the golden calf vs the tabernacle, some thoughts about Exodus and the arts, and on idolatry as the veneration of holy things as distinct from a sacred way of life, plus some stuff on Francis Schaeffer and Adorno

I'll admit to being pretty anti-Romantic in my sympathies as a writer, musician and when I was into visual media I liked some of Friedrich's stuff but I was more into Rembrandt.  Whether in art, music or literature I tend to dig the 18th and 20th centuries and like selections of the 19th.  I dug Melville and Dostoevsky, for instance.  But I didn't much care for Whitman and I hardly ever came across a Transcendentalist axiom I didn't find at least vaguely dumb.  I can try to be more generous but basically I'm not hugely into the Romantic era or 19th century.  Romantic era music seems bloated, self-important and lacking in focus, using sheer size to disguise what for me is a lack o freal invention.  So I don't care much fo rBerlioz or Wagner and just some of Lizst to the extent that Lizst inspired Bartok.  The Romantic era or 19th century composers I've liked are Mendelssohn, Chopin and Brahms ... not coincidentally the ones who most often paid tribute to J. S. Bach and/or Haydn. 

I mention all that by way of saying that even though I feel like I'm something of a musical hermit I'm not, in fact, a hermit, and I think that all art is in some sense a social activity.  I don't believe in art for the sake of art and I don't think artists should be able to do whatever they want as though artists were the prophets and priests of our age even if the professionals tend to have that kind of entitlement about them.  The idea that a film maker and a movie star can make a film that's supposed to be a parable about the Earth choosing to fight back against us seems daft.  The carbon footprint involved in making such a film might be better used to do anything else.  I sometimes wonder whether after some future ecological crash some people might not come together and make the observation that if Hollywood weren't so busy embodying the waste and exploitation it claimed to decry the world could have been made a more beautiful and fulfilling place for the rest of the world.  An entertainment industry in which a Woody Allen or Roman Polanski can still be celebrated is not necessarily an entertainment industry that has clearly retained the moral high ground from which to lament the predatory behavior of some Catholic priests.  It is possible to embody the vices and ideas of the very thing you subject to criticism without realizing you have done so. Alternatively, it can be possible that something or someone you critique can turn out to embody your highest stated ideals better than you whether you recognize this or not.  This will take a while but it will involve a ramble through the end of Exodus with some occasional thoughts about Richard Wagner.

I was reading through Exodus earlier this summer and was reading about how Israel went to Aaron and said they had no idea what happened to this Moses fellow.  They insisted upon a god to go before them. Aaron asked them for gold rings and fashioned the calf for them to worship for their deliverance from the hands of the Egyptians.  While this was going on, it seems, Moses was receiving instruction from Yahweh as to how to assemble the Ark and the Tabernacle and the cultic tools of worship for Israel.  The Lord describe who he had given gifts of skill to build things according to His aims.  Aaron fashioned the golden calf himself at the request of the people. 

I wonder if this is a possible point for reflection on idolatry and the arts, since it seems the idolatry of the solitary genius couldn't sound more Romantic.  The one who fashioned the idol gets named and gets the credit.  The one who fashions the idol does so to appease the demands of the people who want a god to go before them.  This calf is then presented as the one who delivered them from Egypt.  Art, as many a person would like to believe, constitutes a path to salvation or a means of redemption.  it is not necessarily the case.  Aaron fashioned the calf because the mob insisted upon it.  Maybe he had the power and will to say "no". We're not really told that part.

But what I'm mulling over is that Aaron made the calf at the behest of the crowd when the Lord had been instructing Moses as to how to build the instruments of worship in a way that would require the contributions of everyone in Israel across their range of abilities and resources and to fashion these instruments of worship after the design the Lord would show them.  After the calf is destroyed and the people rebuked the people are given the opportunity to build everything the Lord commanded in the manner He commanded.  The people skilled in working with metal and wood are given the opportunity to work together to build the Tabernacle and the Ark and the priestly vestments as the Lord instructed through Moses. 

As I've been reading about the history of the total work of art in European avant garde thought it has been interesting how Wagner berated Jews for lacking a real grasp of what makes for "real" art.  Yet he aspired to create a total work of art that would unite every possible art into a new form of redemptive art that could take the role that had previously been played by religion.  Yet within the Jewish literature the god fashioned by the one is the idol that is condemned while the tabernacle and the instruments of worship for Israel are the total work of art created by all the people and overseen by skilled laborers, aren't they?  This just seems like a strange, ironic juxtaposition of anti-Semitic sentiments in European artistic thought despite the fact that it wouldn't be hard to present the instruments of worshipping the God of Israel as a total work of art devoted to worshipping Yahweh and commemorating His deliverance of His people from slavery to the Egyptians.  Yet in Israel's idolatry they turned to one man to fashion for them the god they would venerate and that would go before them, whom they would thank for delivering them.  Wagner wanted his total work of art to play a role in catalyzing a revolutionary moment that would change the world.  Yet in the span of world history I would propose that the Moses who put together the instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle and the Ark and the priestly vestments made the total work of art millennia earlier. 

Now Wagner did want the total work of art to be the product of the genius of the people and not merely the egoistic vision of a single artist and in that sense the juxtaposition of Wagner's operas with the Jewish instruments of worship in the tabernacle, the ark and the priestly vestments can be seen as even more acute.  For in Judaism these were made according to the design and instruction of Yahweh and while Moses conveyed the instructions this was all the work of the people and a reflection of their gifts and skills, we could say, in a phrase, a reflection of their genius as the people chosen by God. 

I spent this summer reading through some books by David Roberts.  I started with The Total Work of Art in the European Avant Garde.  Then I got to Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Finally I got to the David Roberts and Peter Murphy book Dialectic of Romanticism. While it's futile to try to summarize hundreds of pages in a few sentences the case Roberts makes is that Adorno was trapped in the mental straitjackets of Romantic era historicism and Enlightenment assumptions about the linearity of history and progress.  The sense of crisis that all art was kitsch after 1910 and that the only way forward was through the repudiation of bourgeoisie aesthetics was itself borne of that aesthetic it aimed to repudiate.  Roberts' proposal about the nature of Adorno's aesthetics, to attempt to formulate this in Christian theological terms, is that Adorno rejected the arc of art history across media and replaced it with an ideal of art in which aesthetics had to be conceived of in strictly apophatic terms.  Whatever true art is it must be a negation of the clichés and kitsch of earlier epochs of art.  So Schoenberg was a true path forward where Stravinsky's conscientious stylistic formalism and eclecticism was dishonest and Bartok's folklorist work was problematic but at least less so than Stravinsky.  In the end an Adorno and a Spengler agreed the West was in inexorable and unavoidable decline and the new era was dark and barbaric. 

But ... Adorno's unexamined acceptance of an essentially romantic/enlightenment narrative meant that he did not grasp that Stravinsky's subversive appropriation of any and every stylistic idiom from the past that he liked meant that the past was allowed to be present. Stravinsky approached his music with a kind of detachment that is less typical of music as we colloquially think of it and more typical of what might be called a literary irony.  Famously, Stravinsky claimed that music was powerless to express anything beyond itself.  Now there are those who insist that the modernists and the avant gardists in the 20th century embraced materialism but the speciousness of this claim seems too easy to refute.  Stravinsky was a wild child for a while but came back to the Orthodox fold and Messiaen was an observant Catholic.  The same could be said for Penderecki if memory serves. 

Back to Roberts.  He's proposed that Adorno and many criticisms of modernism in both its romantic and enlightenment forms are still ultimately beholden to a historicism that we should reconsider.  Again, in an attempt to articulate this in what might be thought of in Christian terminology, a lot of eighteenth and nineteenth century European thought retained a vestigial postmillennialist utopian drive, one that is not put in those terms by David Roberts himself but that could be translated into those terms by, say, a Christian writer attempting to describe what Roberts says is the shortfall in Adorno's analysis of Western civilization.  In the end Adorno's condemnation of the entirety of Western civilization is too sweeping and too beholden to the historicism he criticizes in others and yet at the same time his aesthetics are too clearly steeped in nineteenth century Romantic era arts for him to see that bringing back earlier styles in the mode of Stravinsky is not "inauthentic" or "dishonest". 

For want of a better way to summarize Roberts' books, he proposes that in some sense we need to remember the distinction between historicism and history.  He proposes the Jena Romantics have been sufficiently misread in the last two centuries that where they thought they were going is not necessarily where "we" took their ideas.  Post-modernism isn't in fact the end of modernism at all so much as a new phase of modernism in which it is forced to contend with its existence after the death of the viability of the master narratives of history that guided European modernism in earlier times.  To repeat my translation of this proposal, post-modernism can be thought of as a modernism in which its postmillennialist utopian narrative has been dismantled but the project of modernity itself going back to the enlightenment and romantic ideals has remained. To the extent that Adorno's quasi-apophatic aesthetics found their foundation on such an unexamined narrative of the arc of history they need to be abandoned in favor of something else, whatever that something else might be. 

All that said, I think Adorno was absolutely right to warn that the idea of "naïve" art is an absurdity, that in modern parlance we must always remember that there's an organic relationship between scientific understandings of the human condition and the arts on the one hand and, on the other hand, that art cannot be reduced to some strictly 'right brain' approach without leading to junk--both hemispheres of the human brain must be involved in creating art.  On those points the problem is that Adorno has not been appreciated enough, I'd venture.  Just because Adorno's "On Jazz" is one of the most infuriating, condescending pieces of literary tripe I've read in my life doesn't mean I can't grant that he had a couple of really good ideas about aesthetics in spite of his shortfalls. I can't really hold it against him if he admired the music of Bach and Beethoven, either.

At a very practical level, and writing as a musician and a composer, Adorno's problem was that when it came to the art of music there was, for him, nothing before J. S. Bach.  A history of Western music without Josquin, Palestrina, Tallis, Byrd, Schutz, Sweelinck, Buxtehude and many others is a history that shouldn't be trusted!  But to make that kind of move Adorno and other 19th century-inspired thinkers made is a grotesque historical oversight ignoring centuries of musical art and centuries of cycles of style change and form change.  In that sense I would say the fatal flaw in the thinking of both Adorno and Francis Schaeffer is that they were both sentimentally beholden to 19th century art forms whether they recognized it or not.  Adorno advocated a type of apophatic modernist aesthetics that despairs of the legitimacy of Western-ism as a whole while Schaeffer seemed to want Christians to reclaim the glories of an essentially pre-Enlightenment command of the arts.  But history hasn't ended on the one hand and, on the other hand, we can't go back and recover that magical era of Christendom that a certain strata of American Reformed types imagine they would enjoy seeing come back if only we had enough Christians making great art.  I am, as a matter of fact, sympathetic to making the best art, music and literature we can manage to make but absolutely nothing about that stuff will make it sacred. 

One of the things he highlighted in his book on European modernism was that Germans tended to venerate Athens while the French tended to venerate Sparta. The given was the Greek city state.  If Christians want to participate in a recovery of classical aesthetics and if conservatives want to recover a classical idiom (I did just finish reading John Borstlap's The Classical Revolution lately) I have my doubts that we're going to get "there" by simply going back to Greek ideals.  Let's say the Germans venerated Athens and the French venerated Sparta. But when the tabernacle was built it was built by people wandering in the wilderness and the tabernacle would be where ever they were.  The tabernacle was not a city state with a cult but a tent that is taken where ever the Lord's people travel and they would set up and tear down the tabernacle based on where the cloud traveled and stayed.  If you were an Israelite you had to go where ever Yahweh would go, where ever the cloud would descend and stay and to where ever the cloud of His presence might rise and depart to.

At this point it seems worth noting that when the kingdom divided Jeroboam created two golden calves to be venerated as if they were Yahweh who delivered Israel from Egypt.  Jeroboam feared that if there were not an alternative cult that as all Israel returned to worship the Lord in the temple they would turn against him.  He feared that if Israel stayed on the path that led them to worship Yahweh where Yahweh chose to be worshipped then he would ultimately lose his kingdom. 

I guess what I'm struggling to articulate is the in the temptation to idolatry Israel told Aaron to give them sacred things while Yahweh was instructing Moses on how to enlist all of Israel to travel a sacred path. Sacred things as an alternative to a sacred path was also what Jeroboam set up to create an alternative cult to ensure that Israel did not keep going down to Judea to worship the Lord there lest they forsake Jeroboam as their king. We know from the prophets that the Lord would bring destruction on Shiloh and let the instruments of the tabernacle and temple be carried off by warlords and the people cast into exile.  The things in themselves were not finally so sacred that they imparted any divine protection.  They could serve as reminders to Israel of the Lord's presence and were commanded to be made and used in offering worship to the Lord but I guess I'm proposing here that they are prescribed means. There is a right way to offer worship to the Lord and those who offered unauthorized fire were slain. 

Across the centuries we get people invested in the arts who disdain religion but are excited to create cults around things.  Wagner had his opera cycle and Joss Whedon invented the cult of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Men who would disdain religion as a whole if by religion we meant the existence of divine beings are excited to share how across decades they have successfully made cults of people devoted to the things they have created and what they believe these things mean.  There may be all sorts of benefits in studying those artistic creations if you make stuff in that field but in a sense what these kinds of men are boasting about is that they have fashioned golden calves to address what they regarded as demands made by the masses.  The irony of a guy like Joss Whedon being a self-identified atheist who is, nonetheless, proud of the cult that formed around a TV show he made seems hard to overstate.  That may be one of the trippier things about this series of reflections, the observation that even atheists are excited to report when they have successfully created a thing, whatever that thing of art may be, that inspires decades of cultish devotion.  Thanks to fan fiction these shows can become iterations of the total work of art, tabernacles to ideals, perhaps, or perhaps ways for everyone to build their own version of a golden calf. 

I'd try to explore these ideas a little further but it's kind of late.