Paideia

New Liturgical Movement: Russian Iconographer, Fr. Gregory Krug, 1908-1969

The work of the 20th century Russian iconographer and monk, Fr. Gregory Krug (1908-1969), is rather interesting, particularly as it is an example that is clearly rooted within the Byzantine iconographic tradition, and yet there is also something of a contemporary sort of quality to it as well.

Fr. Krug, born Georgii Ivanovich Krug in St. Petersburg, the son of a Swedish Lutheran Father and Russian Orthodox mother, as a young man emigrated from his native Russia to Paris, where he attended the Academy of Arts which was opened in Paris, and there met and established a friendship with another man who would also become a well known 20th century iconographer, Leonid Ouspensky. His time as an iconographer began when he studied the iconographic tradition under Federov, Stelletsky and Sister Jean Reitlinger.

In the latter part of the 1930’s, Krug (along with Ouspensky) joined an association of Eastern Orthodox theologians, intellectuals and artists which established itself in Paris known as the “Stavropegial Brotherhood of Saint Photios” of whom another member was the respected Byzantine theologian, Vladimir Lossky (author of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church).

Krug would eventually move to the Skit du Saint-Esprit near Mesnil-Saint-Denis, France, to function as a reader and eventually become a monk. This skete is particularly associated with Krug's work, since the icons within were substantially painted by him. (Sadly, a photograph of the full interior has not been forthcoming.

Returning to the particular stylistic qualities of Krug's iconography, the well respected contemporary iconographer, Aidan Hart (whose work has a similar quality in its own right), has this to say of Krug's iconographic work:

Fr. Gregory’s icons are stylistically unique. While remaining true to the principles of the icon tradition, he has his own unique way of expressing these principles. One such feature is his use of darts of pure white highlights, which float over a sea of uneven colour. Also, the over-sized irises and pupils of his eyes give an impression of tenderness, sadness devoid of sentimentality, and of a deep interior life.

Fr. Gregory’s icons stand above all for a marriage of freedom within and a deep respect for the Church’s iconographic tradition. His work is devoid of that unhealthy type of fear which so easily leads to lifeless copying, but nor is it disdainful of the Church’s wise traditions.

Source: Iconographers of the Twentieth Century

Indeed, as noted earlier, Krug's work presents us with a sort of contemporaneity, a development, that is also clearly in continuity with and deeply respectful of the tradition.

Without further ado, here is some of Krug's iconographic work.













Those who are interested in seeing and reading more about Fr. Krug's work may be interested in The Light of Christ, published by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.

via www.newliturgicalmovement.org

A Preface To Kierkegaard | The New Republic

As a Christian, Kierkegaard belongs to the tradition of religious thinking—theology is too systematic a term—represented by Augustine, Pascal, Newman and Karl Barth, as distinct both from the Thomist tradition of official Catholicism and from the liberal Protestantism of men like Schleiermacher. As a secular dialectician, he is one of the great exponents of an approach, equally hostile to Cartesian mechanism and Hegelian idealism, to which the Germans have given the name Existential—though it is confined neither to Germans like Nietzsche, Jaspers, Scheler, Heidegger, but may be found, for instance, in Bergson and William James, nor to professional philosophers, for the same approach is typical of what is most valuable in Marx and Freud.

In contrast to those philosophers who begin by considering the objects of human knowledge, essences and relations, the existential philosopher begins with man's immediate experience as a subject, i.e., as a being in need, an interested being whose existence is at stake. He does not assert, as he is usually accused of asserting, the primacy of Will over Reason, but their inseparability. As Augustine says: "I am and know and will; I am knowing and willing; I know myself to be and to will; I will to be and to know." There is, therefore, no timeless, disinterested I who stands outside my finite temporal self and serenely knows whatever there is to know; cognition is always a specific historic act accompanied by hope and fear. To realize this is not, again, to abandon as hopeless the search for common sharable truth and surrender to a subjective relativism: on the contrary, it is precisely in the interest of such a common truth, that it is necessary for the individual to begin by learning to be objective about his subjectivity, "to know his station," to become conscious every time he asks calmly of an object or an event, "What are you?" of his urgent, simultaneous aside, "Be this. Don't be that."

From this viewpoint, the basic human problem is man's anxiety in time;e, g., his present anxiety over himself in relation to his past and his parents (Freud), his present anxiety over himself in relation to his future and his neighbors (Marx), his present anxiety over himself in relation to eternity and God (Kierkegaard).

via www.tnr.com

Beautiful preface by W.H. Auden.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: An Interview with Eugene McCarraher

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: An Interview with Eugene McCarraher

Part 1

"...The Other Journal (TOJ): We’ve reached the end of the decade, and Time magazine has already hyperbolically pronounced it the “worst decade ever.”² In 2001 you said that in the ’90s “the trajectories of abundance and power had never seemed so righteous and unalterable.”³ What is your take on this decade? What cultural themes have emerged in the last ten years?

Eugene McCarraher (EM): The 2000s were most definitely not “the worse decade ever.” That pronouncement demonstrates how addicted to hyperbole our historically illiterate media have become. There’s any number of decades that far exceeded the last one in awfulness: the 1940s, when almost the entire globe was engulfed in war; the 1930s, when a quarter or more of the workforce was unemployed, and fascism was on the march; the 1860s, when the nation was torn apart by civil war. People have endured horrors and upheavals of far greater magnitude than our own.

That said, the 2000s did really suck, and the key word in that sentence of mine you quoted was “seemed.” Some of us knew back in the ’90s that the American Empire was heading toward a reckoning with Nemesis, and the only question was when, not if. The trajectories of economic and military supremacy were unsustainable, and at some point, the Empire would meet resistance to its courses of military and financial overextension. The tech-stock bust of 2000—no one seems to remember it these days—was the first sign that the imperial finances were out of whack. But it was swiftly patched up—to a considerable extent, we now realize, by creating new bubbles in the housing and “financial product” markets. Similarly—albeit much more tragically and horrifically—the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were the first acts in a tragedy of retribution for imperial sway in the Middle East. The distemper of that episode was composed by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—rather than confront the real issues and reasons for the attacks, Americans acquiesced in or enthusiastically supported the most arrogant and brutal assertions of imperial might. In both cases, we heard a lot about how We’re All Going to Get Serious Now and how the Decade of Frivolity (that would be the ’90s) would be followed by a Decade of Seriousness. (We’re hearing the same thing now, about how the economic crisis is going to Change Our Values, etc.) It didn’t happen. Most Americans are just as deluded and mortgaged in Fantasyland as they were on September 10, 2001, or on September 15, 2008, the date often affixed to the current crisis. Even as the trajectories of power and abundance have turned out to have real and jarring limits—our follies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the exposure of our economy as a vast and meretricious shell game—most people reside either in Palinland or in YesWeCanistan.

Where does one begin the retrospective on this “low, dishonest decade,” as W. H. Auden described the ’30s?⁴ For me, one of the more revealing episodes was the public reaction to the Abu Ghraib revelations—the callous indifference or approval a lot of people exhibited to the cruelty recorded in those photos. As soon as they first appeared, our Wise Statesmen and Pundits roared in a chorus of outrage, “This is not who we are.” Who the hell do they think took the photographs? Who do they think was telling interviewers that they thought the prisoners deserved what they got? Who do they think had been told by people such as Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter that torture was an acceptable practice?⁵ The aesthetic of the photos was just as revealing as the reaction. Much was made at the time of the resemblance between the composition of the photos and the aesthetic of Internet porn, one of the leading uses of the Internet. No, Abu Ghraib was a snapshot of the American character. Those photographs and the reaction to them told us how harsh we’ve become as a people.

Bound up with the cruelty was credulity. The 2000s was a jubilee season of credulity, when masses of Americans exiled reason and evidence to some nether region of the mind. And what was especially striking and dispiriting was how willful so much of it was—and remains, because I don’t see much of a let-up. So many, many people, almost on principle, decided to accept on faith a lot of falsehood or bullshit. (I use that latter term not as an indelicate provocation, but in the technical sense defined by Harry Frankfurt in his treatise On Bullshit, published, in exemplary fashion, in the middle of the decade: not simple lies, whose speakers actually pay a kind of homage to truth, but assertions made without regard for their truth or falsehood.)⁶ Not quite as a side note, credulity should be a serious matter for Christians, because we are people who take certain things on faith, and so we are open to the serious charge that we’re gullible folk who’ve taken leave of sense and reason. This isn’t the place to hash all that out, but one reason I’ve grown fonder of the Thomist tradition over the last decade is that it’s a rigorous lineage of rationality. (Speaking of Thomists, whenever I can, I advertise for the late Fr. Herbert McCabe, O.P., so let me recommend his entire oeuvre.) Christians have an obligation to affirm reason, evidence, and science; they shouldn’t be the first to jump on board “faith-based” anything.

The 2000s was, sadly, the heyday of faith-based everything: faith-based wars (Iraq), faith-based science (“intelligent design” and global-warming denial), faith-based economics (the financial and housing bubbles, the extraordinary trust placed in a gnomic mediocrity like Alan Greenspan). And let’s be honest here: conservative Christianity, Protestant and Catholic, remains one of the leading service providers of credulity. You just can’t escape the fact that conservative religious culture leavened almost every instance of faith-based bunkum that characterized the last decade. Anyone who studies the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq knows that one of the reasons George W. Bush went to war was his belief—encouraged by neoconservatives who don’t give a damn about Christian or any other faith—that God wanted him to be some righteous warrior. Churches and synagogues around the nation sounded their tocsins for war, but the invasion received the most enthusiastic benedictions from conservative churches, all resounding with hosannahs and praise for God’s President. Even churches like the one I attend, which isn’t especially conservative, started draping the Stars and Stripes from their choir balconies. When I objected strongly to this, I was told that parishioners were demanding it. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson drooled with anticipation at the prospect of vengeance and assassination; John Hagee, Rod Parsley, and others reveled in blood-soaked eschatological visions; the Left Behind books sold millions of copies, filling the minds of readers with hateful, sanguinary orgasms of violence; theo-con journals like First Things, the religion supplement for the Wall Street Journal, ran articles about America’s providential mission in the world. Add to that the cavalier hostility to science that now makes a cretin like James Inhofe into a major player on climate policy. Very large swaths of American Christianity now compose a potent culture of resentment, bigotry, and militarism. Where, oh where, is H. L. Mencken when you need him? You can’t even begin to understand someone like Bush—or Sarah Palin, the true heir to this maelstrom of nuttery—without attending to this stew.

..."

Part 2

"...I discussed Christian realism at some length in my book "Christian Critics", so I’ll restate and perhaps embellish my objections to it here. In my view, the fundamental problem with Christian realism isn’t the Christian part, but the realism part. Whoever defines reality holds the most crucial power one can have. If that reality is one of love and abundance—that is, reality as it’s defined, or should be defined, by the community called to Christ—then your politics will follow from that ontological foundation. If that reality is one of scarcity and strife—that is, reality as it’s always defined by nation-states and corporations—then your politics will follow from that ontological foundation. So because Christians reside in nation-states, they have dual citizenships, one in a global, cosmopolitan community, the other in a limited, national community. The mythology of the nation-state is that those two citizenships are completely compatible, if not identical, and that if one seems to conflict with the other, the national identity must prevail. The gospel has no such illusions: Christians can and must obey laws that do not harm faith and morals, but if those laws do such harm, they must not be obeyed. The problem then becomes, what practices of the nation-state harm faith and morals? That can be an extremely difficult question to answer, to say the least, and it dovetails with another question: is warfare a practice that harms faith and morals? Not the first, but the historically most determinative answer, was Augustine’s: yes, Christians can fight “just” wars. But I’ve never been satisfied with Augustine’s answer, in part because I don’t think he argues so much as he asserts it in the City of God, and in part because he defines the problem of war precisely in the terms of imperial self-protection and expansion that he should have been challenging.⁴

In short, by defining the problem of war in terms he borrowed from Roman imperial culture, Augustine was the model for what Niebuhr and later Christian realists would do: accept the terms of the nation-state for what counts as realistic. Once you let the nation-state, whose government is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, define the terms of political and economic reality, you’ve ceded the cognitive terrain to its corporate, bureaucratic, and military elites. The problem with Christian “realism,” then, is that it offers just too beguiling a deference to the nightmares and fantasies of politicians, bankers, generals, and pundits. Christian realism has served, on the whole, as one of the more sad-sack imperial ideologies, the kind of thing imperial Christians feel they have to say to the world when the “necessities” of power “compel” them to bankroll tyrants, assassinate insurgents, or kill innocent people. At its best, it can and has mitigated violence; as its worst, it corrupts the good news of redemption into the very bad news of death.

Not that it would help him at all—he’d probably have to resign if he took it seriously—but I’d recommend that Obama read, not Niebuhr or Augustine, but Origen, whose Contra Celsum is a magnificent piece of polemic and exposition.⁵ Celsus was one of the Roman Empire’s embedded intellectuals, shaking his head and furrowing his brow over antiquity’s version of the Culture Wars. These Christians, the old fogey complained, they blaspheme the traditional deities, they dishonor our imperial past, they refuse to fight in the legions that protect them.⁶ Origen dissected Celsus’s arguments with exquisite forensic skill. But the upshot was simple: we won’t fight in your wars or sacrifice to your gods because we don’t accept your account of reality. The same defiance animated critics of Niebuhr such as A. J. Muste, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan; they, too, should be on Obama’s reading list. Like I said, Obama would have to hand in his resignation if he took Origen to heart, but he’d save his soul, and perhaps those of at least a few other people. Stranger things have happened.

..."

Part 3

"...

This goes a long way in explaining the theocon obsession with sex to the exclusion of economics, health care, et cetera. As I’ve suggested, the theocons, like other kinds of conservatives, are in the impossible position of wanting capitalism without its inevitable social and cultural turbulence, a large part of which has been the sex and gender trouble provoked by capitalism’s demolition of traditional patriarchy. The greater sexual freedom of women in particular reminds theocons that the self-possession and autonomy they celebrate in the marketplace can be exercised in the bedroom and elsewhere. I mean “sexual freedom of women” here to include, not only what they do in bed and with whom they do it, but a broader range of freedoms in areas of traditional male control and supervision: access to education, employment, housing, et cetera. It’s quite revealing of the level of fear and angst involved here that Leon Kass, another B-lister who gets exalted in some quarters into a sage, once lamented that college-educated women don’t live with their parents until they get married. Rather than ponder the significance of the fact that choice and autonomy are keywords in both economic and sexual libertarianism, and thus rethink their entire conception of the relationship between the sexual and political economies, theocons displace their anxieties about market autonomy onto sex. They make feeble attempts to argue that sexual activity and market activity are in separate spheres, evaluated by different standards, but this ideological obfuscation is becoming more and more apparent. If you really want patriarchy and traditional, “natural” gender roles back, you’ve got to destroy capitalism in the name of some reactionary proprietary vision. Unless they’re absolute loons like the dominionists, the theocons can’t and won’t do that.

..."

New Liturgical Movement: Minimalism, Modernity and Monasticism

From a lecture on monastic architecture I have given to three different groups of monks and nuns:

The building of an abbey—even a Romanesque abbey, and especially because it is a Romanesque abbey—is a modern concern, even if perhaps our age does not realize it. By its very timelessness, it is a response to modern needs, much more so than the dated experiments which we are still recovering from today. The English wit John Betjeman had this to say about the distinction between modernity and modernism. In a modernistic church, of the sort we have become groaningly familiar with,

the effect is ‘unusual,’ but not truly modern, and is obtained by mouldings and shapes and colors which are the result of indigestion after a visit to Stockholm Town Hall, and the Neue Baukunst of Germany. Some young man has thought he would invent new moldings, new window shapes, new pews, new light-fittings, and in his anxiety to avoid the admittedly bad “churchliness” of ecclesiastical fittings, he has gone to the other extreme and produced an arrogant decoration of his own. […] The trouble is that a ‘modernistical’ as opposed to ‘modern’ architect, mistakes unusual detail for the truly modern. The thing that matters is the function of the church. […] Style is a side-issue.

There is a clear difference between this monastic modernity, developed in continuity with tradition, which has as one feature of it a contemplative simplicity, and the modernistic taste for pseudo-primitivism and mechanistic minimalism. One springs from a spirit of noble sacrifice, putting aside a created good for a greater good, while the other comes out of a misplaced sense of “spirituality” that is really a sort of attenuated mentalism—I am what I think, I am not the God-created union of a body and soul. The monk has a body—admittedly one tempered by work, self-discipline, and fasting, but it is a body and not a skeleton or a disembodied spirit. [It is useful to compare the] alien and disturbing starkness [of a modernistic building, as below] with the beautiful and timeless simplicity of the Romanesque.

One can see, simply by comparing these two images, above and below, that even the most austere Cistercian architecture had a sense of humanity and warmth that is lacking in its faddy modernistic--but not necessarily truly modern--counterpart. The purity of the monastic life is rather different from the sterility needed to produce microchips.

via www.newliturgicalmovement.org

Paris, 2 Months Later

 

It has now been almost two months since my trip to Paris. I believe enough time to digest all of the happenings in my life.

Previous to my lifting off for the continent was the unforeseen death of my maternal Grandmother. She was a woman born and raised in eastern Kentucky who had more wisdom about particulars and a constant sense of wonder for our “inherited life”. By “inherited” I mean a life given to us and shaped for us by our forefathers. Her love for nature and her wisdom in regards to it taught me not just some technical things (which due to my amateurishness proved less than desired) but a profound respect and disgust with certain patterns of contemporary life. May Her Memory Be Eternal!

With that heaviness I flew to Paris for a brief but wonderful stay. My aerial trip was not much to discuss, some movies and very light snoozing, but seemed to pass rather quickly in comparison to my expectations. I landed in Paris before the sun rose and my body was beginning to shut down already (an hour or so of running around trying to get to where I needed to be did not help!! De Gaulle is not the best airport!!). As I sat in a stupor close to a Starbucks (gladly only saw a small amount of them) I noticed the rather deadening modern architecture that is Charles De Gaulle Airport. Each terminal is a huge cylinder around which tubes in the middle connect each floor. The middle of the inner cylinder is open to the sky.

 

 

Bland and banal modern architecture does not soothe someone who has not slept for over 24 hours sitting in hard plastic seat-benches.

Fortunately my friend Matthew Baker was able to make it on time and find me. We quickly got out of the airport and hit the train south. We arrived at our hostel to my delight and after a half hour or so I collapsed. FF to around 4 AM and I am awake and cursing to myself that I had messed up almost an entire evening because of my sleeping. Matthew woke up soon after and we were soon on the abandoned streets of the 19^th arrondisment. Apparently nothing in Paris opens until at least 8 AM, mostly 9 am. We found St. Serge’s location and wandered around a bit more. We were soon off to the Seine to see Notre Dame. We got there just as the sun was rising.

This magnificent structure after a good nights rest is quite the breath taking sight. Inside was an assortment of art, theology, history, and even an icon given from the late Patriarch Alexei II.

To see the Gothic mixed with the “postmodern” is usually rather disturbing and Matthew and I grimaced at some of the rather bleh designs.  The rest of the day was spent walking around the Left Bank, perhaps some of the best time in Paris was just sitting on the sidewalk drinking uber-expensive coffee and smoking hand rolled cigars. The view! The hustle and bustle that is similar but not CLOSE to Chicago or New York. A sense of living that was electrifying. We eventually found the infamous Shakespeare and Co. as it was opening (10 AM) and I was able to pick up a large tome of R.S. Thomas for much cheaper than in America. We eventually found the street called St Genevieve and spent a good hour or more in the Les Editeurs Réunis, a Russian bookstore with tons of Orthodox stuff (portrait of Bulgakov on the wall). We then meandered around the area, went to visit the relics of St Genevieve, poked our heads into the Pantheon, and ended up near St Sulplice at La Procure. This Catholic bookstore was unlike anything I had ever seen in America, a wall full of primary sources (Sources Chrétiennes) as well as a large section on Orthodoxy. Archimandrite Placide (Deseille) was well represented as well as the usual suspects, Larchet, Lossky, Evdokimov, Bulgakov, etc.  

The next day was the conference and we arrived rather early. I had hoped that at least half of the talks would be in English (since it was advertised as bilingual and half of the lectures had English titles), but after the first lecture (where I could follow along alright in the French) I began to be unable to follow with the same concentration. Alexis Torrance, Matthew Baker, and Brandon Gallaher had to keep me up to date with the exacts of the Franco-Russian dialogues (since a good representation from Russia came). The papers from what I could gather were rather diverse and in some ways kind of “elementary” or “insular”. From the discussions and conversations I overheard there was a few papers that were quite good, but others were simply comparing Florovsky’s thought to another thinker or just not being as imaginative or thorough a reading as could be gathered from the multiple dimensions of Florovksy’s works. My caveat here is obviously the language barrier; some of the insularity could be attributed to this.  I enjoyed the discussions and food with the Torrance family, Brandon Gallaher, Dr Marcus Plested, and friendly Serbian and Russian seminarians (unfortunately I was told there are no French students there, quite disturbing to me!!). St Serge’s Church was gorgeous, but badly in need of repair. The services were beautiful and in that wonderfully Russian way: haunting.

 

You may find a lot of the talks available via orthodoxie.com – Here is a starting page

The rest of our time in Paris on Sunday afternoon was more meandering and a final scoot out to the Eiffel Tower after darkness had fallen.

 

My general overall thoughts-

-          Orthodoxy in France seems to be small yet very devoted

-          You don’t really need to know much French in Paris

-          There are so many untapped resources and directions for contemporary Orthodox theology to draw on

-          St Serge needs monetary support

-          American Orthodoxy really seems to be disconnected from the “Continent” and therefore not be as in touch with the “Old World” as the Orthodoxy I have encountered in Paris and England.

-          Matthew Baker is a great travel mate and is probably glad I finally blogged

My Picasso pictures-

Paris

Paris! Fr Georges Florovsky Conference!

This past Monday evening it dawned on me that next week I would be flying to Paris for almost a week full of some wise sight seeing and the upcoming Fr. Georges Florovsky Conference @ St. Sergius Orthodox Institute.

I say wise because I mean to only see a few things, i.e. Shakespeare and Company, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and hopefully some Cathedrals and perhaps the Louvre. This will be my first time in a country that does not speak my mother tongue (spent more than a week this past spring in the U.K.). A bit apprehensive about this, but otherwise good natured and ready to make some horrible mistakes in directions and/or my 6 years of middle school French. Hopefully my brother who is fluent in French can give me a crash course this weekend.

Does anyone have any suggestions of important sites to see? I might try and locate Vladimir Lossky's grave (as I believe is seen in Patrick Doolan's book on Ouspesky) and/or visit the Three Hierarchs Parish. Perhaps St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral?

I will be accompanied by my good friend Matthew Baker, a ThM student @ Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary, and an avid Florovskian (totally made up word). I am also looking forward to seeing Brandon Gallaher, who is about to be done with his doctoral work @ Oxford and is presenting a paper @ the conference. Both of these gents are folks I had the pleasure of meeting at various Theological Conference gatherings, Brandon @ an AAR about three years ago now? (where I also met Matthew Francis (evidence here). I met Matthew B. through the Pappas Patristic Institute where we discovered our similarities in many ways. I am actually thinking about starting up a blog off this Typepad account that will be a place where Matthew can share some of his work and thoughts (he does a bit on Facebook, but I think it deserves a larger audience). And perhaps some other acquaintances I have made over the years!

I plan on blogging this event as much as I can (half of the lectures are in French, my suspicion from pictures I've seen from St. Serge they may have some translation in process? We will see!) and also taking pictures and sharing them. 

Please pray for my safe travels!

The Conference Line up: Download Florovsky_colloque

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An update comes this next week!!!

My Views on Church and State Relations

St. John Chrysostom and Empress Eudoxia

St Isaac the Syrian: Truth and Zeal

Someone who has actually tasted truth is not contentious for truth. Someone who is considered by people to be zealous for truth has not yet learnt what truth is really like; once he has truly learnt it, he will cease from zealousness on its behalf.

- St Isaac the Syrian: Truth and Zeal.