Flannery O'Connor & the Incarnation

There's a splendid article, apparently by an Orthodox writer, on Flannery O'Connor qua iconographer over at ISI. Well worth the read: The Iconographic Fiction and Christian Humanism of Flannery O’Connor.

The Internet & the Size of the World

If we believe "about.com," the earth has an equatorial circumference of 24,901.55 miles. That gives us 196,888,000 square miles of surface area. Yet every once and a while, more often it seems due to the internet, one comes across a thing that or a person who belongs in some far-away corner of all that space.

My most recent experience of this phenomenon comes via the blog Roma locuta est (note the fun url). It's kept, under his real name, by a perfectly splendid and highly talented fellow I knew (not immensely well, but somewhat) during my time in Ohio. He beautifully sang one-half of the Victimae paschali (the other half being done by the lovable Italian permanent deacon) one Easter when I was in college. One of his daughters, when about two, is reported (I didn't see this myself) to have put a couch arm cover on her head and announced, in response to an inquiry, "I'm not a princess, I'm a nun!" It's a pity he lives in Delaware and not Nashville. And the blog, by the way, is thoroughly enjoyable.

Lies, Untruths, and Historically Unencumbered Examples

Anyone for whom the internet is more than a series of tubes has probably observed, over recent weeks, a widespread smoldering fire over the moral boundaries that surround violations of the eighth commandment. The discussion, on which a veritable whose-who of Catholic American thinkers has weighed, was sparked by the "sting" videos produced by an organization called Live Action at a Planned Parenthood facility. I write here not because I have anything profound to offer to that conversation (that would require that this page have an audience), but rather because I have thoughts that I want to develop myself, and this is the easiest place in which to write them.

Several writers, notably at the Witherspoon Institute, have come out strongly with the opinion that there is no exception to the prohibition on deceptive false utterances. Many of their critics have raised the Nazi-at-the-door scenario and the necessity-of-spies scenario in response. I think the Nazi scenarios are bad examples for this exercise because they carry too much baggage, leading to uncritical assumptions and conclusions.

Thus, for this exercise, we're going to take a situation that engender essentially no preconceptions, at least among Americans: there is a Frenchman, working for the French government, who slips into Sevastapol as a spy during the Crimean War. He carries false papers and is there with the express intent of passing sensitive information to the allied armies. We will assume that the Crimean War was just. Of the following acts undertaken by the spy, which are immoral as violations of the eighth commandment?

1. The Spy comes ashore furtively.
2. The Spy wears Russian clothes.
3. The Spy wears his hair and beard in a Russian fashion.
4. The Spy carries papers falsified to appear as identification documents issued by the Czar's government.
5. The Spy carries Russian matchbooks and other personal paraphernalia.
6. The Spy greets a Russian fisherman in Russian.
7. The Spy greets a member of the Sevastapol garrison or police in Russian.
8. The Spy lends a match, from his Russian matchbook, to the policeman.
9. The Spy, when asked for his name, gives the Russian translation of his name.
10. The Spy, when asked for his name, gives a false Russian name that bears no relation to his own.
11. The Spy asks directions from a Russian passerby.
12. The Spy, when asked, produces his Russian passport.
13. The Spy, when asked about his background, says that he is from Odessa, that his father is a clockmaker. a) Assume his father is not a clockmaker, and that he was born in Marseilles. b) Assume instead that his father is a clockmaker in Marseilles.
14. The Spy, when asked about his business, says that he has come to Sevastapol to make arrangements to sell goods to the garrison and ship them across the Black Sea (or insert preferred business).
15. The Spy observes the dispositions of Sevastapol's defenses.
16. The Spy communicates his observations to the allied forces by furtive means.
17. When asked "You're not a French spy, are you?" the Spy replies "No."
18. When asked "You're not a French spy, are you?" the Spy replies "What a silly thing to say! By the Autocrat of all the Russians himself, I'm shocked to hear such an accusation!"
19. The Spy, when conversing with a Russian, makes disparaging remarks about Napoleon III, when he personally admires the Emperor.
20. The Spy attends the Divine Liturgy at an Orthodox church, where he engages in liturgically correct gestures and recites the Nicene Creed without the filioque.
21. The Spy goes into a tavern, plies a Russian soldier with vodka, and tells him stories of his adventures (which never happened) until the soldier reveals secret military information.
22. Thy Spy engages in #21, but drinks the Russian into a stupor and then rifles his papers.
23. The Spy engages in a) #21 and b) 22, but without telling false stories.
    

I can't think of any other spy activities that involve dishonesty and aren't covered here. Which are lies?

Iconoclasm

The decline of ecclesiastical art in the Christian west---and the decline of art in the west more generally---is a well-documented, or at least a well-observed, phenomenon. The history of artistic decline, the rush to shatter rules and co-opt artistic renderings for the purpose of expression, can be found elsewhere. I tend not to regard myself as qualified to tell it, and I shall decline to attempt to do so. But it seems, based on simple casual observation, that this decline must be related to a different trend that has arisen recently in ecclesiastical art.

The trend of which I speak here is the practice of writing icons of Western saints. You can find over at the New Liturgical Movement a contributor who writes at great length about his practice of writing icons of Western saints (among other subjects). I will here step out on a limb and unequivocally declare that I do not approve of this practice. I find it wrong-headed, counter-productive, discordant, and just plain odd.

First of all, the practice is wrong-headed. The icon is the principal form of ecclesiastical art in the East. There, it has flourished, developed, and become an integral part of the lives, practices, and belief of generations of Christians. Iconographical art forms certainly existed in the West and influenced the development of Western art forms. But the traditions of Western Christians developed away from icons and into more representational forms of ecclesiastical art (icons are certainly representational when compared to, e.g., abstract art forms, but it is certainly my understanding that an iconographer does not seek to reproduce the image of his subject in the same way that a realist painter does). Whatever the merits of iconography may be, and I do not pretend to deny them those, they simply are not what the Western Church has been using for a great many centuries: they no longer form an organic part of our tradition here. The current attempt to import them is an odd exercise in unnecessary cross culterization. What would we think if the Archbishop of Louisville appeared on Sunday carrying a serpentine Eastern crozier? more dramatically, what would a Byzantine congregation think if their pastor replaced all the icons in their church with statues? The West and the East have their own traditions and their own art forms. Both produce beautiful works suited to the cultures, history, and sensibilities of their respective societies. Neither has any need of being colonized in this sort of way by the other.

Second, the practice is counter-productive. The Church in America could furnish a large European nation with its monstrous religious art. There is a vast quantity of work to be done in rediscovering and reinvigorating art in continuity with Western traditions. Going and plastering icons all over the place works at counter purposes with that necessary work. In addition, many of these icons depicting Western saints are simply not very attractive. Take this image of St. John Neumann, for instance. The icon is a flagrant copy of an older, well-known image of the immigrant bishop. But it sacrifices the original work's benefits without introducing any of its own. It may not be an absolute eyesore, but neither is it beautiful. So we take business and impetus away from artists in our tradition, while filling the spaces in our homes, offices, and churches with mediocre pieces.

Third, the practice is discordant. It is the artistic equivalent of eating Thai food on Thanksgiving or hiding eggs on Christmas. It takes a saint---a man or a woman who served God in a particular time and place in history and whose life in that time and place has been held up by the Church as a universal example for those still on earth---and thrusts him into an entirely different setting. St. John Neumann does not belong in an iconographical setting; neither does St. Patrick, any more than Our Lady of Czestechowa belongs in a baroque statue. Similarly, to connect to points made supra, I as a Western Christian do not belong in a setting filled with icons. At the very minimum, Western saints and Western Christians together do not so belong: I would not begrudge Byzantines a devotion to St. Patrick based around a rendering made in their traditions, nor would I find it improper to hang Our Lady of Czestechowa in my own home. Both of those cases would be examples of one tradition of the Church recognizing the fruits of the other. This strikes me as an entirely different proposition from the mere appropriation of a methodology indigenous to one tradition into the other, apart from any simultaneous borrowing of content. St. Patrick in a Latin church done up like some kind of archimandrite defeats all the aims of ecclesiastical art: seeing it prompts one to think first not of God, but of why in blue blazes St. Patrick is dressed like St. Cyril.

Finally, the practice is just plain odd. It flunks the smell test. A lot of ecclesiastical-art cognoscenti look with disdain at the plaster and chalkware statuary that adorned our grandparents' houses, as crass, mass-produced, and of poor quality. I will openly admit to looking with even greater disdain at modern resin statuary, which is just plain ugly. But the fact of the matter is that statuary belongs in the West, it's familiar (and even those chalkware statues, which oftentimes aren't all that bad, serve a legitimate purpose for the devotion of ordinary folk). One need not ask questions about its presence, or wonder why it instead of something else is present. The same can be said for many forms of two-dimensional artwork at home in the West as well. Icons, though, except when depicting Eastern saints, produce exactly the opposite reaction. They are, in a word, puzzling. Unfamiliar. Odd. Some of the people who produce them are undeniably odd as well. I decline to look for them, but if one is so inclined, one can find about the internet a series of icons---produced in the same unadorned, bland manner as the one of St. John linked above---depicting a wide variety of non-Catholic and even non-Christian personages surmounted by nimbi. Nobody is ever going to make a baroque sculpture of Martin Luther King as a saint. Maybe inferior icons are cheap to make. Maybe they have simply become trendy somehow. Maybe lots of good reasons can be proffered for their use in the West. But their proliferation remains odd.

Monarchism

I recently saw an article in The Remnant—one of those publications that I don’t read but of which I hear on a semi-regular basis—advocating monarchism. The author, undoubtedly correctly, observes that monarchism possesses a “prestige just a tiny bit better than fascism, but not nearly as respectable as being Amish.” At the same time, I continue to find it, monarchism, that is, strikingly popular in the circles in which I run—actually, a correction: the circles in which I read. I doubt whether a man who could think of only a single personal friend to invite to the baptism of his first child can be said to “run” in any circle, at least of the social kind. Of course, regardless of who exactly these monarchists are, there are plenty of reasons for them being such.

Catholics have been monarchists for a long time. English Cavaliers and Jacobites, Carlists, aristocrazia nera, Hapsburg retainers, the scourged survivors of the Vendée, these and others were the counter-revolutionaries from nearly every land in the West who had fought against some despotism or another that had threatened Holy Mother Church and a political system friendly to Her. Ireland, in fact, seems to be the only European land in which Catholic intransigence has identified itself with republicanism—but that must be a story for another day. The internet has done wonders for these scattered discontents, allowing their names and sentiments to creep out of the small chapels and drawing rooms in which their adherents have gathered for generations. So, like the traditional devotions of the Faith, monarchism, which played such a large role in the social views and traditions of our forebears, has attracted a small collection of converts.

The monarchist faces his chief problem in his need to critique the prevailing alternative, electoral democracy. And like any comprehensive critic, he runs the risk of becoming a crank. Now, some might point to mere disagreeability or biliousness as the sine qua non of crank status. But in reality a person can be perfectly disagreeable without stooping so low. Rather, a crank must be grumpy, in the minority, and wrong about something—not wrong in conclusions, for then crank merely becomes a moniker for “one with whom I disagree,” but wrong in premises. The crank argues that he is correct based on suppositions that are not so.

It is in this vein, then, that the poor Remnant correspondent toys with crankdom. He writes, “I suspect that if there were a real choice on the ballot, such as a box marked ‘none of the above,’ turnout would be higher, and this last choice the consistent winner.” He clearly believes that ballots in electoral democracies do not feature such an option. Sadly, he is mistaken. The state of Nevada provides such an option on every state-wide and national ballot:

Every ballot upon which appears the names of candidates for any statewide office or for President and Vice President of the United States shall contain for each office an additional line equivalent to the lines on which the candidates' names appear and placed at the end of the group of lines containing the names of the candidates for that office. Each additional line shall contain a square in which the voter may express a choice of that line in the same manner as the voter would express a choice of a candidate, and the line shall read “None of these candidates.”

Nevada Revised Statutes § 293.269(1). If one believes Wikipedia, Ukraine, Spain, France, Columbia, and at one time Russia all have such ballot options. Of course, admittedly the influence of Nevada’s option is limited by subsection (2) of the same statute, which requires that elections be decided without consideration of the none-of-these votes, making these non-votes rather like abstentions in the House of Lords. (At least the Lords as it once was; who knows what the rules there are now after the umpteenth reform act.) So it is manifestly untrue that the continuation of business as usual in electoral democracies can be blamed on the invariable absence of enough options on ballots.

The author’s oversight in that regard—his failure to do even rudimentary research before making a rather sweeping claim in an article—is all the more unfortunate because his more substantive criticisms, or at least his wider thesis, have substantial merit. The history of electoral government has not been consistently edifying and its trajectory has taken a substantially southerly appearance. Society has long since realized that they can “vote itself largesse out of the public treasury.” But society has learned that lesson before: surely the Romans developed the art of doing so to a high level indeed. At the same time, however, critics of modern democracy—a class, I should be clear, from which I by no means exclude myself—at times look too uncritically upon its flaws and upon the benefits of monarchy.

The Remnant criticizes modern democracy for its tendencies toward corporate oligarchy: elections require vast sums of money, which sums are supplied by magnates and businesses, with the invariable result that governments are composed almost entirely of men amenable in some way or other to magnates and businesses. The government thus represents not the will of the people broadly speaking, but only of a narrow elite of businesses and the wealthy. To an extent, that criticism is quite valid. But on the other hand, it perhaps overly ignores the degree to which businesses and other associations—take the NRA—are groups of people, communities in themselves, rather than merely monolithic forces opposed to individuals, a rather distastefully Marxist hermeneutic.

At the same time, those who have gone full-bore for monarchism often overlook the nasty oligarchical tendencies of that system as well. The powerful and wealthy gain access to the elected representative through the campaign process. But the same powerful and wealthy gain access to a monarch through the administrative process. For a monarchy, at least a functioning as opposed to a mere decorative monarchy, limits functionality in its concentration of power. The king---or really, I have always preferred a grand duke---makes decisions, but he has the capacity neither to accumulate for himself the vast quantity of data on which such decisions must rest nor personally to administer the decisions he makes. Thus, the functioning monarchy has always found itself dependent on small armies of ministers and attendants to bring information into the crown and direct authority out from it. Some nations have structured those administrative functions well, while others have done so poorly. A history professor of mine once assigned a book by John Brewer, The Sinews of Power, that blamed the clumsy design of France's administrative institutions for the Bourbons' decline in the struggles with England and the eventual implosion of the former in the revolucion. Alternatively, one might look to the last of the old European autocracies, the Russian Empire, to see the discord created by an entrenched oligarchy of incompetent ministers. A crown minister may not need wealth and popularity in the same manner an elected politician needs these things, be he will certainly be as willing to trade his services for them as any Congressman.

What these sorts of considerations reveal is not so much that monarchy, compared to republicanism, is or is not a good idea, or even preferable. The larger difficulty lies in the fact that the American Catholic---always, to a certain extent, and certainly since the Second World War---is irretrievably detached from the cultural context that shaped the political views of his ancestors in the old country. The bugbears and the very real threats to social stability, be they Masons, Jacobins, garibaldists, Hussites, or whomever, simply never took a place in American life as they did in European. Yes, we all know the Framers were largely Masonic deists---all the worse for them. But American Masons, as much as they may have kept Catholics out of trade unions or said inane things about the pope, have never been the anarchist mob laying siege to the Lateran. In part, the distance between American and European Catholicism in this regard results merely from our status here as a perpetual minority: we cannot sing, "Mary's prayers will win our country back to Thee," because the United States has from the beginning been in partibus infidelium.

So when Americans go becoming monarchists---not merely supporting a Bourbon or a Hapsburg restoration, but an advocate of monarchy per se---we almost invariably wade into unknown waters. The monarchist, no less than the republican, possesses the American's unique capacity for historical myopia. There was once more of this essay in my head, but it never got written; I think it will do for now as is.

The Cordial Churchman

Is giving away a tie. Go hither and enter.

Beer From Around Here

Had a bottle of Red Brick amber ale a few weeks ago. I picked it off the loose bottles shelf at Trader Joe's because the label intrigued me. (It appears they've changed their labels since then---wonder how old the bottle I had was.) It was eminently satisfactory. I don't think the South has quite the microbrewery footprint of some other parts of the country (for instance, it became legal to operate a micro-distillery in Tennessee two years ago, and that amid quite some surprise). But being in the Midwest I've missed out on whatever there was. Good to know that there's beer from around here, though.