Protestant Erotics

Protestant Erotics Words, Music, Math

Words, Music, Math

Protestant Erotics

Protestant Erotics Words, Music, Math

A Little Lord

Contents

Introduction I. Words: The Classic Verbal Order II. Music A Courtly, Aristocratic Social Order III. Math The Beaurocratic System

Protestant Erotics

Introduction

Introduction

A “Protestant erotic” describes the desire to have religious truth without religious dogma, doxa (opinion), or ideology; metaphysics without tradition.

In the contemporary era, all religions have

become “Protestant” in that they are capable of selfawareness as religions. Since William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience anatomized spiritual interiority, Christian mysticism is psychologically comparable to Buddhist, Taoist, and Sufi mysticisms. A Hegelian ontology has replaced religious metaphysics, and Heidegger and Derrida’s exegetical negatives draw on a spiritually neutralized theology only vaguely echoing Eckhart, Silesius, and Pseudo-Dionysius. Indeed, différance is not God.

For those of us who persist in our religious belief,

these analogies set up an erotics—an attraction to what is lost or otherwise unobtainable.

The Protestant era is over.1 The religious legacy

of the Reformation has become quaint. The idea of a Christianity that could be examined in relation to the wider culture—as in T. S. Eliot’s Notes Toward the

1. Our perfunctorily chosen end-date is 1948, the year Paul Tillich published a collection of essays originally titled The End of the Protestant Era.

Protestant Erotics

Definition of Culture or H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture—no longer exists. We live in a thoroughly post-Christian, post-Protestant civilization.

An anti-modern traditionalism, or an after-

modern non-essentialism are the choices we’re left with. Once we’ve chosen, another Protestant erotics describes the inevitable desire for the one we can’t have—an awareness of belief’s remainder.

In place of the religious commodity of ideologi-

cal certainty, spirituality properly so-called holds out the potential to locate the divine. But unlike Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, Protestantism is a product of the modern era.

Religion Requires Symbolism

The idea of a modern, or post-modern, religion appears to be an impracticable paradox. Disenchantment and de-divinization are among the primary characteristics of the contemporary era.

To re-enchant the world, we would have to either

ignore history or submit to dogma. Our best hope may be, against all reason and common sense, a reexamination of the latter. But what could a non-ideological dogma possibly look like? In short: it looks like allegory and symbolism.

Introduction

Huston Smith, undoubtedly one of our best histo-

rians of religion, puts it like this: The use of visible objects to describe invisible things is “the language of religion generally; it is to religion what numbers are to science.” 2

If we accept Smith’s formula, it will not be a surprise to hear someone assert that Protestantism’s primary shortcoming, from the beginning, was a failure to account for symbolism. Frithjof Schuon describes Martin Luther, specifically, and Protestantism generally, as unaware, in its “mystical subjectivism, that a religion has need of symbolism in order to subsist; that the inward cannot live in a collective consciousness without outward signs.”3

2.

3.

Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. New York: HarperCollins, 1991, p. 262.

Frithjof Schuon, “The Question of Evangelicalism,” in Christianity/Islam: Essays on Esoteric Ecumenicism.

Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books, 1985, p. 25.

Protestant Erotics

God Is Not

Apophatic Obfuscation

Protestant Erotics

God Is

Cataphatic Confusion

Protestant Erotics

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness . . . ­—T. S. ELIOT, East Coker

Nothing

Part I Words

Protestant Erotics

The Classic Verbal Order

Part I: Words

The Classic Order?

According to George Steiner, a logocentric, “classic verbal order” has been exchanged for image–, music–, and math–based “cultures outside the word.”1 Roughly democratic popular culture has overcome the ordering of culture according to bourgeois and bureaucratic (American) and courtly and aristocratic (European) hierarchies.

Steiner and other conservatives worry that words have been undermined by disorder. Visual art and music will lead us into a chaos without civilization.

1. George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. New Have: Yale University Press, 1971, p. 123.

Part I: Words

From Language to Texts

Understanding and interpretation are elusive and volatile. Knowledge can’t be measured. Unlike information, knowledge can’t be cataloged and automated.

Similarly, there is no universal key to decoding

language. The classical god of interpretation and hermeneutics is Hermes, inventor of purposeful deception, illusion, and trickery; god of salesmen, crossroads, and thieves. Hermes is also the creator of writing—the art of saying what you don’t mean; of purposeful evasion and disguise and concealment.

The Classic Verbal Order

Print Culture & The Late Age of Text

The Reformation occured at the same time as the widespread use of the printing press.

Martin Luther had to give up his dream of every

Christian citizen being able to read the Bible in his own language when a sufficiently high rate of literacy was not realized in sixteenth century Germany. Interpretation of scripture continued by means of oral tradition.

Only during the “Second Reformation,” associat-

ed with the rise of Pietism a century later did believers learn to read personal copies of the Bible, developing the ability (and the right) to interpret scripture for themselves. “Pietism, not Lutheranism, spread the ability to read in Germany.”2

2. Finkelstein, David, and Alistair McCleery. The Book History Reader. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006, pp. 161–162.

Part I: Words

The Protestant verbal order is a message that self-destructs.

It contains a built-in, progressive, obsolescence.

The Protestant Verbal Order

X

Part I: Words

A Protestant Koan

First there was an image.

Then there was a text.

Then there was an image.

Part I: Words

Serious Logocentrism

The logos is more than a text.

Part II Music

Protestant Erotics

A Courtly, Aristocratic Social Order

Part II: Music

Sound / Music Roland Barthes describes two musics: disappeared, played music, and the current, listened to music.

The former was the province of an aristocratic

class. “It lapsed,” Barthes writes, “into an insipid social rite with the coming of the democracy of the bourgeoisie (the piano, the young lady, the drawing room, the nocturne).”1

1. Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. Image, Music, Text. New York: Noonday Press, 1988, p. 149.

Protestant Erotics

The Story of Eros

Part II: Music

The Birth of the Erotic

Eros, the god of Love, was conceived when Poros (Plenty) got drunk at Aphrodite’s birthday feast. Penia (Poverty) found him in the garden and decided she would like him to be the father of her child. Eros was the result.

Plato’s Symposium makes it clear that godly love

(personified by Eros) is always an ardent follower of Beauty (Aphrodite)because he was conceived during the celebration of her birthday feast.2 Eros is also described as inheriting the primary characteristics of both his parents, Poverty and Plenty.

To search for Beauty means to discover much, but

possess little.3 True Love (Eros) always has a bit of the bohemian about it. It is a starving artist, in pursuit of what it can never quite possess. And while it never compromises or sells out to the prevailing, conventional understanding of beauty or success, the ideal becomes more subtle and fleeting the closer it gets.

2. Plato, Symposium 203–204, and 211e–212b.

3. Compare to Needleman, Jacob. The Heart of Philosophy.

New York: Knopf, 1982, pp. 16–17.

Part II: Music

Being & the Bourgeoisie A legacy of existential effort.

Existence is hard work.

An experience of nothingness as a pleasant escape from reification and ontology.

Part II: Music

Fantasy literature is theology.

The Blues is an authentic form of entertainment.

“Cultural” Analysis

Fantasy isn’t real.

Authenticity is regressive.

Part III Math

Protestant Erotics

Good Number

Part III: Math

Qualitative Quantity

Augustine’s book on the subject of music, De Musica, was an attempt to discover a “road with definite, easy stages, that would lead the mind from material things to the immaterial.”1

How could music lead to knowledge of the

supernatural? Augustine cites Romans 1:20: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” Music, as Augustine the Christian Platonist understood it, was the mathematics by which one might measure the working of the soul. Unlike our contemporary notions of psychological subjectivity, the ancient world understood human interiority, the inner life, to be mathematically precise. The most microcosmic levels of the human being corresponded, in fact, to the measurements of the astronomical cosmos. This is the theory of the “music of the spheres.”

As astronomy is conserned with measuring the stars, music is a science by which the inner life, the constituent parts of the soul may be measured. It is a subject,

1. Quoted in Brown, Peter Robert Lamont. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, p. 126.

Protestant Erotics

Augustine wrote, “worthy of investigation . . . namely, how, from corporeal and spiritual but changeable numbers, one comes to the knowledge of unchangeable numbers which are already in unchangeable truth itself.”2

This law of mathematical correspondence was

still commonplace some 800 years later when Moses Maimonides wrote that, “to obtain a correct estimate of ourselves, we must reflect on the results of the investigations which have been made into the dimensions and the distances of the spheres and the stars.”3

The “music of the spheres” is present another

three centuries later, in Shakespeare’s portrayal of music as an allegory for multiple levels of (psychological, social, and universal) harmony. Lorenzo’s speech to Jessica in the final act of The Merchant of Venice is a well-known example. It concludes: The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;

2.

3.

Augustine. The Retractations. Translated by Mary Inez Bogan. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1968, pp. 45–46.

Maimonides, Moses. The Guide for the Perplexed. Trans.

by M. Friedländer. New York: Dover, 1956, p. 277.

Part III: Math

The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.4

As recently as the 18th century, J. S. Bach still

believed that art was identical with an “ensouled” word. Music, when done well, acts as “the voice of the living Word, Christ.”4 It wasn’t until Enlightenmentera aestheticians adopted the concept of Emfindung (sentiment) from the Pietists, 5 that the tradition of a mathematical-musical correspondence was finally abandoned for the idea that art is little more than ornament or decoration. The intellectual content of music had no purpose other than to inspire moral “thought and feeling.” Music, art, and an intellectual intuition were no longer useful for taking the measure of a man.

4.

5.

6.

V, i, 83–87 Hendrickson, Marion Lars. Musica Christi: A Lutheran Aesthetic. New York: Lang, 2005, pp. 103–104.

Hendrickson, p. 104.

Protestant Erotics

Another Good Number

Part III: Math

Soteriological Play

The case has been made that Augustine’s conversion prefigures his theological conclusions.7 It is not insignificant to note that he was inspired by a sound, not a text, and that the voice he heard in the garden at Milan spoke in a “sing-song” fashion. It reminded him of the singing used by children in their games.

We might fairly draw the conclusion that a spiri-

tual, or allegorical (even anagogical), level of exegesis must be located in:

1. The physical, the heard or seen, and

2. The playful, or “sing-songy.”

The first of these two categories, of course, has more to do with what Evagrius referred to as physiki, the spiritual contemplation of nature, than a scientific, empirical method of observation or sense perception.

7. See Brennan, Brian, “Augustine’s ‘De musica,’” Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), pp. 267-281.

Protestant Erotics

Numbers are Good Enough

Part III: Math

Quantitative Quality

When compared to Augustine’s experience in the Milanese garden, contemporary Protestant hermeneutics treats meaning without the “sing-songy;” without the symbolic, allegorical, or anagogical.

The contemporary theologian J. I. Packer, for

example, stands outside the Augustinian tradition of anchoring exegisis in spirit, value, quality, intuition, symbol, or allegory. “Exegesis,” Packer writes, Means bringing out of the text . . . the “literal” sense, in the name of which the Reformers rejected the allegorical senses beloved of medieval exegetes.

We would call it the “natural” sense, the writer’s “intended meaning.” The so-called “grammaticalhistorical method.”8

8. Packer, James, “Hermeneutics and Biblical Authority.”

Themelios 1.1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 3-12.

Part III: Math

The dangers of interpretation

Beware of . . .

Prooftexting, Platonism, Eisegesis, & Allegory.*

Instances of a canonical author’s clear, occasionally stated, and intentional use of allusion, symbolism, elliptical expressions, or parables.

. . . missing Dante’s anagogy.

*Thanks, Jeff Reimer.

Protestant Erotics

Verisimilar Symbolism

The City

Levels of Purgation

A Mountain

Protestant Erotics

Buddhist Epistemology

Realization Embodiment Contemplation Knowledge Learning Understanding

after Robert Thurman

Part III: Math

Sacred Eros

Your Neck is Like an Ivory Tower

Protestant Erotics

The Measure of Your Neck

Part III: Math

Contemplation is Action

Thinking and Doing

Protestant Erotics

Environmental Mandala

A Hindu Temple

Part III: Math

Environmental Mandala II

A Haunted Franchise

Protestant Erotics

The Nine Triadic Choirs of Angels According to The Celestial Hierarchy of St. Dionysius the Areopagite

The Celestial Hierarchy

God Seraphim Cherubim Thrones Dominions Powers Authorities Principalities Archangels Angels Nothing

Part III: Math

Morning Noon & Night of the Ego

Distillation of a Soul

spirit

understanding wisdom intuition

rational analysis

impulse passions senses

ego

Protestant Erotics

Entertainment is Culture, Art is Entertainment

The Middle Class

Culture: Level 1 (low) . Abstract ideas are unpleasant to me; form should always serve content . Culture should depict simple morality . I identify with performers; I like to live vicariously through celebrities . For me, ornateness is attractive

Culture: Level 2 (low-to-middle) . Form should be unambiguous . Performers are more interesting than writers and directors . My consumption of art, music, literature and film is mostly influenced by word-of-mouth.

after Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, 1974. Quoted in Stephen Bayley, Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, 1991.

Part III: Math

Toward Noble Detachment, An Aristocratic Ideal

Middlingly Classy

Culture: Level 3 (middle) . 19th century art & opera is pleasant, but contemporary art is not. . I like to identify with the protaganists in figurative and narrative art (especially if it is “redeeming.� Art is best when it illustrates personal achievement and social mobility). . I read bestselling management titles by writers from the New Yorker, not literary novels

Culture: Level 4 (high) . The creative process & symbolism is interesting on its own. . experimentation is good . introspection is prefereable to action . I accept that meaning has multiple levels . I expect art & culture to take on complex subject matter, like philosophy, psychology & social issues

after Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, 1974. Quoted in Stephen Bayley, Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, 1991.

Protestant Erotics

An adversary

Beware the Over-Self, the Super Ego

Part III: Math

Sur Moi, the Over-Self

Part III: Math

A Chimney & A Way Une CheminĂŠe et un Chemin

Merry Christmas

a la Guenon

Part III: Math

Mandylion

No Hands

Protestant Erotics

Environmental Geometry III

Temple Mandala

Part III: Math

Levels of wisdom according to the Mahayana tradition: A Gradient.

A Buddhist Triad

Three Pointed realization, Knowledge of nothing, Embodied wisdom Two Critical reflection, Thinking-understanding, Knowledge One Learning, Accumulated technical perception, Material/mathematical facility, Information

after Robert Thurman

Protestant Erotics

Dream On

Is This Home?

Protestant Erotics

Philosophical Ambiguity

Symbolic Precision

hierarchy sacred authority pre-modernity tradition

wisdom

reason

understand-

science serious unbelief

ing belief subjectivity modernity contemporaneity

Protestant Erotics

The Metaphysics of Making

Production’s Hierarchy

Heaven Wisdom Reason Sense Skill Production Earth

Part III: Math

The Pythagorean Precedent

Mathematics & The Idealist Tradition

Protestant Erotics

Keep Dreaming II

Nothing Beyond-being Being Non-being

Part III: Math

A two-way cycle of unity

Judas’s Tears & the Teats of the Sun

Protestant Erotics

. . . illustrated

Part III: Math

The dome of heaven, juana coeli, sun door, sky light, mountain top, heavenly passage, terminal, oculus, light of reason, celestial vagina, the clashing rocks, simplegades, the end.

Look Up

1st print-on-demand edition, July 2010. © Nonnus Studio, Inc. Wheaton, Illinois 60187 nonnus.org The Little Lords are small-format artists’ books published by the Nonnus Studio—a group of artists who work in close collaboration.

As artists, not authorities, we are intellectually curious and thoroughly critical, but with no aspiration or pretense to anything like expertise or authority. Indeed, our goal is to remain anonymous, and to acquire no reputation.

This print-on-demand edition was not copyedited or proofread. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Protestant Erotics A “Protestant erotic” describes the desire to have religious truth without religious ritual, dogma, doxa (opinion), or ideology; metaphysics without tradition.

In the contemporary era, all religions have become “Protestant” in that they are capable of selfawareness as religions. Christian mysticism is comparable to Buddhist, Taoist, and Sufi mysticisms.

We are left with a choice between an anti-modern

traditionalism or an after-modern non-essentialism.

Once we’ve chosen, another Protestant erotic describes the inevitable desire for the one we can’t have—an awareness of belief’s remainder.

The Little Lords are small-format artists’ books published by the Nonnus Studio—a group of artists who work in close collaboration.