Foxholes, Bird Nests

 

to the edge of the known world

The long-serving rector of our parish church has just retired, and as the search for a permanent successor is by design a careful and time-consuming one, the wardens have been charged with putting together a roster of visitors and local retired clergy to conduct the weekly services—the clerical equivalents of substitute teachers.  The lot fell to Joan for last week and next.  It has been quite a while since I saw her working on a sermon.   “What are the texts?” I asked—meaning, of course, the appointed Bible readings around which the sermon might be constructed.  “Foxes and holes, birds and nests,” she replied.  There are several choices, and her tone of voice suggested that was one she would probably not choose.  I knew what she was referencing, of course, a passage in which Jesus says, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath nowhere to lay his head.  Funnily enough, I myself have spent a certain amount of my recent time thinking about foxholes and bird nests, and in very different contexts.

The past week or ten days have seen our first really warm summer days as well as a significant amount of rain, some of it heavy.  The result in open woodlands has been what I call the Great Greening, in which the more gentle and subtle verdant shades of spring are overwhelmed by darker greens of a rampant, undisciplined character, leaving the impression of forest half yielding to jungle.  The fast-growing-vines—especially the porcelain berry that I wrote about some weeks ago—are particularly prominent.  Serious Summer is on the way, Serious Summer with its many pleasures but also its challenges and discomforts.

I usually think of the fieldstone wall at the bottom of our yard as an architectural decoration; but in Serious Summer it takes on the nature of a protective barrier, like Hadrian’s Wall or the fortified bridge of Conway Castle, dividing the world of safety and civility from a terrible landscape where dragons roam.  And while we don’t have any actual dragons, we do have in abundance most of the other critters of the Jersey fields and woods: deer, squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons,  ’possums, and an increasing number of foxes.  Bears and coyotes have been reported in or at least around Princeton, but I have yet to see them.  The foxes, on the other hand, are now commonplace.  Several times I have seen a fox lithely walking along the top of the whole length of the stone wall as though it were a private vulpine highway.  There was a special reason for the path of this particular fox trot, and I shall come to it eventuallly.

One of the principal objects of my scholarly research in Medieval Studies was the cultural history of the medieval Franciscan Order.  Francis is called the poverello (poor man) because of his commitment to evangelical poverty, the belief, based in a certain reading of the gospels that neither Jesus Christ nor his disciples owned any property.  This was regarded as the perfect (meaning “complete,” “having reached the highest possible level”) stage of spiritual life.  The doctrine of voluntary self-pauperization was usually called evangelical poverty—and it was regarded as morally superior to (and not really having much to do with)  what we usually think of as poverty.  There are many gospel passages in which the friars found this doctrine, but especially in Jesus’s reply to a man who asked him what he must do to be perfect.  The answer: “Sell everything you have; give the proceeds to poor people; and follow me.”  This the questioner could not do, because he had a lot of things.  Ah, yes, rich men, the eyes of needles.  And if this was a problem for a single rich man, what of a burgeoning new religious order with dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of partisans of “evangelical poverty” who did, however, need to be clothed, housed, and fed?  The conflict between literary reality and somber material necessity instigated a major rift within the Franciscan Order and a sustained polemic from conservative monastics of the Benedictine tradition, most of who lived simply but in comfortably endowed digs often supported by revenue-producing farmland.  The friars were also often in conflict with the so-called “secular clergy”—that is, the ordinary parish priests, who might find themselves in unwelcome competition with the new-fangled itinerant monastics, who were becoming as numerous and noxious as “flies and fleas.”  The debate was to a degree a battle of Bible verses, the passage about the Son of Man lacking even the domestic amenities of foxes and birds being a favorite of the more radical friars.  But their opponents could also turn it against them.  The birds came out unscathed.  Who doesn’t like birds?  Francis himself preached to them.  But not the foxes.  Foxes already had a folkloristic reputation for cunning and trickery.  Furthermore, with their reddish-brown coats they looked rather like a certain brand of friars—Franciscans.  So foxes and friars were an almost inevitable literary coupling, the most prominent survival being perhaps the folklore of Reynard the Fox.  I think it is likely that at one level Chaucer’s hilarious tale of the rooster Chaunticleer is an ecclesiastical allegory about the competition between friars and secular priests

 cock and fox

 

vulpes et gallus
 

It is fascinating to note how deeply our earlier artistic traditions in painting and literature, both popular and learned, reflect images derived from scriptural exegesis.  Because of a detail in Jesus’s commission to his disciples (Mark 6.9), the friars called themselves “them that carry no purse.”  But one disciple did carry a purse: Judas, as Chaucer’s imaginary Friar points out in attacking the equally imaginary Summoner, who also “had little purses and was a thief.”  You may also have noted the many ambiguous purses and codpieces in Renaissance portraits of the high and mighty.

approach of the jungle, site of foxhole

But back to my wild garden.  There is hanging from the tool shed near the liminal wall a rather fancy ceramic birdhouse, the gift of a long-departed friend.  Its location is wholly inappropriate to its function.  In fact its particular elegance is not really our style.  I put it there “temporarily” several years ago to keep it safe from lawn mowers.  I was amazed when Joan reported to me a few days ago that there was a nest and a bird in it, possibly a wren.  There had not been bird in it for a few years.  I wonder if that had anything to do with the family of foxes formerly living in their foxhole less than twenty yards away?   

 

But I only came to this realization recently.  For the reason I used to see foxes walking along the top of the stone wall was that the wall was for them the fastest route home.  They had dug out their home in a particularly jungly spot just beyond my property line.  When I stumbled upon it, I found that it was actually less a hole and more  a wide, shallow crater, of soup dish shape, spacious but virtually invisible in its surrounding high grass.  Even so, it was not a particularly good place for their abode, as they apparently decided fairly soon.  But they were there long enough to make the birds decamp, and it has taken some time for them to return.

Historical Jesus

 

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)

            My blog essays neither seek nor merit a large readership, but I think I have discovered how I might get one should I be so inclined.  All I would have to do is write exclusively about Princeton athletic events or the weddings of attractive  and popular young people with many friends.  So profuse has been the clientele for the account of Sophia’s wedding last week that I think I must retreat to the obscurity of some arcane topic and treat it arcanely.  I seek, in Stendahl’s somewhat cryptic note at the end of the Charterthouse of Parma, “the happy few”.  But even the fewest may not be so happy after learning that my topic will be a novel of Mikhail Bulgakov’s set in 1930s Moscow, The Master and Margarita.  Only sort of about that, of course.

 

            This very strange and funny novel was written in the earlier period of Stalin’s tyranny, mainly in the Thirties.  It includes at least two plots, though their summary description will tell you very little about the book’s genius.  One strand (set in contemporary Moscow) is a satirical treatment of an official Communist  Party writers’ guild, Massolit, and its strange visitation by the Devil in the persona of a mysterious foreign professor, Voland.  Voland brings with him an entourage and an ambiance of the weird and the supernatural.   A second plot (set in ancient Jerusalem) is an historical novel written by a disillusioned writer called “the Master,” about Pontius Pilate, Jesus, and Judas Iscariot.  In both there is a lot of interplay with biblical and secular literature.  Margarita, the Master’s girl-friend, appears to be a Marxist reflection of Goethe’s “eternal feminine” in Faust.  Around the early Thirties militant atheism went into overdrive as Party doctrine and practice.  While wrecking crews demolished old churches, stern-eyed poets wrote odes celebrating the death of God. Berlioz, the Massolit commissar, denies that Jesus ever even existed.  But Professor Voland’s amazing powers seem to prove that supernatural evil, at least, is real enough; and the Master’s novel treats Jesus as an unquestionably historical personage, if only a deluded madman.

 

            I read The Master and Margarita in 1976 in London at the urging of a friend and colleague at the William Morris Centre, Tom Drescher.  I thought it was absolutely engaging and rather amazing, but I certainly didn’t “understand” it.   Nor did I then know enough to appreciate its relationship to a long and paradoxical tradition in modern European thought that has at long last captured my curious attention: the cultural significance of “the historical Jesus.”  Judaism, and its late Antique sect that eventually became Christianity as a distinct faith, are described as revealed religions.  The revelation is contained in a book, or rather in an anthology of books, the Bible.  For Christians the revelation is found both in the ancient books first written in Hebrew and in the later ones, first written by early followers of Jesus and recorded in the common Greek language of international exchange of their day.  Of the latter, four (the gospels) are biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, presenting a common narrative with much overlapping and some contradictory detail.  All four gospels present Jesus as a miracle-worker during his life, and report his rising from death after his execution.  The books of the Bible are surely the most studied books in the history of world literature and the objects of a vast secondary literature.

 

            A miracle is an unusual event for which there is no rational or scientific explanation, and in the Age of Reason, or Enlightenment, thoughtful people were less and less willing to credit them—including those in the Bible, indeed including those attributed to Jesus.  Contrary to popular belief, it was not an irreligious age.  But the philosophical minds that were awestruck by the brilliance, order, and rationality of God’s Creation could scarcely credit that the Creator would on odd occasions break his own rules to stop the sun in its invariable course so that Gideon could slay more Amorites, or that his Son could induce the mass suicide of a herd of Gadarene swine.  The Scottish philosopher Hume included a devastating critique of miracles in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).  But growing doubts about New Testament miracles only stimulated greater interest in Jesus as an historical moral philosopher and religious teacher.  There emerged a new kind of biography of the “historical Jesus.”

Ernest Renan (1823-1892)

 

            Its literary history is too rich to deal with comprehensively here.  Our own great Enlightenment President, Thomas Jefferson, created his own version of the New Testament by excising from the Authorized Version those parts he considered accretions, leaving, he hoped, a clearer and more coherent body of Jesus’s ethical teachings.  The rapid growth of scientific investigations in the nineteenth century had its parallels in professional biblical and theological studies.  Two of these were particularly important.  In 1835 David Strauss, a liberal German Lutheran theologian, published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, in which he denied Jesus’s divinity and chucked out his supernatural deeds.  Mary Ann Evans (“George Eliot”) translated this scandalous book into English.  Far more important in its popular impact was the French Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan (1863).  I have written about this gentle, beautiful, and reverent book before.  Renan was a one-time Roman Catholic seminarian, who early abandoned his peasant faith.  He became a deeply learned historian, medievalist, and patrologist concentrating on the origins of Christianity.  His biography of Jesus is wholly demythologizing, but not adversarial or polemical. It was intended for, and connected with, a very large audience of intelligent readers.

 

            It caused outrage among church leaders.  The Pope declared Renan “the arch-blasphemer of Europe”. But many educated Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, actually found spiritual nourishment in the work, which freed them to strengthen their core beliefs by jettisoning dogmatic stumbling blocks.  This is in some ways an astonishing conclusion to come to with regard to one of the most heretical books ever published, but it is clearly demonstrated in the work of an English historian, Robert Priest.*  Priest has made a thorough study of the original Renan archives, which contain many letters written to him (some anonymously) from grateful Christian readers who found in his book a strengthening of their own religious ideas.

 

            I was led to Priest’s work while trying to figure out how a great Portuguese novelist of the 1890s would write two fictional versions of the death of Christ, and place one of them unexpectedly into the middle of a slightly ribald social satire.  Or why a great spate of historical fiction about Jesus, Judas, Pontius Pilate, and other related characters suddenly appears on the scene in the later 1800s.  I have by no means figured it all out, but Bulgakov’s very bizarre Master and Margarita has certainly set me to thinking.  The Bolshevik intellectuals, and their satirical reflections in the Moscow writers and theater people of Massolit, were all of course vocal atheists.  They did not believe in a God of Providence, but in the scientific determinism (dialectic) of history.  In the first, weird chapter of the novel, Mikhail Berlioz, head of Massolit, and Ivan Bezrodny, a poet and the author of a travesty on the birth of Christ, are discussing the non-existence of Jesus.  The Devil, who appears to them in the persona of Professor Woland, a foreign, apparently German historian, overhears and joins their conversation. Their first fear is that this unknown personage is a police spy—generally a sound default assumption in Stalin’s capital—but what Woland has to say is so bizarre as to reassure them that he is only a madman.  His prediction is that Berlioz will very soon meet his death by decapitation by a female member of the Komsomol (a Communist Girl Scout).  Their conversation wanders into various byways, but at its end Woland directly contradicts the views of the literary men concerning Jesus.  

 

“Jesus did exist, you know.”   

“Look, Professor,” said Berlioz with a forced smile.          

“With all respect to you as a scholar we take a different attitude on that point.”

“It’s not a question of having an attitude,” replied the strange professor.  “He existed, that’s all there is to it.”

 

Thus did the diabolical historian insist upon the historicity of the historical Jesus by way of introducing into the mystifying early pages of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita the opening chapter of a second book, a modern apocryphal gospel, the Master’s condemned historical novel, a chapter set at the palace of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem in the time of--Jesus.  In a brilliant introductory essay in the Everyman’s Library edition, Cambridge professor Simon Franklin writes of Bulgakov’s own temporarily doomed text: “Not a page was publishable…[with its] multiplicity of styles, with the logic of fantasy installed as fact; a ‘true’ figure of Christ who stands outside the doctrines both of orthodox Soviet atheism and of Orthodox Russian Christianity.”

 

            But history does have its dialectics, often strange ones.  You can now find photographs in the newspapers of Vladimir Putin (ex-KGB officer) snuggling with Patriarch Kyril of the Russian state church, or of Kyril’s priests asperging Putin’s bombs and bombers on their way to Ukraine.

 

 

*Robert D. Priest, “Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France: The Popular Reception of Renan’s Life of Jesus,” The Journal of Modern History, 86 (2014): 258-284.

 

 Warning: this is post number 666 in the continuing series.

 

 

June Wedding

                                                    the principals and the place

 

           On Saturday, June 4^th, our eldest granddaughter, Sophia Fleming-Benite, married Raymond Wang on the grounds of the fabulous, funky colonial farmstead belonging to her uncle and aunt, Richard Fleming and Katie Dixon, in Kingwood Township near Frenchtown, N. J.   The mother of the bride—also a Katy but with a usefully variant spelling—is our daughter.  The father of the bride, our son-in-law, the eminent Sinologist Zvi Ben-Dor, was one of the two officiants, the other being the father of the groom, Bob Wang, also a professor.  So the erudition was conspicuous, the culture multi, the joy unbounded, and the weather absolutely perfect.  This last point was hardly banal given the event’s open-air setting on a greensward to be reached only after a quarter of a mile of gravel lane marinated by several previous nights of thunder showers.  Though the impressive ecumenicism of the ceremony—roughly Sino-Judaic-Franciscan, I would say—avoided all parochial spiritual sectarianism, I might give some small credit to my own silent orisons to Aeolus, the god of winds, and the stormy goddess Tempestas.

John Henry warms up the crowd
 

But only very small.  The wedding couple are in themselves such magnificent specimens of benign energy, moral majesty, and boundless promise as to restore some sense of that social confidence so severely undermined by two years of dystopian plague  and the seemingly remorseless bombardment of the daily news.  None of us can ever be wholly prepared for the storms of life, literal or metaphorical, but Raymond and Sophia strike me as about as fit for life’s struggle as they are destined for its happiness and satisfactions.  That seemed to me as well to be the general sense of the gathering—upwards of a hundred friends and family, I would have thought, vibrant with admiration, congratulations, vibes of universal amity, and the determination to enjoy to the fullest one great party.   This was in the form of a dinner-dance beneath a spacious tent, itself enclosed within a yet more encompassing canopy of towering old forest, through the foliage of which, when one stepped out, shone occasional glimpses of those stars which are the pilgrim Dante’s culminating vision of Love in his imagined Paradise—"the Love that moves the sun and the other stars”.

 

I find myself challenged by certain expectations of the write-ups of weddings as I find them in the social pages.  What of the bride’s dress, for example?  Well, Sophia would look gorgeous in a potato sack, so naturally she looked even better in something very different—not a traditional bridal gown, but a stunning long white dress in a fine fabric that gave off the tactile effect of tiers of finely beaten copper.  Both of the principals’ mothers were dressed in arresting red, explained by Mrs. Wang as by Chinese cultural custom the requisite wedding hue.  The grandmother of the bride, whose beauty has but mellowed since her own somewhat more modest marital event precisely six decades earlier, was a symphony in blue.  Put this all together and you get—yes, red, white and blue!  The bunting of our national allegory.  Sort of looks like America.

 

sixty years on
 

Lulu and Cora Louise, Sophia’s younger sisters, were of course the bridesmaids and ring-bearers.  Of our six grandchildren, five are girls, including all three in the bride’s family.  The three Fleming-Benite sisters invite an analogy that must commonly spring to the grandparental mind in such circumstances.  What naturally presents itself to the classicizing temperament is, of course, the vision of the Three Graces.  Though these young ladies have names--Aglaia, Thalia, and Euphrosyne—I seldom can remember them.  What is important is that as a group they are the classical mythological embodiments of feminine elegance, beauty, and joyousness, qualities that on Saturday last were on conspicuous display in the backwoods of Kingwood, New Jersey.

 

 

Cora Louise, Lulu, Aglaia, Thalia and Euphrosyne

 

The ceremony, beautifully crafted yet pleasingly relaxed, almost took place at its appointed hour, and almost all the guests had arrived in time.  There are certain situations for which almost is in fact the most desirable possible state of affairs.  A definite and significant formality of concept joined with a flexible and relaxed mode of execution to form a union of what Chaucer called sentence and solace—deep meaning and lots of fun.  And, boy, was there ever fun!  The music began even before the ceremony, and not just any music, but music of exactly the right kind—a line of cool New Orleans brass lined up in front of the old house’s façade looking onto a long meadow, gently sloping down toward a distant pond.  It was in this field that the chairs for the guests had been arranged, the slight declination of the ground creating the effect of a natural and spacious amphitheatre.

 

Without claiming objectivity as an observer, I have to say that this wedding was the most joyously received large event in which I can remember having participated.  From time to time I read in the papers of certain initiatives—the building of a concert hall, perhaps—as being “public-private” undertakings, meaning that they come from the cooperation of individual and communal efforts.  So I would describe the wedding at Kingwood.  It made good use of expert professionals: caterers, a “wedding planner,” musicians, sanitary engineers who introduced us to completely new horizons in portapotties.  But all these amiable and competent experts were at the service of, rather than in exerting control over the wedding couple and the site hosts.  Richard and Katie Dixon, lord and lady of the manor, laboring for months in further beautifying their beautiful domain, had produced an horticultural masterpiece.  I doubt that the grounds ever looked better in all their two-hundred and thirty-two years.

 

The dining and the dancing were superb, granting the necessity for the latter to be “age appropriate”.  In fact the vigorous participation of several small children added a delightful dimension to the activity on the dance floor.  Of this we were observers rather than participants.  In my condition anything more lively than a sarabande is unthinkable.  An edible joint of chicken produced by a caterer is a rare achievement.  The delicious one these people produced was virtually unprecedented.  And of course there were other hilarities and highjinks—including a moving and heartfelt speech shared by a married couple among the newlyweds’ closest friends, random bursts of uproar among the dining tables, the modulated hum of happy fressers.  I myself was honored by Sophia and Raymond to propose a toast, which concluded thus: “As they set out on their committed life together and their destined mission to leave our needy world a better place than they found it, we, their families and their friends, wish them all happiness, good health, material sufficiency, and the never-failing comfort and support of mutual love and companionship.”  From my lips, I hope, to the ear of God.  The party continued after the geriatrics’ witching hour, though how long I cannot say.  I awoke to a silent breaking dawn, preternaturally still and empty save for the many musics of many birds.  Everyone had disappeared while I slept.  The newlyweds, I presume, were on their way to their honeymoon, and to their new life together, leaving us all the richer for the privilege of having witnessed its glorious moments of inception. 

                                        

two, always better than one

                   

               

Thoughts of a Gun Owner

 

            Amidst so much talk of privately owned guns, I feel compelled to say a word about my own, for I indeed am a gun-owner.  My gun is a forty-five caliber Colt revolver, a genuine original “six-shooter”.  It probably was manufactured in the 1880s.  It belonged to my maternal grandfather, who was an employee of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, stationed in Salida, Colorado.  For a country showing signs of political senility, the United States is a comparative infant.  My father knew a man who had known a man who had known George Washington.  My grandfather was born shortly after the Civil War and my mother, his youngest child, was not young when I was born.  Three family generations easily occupy more than half our national history.  My gun is an antique from America’s antiquity.  It has been fired once—meaning one shot--in the last seventy years.  My late elder brother, who inherited it in 1950, wanted to see if it still worked then.  It did.  He hit a tree at about fifteen yards.  I don’t know where he came up with a projectile for it.  We have never tried to find any.  It has been preserved ever since in a safe place in the metaphoric mothballs of a leather holster probably dating from the early twentieth century.  At rare intervals it gets a light wipe with a faintly oiled cloth.  I don’t want anybody to take this gun away from me.  My hope is that it will be passed on through generations yet unborn, a significant antique, a beautifully precise steel forging from a great age of American industry, and an intriguing material link to a proximate but vanished past.

 

            My grandfather never heard of an event like that in Uvalde, though such events now seem almost common.  Just how common?  It depends upon whether you address the question from an ethical, a comparative, or a statistical point of view.  From the ethical point of view, which must command the attention of every person with a conscience and surely commands our communal national consciousness at this very moment, the mass murder of young children in a primary school is an event so obscene as to render the question just asked about it obscene as well.  The suggestion seems to be that we should establish a baseline number of annual school massacres against which the actual number might be deficient or excessive in any given year.  If we use the language of ought, there ought to be no such events.  But the tragic empirical fact is that there have been many, precisely documented by police and medical officials, and recorded and broadcast by journalists.  We are thus provided with a very sound basis to make the comparative judgement that the United States is the runaway world leader in such atrocities.

 

            It is the third approach to the question, the statistical part in its narrowest sense, that proves troublesome.  How statistically likely is it that a given student will be murdered at any given school by a maniac?  I don’t know the answer, except that it is very unlikely.  On the day that the school in Uvalde was attacked, just about a hundred thousand other American public schools were not attacked.  But current thinking about “safety measures” seems about as antiquated as my grandfather’s six-shooter.  It accepts as a matter of grim possibility that all our schools are potential abattoirs.  They are all “targets” to be “hardened” with high security techniques possibly appropriate for a military laboratory conducting classified research but hardly conducive of a wholesome and open educational experience.  Teachers and students are further to enhance their own safety by training in simulated attacks.

 

            According to Wayne La Pierre  of the National Rifle Association, the appropriate response to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  This is a strategy of war.  It was the strategy of Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease policy in the Second World War.  It is the strategy of President Biden and other Western leaders in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war.  Here’s the idea: you supply the good guys, Mr. Zelensky, we’ll help supply the guns.  In civil society the authorized armed good guys are the police.  There were many police on the scene in Uvalde including a small group specially designated as school-protectors.  We have learned that as many as nineteen of these assorted good guys stood by in uncertainty and inaction outside the door of a schoolroom within which children were being murdered.  This is now the cause of probably justified criticism and even outrage, but can I honestly claim that I would have been the first to rush at that barricaded door?  Or can we believe that a hundred thousand schools can indefinitely maintain honed and effective defense plans against rare events?  Perhaps this grotesque episode at least provided a useful hint of the likely results of proposals, should they come into effect, to “Defund the Police!”

 

            The patent renewal date stamped into the metal of my six-shooter is 1874.  In the manufacturing of killing machines there have been giant strides since 1874.  I will not fault vocal advocates of “gun rights” for introducing the language of military strategy into school safety, but surely there should be an update in the strategy reflecting revolutionary developments in the military weapons being used by the perpetrators.  What military commander would begin by ceding a would-be assailant all the ground up to your very front door before taking action?  If a disturbed youth armed with war weapons makes it to the school door, let alone penetrates a classroom, it will be a near miracle to escape without carnage.  My own quixotic suggestion would be to rescind the second amendment, as Americans had the good sense to rescind the high-minded, well-meaning nineteenth (prohibition of alcohol) when it led to disastrous unintended consequences.    Then our legislators could start afresh, liberated from eighteenth-century technological assumptions and the further mystification of an ambiguous ablative absolute about well-ordered militias.  I already said this idea was quixotic.  In fact it would probably embarrass the old hidalgo himself.  So I move on.  But even back in the surreal world of Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde there are intelligent and, yes, truly “common-sense” initiatives to address the problem of school shootings that do not await the firing of the first shot in a third-grade classroom to implement and that do not interfere with the right to own and bear arms any more than driver’s ed courses, vision tests, and insurance requirements interfere with an unenumerated right to own and drive a car.  I will not rehearse these common-sense proposals.  They are in the press every day. They reflect two main ideas.  The first is that in America the available armory has changed quite a bit since the time of Natty Bumppo.  The second is that it is best to keep mentally disturbed people and known criminals away from guns.  These common-sense ideas do not rest on the assumption that gun owners are knuckle-dragging knuckleheads or that the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence is a sodality of effete leftists.  They do begin with the assumption that Americans, polemically divided as they may be, are still bound together by a bond of common human decency, and for all their parochialism still wish to exhibit (as Jefferson put it) “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”  This may already be a bridge too far.  But everybody else in the world surely thinks we are crazy.

 

 

 

Replacement

 

 

            What I am going to talk about this week is my excitement as we anticipate the wedding of our eldest granddaughter, Sophia, at the beginning of June.  But this seems to require that I tell you what I am not going to talk about , and not talk about at considerable length: namely, the theory of the so-called “Great Replacement,” according to which sinister forces with sinister motives are consciously attempting to alter the broad ethnic composition of the populations of the United States and various European nations.  This is a topic that has been much in the news of late, especially in the wake of a murderous rampage perpetrated by a homicidal maniac in Buffalo NY ten days ago.  I do not use the word “maniac” idly.  The killer is a mentally disturbed teenager whose mind, if we can judge by on-line evidence scattered about the Internet, is crammed with hate-filled thoughts and crackpot and randomly gathered ideas, one of which is a racially inflected version of the Great Replacement theory.  In the prevailing political climate, this horrible event was immediately discussed mainly in political terms; but it is now already the day before yesterday’s news.  Yesterday’s news, the slaughter of small children in a Texas elementary school, Sandy Hook redux,  has effaced it.   While ideas can have consequences, I myself doubt that rational theory inspires such wickedness; I am more reluctant than some others to use the word reason to denote the rationalizations of infirm minds.  The mystery of iniquity remains for me mysterious—though mainly iniquitous.

 

            Brett Stephens, an official conservative paladin of “viewpoint diversity” at the New York Times and in my view among the writers with one of the higher ratios of matter to manner on their editorial pages, had what I thought was an excellent essay about “replacement”.  While in no way dignifying the febrile “theory” of political kooks, he does point out that “replacement,” sometimes violent and sanguinary, sometimes as imperceptible as the mutation of old growth forests, has been the recurrent pattern of American history.  He begins with the removal and frequent liquidation of the populations native to this continent in the seventeenth-century by newly arriving Europeans.  He could have begun earlier, with the inter-tribal Indian genocides, some of them documented to a degree, which ante-dated the arrival of the principal European colonists from Spain and England.  And what was the history of these newcomers themselves?  Iberia had for centuries been an arena of struggle, of conquest and reconquest, a clash of races and religions.  In the British Isles invading Germanic tribes overwhelmed and literally marginalized a mixed Celtic population.  After a great deal of further national and international strife the resulting “Englishmen” themselves were conquered by the Normans, who, as their name might tell you, were originally Scandinavian Vikings, though long enough settled in the last place they had conquered to pick up its French language.

 

 And really so it goes, but not (one hopes) in infinite regress.  Because the recurrent pattern of American history is in fact the pattern of history, period, just as replacement is the recurrent pattern of human biology.  So far as I can tell from what science can teach me my only actual purpose on earth is to cooperate in my own replacement.  This is one of the reasons I prefer to look to philosophy and religious tradition for the guidance needed to interpret the teachings of science.  Being replaced, after all, is a continuous process, and mostly not all that scary. You remember chairing that committee back in the ‘nineties.  Somebody moves into your old office.  You used to be able to play tennis with your son.   Now he plays with his son.  Are these evident “replacements”?  Heterosexual mating, though now talked about by some of our advanced thinkers as a mere option among a bewildering array of others, has had a pretty long and successful run in perpetuating the human species, and as I write this, I see little prospect of its abandoning that role any time soon.  Yet in individual life a point arrives when the sexual imperative, which supervises the replacement business,  loses its imperium.  Then, if not before, the realization of one’s own impending and definitive “replacement” can become quite concrete.  Though I admit the subject’s gloomy potential, I am just now finding it rather joyful and energizing as I contemplate the young couple about to be wed and poetically designated as our replacements.   At least I was until our national pathology once again rendered joyful thought difficult.  Weddings are by nature family events.  The marital partners, formed by family, come together to form a new family.  Our granddaughter Sophia—beautiful, brainy, ethically rock solid, and in her late twenties already strikingly successful in a useful and productive profession—is as fit for the world’s fight as anyone my imagination could conjure up.  Her radiance is her own, but the sparkle of her loving  and talented parents is there as well.   I naturally know her better than as yet I know her fiancé Raymond, our future grandson-in-law (if there is such a thing), but I can see that he is a gentle genius with a great and loving heart and an impulse to leave our world a better place than he found it .  I shall be most content to be “replaced” by the likes of Sophia and Raymond.

 

But surely the whole notion of “replacement,” as often used, is a retrograde idea that is not well suited to a forward-looking world.  It seems to me to derive from modes of thinking no longer very helpful: categories of hereditary royal dynasty and aristocratic lineage.  In  the dynastic mode of thought too much attention is focused on a glorious past and too little on a possible future.  Perhaps a better term would be the “great continuation” or even the “great advance”.  It is obvious from current world events that old and violent modes of population exchange  have not disappeared from the earth, but they are no longer the norm as they were in the times of the Barbarian Migrations or of Genghis Khan.

 

 I have to hope that my posterity is marked with some benign traces of my influence, but their world should be what they are able to make of it, not what I have saddled them with.  Perhaps the metaphor here should be that of flow, as in the great Isaac Watts hymn, “Time, like an ever-flowing stream…”  Heraclitus tells us one can never wade in the same stream twice.  Strong families are like fine works of art as described by Eliot in his wonderful essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”  A great artist can reflect the work of a predecessor with respect and admiration even while setting off in an entirely new direction.  Like Heraclitus’s stream: the same, but not the same.

 

 

 

Barnes Foundation

 

The constraints of the pandemic have proved trying for us as for everyone else, especially as they have coincided with those of aging.  The cloud’s silver lining has been an enforced leisure.  Though I have not exploited it as I undoubtedly should have, indeed though I have sometimes found it rather trying, it has allowed me the time and the impetus to think a little more deeply about certain questions that have long interested me.  Against the backdrop of really terrible world and national problems, I have had the luxury to read and think about art, literature and music with licensed self-indulgence.  Mark Twain famously  said that “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read”.   Quite a crack, and too close to true.  I now realize that as a young man I invested much time in reading classics of this sort, books that I didn’t quite “get” but I knew on the excellent authority of somebody else were very good for me.  One of these was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.  I didn’t get it at all, but about thirty years later something of Hawthorne’s plan may have dawned on me when I started reading Henry James seriously and began to understand the degree to which so many nineteenth-century American intellectuals were ambivalently fascinated by Old Europe, and especially by its opulent artistic heritage.  One never stops learning, thank God, and I may have progressed a little further in understanding this matter on Friday last.

 

The pandemic has surely been particularly severe for elderly people who have been isolated or solitary.  We have been blessed to enjoy the constant, cheering support of our children and grandchildren and, at the local level, numerous good neighbors and friends.  One of these, who is both a former student and a former colleague, has done us innumerable kindnesses.  It was he who on Friday drove us door-to-door to Philadelphia to visit the art collection of the Barnes Foundation.  This was our first visit , but I certainly hope not our last.

 

Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) was a Philadelphia physician who accumulated considerable wealth by developing an eye medicament called Argyrol.  As sources of nineteenth-century baronial fortunes go, Argyrol had a good deal more social beneficence than most.  Barnes had developed a serious interest in art, especially what was “modern painting” around the year 1900.  While not exactly a conventional philosophical deep thinker, he had definite ideas about aesthetics and the educational role that art could play in public life.   He had a pioneering sense of the potential role of elite art in a democratic society.  It was with a large if at first unformed sense of social mission that he set out energetically and purposefully to construct a great collection of paintings.  In retrospect his success seems nearly incredible.  He was the right man in the right place at the right time.  Barnes was a high school chum and artistic soulmate of William Glackens, a prominent leader of the “Ashcan School” of painters, and a man with a faultless eye.  As Glackens was setting off for a trip to Paris in 1912 Barnes slipped him a line of credit in the amount of $20,000 with a commission to buy up some post-impressionists of the sort both men admired.  It was not the most famous transatlantic voyage of that year, as it evaded icebergs, but it was of signal importance in the history of American art collections.  At the time Barnes was particularly interested in Renoir.  Glackens was able to negotiate essentially wholesale prices and scored thirty-some now priceless works by Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, and others.  Twenty grand was a lot of money in 1912, but still…Such was the nucleus of one of the greatest private art collections ever constructed in America—or anywhere else, for that matter.

 

Barnes’s private residence was in Merion, a ritzy Main Line suburb west of Philadelphia, and it was there that the treasures were housed.  Once started in his self-conscious role as collector, it was full steam ahead, and he never again bought a painting he had not himself first examined.  He read voraciously among the leading art authorities of his day, and he cultivated personal friendships among artists and intellectuals, particularly the educational guru John Dewey, a fellow patrician democrat in the Emersonian tradition.  By the 1920s, his collection burgeoning, he built a separate gallery in Merion to house it and established a foundation to preserve and shepherd it. 

 

                                      Giorgio di Chirico: Albert C. Barnes

 

There is much more to be said about Barnes the man, but I need to say at least a few words about the paintings.  He had very definite ideas about how they should be displayed.  When in an act of the highest philanthropy—a word meaning the love of mankind—he gave them over for public access, he did so in a narrowly framed will that required them forever to be displayed in the Merion gallery and in the exact spatial configurations in which he had left them at his death in 1951.  Residential Merion, PA, was never a great site for a public museum intended to attract crowds.  It became ever less so in the next five decades.  A half century after his death the Foundation eventually gained legal authority to build a new and magnificent gallery, itself a work of art, on Philadelphia’s “Museum Row,”  and to remove the paintings to it.  But his personal (eccentric?) concept of presentation continues to be honored.  That is, the paintings are displayed in the clusters or groupings (he called them ensembles) exactly as they were in Merion. 

ensemble presentation 

 

Barnes thought painting should be appreciated with as little intermediation as possible, with a minimum of textual explication.  (This was also the theory of the “New Critics” behind the teaching of poetry in my undergraduate years in the 1950s).   Most of the paintings merely have small brass plaques with the artist’s surname.  As for their organization on the walls, arrangement is not by artist, period, or genre.   The controlling principles seem to be harmony of size and placement.  The collector’s principal interests naturally took him to what was for him recent or contemporary, so there is a lot of the late French nineteenth century.  But along the way he picked up classical artefacts, African art, and numerous old masters.  So you will find an El Greco flanked by a French post-impressionist and a panel separated from a medieval altar, if the sizes seemed right.  He also loved Pennsylvania Dutch “primitive” cabinets and dowry chests, one of which is centrally placed in most rooms, and little bits and pieces of old forged iron.  And through it all runs the bright red thread of thought touched upon in my initial paragraph: questions of the universality of art, the nationality of its expression, the possibilities of its democratic appreciation and influence.  Maybe that’s what The Marble Faun is about, though I somehow doubt it.

 

 

                                                          

 Around the periphery of this fabulous modern collection are some almost accidental delights for a medievalist.  One that surprised and captivated me is a small panel (“Westphalian, About 1400” says the little brass marker) of Dives and Lazarus, otherwise known as the Rich Man and the Pauper (Luke 16: 19-31).  My Franciscan preachers loved this text’s apparent support for their doctrine of evangelical poverty.  The chief indication of the wealth of Dives seems to be his very classy hat.  But the context in which I came upon this surprising piece complicates the usual interpretation of the parable.  Barnes was a rich man whose private wealth is now the public good of thousands.