Admirable as it may be, man’s capacity to manufacture and produce useful objects even of the highest quality, such as the machines of our modern technological civilization, is not to be directly associated with human personhood. Perhaps on this point the contrast we have been making here between man as a person, on the one hand, and man as an individual thinking or acting agent, on the other hand, becomes more evident. The ‘creation’ of a machine requires man’s individualization both in terms of his seizing, controlling and dominating reality, that is, turning beings into things, and also in terms of combination of human individuals in a collective effort, that is, of turning himself into a thing, an instrument and a means to an end. Hence, it is only natural that the more collectivistic a society, that is, the more it sacrifices personhood, the better the products it achieves. But when we say that man is capable of creating by being a person, we imply something entirely different, and that has to do with a double possibility which this kind of creation opens up. On the other hand, ‘things’ or the world around acquire a ‘presence’ as an integral and relevant part of the totality of existence, and, on the other hand, man himself becomes ‘present’ as a unique and unrepeatable hypostasis of being and not as an impersonal number in a combined structure. Un other words, in this way of understanding creating, the movement is from thinghood to personhood and not the other way round. That is, for example, what happens int he case of a work of real art as contrasted to a machine. When we look at a painting or listen to music we have in front of us ‘the beginning of a world’, a ‘presence’ in which ‘things’ and substances (cloth, oil, etc.) or qualities (shape, colour, etc.) or sounds becomes part of a personal presence. And this is entirely the achievement of personhood, a distinctly unique capacity of man, which, unlike other technological achievements, is not threatened by the emerging intelligent beings of computer science. The term ‘creativity’ is significantly applied to art par excellence, though we seldom appreciate the real implications of this for theology and anthropology.

John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 216

This poem came out of studying The Cappadocians, three men and one woman who were 4th centery Eastern, Greek speaking xtians who had a huge part in the formation of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. They were affirming the goodness of Creation in the midst of all the muck and dung that we seem to endlessly make out of our lives and world. This has often been a great struggle for me. So there are Hebrew and Greek words referring to various human, social realities. Nietzsche has breathed in my ear in times of agnostic, nihilistic struggle in the past so he shows up dueling with Macrina. I wrote it during a rain storm outside the GF Java Cafe in my hometown of Jamestown, TN.

Like Mercy

“Sweet Rain…like God’s own Mercy…”

What exactly is the connection, the connection between a world of harmonic order and a world of suffering, decay…death?

The rain pours upon the earth, invading but belonging in every pore, awakening parched roots. Dry and dead now leap for joy, springing to the sky

Water pours upon the earth, dancing and splattering…splattering/dancing…dattering splancing upon the streets, rolling over pavement, falling over steps in the ever-moving niagra of spinning cosmos

Water…one of those fundamental elements…rolls over and into the pores of earth and…and thunder rolls, lightening strikes

Harmony or discord?

Walls fall, lifeless bodies collapse down the collapsing hills of collapsing houses of collapsing earth. Lifeless bodies of deer and cattle and dogs and cats and Adam and…and it would’ve been a damn good time to be a fish

Soul rolls over and into the pores of Adam, ish and isha, man and woman, mother and son, son and sister and father and neighbor and polis and oikos and agora and oikonomia and…creation…and out of the Alpha Rhythms of participatory love bodies are enraptured, so babies are born in the midst of heroic words like “till death do us part.” Homes are built, gardens are planted. Games are played while laughter is shared. Songs are sung and enraptured bodies move to the rhythms of the dance

Pointing and jumping, laughing I scream “look! Look! LOOK! Harmonic order!”

Soul rolls over and into the pores of Adam and all the ways and webs of the knitting together of Adam and…and reputations fail, economies collapse as bodies collapse as families collapse as marriages crumble as children collapse as cities collapse and as lies are told lust takes over, giving forth torture and greed, hunger and rape, famine and coldness

All of a sudden that madman runing through the streets that night with the silly mustache shouting” God is dead and we have killed him” seems not so far from of right. Adam seems to care much more about power games than love games…and people are torn and lives collapse and…and it still would’ve been a damn good time to be a fish!

Harmony or discord? What is the connection?

This fish feels the jaws surround and the darkness elbow out the light

And in the darkness I hear Macrina sing, pointing, shouting, jumping up and down, “look! Look! LOOK! Harmonic order envelopes chaos. There is not beginning, no arche, without an end, a telos.” And her voice echoes

“Get up Lazarus”

“Shall these bones live?”

“Where oh death is thy sting?”

“The heavens are telling”

“He is not here, he is risen”

“Sweet rain…like God’s own Mercy..Mercy that upholds it because it is good. It is fallen but it is good…

Discord or Harmony?

Macrina I hope like hell you are right because…because the deaf want to hear, the lame want to leap, the dead want to live and…and I am just so fucking tired of wanting to be a fish…Amen

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“We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”- T.S. Eliot

I have admired the greatness of Eliot as a poet, but never expected to use a bit of his work for a meditation of education such as this. However, it seems to me that this quote from Eliot is filled with profundity and enormous implications for our practice as educators and continuing students. I must say from the outset that my reflection on this quote is not an exegesis of Eliot’s poetry (though certainly such an venture is a worthy endeavor and has been embarked upon by interpreters much more able than I), but rather a contemplation of these words as they stand on their own, detached from the context of his work in which it is originally embedded.

I will begin with a memory. A couple years ago I made the routine visit to my hometown of Jamestown, TN where I was born and raised in the same house until I went away to college at the age of eighteen. While home on this visit I distinctly remember riding in the car with a family member, perhaps my dad. The road that we were travelling upon was a route that I had taken hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times in my life. It was the road from my family’s home to the center of town. About a mile into this route is a field, off to the left, which has cattle and much green grass in its midst. It is perhaps ten acres or so. What was so distinct about the memory is that, to my amazement, I noticed something about the field that I had never noticed before. What I saw was a patch, or perhaps angle on a patch, of trees that I had never noticed before. What struck me with such awe was the fact that I had been travelling this stretch of road almost everyday for the first eighteen years of my life and many times in the ensuing years and had never noticed this patch of woods! It taught me, or perhaps reminded me in a deeper way, that no matter how much we have partaken of God’s creation there is always more to see, touch, taste, and feel.

This “always more-ness” of creation is rooted in the fact that creation derives its being through participation in the Being and Life of the infinite Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So there is always more to any creature than just themselves. If we have eyes to see,ears to hear, and skin to touch we will find that creation and its creatures are iconic gateways into the infinite depth of God from which they draw life. Because this infinite depth just that, infinite, there will always more to contemplate, to learn about a person, a tree, a sunset, etc. For us as educators this means that we must never approach a class or subject we are teaching our students in such a way that we work under the assumption that we comprehensively “understand it” and intend to lead students to this same comprehensive understanding. Rather, if we are teaching the Interior Castle by Theresa of Avila, for instance, we must lead our students into the depths of Theresa’s text as fellow sojourners who are all students of Theresa. For Theresa’s text provides an iconic gateway into the life of the Triune God. We may lead students into the depths of Theresa a hundred or more times in our lives as educators but there will always be “another patch of trees to see.” There will always be the light of new dimensions, angles from which we have not ventured a look at Theresa’s castle, a fresh harmony we have yet to hear in her music.

I think this is perhaps some of what Eliot’s turn of phrase means for our craft as educators. We are to lead our students into continual exploration of the depths of our discipline, for there will always be new vistas, or at least clearer vision of what we are beholding. When we behold this new depth of our subject matter we must pray for the grace to always and ever “arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.” No doubt that we and our students will find ourselves at times at the point of satiation, believing like the (cynical) laughing Sarah and Abraham, that we “know the deal.” Geriatric age couples do not have children and one does not encounter fresh dimensions of truth in texts that have been read for hundreds of years and which we have read over and over. And yet this small imagination of Sarah, Abraham, us, and our students shows not a lack in the depths of our subject matter, but a failure in our ability to imagine and encounter a world in which we will ever journey into fresh knowledge. This is so for this world, and the disciplines of study which lead us into exploration of this world, find their being and life in the Being and Life that is beyond all category of being and description…the infinite ocean of love and joy that is the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As teachers and learners may we be given grace by this God to “not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”

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Contrary to my position, Jerome Stolnitz maintains that the iconic status of these works depends on the disinterestedness that the museum culture preserves¹. This assertion or judgment, it seems, relies on two judgments of which I remain unconvinced. First, regarding this iconic status, he presupposes that the reasons for which these works are valued is and ought to be grounded in their being works of the museum culture, or works that we value in a disinterested way. Is this in fact why many or most people do value these works? Is this the only reason why they can value these works? For instance, the Isenheim altarpiece might facilitate a new way of experiencing Mary’s role in the passion of Christ, or, in it’s original context, it can change the way in which the space is experienced, niether of which seem to be especially reliant on ways of viewing that are explicitly dependent on the contemporary museum. And thus, second, Stolnitz asserts that the museum culture fosters the right way of viewing or experiencing works of art. Why? Who decides which aspect of the artistic milieu is the one that ought to be emphasized? What does this say about the revival of urban murals? Are these murals to be viewed the way that one would view visual art in a museum? Is one detrimentally impaired in viewing an urban mural if one hasn’t been formed by the museum culture? Or, is it possible that developing an awareness of the way in which murals shape urban space, and are contextualized by urban space, can actually improve viewers’ sensitivity to museum pieces by thinking about the ways in which context and space change the our perception of works and the way in which works change our perception of space and context? In this case, the intention of the artist and the intentions of the viewers are not unimportant. Nor are they the focal point of a work because works are plurivocal, they function in ways that neither the artist or nor viewers anticipate when working from the perspective of the museum culture. They exist in a milieu of activity, intentions, contexts. Similarly, in Art in Action, Nick Wolterstorff says the only thing that works of art have in common is their varied activities, their ability to do many different things.

Thinking about aesthetics this way, how much does the status of the piece as a work of art or non-art make a difference? I don’t really have a defensible answer at this point… just a hunch that it doesn’t make much of a difference at all.

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1. “On the Apparent Demise of Really High Art,” JAAC 43 (1985): 356

“…The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:29b-30). So responds John the Baptist when questioned by the religious leaders seeking to lodge a wedge between Jesus and John. His inquisitors appeal to a temptation similar to the one offered to Adam and Eve, the temptation to throw off their identity as the IMAGE of God in order to BE God. The tragedy of this sin is that seeking to be “more” than the Image of God does not lead to greater life. It leads to death. The greatest possible life for Adam and Eve was not to “know good from evil” and have a “choice” but was in fact to continue to grow into infinite, never-ending fellowship with God and thus fulfill their greatest possible destiny. And so John is tempted. Rather than being the character in God’s Story, he is tempted to write his own story of which he is the central character, thus using his own powers to secure his memory in history. But John understands this counterfeit story of his own making to be just that…a counterfeit. And so John, as depicted in the painting by Grunewald, Crucifixion, The Isenheim Altar Piece, seeks to be the character of the Friend and Forerunner of the Bridegroom, Jesus. Refusing to write his own story John is freed from feeble pursuits of self in order to be the one whose life points not to himself but to Christ. Ironically it is in “losing his life” by pointing to Christ that John truly finds his life. For he exclaims to his inquisitors, “for this reason my joy has been fulfilled.” In being caught up in God’s Story we find true joy which any lesser story will always fail to give.

As the Body of Christ our lives are to be “the bony finger” of John the Baptist who points the world to Christ; lives shaped by the Spirit into the very Image of Jesus. By being caught up in God’s Story in this way God offers through us Faith (trust) where the world can only offer fear, Hope where the counterfeit story can only offer death and despair, and Love where the world only offers unforgiveness and violence. May we be “the bony finger” pointing the world to Christ. AMEN.

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Yet, while the debates over modernity and its theological consequences drew on, the distance between humanity and world stretched ever wider, matched only by modernity’s maw, engulfing the world quicker than Christianity could respond and, some would argue, in ways Christian scholars and clergy didn’t know how to respond to. Christian (sub)culture was born, an enclave of fear of and loathing for the secular, an a-theism which Christian subculture bore to life and gave authenticity and integrity to the more it removed itself form the world.

The frequently brutal dismissal of the Church’s authority also in worldly matters of politics, of the planning of the world, and above all in matters of the spirit and science, does indeed correspond in part to an increasing falling away of the educated and of the masses from the Christian faith, but in part also to a process (acknowledged and justified by the Church herself) in which the natural orders and areas of knowledge assume autonomy, as was demanded by the Vatican Council itself in clear distinction between the natural and supernatural orders: duplex ordo cognitionis, proprio objecto, propria methodo.

In the most recent Books & Culture, and his new book Resounding Truth, Jeremy Begbie argues that, while the Christian subculture removed itself from the world, the world is not so easily shaken off, as if it were an old coat or bad dream. In fact, at the heart of the Christian truth is the deep understanding of the world as a gratuitous and ex nihilo “expression of divine love.”² As such, interaction with this world, this given reality, is sacramental, inasmuch as it is a graced reality. For the arts, this demonstrates a truth that reformed thinkers in the Dutch tradition like Begbie and Wolterstorff have been declaring for nearly the past 3 decades, that the experiences of the arts and artistic making are fundamentally “ways we engage the physical world… physical things… [that] have ultimately arisen through the free initiative of God’s love- they are part of the ordo amoris.”

As the church shrunk back from the world, both Catholics and Protestants had difficulty articulating this Christian view on the arts and the world. Begbie points out that the retreat from the physical often took the form of looking for an underlying spiritual value or meaning: “Commonly, the thrust seems to be to look beyond the material sounds to the order or beauty they reflect or point to rather than to welcome them as valuable embodiments of God-given order and beauty in their own right, with their physical character intrinsic to that value.” Later, even the spiritual would lose cred, and the hermeneutic tendency would look for meaning in the individual’s psychological experience of art – think here of those like Clive Bell and Sylvia Plath.

As art become more abstract, so too artists and the public alike more often practiced abstraction in seeking the underlying essence of the artifact from its physical boundaries. Even theologians programmed this dichotomy of the physical from the meaningful and spiritual.³ Yet all of this misses or regrets what is most characteristic of art, that it plays with and in the physical realm, that it is transmitted to us not by spiritual means, but by and through creation: “[B]earing in mind the long-standing legacy of thinking about music … which has arguably suppressed a great deal of music and led to unnecessarily negative attitudes toward it (not least in the church), we might do well to regain a sense of music’s profound physicality – its embeddedness in God’s given material world.” Although Begbie is addressing music in particular here, his argument easily extends to the other arts.

Furthermore, re-situating our relationship to art as physical helps us relearn the physical world in general as well as the human body itself, the last act of the original creation: “Our own bodies… are intrinsically part of musical experience. To insist that Christians are to be spiritual is indeed quite proper, but to be spiritual is not to renounce the body per se.” The acceptance of the body as creation and thus necessarily and constitutively part of this thing we call art has a dual fecundity. First, as it emphasizes not only artistic creation, but rather experience in general as a physical act, it leads us to an intimacy with art we may have hitherto reserved for the artist herself. And second, it explodes the individual nature of art, emphasizing the communal aspect of physicality, the “koinonia” of the created order. Begbie draws on the thought of Bonhoeffer to explicate the image of the Christian community, one not of cheap harmony, but of polyphony, sometimes difficult to grasp, but always rewarding. The emphasis is relatedness being part of the overall aesthetic creation, rather than the Romantic image of the artist as sole-creator in defiance of the heavens and the masses. “True enough, the self is always and already a social product… and yet the self is centered when addressed and treated as a distinct you by another person or other persons… Such is the ecstatic love at the heart of the Triune God in which we are invited to share.”

I would add that it is not only the community of believers or simply humanity that we join when we participate in creation and acknowledge our place within the created order. For, if even the stones would cry out in praise should humanity fall silent (Luke 19), it seems only “natural” that they also welcome our joining in the polyphony of the worldly community. The elements of creation seem to be actively awaiting commune with the other members, a vision that the land artist Andy Goldworthy seems to have focused on with his lens. His work carries a sense not only of an order or form inherent to nature, to physicality, but also the yearning of the natural for the supernatural koinonia to which Begbie alludes. The question is if and how one might speak of stones and wood and leaves singing in the polyphony.

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1. HUVB, “On the Task of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time,” Communio 20 (1993): 148; although von Balthasar was not the first or last to issue this warning.
2. B&C (September/October, 2007): 28-31.
3. Begbie cites P. T. Forsyth here.

Salient = things i’m interested in. so what.

My contention is that all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly… My contention is that creativity, now, is as important in education as literacy, and we shoudl treat it with the same status.
…Intelligence is interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. Creativity…more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

For those of you that are savy with ipods and podcasting, there’s a link on the TED site (linked in this post’s title) to download the video of this to itunes. enjoy

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