medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

I had no illusions that my comments solved anything, other than the unproblematized situation (unproblematized presuppositions that we all carry) that, I think, gets in the way of understanding people from the past.  I certainly did not interpret your comments as attacking Catholics and my comments were not intended to imply that or defend a Catholic view.  I mentioned traditional Catholic presuppositions only as one among several sets of presuppositions into which one can, I believe quite reasonably, group modern attitudes.  (One has to specify "traditional Catholic" these days because what were straightline Reformed presuppositions from the 16th-late 20thc today are espoused by many who would understand themselves to be Catholic, so the term "Catholic" has become fuzzy enough to require a modifier if it is to be useful, even though the Reformed presuppositions I refer to are clearly defined as non-Catholic in official Catholic teaching, e.g., Vatican II and the Catechism of Vatican II.)

I am responding to your last posting because it might be understood (perhaps unintended) to personalize the thread.  My goal is the same as yours: to understand what happened.  If my approach makes the process more difficult (problematizes it), I can only say that I am convinced that we too often, as professional historians (art or otherwise) leap too quickly to ascribe motivations.  It's in ascribing motivations to people in the past that our presuppositions probably do the most damage because they are most easily read into the data when we go from the data to trying to explain the human, personal, emotional motivations animating people.

The facts are clear: no realistic portrayals of the crucifixion in Christian art until fairly late.  I was not suggesting that we cannot know why Christians did this but was suggesting that shame or embarrasment about worshiping a crucified person not only would be difficult to prove and thus remains a speculation, but that it is an unwise speculation based on theological grounds--it flies in the face of what Christians repeatedly said about the crucifixion.  Very early on they were taunted with the fact that the person they claimed to be God incarnate had died ignobly on a gibbet.  Their response theologically was to turn this around into a strength (based on their conviction of a resurrection). 

Now, it is of course possible that artists did not know or chose not to use this theological principle but acted instead out of embarrassment.  But notice what this explanation of their motivation requires: they have to concede the point that the crucifixion somehow was not elevated, glorified by the resurrection but cowered and took refuge solely in the resurrection.  On the other hand, the theological response found throughout the NT manages to elevate both resurrection and crucifixion: St. Paul positively glories in the scandal of the Cross; the "wise of this world," of course, will find this incredible, he notes.  But even that, he turns into a point of strength (1 Cor. 1 etc.).  This theological response refutes the argument of the opponents of Christianity: that the Crucifixion is shameful and nullifies Christian belief.

Is it possible that none of this fed into trends in art over the first 1000 years?  Yes, but on the face of it, unlikely.  And ongoing late antique and early medieval literary sources support the unlikeliness that it played no role.

When you add to this an alternative explanation for the absence of realistic portrayals of a dying crucified man on the cross (iconic and stylized patterns of early medieval art yielding to more realistic and naturalistic art in the hgih and later Middle Ages, coinciding roughly with the shift in portrayals of the cross/crucifix _and_ also corresponding chronologically with the rise in more and more naturalistic literary passion meditations (as distinct from the more iconic _theological_ coming to terms with the "scandal/glory of the Cross" in late antique and early medieval literary sources), and then plug in the Enlightenment and liberal Protestant/Catholic embarrassment over all three: the Pauline and Johannine "glory of the cross" theology, the late medieval realistic passion devotion, and late medieval realistic passion art, I think a very plausible explanatory model emerges.

Does this problematize things to a greater degree?  Yes, but in the hope of finding a more nuanced answer than "Christians were embarrassed when their opponents threw by the pain and shame of the crucifixion in their faces and thus shied away from portraying it for many centuries."

I think one opens up to this as a plausible answer if one first of all is able to dissociate oneself from a quite understandable natural revulsion from the gory details of death by crucifixion.  Christian theologians like Paul understood this--only by theological belief (including the Resurrection) could this be overcome.  The growth of passion piety in the later Middle Ages (growth, not rise--I think it was never absent from Christian believers, beginning with Peter and Paul) indicates that the theological path to overcoming the revulsion is translatable into broader piety and religious affections.  If that is true, then people who do not share those beliefs and who hold opposite beliefs (there is no neutral ground, as I have argued in the past--everyone has assumptions and beliefs about the claims of Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Buddhism, though the degree of thematization of those beliefs varies widely) would find it naturally very difficult not to feel revulsion at death by crucifixion.

Finally, I don't think it's really terribly helpful to try to bracket out one's philosophical/religious beliefs (and here I include those who adhere to no specific set of religious beliefs--they certainly hold basic assumptions about the big religious-philosophical issues: an ordered compared to a chance universe; a freely-creating [and hence loving] God with man in his image compared to an impersonal determinative force/Fate; selfless love compared to rational choice/self-interest power as the principle of human behavior; human freedom compared to behaviorist conditioning/social construction as characteristic of human nature etc.).  We simply cannot bracket these out because we deal with members of the species _homo sapiens_ acting in history.  If we conceive members of this species to be conditionable, socially constructed, instinctual actors and thus not really distinguishable from the higher animals (B. F. Skinner, Peter Singer) we will interpret their motives for the choices they made and the trends their choices create in history differently than if we assume that members of the species _homo sapiens_ make free decisions that can contradict and overcome self-interest (which is what social constructors manipulate, in the behaviorist model) to the point of selfless love.

I am sure some would argue for mediating positions, but I am not sure that this is philosophicall defensible--what I am outlining are two essentially opposite fundamental assumptions and all mediating positions are really, I would suggest, one or the other fundamental position with various unclarified admixtures that lead people to act confusedly.  That people act confusedly and with elements of both of these principles is undoubtedly true, but that would only be the exception that proves the rule: the philosophers who have grappled with these polarities always end up on one side or the other at basis and seek to clarify the confused superstructure toward the basis.  I would read the history of modern philosophy this way: a variety of efforts to combine fundamental human freedom with powerful impersonal forces characteristic of the high Enlightenment and culminating in Kant proved to be unstable and were broken down into the stark opposites by the time of Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche on the one hand (impersonal/power/self-interest/natural selection etc.) and freedom/love/selflessness in the trajectory from Leo XIII through John Paul II and a wide variety of Orthodox and Catholic writers of the late 19th and 20th c.  (I recognize that I take a huge risk in offering such an outline--I understand that many will wish to argue with one or another aspect of it.  I dare to make such a sweeping survey for the sake of understanding in a broad way how presuppositions affect our work as medievalists.  Of course, what I write here opens itself to a variety of further _problematizing_.  On the other hand, had I not offered at least some illustration of my initial generalizations about basic worldviews, I would have been no less open to _problematizing_ demurrers from those who read what I wrote and much more easily misunderstood, perhaps, by those who wish to problematize my generalizations.  So I thought I'd at least try to anticipate some of the "but, . . ." responses.)

This is an overly long and roundabout way of pleading guilty to having shamelessly problematized the simply assumption that the absence of naturalistic visual protrayals of the crucifixion indicates Christian embarrassment.  Yes, I problematized it.  Isn't that the first step in the analysis of any problem--to problematize it sufficiently and thus avoid an overly simplistic solution?

Dennis Mrtin 

>>> [log in to unmask] 10/26/02 05:59AM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Dennis,
Many thanks for this, even if it "problematizes" rather than "solves"
what for me is a puzzling phenomenon.  Quite apart from my religious
convictions, I am a professional art historian, and I do not think it
an inimical project to try to come to terms with this very great
disparity in the earliest occurrences of visual representations of
the Resurrection and Crucifixion.  I was certainly not trying to
attack Catholics, I assure you!
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag

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