Iconoclasm in the Age of Facebook

That art history is suppressed religious discourse is not a new idea.  "The familiar thesis of art as a secularized religion," wrote Joseph Koerner more than twenty years ago, "is a foundation of the historiography of painting as it developed in the discipline of art history since Romanticism"(148).  Or as James Elkins put it more recently, "some of the interpretive discourses in contemporary art history are implicitly religious… some of art history… is a shadow discourse.  It wants to say things about transcendence, the sacred, the spiritual, but in an academic setting – and for many reasons that continue to confuse and fascinate me, it feels it cannot." And so, resisting "several decades of sometimes ruthlessly secularized art criticism," Elkins demurs:

Getting to know some of the many careful and reflective people who write about religious art from outside academia has made me sensitive to the absence of personally engaged conversations about religion (as opposed to historiographic, philosophic, or sociological conversations) in academia.  The excellent scholars of religion who are themselves religious, and value their scholarship principally as a way to enrich their religious experience, have shown me a different way of reading art history.  To them, some texts in art history are indirect, in that they explore religious issues without identifying them as religious (133).

Elkins appears to suggest that discussion around the perennial topic of iconoclasm will be hamstrung until this is somehow acknowledged within academia as well.  And here is where Baylor's Natalie Carnes comes in.  Taking issue with two recent books (Simpson's Under the Hammer and Latour's On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods) Carnes offers a conceptual shift in what she calls a "Prelude to a Theology of Iconoclasm" (h/t Tanner Capps).

Iconophilia need not be sanitized of iconoclasm to be iconophilia.  Indeed, iconophilia may even require iconoclasm, inasmuch as loving an image qua image may fail to take seriously the particular claim an image makes on the beholder.  ...The iconophila in which there is no hidden heart of iconoclasm is an iconophilia without philos.  It is iconapatheia.

Carnes' point that iconoclasm and iconophilia coinhere has precedent.  Koerner elsewhere suggested that "In Christian thinking, every semblance hides a dissemblance and every dissemblance, a semblance"; and David Freedberg likewise observed that "the love and fear of images, as the Byzantine arguments show so clearly, are indeed two sides of one coin" (405).  But whereas Koerner and Freedberg observe this dynamic, Carnes offers the same insight in the context of a creative theological project - an "ecumenical theology of iconoclasm," which crosses into art history's forbidden territory, a world (foreclosed by Koerner) "beyond representation."  Wagering on transcendence, Carnes avoids the very quality that Elkins finds so dissatisfying in art history, the ineffectual attempt "to speak about religion while remaining appropriately secular."

In an age of adverstising - where so many images rely upon apathy (iconapatheia) but deserve active resistance (iconoclasm), does iconophilia less robust than the one proposed by Carnes stand a chance?  Michael Sandel sounds the alarm, lamenting that corporate images are creeping onto once inviolate spaces - fire-hydrants, ballpark bases, and even human foreheads.  Faced (or defaced) with this situation, the iconoclastic treatises of the Reformation, subsequently discarded by their confessional progeny for admittedly legitimate reasons, are ripe to be recovered - not as Christological statements (they're often wrong on that front), but as early versions of Adbusters.  But recast in the wider, irreducibly iconophile framework of ecumenical Christianity, such broadsides can also offer the one thing that Adbusters never has:  A solution.

Let There Be Kitsch

Site of the crucifixion at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

For the summer pilgrim confronting tackiness, there is nineteenth-century Biblical scholar Charles Augustus Briggs's dismissive approach to Christian materiality:

The valleys of biblical truth have been filled up with the debris of human dogmas, ecclesiastical institutions, liturgical formulas, priestly ceremonies, and casuistic practices. Historical criticism is digging through this mass of rubbish.  Historical criticism is searching for the rockbed of the Divine word, in order to recover the real Bible.

And then there is Rose Macaulay's (via the main protaganonist in The Towers of Trebizond).

Bethlehem was charming and moving and strange, and one does not mind either there or in Jerusalem whether the shrines are rightly identified or not, because the faith of millions of pilgrims down the centuries has given them a mystical kind of reality, and one does not much mind their having been vulgarized, for this had to happen, people being vulgar and liking gaudy uneducated things round them when they pray; and one does not mind the original sites and buildings having been destroyed long ago and others built on their ruins and destroyed in their turn, again and again and again, for this shows the tenacious hold they have had on men's imagination; they were dead but they would not lie down.

I'll take the latter, please.  Garish or not, there simply are some places, as Eliot put it, "where prayer has been valid."

Newman on Bad Religion

The below passage confirming Douthat's take on American Christianity is from John Henry Newman's Essays, Historical and Critical (1839).  According to Edward Short (who really likes Newman), "no better description of nominal Christianity has ever been penned."

To tell the truth, we think one special enemy to which the American Church, as well as our own, at present lies open is the influence of a refined and covert Socinianism. Not that we fear any invasion of that heresy within her pale now, any more than fifty years ago, but it is difficult to be in the neighbourhood of icebergs without being chilled, and the United States is, morally speaking, just in the latitude of ice and snow. Here again, as our remarks will directly show, we mean nothing disrespectful towards our Transatlantic relatives. We allude, not to their national character, nor to their form of government, but to their employments, which in truth we share with them. A trading country is the habitat of Socinianism... Not to the poor, the forlorn, the dejected, the afflicted, can the Unitarian doctrine be alluring, but to those who are rich and have need of nothing, and know not that they are "miserable and blind and naked;"—to such men Unitarianism so-called is just fitted, suited to their need, fulfilling their anticipations of religion, counterpart to their inward temper and their modes of viewing things. Those who have nothing of this world to rely upon need a firm hold of the next, they need a deep religion; they are as if stripped of the body while here,—as if in the unseen state between death and judgment; and as they are even now in one sense what they then shall be, so they need to view God such as they then will view Him; they endure, or rather eagerly desire, the bare vision of Him stripped of disguise, as they are stripped of disguises too; they desire to know that He is eternal, since they feel that they are mortal.

Such is the benefit of poverty; as to wealth, its providential corrective is the relative duties which it involves, as in the case of a landlord; but these do not fall upon the trader. He has rank without tangible responsibilities; he has made himself what he is, and becomes self-dependent; he has laboured hard or gone through anxieties, and indulgence is his reward. In many cases he has had little leisure for cultivation of mind, accordingly luxury and splendour will be his beau ideal of refinement. If he thinks of religion at all, he will not like from being a great man to become a little one; he bargains for some or other compensation to his self-importance, some little power of judging or managing, some small permission to have his own way. Commerce is free as air; it knows no distinctions; mutual intercourse is its medium of operation. Exclusiveness, separations, rules of life, observance of days, nice scruples of conscience, are odious to it. We are speaking of the general character of a trading community, not of individuals; and, so speaking, we shall hardly be contradicted. A religion which neither irritates their reason nor interferes with their comfort, will be all in all in such a society. Severity whether of creed or precept, high mysteries, corrective practices, subjection of whatever kind, whether to a doctrine or to a priest, will be offensive to them. They need nothing to fill the heart, to feed upon, or to live in; they despise enthusiasm, they abhor fanaticism, they persecute bigotry. They want only so much religion as will satisfy their natural perception of the propriety of being religious. Reason teaches them that utter disregard of their Maker is unbecoming, and they determine to be religious, not from love and fear, but from good sense.

In Newman and His Contemporaries, Short suggests that such remarks currently apply to American Catholics as well, "many [of whom] are indistinguishable from their erstwhile Episcopalian betters.  They, too, preen themselves on their private judgment and cleave to a worldly, self-congratulatory, nominal faith."

Of Beauty and Suicide Bombs

Below is a response I gave to Eleanor Heartney at CIVA's art and justice conference this weekend.  Thanks to some discussion that followed, I've developed it below.
 
We've been asked today if beauty can be used to obscure justice, and it has been suggested that there is not one way to bring art and justice together.  In response, I'd like to offer one recent place where beauty has - it seems to me - obscured justice, and to put forth that traditional religious imagery should also be considered an especially effective locus of justice.

The roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently covered with blood. Which is to say, the installation by the Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi intentionally resembles the blood spattering that results from a suicide bomber’s detonation in a crowd. The work is a response to bombings in Lahore, Pakistan, where in the cool of a July evening as crowds gathered at a Sufi holy site, three suicide bombers - who considered said crowd insufficiently Islamic - killed themselves and fifty more, while maiming two hundred.

In the museum label, Metropolitan curators did not hesitate to mention the blood many of us saw similarly splattered on television screens after the Boston Marathon bombing.  Such a reference seemed acceptable because within Qureshi's blood is beauty.  Inspired by a Mughal miniturare, Qureshi has painted delicate foliage within the splatters.  I slipped up to the Met's roof the week that Qureshi’s installation opened, and had the exhibit essentially to myself.  It was beautiful, in a certain way.  I thought, what a perfect discussion point at an art and justice conference.  Theoretically, I supposed this could help someone work through such a catastrophe.  Had one witnessed the bombing, perhaps one avenue of healing the memory would be to confront it - to imagine it beautiful.  "Yes, these forms stem from the effects of violence,” says the artist, “but, at the same time, this is where a dialogue with life, with new beginnings and fresh hope starts."

Having now had time to think on it, I'm not so sure.  Yes, this is an attempt at overcoming brutality, but the beauty is comparatively mute. I tried a thought experiment.  What if my ten-month-old daughter had been killed in such a bombing?  Would I want to see any beauty in that blood?  Googling around about the exhibit, I came up with some photographs taken when Bono showed up at the opening, in which he prostrated himself with the artist for a zany, "so fantastic!" pose.  Again, had people I had loved fallen in such a suicide bombing, two prostrate bodies surrounded by red paint might have been a bit too reminiscent of the original event.  I also noticed that the roof garden’s Martini Bar is offering Gola Gonda, “Traditional Pakistani Shaved Ice with Choice of Pomegranate, Rosewater, or Mango Syrup over Vodka.”  Enjoy a Pakistani beverage as one meditates on the same country's sickening catastrophes?

Walid Raad at Documenta 13 (2012)

The more I considered Qureshi’s work, the more ingenious and bold it seemed to me, but also the more dissatisfying it became.  In the face of real evil, such muffled gestures of beauty seem powerless, perhaps even making the exhibit a case of false beauty.  Qureshi's adornment seems inadequate because it fails to fully grapple with, let alone counter the evil of the event that inspired it.  There are other artistic responses to violence that seem to understand exactly this.  Lebanese artist Walid Raad has intentionally responded to political tragedy with blank spaces, what has been called a “language of disappearance.”  His artistic reaction to Lebanese violence in one instance was nothing – a deliberate, focused silence.  

T.J. Clark

T.J. Clark made a similar point in a paper at the University of Chicago this last year.   In a talk on “Capitalism without Images,” the noted Marxist art historian surveyed the London riots and the fading Occupy movement, and appeared to conclude that the best response to the regime of advertising was no images at all.  Clark suggested that one cigarette advertisement was a warped image of the Annunciation, but he offered no real Annunciation in its place.  A wheatpasted anarchist tract on a telephone pole was all he could offer in response to visual injustice, which also seems (in my estimation) comparatively helpless.

Is there really justice in any of these responses – Qureshi’s hermatological ornamenent, the silence of Raad, or Clark's anarchist punt?  As I continued to reflect on what my response to losing a daughter in such a bombing would be, I’m afraid I began to sympathize with the motivation of those who resort not to art, but to violence.  If I had seen the blood of someone I love – a creature whose creation in the image of God I was particularly sensitive to – so casually spilled, I would be happy to put beauty aside and seek balance instead.  If the perpetrators were so numb to the significance of human life, an appropriate reminder might be for their blood or the blood of someone they loved to be spilt. This is justice: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.  Such is the motivation of the main character in Homeland – the only just response to dead Iraqi children is dead Americans.

I know of no theology of suicide bombings.  It initially seems something foreign to Christian tradition, something for other religions to grapple with.  But just this morning, Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad, pleaded for prayers as scores were killed from two suicide bombs in Iraq.  Of course, it is a Christian issue, for the suicide bomb stands in our global culture today as the cross once did to first century Romans:  A foremost spectacle of gruesome "justice."  Far more shocking than any suicide bomb theology would be the idea that the Christian God is incapable of grappling with tragedy on this scale. But He is - and the first Christian thing to say about it is that Christ suffers with the victim of every such event.  The New Testament even leaves room for us to say he mysteriously is every victim.  "Whatsoever you have done unto the least of these you have done unto me."

Fra Angelico, Crucifixion at the Met, c. 1440, detail

But another way to understand suicide bombs requires falling into the well worn grooves of an old evangelical path, however unfashionable it might be.  The one who seeks justice is right.  The answer to evil and atrocity of a suicide bomber is not a vague gesture of beauty.  The answer is that innocent blood did have to be shed to make it right.  The divine response to the abyss of evil unleashed in by three suicide bombers is an even more devastating, atoning detonation.  “For this reason the Father loves me,” says Jesus, “because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”

But in this blast there was only one victim, who absorbs the impact for all of us, thereby exonerating multitudes of the guilty, even – should they ask forgiveness – the bombers themselves.  Why do bad things happen to good people?  R.C. Sproul’s answer:  “That only happened once, and he volunteered.”  And here, of course – only after innocent blood atones - is where beauty does properly come in: the beauty of every crucifix.  Because it alone fulfills the requirements of justice, only Jesus’s shed blood can be beautiful, and only in view of that blood can Qureshi's art be taken in.  Fortunately, such beauty is on offer in abundance at the Met in the countless crucifixes and passion scenes just beneath this provocative installation, images which will be there long after the current commision is replaced by something that goes better with rooftop Martinis. 

Trinity Sunday

St. Louis, a photo by millinerd on Flickr.

The Controversialist's Temptation

“Certainly nothing jolts us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet but for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible ourselves.” So wrote Blaise Pascal concerning original sin.  In his book on the subject, Jacobs explains that one of the reasons it became so jolting was the doctrine's unfortunate appendages, results of the late Augustine - not at hist best - getting cornered into debate with the hotheaded Julian of Eclanum. This is familiar territory, but I've never seen it put quite this way:

And so, because a brilliant and devout old bishop could not resist the controversialist’s temptation – to take even a caricature of his views and defend it to the death, rather than show dialectical weakness – the whole doctrine of original sin, in Western Christianity anyway, got inextricably tangled with revulsion toward sexuality and images of tormented infants.  And there has never been a full and complete disentangling.

Or to put it otherwise, the unnecessary accretions onto the doctrine of original sin offer some of its most convincing proof.

Warburg's Wish

Legend has it that art historian Aby Warburg famously gave up a considerable inheritance to his younger brother on condition that said brother would buy him any book he ever wanted.  So the Warburg library was born.  Such a love of books makes it curious that Warburg dreamed of an art history without texts.  Because words are gifts as much as pictures, I'm skeptical of the project; but I will say that an image replication made by sophomore David Wainwright for my Art 101 class at Wheaton College this semester (using self portraits) outdoes many textual commentaries on Hieronymus Bosch that I've read.

Left: Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross (1515) Right: David Wainwright's Wheaton College replication for Art 101 (2013)

Why Not Just Pop It?

If Jeff Koons (left) was outdone by Paul McCarthy (right) in this year's Frieze fair, isn't that the next step?  I'll even volunteer.

Not Angles but Angels

The wait for the soon to appear biography of one character in the Anglican drama is occasion to explore another.  To read A.M. (Donald) Allchin's obituary is to read a life well lived.  His description of Anglicanism (written before present woes) makes it sound almost worth a try.

A faith which recognizes our hopeless ignorance before the mysteries of God, and does not pretend to find answers when it has not got them.  It recognizes at every point ‘the mysteriousness of our present being.'  It 'takes the side of faith and patience against the attractions of completeness and security and achievement and repose' [Eliot]. A certain tentativeness and humility before the affirmations of theology… which corresponds very closely to the apophatic elements, the awe and the reserve, which characterize the teaching of the great Fathers of East and West alike. This characteristic does not imply refusal of knowledge, any turning away from God’s gift of himself.  It is rooted rather in an experience of the limitations of man’s language and man’s concepts, and expresses a humility before the immensity of the divine.

Needless to say, said program has been occasion for pandemonium - for the very "refusal of knowledge" Allchin counseled against.  But at least he pulled it off.  Allchin's was an Anglicanism as serious as Eliot's, who once audaciously suggested that "Individual Conscience is no reliable guide; spiritual guidance should be imperative, and it should be clearly placed above medical advice" (141).

While Allchin was overwhelmingly indebted to Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Greg Peters suggests that one of his greatest contributions to ecumenism was to remain Anglican.  It sure helps when one lives in a town where it's possible - but there might be something to that. 

Natural Bodies

That the following is more provocative, not to mention truer than secular, Butlerian gender theory goes without saying.  What makes it especially noteworthy is that it is more interesting than most serious theological reflection on the body I've come across as well.

Tim Hawkinson, Totem, 2004

The body of the historical Jew from Nazareth, born of the virgin, crucified and buried, is a natural body. The body of that same one, raised by the Father and Spirit, materially continuous with and materially transformed beyond the body that was crucified, is a natural body.  The Church - body and bride of this same crucified and risen one - composed of men's bodies and women's bodies, is a natural body.  The body offered on the table of that Church, broken and consumed, is a natural body.  These sentences describe the body of Jesus Christ as he has granted us access, availability, to it, and these sentences must then be the starting point for our understanding of the nature of bodies.  We do not begin with out bodies as we think we know them - in the bed, in the chair, at the table, in the grave - and then proclaim that the ecclesial body, the Eucharistic body, the resurrected body must only be bodies metaphorically as they do not correspond to the way we usually understand our own bodies.

God's revelation to humanity is given to the senses, given in the body of Christ.  So, we begin instead with the access the Spirit has granted us to the body of the Son and accept that here we encounter the natural body.  Only then can we invoke nature with proper care (Marks of His Wounds, p. 100).

Orthodox Christian reflection on the body, at least as expressed by my colleague Beth Felker Jones, makes body-bending artists like Tim Hawkinson look comparatively tame.

The End of the University (I'm sure of it)

It's over - the entire enterprise.  Begun in the Athenian groves of Akademos, reconvening in Paris to become what Newman called the glory of the Middle Ages, and surviving until 2013... but now it's done. The University as we know it is finished.  What killed it?  The internet.  So just before I submit my job application to another industry (all of which are doing splendidly), I'm offering you one last declaration of doom, so you can't say you weren't warned:

The typical liberal arts college... is obsolete.  Its sovereign isolation, its protected students, the one-track careers of its faculty, its restricted curriculums and teaching and its tepid purposes make it unsuited to the needs of the decade ahead.  To have a bright future, private colleges must struggle to surmount these defects in a context of significantly altered purposes.

To my embarrassment I now realize that said paragraph, perfectly mirroring the rhetoric of 2013, was published nearly half a century ago, and the University (curiously enough) survived.  But don't let a mere clerical error of mine throw you off.  It's over.  For real this time.

Evangelical Gothic

Firestone on Fire by millinerd

"Our Aim in the Undertaking is to promote the Interests of the Redeemer's Kingdom," explained Jonathan Dickinson, the first President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).  A refusal to deal seriously with such university origins is not dissimilar to the refusal to deal seriously with the origins of the universe: the six day creationist's naive hope that present realities magically dropped out of the sky.  In College, What it Was, Is and Should Be, Andrew Delbanco puts it this way:

To anyone even glancingly acquainted with the history of American education, it is hardly news that our colleges have their origins in religion, or that they derive their aims, structure, and pedagogical methods mainly from Protestantism...  Many academics have a curiously uneasy relation with these origins, as if they pose some threat or embarrassment to our secular liberties, even though the battle for academic freedom against clerical authority was won long ago.  If you were to remind just about any major university president today that his or her own institution arose from this or that religious denomination, you'd likely get the response of the proverbial Victorian lady who, upon hearing of Darwin's claim that men descend from apes, replies that she hoped it wasn't so - but if it were, that it not become widely known.

This is a pity and a waste, since there is much to be learned from the past, including the clerical past, about the essential aims and challenges of college education.  We tend not to remember, or perhaps half-deliberately to forget, that college was once conceived as a road to wealth or as a screening service for a social club, but as a training ground for pastors, teachers, and, more broadly, public servants.  Founded as philanthropic institutions, the English originals of America's colleges were "expected," as Morison put it, "to dispense alms to outsiders, as well as charity to their own children (pp. 7-8)

That these founding ideals might ameliorate the present crisis in higher education is one suggestion of Delbanco's book.  What W. Barksdale Maynard's Princeton: America's Campus accomplishes (among many things) is to show that Collegiate Gothic architecture once did just that.  By replicating the English Gothic of Cambridge and Oxford, Princeton resisted the secular German research ideal (Wissenschaft over Bildung) that had overtaken American education starting with Johns Hopkins, and renewed its original commitment to the liberal arts:

[One] plus for Gothic at Princeton was its religious tinge: a churchly, monastic quality suggested a bulwark against secularism, especially appreciated by the many ministers on the faculty and among the alumni (fully one sixth of the graduate were ordained).  "Princeton's crowning merit," said a reporter [in Harper's Weekly, 1887], "is that it can keep pace with all the learning and progress of the age without yielding to the encroachments of modern unbelief."  Parents could trust that their sons would learn the most advanced subjects and approaches "without sacrifice of those principles which are inculcated in the Bible... Its founders and upholders have pledged themselves and their successors to be true to that religion which has been faithfully taught here from the beginning."  Tigers celebrated their "loyal adherence to the sturdy, unsectarian, evangelical Christianity which is synonymous with the name of Princeton."  No style could better connote this time-honored and pious approach than Gothic (p. 82).

But if one can't afford, or does not prefer, the Gothic - another tack would be to simply reexamine founding ideals as one ingredient to present renewal - perhaps by reasserting Dickinson's motivation with a motto like (to choose one college at random) For Christ and His Kingdom.

(More on this subject to come, by the way, in a forthcoming issue of Books & Culture.)

VIDEO: Daughter of Thy Son

I gave a talk at Wheaton College chapel this Monday (the traditional Feast of the Annunciation).  The contemporary art of Martin Creed, an obscure Byzantine church, Luther, Dante's Paradiso, T.S. Eliot, and - most compellingly - the provocative imagery of my Wheaton Art Department colleagues... all in one place!

Endless Knowing of the Victorian Origen

Ben Myers has a charming reflection on Origen as the consummate teacher and the eternal prospect of learning.  A similar case was built in the Victorian era by Thomas Cooper, a self-educated shoemaker, who had served a prison sentence for once sparking a workers' riot, and who rose to prominence in Victorian intellectual culture - even becoming a respected freethinking lecturer - before returning (as as a strangely high number of secular leaders did) to Christian faith.

Tim Larsen explains how Cooper was interested in everything:

He lectured on European political development and on injustice in Ireland.  He lectured on the life and genius of Milton, of Burns, of Shakespeare, of Byron, and others.  He gave a ten-lecture series on the history of Greece and seventeen lectures on the history or Rome.  He gave addresses on Cromwell and the Commonwealth, on the French Revolution, on George Washington.  He gave an eight-lecture series on Napoleon, and four on the duke of Wellington... He gave fifty-one lectures on the history of England.  He did a series on seven schools of painters: Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, French, and English.  He gave six addresses on Russian history.  He lectured on musicians, including Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven.  His lectures on discoverers and explores included Columbus, Newton, Cortez, and Pizarro.  He helped his hearers understand Mohammed and Swedenborg.  He lectured on slavery, on the national debt, on the age of chivalry, injustice in Poland, the gypsies, the conquests of Alexander the Great, on ancient Egypt...   the philosophy of Bacon and Locke.  His efforts to educate his hearers in a range of sciences included addresses on vegetation, astronomy, geology, and natural history.  This, moreover, is not even close to an exhaustive list of the specific subjects that he addressed.

Thomas Cooper

It was this catholicity of interests that initially led Cooper to the secular viewpoint, his youthful faith having been eroded by D.F. Strauss' Leben Jesu.  But it was also this catholicity that caused Cooper to think his way through Strauss, finally offering an answer, "counter[ing] well-reasoned skeptical criticism with well-reasoned believing criticism."  Unlike the surface responses of most Victorian Christians, Cooper actually gave Strauss' argument the respect of an honest and thorough response (which required mastery of original languages).  "Someone really interested in the latest thought in the field of modern biblical criticism," explains Larsen, "would have been better off going to hear Cooper at the London Hall of Science than an Oxbridge lecture."

Cooper continued his lecture circuit after his reconversion, often denying the flashier (and better paying) speaking venues to prioritize lower class audiences.  It is no wonder that his voracious appetite for learning caused him to offer an intellectual riff on the argument from desire.  As Cooper put it:

And do we not all know that the more we learn to know, the more we thirst to know?  It is only sheer ignorance that has no desire for knowledge... Is the wisdom of God so abortive as to make a being of boundless desires for knowledge, only at the end of a few years to put him out of existence? .. The Progressive Nature of Man - if I use the most circumspect language - is a strong presumptive argument for a Future Life for Man.

What Myers says of Origen could then equally apply to Cooper.  He "knew scripture and the mysteries of the faith better than anyone. But he knew that all the learning of this life is only preparation for the life to come."

The Enduring Age of Eliot

In a review of the latest publication of Eliot letters (1926-27), The New Republic offers the standard academic explanation for why interest in T.S. Eliot is (presumably) at low ebb:

Eliot’s criticism, with its probing of individual passages and its fixation on a specifically literary tradition, predominantly European and Christian, is out of key with current academic approaches based on such “contextual” categories as race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, post-colonialism and social class. Eliot’s poetry, with its learned footnotes that themselves require footnotes, reeks of the “elite.” Influential critics of poetry, including those who do not subscribe to the prevailing critical fashions, have not rallied to Eliot’s defense....  [Harold] Bloom (whose view of literature as a ruthless competition among individual writers closely resembles Eliot’s) has been dismissive of what he calls Eliot’s “churchwardenly” criticism.

But as said passage momentarily concedes, there is reason to think that Eliot's legacy is more present than is frequently presumed.  What reeks of the "elite" today is not an admiration for Eliot's poetry, but its carefully curated academic disdain.

Harold Bloom recollected that as a young student he had been “virtually enslaved” by Eliot’s “preferences and prejudices.”  If Eliot had dethroned the Romantic poets, Bloom reinstated them, even reading Eliot as the Romantic he claimed not to be. And where Eliot had stated the importance of influence in his famous early essay, Bloom upended this benign proposal in The Anxiety of Influence, offering six patterns for how literary influence functions almost perversely.  “Poetry is the enchantment of incest, disciplined by resistance to that enchantment,” claimed Bloom, adding a sinister tint to a process hitherto deemed positive.

But reading The Anxiety of Influence today with full knowledge of Bloom’s career is to be faced with an irony.  The sixth form of negative influence he describes is termed apophrades, or “return of the dead,” evoking the unlucky days in Athens when the dead inhabited the houses where they once lived.  Having sought to avoid the influence of his precursor, the later poet – Bloom tells us - now seems as if the one he sought to avoid inhabits him.  “It seems to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.”  Curiously enough, Bloom’s relation to Eliot is a fitting example of apophrades.

How can we read Bloom as anything but an extension of Eliot’s critical legacy through the literary heyday of deconstruction?  Faced with assaults on the literary tradition, Bloom responded with a furious defense:

Without the Canon, we cease to think.  You may idealize endlessly about replacing aesthetic standards with ethnocentric and gender considerations, and your social aims may indeed be admirable.  Yet only strength can join itself to strength, as Nietzsche perpetually testified.

Bloom, furthermore, made a sharp turn to what he termed religious criticism, even if he did so as a “Gnostic Jew,” loyally opposed to his Jewish tradition.  Beyond celebrating the KJV, he even went on to dispassionately advise an Augustinian revival amongst traditional Protestants and Catholics.  Bloom’s critical style also clearly echoed Eliot.  “Over time,” writes Sam Tannenhaus, Bloom’s “notion of influence has become more orthodox, growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics."  Eliot, according to Bloom, “remained a Whitmanian poet, despite all his evasions of Whitman.”   And so has Bloom remained Eliotic despite his evasions of Eliot.

But if Eliot’s understanding of influence is correct – which is advantage not anxiety – this is no condemnation of Bloom.  “If we approach a poet without this prejudice [toward unexamined originality]," wrote Eliot, "we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”  So yes, Eliot persists, and one reason his legacy is continually denigrated might be because his detractor's sense a threat, as the subtle perpetuation of Eliot's legacy would make it easy to revive.  (Hence the tired appeals to accusations from Julius's now dated book instead of bothering to take account of nearly two decades of conversation on the matter since Julius, a common note of which is serious attention to faith).

While there have been obvious critical gains (and losses) since the high water mark of Eliot adulation half a century ago, his legacy has been perpetuated by critics like Bloom, has lately inspired a new journal, Fare Forward, and new waves of artistic production, the Qu4rtets project.  It would be easy to overplay this evidence, but also to underestimate it.  Call it, if you like, apophrades - return of the dead.


QU4RTETS from Pilar Timpane on Vimeo.