spirits embrace . . . .
But can angels croon Mmmm . . .
Later, can they lazily
disentangle themselves
to get up and go pee?
Virgin nun of my
childhood,
many years late I raise
my hand.
In your black habit and
unloved
black shoes,
how did you know
what the angels crave:
our bodies, soft as
regret;
our laughter so much
like pain.
*
While you sleep like
Jacob
on his pillow of stone,
I still think about it:
we don’t want to see
God.
We want wings.
~ Oriana © 2012
**
Hyacinth:
In your poem I love "god is not hard of hearing."
There is much to admire about the original ending. What was
the objection to it? Maybe you could combine some of the lines??
Nature and god seem inseparable and mankind has always
worshipped god through nature.
He or she seems more accessible and believable in nature.
I have witnessed northern lights, green flash, double rainbows, geysers,
icebergs, moons and sunsets to name a few and feel blessed by the sightings.
Even Nature at its cruelest is astounding. Man's inhumanity is the exception.
“BLIND WORK” LIKE “BLIND FAITH”
Oriana:
The objections to the original ending of “God’s Hearing”
were not clear to me. It was more the facial expressions, as if people were
disappointed with it. It fell flat – perhaps because it departed from
grandmother, god not being of much interest any more, an archaic ghost in a
secular age. Maybe the “language of nature” ending made me seem religious and
defending god's deafness? As if I were saying – and based purely on the text I
can see how strangers might assume that – that god exists and is not hard of
hearing, just replies in another language . . . I guess that
sounds weak when we contemplate the atrocities of the camps. When the
inmates at Dachau
watched the spectacular sunset, they didn’t think that god was trying to
console them, or convey a message. But they saw how beautiful the world could
be if only we eliminated human cruelty.
Humanity worshipped nature for thousands of years, but
monotheism put an end to it. Nature was no longer sacred; man was to have
“dominion” over it. The Romantics and Transcendentalists tried to restore the
sacredness of nature, but what could they do against industrial capitalism and
the kind of fundamentalist religion that sees environmental protection as
contrary to the bible (think of Senator Santorum’s attack on environmentalism
as a religion not based on the bible).
The insufficiency of nature as an object of worship was
noted by Robert Frost in “The Most of It”:
. . . all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Nevertheless, the only notion of god that still makes some
sense to me is simply equating god with the universe. Yes, nature is amazing, and
beyond good and evil. Alternately, I might entertain the possibility of a
meta-cosmos, something inherent in the universe that has some attributes that
humanity traditionally bestowed on its gods. New Age people speak about “cosmic
laws” and “cosmic intelligence” and “the Light” in this manner. They try to
cobble together various world religions so that only the best is preserved. But
it’s still wishful thinking with no supporting evidence. The Secret is the best-selling New Age bible (outselling Frankl’s book: no
surprise).
Still, that “fusion of the East and West” approach
had a lot of appeal for me until I went to a lecture on karma and saw the old idea
of justice as vengeance, and the old dogmatism (during the Q&A period,
questions about the validity of the concept of karma were not permitted), along
with blaming the victim. The speaker (an American Jungian psychologist who’d
lived in India for a while) seemed taken aback by how much the audience
treasured THIS life, rather than being eager to die and experience the wonders
of the astral world (I’ll never forget his saying, “The flowers here on earth
are nothing compared to how beautiful astral flowers are”).
Re: Viktor Frankl. Is meaning necessary for survival?
It helps a lot and it can work wonders (e.g. when I knew why I was working so
hard to master English, and could see how exceptional effort leads to
outstanding results). But then for almost 20 years I had only a weak and
shifting sense of meaning -- and a haunting memory of how wonderful it was to
have a strong sense of purpose, a powerful goal.
When I had my perception shift re: depression, I threw
myself into work even though it had no meaning for me – practically none. I
wanted to be productive rather than stagnate in despair. Productive for what
purpose? I had no answer. I decided to do it blindly (e.g. write the blog),
without allowing myself to wonder why I'm doing it (and a friend didn’t help by
saying, “Enjoy writing your blog. That’s all it’s good for”). Normally people
are sustained by meaning, but at that point I did not have a sense of meaning.
Meaning emerged later.
Those first months after closing the door on depression were very
exhausting. It was work, work, work. Nothing gave me much pleasure, and my
memories of positive experiences were still blocked. But working hard was the
only thing I knew how to do. That particular summer was very rich and brought
me much writing material, though I couldn't afford to think if anyone would ever
want to read what I wrote. I said to myself, work blindly; don't ask why am I
doing this, don't ask where am I going. Even though I’m extremely introverted, I
managed to establish my no-thinking zones. I had to stop thinking, except in
terms of what to do or write next.
So I both agree and disagree with Frankl: it's wonderful to
have a meaning, but based on my experience I say that it's possible to survive
without a meaning in life, at least for a time, if you throw yourself into
work simply to be doing something and kill self-centered cogitation –
the
answer lies outside. When I focused on what lay outside the suffocating
labyrinths of my psyche, I could function quite well. Even such "blind
work" (maybe analogous to "blind faith") can be salvation.
Meaning doesn't have to precede activity, but can emerge from it, and/or from
the healthier state of mind brought about by being active.
Of course I was very lucky to have had the skill and to have
forged my own venue. And to have the intelligence and the talent, both mostly
genetic. Luck all around!
And that has been one of my life's great surprises:
after having regarded myself as unlucky almost as long as I can
remember (with two magnificent exceptions: the last year in Warsaw ,
and the last year in Los Angeles
– the beauty of it before loss), I came to perceive myself as exceptionally
lucky.
Charles:
I love that you are an atheist and the title of this blog is
GOD’S HEARING. You quoted your grandmother and you are talking about God with
love.
Love the portrait of grandmother Veronika, such a beautiful
acknowledgement of her.
"The countries where life
is most secure have the highest percentage of people who describe themselves as
secular. " Yes, but I'd rather have less security and more liberty.
Freedom from "security" makes me happy.
So brilliant how every paragraph brings a complete surprise
and a different viewpoint. Great blog.
Oriana:
Just this morning I was pondering the idea, foreshadowed by
Rilke and picked up by various writers and psychologists, that we each create
our own personal god – though not out of nothing. Childhood indoctrination and
other cultural influences certainly have a huge impact. So does our secular
education, our peers, the books we read, the movies we watch, the popular
culture and, to an extent that may be impossible to estimate, our life
experiences (are we crying out for help?), and yes, especially in my case,
family stories. For me god and Auschwitz were inextricably intertwined, though
it wasn’t until adulthood that a thought ran through me, in response to “God
will not allow it” – “If god allowed Auschwitz ,
god will allow anything.”
Hell and Auschwitz (Dachau , Buchenwald , Ravensbrück, where one of my aunts died,
Treblinka, Majdanek, and scores of other camps) were pretty synonymous: this
was the heart of darkness, this was hell. In fact the camps provided more
concrete imagery of suffering than paintings and descriptions of hell ever did.
Instead of the stench of sulfur, there was the stench of bodies burning in the
crematoria, the thick choking smoke that my grandmother saw already from the
train. Yes, the camps outdid the depictions of hell, but hell had a special
distinction: it had been created by an omnipotent deity, and the torture would
last for eternity, non-stop. Pondering this, I knew: a deity that would design
hell was not worthy of worship. That would be like worshipping Hitler, except
far worse.
An answer to this might be that it’s humans who create hell,
and I readily agree. Still, if we say this, we are rejecting the official view
– not too clear in the Old Testament, but ingrained in Christianity, where the
clergy used hell as their chief weapon of psychological terror. The more we go
back in time, the greater the emphasis on hell – with the exception of early
Christianity, where there were no images of hell and crucifixion and Last
Judgment. In early Christianity, amazingly, we find an emphasis on paradise.
How different the Western culture would be if this emphasis
had survived!
That paradise included brotherly love, agape. Many Christians
know the word, but attempts to revive it have been few – perhaps it’s too late
in history for that, and the figure of the punitive God the Father casts too
heavy a shadow, overwhelming the charisma of gentle Jesus – who in any case is
supposed to come again as a Judge, in spite of having preached non-judgment and
forgiveness.
Only recently the church changed its official definitions of
heaven and hell, designating them not as actual places (one in the clouds, the
other inside the earth) but as states of mind. I am not sure if this has really
registered on the collective psyche. And it’s possible that this comes too late
to heal the massive problems that rose from “old-time religion.” At the same
time, I can see how religious faith can sustain people in desperate situations.
A lot of praying went on in Auschwitz and
similar places, contrary to the prediction that the inmates would lose their
belief.
But I digress. You are right that here I am, an out-of-the-closet
public atheist who frequently writes on religious topics. I certainly am not
about to deny that I had a devout grandmother and went through a period of
being a devout Catholic myself. Considering my emotional intensity, it’s not
all that surprising. The imprint on my psyche can never be fully erased. In
some corner of my mind, I fully expect to go to hell because I have dared to
think for myself. But that is a small, grimy corner. Love of life dwells
elsewhere, in beautiful neural networks that could be called “many mansions.”
**
**
Charles:
The first thing that I
noticed about Poussin's painting is the blue robe of Mary too. She also looks
like a nun there.
I love the look of the Cherubs in Raphael's painting, thinking, "To believe or not to believe...."
Love the concept that God needs man.
I love the look of the Cherubs in Raphael's painting, thinking, "To believe or not to believe...."
Love the concept that God needs man.
Oriana:
That’s a fabulous idea
that Raphael’s famous cherubs are thinking, “To believe or not to believe . .
.”
Yes, the blue is striking,
but I couldn't get over the “gimme-gimme” look of baby Jesus stretching his
chubby arms upward toward the cross. It was that familiar look of a toddler
reaching for something, anything, in the aisle at a grocery market, driving the
parent crazy.
What drives me at least
slightly crazy was that this mediocre Poussin was the loan in exchange for
Timken’s great Rembrandt.
As I say in the post, the
ancients took it for granted that the gods needed man because who else was
going to offer sacrifices. Christianity was uncomfortable with the idea that
god needed anything, even though god’s apparent need for incessant praise is a
constant theme in the bible. Naturally, we start thinking how lonely and boring
it must have been for god, so perhaps he wanted some fellowship? He’s mentioned
literally walking and talking with certain favorite humans. Certainly long
chats with Moses on the mountain can easily be imagined. But it took Rilke to
say something as radical as, “Once I am gone, you lose your meaning.” Who says poets are wimps.
