The Dish

Victoria Coates asserts that throughout history “democracies have demonstrated a special capacity to produce extraordinary self-referential works of art.” Her examples:

The Parthenon and David are examples from a larger series of works of art and architecture inspired by democracy. There is the bronze portrait of Brutus that legendarily portrays the founding hero of the Roman Republic’s stern features. St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice is a splendid jewel adorning a city-republic that built its own solid ground and grew fabulously wealthy through maritime trade. Rembrandt’s Night Watch honors the citizen militias that proudly defended the liberty of the Dutch Republic, which, like Venice, reclaimed land from the sea and prospered far beyond its size. InThe Death of Marat, Jacques-Louis David memorialized the tragic sacrifice of the revolutionary “Friend of the People” in the turmoil surrounding the first effort to establish a French republic. By salvaging the marble sculptures from the decaying Parthenon and putting them on permanent display in London, Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin converted the work of Phidias into a proclamation that the British constitutional monarchy was the worthy modern heir of democratic Athens.

Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak conveys the huge potential of a young democracy in the untamed spaces of the New World, even while a brutal civil war threw the whole American project into doubt. Claude Monet offered his Nymphéas (“Water Lilies”) to the French Third Republic to commemorate the hard-won victory of his friend, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, over imperial German aggression. Finally, Picasso’s harrowing Guernica is a stark reminder of the existential threats to democracy, such as Fascism, that gathered in the twentieth century.

Each object is part of its own nationalistic narrative and gives us a snapshot of a particular point in the trajectory of the state. All of them provide tangible pieces of historical evidence that are in some ways more reliable than texts (although texts abound in this line of study) and offer powerful insight into successive efforts to establish and sustain a democracy. They are not isolated aesthetic objects; part of their value as historical evidence derives from their active roles in the public life of the communities that produced them.

(Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, 1641, via Wikimedia Commons)

Last month the Vatican hosted a colloquium on “The Complementarity of Man and Woman,” during which Pope Francis asserted, to the joy of both conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics, that “Children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother.” Brandon Ambrosino unpacks the nuances that make the line anything but a simplistic defense of traditional marriage:

As many theologians and commentators are pointing out, the most important part of Francis’ lecture was this:

When we speak of complementarity between man and woman in this context, let us not confuse that term with the simplistic idea that all the roles and relations of the two sexes are fixed in a single, static pattern. Complementarity will take many forms as each man and woman brings his or her distinctive contributions to their marriage and to the formation of their children — his or her personal richness, personal charisma.

According to [Fordham theologian Patrick] Hornbeck, these words signal a departure from Francis’ predecessors. For one thing, Hornbeck notes, Francis didn’t go out of his way to condemn homosexuality. Second, Francis’ comments display a certain level of openness often lacking in discussions about complementarity.

“What Francis tells us in his address is complementarity is not about a rigid demarcation of gender roles,” said Hornbeck.

In other words, Francis has displayed a more nuanced understanding of sex and gender than we’ve seen from a recent pope. He understands that human sexuality is complex and that it resists easy categorization, which is why his lecture warns against simplistic, static, reductionistic ways of looking at it.

In an interview, Hornbeck further delineated a more expansive understanding of what complimentarity can mean, especially as it connects to gay relationships:

What I like about his statement is, first of all, how he uses Scripture. He uses I Corinthians 12 to talk about spiritual gifts: “Saint Paul tells us that the Spirit has endowed each of us with different gifts so that – just as the human body’s members work together for the good of the whole — everyone’s gifts can work together for the benefit of each.” Now, there’s no gender associated with those gifts. Those are unique to each individual.

The way those gifts complement each other is the second point. Francis says, “To reflect upon ‘complementarity’ is nothing less than to ponder the dynamic harmonies at the heart of all Creation.”

When we think about the harmony of sexuality, one of the fundamental aspects that defines that harmony is sexual orientation. So heterosexual relationships are harmonious for people with a heterosexual orientation. And homosexual relationships are harmonious for people with homosexual orientations. I think it’s correct to say, as Francis does, that all complementaries were made by the Creator, and sexual orientation is part of that creation. (Even though the Church uses the language of “disordered,” I and many other theologians would challenge that language.) But I think there can be harmony for gays and lesbians in sexual relationships, just like there can be harmony for heterosexuals in sexual relationships.

The sociologist of religion Peter Berger posits that modern atheism emerged as “a rebellion against the monotheistic faiths that originated in the Middle East – Judaism, Christianity, Islam,” and that, as such, it “makes much less sense in a non-monotheistic environment”:

The rebellion is triggered by an agonizing problem: How can God, believed to be both all-powerful and morally perfect, permit the suffering and the evil afflicting humanity? This is the problem called theodicy, which literally means the “justice of God”; in the spirit of the rebellion it is also a demand that God has to justify himself. The most eloquent expression of this atheist rebellion in literature is by Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov rejecting God, because he allowed the cruel murder of one child.

Within the Hebrew Bible the problem of theodicy is of course confronted in the Book of Job. Its happy ending (Job’s restored good fortune) is probably a later redaction, intended to assuage the outrage at Job’s innocent suffering. If one brackets the ending, the message is one of submission to God’s will, whatever it may be. The most radical version of this theodicy (if one can call it that) in the history of Christianity is that of Calvinism. God, in his inscrutable will, has ordained from eternity who will be the elect destined for heaven, and who the damned going to hell–and nothing an individual can do or fail to do can change the divine edict. There is a certain (if perverse) grandeur in such faith.

On a related note, Shalom Carmy reviews Mark Larrimore’s The Book of Job: A Biography, which marks when the problem of evil came to dominate readings of that Biblical text:

For Larrimore the medieval and early modern periods mark the rise of the Book of Job as disputation, with Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and Calvin as his chosen representatives. These writers see the book through the prism of the question of evil. Maimonides is the first of them to ascribe specific philosophical views to Job and to the other speakers in the dialogue. For the sake of argumentative consistency and focus, Maimonides dismisses many powerful emotional passages as philosophically irrelevant digressions. Other theologians, in the service of Job’s pious image, play down his pungent sayings. Calvin, for whom Job is a vehicle for communicating the transcendence and inscrutability of God, cites some of Eliphaz’s utterances as if they were Job’s, assuming, as did other Jewish and Christian writers, that all Scripture delivers the same message, irrespective of the speaker.

With the modern problem of theodicy, the readings of Job that attract Larrimore’s attention are increasingly embedded in larger philosophical, literary, or academic projects. Perhaps the most thought-provoking element in this book is Larrimore’s emphasis on the importance of Kant, more than Leibniz, as the hinge around which the history of theodicy revolves.

(Image: Satan pours on the plagues of Job in William Blake’s The Examination of Job, via Wikimedia Commons)