DappledThings.org

A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith

Friday Links, July 10, 2020

On the Feast of St. Benedict, Saturday July 11, Celebrate Young Catholic Artists

Possibly of interest to our readers—a ZOOM event sponsored by the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship, with Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone. Saturday July 11 5:30 p.m. Pacific, 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Register here. The evening includes:

  • A virtual staged reading of “Friend Request,” the winner of the Merry Beggars’ 10-minute Quarantine Radio playwriting contest. The play by El Salvadoran-American playwright Christine Sloan Stoddard will be performed by Leah Libresco Sargeant and her husband Alexi Sargeant.
  • A chance to talk with the playwright, with the actors, and with Peter Atkinson, founder of the Merry Beggars.
  • A reading by James Matthew Wilson, of a 6th century poem (in English translation)—which was written to celebrate the great St. Benedict by Marcus of Monte Cassio, one of the saint’s companions.
  • An opportunity to chant the Litany to St. Benedict newly set to music by noted chant composer Fr. Samuel Weber, O.S.B.

Writer can’t give her book away

The above linked post in the Minneapolis/Star Tribune blog, “On Books,” by Laurie Hertzel is what? Ironic? Outrage provoking? Typical of how libraries are run these days? Katherine A. Powers, eldest daughter of J. F. Powers, and author of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J.F. Powers, 1942-1963, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cannot get the Cambridge, MA, library near her home to accept a free copy. Powers is irate about the very idea “that a local author’s book, published by a reputable publisher, which has been widely reviewed, should not be in her local library—and is, in fact, refused a place in it.”

Now and then some statues need replacing

Former Minnesota writer and radio show host Garrison Kiellor has a skewed humorist’s take on the tearing down of statues. He suggests, “As replacements for generals that nobody much remembers, I’d propose . . . Miss Flannery O’Connor who said, ‘Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.’ She said, ‘Conviction without experience makes for harshness.’ She said, ‘Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.’ Any one of the three would make a terrific inscription on a statue and I say there are enough statues of men on horses, there need to be more statues of slight women in plain dresses wearing glasses and looking intently down at their visitors.”

Not quite a full figure statue, this odd piece of Flannery O’Connor memorabilia is for sale here.

In Praise of Idle Curiosity

Last year I went back to school. I applied, with misgivings, to a top-ten graduate program in foreign affairs, requested official transcripts from the colleges and universities I attended in my youth, solicited recommendations from friends who’d known me as an investment professional, updated my résumé, wrote a biographical note and a statement of purpose, waited for a decision. After what seemed a long delay, I was admitted, to my immense gratification, and I started attending classes in the fall semester. I’m on summer vacation now, a 72-year-old grad student with, to date, a 3.875 grade point average. Upon completing one more course I will have met the requirements for a graduate certificate in international economic relations. I have decided not to go on for the master’s degree, it’s far too costly, and, anyway, I promised my wife that I’d never learn anything again. She laughed.

The university I’m attending is located in Washington, DC, 120 miles northeast of my home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I’m a commuter. During the academic year, I drive to Washington once or twice a week, taking country roads up to northern Virginia, then the notoriously dodgy I-66 into the wilds of the District. I normally make the round trip in a single day, reaching home late at night, but sometimes, if I have to give a presentation or take an exam, I’ll head up a day early and stay in a hotel near the campus. That’s a treat, and I invariably complement it with dinner in a fine restaurant, usually steak and a two-shot tumbler of Irish whiskey. But mostly I just drive up, study in the library or the coffee shop, go to class, and drive down again, taking the same route coming and going. I don’t mind the journey, on the contrary, I love it, the peacefulness of woods and farmlands, the intensity of interstate and city traffic, the hours to myself. I listen to NPR on the way there in the morning and classical music coming home at night.

My social status is delightfully ambiguous. Students in their twenties and thirties always call me sir, often ask if I’m a professor. (No, I tell them, just a very slow learner.) I take an active part in class discussions, and sometimes, on a break or in the campus coffee shop, my classmates ask me about the topic I’ve chosen for a term project, or how I answered a difficult exam question. But they don’t seem to know what to make of me, and we have little outside contact. They have yet to invite me to join a study group. That’s fine. I don’t blame them. There is a lifetime of difference between us. I tend, rather, to form relationships with the faculty members, and, while we remain on formal terms during the semester, we switch to first names as soon as the courses end and the grades have been submitted.
The school in which I am enrolled affords graduate students some latitude in course selection, and I chose to take an historical survey of economic thought as one of my early electives. Taught by a distinguished scholar and gifted lecturer, the course was offered in the university’s Economics department, where it is, unusually, a first-year requirement in the doctoral program. We read extensively, primary as well as secondary sources, selections from all or almost all of the classic thinkers in the field, and I seized the occasion to write a short paper on the interaction of instincts and institutions in Thorstein Veblen’s economics. This summer, with time on my hands, I picked up his 1918 book, “The Higher Learning in America.”

Veblen’s treatment of the topic is an unsparing critique of universities as competitive institutions managed by the businessmen who serve as trustees and the administrators they hire. It is characteristically replete with gracefully worded but wholly unconvincing disclaimers of distaste or disparagement. He is, he maintains, merely describing patent matters of fact and setting forth their obvious logical implications. His argument runs like this: if education in a scholarly or scientific discipline makes people ill-suited for commercial life (as I can attest it does), then business success must make people equally unfit for engagement in scholarly and scientific inquiry, and even less apt for the leadership of a university. That’s plain speaking.

It is true that Veblen’s relations with the heads of several universities were contentious, and the author’s discreet footnotes to “The Higher Learning in America” contain, without attribution, illustrative anecdotes and telling opinions that assiduous biographers could probably trace to specific incidents he observed and individuals he met in the course of his checkered teaching career. His report on the state of higher education in this country may not be entirely disinterested. But Veblen was an acute observer, and recognizing that he has a point of view, perhaps even a score to settle, does not invalidate his thesis.

At base, he held, scholarly and scientific pursuits arise from, “idle curiosity,” one of the three primal drives that underlie human behavior. (The other native gifts are the parental bent and the instinct of workmanship.) People instinctively seek knowledge, and, while it might prove useful at some point, they value it above all for its own sake, not for any ulterior purpose—that’s the positive sense in which the desire to know is “idle.” And the university’s sole legitimate mission is the increase and dissemination of knowledge as an end in itself.

By “university,” however, Veblen meant only the graduate school of arts and sciences. He explicitly excluded the undergraduate college, whose purpose is to provide gentlemen with a certificate of discharge, and the professional schools, whose aim is to train them for gainful employment in the interest of conspicuous consumption. Under the leadership of businessmen, the institutions’ stated goal may still be academic excellence, but their real objectives are to increase registrations and grow the endowment fund. They do so by competing for prestige in the eyes of the uneducated, who may be induced to apply for admission, and in the view of ageing alumni, who can be called upon for donations and bequests. Both groups enable the school to gain still greater preeminence by attracting headline talent, adding to the impressive physical plant, and recruiting superior athletes. In this environment, the undergraduate college, professional schools, and sports programs progressively take precedence, the joyful search for pure knowledge becomes the dogged pursuit of academic credits, the rivalry for athletic supremacy swells beyond measure. And the true purpose of higher learning gets lost in the shuffle.

Veblen proposed an idealistic remedy, establishing free-standing graduate schools of arts and sciences, and, indeed, in 1919 he was one of the founders of the New School for Social Research. But the broad trends he identified a century ago, especially the emphasis on vocational training, have undeniably shaped contemporary higher education in the United States.

Full disclosure: unable to support a growing family on the strength of my education in the humanities, I earned a master’s of business administration, with a concentration in finance and accounting, and went on to have a varied, interesting, and fairly remunerative career in institutional investing. The graduate school in which I’m now enrolled is also professionally oriented; it prepares students for meaningful employment in international service. Several of the professors in my area of specialization are knowledgeable about the history of economics. They have read, and written about, the great political economists, and they tend to be more or less open to heterodox perspectives. Most, however, teach and practice mainstream economics without reference to anything published more than 10 years ago, 20 at most. Theirs is the conventional economics that aspires to the stature of physics, a social science that seeks to discover mathematically describable regularities and infer causal relationships.

Within the limits of their expertise, these educators have taught me useful skills. (I would say marketable skills, but people my age are not in great demand.) Under their guidance, for example, I’ve become respectably proficient in using Stata, a high-power statistical software package whose syntax is decidedly not intuitive, and, so equipped, I wrote a research paper that has passed the first stage of a scholarly journal’s peer review process. I do not denigrate vocational training in customary ways of thinking and standard analytical techniques. It has enriched my life, materially and otherwise.

I’ve also found other, more unexpected benefits in my current situation. The students in my program are a diverse lot. (So, in fact, are the teachers.) The school is exemplary in this regard, sees exposure to different cultures as a source of creativity. An official statistic confirms my observation: 20% of the school’s graduate students come from outside the United States. Some, no doubt, struggle to keep pace with the curriculum—the university offers them broad academic and sociocultural support—but I don’t have to grade their coursework, and, from my selfish point of view, they contribute substantially to the quality of my education. In a course on economic development, for example, students from low-income and emerging-market countries drew on their own experience and offered surprising insights into complex policy issues. That they sometimes found it effortful to express an idea in a language not their own simply meant we had to listen more carefully, ask questions, try to clarify their point. (Like them, I’ve taken substantive courses conducted in a foreign language. My first-year grades were unimpressive.) Trying to communicate across cultures is almost always rewarding.

And another, related discovery. My initial idea, the one I set forth in my statement of purpose, was to build on my knowledge of 20th century intellectual history by studying the political and economic stresses that currently threaten the European Union, trying to foresee the consequences of a possible breakup beyond the Brexit folly, the repercussions of resurgent right-wing nationalism and the entrance of Eastern European economies in transition, the implications of Germany’s potentially dominant rôle on a divided continent, Germany, with its martial history. I am acquiring the know-how to conduct this research. But that course in economic development, the one to which the foreign students contributed so much, opened my eyes to the problems of poverty and inequality in low-income countries, made me aware, in particular, of the desperate conditions in sub-Saharan Africa, a part of the world to which I’d previously paid scant attention. I’ve gained some understanding, admittedly superficial, of the economic issues facing these countries, the initiatives of multilateral organizations, the relative impact of financial, physical, and human capital, the need for infrastructure and institutions, the power of microfinance. Once again I wish I were young.

But I’m not. Apart from my writing and an occasional consulting assignment, I am in retirement, that blessed interval—may it last a few more years—after the brutal demands of work have fallen away and before navigating the health care system becomes all-consuming. For now, my corrected vision is sharp, blood pressure low, posture straight, gait steady, bones strong, and, most vitally, I have my wits about me. Once I earn the graduate certificate, I’ll continue to read in the field of international economic relations, and I may write one or two academic papers if I see a different research angle or find I have something new to say. But I plan to spend the better part of my free time as I always have done, reading philosophy, history, literature, giving poetry the unhurried attention it requires. Idle curiosity is not only an elementary instinct, as Veblen recognized; it becomes a physical addiction, perhaps the only harmless one. Making connections—seeing how ideas overlap, recognizing how facts touch one another, sensing, in the end, that everything is of a piece—releases serotonin, produces a chemical reward that never grows old. The experience is, precisely, as pleasurable as a good joke, one whose wholly unanticipated punch line suddenly alters the listener’s perspective. I’m superannuated, I have time to spare. And the owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk.

 

Philip Lawton has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the French-speaking section of the Catholic University of Louvain and an M.B.A. in Finance from Northeastern University. His writing has appeared in Flying South 2018, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, the Bookends Review, Cagibi (runner-up for the 2019 Macaron Prize), Streetlight Magazine, and the Bangalore Review. Since writing this piece, he has obtained his graduate certificate in International Economic Relations.

Hawthorne shines a light

“Everyone is scared, everyone’s alone
Unless hand reach for hand when the trouble comes
All around the world when the dark night falls
We should be sitting around the fire…telling stories.”
– Greg Brown

“I like Nathaniel Hawthorne,” I said quite innocently one summer evening as I sipped my glass of Chardonnay under a lovely, starlit sky with friends. My writer friend looked over at the PhD in Literature friend and they both turned their gaze on me as one and peered incredulously over their glasses. “Na-than-iel Haw-thorne?” they said together – in a TONE that said, “Seriously? You would actually say that out loud? You would defend this publicly?” Then, with a customary snarkiness I have grown to love (and expect) they proceeded to point out quite willingly all of poor Hawthorne’s foibles. Too preachy, obvious metaphors, lugubrious writing, dark, stilted, stale, a thing of the past that should stay in the past. I knew they were right. But I don’t mind admitting that I was bristling inside as I took a larger sip of wine than usual. Poor, set-upon Hawthorne. I wish he were here to defend himself! And why was it that I liked him? I returned home that night, dusted off my trusty 1957 Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 11, and immersed myself in his life story.

Hawthorne’s world was not a happy one. He was born in Massachusetts, but not just any Massachusetts. His home was Puritanical Salem. His own grandfather had been a judge in the Salem Witch Trials. One of the only judges who did not repent of his verdict. That is why the “w” was added to the family name. To help them hide from this unfortunate truth. Salem, “in the 18th century was a town that enjoyed a temporary prosperity from overseas commerce, and thrifty sea-captains built dignified houses out of the profits of the China trade. Then came a swift decline, the passing of commerce to other ports, and a musty quiet about the wharves.” Hawthorne was a child of this “Salem eclipse.” It was the grim decay of a former prosperity. This was the Salem that fed Nathaniel’s imagination. His father married a young woman from one of the established families of Salem, and when Hawthorne was quite young when he died. Nathaniel was left with his mother and two sisters, in a “strange household reared in a sort of Puritan nunnery with the mother and daughters slipping wraith-like from room to room, fearful of every contact, given to solitude.” Their life was financially meager, but they covered this over with a deep family pride that remembered greater, more prosperous days. However, along with this pride came a repressed, mirthless, and passionless life, and an all-consuming obsession with sin. Nathaniel Hawthorne was steeped in this atmosphere, permanently stained by it down to his soul. He grew into a solitary, aloof person, suspicious of the outer world he didn’t know. And over the years, “a barrier slowly rose about his soul over which he was never willing or able to climb, and within this barrier he dwelt alone.” Later, he was sent off to school, and experienced the wider world. But he never quite recovered from his years in Salem. He managed to confront the Calvanistic dogma of his upbringing and threw it off completely, eventually. “But he could not quite free his mind from the specter of sin that haunted the waking hours of his ancestors.”

Yet Hawthorne was an artist. And the artist who lived a prisoner within that barrier could not entirely be repressed. He began to weave stories in his mind, creating fantastical images in his imagination, finding symbolism in every Puritanical fact that surrounded him, wrestling with questions and longings within. And from that moldering, dank, obsessive world of darkness, he, the artist, discovered… beauty.
How else can you explain Phoebe? Hawthorne’s character Phoebe emerges suddenly like a happy little miracle from one of his darker stories in her beautiful and tender light. In his semi-autobiographical novel, The House of the Seven Gables, we enter a moldering, sagging old house, once prosperous, where lives an elderly spinster named Hepzibah Pyncheon. (Can there BE a better name?) She is near-sighted, which makes her look severe and irascible. In reality, she is timid, anxiety ridden with shouldering the appearances of her aristocratic heritage, dressed in somber black and simple lace with bonnet, wandering from room to room in lonely solitude, clinging solely to family dignity. Outside her door, if she had ventured forth, she would have found a happier world. A town with tradesmen and bustling with people smiling, working, walking in the sun, and blissfully unaware of her old-fashioned and fading way of life. But she does not emerge from her house. She is too afraid to leave its dark security and so she is a prisoner in its world and is unaware that any other world exists.

Enter, by happy fate, little cousin Phoebe, sent to Hepzibah to live for a time. She is a cheerful, light-stepping young woman prone to singing and filled with bright and optimistic thoughts. Phoebe enters Hepzibah’s dark, Puritanical monster of a house and is… undaunted. She is not at all afraid or even repulsed by Hepzibah’s sour face and dowdy clothing. She hugs the poor, surprised woman and stirs a tender space in her old heart. Phoebe moves the furniture around, she dusts, she brings flowers from the overgrown garden into the house and opens the windows. She takes down the solemn, frightening portraits of ancestors and puts up lovely curtains. She bakes cakes and serves Hepzibah tea on her fine but unused china. She breaks all tradition. All this while Hepzibah is simultaneously wringing her worried hands at change, and yet following Phoebe around like an ancient heliotropic plant drinking in a newfound sun. In a series of events sparked by a dark and sinister Pyncheon history, Hepzibah finds herself edging closer and closer to the front door of her dark life. In the end, with Phoebe’s help, she steps over the threshold, closes the door to her sad and moldering past and finds a happier life where love exists and is willing to take her in. Hepzibah at last smiles and walks forward.

In the end, Hawthorne astounded me. He can perhaps be accused of many things, by those who know better than I about literature. But Nathaniel told a story that needed to be told. He wanted us to know he was there behind his wall, with night falling about him. He wanted us to know he tried and failed to fly. He did not want us to forget his valiant effort. He sent his message through a story. I cried real tears at this tale. I cried even more after reading Hawthorne’s life. He climbed nearly to the top of the wall that his past had built up around him. He saw a light over that Puritanical space. And he called it Phoebe, the Greek word for bright dawn. He knew it was there. He longed for it to be there. For “he resented the inhibitions of Puritanism” with its stifling obsession with sin and guilt and lonely despair. But he was unable to trust a more kind and forgiving God. His wounds ran too deep. He could not make the leap. So, Hepzibah leapt for him right over the wall, following Phoebe to a better world. And you can almost hear him crying out in this beautiful story, “Run, Hepzibah! Run! Be free at last, as I could not be.”

For all of us who may be haunted by the past mistakes or hurtful events in our lives, thinking we will never be set free, feeling our wounds and wondering if we too dare pass their dark but familiar threshold, Phoebe beckons with her cheerful face and gives us a hope that we too can cross into the light that holds out its hand to us. And we might hear her whisper, “Nathaniel sent me.”

 

Denise Trull lives in St. Louis, MO with her husband Tony. She is the artistic director of a small but mighty theater company and loves the written word in all its forms.

New Reading Periods for Poetry and Fiction

Good things are happening at Dappled Things! In the past few years we’ve been joyfully inundated with a landslide of submissions of amazing quality. Clearly, the Holy Spirit is busy in the lives of Catholic writers today.

To help with this abundant harvest, we’re instituting an annual reading period of February 1 to May 1 for our poetry and fiction categories. We will re-open these categories on February 1, 2021.  Nonfiction, book reviews, guest posts, and visual art will remain open year-round as before.

This move should help us improve our response time and communication to you, our writers and artists, without whose work there would be no Dappled Things. We are always grateful to all of you.

A few gentle requests, for everyone’s benefit: Please don’t submit your poetry and fiction under other open categories. Mis-categorized submissions will not be read — please save them up for the reading period! For the same reason, please submit through Submittable, not through e-mail to individual editors or to the general editorial account. E-mailed submissions may not be read.

If you’ve been waiting on a response for a while, we’ll do our best to respond to status queries, but please wait at least two months after an initial submission before reaching out. And thanks for withdrawing simultaneous submissions promptly if they’re accepted elsewhere.

Happy Independence Day to all of our U.S. writers and readers, and happy creating!

Friday Links, July 3, 2020

Kafka writes about what kind of books we need, Alcuin writes a poem to his cell, and we look at the WWII P. G. Wodehouse scandal, which illustrates how easily fear in tough times can exaggerate a slight misstep and cause the grossly disproportionate destruction of a decent person’s reputation.

Happy Birthday Franz Kafka, born in Prague on this date, July 3, in 1883.

You can either read or listen to a podcast with highlights from Kafka’s life by Minnesota writer and humorist, Garrison Kiellor, at his recently revived Writer’s Almanac here.

Kafka once wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.’”—Garrison Kiellor

Scroll down for more links.

Oddly enough, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” was reprinted in the June 1953 issue of  Famous Fantastic Mysteries unexpectedly paired —but only getting second billing—with Ayn Rand’s “Anthem.”  (Flannery O’Connor fans may remember that in a May, 1960 letter to playwright Maryat Lee, O’Connor wrote, “I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”]

Alcuin Break

Katy Carl recommended this link about medieval scholar, educator, and writer, Alcuin, at Amy Wellborn’s “Charlotte Was Both” blog, with this comment, “Relevant to the ‘New Medievalism.’ Sign me up; a monastic cell sounds amazing right about now.”

I share it with you just to help you remember – that as the world might seem to be shifting under your feet or changing too fast, leaving you behind – Alcuin wrote this over a thousand years ago. You’re not alone.
Here are the first two lines of O Mea Cella in Latin.
O mea cella, mihi habitatio dulcis, amata,
semper in aeternum, o mea cella, vale. . . .
O my cell, for me a dwelling sweet, beloved,
Ever into eternity, o my cell, farewell.”—Amy Wellborn

A Catholic Encyclopedia article referenced by Wellborn tells us that Alcuin also invented cursive handwriting.

Katy Carl added, “A commenter on that post left this tangentially related effort of the Diocese of Tulsa, named after the poet in question”: Alcuin Institute for Catholic Culture.

Scroll down for more links.

Alcuin in the middle is supporting a student on the left who is reading to an archbishop, on the right.

Wartime for Wodehouse

Fr. Michael Rennier recommended the above link with the comment, “Wodehouse gets cancelled.”

The New York Times ran this sympathetic piece by Rivka Galchen about how it came about that after writer P. G. Wodehouse was interned by the German government, he—seemingly innocently enough—recorded some radio broadcasts in the summer of 1941 titled innocuously, “How to be an Internee Without Previous Training.”

Wodehouse was then pilloried as a traitor—until he was rehabilitated only late in his life. For example of the traces of rancor that still may be found, see the following cartoon from the UK Telegraph.

Scroll down for more about Wodehouse.

From UK Telegraph article  “P G Wodehouse: Filthy Traitor or Frightful Ass“

For Wodehouse’s own words about why he did the broadcasts, see this “Author P.G. Wodehouse’s apologia of Nazi-Germany broadcasts revealed, published by The Times of Israel.

In prose typical of his style, Wodehouse wrote “the global howl that went up as a result of my indiscretion exceeded in volume and intensity anything I have ever experienced since that time in my boyhood when I broke the ­curate’s umbrella and my aunts started writing letters to one another about it.”

“I overlooked completely the dangerous possibility that a wave of pro-German sentiment might be created in the United States by such revelations on my part as that when in camp I read Shakespeare, that when internees ran out of tobacco they smoked tea, that the Kommandant at Huy had short legs and didn’t like walking up hills, and that there was an unpleasant smell in my cell at Loos prison.”—Quotes from the above-mentioned article from The Times of Israel.

Citadel of Huy, where Wodehouse was imprisoned in 1940

Geneologies of Modernity

We have lots of fascinating work to share from our friends at Geneologies of Modernity. Happy reading, everyone.

Re-Learning How to Read – A lesson from St. Augustine I never thought I’d need.

Exterior View: Pierre Soulages’s Conques Windows – A very different type of stained glass for a church.

A Mobile Proposal – Maybe it’s time to put down the phone?

Neither Modern nor Post-modern: Newman on Certitude – Cardinal Newman has always had the answer.

Lessons in stone

We had a walked about fifteen miles that day – one of the shorter days of our Camino. We arrived in Astorga, tired and hot, just in time for the noon Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. We had been walking since 5:30 am that day. My friend had a particularly challenging day as her feet were covered in blisters. We were sore. Everything hurt. We shuffled into the Church and as Mass began, we found our bodies trying to adjust to the rhythmic motions of standing, sitting, and kneeling. After a thanksgiving, we went to leave the Church. As we genuflected in our exit from the pew, we both grimaced and then started laughing from the pain as we slowly descended and ascended from the floor.

We waddled out of the Church to find food and lodging. My friend decided to call her family and take a much-needed rest as her feet were covered with blisters. I, on the other hand, needed to quench my adventurous spirit. I wanted to explore the city, visit the Church where Saint Francis of Assisi stayed when he was on the Camino, the Way of Saint James, see the ancient Roman ruins, and visit the Cathedral of Astorga.

After some sightseeing, I stopped before the entrance of the Cathedral of Astorga within the hour of its closing. Like most famous cathedrals in Europe, one must pay to enter. This presented a dilemma as I recalled a promise I made to my friend earlier: I would stop paying for entrance into cathedrals for some time. We were on a budget, and the majority of the allotted money for sightseeing was being spent towards paying for cathedrals of the towns we had visited or walked through, such as Madrid, Avila, and Leon. Since I needed a minute to internally debate whether I should keep my promise, I migrated to the façade of the Cathedral to carefully weigh my options. Perched on a seat overlooking the façade, my internal conflict ceased as the beauty of the façade of the Cathedral captivated my interest and left me pondering the mysteries which the exterior design presents.

Normally when we think of cathedrals we gaze at their grandeur. We are left awestruck at its height, design, and beauty. We spend most of our time wandering around the interior of the cathedral. We contemplate its vaulted ceilings, arches, and domes and experience first-hand how the design of the cathedral shifts and guides one’s focus to the heart of the church: the altar, where the sacrifice of the Mass takes place.

The builders of the cathedrals of old knew the important role which architecture plays in worship. Sacred architecture disposes the mind and heart to be transformed and transcended as it reflects Heaven. Besides its practical purpose, the design of cathedrals also serves a spiritual purpose. For example, high cathedral ceilings reference that the liturgy transcends time and space, and so invite man to worship in a manner which points to the timelessness which occurs at every Mass.

Yet, though cathedrals interior relay rich theological aspects of the Faith and aid man in his transcendence in participating in the eternal, the exterior of the cathedrals were also built to enable spectators to contemplate spiritual mysteries. Thus, in my internal conflict of visiting the interior of the cathedral, my mind soon become enveloped in contemplating the theological meaning which the façade of the Astorga Cathedral offered.

The woman caught in adultery

On the façade of the building, visitors are greeted with two images above the cathedral’s doors. To the right, there is an image of Christ bending down, writing in the sand as the woman caught in adultery is brought before Him. Above this image the word “innocence” is chiseled. To the left, the panel depicts Christ angrily dismissing the moneylenders from the temple. The word “piety” is chiseled above this image.

Both of these panels speak to the faithful of the disposition one needs to enter the house of God. They remind all who enter the doors that the temple, the church, is sacred. Nothing unholy should be brought into it to profane or defile it. If man has sullied his soul, then like the woman caught in adultery, forgiveness should be sought. These images further inspire worshipers to leave behind worldly concerns so as to focus on Christ. It reminds them that the house of God is a house of prayer; thus, the virtues of piety and innocence, being properly disposed and free from grave sin, is integral to proper worship.

To help maintain the virtues, the cathedral depicts the archangel Michael slaying the dragon. His image centered above the doors to the cathedral reminds the faithful of Saint Michael’s role as protector of the Church. He guards the Church against evil. His very presence inspires those who pass through the doors to ask for his intercession to shed any inclinations to sin before entering into the presence of God.

The intricately carved main door

Above the main wooden doors, the archway depicts a three panel relief series. The central panel portrays Christ being taken down from the cross, thus calling the faithful to prepare their minds and hearts to enter into the mystery of Christ’s Passion, death, and resurrection. By doing so, the dispositions of these souls are more receptive to living the Paschal Mystery in the liturgy and are more aware of the sacredness which occurs at Mass.

To the right, a panel portrays Jesus healing a boy suffering from dropsy, a condition more commonly known today as edema. In the relief, the sculptor depicts Christ in the act of curing the boy, for Jesus touches the boy’s hand. Meanwhile, the left panel shows Jesus healing the sight of the blind man. However, both the boy cured from dropsy and the blind man do not wear the traditional garb of Jesus’ day. Both are dressed as pilgrims.

These two reliefs speak to the passing pilgrim for the men cured physically resemble pilgrims. The young boy suffering from dropsy clutches a staff in his hand, which is a familiar sight for those on the Camino. Likewise, the boy’s condition is one which the seasoned pilgrim soon becomes well acquainted with, for it is not uncommon for legs and ankles to swell on the Camino journey. Similar to that of a pilgrim, the boy with dropsy experiences physical obstacles and challenges which test his endurance on the journey to Christ.

Yet, all is forgotten in the moment of encounter. The boy extends his hand, and Jesus returns this acceptance of friendship in a moment of compassion and healing. By placing His hand on that of the extended boy’s, Christ’s demeanor reflects His understanding of the difficulties of the boy’s journey. His presence reassures guidance and protection for the boy who has searched for Him in love. The boy’s gaze is one of adoration, love, and trust. He does not exhibit fear, nor focuses on the pains of the journey. The young pilgrim’s encounter with Christ is enough, for the boy recognizes Christ to be the fulfillment of all his desires and the goal of the journey. The encounter reaffirms Christ’s continual companionship with the pilgrim on earth, and so, with a renewed strength and conviction, the boy continues his earthly pilgrimage, mindful of Christ’s presence.

The imagery of the blind man conveys similar sentiments as the panel of the boy cured of dropsy. The body language of the blind man conveys that he intuitively knows the Lord’s presence although He cannot yet be physically seen. The blind man too has experienced suffering as a result of his search for the Lord. Yet, the suffering allows him to encounter God in this most intimate way. Once recognizing the Lord’s physical presence, the man kneels and tilts his face so that, once cured, he may immediately see the face of Christ. Christ, in return, reaches His hands to heal.

The man with dropsy

As the cathedral served as a place of worship for countless pilgrims throughout the centuries who walk the Camino, it is fitting that in both panels, the men healed are depicted as pilgrims. By doing so, the cathedral’s exterior speaks to the very depths of man’s nature: all are pilgrims on this earth in need of healing. The pilgrim on the Camino experiences this both on his physical and interior journey, for the Camino itself presents various sufferings to the pilgrim who walks.

All experience suffering due to original sin, whether it be physical, mental, or spiritual. All seek healing and grace from the Divine Physician. All desire an encounter with Christ and to be touched by Him whether realized or not. Yet, through life’s struggles and sorrow man experiences intimacy with God if he allows the Lord to penetrate his heart and heal the wounds inflicted by the effects of fallen human nature. This interior journey, as learnt by the boy with dropsy and the blind man, is never accomplished alone, for the Lord always accompanies man and meet him on the way. The pilgrim learns that he is aided on His journey by Christ Who walks with him, caring for him through the Church.

The Astorga Cathedral teaches that each person who walks through its doors has a unique journey which has been shaped by his experiences, upbringing, conversations, friends, temperament, and the stirrings of his heart. Everyone’s journey through life differs, as each encounters joys and struggles which are unique to his personal story. Because of this, no one can fully understand another as God does, for only He knows the innermost joys and sorrows, as well as one’s past and future. As only He sees the workings and desires of the heart, only He can touch the areas of one’s life in need of healing. The Psalms echo this, saying that God searches and knows us, He discerns our thoughts from afar. For God knows our innermost beings and before the foundation of the world, He knit us in our mother’s wombs.

For the pilgrim, it is necessary not only to recognize his journeying state, but also that all too are wayfarers. Man is called to be a companion to those whom he meets on the journey to Heaven, and it is integral for him to realize that this pilgrimage is never completed alone. This reality perhaps inspired Saint Ignatius of Loyola to call his order the “Company of Jesus”, otherwise known as the Jesuits, for man discovers that Christ walks with him on life’s journey. Though all are sojourners on earth, searching for what will give peace, Christ personally meets each soul and extends His healing, grace, and friendship to all those who accept. Thus, Saint Therese speaks to the uniqueness of man’s journey and of the need for Christ’s personal encounter as she said: “I realized that all souls have more or less the same battles to fight, but no two souls are exactly the same.”

To accompany man on this path, the façade of the Cathedral reminds its spectators, is the Blessed Mother and the Apostle Santiago (James). Mary is seen assuming into Heaven, reminding the pilgrim of her intercession and of man’s heavenly destination. Meanwhile, the Apostle Santiago watches over the pilgrims entering the cathedral, reassuring them of his protection on the journey, not only on the Camino, but also one life’s pilgrimage. As the eye shifts higher past the Apostle’s statue, the image of the slain, victorious Lamb emerges to remind man of the Resurrection of Christ and of the promise of Heaven.

The façade of the Astorga Cathedral gave me much to think about in regards to pilgrimage. It also spoke to the beauty of sacred architecture as integral to the survival of the Church for it causes man to wonder and lift his mind and heart to God and internalize the theological images which it portrays. Quite similar to the interior of the European cathedrals, the design of the façade of the Astorga Cathedral enables man to contemplate. It confronts man with the mysteries of life, challenging him to come face-to-face with spiritual realities.

 

Maria Cintorino currently teaches at a Catholic school in Northern Virginia. In her free time, she enjoys to travel and write. She has been published in Homiletic and Pastoral Review, Crisis Magazine, Our Sunday Visitor’s “Catholic Answers,” and The Imaginative Conservative.

How Putting Brâncuși’s “Bird in Space” on Trial Changed Our Definition of Art

“Bird in Space” 1928 by Constantin Brâncuși

If you ever wonder—as I do—exactly how it came about that our culture’s definition of art has evolved (devolved?) to its present state, you may be interested in this story I heard a few months ago. The outcome of a trial of a sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși contributed in its way towards American society’s acceptance of non-representational art, similar to how the more-well-known outcome of the obscenity trial of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1921 previously influenced the definition of what constitutes literature.

The story was told by British art critic Alastair Sooke in an episode in The Way I See It series from the BBC, in which Sooke interviewed individuals he called, “some of the leading creatives of our age.” Each of the “creatives” talked about an individual work that appealed to them from the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).  This story came up in the episode in which fashion designer Zac Posen gave his reactions to a 1928 Brâncuși sculpture called Bird in Space. As it turns out, the Bird in Space sculpture at the MOMA is actually only one of a series of sculptures by Brâncuși—all of which are titled Bird in Space. Brâncuși made fifteen versions in marble and bronze and a number of plaster casts.

How a Bird in Space Launched a Legal Battle

This is the entertaining way Sooke told the story:

American photographer Edward Steichen “bought a version of “Bird in Space” from Brâncuși’s studio in Paris, and he wanted to bring it back to America. And when he turns up at the border and shows it to the custom’s official, the official looks at him and says, What is it? Steichen said, Well, it’s a work of art. It’s called “Bird in Space.” It’s a sculpture. And the customs official would not entertain the idea that a piece of metal could possibly be a work of art. And so he said, I’m sorry mate, it’s not. It counts as kitchen ware or other ordinary household utensils. And consequently he slaps a big tax onto the work which would have been exempt had it been categorized by the customs official as a sculpture. And Brâncuși got involved, and he decided to fight it as a law case and he actually took it as a law case took to trial. Trial starts October 1927 and apparently lasted for four years. There were many expert witnesses, critics from the art world critics who were invited to come in and explain in a court of law how this could possibly be a masterpiece of modern art. It has a happy ending this story, because the judge was quite enlightened. And in the end, the judge ruled that Yes, it may not look like a bird but this is nevertheless a representation of flight. It is a work of art. Let’s hear it for Judge J. Wait whose landmark ruling on that earlier variant of Bird in Space was something of a turning point in the acceptance of modern art.”

Incidentally, Sooke’s story is one of many examples I’ve come across of stories that have erroneous details but are often taken up and repeated in many places, even though the facts are not quite right. The errors in Sooke’s account (which I describe below) are repeated elsewhere at the MOMA website and in other sites I ran across in a cursory Google search.

Facts from Legal History

Actually, as reported in “Brancusi’s Bird in Space: Is it a bird or is it art?,” the Bird in Space version that occasioned the law suit was one of many works by Brâncuși that were shipped with it in crates from Paris on the steamship Paris, in 1926. The shipment was accompanied not only by Edward Steichen but by perhaps the most notoriously boundary-challenging artist of his day, Marchel Duchamp, he of the signed-urinal fame.

Brâncuși’s “Bird in Space” 1926

Protective custom laws had been set up to tax craft works at high rates—to protect U.S. artisans—and to allow fine art to enter tax free, which would encourage U.S. museums to purchase European art for their collections.

It seems odd now almost a hundred years later and after many successive waves of art theories have expanded the definition of art to a hitherto unimaginable extent, but for the purposes of defining what could be brought into the U.S. as art, until 1926 art was required to be figurative.

“The witnesses for the government argued that the court should follow the precedential standard set by Olivotti: that art must represent a natural object in its true proportions. (Brancusi, 45 Treas. Dec. at *4-5).”

So, the hangup of Bird in Space at customs was due to its abstract nature, which made it doubtful as a work of art to the customs officer’s eye.

One mistake in Sooke’s account is that it wasn’t Brâncuși who brought the subsequent lawsuit. As the article says, “Edward Steichen . . . who had purchased Bird in Space, filed an appeal funded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a collector and patron of the arts.”  Whitney was planning to open her own museum (Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened in 1931), so the article hints she “may have had an ulterior motive when she funded the Brancusi appeal.”

Another mistake in Sooke’s retelling is the sculpture wasn’t actually classified by the customs officer under household utensils.  “The Customs Official assessed the work as a “manufacture of metal,” not a piece of art, and imposed a tariff of 40% of the sales price. (Brancusi, 45 Treas. Dec. at *1).”

The reclassification happened later as described in the article, “An Odd Bird” at  LegalAffairs; The Magazine of the Intersection of Law and Life.

Under pressure from the press and artists, U.S. customs agreed to rethink their classification of the items, releasing the sculptures on bond (under “Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies”) until a decision could be reached. However, customs appraiser F. J. H. Kracke eventually confirmed the initial classification of items and said that they were subject to duty.”

“An Odd Bird” has many additional satisfying details of what transpired, including common opinions about the work using words that some of us can still relate to: “several men, high in the art world were asked to express their opinions for the Government . . . . One of them told us, ‘If that’s art, hereafter I’m a bricklayer.’ Another said, ‘Dots and dashes are as artistic as Brâncuși’s work.'” 

“The next month, Steichen filed an appeal to the U.S. Customs’ decision.” 

Eventually, after listening to expert witnesses, as Sooke said, Judge Wait did allow that Bird in Space was a work of art after all, even though it wasn’t representational.

“[T]he court recognized . . . that a new school of art that centered around abstraction was developing at that time.  The court found significant that the work was an original production by a professional sculptor and declared that while Bird in Space did not immediately resemble a bird, it was “beautiful and symmetrical in outline” and “nevertheless pleasing to look at and highly ornamental.” (AId. at *8).  Thus, the court held that Bird in Space was entitled to free entry under Paragraph 1704 of the Tariff Act as a work of art.  (Id.).

Edward Steichen’s photo of Brâncuși’s first cast of “Bird in Space” from 1925

Afterword

The beauty of Bird in Space continues to appeal, even to someone like me who subscribes to another definition of art. Sadly, even the minimal criteria of beauty is no longer considered a criterion for art. Even back in 1926 theories of art were already floating around that also rejected beauty. For example, as mentioned earlier, Marcel Duchamp had signed a urinal and submitted it to an art exhibition in 1917.

The pose of rejecting the traditional artistic standards was still prevalent when I was an art student in the 1970s in San Francisco and in Minneapolis. At the University of Minnesota, for example, one day I listened to a presentation by a visiting New York City “installation artist” who poured concrete on gallery floors (apparently he relished the gallery owners’ dismay at the destruction of their hardwood floors) and told us earnestly that he had to work very hard to make sure he obliterated the beautiful patterns that naturally form when concrete is poured, “to avoid the trap of beauty.”

The Way I See It series is recommended listening for a course I’m taking during SIP about contemporary art, which is offered for free by the Museum of Modern Art. Although I turned my back on modern art after my immersion in its theories and practices in the process of pursuing my degree in Studio Arts: Drawing and Painting, which I earned in 1979, I took notes from the BBC series to get more current in art theory—motivated by a discussion I’ve been having with another writer who thinks we should not reject what I and many others think of as an often offensive, egotistically motivated contemporary art scene, because, he says, we should first engage the artists and understand the motives of those who create works aimed at being transgressive. I certainly don’t share his assumptions, but I’m sincerely trying to understand why he thinks that way and why others who I also respect think what he is saying has merit.

More Photos by Edward Steichen of One of Brâncuși’s Bird in Space Sculptures

Willa Cather’s Art of Neighborliness

It would be so convenient if all that neighborliness required was knowing names and offering polite smiles. Yet, as the Boston Globe reported and may others have observed, modern American culture is not one for knowing, let alone being neighborly to, those near us. With many traditional community associations on the decline and loneliness on the rise, neighborliness is more and more a lost art.

For this cultural sickness, Willa Cather, writing over one hundred years ago, has a timely antidote: a recipe for neighborliness—simultaneously a bitter medicine and its sweet sugar chaser. Neighborliness, for Cather, is at once binding oneself to another and experiencing the freedom of one’s own individuality that is only visible reflected in the eyes of another. The brilliant diversity of these eyes is on display in her three early novels about the Nebraska and Colorado prairie: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Ántonia (1918).

Cather’s nostalgic love and genius descriptions of the prairie along with the relationships that characters develop with it emerge quickly in the shortest of the three, O Pioneers!. The story centers on Alexandra Bergson, who immigrated with her family from Sweden as a young girl. In her young adulthood, her father dies, not so unexpectedly, and leaves her as matriarch, which he clearly communicates to her three younger brothers. Now she wants to put in the work to expand their holdings and buy more land. Because her brothers are resistant, she goes to investigate the prospects. As she returns home across the Divide, the narrator explains what her youngest brother, Emil, observes in her:

For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

Alexandra is conceiving a new country in her heart, as the free spirit of the Divide obeys her love. The community of persons that grows on the prairie is only sustained through a love of and cooperation with the virgin land. Otherwise, pioneers fail and return east, selling their land to those willing to stay. Carl Linstrum, Alexandra’s nearest neighbor and her first best friend, was of such a family who gave up on the pioneer dream and left Nebraska.

In adulthood, as she runs her household and farm, Alexandra becomes a paragon of generosity and hospitality, often to the frustration and disapproval of her brothers. She takes in an elderly Swede who lost his land; she employs housemaids from Sweden even though she’s more than capable of doing it all herself. She is a community leader, a family leader, certainly constrained in many ways by her time and culture, yet a free woman in the image of Cather herself.

Even so, when an adult Carl Linstrum comes to visit, she confesses: “I’d rather have had your freedom than my land.” This is Alexandra’s paradox. In so many ways, her business acumen and the financial success attributable to the land she wisely acquired have given her a great freedom reflective of the “free spirit” of the prairie itself. But at the same time, she is tied to the land forever. She has responsibilities to friends, family, neighbors, livestock, and the land itself. To be a neighbor is to be bound to another for the good of the other. It is accepted restrictions on freedom for a broader flourishing, a good created and held in common. Seeing the beauty and goodness in this,

Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him[…]. We have no house, no place, no people of our own.”

It is precisely the lack of freedom that gives meaning, individuality, ties, relationships, belonging.

Elsewhere in the novel, neighborliness is interrupting work to share coffee with a friend dropping in. It is sharing equipment that may return broken, giving time to mow another’s orchard, mend another’s clothes, help harvest another’s crop. Neighborliness is high risk. It is accepting limitations. At the same time, it is openness to reciprocal gifts; it is an invitation to deep and abiding friendship.

It is easy to suppose that Cather’s descriptions are not endorsements. There certainly wasn’t a large-scale hospitality industry at the time, so the welcome and assistance people provide was necessary to friends and travelers alike. Still, let us not begrudge a culture its pervasive virtues. As odes to the prairie, these novels are likewise celebrations of the pioneer way of life and the neighborliness it extolled.

At the very end of the novel, Alexandra once again contemplates the nature of freedom in a place so vast and open as she remembers that return trip with Emil years before:

When I was on the train this morning, and we got near Hanover, I felt something like I did when I drove back with Emil from the river that time, in the dry year. I was glad to come back to it. I’ve lived here a long time. There is a great peace here, Carl, and freedom.

She is only forty years old, but the weight of her full life is tangible. On this side of tragedy and loss, of struggle and difficulty, Alexandra realizes that that freedom and belonging are not antithetical, but that being tied in relationship to others enables one to embrace the reality of one’s own individuality, the peace of living life as it is meant to be lived in the complicated contradiction of our individuation and desperate interdependence.

The sacrifices required for neighborliness acknowledge the temporary stewardship of all that is given to us. We hold things only for a time, for all is given by God and often meant to pass through our hands into those of another. Alexandra realizes this, too: “We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.” The only way to own the land is to love it. And even this intimate affection is only temporary. Alexandra’s legacy, however, will be those people whom she has known and loved: the needy, the young, the old, the stubborn and the lonely. In the end, it is the land that mimics the generous Alexandra, receiving hearts like hers, “to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!”

 

This is the first part of a series of articles on the work of Willa Cather.

Timothy Chapman worked in youth ministry in St. Louis before moving to Nebraska where he writes and studies theology and culture. 

The New Medievalism

When Laurus dies, his body lies beside his little hermitage. It gives off the scent of pine cone like an incense. Finally, after reposing in the woods for some time, writes Eugene Vodolazkin, “On August 8, in the year 7028 since the Creation of the world and the year 1520 since Christ’s birth…they raise Laurus’s body from the earth and carefully carry it through the forest.”

In the hauntingly vivid novel Laurus – translated with great sensitivity by Lisa C. Hayden – Vodolazkin always has the end of the universe in view. Arseny, the protagonist, transforms into a Holy Fool named Ustin, and finally full circle into Laurus, a hermit who lives in silence among the wild herbs of the Russian forest. Always, though, he is Arseny. After his death, a rope is tied to his feet. Screams are heard from the crowd of 183,000. The bishops, beards floating in the wind, take the rope and drag his body through a field of wheat, his dead arms fall open into a blessing and begin to finger the grass, just as you or I would finger a rosary bead.

It’s a haunting image, a riddle presented to an uncomprehending, modern mind. Why did it make my eyes water as I pictured the image? Why did that funeral rite baffle me so, almost make me angry how they treated the body? Laurus is a particularly beautiful but incomprehensible novel, a blend of modern language with archaism, a series of juxtaposed vignettes that somehow stitch together into a unified life. Vodolazkin writes like a medieval. This is an intentional choice, he explains in a contribution to First Things, “Texts were not so much composed as compiled in the Middle Ages. New texts contained, almost consisted of, fragments of preceding ones.” Time is cyclical. What has come before will come again.

The nature of time means that it doesn’t endlessly progress, but returns to itself in new and mysterious ways. Laurus is written in the form of a new medievalism. It seems fragmentary until, suddenly, it isn’t. The fragments are gathered up and circumscribe a redemptive moment.

In another contribution to First Things, in an article titled, “The Age of Concentration,” Vodolazkin clarifies his search for the new medievalism. In Russia, he writes, materialism is passing away both in its communist and capitalist iterations. The two are closer than they like to admit, with their chaotic permissiveness and individualistic selfishness, their all-encompassing worship of the economy as a measuring post of success. Even as Russia has seemed to be growing economically closer to the West, she has grown more wary, passing out of the range of Western cultural influence and back to the East. This doesn’t seem possible – why would a people only dabble in Western capitalism, and why would they turn away from its unsurpassed ability to produce wealth? It only makes sense once we understand that, “Metaphysics is one of the movers of history”

In the split of Russia from the West is proof that the Age of Concentration is upon us – the new medievalism – an age when the inner life of man will be concentrated, filtered, and by some mysterious herbal alchemy, transformed entirely.

The Age of Concentration is marked by: 1) Inner Strengthening, and 2) Social Reconsolidation. Both of these markers are present throughout Laurus.

Inner strengthening

Vodolazkin writes, “Our dispersed and untrained souls need to be shaped and formed, attaining focus or concentration. This will have to be realized first of all on the personal level, requiring the development of the ability of self-direction independent of the condition of society and the propaganda surrounding us. Personal concentration works against the dispersing influences that might otherwise gain control of our souls.”

With each passing day, we are learning (or have already learned) to distrust legacy news and other sources of information as a form of propaganda. The old establishment has lost credibility. Institutions such as Congress, academia, and even law enforcement are coming under severe criticism. The American Dream is in tatters as hope is lost in the once taken-for-granted proposition that a person who works hard and does right will prosper. Personally, my social media feeds have tilted over the past few months into political commentary at an alarming rate. Any sense of these people as individuals who I have befriended is subsumed under the weight of current events. I’ve been snoozing people on my facebook feed at an alarming rate as they’ve become unwitting mouthpieces of propaganda (of all kinds), and find myself constantly fighting the urge to spout propaganda too. The urge is powerful. It is a singing Siren. There’s a manipulation at work that strikes the foundation of who we are as individuals and as an authentic human community, a hollowing out of our personal agency. The deployment of language to gain and leverage power is alarming. The goal is to gain control of our souls and subject them to a materialist end. This is all the more frightening because it’s unwitting, an unstated movement of materialism towards its proper end. Even the villains are being manipulated.

In Laurus, Arseny is assaulted by a gang of young boys. “They knock him down, onto the boards of the roadway. Several pairs of hands press him into the boards, though he does not resist. The boy whose hands remain free nails the edges of Arseny’s shirt to the boards. Arseny watches the boys laugh and then he laughs, too.” Why are the boys abusing a holy man who never did them any harm? No reason. No reason at all. It’s just what you do. See a Holy Fool. Abuse the Holy Fool.

What happens next is even more interesting, “It gets quiet when (the boys) run away. Only one boy remains, and he approaches Arseny and embraces him. And weeps. Arseny’s heart sinks because he knows this boy pities him but is embarrassed to show it in front of the others…He kisses the boy on the forehead and runs away because his heart is ready to burst. Arseny chokes on his sobs. He runs and the sobbing shakes him and tears fly from his cheeks in all directions, sprouting all sorts of humble plants on the roadside.” Set free from the mob, the humanity of the boy returns to him. It is only when he is free of the dehumanizing social construct in which he was trapped that the boy is able to concentrate his personality into that of a sympathetic, caring, feeling, human being. The change comes naturally and it comes easily.

It’s time to turn off the system that we might see and love the individual souls of which it is comprised. Doing so takes enormous inner strength.

Social reconsolidation

A society made of only horizontal, materialistic connections cannot prosper. In Laurus, the people laugh at but, ironically, are in desperate need of the Holy Fools who wander their city. These strange men remind them daily not only of their charitable obligations to each other but also that demons linger at the door to their houses waiting to pounce. Arseny very helpfully throws rocks at the houses to chase the demons away. The Fools are embarrassing and unacceptable socially, but they provide a necessary vertical connection. God exists and he is a strange God. This vertical connection serves as the basis for personal autonomy and individuality. It’s the staggering and disruptive departure from the usual material concerns of life that sets us free to live in solidarity with our fellow man. Arseny feels connected with his fellow man throughout his life, caring for and nursing them with heroic compassion, even as he lives in isolated circumstances for most of his days.

Metaphysics is a great mover of the Russian mind in Laurus – concern for the end of the world, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the truth of the Holy Fools, the inexorable, redemptive drive that steers Arseny towards his destiny. We might be able to convince ourselves that the path to freedom is through protest and revolution. It is not. Vodolazkin writes, “Today, the paradigmatic modern way of achieving independence from mass consciousness is one of social protest. But this is horizontal—the position ‘against.’ The vertical connection provides a much stronger position. It puts one in position ‘above’ and transcends the horizontal web of social relations.” The source of renewal for the individual, the living power of Laurus, of all art, of human thriving writ large, is religious – transcendent beauty mediated through cultus.

The new medievalism is focused on the reconsolidation of society towards its metaphysical end, always keeping in mind that the end of the world is drawing nigh. Everything proceeds in light of this apocalypse. Everything physical is in the shadow of the metaphysical. The effects this has on societal construction is concentrating. There is but one goal, one way this life we are building together will end. So focus.

Laurus reveals again and again the dark heart of human communities have lost sight of the metaphysical, particularly how they become wrapped up in utopian delusions of constant progress. Communities that forget the year the world will end also let go of their humanity. They form irrational, purposeless mobs to scapegoat and do violence to justice. They’re prone to plague and natural disaster but don’t know how to put their pain into perspective, have no ability to situate suffering within a redemptive framework, and so they dissimulate, building up to a mimetic, propulsive force that randomly explodes into singular, murderous acts. Arseny himself, a holy man, is regularly confronted by mobs who would bully him and rulers who would control him. The relationship is asymmetrical, because for him, these are but episodes on a pilgrimage.

The mob is unable to accurately name an enemy and address it in a constructive way. It lashes out. An age set adrift on a sea of materialism is unable to bring language to bear in an accurate way, unable to communicate, and thus unable to grapple with reality. When the mask slips from the fantasy, the utopia descends into a hellish panorama and the myth of constant progress becomes violent. Sound familiar?

Vodolazkin is clear on this point, “It is wrong to think of utopias as harmless dreams. Combined with the idea of progress, utopian thought is a dream that motivates action. It establishes a goal so lofty that it cannot be reached. The more ideal it becomes, the greater the stubbornness with which it is pursued. There comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of blood.”

These past few months have rattled us, but we have before us the opportunity to reconsider our values. Not what we say we believe, but how we actually situate ourselves in a particular place, with each discrete action never taken for granted. “The past is returning,” argues Vodolazkin, “Any return assumes a preceding departure. Perhaps, though, the past never left, and its absence will turn out to have been an illusion.” Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps a new medieval age is upon us, not as a departure from the present moment but as an antidote ready-born within it.

We are a new text about to be incorporated into an old text. We are being written into an ancient story. Our history matters. Who we were and where we have come from is not worth sacrificing on the altar of progress. Vodolazkin writes, “In the Middle Ages, which did not know the idea of progress, either in public life or in aesthetics, the old and the new were not opposed: New texts incorporated old texts. We see the same sort of symbiosis in postmodern literature, which makes precursor texts a part of itself rather than rejecting them.”

The Age of Concentration is here. I have no clue what it means to lay out this claim. I am as baffled as anyone else as I watch Laurus dragged through a field of wheat, his blood spilling into the furrows. Is this a fruitful seed?

“What kind of people are you? Says the merchant Zygrfyd.” The merchant is a symbol of materialism, a world devoid of inchoate, deep mysteries. It isn’t so much that he is wrong so much as he, like all of us, must turn our faces to the mystery. “And do you yourselves understand it? Asks Zygfryd. Do we? The blacksmith mulls that over and looks at Zygfryd. Of course we, too, do not understand.”

 

The Rev. Michael Rennier is on the editorial board of Dappled Things. He is pastor of Epiphany of Our Lord parish in St. Louis, MO and regularly posts his homilies here.

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