The Renaissance: Myth?

Australian mathematics professor James Franklin assails the Renaissance Myth. An admirer of the renaissance that birthed the High Middle Ages that died in the Black Death, Franklin argues the reputation of the 15th to 16th century Renaissance is inflated. Comparing the period to both the Middle Ages and the early Modern period, he condemns the Renaissance for its negligible scientific discoveries and technological advances of the time(Copernicus excepted), lack of philosophical genius, relatively poor literary output, and its slavish devotion to the ancients.

The impact of the discovery of the New World and the newly-invented printing press, Franklin dismisses. "Both of these have been the occasion of innumerable effusions of a priorist theorising, to the effect that they opened new vistas of thought, led to the spread of radical ideas, confuted scholastic dogmas and so on. As usual, evidence that any of this happened is rarely seen," he writes. He compares the moon landing and the introduction of television as events analogous to these supposed paradigmatic moments. Both caused a splash but rarely elevated the people of the times.

Franklin argues that the undeniable excellence of Renaissance art is in part responsible for the period's reputation. The ease of observing such great art led people incorrectly and lazily to project that excellence onto the whole era.(The comments on Leonardo da Vinci's non-artistic endeavors are particularly iconoclastic.)

"The Renaissance Myth," Franklin thinks, is also the creation of anti-clerical polemicists, bad education, and Petrarch's self-aggrandizing writings.

Franklin's essay merits a deeper response, though I have to my regret forgotten most of Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence and whatever else I've read on the period. The romantic epics of Orlando comprise one set of Renaissance masterworks that Franklin overlooks. Though they are not popular even among the learned today, they enjoyed a great reputation mere decades ago.

Further, the Jesuit system of education was inspired by those universities whose 16th-century state Franklin disdains as dull and slavish. These scholars who produced so many brilliant thinkers apparently found much valuable not just in the content the Renaissance preserved, but in the era's system itself.

However, some of Franklin's criticisms surely hit their target. There really is a schoolboyish naivety in the writing of, say, Pico della Mirandola. Renaissance servility toward Aristotle and other ancient aristocratic thinkers, I wager, helped dampen the dignity of both productive labor and experimental inquiry.

Franklin also seems to have Michael Flynn's admiration for medieval science, which is a good thing. He recounts one telling anecdote about the scientific work of Pope John XXI:

Until 1300 the most actively cultivated science was geometrical optics, the leading researchers in which were associated with the Papal court of John XXI in the 1270s. The Pope was himself the author of a book on the subject (besides writing best-sellers on logic and medicine), and in fact died in the pursuit of science when the roof of his laboratory collapsed.

However, what struck me most about Franklin's critique was his attack on the early Renaissance's obsession with enumerating all aesthetic relations:

This habit of thought was peculiarly destructive of rational thinking, since on the one hand enormous imaginative effort was expended in drawing ever more striking parallels between things, but on the other hand it was essential to the exercise to pretend that these parallels were not just figments of the imagination, but were edifying just because the things compared really did mirror one another. It is not too far-fetched, I think, to compare this with Marxism. The tendency of Marxist thought when faced with, say, a scientific result, is to relate the ideology of bourgeois science to the historical consciousness of scientists and their community. Aside from the question of the truth of this, the overall effect is to divert attention from the original fact. The same is true of allegory. The facts about a thing and its actual relations with other things will be missed if the mind contemplating it is trained to look immediately for ingenious ways of seeing the thing as a sign of something else. The construction of allegorical similarities replaced the search for causal connections.

This is a good caution complementing my foray into C.S. Peirce's semiotics. Too much concern for the logic of signs and relations obscures the fact that their logic is neither scientific nor entirely philosophic, but artistic. While good poetry and rhetoric, for instance, can rely on and encourage close observation of reality, imagination is their native domain.

Poetry and rhetoric rest on the careful organization, invention, and manipulation of signs. Letting the sign overshadow the thing signified is a precursor to, if not a practice of, falsehood and idolatry.

Peirce on Language and Reality

A November post here promised more on Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club.

Peirce thought that our representations can be classified, filled out, and elaborated in all sorts of ways, that they can even become "better," in the sense of "more useful," as we peel off their metaphysical husks. But we can never (as individuals) say that they are identical with their objects. This is not just because our knowledge always "swims" as Peirce put it, "in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy"; it is also because--and this is the distinctive feature of Peirce's theory of signs--there are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all. You can call this notion counterintuitive, because that is exactly what it is: it is part of Peirce's attack on the idea that we can know some things intuitively--that is, without the mediation of representations. For Peirce, knowing was inseparable from what he called semiosis, the making of signs, and of the making of signs there is no end. If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words to be looked up in turn. There is no exit from the dictionary. Peirce didn't simply think that language is like that. He thought that the universe is like that.

This highly relational theory of reality is very congenial to the sacramental imagination, where no thing exists in itself but exists, analogically speaking, in communion with God. This is perhaps why the novelist Walker Percy was so attracted to Peirce, calling himself "A thief of Peirce" in his correspondence with semiotician Kenneth Lane Kenter.

It is possible that not just language in general but poetry in particular works because reality is thus interconnected. The talent for seeing the unobvious relations between an object, a quality, or another relation and describing its congruity or incongruity would be most fitting if that seen relation were not just a linguistic accident but instead had reality.

If poetry best relies on some form of ontological realism, the rise of nominalism or other habits of analytic thought would undercut the quality of poetry as well as the motivation for people actually to listen to it. The analytic approach, which breaks down reality into components with little regard for their relations, perhaps dissolves the structures basic to poetic success. All poetry becomes mere wordplay, the flatus vocis[puff of the voicebox] disdained by Ockham.

Illiterate Poetry

Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.”
Twilight of the Books

This suggests a thought exercise: shun abstractions in one's descriptions of color and use metaphorical descriptions to the point of abuse.

The article, which theorizes how a visual culture differs from a literate one, also touches on the work of Walter Ong, SJ.

Another provocative excerpt:

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to "think memorable thoughts," whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There's no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in "enthusiastic description of physical violence." Since there's no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past's inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

Writers could react to this conclusion in a fit of Romanticist primitivism and aim to swamp cool reason with the most tempestuous of imagery. A more productive reaction would be to create a synthesis between the poetic and the analytic, a synthesis that could survive YouTube-ification.

Nicolosi on the Hero, Nicolosi on Bella

Barb Nicolosi makes a nice examination of heroism in story, film, and real life and the qualities of the hero. Though it is only in note form, her advice seems more practical and substantive than what I've seen of Joseph Campbell's writings.

Here's a sample:

Things that are not heroic:

To have an illness. To be a victim. To have a bad hand dealt to you. HEROISM is in still serving others with an illness or bad thing.

To survive your own iniquity. (In the Bill Clinton sense. I heard a lady on TV say that she admired Clinton because he was "a survivor." Well, by that standard, you could admire roaches.)

It isn’t heroic to have a great talent or skill. To be able to run fast or sing well.

Nicolosi, a professional screenwriter, also isn't impressed by Bella, the new movie some pro-lifers are rallying around. I worry Nicolosi's standards can be too artistic and elite-oriented. Surely there is a craft to making popular mediocrities. I suspect the aspiring artist must first know mediocrity before he can know excellence.

Then again, I haven't seen the movie and don't plan to. When the film's own publicity highlights the fact it is made by "first-time filmmakers," I'm not inspired to open my wallet.

"The Jeweler's Shop" On Stage

The Theophany Theater Company was recently in town to perform The Jeweler's Shop, a play written by Pope John Paul II when he was still Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Krakow. The play explores love and marriage as experienced by three couples: one ends by a death, another by separation, and later the third begins with the betrothal of two children of these unions. All three couples visit a mysterious jeweler's shop whose magical rings and vatic instructions bracket these couples' experiences of engagement and marriage.

The Jeweler's Shop, I am told, is representative of the Polish nationalist movement which tried to preserve and extend Polish culture despite foreign domination. Originally meant for performance in small homes, the intimacy of the play can be adapted to larger venues only with difficulty. Theophany's performance did not transfer well. The actors were difficult to distinguish at a distance. Costumed in uniform black dress, their appearance evoked distracting comparisons to avant garde productions. Their delivery lacked significant dramatic energy, being over-reliant on the script and its author to carry the production.

The writing itself is often provocative. At times the imagery flourishes into self-interpretation. In one scene an affianced couple stands outside a shop, contemplating each other in the store window:

[the shop window] became, however, a mirror reflecting us both-Teresa and myself. Moreover, it was not an ordinary flat mirror, but a lens absorbing its object. We were not only reflected but absorbed.

A lover's gaze upon himself and his beloved suggests the iconic nature of holy matrimony, which segues into iconographic theology. Rarely has such interrelated symbolism so echoed off a stage.

The soliloquy has but a small place in American film or theater but it frequents The Jeweler's Shop. Indeed the soliloquies are so many that at times the characters seem to have talked themselves into isolation from one another. On occasion this serves dramatic purpose, as when an abandoned wife futiley seeks comfort in a crowded village street, but at other places attentive staging must channel the solitude which was too prominent in Theophany's performance.

The speeches themselves often turn into philosophical asides. Observing two immature lovers, the everyman Adam states:

love carries people away like an absolute, although it lacks absolute dimensions. But acting under an illusion, they do not try to connect that love with the Love that has such a dimension. They do not even feel the need, blinded as they are not so much by the force of their emotion as by lack of humility. They lack humility toward what love must be in its true essence. The more aware they are of it, the smaller the danger. Otherwise the danger is great: love will not stand the pressure of reality.

Poetic imagery is lacking, to say the least. How is it that a play can tolerate such analytical ventures?

I suspect the oppresive state of 1960s Poland is one reason. Communist suppression of unofficial cultural events required that distinguishable artistic goals be concentrated into the power of one work. Archbishop Karol Wojtyla lacked the time and the flexibility of the free artist to explain and expand upon his vision. The playwright must do the work of criticism because few others will.

The play's confluence of aesthetic goals also includes the moral. The specialization of American society shuns the combination of education and entertainment. Such a union suggests the brightly-colored monstrosities of children's television. But didacticism is not necessarily an artistic sin. It is certainly a failure when a work of art teaches us something shallow or something wrong, so it is good for moviegoers that Hollywood usually shuns the didactic in favor of pure entertainment. Didacticism is also a risky tactic when advancing something the audience would rather not want to learn. The market pressures for mass appeal cannot afford any resentful patrons.

The effort to teach goes awry worst when one teaches something badly, and here performances of The Jeweler's Shop risk the most danger. The play is inescapably foreign. Its design for the house theater, its numerous soliloquies, its dramatic choruses, and its philosophic interludes have little appeal to action-loving American audiences. There are even a few rhetorical clunkers, as when one Chorus begins to speak of a wedding:

"The occasion is most beautiful, it evokes so many associations. We are looking only at what is!"

One hopes this is a fault of the translator.(*)

As much as a fifth of the audience at Theophany's performance ducked out at intermission. While one can excuse the players or the playwright by blaming the average American's taste, I think it is instead a sign that The Jeweler's Shop is a play fit only for the more academic or more adulatory sectors of American Catholicism. Written to compete with the bland socialist realism and the quasi-rationalistic Communist ideologies of its age, it can hardly challenge today's multi-billion dollar entertainment industry that stirs appetites for the spectacle and the sarcastic one-liner.

There is great potential for some budding playwright to remix this play for an American audience, as Christopher West distilled the pope's Theology of the Body for ease of understanding. Such a writer must unite the contemplative self-reflection of Wojtyla to an accessible story with characters and style more common to American performances. This effort will require considerable talent, but without it the best points of The Jeweler's Shop will remain trapped in a diamond uncut for its setting.

* On second thought, this line would work well when whispered in a home setting.

Sacrificial Architecture and Modern Urbanism

Notre Dame professor of architecture Phillip Bess is writing at Right Reason on architecture both secular and sacred:

What are the marks of a sacramental sensibility in architecture and the city? To dwell even briefly with sacrifice, prohibitions, and obedience as marks of a sense of the sacred is to underscore the fact that these are not exactly prominent themes of contemporary "therapeutic" society. Indeed, contemporary art and architecture seem to aptly display the tenor of our era in works that commonly thematize self assertion over self sacrifice; revolt and entitlement over gratitude; the temporary over the durable; transgression over prohibition; autonomy and the pursuit of power over obedience to legitimate authority; and the deliberate blurring of distinctions over the desire to understand and order things in clear and right relationships to one another. To the extent that these themes indeed flourish in works of contemporary art and architecture, such works may be regarded as a conscious or unconscious denial of the sacred, or (perhaps) an artistic lamentation of the absence of a shared sense of the sacred in the contemporary world. If I am correct about the marks and effects of the sacred upon human social life however, the one thing these works are not is an address to the sacred.

Atheist Poetics, or the Lack Thereof

"They want us to believe that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead, but then tell us it is blasphemy to suggest that he had done something prosaic like engage in an affair or have offspring."
-American Atheists

On Beauty in the Catholic Liturgy

My constant complaint is that "aesthetic" has come to mean only one thing, "superficial." Fortunately I'm not the only one who has noticed this shift in connotation:

One commonly hears criticisms of those who prefer the classical Rite along the lines that such persons are "mere aesthetes", as if a love of beauty[Philokalia! -kjj] has nothing to do with being a Catholic. After 30 years of "accommodationist" practices, even Catholics who are loyal to the magisterium are starting to think like Calvinists. The general attitude is: form and substance are two different things, and we only care about substance. Anyone who cares about form is labelled an "aesthete" and "aesthetes" should be contained in places like Oxbridge common rooms and Anglican country vicarages. The logic of this position is that Catholics must be, by definition, tone deaf philistines whose levels of intellectual life are sufficiently low to exclude the ability to see a relationship between form and substance.
Tracey Rowland, "The Pastoral Relevance of Beauty"

A Notable Local Artist

The Arvada Center has a exhibit of the rather intriguing work of pastel artist Riva Sweetrocket.

Surrealist yet accessible, she's one of the better recent artists I've seen on display. "The Power of Thought," depicting fighting doves where a woman's head should be, captures nicely the mental conflict of everyday life. The piece "Steak Out" I took to have been inspired by various womens' magazines, an interpretation surprisingly close to the artist's intent.

Her other pieces are certainly worth browsing.

Dueling Obscurantists

There is a minor kerfuffle in a small Colorado town involving an intro-to-opera program for children. The Denver Post reports that certain parents in Bennett, Colorado were incredibly upset that their elementary-age children saw a puppet-populated introduction to opera video, featuring scenes from Faust and other works. The devilish imagery of the work was of great concern to them, as well as scenes of operatic cross-dressing misunderstood by their children, which the parents then mistook for a representation of lesbianism.

I received an action alert from an artsy friend which claimed that the music teacher, Tresa Waggoner, didn't exactly endear herself to the community because she excluded Christmas Carols from the school's "winter festival" choir recital. This being so, I find it hard to get much riled up about any supposed censorship or cultural obscurantism going on in this dispute, since both sides appear to be practicing that. It's not like a foreign-language opera is more relevant to grade-school kids than centuries-old songs rooted in their own culture.

Furthermore, hardly any opera is suitable for the young. It's in another language, it is incredibly expensive to enjoy, and it is typically about adultery, murder, and all sorts of R-rated subject matter. The arts teacher is a rookie, which explains her lack of discretion.

What I don't much like is the sanctimonious depiction of concerned parents as mouth-breathing yokels, an easy temptation for would-be cognoscenti like the Denver Post's Kyle MacMillan, whose article is also linked above.

There is also an unfortunate habit in the education industry for its workers to think of themselves as great liberators who free enslaved children from the supposed errors of their parents. One can easily reach that interpretion by reading the superintendent's comments:

"We're in no way going to back off," Sauter said. "We want to expose kids to things, to help them see there is another world beside Bennett out there. But we have to understand who we are serving."

I was not aware that Bennett existed in an alternate world. Mr. Sauter has read too many times Dr. Suess's Oh the Places You’ll Go.

We Dissect to Give Life

And the suspense is over. Because we have stopped reading this poem. There’s nothing about it in the first lines or the second or the third to gain our confidence that the organizing intelligence behind it is either organized or intelligent.
Joan Houlihan, Three Invitations to a Far Reading

The essay is a welcome dissection of bad poetry. In many ways, such poet manques aspire to be something like Richard Dawkins' blind watchmaker in their unguidedness, but fall short even of the appearance of design which Dawkins admits as an end-result. Their poems are as opaque and inscrutable as any other chaotic impulse. The reasons for their being published are the deepest mysteries whose purposes shall not be revealed until the Apocalypse itself.

A Decent Overview of Nietzschean Indecency

Ian Johnston's "There's Nothing Nietzsche Couldn't Teach Ya About the Raising of the Wrist" : A Lecture in Liberal Studies deserves a note.

Eye-Catching passage #1:

And throughout the nineteenth century, the rising success of the new science seemed to be delivering on the promise of an exact description of the world. And the application of this spirit of empirical observation and precise, unambiguous description to an understanding of history and morality, of the sort offered by Karl Marx, set up the hope of a triumph of the language of philosophy (as defined earlier) over the language of poetry (in spite of the objections of the Romantics).

It was an alluring vision, because it promised to lead, as Hannah Arendt points out, to the end of traditional political argument. Since we would all have a full and shared understanding of the way a just state really does work, we wouldn't need to argue about it (any more than we argue about the Pythagorean Theorem). Anyone could govern, since governing, traditionally the most challenging task in human affairs, would be simply a matter of applying known and agreed upon rules, something a technician could do. As Lenin observed, governing would be for cooks, because the truths of political life would be expressed in a language coherent to anyone, a language which did not require interpretation of any sort.

Eye-Catching Passage #2

First, the constant emphasis on individualist self-assertion through new metaphors has made much art increasingly esoteric, experimental, and inaccessible to the public, for the Nietzschean imperative leaves no room for the artist's having to answer to the community values, styles, traditions, language, and so on. Hence, the strong tendency of much modern art, fiction, and music to have virtually no public following, to be met with large-scale incomprehension or derision.

The article lead me to John Dewey's essay Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy and Canadian Tory political thinker George Grant, the further study of which could bear good fruit.

Art, She is Not Dead

Back in the late eighties I saw my first computer-generated cartoon. A field trip to the National Renewable Energy Labs, (or was it the National Center for Atmospheric Research?) up near Boulder ended with our class sitting in a small theater watching an exquisitely-crafted CGI cartoon about a love story between a bird and a fish who lived with all their fellows in a large sphere. As any kid would be, I was utterly entranced with the short piece. A few years later, I made a ray-traced picture for a chess club flyer using good old POV-ray, a small freeware program. It looked great, especially since somebody else had built the framework for the chess piece models.

Of course, I quickly forgot about POV, and it never entered my mind until I discovered the POV Hall of Fame and CGTalk.com's Choice Gallery. Sci-fi, fantasy, M.C. Escher, and Terry Gilliam's films are obvious influences. But at the moment what particularly strikes me about the medium is its many artists' dedication to realism--even if it is "magical" realism. Supposedly realism in painting declined with the invention of the photographic camera. But now that CGI artists are attempting to make nearly photorealistic portrayals of the images in their mind, it looks like the style might be up for renewal.

In the better art galleries, one comes across students planted in front of some finely-made painting with an easel and a pallette, hoping to learn the techniques of the masters. Likewise, some CG artists try to recreate classic works. There is an admirable attempt at remaking Jan Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, and one talented artist has made a stunning copy of Michaelangelo's Pieta.

A few "magical realist" pieces that caught my eye are Medieval Airport and one called Family, a snapshot of life amid a sea of pipes and machinery.

But perhaps the saddest artwork I have found in this medium is Innocent Shadow, depicting one small space in Nagasaki a few years after the atomic bombing.

Every Sin a Misdirected Virtue

Eve Tushnet on problems in some "ex-gay" thought and rhetoric:

Jesus wept, people, read some daggone Evelyn Waugh why don't you! Read some Augustine. What on earth would make you think that sin never contains any seed of goodness, any element of love? St. Augustine thought precisely the opposite of that--that every sin was a virtue misdirected.
[...]
But then I noticed my other huge problem with the "ex-gay" form letter Jason describes: There's nothing to be loved. There's nothing beautiful to Whom the writer cleaves. There's only something horrible to be shunned. And while I have some personal sympathy for that perspective--the horror of sin is sometimes much easier for me to see than the beauty of Christ--it's a thoroughly crippled view of the Christian life.

I believe what the Catholic Church teaches not solely--not even, when I'm at my best, primarily--because the alternatives are ugly. Quite often the alternatives are attractive, insofar as they partake in a partial share of the goodness, love, and grace that God offers. I believe what the Catholic Church teaches because, when I'm at my best, I love Jesus Christ, I love God, and I can faintly discern the beauty, hope, and peace He wants for me.

Quite relevant to the Wilde quotation below.

Scruton on Kitsch: The Sacred on Sale!

This is why the loss of religious certainty facilitated the birth of kitsch. Faith exalts the human heart, removing it from the marketplace, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion, our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life, the life lived in judgment. When faith declines, however, the sacred loses one of its most important forms of protection from marauders; the heart can now more easily be captured and put on sale. Some things—the human heart is one of them—can be bought and sold only if they are first denatured. The Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be: hence the emotion that they offer is fake.

-Roger Scruton, Kitsch and the Modern Predicament

via Michael Brendan Dougherty

Every ceremony, every ritual, every public display of emotion can be kitsched—and inevitably will be kitsched, unless controlled by some severe critical discipline. (Think of the Disneyland versions of monarchical and state occasions that are rapidly replacing the old stately forms.) It is impossible to flee from kitsch by taking refuge in religion, when religion itself is kitsch. The "modernization" of the Roman Catholic Mass and the Anglican prayer book were really a "kitschification": and attempts at liturgical art are now poxed all over with the same disease. The day-to-day services of the Christian churches are embarrassing reminders of the fact that religion is losing its sublime godwardness and turning instead toward the world of fake sentiment.

So true. Here's the aesthetic argument against the LifeTeen barbarization of the liturgy and the priests who ride bicycles into the sanctuary during their homilies to "connect with the laity," by which they mean "audience." I suspect this is related to "ovation inflation," where nobody ever boos at a performance; the sentiment that one is a sophisticated and appreciative person is far more important than forming and then expressing one's sense of the aesthetic. Sentimentalists wouldn't be so bad, nor indeed sentimentalists, if it there were somebody there to shoot them every minute of their life.

Preachers and Sunday School teachers are conscious that some of the biblical imagery is not easily recognized: few people have ever tasted a pomegranate, or know what it is like to be a shepherd. Catholic preachers always make sure to clarify what the Gospel meant when it implies that Jesus had biological brothers.

I have yet to see somebody analyze from a local pulpit what Our Lord meant when he told us to become as little children. In many contemporary minds, the child is some sentimental bundle of joy who never sins, a true innocent. Some atheist propagandist, perhaps even a well-known one like Russell or Dawkins, seized on the exhortation to become little children, interpreting childhood in the sentimental sense that has become so widespread in the churches, and cited it as a reason that freethinking was for "adults," and religion for spoiled children. I am told by my betters that Our Lord meant us to imitate the humilty of the child, not his self-centeredness, acknowledging our weaknesses and failures and having a recognition that our desires have not yet reached maturity. Such a child sure wouldn't frivolously modify the divine liturgy, knowing that he does not and perhaps never could understand all its intricacies.

See also: Edward T. Oakes, Icons and Kitsch

Beauty will Save the World

THE BEATIFUL IS THE GOOD, an essay by then-Cardinal Ratzinger. via Basia Me, Catholica sum

An Award-winning Touchstone Review of David B. Hart's most recent book, Return to Beauty.

Bahaus Architecture?

"....... In another of his books, "Living Machines: Bauhaus as Sexual Ideology" he address the peculiar psycho-sexual worldview of Gropius and his circle. The self-confessed purpose of Bauhaus architecture was to create a world where man is a sexual nomad, completely uprooted from family, God, and even sense of place...." (source)

Intercollegiate Review Spring 1975

Was the American Founding A Lockean Enterprise? The Case of James Madison

Between Language and Silence: Wittgenstein’s Dilemma

Art and Religion: Felicitous Tension or Conflict?

Speaking of Beauty

Take, for example, the line of another Marxist critic, Frederic Jameson, now plying his trade at Duke University, who asserts that "the visible is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination." Now it is true that pornography is the premier sign of the decadence of late capitalism, and the fact that liberalism can offer no moral or legal objections to it is a sure indication that liberalism is far more complicit in capitalism?s dynamic than are non-libertarian schools of political conservatism, paleo-, neo-, or whatever. But only a Marxist utterly hung up and scandalized by disinterested contemplation could equate all gazing with consumption of pornography.

-Edward T. Oakes, SJ

The Art Renewal Center, link courtesy of the Old Oligarch