#but sight is truly the one sense that preconditions all of it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kabane52 · 5 years

Text

Thinking Through Divine Embodiment

This was in response to some Facebook comments, not everything below might make sense standing alone, but it became way too long to put on Facebook.

While there are Fathers who refer the theophanies to the hypostasis of God the Father, I think that's mistaken- the view of Justin and many others as far as I understand them is that theophanies are of the preincarnate Son. The one tough bit would be Daniel 7, but I think the enthroned figure is the Son, as described in Revelation 1. The "Son of Man" is a figural reference to the High Priest on the Day of Atonement and carries in it the double-ascent of the High Priest- once for himself, once for the nation. So the vision is of an enthroned Lord Jesus receiving His Church to glory to reign in the Communion of Saints for the millennium. I've made that argument elsewhere, but this is what I think Revelation is about. Daniel 7 certainly includes both ascents- of Jesus and the Saints- in its prophetic portrait, but the actual person who was seen enthroned was the Son.

Theologically, I think this is because the Father always acts through the Son in the Spirit. One might conceive of the Father as something like the inner being of a star, that which produces, in its very nature, its radiant and fiery character. The Son is the radiant and flaming star itself, and the Spirit is the carrying of these rays outwards to illumine and heat all else. It's an analogy, but I think a helpful one. This is consistent with the pattern of trinitarian action in the New Testament, and I take the economy to reveal the immanent God, understood in terms of the divine energies developed Christologically. The Son is the visible, concrete revelation of the Father, the Spirit radiates the glory from His face and makes Him present to us. If we think in terms of creation's symbols, the Spirit is signified by things like wind, fire, and water. You cannot hold these things in your hand or point to a stable particular and say "there it is." But you can do this with the source of the river and fire (pinpointing the particular starting point from whence it burned). The concrete hypostatic presence of Jesus Christ allows us to really gaze upon the glory of God. That glory is gazed only in and through the Holy Spirit- as personal as the Son- but strangely less "graspable."

And so when we think of an instance of God's direct revelation, that which one would point at is the hypostatic Son, generated from the Father and revealed through the communicative act of the Holy Spirit who always manifests the Son. Think of how the air is the necessary- and yet, totally unnoticed unless we call attention to it- medium by which our speech is communicated. Even space itself is a thing, not "nothing."

All creation is sustained in the active, flowing, presence of God constituting it as what it is and giving it its properties. When I read of God's glory filling a spatial setting, then, what I take it to mean is that the existent things in that setting were actualized in their capacity to radiate with the glory of God which was their constant sustenance.

So here is the big question: why the particular shape of the divine body? "You saw no form" is often misread as "there is no form to see." This isn't true. We are explicitly told that Moses beheld the Form of the Lord. The form of the Lord was that which was hidden in deep darkness, concealed from Israel for their own protection. At night, they could see the fire through the cloud, but only as we might hear a drumtrack playing through thick walls. I am struck by how this actually does anticipate later Platonic and Aristotelian formal realism. Here's why- it is when Moses enters into the cloud to behold the Divine Form directly that he perceives the pattern by which the tabernacle is built. The tabernacle is given in seven speeches corresponding thematically with the seven creation days, and is a microcosm, beginning from the Earth in the Courtyard, ascending up the mountain of the altar, into the starry heavens with the seven-branched menorah (sun, moon, five moving stars, the planets seen with the naked eye) which is called by the same word which names the heavenly lights in Genesis 1. But one ascends beyond the heavens, too, to enter into the Heaven of Heaven's, where God reigns with full presence. This is the ark of the covenant in the Most Holy Place, which is the footstole of the Lord's throne. Besides Him are the two cherubim, signifying the whole council of God as seen in Isaiah 6, 1 Kings 22, and elsewhere.

And so we find that it is when Moses enters into the darkness to behold the light directly- to see the Form of the Lord- that he finds the forms of all other created things. These forms are the divine logoi, summed up in the Logos. The logoi are those particular chords in the infinite music of divine life which are played creatively. God, being infinite, has infinite ideas of creatures which could be but are not. A five-headed red elephant could exist, God could have played that chord creatively- but He did not. There is no logos of a five-headed red elephant, for no such creature exists. But if God chose to make such a beast, that set of energies interwoven in that particular way would be called a logos. Moses beholds the forms, the logoi, of all creatures in the vision of God. And since the logoi are personally summed up and declaratively manifested in the person of the Logos, the Son, Moses beheld the person of Jesus Christ prior to the incarnation.

The revelation of the Form of God is a major characteristic of the new covenant. Job's story is a miniature version of the whole story of the human family. Brought down to death, he is raised up and more glorified than he was before, with a doubled kingdom and making intercession in the council from whose proceedings he had been shut out in the beginning of the book. [prophets are members of the council, Job's intercession for his friends is clearly prophetic, cf Gen 20, Ex 32-34, etc] And Job sums up this dynamic: "My ears had heard of you, but now mine eyes have seen you." The old covenant is aniconic, the new covenant is iconodulic. In the old covenant, as Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 3, the words of God are read to the people for whom a veil covers Moses' face (he's playing on "Moses" as the Torah book and "Moses" as the prophet), but in the new, the people behold the glory of God with unveiled face.

And in the Gospel of John, this is perhaps the central theme. John 1:1-18 sums it up: the Son was eternally face to face with the Father, whom no one had ever seen- it was God the Only-Begotten, who dwells at the Father's Breast [as does the Beloved Disciple to the Lord Jesus in John 13, the only two places where the word for "breast" is used, IIRC] who "expressed" or "exegeted" the Father. The Son who shared eternal glory with the Father now makes that known so that "we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." That language is an echo of the LXX of Exodus 34, where God's Name is visibly manifested to Moses in glory. And thus the theme of the vision of the Father in the face of Jesus: "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." This is situated in relation to the old covenant's dichotomy between sight and hearing. Deuteronomy says that Israel saw no form but heard the divine voice. Jesus says to the apostate sons of Israel that they have neither heard His voice nor seen His form. The incarnation makes manifest the form of the Lord to us because all apprehension is a two-way street. The thing apprehended manifests itself in a sensible manner, the thing apprehending utilizes its natural capacities in receiving such a manifestation. And so when the one who eternally beholds the Glory becomes a human being, we can see the glory too. In thy light shall we see light. And if His words abide in us, then we shall understand His words truly.

The incarnation of the Son thus is something which, while not necessary metaphysically, is particularly appropriate for God to accomplish. There is no humiliation or suffering in incarnation. Human nature is beautiful. The suffering is in the freely willed embrace of our pains and sorrows. This is key, because it reminds us that the body, with its very particular shape, is of immense significance. It is shaped and molded the way it is for specific theological and symbolic reasons. This is how God corporealizes those whom He fashions after His Archetypal Son.

I'm going to put out an article in the future about the specific and detailed symbolic content which can be found in the structure of the human body, but for now, all that matters is that there is such content. Creation is revelatory. It's not a barrier to revelation, it is the precondition for revelation. Everything in creation manifests a particular property had infinitely by God. The sky is blue because God has eternally known in Himself the deepest and most profound blue, a blue so beautiful that we would weep uncontrollably at its sight. Visual apprehension is not something unholy. Why should it be so for the body? And if this is the sort of body proper to our being created in the image of God, why should the Son, when appearing even prior to the incarnation, not appear as a Man? He is the archetype of man! That is why the Logos, enthroned upon Ezekiel's Chariot (which is a visionary ark of the covenant in motion) is "in the likeness of a man."

The doctrine of incorporeality is really, as I think I mentioned above, a doctrine of divine infinity. We tend to associate embodiment with limitation. We are spatially at X point and thus not Y point. I would note, however, that the miracle of bilocation is not a divine parlor trick. Bilocation is that miracle whereby the person's body, through the Holy Spirit, is really spatially present at more than one locale. It is only possible through participation in the Spirit of God who fills all things with Christ's presence. As with all of the divine negations, in a sense God in His essence transcends both the affirmation and the negation. He transcends the category altogether. But I would want to distinguish that apophatic predicate- which belongs to essence and is the ontological root for the infinite but really apprehensible (never totally, but always journeying towards fullness) - from the self-realization of the divine nature by the divine persons in relation to each other- the divine energeia, the actualities, the energies. That an actuality is an activity and an activity must have multiple subjects tells us that to exist is to exist in communion. The energies (which I will call below the "glory" for convenience) are infinitely rich and various. Space is a theater for communion. Rather than seeing it as the context for large, empty gaps, let's think of it rather as the medium according to which things are properly related in communion. Think about the richness of human interaction created by the variety of spatial relations that two embodied persons can have with each other. Various degrees of distance or closeness communicate different things, body language demands a spatial context, and meaning is woven through the integrated fabric of space and time- the verbal communication being the temporal and the bodily the spatial. Space creates the possibility of having relational properties like X feet to the left or Y inches above.

But we recognize that everything I just described only can occur because of the opening found within the infinite sea of divine glory. It is the ocean of glory that has the intrinsic potential (not in the sense that means a thing is at some distance from its final cause, but in the sense of dunamis, the possibility of a thing's being accomplished or made because of a capacity that a hypostasis possesses) for creation.

Consider, on the theme of the ocean, this analogy. Let us imagine a vast ocean which was totally conscious and in self-control of all its motion. If a wave rose, it was because the ocean wished. If the sea became still, likewise. Take creation to be a vast whirlpool in this infinitely vaster ocean. It would make no sense at all to think of a whirlpool without the ocean, but you can easily think of the ocean without the whirlpool. The living sea actively creates this particular whirlpool, with all its contingent specificity, precisely out of its having the potential to generate whirlpools from its being ocean, though nobody would say it was less of an ocean without whirlpools.

Now, consider the eschatological destiny of creation in this image as the infinitely fast swirling of the water so that it creates an entirely white water spout, ascending forever upwards.

This is like the Eighth Day for us- God's glory will be all in all.

So what might a theophany be, on this analogy? [I know this analogy might be totally useless to everyone- I think in very visual terms for better or worse.] A theophany would be something like a smaller water spout emerging, by the active sustenance and will of the living sea, in the context of the cosmic whirlpool. I take it to be analogous for the following reasons:

-The living sea is a living sea in virtue of the motion of its waters, so that an emergence of a perfectly swirling water-spout within the broader system- not predictable from its regular patterns (which were called by some silly clownfish its "unbreakable laws")- manifests the quality and character of the ocean of being in which this comparative lily-pad (vast as it is when considered in itself) floats. In other words, it bears an intrinsic relation to that which is made manifest.

-The particular character of the swirling water spout is formed only in view of its context in the cosmic whirlpool. That is, if the whirlpool had a somewhat different shape, the spout would have a somewhat different character.

-We speak of the spout as a distinct revelatory act by which the quality of the living sea beyond is made manifest. Yet, the whirlpool in which it is made manifest is entirely constituted by that sea. The living sea gives it every property it has. It gives it the motion it has, the water it has, the beauty it has. It is entirely a product of the sea's sustaining work. So it is true on the one hand that the living sea permeates the entire whirlpool and is present to each point of its space and on the other that the perfectly spinning water spout is a revelation of the living sea within the cosmic whirlpool.

-And so we have on the one hand incorporeality- being understood in the sense of infinity- and on the other, the reality of theophany.

And so also for the revelation of the preincarnate Son in a human likeness. The Father and Son see in each other always every beauty that is possible to be seen. The form of the giraffe, the idea of the color orange, and the perfected form of the human body are known from all eternity with such intensity that one would think- if these things were known according to the finitude belonging to our sort of being- that they were the only thing ever contemplated. But God is such that He gazes upon and rejoices in an infinite variety of distinct beauties with a perfect specificity belonging to each. Each is rich in its own proper way.

At last, we are at the end. The question is "how does the Son appear corporeally before the incarnation?" There are two criteria which must be satisfied.

First, any proposed answer must explain how the theophanies were revelations of God as God. There is not a hint of evidence in the Bible that these visions of God were visions of something created. Stating that a vision of God as God contradicts some other text in scripture doesn't get around this. Stating that the incapacity of real vision of the uncreated follows deductively from a premise that is found in Scripture doesn't get around this. Each text must be properly interpreted so that the unity of the whole is intrinsic to the parts. If you think that the glory-light of God in scripture is a created symbol and not God, show us where this is taught. This is just a non-starter.

Second, the answer must affirm the classical Christian doctrine that God is incorporeal. This is a criterion because I am firmly committed to the tradition of the Orthodox and Catholic Church of East and West, and the Holy Fathers spoke with one voice in this subject.

Here's the answer I would provide:

-Visible manifestation is proper to God, being an intrinsic part of the trinitarian life. The Father and Son gaze upon each other in glory and beauty.

-The particular shape that is the human body is not arbitrary, but has rich symbolic significance and exists eternally as a specific beauty in the mind of God in which the Father, Son, and Spirit rejoice together.

-On account of the infinity of the divine mind (to conceive of possible worlds is essentially to speak of those things which are conceivable to God), there are an enormous variety of different ways in which He could have made a beautiful and good creation which really signified and manifested His own life and beatitude. For example, He might not have made a giraffe and instead made a flying donkey with golden feathers and a birdsong of unimaginable complexity. Or He could have made both. Point is, there is nothing that entails that the way God made the world is the only possible good way He could have made it.

-No matter which of the possible worlds was brought into existence, those things which were given concrete particularity would have their formal basis in an eternal beauty present to the mind of God. The creation of this or that thing really manifests something about what God is like.

-The visible revelation of God the Word, thus, in the likeness of a Man is a capacity which God has intrinsically- and the particular mode of manifestation comes from the fact that God created this world and not another, and so manifests Himself visibly and spatially in ways which reveal His unbreakable bond with that world.

-Incorporeality simply states that God, altogether transcending spatial categories in His essence, flows florth infinitely in His operations, sustaining the creation constantly as what it is by His personal and intimate presence at every point of it which still does not circumscribe Him. "Heaven and Highest Heaven cannot contain you" Solomon says. This text tends to be ignored by certain biblical critics interested in positing a very rigid corporealism among the biblical authors. But to state that God cannot be contained even by what is presumably the vastest (if the Heaven of Heaven cannot contain God, then certainly nothing less can, the argument goes) is to state that He fills all things with His presence, which is the classic Christian doctrine. The trick is in integrating that with the theophanies, which I have tried to do above.

4 notes · View notes

bramieven · 6 years

Text

Chris Beekman and the Political Composition of a Crowd

Beekman’s Forbidden Demonstration from 1934 is a picture you can keep staring at. Beekman, a one time collaborator of De Stijl who disengaged from the journal and movement around 1919 when it became clear to him that the majority of its collaborators were unwilling to engage a more explicit artistic endorsement of communism, moved to Amsterdam in the middle of the 1920s and started developing a style of painting that was known as ‘populism’ in its days. Unfortunately that name, which emphasises the immediate accessibility of these kind of paintings to a largely uneducated group of viewers, tends to obfuscate aesthetic subtlety and artistic ingenuity that can be found in Beekman’s best paintings during that period. The aesthetic ingenuity that Beekman engages in, moreover, was a visual way for him to not simply represent communism in a concrete way, but to actually advance it by thinking through painting.

Taking a close look at the painting the first thing one notices is probably the woman in the dark munsell yellow coat. Located on the foreground at roughly two thirds to the right in the composition, this woman grabs the viewers attention not only because the central position she occupies in the composition but also because of the striking, subdued yellow colour of her coat, the fact that she is just slightly longer than most other figures in the painting and, most of all perhaps, because of the strikingly recognisable face that looks just a little somber (a state of feeling that resonates well with the color of her coat). The dynamics of the painting arises not from the woman herself, who provides the viewer with a affective starting point for the visual experience but remains static if viewed in isolation. The aesthetic ingenuity of Beekman’s painting lies in the way he plays with the diagonal and vertical relations in the painting, by aligning the woman with two men located at an equal distance on the right and left side of her and the slightly diagonal marching lines of people on vertical plane. While the man on the right of the woman is turned towards the viewer, the man on the left sight is slightly turned away from the viewer. Combined with the diagonal marching lines, which progress from strictly diagonal for the man on the right side of the painting to almost entirely vertical for the man on the left side of the woman, we get a sense of dynamics that gives this painting its particular aesthetic force.

What fascinates me about this painting is that, like many painters who came into contact with De Stijl, Beekman is using painting to work through a political and aesthetic problem. When does a crowd become truly political? What is it that distinguishes a political, revolutionary democratic crowd from an angry mob? Certainly it is not its discontent, Beekman seems to suggest; and the protesting crowd he depicts is voicing its discontent, indeed it is motivated by discontent. What makes a crowd political is the precarious balance, somewhere midway between interaction and synergy, of individual and group.

In Crowds and Power (1960), Elias Canetti writes about the crowd as an inherently defacing, angry phenomenon. Having lived through the Second World War, Canetti is deeply skeptical about crowds but is also able to see the enormous impact and relevance of the crowd during the twentieth century; not just for for the emergence of populist and fascist regimes but also for the development of our concept of justice as equality. “All demands for justice and all theories of equality”, Canetti argues, “ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.” But there is a dark side to this sense of equality for Canetti. To reach this deep sense of equality we need to erase all sense of individualism; people need to become indistinguishable from each other. That is and remains, according to Canetti, the precondition of equality.

Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is the greatest.

This is what makes the crowd such a dangerous phenomenon for Canetti. As a communist and a painter whose focus point remains the same as that of De Stijl - the problem of communality - Beekman intuits a similar problem but is looking for a way out of it. Like Canetti, Beekman understands thet that problem of the crowd is up to a large extent an aesthetic problem: the problem of touch (being pressed close to each other and losing one’s individuality) and affect (losing oneself in the crowd). But this implies that the political problem of how to create a democratic crowd will need to deal with these aesthetic problems. Beekmans painting is a contribution to this political problem, I think, without becoming political art in the sense that it loses sight of its properly aesthetic trajectory.

None of the persons depicted in this painting are anonymous. Quite to the contrary, they are the antithesis of an anonymous crowd. But they are a crowd indeed; and as such they are participating in an upward movement that leads to something higher - a higher cause. Interestingly though, this upward movement, however, is achieved by Beekman without lifting the crowd upwards. Taking a closer look at the composition one notices that all the people are of the same high, regardless of where that are positioned in the painting. This compositional choice, while oddly goes against the laws of perspective, works excellent; moreover, combined with the fact that none of these persons are anonymous we get a crow that is personal, unique and singular yet equal. In a review of the painting by the French journal Les artistes d’aujour’hui a critic wrote the following about Beekman’s painting:

La démonstration défendue est un vrai problème artistique résolu d’une façon magistrale. La foule en marche offre une quantité de volumes verticaux qu’il s’agit d’utiliser dans la composition tout en évitant l’écueil de la monotonie. La toile de Chris Beekman est une leçon de composition. Beekman semble jouer avec la difficulté (le mur qui est presque continuité par le jeune marcheur - presque - et pourtant pas du tout). Et le visage tragique et concentré de cette jeune fille. [quoted in Chris Beekman: Een kunstenaarsleven 1887-1964 by Ger Harmsen]

I agree with the reviewer that Beekman is tackling an aesthetic problem (a problem of composition); but it’s of the utmost importance to understand that by dealing with this complex compositional problem, this painting is also dealing with a political problem of composition: how to compose a democratic crowd. It is the unique feature of retaining individual properties while at the same time submerging these individuals in a crowd, achieved through a compositional and aesthetic ingenuity, that elevates Beekman’s painting above that of ordinary social realism of painterly populism. Beekman’s work is, one could say, an aesthetic think-piece.

#politicalaesthetics #destijl #Beekman #painting #communism

1 note · View note