3
Secular Sirens
In the beginning, there was no word. There was touch and there was smell and there were pheromone receptors. There was sensitivity to light; the beginnings of hearing and sight.
The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.
Appetite or desire, not DNA, is the deepest principle of life.
In weaving the tale of Odysseus and his ancient voyage to Ithaca, Homer tells his readers that the goddess Circe cautioned the hero to keep his distance from the Sirens, “those creatures who spellbind any man alive.” It was believed that if a ship’s crew heard the Sirens’ beguiling melody, they would lose all reason and wreck their vessel on the rocky shoal. Often with a word of warning comes the means to escape: “Soften some beeswax and stop your shipmates ears so none can hear, none of the crew,” insisted Circe, “but if you are bent on hearing, have them tie you hand and foot in the swift ship, erect at the mast-block, lashed by ropes to the mast so you can hear the Sirens’ song to your heart’s content.”1 The Sirens’ song and its allure illustrates a worry that permeates the moral, social and religious conscience of the West: if sensate experience ignites one’s passion, then one will be tempted to abandon all reason.
Painted centuries later, a similar tension appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s An Allegory of Passion (c. 1530) (fig. 3.1). Holbein depicts a rider atop a galloping, unbridled white horse. The horseman’s red cape flaps in the breeze behind him, and to avoid being thrown violently to the ground, he clings to the steed’s mane. An accompanying text, painted by the artist and located in the bottom center of the painting, reads e cosi desio me mena (“and so desire carries me along”). Similarly, consider Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s painting Socrates Tearing Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensuality (1785) (fig. 3.2). In literature Alcibiades, a political figure who appears in several Socratic dialogues, is a pleasure seeker whose indiscretions led to the betrayal of his fellow soldiers and, subsequently, the downfall of Athens. Having alerted readers and viewers to the dangerous entanglements of sensual pleasure, Homer, Holbein and Regnault go on to insist that the pull of these enticements is so strong that only acts of intervention can deliver us from their power.
3.2. Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Socrates Tearing Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensuality, 1785
Building on the broader theme of embodiment developed in the previous chapter, we turn now to examine the tension between moral restraint and sensate engagement or, more classically, between asceticism and aesthetics. There are two compelling reasons to pursue this tension. First, it is surely the case that Homer, Holbein and Regnault’s worries about sensual pleasure comport with reality. Who can deny the powerful desire that is stirred up by our senses and its corresponding hold on every facet of life? Second and pertinent to our consideration of the relationship between art and religion, secular and religious leaders in postwar America perpetuated a dichotomous understanding regarding the relationship of piety to pleasure and used this as a means to organize their respective agendas. In this arrangement, particular forms of asceticism enabled evangelicals to isolate their devotion to Christ from the stain of worldliness. Meanwhile and entirely apart from the piety of religious regulation, artists embraced an aesthetic enterprise that permitted them to drink deep of the world and its pleasures. Hence, there emerged a binary pair wherein evangelicals regarded particular evidences of piety to be the central feature of Christian discipleship as contrasted with the secular art world, where radical expressive freedom formed the basis of creative exploration.
To clarify the thematic weave of this chapter, consider these familiar lines from a chorus sung by children across the land during their Sunday school classes:
O be careful little eyes what you see.
O be careful little eyes what you see.
There’s a Father up above,
And He’s looking down in love,
So, be careful little eyes what you see.
Those familiar with this chorus know that it contains four additional verses—each an iteration of its first—so that in the remaining stanzas the phrase “eyes what you see” is replaced by “ears what you hear,” “hands what you do,” “feet where you go” and, finally, “mouth what you say.”
At one level, this chorus is sage advice to persons of every age. After all, who has not regretted seeing what should not be seen, hearing what should not be heard, touching what should not be touched, going where one should not go or speaking what should not be said? In this cautionary counsel we hear wisdom’s voice, for, indeed, managing one’s passions is daily and demanding work. Ever since learning of Adam and Eve and their taste of Eden’s forbidden fruit, many Christians have imagined that the pursuit of pleasure can only be the enemy of piety.2
But this simple scheme should also give us pause, for its practicality offer no guidance with regard to the corresponding pleasures of sight, sound, touch, exploration and speech. How, in particular, shall we evaluate our encounters with visual art and, more broadly, visual cultural? For religious believers, the matter grows yet more complicated. What shall we make of the implicit theological claims contained in the words of this chorus: Father / up above / looking down / in love / so be careful. Christian believers will be comforted by the thought that they have a loving Father who watches over them from above. But are their sensate practices truly subject to regular divine surveillance? For twentieth-century evangelicals, the moral watchword was “be careful.” And while they sought to live upright lives, the moral code that they advanced often defaulted to a graceless legalism.
Having introduced the challenge posed to us by our senses and then citing a children’s chorus to illustrate the dilemma, let me quickly affirm that the biblical narrative accredits substantial virtue to our sensate being. We will consider this claim at length in the closing section of this chapter. Before doing so, however, it will be important to summarize the disposition of postwar evangelicals regarding their moral management of our five senses.
AN EVANGELICAL TAXONOMY OF THE SENSES
Through the ages, Christians have recognized their primal attraction to what Augustine termed “the temptation of the flesh.”3 If a person’s base behavior leads him to spiritual calamity, then he must forsake it. To accomplish this, Christians advanced a variety of strategies to “mortify the flesh.” For instance, Catholic orders took vows of chastity, poverty and simplicity as means to avoid worldly distractions that might prevent them from leading lives devoted to service and prayer.4 Also seeking to be faithful disciples of Christ, postwar American evangelicals adopted similar disciplines and prohibitions that were the natural outworking of their Puritan and Pietist roots. Whether Catholic or Protestant, this effort seems consonant with Jesus’ insistence that the path to God and his kingdom is a narrow way, one that forsakes the pleasures of this world. This view was surely the sentiment of the psalmist who wrote:
Keep your servant also from willful sins;
may they not rule over me.
Then I will be blameless,
innocent of great transgression. (Ps 19:13 NIV)
Desiring personal holiness and eternal reward, postwar evangelicals exercised caution and restraint with respect to their cultural participation. And nowhere is this more evident than in their management of the senses. In this regard, Christ’s example seemed the most compelling. If, like Christ, believers would willingly bear the burdens of this life as those who had been crucified with him, then in the life to come they would receive a great crown of glory. In the pages that follow, I offer a brief taxonomy of the senses as viewed through an evangelical lens.
First, let’s consider the olfactory sense—our capacity to smell. Although the Bible makes abundant reference to fragrant offerings and sweet aromas, evangelicals seldom associated the olfactory sense with any serious moral problems. Contemporary women may find the fragrant soaps, lotions and candles at Bath and Body Works appealing, and the marketers of perfumes such as Obsession, Forbidden and Tabu may hope to incite sexual rendezvous; even so, on the whole postwar evangelicals would have agreed with Augustine: “I am not much troubled by sensuality in regard to pleasant smells: if they are absent I do not seek them, if present, I do not reject them, and I am prepared to do without them at all times.”5
Second and closely related to smell is our capacity to taste. The potential hazard of taste is its direct connection to our appetite for food and drink. As Leon Kass puts it, “The danger and the glory of living forms is writ large in the fact of eating.”6 To eat is to live, and the manner in which we do this is freighted with personal, social and religious meaning.7 Taste may invite the selfish or undisciplined consumption of food that can in turn lead to a wide range of maladies and diseases including obesity.8 Still, although gluttony is listed as one of the seven deadly sins or vices, few sermons have ever been preached from an evangelical pulpit on overeating and related eating disorders.9 And, of course, drawing attention to someone’s corpulence would always be considered impolite.10
By contrast, evangelical attitudes regarding drink, or alcohol, were an altogether different matter. Without exception the Bible regards drunkenness as a sin. In the early decades of the twentieth century this conviction motivated fundamentalists to take up the cause of Prohibition, and the tales of baseball-star-cum-itinerant-evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935) preaching against the evils of alcohol are legend. Prohibition was rescinded in 1933, and yet throughout the postwar period thousands of local churches and Christian organizations continued to regard abstinence from alcohol as a precondition for membership. In this same spirit, most of today’s conservative Christian colleges require students to sign a morality statement confirming that, among other abstentions, they will not consume alcohol. While these kinds of elective pledges might ring hollow for some, given the staggering abuse of alcohol by today’s undergraduates, it is hard to see the downside of the policy.
But where appetite for food and drink is concerned, a more filled-out biblical view cannot be limited to prohibitions. This account must include the frequent mention of celebratory feasts where friends gather in table fellowship to partake of rich food and drink. And in this regard, Bible readers will recall that Jesus’ first public miracle in Cana was to produce fine wine at the end of the marriage feast. Suffice to say, instances of God’s people gathered in community around feasts appear again and again in Scripture, the supreme example of this surely being “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev 19:9).11 Imagining this great marriage feast, theologian David F. Ford offers an intriguing image: “To envisage the ultimate feasting is to imagine an endless overflow of communication between those who love and enjoy each other. It embraces body language, facial expressions, the ways we eat, drink, toast, dance and sing; and accompanying every course, encounter and artistic performance are conversations taken up into celebration.”12
Third, in assessing the potential hazards for the five senses, our auditory sense, hearing, has been highly controversial for evangelicals. It is the auditory sense that invites one’s mind and body to enter into everything from the tender phrasing of “Amazing Grace” to Mick Jagger’s complaint that he “can’t get no satisfaction.” For postwar evangelicals it was secular music—especially the beat of modern jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, disco, and heavy metal—and its impact on the spiritual development of their young people that was most grievous.13 Some argued that the sonic waves generated by these musical genres stimulated sexual desire and that dance, which introduced touch, further sexualized these encounters. And in a sort of sensual crescendo, the addition of moving images and the provocative staging and choreography of MTV in the 1980s and 1990s replaced the more subtle sexual innuendo of earlier forms with narratives of steamy desire and conquest.
Along the way, evangelicals mustered one of two responses to the seeming irresistible hold of contemporary music on their youth. Beginning in the 1970s, some launched a no-holds-barred campaign against popular music from the pulpit. In that decade and the ones to follow, it was not uncommon to have a youth pastor challenge his teens to burn their secular record albums or, later on, to destroy their compact discs as a means to defeat the power of “worldliness”—a strategy not unlike Savonarola’s fifteenth-century Bonfire of the Vanities mentioned earlier. Other evangelicals chose a more practical measure: they adopted the centuries-old habit of “baptizing” or sacralizing secular musical forms, assigning new lyrics to existing secular or pagan melodies.
While the debate surrounding music and its proper function in worship is long-standing, generally speaking most Protestants and even Catholics would find themselves in agreement with Martin Luther, who believed that “next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through music.”14 And here it is worth noting that many of the sixteenth-century Protestant churches that cleansed their sanctuaries of religious paintings and sculptures were among the first both to sponsor composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) to write stunning hymns for the church and to install impressive pipe organs in their sanctuaries on which to perform them.15
In revisiting evangelical strategies designed to manage the impact of secular music on its members, it can be observed that an unintended shift occurred. Nearing the end of the twentieth century, the Reformational emphasis on biblical preaching and teaching was supplanted by a palpable hunger for spiritual experience. Increasing numbers of evangelicals abandoned traditional hymnody and replaced the organs and acoustic pianos that once accompanied them with microphone stands, electronic instruments, monitors and drum kits. To the extent that sacralized contemporary music could supply these longed-for experiences, the critical center of evangelical life for many was relocated from biblical pedagogy to the multibillion-dollar business of contemporary Christian music, where cognitive expressions of Christian belief were displaced by more sensually engaging contemporary musical genres.
Amid the rising din and spectacle of today’s ubiquitous audiovisual world, one can easily forget that most of the sonic world exists elsewhere. This other world includes everything from whispered words, to the hum of machines on a factory floor, to wind blowing through a stand of poplars, to a cheering crowd at athletic events, to the sound of a house as it settles in the night. For more contemplative followers of Christ and as much as any familiar hymn, “The Sound of Silence” would remain spiritually evocative.
Next we consider a fourth sense, our capacity to see. For most, vision is our primary orientation to the world. Of the five senses, sight may be the most volatile since it directs our attention to those things and experiences that we long for but do not possess.16 During childhood it may have been the sight of a stuffed bear or ice cream cone belonging to another that triggered our envy. But beginning with adolescence and continuing on through adulthood, the scope of our desire expands exponentially; we learned to long for objects, places, experiences and relationships not our own. As we gaze on those things that we desire, they become symbols, icons and idols that consume our thoughts and redirect our actions. Some postmodern thinkers convincingly argue that this powerful relationship between vision and possession—the central nervous system that regulates our vast network of political, financial and social economies—is best understood as a “gaze.”17 No wonder the last of the Ten Commandments offers such clear instruction: “Neither shall you covet your neighbor’s wife. Neither shall you desire your neighbor’s house, or field, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Deut 5:21).
Postwar evangelicals would have been quick to point out that our capacity see enables us to delight in the things of God, to have compassion on others and to engage in fruitful labor. Conversely, it was common for conservative Protestant congregations to discourage or even prohibit their members from attending the cinema. The rationale for this prohibition was as follows: since movies showcased the vanity, immorality and worldly ways of Hollywood, followers of Christ should keep themselves from it.
Of the five senses, the one we have yet to review is touch, our tactile capacity. Evangelical worries about touch centered mostly on sex. It was reasoned that if sight led one to the “lust of the flesh,” then physical touch might lead to sexual passion, which would be the evidence of moral compromise and, eventually, personal ruin. Regarding touch, the Bible surely does rehearse the treachery of sexual immorality, but it also addresses the immorality of violence inflicted on innocents by a vicious hand. In this regard, no story is more central to the gospel message than the loving embrace of the Father who welcomes the prodigal home. Similar stories are Mary’s washing of Jesus’ feet with her hair and tears or the invitation from Jesus to Thomas to touch the Master’s wounded hands and side. No extended description is more filled with eros than the Song of Solomon or more pathos than the Christ’s passion. Meanwhile, it is generally held that common pleasures like petting one’s dog, plunging headlong into a pool of water or slipping into a warm sweater on a brisk autumn morning pose no moral temptation or hazard.
Finally and complicating matters further still, there is no sharper critic of one’s sensate being run amok than Jesus, for whom at least sight and touch presented a kind of treachery:
But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell. (Mt 5:28-30)
On the heels of a passage condemning adultery and situated inside a larger discourse in Matthew’s Gospel—known to us as the Sermon on the Mount—the words of Jesus are arresting, to say the least. One suspects that most who gathered to listen to the teacher’s words were either stunned or angered by them. For if maintaining the letter of Jewish law was already a daunting proposition, it must have seemed to Jesus’ followers that he was calling them to a new and impossible standard: righteousness at any cost.
Recognizing Jesus’ use of hyperbole in this teaching, we might ask, did he really expect his listeners to cease looking and touching? Only context can provide a suitable answer. If, for instance, touch tempts one to become an adulterer, then the answer is surely yes. At the same time, Jesus’ actions reported in John 9:1-12 will confirm that a correct answer could also be no. Seeing a blind man, Jesus stooped to gather dirt in his hand, mixed it with his own saliva, spread the mud on the man’s eyes and then commanded him to go and wash it off in the pool of Siloam. Immediately the man, who had been blind from birth, recovered his sight. All of the four Gospels abound with such stories: Jesus had compassion for those who could not see, hear or walk, and he routinely relied on his own sight and touch to heal them. It is the sensate-based practices of Jesus himself that form the foundation of every ministry of compassion ever to be sponsored by the church.
To summarize this section we may rightly conclude that smell, taste, hearing, touch and sight are essential features of our embodiment. Whether we warm our hands before a fire, taste the tang of sweet cherries or take in a lively performance of Beethoven’s Eroica, the nerve-endings or surface-sensors that cover our bodies are vital components of our material being. In the event that any of these capacities cease to function, we are—in some degree—disabled or handicapped.
In this brief taxonomy I am surely not intending to suggest that there was or ever has been a uniform conservative Protestant estimation of the senses. But what can be claimed is that Protestant evangelicals found the corresponding pleasures and hazards of sensate engagement a source of considerable moral anxiety, especially in light of their desire to realize deeper levels of sanctification. And it followed that as these evangelicals sought to cultivate a morally careful life, it at least tempered their ability to enjoy God and his good creation. If the high point of this pursuit was marked by the deeper joy of knowing God, it was often sullied by the keen awareness of personal failings and shortcomings and, consequently, overwrought by unnecessary guilt and shame.18 In the next section we will consider a provocative secular counterpoint to such worries.
AN ALLEGORY OF PASSION
Set in the late 1920s, Sirens recounts the fictional tale of Norman Lindsay, an artist-bohemian who resides on a secluded country estate in the Blue Mountains of southeastern Australia with an entourage of beautiful women—a wife, two models, a housemaid and two young daughters.19 In the opening frames of the film, two cassock-attired clergy enter the Art Gallery of New South Wales and walk briskly through its corridors until they reach an artwork created by Lindsay. The etching is draped in dark cloth. The older man, the bishop of Sydney, uncloaks the piece to reveal a crucifixion scene in which the male Christ figure has been replaced by a nude Venus. As anticipated, the clerics regard the content of the artist’s print blasphemous and its presence in the exhibit an affront to the church.
To remediate the problem, the bishop dispatches Anthony Campion, his young priest, and Campion’s priggish yet attractive wife, Estella, to persuade Lindsay to remove his work from the exhibit. Having arrived in Australia only recently, the inexperienced Englishman sets out to visit the offending artist, who, it turns out, resides in Campion’s newly assigned parish. At the end of a long and wearisome journey, the couple is warmly welcomed by Lindsay, who invites them to stay in his guest house.
In short order Campion grows intrigued by the appointments of Lindsay’s gracious home and its surrounds. Dinner debates over rich food and drink seem to impassion Anthony, and when he happens on the artist posing and painting his nude models, the young priest finds himself an unexpected voyeur. But as the days pass, the anticipated schism between Campion’s religious convictions and his host’s obvious disdain for Christianity deepens. Beneath this burden the cleric’s convictions about his own faith seem to falter. Nonetheless, in his commitment to persuade Lindsay to remove his offensive print from the museum—especially before the show travels to England, Anthony’s home country—Campion is undeterred.
Meanwhile Estella, Campion’s wife, embarks on a different personal journey. Initially, her modest dress and obligatory sexual relations with her husband cause her to appear withdrawn and absent of passion. But like her husband, she too is intrigued by the sensual abandon of Lindsay’s people and place. As the narrative unfolds, Estella warms to Lindsay’s women, and then—in an episode reminiscent of an open-air water baptism—her defenses fall entirely away. Estella, now in a dreamlike state and dressed in a shimmering white gown, yields to the caress of the other women, and the film’s viewers are given cause to believe that she is experiencing a kind of sensual-sexual rebirth. A bit too obviously, a large and dark water snake—the serpent in paradise—slithers from scene to scene.
Sirens narrates the conversion of two seekers—Campion and his wife—as they fall steadily beneath Lindsay’s spell. At the film’s conclusion, the couple departs from the region by train even as the film flashes back to a scene wherein five unclothed women stand atop a rocky hill—five Sybils heralding the Neopagan conquest of a dull and archaic Christian universe. Sensuality and the lurking serpent have prevailed over the rigid doctrine and manners of the church.
What shall we make of director John Duigan’s fascination with the long-standing tension between staid religious orthodoxy and bohemian sensual abandon? Most viewers will be quick to understand that the film’s setting—its lush landscape, charming spaces, sensuous women and attendant luxuries—is the stuff of movies. Nonetheless, in sketching an image of contemporary paradise set within a larger celebration of sensual gratification, Duigan is right to emphasize that art making is a sense-centered encounter.
Sculptor and designer Maya Lin asserts, “I think with my hands.”20 As her comment suggests, the art of making triggers a rapid sequence of sensate connections—the eye to the brain, the brain to the hand, the hand to the eye. Apart from sight, one cannot comprehend the brilliance of cobalt blue. Apart from sensing the drag of a loaded brush against the grain of paper, one cannot lay down a watercolor wash. And apart from the scent of, say, turpentine, linseed oil, wax, machined steel, sawdust or acrylic polymers, the materials that we manage might leave us uninspired.
But if Sirens seeks to persuade its viewers that Lindsay and his women are “naturally” attending to their desires, it also hopes to convince us that Christians are sexually and aesthetically repressed. At the same time, Duigan’s easy embrace of sensual license over against the abrupt dismissal of Christian piety is far too formulaic. That is, as Duigan invites his viewers to embrace a new Eden, he seems unwilling to scrutinize the charms of such a world with the same rigor that he levels at Christianity. One may dismiss these glosses as part and parcel of popular cinema. Had he desired, Duigan might have directed his viewers to a different conclusion. For instance, the opening scene of Sirens reveals Lindsay’s intrigue with biblical themes, albeit their inversion. Why did Duigan choose to turn his artist away from Christianity rather than toward it? Why did Campion—we presume he is theologically trained—not lead the conversation to more transcendent matters?
What Sirens does portray is the abiding conflict that appears to exist between Christian asceticism (the denial of one’s senses for some greater spiritual good)21 and a secular, or in this instance pagan, aestheticism (the stimulation of one’s senses through the arts).22 Duigan invites his viewers to consider the latter, not the former, as a path to salvation. Perhaps this is what John Berger envisioned when Janos Lavin, a Hungarian artist in Berger’s novel A Painter of Our Time, declares: “There comes a time in every work when suddenly the form of it takes over. Then I can do no wrong. I am Adam in paradise. And the whole of life seems to have conspired to help me. It can last five minutes. Just occasionally, like today, for a whole afternoon.”23
Thus far we have examined evangelical worries about the capacity of our senses to enflame desire. Following that, we evaluated director John Duigan’s counterproposal that we yield to the same. As such, it may seem that we are faced with a simple choice: self-management or self-indulgence. And while the implicit hedonism of the latter option is surely seductive, prudence invites us to consider the wisdom of the former: restraint.
However one navigates the liminal space between freedom and moral obligation, no one—not even the most pious spiritual seeker—can entirely dismiss her or his capacity to touch, taste, smell, hear and see. These abilities affect everything from our acquisition of knowledge to the management of daily life and from making art to Christian discipleship. We call on them to harvest the raw data that forms the bulwark of scientific observation, to keep our bodies from great physical harm and to distinguish fanciful imaginings from concrete reality.
The senses are basic to our being. And it follows that we employ phrases such as “coming to our senses” or “making sense” or “being sensible” to confirm that we are reasonably located in actual space and time. Cast in this light and contrary to the worries expressed thus far, our sensate being need not be either a path to wild abandon or an invitation to moral mishap. Rather we are, all of us, caught up in what appears to be an impossible paradox: on one hand, we must trust our senses to gain true knowledge of the world; on the other, we dare not trust ourselves to yield to their power.
THE SENSATE LIFE
In his book Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean? Leonard Koren writes, “Virtually everything we know about the world, except that which is genetically encoded, comes to us through our senses and is then intellectually processed in one way or another.”24 Similarly, Diane Ackerman theorizes, “There is no way to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.”25 Artist Jacquelyn McBain presses the matter still further: “In the beginning, there was no word. There was touch and there was smell and there were pheromone receptors. There was sensitivity to light; the beginnings of hearing and sight.”26
Persuasive as Koren’s, Ackerman’s and McBain’s claims might be, from the ancient Greeks onward the acquisition of “higher” knowledge in the West has been mostly regarded as a cognitive endeavor. This confidence in the preeminence of mind is subtly confirmed by the manner in which we rank our perceptual faculties within the vertical hierarchy of our bodies: reason or intellect being associated with the head and then, in descending order, feeling and belief attributed to the heart, and sensate encounters and animal passions paired with the bowel or gut (viscera). In this schema and with the “head” in first position, fully formed adults are preeminently thinking persons whose minds have gained mastery over the more base and profligate aspects of their being. Hence the familiar saying “mind over matter.” In more educated and philosophical circles, intellection is elevated to a place of nobility and far above the taint of more ignoble urges and promptings. “I think, therefore I am,” insists René Descartes.
This admittedly elegant arrangement wherein sensate data is mined and managed by a rational self advances its cause through proofs and propositions, measurement and assessment, strategies and tactics. Moreover, social and economic histories confirm that ordered worlds can be remarkably efficient and productive, engendering a strong sense of security, confidence and well-being for the individuals whom they serve. This rational self is most at home in branches of science, technology and business where logical patterns of organization are reinforced, and this self frequently calls into service subdisciplines within philosophy, sociology, architecture and design that are practiced in social management and control.
When these disciplines and subdisciplines are ungoverned by law or unchecked by conscience, however, their considerable power is often harnessed to advance the self-interests of a few. And run amok, these practices and their agents have formed the operational center of every modern totalitarian state.27 Consequently, these systems of power and those who control them must always be subject to criticism. Wendell Berry observes:
In my region and within my memory . . . human life has become less creaturely and more engineered, less familiar and more remote from local places, resources, pleasures, and associations. Our knowledge, in short, has become increasingly statistical. . . . This is the sort of knowledge we now call “data” or “facts” or “information.” By means of such knowledge a category assumes dominion over its parts or members. . . . Virtually all of us, in order to participate and survive in their system, have had to agree to their substitution of statistical knowledge for personal knowledge.28
In support of Berry’s complaint, it must be observed that the rational self is inclined to discredit and even disallow critical dimensions of life that are essential to human flourishing; aesthetic and religious experiences are most endangered. A line from Robert Browning’s nineteenth-century poem “A Grammarian’s Funeral” estimates the cost of preferring the rational self over other ways of being: “The man decided not to live but to know.” Commenting on the same, George Steiner observes the critical distance that exists between knowledge (philosophy) and experience.29 To grasp this difference, compare the following pair of actions: studying the description of a tantalizing entrée on the menu of a fine restaurant and actually partaking of the meal. The former might be an enticing prelude to the latter, but taking in the culinary delight (preferably with friends) is surely the greater good. And here a larger pattern holds, for, whether it is community, sex, manual labor, worship or travel, there is a critical difference between ideation and experience. Comprehending this distinction keeps us all from wondering off into unreality.
Experience. To enlarge our thinking about the nature of aesthetic and religious experience, consider a painting by Claude Monet (1840–1926) and a passage from the prophet Ezekiel. The expansive surface of Monet’s Water Lilies—on view in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—stretches nearly forty-two feet wide and stands seven feet tall. This triptych bears the weight of thickly scumbled impasto paint. One could, as many scholars have, engage this trio of panels in formal terms, taking care to document the work’s provenance, assess its plastic qualities and flesh out the artist’s biography.30 Almost without fail, this kind of research yields interesting material. Concerning Water Lilies, for instance, we learn that the artist labored over this painting and the larger oeuvre to which it belongs from 1914 to 1926; he did so from the vantage point of his studio, which was situated at the edge of his celebrated water-garden at Giverny, some forty miles from Paris; later in life his eyesight grew weak; and, remarkably, this impressive painting was largely forgotten in Monet’s studio until it was discovered and then purchased by MoMA in 1959.
While most are likely to find this data intriguing, my description of Monet’s painting lacks what I regard to be its most salient element: the mention of a viewer’s actual encounter with the work. Certainly formal considerations are important to the critical reception of any work of art, but the essential act is to witness it. For only in witnessing Monet’s Water Lilies can one hope to recover something of the artist’s encounter with his beloved lily pond at Giverny.
The experience of viewing a painting bears striking resemblance to the act of reading a text. More than two and half millennia before Monet commenced to paint, Ezekiel recorded a strange vision that he received from God by the river Chebar. I saw, he says, “a strong wind [coming] out of the north: a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber” (Ezek 1:4). The passage goes on to describe four exotic and winged human-like beings, four wheels within wheels covered in eyes, a dome overhead, a throne attended by creatures that resembled lions and a visage seated on the throne who appeared to be a man. Ezekiel tells us, “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. When I saw it, I fell on my face” (Ezek 1:28).
Similar to the formal considerations that may be directed to any work of visual art, a large and critical enterprise is dedicated to the interpretation of biblical texts. And it follows that if the primary experience we seek from a work such as Water Lilies is to stand before it, then with regard to Ezekiel’s text we place ourselves beneath it. Of course it is not possible for us to witness Ezekiel’s vision firsthand; even the prophet encountered his vision but once. But like Monet’s painting, Ezekiel’s account enables those who read it to see what the prophet saw. How did this vision alter the prophet’s comprehension of God? Having read Ezekiel, should we dare to hope for or even desire a similar lucid and ecstatic encounter?
I have cited Monet’s painting and Ezekiel’s text for two reasons. First, each illustrates a way in which viewing or reading might shape our aesthetic or religious being. Second, each demonstrates the limits of the rational self. Indeed and contrary to its boast, the rational self is ill-equipped to process the overload of sensate data it receives from these kinds of encounters. Consider, for instance, Czeslaw Milosz’s description of a man as he strolls a busy street:
In the cities, the eye meets colorful store displays, the diversity of human types. Looking at passers-by, one can guess from their faces the story of their lives. The movement of the imagination when a man is walking through a crowd has an erotic tinge; his emotions are very close to physiological sensations. He rejoices in dresses, in the flash of lights; while, for instance, Parisian markets with their heaps of vegetables and flowers, fish of every shape and hue, fruits, sides of meat dripping every shade of red offers delights, he need not go seeking them in Dutch or Impressionist painting. He hears snatches of arias, the throbbing of motors mixed with the warble of birds, called greetings, laughter. His nose is assailed by changing odors: coffee, gasoline, oranges, ozone, roasting nuts, perfumes.31
Whether actual or imagined, Milosz’s description remains fixed in the mind’s eye of the one who beheld it. Moreover, the kind of sense-sifting and winnowing that it records is less the evidence of intellectual restlessness or indecision and more the confirmation of our unceasing need to make meaning.
It is sensate experience and not mere rational reflection that gives rise to life’s most poignant moments. A story grips our soul, a spiritual encounter probes our deepest being, a musical performance plays on at the far horizon of our memory, the image of a face returns to us again and again, and because of this our lives are forever changed. English philosopher and geometer Keith Critchlow puts it like this: “The human mind takes apart with its analytical habits of reasoning but the human heart puts things together because it loves them.”32 That is, we sort through ideas, memories, signs, sensations and symbols, hoping—believing—that they will cohere into some greater whole and that this new knowledge will teach us how to live. All the while we recognize that the rationalization of experience is and can only be reductive.
Thus far we have noted that sensory data are fundamental to both the aspirations of the rational self and the experiences of aesthetic life and that, in fact, the rational cannot meaningfully exist apart from the experiential. Nonetheless, the debate in the West surrounding the relationship of cognition to more sensate ways of being has sponsored entire schools of thought in philosophy, art and religion.
Binaries and their limitations. The juxtaposition of the rational self to sensate being naturally returns us to the tension between Enlightenment and romantic habits of mind that we noted in chapter one as well as to the supposed contrast between asceticism and aestheticism that was highlighted earlier in this chapter. Ancient philosophers imagined another related polarity between the Apollonian and the Dionysian self—the former being rational, ordered and self-disciplined and the latter, sensual, spontaneous and given to emotion. Joining these pairs is the familiar wager concerning objective knowledge, or truth, and its counterpoint, subjectivity. Desiring to find a pattern in all of this, a “back of the envelope” approach might suggest the following pairs:
|
Rationality |
Sensuality |
|
Asceticism |
Aestheticism |
|
Enlightenment |
Romanticism |
|
Apollonian |
Dionysian |
|
Objectivity |
Subjectivity |
On first appearance this scheme offers a simple means to navigate what is surely complicated territory and then goes on to establish some observable affinities. For instance, where the rational self is concerned, there is a comfortable affiliation between the Enlightenment mind, an Apollonian persona and ascetic practices that favor reasoned decision making, deferred gratification and objective claims. Meanwhile, the sensate self easily advances a romantic vision, assumes a Dionysian persona and substantially resembles a version of the modernist aesthetic that prefers expressive forms marked by immediacy, directness and spontaneity, some of which are called on to manifest the unconscious or entertain the absurd.
In large part the language used to describe art and religion during America’s postwar period conforms to this columnar alignment. Regarding modernism, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century schools and movements set the stage by coining terms like abstract expressionism, art brut, Dada, fauvism (wild beasts), impressionism, surrealism and so on that prized experience and celebrated subjectivity. Like the Beats and the politics and psychedelia of the counterculture that followed, the American modernist enterprise generally bears a strong Dionysian cast.
Meanwhile, consider the language conservative Protestants adopted to describe their regular behaviors and beliefs: discipline, sacrifice, piety, obedience and faithfulness. These habits of heart were paired with ideational commitments to a range of particular doctrines and moral absolutes that were surely Apollonian in character.33
Could it be that we have happened on a tidy summation wherein modernism might be classed as Dionysian and evangelicalism, Apollonian? Might it be that when this picture is fully colored in, we can locate religion—especially the various fundamentalisms—in the left column of our diagram and assign art—especially modernism—to the right? In fact, a careful review casts doubt on this arrangement.
3.3. Donald Judd, Untitled, Douglas fir plywood, 1976
Consider, for instance, the American minimalist movement that followed abstract expressionism. It is well known that devotees such as Donald Judd (1928–1994) were deeply indebted to forms found in Shaker furniture and architecture. As evidenced by his reliance on plainness, repetition, austere materials and monochromatic color, Judd’s minimalist aesthetic resembles the ascetic practices of Shaker Anabaptists (see fig. 3.3). As such, a good deal of minimalist work bears an easy resemblance to the appointments of a monastic enclosure, the silence of an empty chapel or even the rhythmic pattern of the daily offices. Within modernism, this same aesthetic disposition was fully present in the German Bauhaus, mid-century American formalism, and the International Style in architecture. It continues in the contemporary work of painters like Sol LeWitt and Brice Marden. While, as already suggested, the larger modernist movement was primarily given to a more Dionysian way of being, clearly the noteworthy practitioners that I have mentioned embraced an Apollonian sensibility.
The reality of postwar conservative Protestant religion evidences similar anomalies. For instance, if fundamentalists and evangelicals were essentially Apollonian in habit of mind, the religion of their charismatic and Pentecostal sisters—whose doctrine and piety, save for the person and work of the Holy Spirit, was broadly and mutually aligned—was unabashedly Dionysian, less concerning beliefs and more in regard to style. Charismatic theological conservatives, including a great many African American congregations, promoted a wide range of practices centered primarily on spiritual experience—healing, glossolalia, dreams and visions, the casting out of demons and evil spirits, words of knowledge, and signs of supernatural power. In other words, the reality of Pentecostal and charismatic life was weighted more toward experience and less toward doctrine and apologetics, though these latter concerns remained important.
Given their scope, neither minimalism nor the charismatic movement can be regarded as mere aberrations or anomalies within the larger movements to which they belong. To account for them, therefore, our model needs to be more fluid. That is, as we seek to gain an accurate picture of American life and culture during the postwar period, we cannot claim either that modernists wholly embraced sensate experience or that conservative Protestants rejected it. The binary pairs and polarities we have outlined might be useful in charting differences of mind and disposition, but even the very architecture of this proposal demonstrates a clear preference for the rational self. By design, schematic charts are different in character from life lived; at best they are dinner menus and not the meal.
Meanwhile and with considerable confidence, we must insist that sensate experience and perception has been and will remain an animating force for artists and religious practitioners alike. Those who claim (or imagine) that they are able to perceive ideas in some pure and abstract form apart from their embodiment are simply misguided. For in making this claim they fail to remember that sensate experience precedes all intellection. It can be no other way. Indeed, the gravitas that we assign to art and religion is due substantially to its ability to embody form and belief in ritual and routine, its capacity to cherish abstract dimensions “as lofty as the heavens,” all the while grounding these in the materiality of daily life. And it is the business of aesthetics to plumb their depths.
Aesthetics. Leonard Koren reminds us that aesthetics “is less than three hundred years old. Etymologically it derives from a Greek work for perceptual or sensory knowledge, aisthesis.”34 “German philosopher Hegel defined art as ‘the sensuous presentation of ideas.’ It is, he indicated, in the business of conveying concepts, just like ordinary language, except that it engages us through both our senses and our reason, and is uniquely effective for its dual modes of address.”35 In concert with Koren’s and Hegel’s insistence that our senses enable us to acquire genuine knowledge, philosopher Arthur Danto takes the matter a step further by defining works of art as “embodied meaning.”36 This mode of thought comports nicely with the claim of artist Ellsworth Kelly, who, in describing his unframed relief paintings, announced, “What I’ve made is real—underline the word real.”37 While the nuances of particular aesthetic theories can be configured variously, most visual art seems to contain at least three elements: a core concept or idea, a physical form, and the sensate experience of both making objects and encountering them.38 The discipline of aesthetics, therefore, provides a means to fruitfully consider the dynamic intersection of cognitive and sensate and material ways of being, a place that sponsors the poignant meeting of idea and experience in the material world. Diane Ackerman explains this as well as anyone:
We look to artists to feel for us, to suffer and rejoice, to describe the heights of their passionate response to life so that we can enjoy them from a safe distance. . . . We look to artists to stop time for us, to break the cycle of birth and death and temporarily put an end to life’s processes. It is too much of a whelm for any one person to face up to without going into sensory overload. Artists, on the other hand, court that intensity. We ask artists to fill our lives with a cavalcade of fresh sights and insights, the way life was for us when we were children and everything was new.39
In the West, however, there is a long and commanding history of ideas that runs counter to this more integrated manner of thinking. Since the scope of this terrain lies beyond my training, philosopher Charles Taylor and his landmark study, Sources of the Self, will guide our thinking.40 If Western dualism between mind and body begins with Plato (less so, Aristotle), it comes of age in the writings of Descartes. Taylor points out that the penchant of Cartesian thought was to distance ourselves from the embodied world, to regard our senses and passions as unenlightened, tawdry and plebeian. Built on the observations made earlier in this chapter, the shift from the primacy of one’s senses to reason as the basis of self-formation effectively advances the Greek ideal of a rational and ordered world from which emerges a conception of higher and lower orders of being. The fully realized self is the precursor to new conceptions of everything from civic order to ideal beauty, as we observed in the previous chapter.
As Taylor points out, the move from sensate passions to rationality as the basis for being was just the first half of the story. There was also a move inward. That is, the move to the inner life as expressing the true nature of reality that would become the basis of the radical individualism that now forms the common understanding of our popular consumer culture and the disembodied spirit that remains part and parcel of American Protestantism. Put differently, the move upward toward intellection and inward toward the self is a striking affirmation of the Gnosticism that tempted second-century Christians.
Though unorthodox, Diane Ackerman’s thinking on this matter is instructive. According to her, our routine juxtaposition of the cognitive to the sensate is entirely mistaken. That is, Ackerman believes these functions exist in a fluid and dynamic relationship to each other. “The mind,” she writes, “doesn’t really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision.”41 Luci Shaw’s poem “The Simple Dark” suggests a similar unity. Writes Shaw, “My whole body an ear, a nose, my whole being an eye.”42 For Christians like Shaw, there is a resonance between the integrated conception of the self that she advances and the ancient Hebrew worldview that showcases a unity of heart, mind, body and soul. Embracing this more filled-out understanding of the self, theologian David Ford wonders: “Are there also possibilities of transformed sensing which see with ‘the eyes of the heart,’ hear with ‘the inner ear,’ smell ‘the odour of holiness,’ savour ‘the sweetness of the Lord’ or feel ‘the touch of the Spirit’? Are these only metaphors? Or is there something in the rich traditions about ‘the spiritual senses’ within and beyond Christianity?”43
While sorting out these preferences with respect to habits of mind is valuable work, our greater need is to construct a unified understanding of the self. In this regard, simple binaries will inevitably betray us since they lack any real capacity to account for wonder, doubt, mystery and suffering—the deeper matters that ground our being and also beguile us. Our senses are a vital and arresting means to muse, learn and know, but as we have observed throughout this chapter, many believe that a life given to the senses represents weakness. In the section to follow, we will consider the ways that unfortunate stereotypes concerning gender and age and have been mobilized to confirm this.
BORN OF WEAKNESS
It is the nature of the rational self—the head—to overcome, to dominate, to rule. In the West this domain has been traditionally demarcated as male and adult, thereby assigning more diminutive aspects of being—matters of the heart and unrestrained passions—to women and children. In postwar America, gender bias occupied an important place in the sociology of the evangelical church as well as the secular art world. Regarding the latter, historian Francis Pohl states the matter forthrightly: “In the world of art, as elsewhere, women were perceived of as nature, both literally and figuratively. Women were seen as more ‘natural’ because of their supposed inability to engage in sophisticated intellectual activity. They represented the body, the world of the senses and the earth, while men represented the mind, the world of art and science and industry.”44
The arrangement that Pohl suggests—in which women are bound to their nature and naturalness—is an assumption that prevails in the John Duigan film we considered earlier. If, as Western philosophy has argued, our higher nature is to think, then the well-formed rational self is imagined to be masculine and adult. In this arrangement the male mind strides, so to speak, with confidence toward objectivity. The unfortunate corollary to this view is that women and children are relegated to the domain of feeling and associated to nonrational functions such as passion, whimsy and hysteria. Again, a listing of binary pairs might help to sort out these simple, yet pernicious, assumptions:
|
Higher Nature |
Lower Nature |
|
Thinking |
Feeling |
|
Objective |
Subjective |
|
Adult |
Child |
|
Male |
Female |
In Western culture, at least, the qualities listed in the left-hand column of this oppositional arrangement have been granted dominance, such that lives given to feeling, emotion, intuition and pleasure must be regarded as subdominant. To maintain this ordering of passion, traditional understandings of masculinity have mostly aligned to the left-hand column, and the “weaker” inclinations of women and children have mostly aligned to the right. To further establish this pattern of dominance and subdominance, “soft” categories like naiveté, subjectivity, sentimentality and (surprisingly) promiscuity have been attributed to women and children.
First let’s consider the state of naiveté or childishness. When a young boy explores the face of a grandparent with his hands, makes noise to discover language or experiments with movement to understand space, it is understood that these behaviors are his primary means to gain knowledge of the world. Consequently, these actions are lauded.45 But in the modern world this cause-and-effect relationship is understood to be temporary. Childhood and the season of adolescence that follows is a transitional zone from which an adult self is to emerge. Adulthood calls for “more responsible action,” wherein sensuality and subjectivity no longer hold sway over the rational self. That is, a fully formed adult is one who has abandoned adolescent practices by regularly exercising his mind over matter so that in his mature state he has undergone a Cartesian coming of age wherein his immaturity and naiveté have been redirected. In the developed world that follows, the work of the successful man no longer requires him to use his back or his hands. Here more base sensate encounters are displaced by cognitive being, hence the traditional workplace ascent from “blue collar” labor to the “white collar” professions.46
Second is the matter of subjectivity. If the realism of objectivity belongs to the rational self, then all else must be consigned to the domain of subjectivity, a territory that not only appears antithetical to certainty but also can be perceived as the dark entrance to theaters of doubt. Generally speaking, the arts are engulfed in subjectivity. Consider the following examples. To one, the luminous red field of a Mark Rothko painting appears to be empty, meaningless space. To another, this same work is the deep exploration of unconscious being. One connoisseur might delight in the finery of Japanese porcelain, even as another finds it wholly unremarkable. One admirer might find a monumental sculpture by Mark di Suvero fashioned from steel I-beams and painted blaze orange to be a bold, life-giving civic gesture. A critic of the same might regard it as an urban eyesore. Since there is no obvious objective means to account for this wide variety of likes and dislikes, we regard the variances that result as matters of personal taste or acquired social convention.
Again, if the adult male persona exudes confidence, rationality and certainty, then the disposition of women and children represents indecision, subjectivity and doubt, as the latter group moves move from impression to impression, never gaining mastery of the whole. Many find this soft or indeterminate territory troubling since it suggests that taste (and by extension truth) is a relative matter and that, beheld in this zone, it lacks the needed mettle to accomplish real good in the world.
A third worry has to do with sentimentality. Sentimentality signals a return to childish ways, but unlike the bliss of childish ignorance, when this state is willful or elected, when feelings are either untethered from formal training or some agreed-upon rational framework, it is believed that these lack substance, gravitas. For some religious believers, sentimental notions invite saccharine and even maudlin images of Mary and Jesus in religious gift shops.47 Their secular counterpart delights in collecting Precious Moments and all manner of mass-produced tchotchkes. Together they find solace in the screensaver kitsch of market-savvy Thomas Kinkade’s Media Arts Group, Inc. In these kinds of situations, the objects in question might hold substantial personal meaning to those who possess them, and yet in the larger cultural context they are cliché and trite. But these kinds of objects are easy to criticize. Sports paraphernalia, designer labels and material pop culture are simply more refined iterations of the same.
A fourth and final concern is that the sensate self is vulnerable to the ways of pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. In this regard, the woman is thought to be a disordering presence, a Siren. From Eve to Delilah and from Bathsheba to Salomé, the woman is not only a beauty; she is also a temptress. Meanwhile, it is generally understood that the man who pursues these encounters is the aggressor. But things are not as they appear, for in pursuit of this pleasure he finds himself yielding to an irrational force: the woman in whom he encounters subjectivity and sensuality—this is beyond his control.
Simple physiology confirms that real difference between male and female Homo sapiens does exist. But beyond this, the degree to which similarity and difference between males and females is genetically coded or socially acquired remains a matter of considerable research and speculation. Nonetheless, while the topic of difference is both interesting and important, with regard to this study it is secondary. Our interest here is simply to observe the ways in which age and gender stereotypes have been used as a means to dismiss the authority of art and religion.
In fact, postwar conservative Protestants and secular modernists cultivated institutional machismo as a means to establish their dominance. If evangelicals aligned themselves with professional athletes, military heroes and handsome preachers, modernists adopted a frontier aesthetic, tackled monumental projects and assumed a barroom swagger. These inclinations may be more the evidence of America’s postwar cultural norms than any doctrinal or aesthetic convictions. But whatever its source or sources, from the 1950s onward both movements sought to cultivate a masculine identity, which in turn generated considerable internal strife.
American modernism often evidences a hard-edged, gritty realism. The movement was urban and not pastoral, more prosaic than poetic, dystopic and not utopian. If America’s popular culture celebrated the heroism of what would come to be known as the “greatest generation,” modernists traded in existential doubt and explored the anxiety of the unconscious that had been spawned by the violence, mechanization and bloodshed of the new world that was emerging. The work of painters such as Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock and the sculptures of Mark di Suvero and David Smith bears the marks of this kind of machismo—they are bold, direct, raw and immediate.
Also present, but consigned more to the background, was the movement’s penchant to explain subconscious states, dreams and primitive mark-making and to make assertions about the primarily subjective nature of aesthetic experience. In one sense, the art world went on to celebrate visionaries and naives and their automatic drawing, brute experiences, sensuality and sexuality. But in another, the demonstration of a kind of romantic weakness in the visual arts has often been regarded as a feminine enterprise, and through much of the modern period, the men who ventured into these endeavors were thought to be feminized or effeminate. If gay identity and sexual practice had previously been present mostly in the background, in the closing decades of the twentieth century it was entirely “outed” in the art world.48
While these claims invite all manner of political posturing and social critique, pursuing them in this study will not help us to estimate what is actually at stake. A remarkable irony underlies all of this: most artists in the annals of art history are male, and most architecture in the West is masculine in form.
Meanwhile, postwar evangelicals maintained their own convictions about the roles of men and women. Consider, for instance, the nature of Christian discipleship. Having managed his petulance and subdued his passions, the young believer was to move from “drinking milk” to “eating meat.” In time he would gain the very mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16; Eph 2:3).49 There is much to commend this account. But in their haste to define Christian maturity, low-church Protestants generally bypassed a role for the senses, save for music. And to the extent that they sought spiritual experience, these were lodged less in the material world and more in the momentary warming of hearts and the training of minds toward God. In other words, evangelical spirituality remained largely gnostic, and this proclivity was reflected in its programs of discipleship and leadership.
If the “upward” move from sensate being to an adult cognitive self seemed like a sure route to Christian maturity, then it was also the prelude to Christian leadership. With few exceptions, Catholics and evangelicals regarded leadership in the church as an exclusively masculine domain. The man of God was to preach the Word of God. Other church duties such as service, hospitality and teaching children were delegated to women. And in Protestant circles, this view gained substantial momentum from turn-of-the-century movements such as “muscular Christianity,” which was designed to reverse the feminization of faith.50 In the light of these arrangements, it is no surprise that aesthetic concerns seldom appeared among the “core values” of most evangelical ministries during the postwar period. If the character of art was essentially subjective and feminine, then its purpose must be limited to mere embellishment and decoration. During the postwar period, rare would be the man who ever served on a church decorating committee.
Could it be that these Christians had forgotten Jesus’ teaching “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Mt 5:5), or Paul’s reminder to the Corinthian church that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1:27)? Art and life are born of such weakness. And great art and great lives must be continuously open to consider the possibility that weakness is the truth, the truth that lies beyond or beneath the so-called facts that we substitute for truth. This is because truth is engaged and given to empathy. Perhaps we have underrepresented the virtue of childlikeness. Perhaps we have forgotten that childlike faith is lauded in the New Testament.
Whether it is Odysseus’s intrigue with the Sirens, the fictional John Lindsay’s attempt to create a new Eden, Jesus’ teaching regarding the law, or Platonic and Cartesian habits of mind, in the West there has been an imposing and collective nervousness about the capacity of our senses to generate desire even as they jettison reason. As we have seen in this section, one strategy for managing the senses has been to align them with weakness, to regard them as essentially childlike or feminine. In the postwar period, both the evangelical church and the secular art world embraced this bias, albeit in dramatically different ways.
But failing to extol the virtue of our senses might be likened to an urban planner who cannot see a place of brilliance, beauty and hope beyond the failed systems of her city. Meanwhile, the true promise of her blighted habitat can be realized only when its architectural achievements, natural assets, economic potential and civic pride are attended to. So it is with our senses; every effort to recover their virtue will be futile until we can see beyond the ways in which they have been apprenticed to debauchery.
In most Christian contexts the way of the cross rests at the heart of discipleship, and it follows that every effort must be made to pilot the ship of the self away from any ruinous shore. But in resisting the kinds of desires that are summoned by our senses, Christians must not forgo their opportunity to enjoy God’s good world. In fact, it is God’s intention that psalmic joy—a joy that draws its vitality from unending encounters with the goodness of God and the fecund splendor of his created cosmos—coexist with sacrifice. A deep and rich spiritual life will be lived only when aesthetic delight and ascetic discipline walk hand in hand.51
PLEASURE REDEEMED
Luke 7:36-50 recounts the story of a woman who anointed Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume. Each time I read it, I am reminded of her overwhelming need and audacious course of action. In what must have seemed like mad hysteria to all of those who watched, she rushed to Jesus to prevail on his mercy.
The incident that Luke describes occurs in the household of Simon, where Jesus, an invited guest, reclines at the Pharisee’s table. Though not an eyewitness to the event, Luke reports that the woman, who had entered the room uninvited, “brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him [Jesus] at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment” (Lk 7:37-38). By any social or religious standard, the woman’s impulse to let down her hair in public and then use it to cleanse Jesus’ feet—all the while kissing them—was an outrage. She was, according to Luke, “a woman in the city, who was a sinner” (Lk 7:37). No doubt, the sweet scent of the spilled perfume permeated the room, and her provocative actions might have aroused the sexual passions and/or social protests of the men present.
For most moderns, it will be impossible to estimate the woman’s social, psychological and physical vulnerability. Her gender and her supposed profession suggest that she was unwelcome and even unsafe in the Pharisee’s house. In fact, Hebrew law might have permitted these men to rise up and stone her, but they did not. The woman’s desperate need to be in the presence of Jesus, to receive his forgiveness for her sins and, subsequently, to worship him enabled her to overcome any shame or fear that might have kept her from interrupting Simon’s meal.
Audacious though it was, the most remarkable aspect of this story is not the woman’s behavior. Rather it is Jesus’ acceptance of her advance—even in the face of Simon’s protestation. Turning to the woman (facing her), Jesus rebuked Simon, saying, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment.” Not only had Simon refused to receive the woman; he had failed to properly welcome Jesus. Speaking to Simon, but all the while looking at the woman, Jesus continues, “Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love” (Lk 7:44-47). The woman had placed herself beneath the mercy of the only one who could save her and the one who—unbeknown to Simon, the other men and the woman—would one day redeem the whole of creation.
I am grateful that Luke includes this outrageous encounter in his Gospel, but this Gentile writer was not alone in recording this event, or at least an event that resembles it. Mark and John offer similar accounts. On first reading Mark 14:3-9, it might appear to be an abbreviated version of Luke 7. In Mark’s telling, however, the woman pours the ointment on Jesus’ head, not on his feet, and the interruption in Simon’s home occurs just days before Jesus’ crucifixion, whereas Luke sets it in an earlier period amid Jesus’ active ministry. Simon is mentioned in both accounts, but Luke identifies him as a Pharisee while Mark reports only that he is a leper. Regarding Mark’s mention of leprosy, it is worth noting that Simon, the host, might have been considered ceremonially unclean. Meanwhile, Mark’s telling includes no mention of the woman’s sinfulness.
If the chronologies supplied by Mark and Luke are somewhat reliable, it is not beyond the pale to imagine two separate accounts that feature a man named Simon (presumably a common name). But perhaps there was just one Simon—both a Pharisee and a leper—and the other conflicting details such as the perfume poured on Jesus’ feet in Luke and emptied onto his head in Mark can be harmonized.
Meanwhile, John 12:1-8 provides yet another account of a woman who anoints Jesus with perfume. In John’s Gospel this event occurs after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and before his final journey to Jerusalem. In certain respects this telling parallels the stories found in Luke and Mark, except for this: here the woman is known to us. She is Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and a close friend of Jesus. She too empties a “pound of costly perfume made of pure nard” (its value equal to a common laborer’s annual earnings) onto Jesus’ feet, but not his head. As in the Lucan account, she loosens her hair to wipe Jesus’ feet, but unlike in Mark’s telling, we have no reason to suspect that Mary is a “sinful woman” or that she has any cause to repent.
In all three accounts, male onlookers are offended by the woman’s importunity. In Luke, Simon objects, pointing out that she is a “sinful woman.” Jesus rebukes him. In Mark, several self-righteous men protest that the perfume she has spilled might have been sold and its proceeds used to feed the poor. Jesus rebukes them, saying, “You always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me” (Mk 14:7). In John there is but one detractor, Judas, who is not mentioned either in Mark or Luke. He too protests the waste but then goes on to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. The men—the keepers of decorum, the rule makers and maintainers—are self-righteous and inhospitable. Failing to understand Jesus, each man or group of men betrays him.
The three events we have considered feature a highly sensual moment in which a woman humbles herself before Jesus and anoints him with expensive perfume. The sensuality of what transpires should not suggest that the woman’s actions are unmitigated by rational constraint. She is entirely clear-headed about her need, as well as the one who can meet it. In fact, it is only the woman (the one anointing Jesus) and Jesus (the one being anointed) who seem to grasp the gravity of what is occurring. Indeed, each of these sensual anointings either acknowledges the Jewish practice of placing oil on one’s head to bestow blessing or imitates the preparation of a deceased body for burial. Jesus confirms this, saying, “She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial” (Mk 14:8). This same sentiment is echoed in John 12:7. These sensual acts are entirely sacramental in character.
The Gospels, then, contain one, two or even three separate events that celebrate the sensual, even sensuous, exchange between Jesus and a woman who seeks to worship him.52 They are spiritual transactions of the deepest sort that are marked by mess, passion and adoration. They are raw, direct and expressionistic, not unlike some kinds of performance art. They stun those who read them. While these women possess no social or cultural power, each has placed herself in the presence of the one who has all power.
The bearing of these three Gospel narratives on the concerns explored in this chapter is powerful and direct. In his telling, each writer highlights the primacy of sensual being as it is manifested in the materiality of the world. In connection to the discussion of our embodiment in chapter two, we are ones who bear God’s image and as such are made to exist in life-giving relationship to the created order, our human community and our Creator. This cannot be achieved by the renewing of our minds alone. Rather, it requires the redemption of the whole person, including every sensory receptor that makes its home in our bodies.
Having made this claim, however, once again we come face-to-face with the truth about ourselves: a great gap exists between our human nature and our human potential. We are conflicted beings. We have sinned and will continue to sin, and in this regard it is tempting to blame our senses for these troubles. But according to Jesus the breeding ground for sin lies not in tasting unclean food served up by unwashed hands. Rather, “out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander” (Mt 15:19). In line with this thinking, Thomas Aquinas reasons, “For parts of the body don’t start action but are merely slaves of the soul’s desires, whereas our inner ability to desire is not a slave but a free man in relation to reason, acting as well as being acted on.”53 The pleasure that we derive from our senses is God’s good gift to us. As such, we have been created to participate in life to the full. To that end, millions of Christians regularly enjoy food, sex, music and art all in a spirit of great thanksgiving. It follows that our propensity to sin is not as the inevitable outcome of our sensate being or any pleasure that it might supply but rather the bad fruit of our misplaced longings.
This chapter underscores the conviction that our passions must be bounded so that we do not harm ourselves, devastate others or spoil the creation—an obligation no different from the one we have to manage whatever wealth, privilege and power we might possess. Stewardship, artisanship and citizenship are all rooted in the same convictions. If love is the best reason to live a bold, generous and audacious life, then love also calls us to practice restraint.
Some years ago it was my good fortune to hear Oscar Hijuelos read the following excerpt from his novel Mr. Ives’ Christmas. As the story opens, Ives recalls entering Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and becoming “lost in a kind of euphoric longing.”
Each time he entered a sanctuary, Ives himself nearly wept, especially at Christmas, when the image of one particular church on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, whose choir was very good and the worshipers were devout, came back to him, its interior smelling mightily of evergreen boughs, candle wax, and pots of red and white blossoms set against the columns. Dignified Irishmen, with greatly slicked heads of hair, dockworkers for the most part, turned up in ties and jackets, their wives and children by their sides. And there were bootleggers and policemen and carpenters and street sweepers in attendance as well. And a blind man whom Ives sometimes helped down the marble stairs; a few Negroes, as they were called in those days, all, Ives was convinced, believing in the majesty of the child. The old Italian ladies, their heads wrapped in black scarves and their violet lips kissing their scapular medals, and crucifixes and rosaries, kneeling, nearly weeping before the altar and the statues of Christ and His mother; and at Christmas, the beginning of His story, sweetly invoked by the rustic and somehow ancient-looking crèche.
The fact was that Ives, uncertain of many things, could at that time of year sit rather effortlessly within the incense-and-wax-candle-scented confines of a church like Saint Patrick’s thinking about the images, ever present and timeless, that seemed to speak especially to him. Not about the cheery wreaths, the boughs of pine branches, the decorative ivy and flowers set out here and there, but rather about the Christ child, whose meaning evoked for him a feeling for “the beginning of things,” a feeling that time and all its sufferings had fallen away.54
Deeply Catholic in character, Hijuelos’s wonderful prose describes an instance where Ives indulges the sights, smells, sounds and textures of Christmas and is led to worship Jesus. The moment is both immanent and transcendent.
While each of our perceptual capacities enables us to participate in the splendor and mystery of God’s world, the most exalted function of the senses might be realized in worship. To underscore this point, consider the highly sensate experience of Israel’s tabernacle worship—smell in the incense and the offering, sound in the trumpet blast and the priest’s blessing, sight in the symbols and space, touch in the animal sacrifices carried in, taste in consuming the offering itself. For Israelites wandering in the wilderness, this spectacle would have been unequaled in pageantry.
At their best, sensate encounters are a wellspring of spiritual communion. It was surely this conviction that led the poet to pen, “Taste and see that the LORD is good” (Ps 34:8).55 And here the psalmist simply anticipates John’s later claims regarding the incarnation: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was revealed, as we have seen it and testify to it” (1 John 1:1-2). It turns out that the very hearing, seeing, looking and touching that is the precondition of all art making is also the bedrock of Christian experience and belief. For as one evangelical hymn confirms, in Christ it is possible to celebrate the redemption of all things:
Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure,
by the cross are sanctified;
peace is there that knows no measure,
joys that through all time abide.56
While art might summon our senses to their highest order, our sensate capacities enable us to love what God loves—his world, his creatures and his people.