This is the kind of impoliteness that Graham Ward calls for in The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Post-Material Citizens. The act of being a citizen does look crass next to the polished acquiescence to consumerism and endless materialism. But for the theologian, who is not a citizen of this world, Ward’s is a call to a radical kind of impoliteness, the scandal of the Christ.

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

Bibliography

Copeland, Robert M. “The Christian Message of Igor Stravinsky” The Musical Quarterly. 68.4 (October 1982), 563-579.Stravinsky, Igor. Symphony of Psalms for Chorus and Orchestra. London: Boosey and Hawkes Inc.,1948.Taruskin, Richard. “Russian Folk Melodies in ‘The Rite of Spring.’ Journal of the American Musicological Society. 33.3 (Autumn, 1980), 501-543.Walsh, Stephen. “Stravinsky’s Choral Music” Tempo, New Series. No. 81 Stravinsky’s 85^th Birthday (Summer, 1967), 41-51.

This would be an excellent opportunity for me to offer my sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the conference. Whether you made a large or small contribution, we are in your debt for what turned out to be a fascinating and thought provoking event!

In any event, we were busy. I was in Chicago with many of you at AAR. However, Aron seems to have joined that contentious group of protesters who haven’t quite come to terms with the AAR/SBL estrangement. Fear not, they’re getting back together, maybe even by 2011. Aron made up for his absence by attending the Chesterton Conference in Niagra, Ontario. Look for his paper to appear here soon once I steal it from his laptop.

I’ve recently become interested in the Bible again after reading Irenaeus’ Against Heresies and teaching the Revelation unit in my advisor’s Seminarian course a couple times.I’m currently writing a paper on the regula fidei, and at Joshua’s suggestion began reading up on some literary theory, including Northrop Frye (although I wonder what you had in mind when you made that recommendation, JADR). Anyway, I stumbled across this bit in Frye that made me laugh, and for lack of anything substantial to post at the moment, I thought I’d toss this one out there:

It took me some time to hit on the right formula for a course in the Bible. I consulted the curricula of other universities, and found that they gave courses called “The Bible As Literature,” which involved chopping pieces out of the Bible like the book of Job and the parables of Jesus, saying, “Look, aren’t they literary?” that approach violated all my instincts as a critic, because those instincts told me that what a critic does when he is confronted with any verbal document whatever is to start on page one at the upper left-hand corner and god one reading until he reads the bottom right-hand corner of the last page. But many people who have attempted to do that with the Bible have flaked out very quickly, generally somewhere around the middle of Leviticus.

- Northop Frye from Northrop Frye and Jacy McPherson, Biblical and Classical Myths

Meanwhile, the Longest Overtly Sophiological Poem I know
by Janet Leslie Blumberg (Deep Grace of Theory)

Meanwhile, let me regale everyone with two passages from the longest overtly Sophiological poem I know. Or so I will posit… to see what you think. (It ought to further our discussion of precursors to sophiology among the Renaissance humanists, at any rate.)

This poem was written by an acquaintance of Giordano Bruno and a fellow renegade, John Donne, although Donne chose to go under cover so as not to die as Bruno did. Or to die as Donne’s own brother had died during the Elizabethan anti-Catholic purges of the 1590s.

In 1611, Donne was asked to commemorate the untimely death of his patron’s adolescent daughter, and Donne seized upon the occasion to write not only about Elizabeth Drury, but also about what he called “the Idea of a Woman.” And while he was eulogizing the young woman who had died (and also eulogizing the passing of more than she), Donne performed an “anatomy” upon the “corpse” of the desolate world that “Shee” had left behind her at her passing. The poem is called “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of World,” and it turns out to be, among other things, a prescient lament for the “death” of Sophia in the coming mechanistic age.

(If you are wondering how Donne could have gotten to this dark proleptic vision of the new world order, apart from having lived through such a ferocious persecution of the “old religion,” I believe that it came to him from reading his kinsman Francis Bacon’s earliest book, The Advancement of Learning, published in 1605.)

Donne’s poem is very long, and most of it is as hypnotic and compelling as the two brief sections I will now cite. Donne is writing here of the condition of the cosmos after the death of “Shee”:

‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot,
For every man, alone thinks he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that there can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.
This is the world’s condition now, and now
She that should all parts to reunion bow,
She that had all magnetique force alone,
To draw and fasten sundry parts in one;
She whom wise nature had invented then [ie. had “discovered”]
When she observed that every sort of men
Did in their voyage in this world’s sea stray,
And needed a new compass for their way;
She that was best, and first Original
Of all fair copies, and the general
Steward to fate; she whose rich eyes and breast
Guilt the West Indies and perfumed the East,
Whose having breathed in this world, did bestow
Spice on those Isles, and bid them still smell so,
And that rich Indie which doth gold interre,
Is but as single money coined from her.
She to whom this world must it self refer,
As suburbs, or the Microcosm of her,
Shee, shee is dead; shee’s dead: when thou knowst this,
Thou knowest how lame a cripple this world is,
And learnst this much by our anatomy,
That this world’s general sickness doth not lie
In any humour, or one certain part,
But, as thou saw’st it rotten at the heart,
Thou seest a hectic fever hath got hold
Of the whole substance, not to be contrould,
And that thou hast but one way, not to admit
The world’s infection, [which is] to be none of it.
For the world’s subtilst immaterial parts
Feel this consuming wound and [this] age’s darts.
For the world’s beauty is decayed or gone –
Beauty, that’s colour, and proportion….

To which one earlier section should now be added:

Let no man say, the world itself being dead,
‘Tis labor lost to have discovered
The world’s infirmities, since there is none
Alive to study this dissection,
For there’s a kind of world remaining still,
Though shee which did inanimate and fill
The world be gone, yet in this last long night
Her ghost doth walk, that is, a glimmering light,
A faint weak love of vertue and of good
Reflects from her, on them which understood
Her worth; And though she have shut in all day,
The twilight of her memory doth stay,
Which from the carcase of the old world, free
Creates a new world, and new creatures be
Produced: the matter and stuff of this
Her vertue [is], and the form our practice is….

So we can see that Bruno is not the only Renaissance humanist willing to go over the top….

Ben Jonson, Donne’s playwright friend (and an open Catholic who nevertheless had managed to survive into Jacobean times), remarked in exasperation that “had it been wrote of the Virgin Mary, it had been something….” But because it was only about the young Elizabeth Drury, a girl Donne had never laid eyes on, the poem exasperated some of Donne’s lady friends and former patronesses as well. Donne wittily replied, “I wrote of the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was.” If any other lady felt slighted, he continued, then she had only to undertake for herself to live as the true exemplar of that “Vertue” he had praised. Then she could rightly regard the poem as written of herself!

However, as you may have noticed, the poem is filled — shades of Ben Jonson — with unmistakable Marian imagery. The Holy Mother is the special guardian of sailors; she is the perfume of the East, and so forth…. But what about that “best, and First Original / Of all Faire copies,” which is also Marian through and through (the New Eve), via the same thinking about her pure and elevated humanity that Bulgakov and the Eastern tradition expounds? At the same time, like Bulgakov, the image draws upon the Platonic Idea, and upon the potent relationship of Prototype and Image. Or what about the figure of “Shee” as the indwelling harmony of the world?  And at the same time as the cosmological Greek Eros who, in the face of Strife and chaos, “should all parts to reunion bow.” She is also Nature, as God’s providential order still indwelling the material world, struggling to maintain it despite its now-fallen state, and she is even God’s Providence itself (ultimately, as in Aquinas, Providence is superior — “steward” — to Fate).  Then She is the World Soul, too, the indwelling divine life that continues to “inanimate and fill” this decaying ghost of the world, re-membering it as it once was, and as it yearns to be again: the paradaisical “golden world” that God designed and intended, God’s divine artistry….

And Renaissance minds were always expecting that the worlds of art could and would imitate this greater and more original Reality, instead of merely copying the “brazen” world in which we fallen humans must dwell, with its “preponderant mass of unreason.” Hence Donne’s imitatio of Woman in terms of “the gold of divine wisdom” (as Bruno’s Tansillo’s explicated the golden color associated with the Goddess Diana). Elizabeth Drury will be extolled by Donne as the Golden woman she is divinely meant to be, and not merely as one of those tarnished copies that are likely to appear in the inferior Ages of Silver or Brass….

We also have clear evocations in the poem of the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs, and of Dante’s Beatrice. Like Bulgakov’s Sophia, the “Shee” of this long and compelling poem can be recognized and known in many dimensions and many aspects: she appears on occasions to be created or divine, mortal or immortal, feminine or cosmological, immanent or transcendent. If Shee is indeed an Idea, this idea is no mere “concept” or “empty abstraction” but what Bulgarov calls “the living thought of God.”  Thus, in a very real sense, “Shee” is one with the essential life and being of the universe, and she is also one with the being of the young Protestan believer named Elizabeth Drury. (By the way, I suspect that Bulgakov’s dismissive comments about the emptiness of the scholastic reception of Aristotelian terms have something in common with Heidegger’s complaints about the shortcomings of medieval “ontotheology”; such criticisms fall upon these earlier thinkers because they are being read — or not read — at something of a distance, and in Heidegger’s case, certainly, through the abhorred conceptual framework of the modern centuries, out of which he struggles so hard to emerge.)

So, I ask you, how on earth, without thinking Sophia in her divine and created oneness (and distinction), could Donne have made such extravagant and contradictory claims, even in principle, about a young Protestant girl? (I don’t care how prominent – and wealthy – her aristocratic family was!)

One way he managed it, of course, was by relying heavily on “Christ in her,” the mystical union of the believer with Christ, which is “the hope of glory.” Except that this by no means would explain everything in the poem. Had Donne restricted himself to Christology and the Body of Christ, he would not have written many, many of the lines contained in this poem. Why, we even have the Aristotelian anima and the Thomistic form here — Form as the indwelling unitive functioning and life that sustains each created being by virtue of the kind of being it is (that is, according to its eidetic nature). No, Donne is uniting here, in one extended Metaphysical conceit (which is the very life and essence of this eulogy), elements drawn from a multitude of resources and traditions, and he is uniting them into a single principle: the creaturely “Shee” who is also divine.

In my judgment, this is not animism, not “vitalism,” not “occult forces,” and not “mere metaphysics” – even though the later 17th century “natural philosophers” would dismiss 2000 years of patient and exceedingly brilliant Western thought with such labels. But their own energies were preoccupied with gazing at other chosen and elect objects, and in gazing at them within the new mechanistic framework they required. Yet these new “objects” of learning, like previous ones, were still quite capable of arousing all of the old erotic devotion in their students, because of their astounding inherent beauty and power. (This is why Lesslie Newbigin aptly called the Enlightenment the “conversion experience of the Modern West,” in Foolishness to the Greeks: the Gospel in Western Culture.) So the early modern thinkers would all impatiently wave aside a past that seemed to clog their way.

But what these ardent and brilliant devotees of “matter in motion” and the new calculus waved aside in the short run, proved to be inescapable in the long run. It returned first as “force,” when Galileo’s “kinematics” yeilded to Newton’s much more powerful “dynamics” of motion. And many decades later, it would emerge again, and this time decisively, as a certain uneluctible numerical quantity that kept showing up in the equations of steam engines and water mills, a quantity that was always the same. This quantity came to be called “energy,” of course, and ever since Clerk Maxwell and Einstein, physics has been the story of the conquest of the material world by energy, and of “solid bodies” by “fields.” In a wonderful irony of history, the name energy (believe it or not) was borrowed directly from the German nature philosophers, who were quite enamoured of old Aristotle’s energeia and had been writing a good deal about it….

*  *  *  *

I keep recalling the very first question asked in this Bulgarov conference, requesting help in providing a  “conceptual framework” for grasping Bulgakov’s “mystical lyricism” and for working out, for example, the “physical” and “historical” ramifications of the believer’s union with Christ. Sophia’s efficacy for philosophy and theology, it seems to me, lies precisely in her inaccessibility to any thought that refuses to think the co-inherence of formal energies within the organizations they inform, and at the same time the transcendence of those formal energies — as more fundamental and more enduring than the material organizations they create and sustain. Compare: “Wisdom is to be understood ontologically, not as an abstract quality, but as the ever-present power of God, the divine essence, as the Godhead itself” (66) and “Wisdom in creation is ontologically identical with its prototype, the same Wisdom that exists in God” (72).

To think Bulgakov, then, means to think ontological identity, to think a formal and dynamic oneness underlying that which we do not cease to keep, structurally and functionally, “distinct.”  (This is the deep structure of classical Greek taxonomical logic in general.)  And it is not nonsense. But it is not the “sense” or “logic” deriving from the “word-concept-object” schema of modern epistemology either.

I do happen to think, though, that this kind of thinking originated and sustained in order to thhink the ratio or logos or proportion-ality of those elegant formalities discovered in the world by the Greeks, and so beloved by them. In Plato and Aristotle, we find a thinking of form (eidos) as the real and dynamic being sustaining and moving all things, but formally distinguished “according to their kinds.” The formal elegance at work in the world was for the Greeks astoundingly multiple, but in a deeper sense, at its core, it was one, and is what first aroused the Socratic longing to engage dialectically in pursuing the Eidos, that beautiful Stag, “in-animating” the world in and through its kinds.  Only thus could an education in the various formal ways of knowing (in knowing in each with exquisite depth something of the formal elegance of one of the quite different kinds of determinacies unfolding in the world) — only thus could such an education possibly be formative and liberating.

It was, I believe, something like an indwelling of the divine Sophia, seen in and as the ratio-nal energies of emerging determinateness itself (kinesis) — this divine energy that was glimpsed so tantalizingly within each of the kinds of things to which the Greek disciplines were devoted (the creaturely Sophia) –  this is what  opened the very possibility of the liberal arts as ways of knowing, and made them capable of forming and transforming human personhood. Only by the oneness within the ontological diversity of that which the liberal arts explored lay a power capable of lifting and transfiguring a human knower into a lover of Wisdom, and into an imitator of her.

And until the 17th century at least, the Western tradition would never lose sight of this Greek love affair with the ordering principles of the world, or lose its faith in the dunamai of the arts and sciences to build in us the enhanced capacities to discern and engage with and be affected by the beauty of what we are coming to know. This Greek word dunamis is in Aristotle translated as a “faculty” or a “discipline” or way of knowing (in The Nicomathean Ethics) and it is in Plato “a power to know” (Ion). But a knower endowed, with with however many such powers, does not become a lover until the divine Stag is glimpsed in (and through) these paths into the truth of the eidos, whereupon the mind is raised to a higher state and friendship becomes possible.

It was the miraculous manifestation of patterns of formal energy in each of the kinds of things (ta onta) that, in the first place, convinced the Greeks that human beings could become able to come to know anything, and on that basis of givenness, that they could develop various formalized means of perceiving them more exquisitely. In this tradition, disciplinary communities and their methodologies are what develop in us our capacities “to be affected” and this is what enables us to press further on in our knowing. Every communal disciplinary pursuit, whether theological or not, whether “first philosophy” or merely one of the “seven pillars of Wisdom” (from Prov. 8 ) interpreted as being the Seven Liberal Arts, could help to equip the lover of Sophia to rise to a higher and deeper contemplation of the divinity in and through the creature. (“Sapientia hath builded herself an house,” and the medieval university was a garden, a mother, a fountain for the cultivation of human nature.)

It is very difficult for us today to “flesh out” the “mystical lyricism” of Bulgakov or to read the dynamical formal elegance of earlier Western thought, and assimilate it to our own standards of clear thinking, because it is necessary at every turn to rely upon a thinking of the “dual” (but non-dualistic) principle of immanent transcendence.  In contrast, modern epistemology labored to contain all phenomena within an apparatus of mutually exclusive, self-enclosed structures, such as “solid bodies” and “motion” in the case of Galileo, or “objects” and “concepts” in Locke, or “the world” and “clear and distinct ideas” in Descartes.

This is why I am grateful that Bulgakov works so very hard to reinvigorate the “consubstantiality” shared by the members of the Trinity, in order to grasp it as being more than an “abstraction” or a mere “concept.”  God’s Ousia is the very “life” and “being” of the Godhead; it is “God’s divinity”; “God’s divine Godhead or nature.” But also, these are very old Greek philosophical gestures, seen in the thinking of the mutual and reciprocal relationships between the Eidos and its instances, and within the Eidos between its eidos-name, its eidos-ideal, and its evolving formal definitions. This thinking of the oneness that participates distinctness is the essential seed of Socratic/Platonic dialectics and it is brilliantly developed by Aristotle when he claims that the form-al nature as such (essence or eidos) is most truly itself when it is fully realized in the actuality of its instances. (That eidectic realization is what he calls an ousia, something that is more akin to a Christian hypostasis.)

Basically, though, I think that I sould show that it is this thinking of immanent transcendence and of transcendent immanence, this fundamental dynamic — that any-thing and its intrinsic formality are one and also distinct (not same) — upon which all knowing is based in the Socratic “philosophical” way of life.
But if I dare to claim that sophiology was working at the heart of Western “first philosophy” (theology) and continued in the West prior to the rise of Newtonian mechanics, then someone might well wish to protest that she is never called by her name. But yes, she was. She was named as Sophia in the very name of philo-sophy itself, and this is not “mere semantics.” It would also be easy to show the profound influence in the Christian West of the Wisdom tradition from Proverbs, prior to the scientific revolution. Look too at the ubiquity of the divine feminine, as in Fortuna and Natura, as in Mistress Kynde, and as in the medieval and Renaissance figure of Truth as a naked woman standing on the summit of her high hill….  Are these merely verbal echoes or merely visual conventions? It was Locke who taught us how to think the “concept” as an abstraction quite apart from the empirical “object.” Have we in the Modern West forgotten how to think the living substance of the Word/word, or of the Image/image, so that we do not even read the sophia in earlier Western philosophy?

For this too, perhaps, “Bulgakov arrives from the East….”

Perhaps all of these “signs” I have mentioned are genuine and iconic pointers, urging us to think more fully the ways in which “hagia sophia” may have survived, for many, many centuries in the West, just as she did in Constantinople, and always, everywhere, as “the last, silent revelation of the Greek genius bequeathed to the ages” (Bulgakov, 2).

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

A Song for Melody Gardot – recorded 8/18/08, mixed 8/24/08