IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO

Jerry Harkins

Wadoo!  Wadoo!

Zim bam boddle-oo!  Zim bam boddle-oo!

Hoodle ah da waah da!  Hoodle ah da waah da!

Scatty wah! Scatty wah!

                                                                                                   —Sportin’ Life

Sportin’ Life [1] is not a biblical scholar but rather the purveyor of Happy Dust to the denizens of Catfish Row.  But he is certainly right that, “De t'ings dat yo li'ble / To read in de Bible…It ain’t necessarily so.”

You don’t have to be a skilled copy editor to find contradictions, ambiguities, blatant immorality and logical fallacies in the Bible.  For example, you may have been taught that Jesus came to bring peace on earth and good will to men [2].  But the man himself is supposed to have said, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” [3].  Luke (12:49-52)  records the same teaching even more dramatically by prefacing it with these ideas:  “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!  But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!  Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.  From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three.”  Granted, a few days earlier he had said, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9).  But a few days after that he reverted to his original idea, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).”  A sentiment shared by every maniacal tyrant through history!

I have often said the evangelists needed better copy editors.  Without doubt, the principal theme of the four gospels is love which is said by Jesus to be the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-38, Mark 12:29-31).  We are told to “…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).  But this did not apply to everyone.  When the disciples asked him why he taught in parables he said, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.  But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven” (Mark 4:11-12).

This sort of thing goes on and on.  Jesus says he has not come to abolish the old law and then immediately proceeds to re-write four of the ten commandments and to add a prohibition of casting pearls before swine.

Suppose Jesus had added a sentence like this to the Sermon on the Mount:  “You have heard it said of old, ‘…the pig, though it has a divided hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you.  You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.’  But I tell you that unless you eat bacon cheeseburgers on the Sabbath, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”  Can you imagine the learned essays the theologians would have written about this down through the centuries?  You would undoubtedly learn more about the cryptic meanings of ancient Hebrew verbs than you wanted to know.  Hundreds of learned essays would paraphrase the famous remark of President Clinton, “It depends on what you mean by eat.”

Bible bashing is an ancient sport but it is no more sporting than shooting sitting ducks.  A lot of it, of course, is pure fiction beginning with the first chapter of Genesis.  Its themes were not revealed to a man named Moses by a God named Elohim or Yahweh but were borrowed and bowdlerized from the mythologies of the neighboring tribes of the Israelites.  Some of the stories are probably true at least in the sense that some of the stories in the Odyssey and the Iliad are based on real history.  But not the story of Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant cannibal or, sadly, the one about the lovely Sirens whose song would “spellbind any man alive” [4].  Similarly, Noah did not build an ark and the world did not flood to a depth of fifteen cubits [5].  Joshua’s priests did not blow down the walls of Jericho with seven trumpets and the shouts of their soldiers [6].  Nor did the sun stop in its orbit around the earth when he fought the Amorites, possibly because the sun does not orbit the earth.  Jesus was not a magician.  He did not raise the dead or turn water into wine or feed five thousand with five loaves and two fishes.  He was an itinerant preacher whose words were recorded many years after his death by scribes who had never met him and who forged the names of disciples and other followers who had [7].  These scribes had heard the stories and sayings at second and third hand.  The only contemporary who wrote parts of the New Testament was Paul who also never met Jesus but claimed to have been granted a private interview with him in heaven during which he corrected the mistakes being made by his disciples (2 Corinthians 12).  However, Paul actually quotes Jesus only twice, both in brief aphorisms.

The King James Version of the Bible consists of 80 books, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament and 14 in the Apocrypha.  It has a bit more than 31,000 verses and nearly 775,000 words.  Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew beginning perhaps around the time of King Solomon (r. 970 – 931 BCE).  Christian scholars believe the Apocrypha were also written around that time.  It is believed that the New Testament was written between 50 CE and 100 CE with significant editing as late as 400 CE. Finally, there are scores of additional Jewish and Christian texts many of which were considered for inclusion in the canon but ultimately omitted.  Many of these were preserved by Gnostic Christians in Egypt who also preserved the most complete copies we have of the Pauline epistles.

In spite of everything, the Bible is the most influential book ever produced.  It is the unquestioned foundation of the entire Judeo-Christian enterprise and the principal inspiration of European and Middle Eastern culture.  There is nothing like it, not the Tao-te Ching, not the Vedic texts and not even the Quran which can be thought of as the final part of the revelation tradition begun by the Bible.  There are, however, two fairly obvious problems with it:

First, reader beware.  Every single author who had a hand in its creation also had an ax to grind.  Now this may be true of any book purporting to be non-fiction but the Bible is more explicitly contentious than most other works.  Paul’s epistles constitute a running, fractious debate with the apostles regarding the fundamental nature of the new sect.  Mark (whoever he was [8]) wrote the first gospel.  Matthew thought Mark’s version was not rigorous enough while Luke thought it missed the poetry of the good news.  Believers often call these the three “synoptic” gospels implying that they are similar in content, structure and wording.  But their differences are much more interesting.  You can check out, for example, the different accounts of the resurrection.  How many went out to the tomb that morning?  Who were they?  Who met them at the entrance?  What exactly did they find?  If you’re tempted to think these are trivial details, please remember the resurrection is the lynchpin of the Christian faith.  As St. Paul says, “If Christ be not risen, then is our faith in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14).  Well, some translations say it’s your faith that’s in vain.  In any event, one might expect the “synoptic” gospels to agree on what happened that first Easter.  But your expectation is in vain;  they do not.

Second, the synoptic gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are factually unreliable.  They are the beginning of a hagiographic tradition that persisted in Christianity for more than fifteen hundred years.  Their primary purpose is not education but edification and in this respect they differ markedly from both the Old Testament and the Epistles.  The stories, parables and miracles ascribed to Jesus, including the resurrection, have almost exact counterparts in multiple cultures throughout the world and in the lives of the early Christian saints.  From a literary point of view, this should not be surprising in that there are only a limited number of themes that have attracted the attention of writers, philosophers and historians.  Theologically, the similarities point to the almost universal human sense of the divine.  From a narrower, purely Biblical perspective, they illustrate the intense intellectual and cultural evolution that occurred throughout the eastern Mediterranean basin in the millennium leading to the birth of Christ.  An example is the Book of Job which is now thought to have been written in the middle of that millennium about events imagined to have taken place a thousand years earlier.  Job has many close parallels in neighboring cultures, among them:  the Institutions of Amenemope is a similar and roughly contemporaneous work from Egypt;  A Dialogue About Human Misery is a slightly earlier treatment of the Job story from the Akkadian Empire;  I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom is an even closer telling from nearby Mesopotamia dated about 1000 BCE.  The story of evil befalling a good person is profound but Job, the carrier of the story, is a fictional or mythical character.  At the same time, he is Everyman.  There has never been any shortage of people who had reason to cry, “Why me, O Lord?”  No amount of scholarly exegesis about Job’s patience or lack thereof or the identity of the “Redeemer” (go’el) upon whom he relies can alter the fact that Job is a victim of Jehovah’s injustice just as Odysseus is a victim of Poseidon’s injustice.

Perhaps it was Mark Twain who claimed, “God created man and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”  But from the beginning, God has been a necessary explanation for everything we don’t understand, including good and evil.  The Bible struggles with such issues and offers the reader both wheat and chaff.  There are, for example, better strategies than turning the other cheek, plucking out an eye that looks at a woman with lust or weeping and gnashing one’s teeth because of a failure to wear the right clothes to a banquet you were dragooned into in the first place.  The laborers in the vineyard would have been better advised to form a union and the last thing the good shepherd should do is to lay down his life thereby leaving the wolf free to dine on the sheep at its leisure.  But the beatitudes, the corporal works of mercy, the golden rule and the great commandment to love one another are the perfect recipe for building the shining city on a hill.  Read chronologically, the Bible tells the story of the Jews gradually coming to the recognition that God is love and that may be the most hopeful idea that the human race has ever had.

Love is not some adolescent sentiment found in saccharine Valentine cards. It is not sexual attraction or infatuation although it can emerge from such over time [9].  Rather it is a sense of fellow-feeling that expresses itself across a wide spectrum of emotions.  Most generally, it is the ability to stand in the shoes of others, to feel their emotions and to act with sympathy toward them.  Sympathy, in fact, is the word used by Adam Smith, the preeminent genius of the Scottish Enlightenment, as almost a synonym for love.  In his first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he argued that sympathy brought about three great virtues, prudence, benevolence and justice which, together with self-interest, formed the basis of what Rousseau would call the social contract three years later.

Like Smith, we need to be careful here.  Love is by no means the strong force of the social contract.  That, of course, is self-interest or, more precisely, what is perceived as essential to self-interest [10].  But untempered by sympathy, self-interest very quickly becomes toxic.  As Smith said, we do not gain our supper through the benevolence of the butcher.  At the same time, the butcher cannot long survive without the good will of the community which will ameliorate any temptation he may have to cheat [11].  For Smith, good will or benevolence tempers self-interest thereby enabling what he famously referred to as the “invisible hand.”

Ultimately, we are trying to deal with extraordinarily complex concepts which are impossible to quantify.  The Bible deals with nebulous intimations of a reality beyond our senses.  How should we behave and why?  Is there a purpose to our existence?  We seem to be born with a sense of alienation or estrangement from something very important, something many people have called God.  Entire mythologies have been built up to explain this something including the oxymoronic idea of an uncaused first cause who or which continues to act in history.  The Bible is a record of the thinking that has been done on these matters.

To return to a chronological reading of the western scriptures, the Israelites appear to have borrowed the idea of monotheism from the Babylonians who worshiped Baal, a fearsome and unforgiving deity.  When Genesis was written, the historians portrayed Yahweh as having had a similar sociopathic personality.  He slaughtered the innocent including the innocent women and children of Sodom and Gomorrah in spite of his pledge to Abraham not to do so.  He committed genocide with his flood.  He toyed with Abraham and Isaac and forced Jeptha to sacrifice his only child (Judges 11: 30-39).  He tormented Job, a blameless and upright man who “feared God and shunned evil” (Job 1:1) merely to win a whimsical bet with Satan.  But Job is a turning point in that, unlike Abraham who begs obsequiously for God to spare the innocent Sodomites, Job confronts his tormentor and is finally restored [12].  From then forward, God begins to realize that love is a two-way street.  And as embarrassing as it may be, God needs the love of his creatures [13].

Until recently, the idea that God is love (1 John 4:16) was stoutly resisted because it is the same thing as saying love is God.  As indicated above, both the Old Testament and the New are replete with examples of this resistance.  When God is about to give Moses the ten commandments, he says, “The Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.  Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished;  he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” (Exodus 34: 6-7)  There is only one explanation for the apparent contradictions.  The Bible has been extensively edited by those with a vested interest in God’s wrath.  Almost every example of God’s love is quickly paired with an example of his irrational wrath.

Cui bono?  Who gains from a fearsome, mercurial even capricious God?   If many are called but few are chosen what is a pilgrim to do?  How do you get to the promised land from this world of trials and temptations when your God seems so arbitrary?  Neither saint nor sinner has a chance without the brokerage of the anointed, the magic of the sky pilot.  Neither Porgy nor Bess can escape the evil strewn either by the distant white demi-gods of Catfish Row or the devil in the guise of the aptly named Sportin’ Life whose Happy Dust brings only despair.  Interestingly, there is no God figure in the folk opera but there are several priests, Clara and Serena among them.  They pray and lead the community in prayer but to no effect.  The prosperity of the priesthood depends on the fear of God.

It is often said that Martin Luther translated the Bible into German so that common people would be able to read it and that was likely part of his motivation.  But he also had a variety of axes to grind to make scripture consistent with his own theology.  Among other things, he tinged his version with some not-so-subtle anti-Semitism.  He even refused to acknowledge that Jesus made his final trip to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover.  Instead, he translated the Hebrew word Pesach as Ostern, Easter.  He did not bother to explain to the common people why Jesus, a Jew, would celebrate an event that was yet to occur.  The Bible and all its translations are, first and foremost, products of their times and places and of the preconceptions and  prejudices of those who produced them.  The wisdom it contains is real and remains vital today even if it must be carefully separated from what ain’t necessarily so.

Notes

1.  From Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, 1935.

2.  Luke 2:14.  Some versions translate it as “good will to men” while others say “to men of good will” which is different entirely. The Greek and Latin versions are not ambiguous; it is the men who must display good will.  Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations in this essay are from the New International Version, Biblica, 1973.

3. Matthew 10:34-36.

4.  The Odyssey of Homer translated by Robert Fagles, Book 12, Line 45, Viking, 1996.

5.  Fifteen cubits is only  about 22 feet but spread out among the 197 million square miles of the earth’s surface, it’s a hell of a lot of water especially since it has to flood Mount Everest and the Grand Canyon.  Where did it all come from and, more importantly, where did it all go when God finally pulled the plug?

6.  Actually the Bible says they were rams’ horns or shofars in which case the cacophony probably drove the inhabitants crazy enough to tear down the walls themselves.

7.  Two of the Evangelists, Matthew the tax collector and John were said to have been among the twelve apostles.  Mark was thought to be an associate of Peter, some say his son-in-law.  Luke was a physician and may have been literate.  He is also said to have written the Acts of the Apostles.  Both works underwent heavy editing for at least two hundred years after they were written.  None of these works however was written before about 60 AD, nearly thirty years after the death of Christ.

8.  No one really knows who “Mark” was.  One ancient and widely help opinion is that the gospel that bears his name was an amalgam of Peter’s sermons in Rome.  Peter is thought to have been crucified in 64 CE and internal evidence suggests the gospel was written between 65 and 70.

9.  In his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI makes a similar point, differentiating between eros, essentially sexual love, and agape which he does not define but which is usually thought of as, “the highest form of love, especially brotherly love, charity; the love of God for man and of man for God.”  The encyclical is brilliant although I would argue that he is wrong to think that eros can only be fulfilled in agape when it is “disciplined and purified.”  An English version is published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops but the translation is unreliable and argumentative.

10.  Or as E.Y. Harburg’s lyric has it, necessity “…is the curse that makes / The universe so all bewilderin'.”  In the aftermath of World War II, Finian’s Rainbow (1947) was a modernist and progressive take on both individual and social ethics.

11.  Adam Smith is best known today as the father of capitalism, an economic system which illustrates the propensity of humans to ignore the lessons of history.  The pursuit of capitalist incentives periodically becomes addictive and metastasizes into greed which invariably brings about the collapse of the system.  Still, it is the only system that has historically been able to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number over extended periods of time.

12.  Confront may be too strong a word.  But where Abraham pleads and whines, Job is merely polite.  As he tells his friends, “I will maintain my innocence and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.”

13.  The great Puritan theologian and poet, John Milton, wrote “God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts, who / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.”  The first two lines have no application to the post-Job God.

CHURCH OF THE HEAVENLY POOP

Jerry Harkins

            On December 30, 2005 the New York Times ran a piece about teenagers shopping around for religious encounters designed specifically for their age group.  There was a Page 1 photo of a large number of them writhing in various states of ecstasy.  It appears many of them had earlier attended Sunday services elsewhere with their parents and then, instead of repairing to the mall like red-blooded America adolescents, they congregated at the youth services chapel of one the local supermarket churches.  The New Life teen center [1] in Colorado Springs looks more like a nightclub to me but what do I know?  There’s a picture of a youth minister, one Brent Parsley, leading some sort of liturgy.  According to the church web site, the Reverend Parsley says he is married.  His exact words are,  “You betcha! (and she's hot).”  He allows that his third favorite book of all time is Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi [2].  In the photo accompanying the article, he’s dressed like a white urban rapper in disheveled layers with ski goggles worn over his forehead.  He is telling his congregation, “Christmas ain’t about presents, yo!  The true meaning of Christmas is my main man:  J.C.”  Deep dude.  Fucking deep.

To some, Reverend Parsley’s service may seem based on the willing suspension of intelligence in favor of unbridled emotional expressionism.  Whatever its appeal, perfervid worship is not limited to teens.  A similar phenomenon can be witnessed among Christians called “Holy Rollers” who are a small minority of fundamentalists who speak in tongues and worship in primitive frenzy.  In one expression of this, adherents are encouraged to handle poisonous snakes thereby adding  elements of danger and excitement.  It would be easy to say all these liturgies tap into the compulsive, concussive power of sex and that may be part of it.  Pain, danger, sexual excitement, ecstasy:  somewhere in that brew there’s the Eros/Thanatos theme that has been part of the religious experience for millennia.  Ecstasy liberates.  Indeed Bacchus and Eros share the epithet Eleutherios, Liberator.  Still, I’m not sure it applies to those writhing teens in Colorado unless at a layer of the subconscious I have no wish to explore.  They’re just too young.  They have too little experience of life to link sex with death never mind with religious ecstasy.  Or, given the natural state of their hormones, to have any need to do so.

            The archetypal gyration of ecstasy is a throwing up and shaking of one’s arms, a universal gesture with a rich semiotic subtext.  Most obviously, it conveys the thrill of victory achieved against significant obstacles.  It also expresses confidence and openness.  A politician arriving at an airport or a dais will often throw up his or her arms as if to accept the laurel wreath or the acclamation of a friendly crowd.  Look, I have nothing to hide.  Of course no one over the age of six believes that of any politician.  But the arms-up gesture also signifies an element of emotional surrender.  It may in fact derive from the hands-up stance universally required of prisoners.

            You used to see a slightly less animated version of the New Life service at the World Youth Days run by the late Pope John Paul II.  These typically involved hundreds of thousands of highly engaged young people but there was never any trashing of downtown, no street theater, no endless chants of protest, no binge drinking and, especially, no dirty words directed at the establishment.  The only offense they gave came from the really bad hymns they invariably sang. Asked why they were spending their summer in the heat and mud, two themes would emerge, neither terribly profound.  First, was simply, “I have to be here” or “I’m called to be here.”  Second was the pure joy of being near the Pope.

            This is not the first time I have found myself out of sympathy with our young people.  Smart as they are, there seems to be much in life that eludes them.  Many have strong opinions about the global economy but absolutely no understanding of it.  They enjoy the most inane entertainment including such dubious jewels in the crown of civilization as Christian Rap.  They tend to dress like slobs and, back home, they often binge like bums.  They don’t read and they don’t write, in many cases because they can’t.  And, yes, an awful lot of them get caught up in the Jesus thing.  They—adore is not too strong a word—a man who has done his utmost to crush the “People of God” theology that emerged from the second Vatican Council fifty some years ago.  They worship at the clay feet of an idol who has degraded and demeaned the female half the human race with his immoral and hypocritical rantings.

            What’s wrong with these kids?  What need did a decrepit old man fill for them?  Why not someone more wholesome?  I do not refer to Brent Parsley.  How about Britney Spears or the Kardashians?  Actually, I think I understand his attraction.  He was pastoral.  He loved these children and what’s more, he respected them.  He had the soul of the poet he once was.  He was courageous in the face of debilitating illness.  He wrote some of the most incisive social commentary of our times.  He faced down the Evil Empire and played a role in moving the world back from the brink of nuclear Armageddon.  Unfortunately, he also preached nonsense and failed miserably the most important test of any cleric, the ability to help people create a satisfying relationship with the divine.  On the contrary he drove many people away from the sacred and he left a legacy of deceit that will be almost impossible to undo.  The Church will crumble and it will be his fault because he was given the last best opportunity to save it and he squandered it tilting at stupidities like priestly celibacy and the use of condoms. [3]

            The kids, I think, know nothing of all this, positive or negative.  I suspect they do know he was crazy but they admired his persistence, his refusal to bend to others, his iron will.  Not a single one of those kids ever read his masterpiece, Centissimus Annus.  Nor have they read any of the sanctimonious drivel he published.  They don’t care, and maybe they shouldn’t.  Adolescence has always been challenging and never more so than at present.  In an Age of Information, today’s young people know far more than they understand.  There is more pressure put upon them from every quarter and, looking forward, they see little relief.  It must seem that the best times are long in the past.  John Paul represented certainty in an uncertain world, loyalty in treacherous world, hope against all hope.  Jesus said to and of Peter, “Upon this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”  For all his frailty, John Paul was a rock.  He insisted, against all evidence, that he was infallible.  In the moral sphere, he could not be wrong.  The young people believed him where they’d be far too smart to believe their political leaders, their gurus or even their parents.

            The differences between New Life and World Youth Day are not insignificant but the similarities are impressive.  The late Pope, for example, probably never savored the literary pleasures of Everyone Poops and it is a good bet that Reverend Parsley has never encountered the prose of Thomas Aquinas.  But like all professional religionists their stock in trade is the answer to all of life’s problems, big and small.  Such folks know that, in the immortal words of Forrest Gump, “Shit happens.”  And they are delighted it does.  If it didn’t they’d be out of business.  As it is, they have a vested interest in assuring that it continues to happen and do whatever the can to assure a steady supply.

Notes

1.  The New Life Teen Center is part of the New Life megachurch formerly presided over by Rev. Ted Haggard, a graduate of Oral Roberts University and once regarded as one of the most politically influential evangelicals in America.  He has said that the only difference between President George W. Bush and himself is that he prefers a different brand of pickup truck.  Otherwise he consulted with the White House every Monday.  Rev. Ted was later fired from New Life after admitting to drug use and a liaison with a male prostitute.

2.  An illustrated book from Japan written for children ages “baby to preschool.”  Part of the same series as that classic of children’s literature, The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts by Shinta Cho .  It may be sacrilegious to wonder what Rev. Parsley’s Number Two all-time favorite book is (assuming, of course, that Number One is the Holy Bible by Daddy-o, the Spook and his main man, the late J.C.  Yo!).

3.  Comparing John Paul II with Pope Francis is irresistible.  Francis too attracts ecstatic crowds but, as a general rule, they appear to be much more diverse and, on average, older.  Like John XXIII, Francis has the chops that would be needed to undo two millennia of the devil’s work as promoted by the church hierarchy.  But like John, he may not have the time.  Moreover, in spite of the theatrics, he has yet to demonstrate that he has the inclination.

MODERN ART

Jerry Harkins

Once upon a time, art was not nearly as convoluted an undertaking as it is today.  Artists did what they did to earn a living or maybe only to nurture their own emotional lives without actually articulating a nebulous theory about it and without the benefit of critics to explain it.  Nor did they need to concern themselves overly with the vicissitudes of a marketplace beyond a handful of patrons.  Aside from works commissioned for churches, the public rarely encountered most of what they produced and art as we understand it was not a force in the lives of most people. Artists were mostly anonymous craftspeople. Of course, there had always been exceptions.  Virgil, for one, was widely acclaimed by both the elite and the ordinary citizens of Rome.  Chaucer himself was not well known to the public at large but The Canterbury Tales was the medieval equivalent of a best seller.  Michelangelo was widely recognized as the greatest artist of his time by contemporary artists, patrons and the Italian public.   Mozart and Handel were favorites of the aristocracy and their large scale works attracted large audiences.  Mozart, however, remained very much a mid-level employee of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg and was poor through most of his short adult life. [1]  But Handel died a wealthy man with an extensive art collection.  Thousands of Londoners attended his state funeral and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Such exceptions notwithstanding, most artists labored anonymously even as their art often attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians and litterateurs.  Plato and Aristotle both wrote detailed explications of the role of the arts in society and both worried about the power of art to deceive.  In late antiquity, Longinus’ extended essay “On The Sublime” described the Bacchanalian power of art almost admiringly to the point that he is sometimes referred to as Dionysius-Longinus.  The great nominalist debates of thirteenth century Paris dealt extensively with the ethics of representation.  Even Abelard addressed the central issue:  if, as Aristotle wrote, art is the heightened and selected imitation or representation of life, does that mean it automatically violates the standard of truth?  Heightened and selected, after all, implies different from and less accurate than its referent.  The truth is being distorted deliberately to make a point.  The artist who carved the Venus of Willendorf, some 24,000 years ago re-imagined female anatomy to emphasize its fertility symbolism.  Modern cubism distorts to emphasize the multi-dimensionality of the subject.  Picasso’s portraits of his mistress Dora Maar are thoroughly misleading if all you want to know is what the lady looked like.  The artist depicts his unique perspective of her.  No other viewer can possibly share that perspective which may be why early cubism was often greeted with disdain.  Modern music, literature and dance were similarly criticized for precisely the same reason:  they distorted, indeed violated reality.  For many, modern art seems meaningless and even tedious.

Of course, all art inherently distorts the world as perceived by our unmediated senses which are in any event often unreliable. Artists bravely stand outside the mouth of Plato’s cave and try to tell us what they see.  Art proceeds from the imagination and deals in metaphor.  Its purpose is not to deceive but to invite the mind to consider something beyond the obvious.  Some find this threatening.  The Bible, for example, condemns “graven images” [2] as sinful enough to be dealt with in the decalogue.  The second commandment begins, “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”

 By the nineteenth century, however, the perception of art was changing.  The arts were going public and artists were suddenly exalted members of the community.  The transition is exemplified by a famous incident in the spa resort of Teplitz in what is now the Czech Republic.  In the summer of 1812, Beethoven and Goethe, friends a generation apart in age, were walking in a public park when they came upon members of the royal family walking in the opposite direction.  Beethoven told Goethe to keep walking as artists are more important than aristocrats and “they must make way for us,” not the other way around.  Goethe thought differently;  he took off his hat, stepped aside and bowed while Beethoven, hands in pockets, went right through the dukes and their retinue. The royals drew aside to make way for him, saluting him in friendly fashion. Waiting for Goethe who had let the dukes pass, Beethoven told him: “I have waited for you because I respect you and I admire your work, but you have shown too much esteem to those people.” [3]

By the end of the nineteenth century, Puccini to the contrary notwithstanding, La Vie de Bohème was no longer the default condition of artists.  Indeed, art itself was undergoing a profound revolution.  In Paris, painters turned their attention to renditions of ideas about things and to emotional responses to those ideas.  Monet’s 1872  “Impression, Sunrise” had suggested the term for an entire movement.  In an earlier era, this painting might have been a recognizable picture of the harbor at Le Harvre.  Now it appeared to be a quick sketch done at the scene and meant to be taken back to the studio for refinement. [4] At first, critics used the term "impressionism" pejoratively.

Impressionism became the progenitor of a dazzling variety of isms that arose in its aftermath as painters and sculptors sought to depict interior rather than exterior realities.  Most of their works remained grounded in representation even as they were explicitly trying to break away entirely from the object in favor of complete abstraction.  It was a difficult quest.  Ultimately, Jackson Pollock developed a thoroughly abstract genre called “drip painting,” and others such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still invented color field painting.

Abstract expressionism, derided by many at first, ultimately became widely if not universally accepted by  connoisseurs, collectors and the general public.  In 2012, a color field painting by Mark Rothko, “Orange, Red, Yellow,” brought $87 million at auction, 2.6 times the highest price ever paid for a Rembrandt.  This was only the thirtieth highest price on record for a painting but, among the top fifty, all but two or three are modern or contemporary.  Acceptance was not, of course, universal.  In 1975, Tom Wolfe published a cri de Coeur denouncing and ridiculing modern art, especially abstract expressionism. [4]  His main complaint seemed to be that the retreat from representation, the “de-objectification” of art, amounted to nothing but pseudo-intellectual masturbation.  It was a theme he returned to twenty-five years later in a remarkable defense of the sculptor Frederick Hart who had  been excoriated by the art establishment for “defacing” the abstract purity of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial by providing a realistic portrayal of “Three Soldiers” nearby.

The entire brouhaha was an exercise in absurdity.  Ms. Lin’s wall may be the most moving war memorial ever erected. It does indeed “de-objectify” the war but, in place of jungles and weapons and burning villages, it forces the viewer to focus on the price we paid in terms of individual lives cut short.  Mr. Hart’s soldiers are majestic as sculpture and innovative as memorial art.  Moreover, they are casting their gaze at the wall with a combination of reverence and grief.  They, together with Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial are a subsidiary but integral part of experience.  They honor the wall and encourage us to see it as they do.

Fifty years after Marshall McLuhan explained the difference between “hot” and “cool” media any debate between the relative merits of representational and abstract art is bootless.  The former is hot, engaging the viewer quickly and completely without requiring extensive interaction.  The latter is cool, demanding a great deal of involvement.  Both communicate between artist and audience.  Neither does so perfectly.  Both seek to seduce your imagination.  Both celebrate the uncertainty and ambiguity that are part and parcel of the human condition.

What is new in “modern” art is not abstraction per se of which there are examples going back thousands of years [5].  But over the past century and a half, artists have developed an entire spectrum of genres which rely more or less on non-representational imagery.  Very quickly, such art has become dominant, especially in North America and Europe.  Many forces encouraged this transition:  the declining influence of the aristocracy and the church, urbanization and a more educated populace, a sudden rise in academic interest in the arts and, not the least, a sense that the humanities in general had reached something of a natural climax.  Museums were established, attracting a large audience of people yearning for culture and advancement.  The British Museum had already opened to the public in 1759 and the Louvre followed in 1793.  Nicholas I admitted the public to The Hermitage in 1852 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1866.  With broader interest came both artistic and economic independence and a favorable environment for innovation.

The new forms occasioned a wide range of responses, positive and negative, from a startling array of sources.  Suddenly everybody was a critic.  Modernism was greeted with ridicule by the public press, condemned as “degenerate” by politicians of the left and right and denounced as the “new iconoclasm” by at least one philosopher.  Less than three weeks after leaving the White House, Teddy Roosevelt published a review of the seminal 1913 Armory Show.  He was not impressed by the European “extremists” and recommended that Americans “should keep track of the avant-gardes but by no means approve of them.”  Both he and The New York Times were actually offended by Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending A Staircase, No. 2.”  More recently, the poet John Ciardi summarized what many traditionalists still think of modernism. “Modern art,” he wrote,  “is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.”  The negative reactions, however, were overpowered with startling rapidity and, as we have seen, traditionalism was relegated to the defensive.  A similar seachange in perceptions accompanied the arrival of modern poetry and fiction while almost the opposite occurred in the reception of modern music.  But such reactions are a matter of taste which cannot be the subject of edict or fiat.  Thus, critics who proceed from a theoretical bias expose themselves to irrelevance.  What happens in art—any art—is a kind of intercourse between an artist and a witness.   As Rainer Maria Rilke explained to the young poet, “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

Notes

1.  Mozart earned 150 Florins a year in Salzburg.  The Florin contained 3.5 grams of pure gold (.123 oz.) which, at today’s price ($1,564.20/oz.) would be equivalent to $28,859.49 a year, roughly the median income of all U.S. workers in 2012.  Such calculations are, of course, less reliable and less meaningful than a writer would hope.

2.  Exactly what constitutes a “graven” image is a matter of some ambiguity.  Most English translations of the second commandment (Deuteronomy 5:8 and Exodus 20:4) specifically limit the prohibition to graven or carved images and most commentators believe that the Hebrew original refers only to idols.  But the text clearly refers to all images.  In both books, it reads, “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”  The next verse prohibits the worship of such images but it is clearly referring to one type of the generally prohibited graven images.  Leviticus 26:1 specifically addresses the question of idols.  “Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it.”  This is one of many priestly regulations, not part of the Decalogue.  To complicate matters further, in Numbers 21:8-9, God commands Moses  ‘“Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.’  So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived.”  A bronze snake is clearly a graven image.  Of course, this is one of those things you should not try at home.

3.  This description of the famous incident is taken from a written account by Bettina von Arnim, a friend of both Beethoven and Goethe.  There are other accounts offering slightly different details but there is no testimony that I know of by an eyewitness.  For one thing, Beethoven’s mild reproach does not sound like the great man who had a titanic temper.  The famous 1887 painting of the scene is by Carl Rohling who was born 37 years after the event.

4.  It almost seems the Impressionists were borrowing an idea from the Romantic poets.  In 1798, William Wordsworth had written, “…poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:  it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

5.  The book (or extended essay) was titled The Painted Word is a notable example of the New Journalism of which Wolfe was a pioneer.  There is irony in the fact that the journalist who dethroned objectivity from journalism should complain about pretty much the same thing in art.

6.  The pre-historic people of Ireland were among the earliest abstractionists, etching their elaborate spirals and other designs on rocks and in metal.  Some of these appear to be standardized patterns which recur in widely separated locations.  Such constructions as the passage tomb at Newgrange which was built between 3200 and 3100 BCE display elaborate designs some of which seem to be symbolic while others appear to be pure design.  They are much more recent than the cave paintings of Lascaux and other sites in Europe which are astonishingly representational.  Greek and Roman architectural ornamentation used abstract motifs but are, of course, much younger than the Irish material.

THINKING ABOUT PLURAL MARRIAGE

Jerry Harkins

Following the Supreme Court’s recognition that gay people have the same right to marry as straights, a number of commentators have remarked that the same logic might apply to those wanting multiple wives (or, more rarely, husbands).  Indeed it may.  The heart of the Court’s opinion as expressed by Justice Kennedy is in its last three sentences which speak of the petitioners’ goals.  “Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”  In dissent, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.”  He concedes that there may be other factors that would militate against polygamy [1] but they are not to be found in the majority opinion.  Of course, there is a very good reason for their absence;  the case at hand had nothing to do with polygamy.  In addition to this red herring, the Chief Justice was also begging the question.  He relies on the unstated assumption that plural marriage will be considered an unthinkable degeneracy.  No acceptable logic could be raised in its defense and, therefore, it is unnecessary for him to explain why it is degenerate.  This is a deeply engrained assumption in American society but is by no means universal which is a good thing because it is also not true.

Plural marriage is an accepted practice in more than fifty countries, mainly those with Muslim majorities.  It is much rarer in the non-Muslim world although there have been and are pockets of it in unexpected places.  In Ireland, for example, until the seventeenth century, Brehon law permitted multiple marriage although with strong protections for the first wife.  Even today, in many societies high status men are allowed and even encouraged, to take multiple mistresses or concubines.  Almost all British monarchs have done so.  Edward VII who reigned from 1901 to 1917 was a notorious philanderer although usually he was slightly more discrete about it than his predecessors.  His great grandson, Prince Charles, the incumbent Prince of Wales, is less prolific but also less discrete.  King Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, was a devout Catholic who nonetheless had nineteen mistresses.  His successor and great grandson, Louis XV (Louis the Beloved) had fewer but among them were the  Mesdames Pompadour and Du Barry and the lovely Irish redhead Marie-Louise O’Murphy who posed fetchingly naked for Francois Boucher. The reason usually given for this playfulness among a class of men not noted for their humor was that official marriages were political or economic unions not love matches.  Perhaps also there is a bit of the Sun King’s conviction that L'Etat c'est moi.

In America’s live-and-let-live society, we seem to be making our way toward a more broadly permissive consensus.  Most of us probably believe that the state has no business unduly burdening freedom of association.  The problem seems to be that our experience with polygyny is rife with forced marriages often involving poorly educated young women.  Prosecutions of polygamists however are typically based on other crimes such as statutory rape and incest. [2]  For example, Warren Jeffs, Prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, is said to have had 78 wives, 24 of whom were 16 or younger.  He is currently serving a life sentence in Texas for two counts of sexual assault involving two children, one a nephew the other a niece.  It is not clear from press reports whether he thought of the victims as spouses (or for that matter as victims).

As soon as the Supreme Court said in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that anti-sodomy laws violate the constitutional right to privacy, a suit was brought in Utah arguing that the same logic should apply to polygamy. U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart rejected the argument that the state's ban on polygamy violates constitutional rights of religion and privacy, saying the state has an interest in protecting monogamous marriage. "Contrary to plaintiffs' assertion, the laws in question here do not preclude their private sexual conduct," Stewart said. "They do preclude the state of Utah from recognizing the marriage ... as a valid marriage under the laws of the state of Utah."  This is a weak argument in that it does not address the claim to religious protection and does not specify the state’s interest in protecting monogamy.  Of course Judge Stewart did not have to address these issues because the plaintiffs based their case on the absurd proposition that Utah was outlawing private sexual behavior when it was really refusing to recognize polygamous relationships as lawful marriage.  Still, in light of Obergefell v. Hodges, society must now confront those issues head-on.

The First Amendment reads in its relevant part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  The Fourteenth Amendment in its relevant part extends this ban to the states saying, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  Together, these prohibitions create a strong protection for religion in all its aspects.  But these are not absolute.  Our history is replete with legal challenges to a wide variety of state and federal actions said to violate the Constitution and case law includes many decisions involving logic that is meticulous.  As I have written elsewhere:

Do the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses have to salute the flag during public school morning exercises?  (No.)  May Quakers refuse alternative service in lieu of the military draft? (No.)   De neo-Nazis have the right to parade through the streets of Skokie, Illinois, a largely Jewish suburb of Chicago with many Holocaust survivors? (Yes.)  May a state ban the showing of a film deemed sacrilegious by the National Legion of Decency?  (No.)  More recently, may a private company refuse to provide its employees with federally mandated benefits that offend the owner’s religious beliefs?  (Yes.)  Should American currency refer to God?  Should religious institutions be tax exempt?  May states erect monuments to the ten commandments?  May towns allow crèches in public spaces?  Can Arizona require a loyalty oath invoking “So help me God” as a condition of receiving a high school diploma?  May public high school students pray in public before a football game?  Did the United States and Canada have the right to suppress the Native American ceremony of the potlatch festival or the sun dance because both were considered pagan and uncivilized?  What is the difference between allowing members of the Native American Church to use peyote for sacramental purposes but prohibiting members of The Religion of Jesus to use marijuana?

So, does the First Amendment protect fundamentalist Mormons who wish to practice polygamy among consenting adults?  If not, what public interest supercedes the polygamists freedom of religion?  If so, would governments be required to recognize such marriages for purposes such as taxation, inheritance, liability and the like?

The judicial analysis of polygamy in the United States, begins and virtually ends with Reynolds v. United States, 98 US 145 (1878).  George Reynolds, a Mormon and a bigamist, was voluntarily put forth as a sacrificial lamb by the Church to test a federal law against polygamy which it believed violated its religious freedom.  Speaking for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Waite disagreed:

…we think it may safely be said there never has been a time in any State of the Union when polygamy has not been an offence against society, cognizable by the civil courts and punishable with more or less severity. In the face of all this evidence, it is impossible to believe that the constitutional guaranty of religious freedom was intended to prohibit legislation in respect to this most important feature of social life. Marriage, while from its very nature a sacred obligation, is nevertheless, in most civilized nations, a civil contract, and usually regulated by law. Upon it society may be said to be built, and out of its fruits spring social relations and social obligations and duties, with which government is necessarily required to deal.

This is another weak argument.  First, the court should have learned from the Dred Scott decision (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 1857) that the mere fact that a legal principle had always been in effect is not decisive as to the question of whether it should continue to be enforced.  Until early in the nineteenth century slavery itself had always been considered perfectly appropriate in most parts of the world.  Second, the question of polygamy is important enough to warrant more than the mere assertion that society is built on a single form of marriage.  Given that polygamy is openly encouraged in the Old Testament and in modern Muslim societies without apparent ill effect, any assertion to the contrary cries out for specifics.

It is hard to see how a law prohibiting polygamy among consenting adults could survive a constitutional challenge today.  Framed in a First Amendment context, today’s Supreme Court might reject such a law unanimously.  The liberals would weigh the harm done to religion against the vague assertion of historical precedent.  The conservatives might see in such a law an unwarranted intrusion of government into private behavior.  Framed any other way, the outcome is less predictable but could flow from the same logic.  The actual harm done to consenting adults might be seen as a possible outcome but not severe.  Should a church be allowed to solemnize polygamous unions and the state refuse to do so, the resulting situation would be not unlike that of thousands of relationships where men keep one or more mistresses. [3] But as long as all parties take good care of all children, pay all taxes and demand no special privileges, the question would come down to a balancing of incommensurables and the outcome is not obvious.

What is obvious, though, is that plural marriage will never be a dominant issue in America the way gay marriage has been.  Americans place a high value on personal fulfillment and it is hard to imagine many of us opting for a life of communal intimacy.  Even among the early Mormons, plural marriage was a minority choice in spite of the fact that the leadership promoted it as the way of perfection. [4] When the Church felt it was time to change, it managed the transition in a careful, wise and compassionate manner that achieved the goal quickly with minimum disruption to the way of life of most of those affected.  There is, however, a tiny remnant of true believers and, perhaps, another small community of people who embrace polygamy for less than religious reasons.  Small as these groups are, they merit consideration as we navigate through the questions raised by changing mores and attitudes.

Notes

1.  As used in this essay, polygamy refers to the practice of having more than one spouse, polygyny refers to situations where one man has multiple wives, and polyandry refers to one woman having multiple husbands.  It is assumed that a marriage (or any other sexual relationship) that is not consensual cannot enjoy the protection of civil law.  A distinction is also made which excludes any such relationships which are less than fully consenual.  Finally, it should be noted that the ideology and practice of free love is an historical reality.  Unlike polygamy, adherents have usually rejected marriage entirely but, in communities like Oneida founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, there are significant parallels.

2.  I am aware that many of the same arguments advanced here could apply to incestuous marriages as easily as they do to polygamous ones.  Indeed, some laws against incest (e.g., against marriage among close in-laws) are based on myth rather than biology.  The problem is that most incest today involves children, usually girls, and close male relatives and is considered a particularly heinous form of pedophilia even if it appears to be consensual.  From a moral point of view, any sexual contact lacking the informed consent of both parties is a species of rape and the state is entitled to set an age below which informed consent is not possible.

3. I realize this is a fanciful role reversal in which the state would be taking what is essentially a moral position and the church the utilitarian one.

4.  Practical demographics required this.  If every Mormon man had two wives, they would need twice as many women as men.  If every Mormon man had 78 wives…well you can see the problem.