More Dogs Join the Hunt
We were talking about the religious temperament, or I was, trying to decide what to believe: Are we religious by choice? By the grace of God? (To paraphrase Lady Brett to Jake Barnes at the end of The Sun Also Rises, “Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to think that?”) Or, are we religious by nature? It’s in our genes; and some of us are and some of us aren’t.
I don’t know what to think about this, so I take, if not the usual, a frequent refuge of fools. I start reading randomly. First, this old appreciation of El Greco I found recently among a friend’s cast-offs. “Take El Greco,” I say, as if that’s a step toward an answer.
Take El Greco, who began apparently as a painter of icons. That wouldn’t require a religious temperament, I don’t suppose, but it might be helpful to have one. And by all accounts El Greco did. That, or he had astigmatism.
That’s one alternative explanation for the increasingly elongated figures in the later paintings—not only elongated but disproportionate: astigmatism. But how to account for the fact that in the sculptures, the figures retain their natural dimensions?
So a religious explanation for the paintings seems more likely. The late El Greco wasn’t trying to paint reality. He was painting a vision, or his reaction to a vision—he was trying to paint the faith that was absorbing him. So, as Dale Brown (The World of Velázquez) points out, even when El Greco depicts the infant Christ’s adoration by the shepherds, “an event that particularly lends itself to realistic portrayal,” he avoids simple representation. Instead, while the shepherds are “recognizably human . . . as they realize that they have come upon the Christ Child, they writhe and assume fantastic postures. In distorting them,” Brown concludes, El Greco “conveys his own sense of awe in the presence of the divine.” He is not describing shepherds before the Virgin and child; he is portraying his own feeling of being twisted by the mystery of God.
Excursus: El Greco comes from Venice and Rome to . . . Toledo. Contrast Velázquez, who can’t wait to get out of Seville if it’s only as far as Madrid. He might have remained; there were more than enough religious commissions in the Andalusian city to keep him till death did them part. But Velázquez departed for the capital, because “his bent was clearly for the secular rather than the spiritual” (Brown again, though my italics). So off to Madrid and the Hapsburg court—poets and politicians, lords and ladies, lap dogs and dwarfs. O, brave new world . . . .
Huxley’s novel. I don’t want to go into why I was reading that recently—or rereading it—because then I’d have to admit that I wasn’t reading it; I was listening to it on two long car trips to Michigan and back. But Michael York was reading it. That must count for something in terms of cultural points.
At the end of the fifth chapter, odd little Bernard Marx is on his way to Solidarity Service to “achieve atonement” with his group of twelve. “Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities to a larger being.” It works for eleven of them, but not for poor Bernard, who is distracted by Morgana Rothschild’s eyebrows. But if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else.
Bernard simply lacks the temperament for faith. That’s the sad, the frightening end of it: he lacks not just a religious temperament; he lacks the temperament for faith.
I don’t know what to think about this, so I take, if not the usual, a frequent refuge of fools. I start reading randomly. First, this old appreciation of El Greco I found recently among a friend’s cast-offs. “Take El Greco,” I say, as if that’s a step toward an answer.
Take El Greco, who began apparently as a painter of icons. That wouldn’t require a religious temperament, I don’t suppose, but it might be helpful to have one. And by all accounts El Greco did. That, or he had astigmatism.
That’s one alternative explanation for the increasingly elongated figures in the later paintings—not only elongated but disproportionate: astigmatism. But how to account for the fact that in the sculptures, the figures retain their natural dimensions?
So a religious explanation for the paintings seems more likely. The late El Greco wasn’t trying to paint reality. He was painting a vision, or his reaction to a vision—he was trying to paint the faith that was absorbing him. So, as Dale Brown (The World of Velázquez) points out, even when El Greco depicts the infant Christ’s adoration by the shepherds, “an event that particularly lends itself to realistic portrayal,” he avoids simple representation. Instead, while the shepherds are “recognizably human . . . as they realize that they have come upon the Christ Child, they writhe and assume fantastic postures. In distorting them,” Brown concludes, El Greco “conveys his own sense of awe in the presence of the divine.” He is not describing shepherds before the Virgin and child; he is portraying his own feeling of being twisted by the mystery of God.
Excursus: El Greco comes from Venice and Rome to . . . Toledo. Contrast Velázquez, who can’t wait to get out of Seville if it’s only as far as Madrid. He might have remained; there were more than enough religious commissions in the Andalusian city to keep him till death did them part. But Velázquez departed for the capital, because “his bent was clearly for the secular rather than the spiritual” (Brown again, though my italics). So off to Madrid and the Hapsburg court—poets and politicians, lords and ladies, lap dogs and dwarfs. O, brave new world . . . .
Huxley’s novel. I don’t want to go into why I was reading that recently—or rereading it—because then I’d have to admit that I wasn’t reading it; I was listening to it on two long car trips to Michigan and back. But Michael York was reading it. That must count for something in terms of cultural points.
At the end of the fifth chapter, odd little Bernard Marx is on his way to Solidarity Service to “achieve atonement” with his group of twelve. “Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities to a larger being.” It works for eleven of them, but not for poor Bernard, who is distracted by Morgana Rothschild’s eyebrows. But if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else.
Bernard simply lacks the temperament for faith. That’s the sad, the frightening end of it: he lacks not just a religious temperament; he lacks the temperament for faith.
posted by Theologic Al at 6:29 AM
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