Passing by

Some recently discovered links I came across with some interesting connections to topics on Theology, the Imagination, and the Arts:

The Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts (ITIA) at St. Andrew’s, Scotland (St. Mary’s College)

Fr. Michael Gallagher, SJ, homepage and reading list on theology, imagination and the arts (used by ITIA)

- On Newman and the Imagination

- Theology and Imagination

 

 

Bl. John Henry Newman Shrine

This is a horribly tardy posting, but as I’ve been absent from the blog scene for quite some time, I decided to play a little catch-up.  Last summer I was commissioned to retro-fit an existing confessional, that had itself become a storage closet some time ago, for use as a shrine to the recently beatified Bl. John Henry Newman in the Church of Our Saviour in NYC.  It was to be the first such shrine to Bl. Newman in North America. 

Mass for Artists

The invite for an event I helped organize, I’ll update this post with the flyer image when it’s available.  Hope those interested will be able to attend, please let me know if you plan to!

 

Dear friends and fellow artists,

I’d like to invite you to our first Mass for Artists, hosted by the Catholic Artists Society.

 

The mass will be offered at the Church of Our Saviour in Manhattan at 5pm on Sunday, May 15th. Fr. George Rutler, pastor of Our Saviour’s, will offer a solemn high Mass in the extraordinary form, with choral music by the choir of St. Mary’s Norwalk. The organist will be Hervé Duteil.

 

Afterwards, there will be a reception and a lecture by our guest speaker, Fr. Joseph Koterski, SJ, from the Fordham philosophy department. Fr. Koterski will speak on Ignatian spirituality and the work of the artist.

 

We look forward to bringing together members of the many groups of Catholic artists and media professionals doing wonderful work in New York City and beyond. Please tell your friends and colleagues about the mass, and feel free to contact me with any questions.

 

An invitation and flyer will follow soon.

 

Yours in Christ,

Kevin Collins

A Trinity of Trinities

Recently, I presented for discussion the paper “Truth and the Christian Imagination”, by DC Schindler, for a gathering of Fordham University graduate and doctoral students as part of a “Communio” discussion group.  This paper can be found at the Communio website here.  In my presentation, I took the occasion to note that the “Imagination” is represented by Schindler, at least in my reading of it, as a distinct, third faculty apart from the scholastic bi-partite division of intellect and will.  I had for some time held the Augustinian idea that as the Trinity stands as the ground of Being, and as there is a triune unity of transcendentals which are co-extensive with Being, that humans as made in image and likeness should exhibit this triune structure with respect to their faculties which are receptors and interpreters of “being”.  Certainly Plato held this indirectly when he granted a third, “spirited” faculty to man, and Augustine labeled this third faculty “memory”, and placed a distinct emphasis on the relation of memory to the theological virtue of hope (more on this later).  In my trinitarian thinking, it made sense that if goodness corresponded to the will and truth to the intellect, and their respective perfections were charity and faith, there had to be a third faculty which was distinct from intellect and will which corresponded to the transcendental beauty and what I saw as its perfection in hope.  It also made sense that the lack of a corresponding faculty in the scholastic tradition was largely indicative of the short shrift given to beauty, which was simply seen as a special manifestation of the good but essentially identical.  I never found such a view convincing, especially after reading the early Church Fathers like Maximus, Dionysius, the Gregories of Nyssa and Nazienzen, Augustine, etc.  The beautiful always seemed to me quite distinct from intellect and will and yet simultaneously the bridge between the two, since it seemed to correspond with both without collapsing into an absolute identity with either.

Abstraction and the Architectural Imagination

A paper I presented at Catholic University on May 1, 2010, for a symposium on sacred architecture.

http://architecture.cua.edu/alivingpresence/default.cfm

Abstraction and the Architectural Imagination:
The Question:  “The Story at the Heart of Faith – Can abstraction call the person into the fullness of humanity?”

Working Definitions:

Contemplation/Contemplative Imagination: The total imagination involving all of our faculties—thinking, feeling, remembering, hoping, believing, perceiving, abstracting, conceiving and interpreting.  It is the conditional ground for our reception of reality, and hence truth, and thereby the condition for our entrance into the fullness of our humanity.

Analogical: Proceeding according to a proper proportion or measure.  It is the principle of unity in difference between the part and the whole, the particular and the universal, essentia and esse, becoming and being, the finite and the infinite, where the contraries are so integrated and mutually dependent and informing that to preference one to the expense of the other is to distort the way we contemplate, create, and live in the world.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Introductory salutations.  The titular question as it relates to architecture, specifically sacred architecture, possesses a rather enigmatic character because architecture is an essentially “abstract” art, at least in any strict use or “icon”ic sense of the term.  In fact, “abstraction” in a certain sense is precisely the power of the imagination that renders the entire creative artistic enterprise possible.  Thus, defining its usage and meaning as it is more narrowly evidenced in architecture will constitute the first part of this presentation, highlighting examples of the types of architectural abstraction realized in built works.  Following this, I will suggest that abstraction thus defined, in light of the Christological form given to the world and the specific purpose of sacred architecture in realizing this form, is too limited and narrow to “call” the person into the fullness of humanity, at least if the invitation is understood to be a definite, concrete one (imitation of Christ) in which the voice doing the calling adequately represents the fullness of life which it is drawing the person into.  Instead, I will submit that contemplation as exemplified in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, is in fact the proper “noia” of the architectural imagination, and that this “noia” is typified by the analogical imagination manifest in the dramatic event-structure of traditional architectural forms.

On Beauty

A combination of readings has given me food for thought over the past couple of months.  David Hart’s essay “On Butterflies and Being” preceded an epiphanic moment reading Timothy Gallagher’s Spiritual Consolation: An Ignatian Guide for Greater Discernment of Spirits, to which I referred in a previous post, and this has been further rounded out by Vol. I of Balthasar’s “Theo-Logic” entitled, Truth of the World.

Recalling the occasion of a spiritual exercitant’s experience of God’s overwhelming love while contemplating scripture, Gallagher remarks that “He is aware of the disproportion between his own efforts in prayer and the magnitude of this deeply spiritual consolation.”  I will leave aside the refutation this implies for the suspiciously ubiquitous “centering prayer” which amounts more or less to a direct proportion between one’s efforts in prayer and the effects generated by the method. What struck me like a thunderclap was the similarity between this spiritual consolation and the experience of beauty; namely that the event of beauty is precisely that experience of the disproportion between the apperception or act of contemplating some object and the resultant experience of being overwhelmingly grasped by the same object, which is to say the subjective experience of simultaneous intimacy and distance in the state of reverential awe.

Totalitarian Sentimentality

A great article by the philosopher Roger Scruton about the differences between Liberal and Conservative social thought relating to the idea of compassion, published in American Spectator.

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/12/09/totalitarian-sentimentality

Cheers!

On Anthropogenic Climate Change

Much has been made of the debate on Climate Change, or “Global Warming”, in recent months, from the Copenhagen summit fail, to cap’n'trade legislation fail, to global warming fail, and to scientific research and data fail in general.  Not being a scientist myself, but a more or less conscientious citizen with a decent brain and a skeptical streak (considering all the craze about global cooling a few decades ago), I took it upon myself to read up on the material, both for and against the hypothesis, over the past couple of months.  As I suspected, the mounting evidence against the science behind anthropogenic climate change provides a fairly damning assessment of the hyper-politicized, unsupportable, and ideologically driven conclusions of global warming proponents.  In short, the evidence against anthropogenic global warming or climate change is so far better than the evidence for it, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find any evidence of anthropogenic caused climate change whatsoever.  And yet the climate-change proponents, rather than reading the contrary scientific evidence and opinions, simply repeat the mantra.  You would think there would already be suspicion when Al Gore became the heroic standard bearer, someone so obviously un-political, unbiased, un-profiting, and scientific.  Al Gore the scientist, who, in case we had forgotten, invented the internet.

Bruckner, squared

My rejoinder to Mr. Goldman’s response below:

Aficionados of music who do not know much about music, but know what moves them, are at the mercy of the professionals, who know how to move them. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” at peril to your soul: even beautiful music can be used for evil as well as good. The problem, of course, is just what Sir Thomas Beecham observed: “People don’t like music. They just like the way it sounds.” I am the first to admit that Bruckner’s music sounds glorious. But just how is it put together?
The greatest analyst of tonal music (and the one whose theory quite properly dominates the university curriculum in the US) was Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), a Bruckner student who respected the man but found grave flaws in the music. His evaluation (republished in Heinrich Schenker als Essayist und Kritiker. Gesammelte Aufsatze, Rezensionen und Kleinere Berichte aus den Jahren 1891-1901, ed. Hellmut Federhofer, Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft, 5 [Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1990], 197-205), finds that the music really doesn’t hold together: his musical phrases lack necessary connections to identify beginnings, middles, and endings. Brahms’ contempt for Bruckner’s music is well known (and this had nothing to do with professional jealousy: Brahms had signed Joachim’s manifesto against the “New German Music” long before Bruckner came on the scene).

– David P. Goldman

In all humility, while I admit to being out of my league from the standpoint of professional musicological debate, I believe, as an architect and philosopher, there is something highly elitist, if not Gnostic, about the view that only professionals have the ability to perceive the beauty or ascertain the truth of things, when it is often the professionals who are responsible for creating the academic dichotomy between head and heart that posits a schizophrenic split between experience and reality: their heads so often in the clouds they cannot see the truth or beauty directly in front of their nose, or in this case ears.

Bruckner, on the square

I heart Bruckner.

As such, I was happy to find a fellow Bruckner proponent in David B. Hart, a frequent contributer to First Things and On the Square.  His essay regarding Bruckner and his 9th symphony came as a pleasant surprise, both by virtue of scant public knowledge as well as lack of general acclaim for Bruckner’s music.  One could reasonably come to this conclusion by conducting a simple comparitive analysis of references to Bruckner one encounters in life, whether or not such references are positive or negative, the small amount of literature available on his works, and the little attention he gets in the cycles of symphonic performances at concert halls around the world.   In other words, Bruckner lovers seem to constitute a small minority district among the voting class of western classical music.  And yet, I have actually dared to call Bruckner my favorite symphonist, though the polestars of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven perhaps loom larger in the broader context of favorite musicians.