Augustinianism and the Beautiful Game

It’s a curious fact, but the best writer on football/soccer is an American: Brian Phillips. Perhaps it something to do with the fact that in Europe football is such a plebeian game. The new England manager they tell us is “a broadsheet man in a tabloid world,” and they are at least right that the world of football is tabloid. In America on the other hand the sort of people who like soccer tend to be europhile intellectuals. But then again there are intellectual football writers in Europe as well – Jonathan Wilson, various people at the  Guardian etc. – but still the way they approach the game is formed by its place in their culture. Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that Americans have an apologetic imperative – they live in a culture which considers soccer rather a bore compared to other sports. This forces them to demonstrate football’s superiority to other sports, which leads to a more philosophical account of its essence.

Bridal Mysticism in Leviticus

When one is doing a lectio continua of the scriptures it starts out being a literary pleasure — Genesis and and the first part of Exodus are as exciting as anything in ancient literature — but then one comes to the tabernacle descriptions in Exodus and then Leviticus. Leviticus! Surely one of the hardest bits of Scripture to plow through. Those long lists of ritual laws. One of the things that makes the laws so boring is that they seem so arbitrary. Why is suet fat never eaten, but always burned entirely? Leviticus doesn’t say. Of all the books of the Bible Leviticus is perhaps the last one that one would least think of reading as belles-lettres, but that is exactly what the anthropologist Mary Douglas does in her book Leviticus as Literature. Leviticus, Douglas argues, is not a random collection of arbitrary rules, but an intricately crafted work of analogical thinking. She shows how the body of the sacrificial animal is a kind of model or map of the tabernacle, each part of the dismembered animal corresponds to a part of the tabernacle, and the tabernacle is itself a model of Mount Sinai, which is a model of the universe. The sacrificial rites thus become an enactment of the cosmic order. So the suet over the entrails is sacred to God not because it corresponds to the curtain before the Holy of Holies. But what corresponds to the Holy of Holies itself. Well, that’s where the bridal symbolism comes in:

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Our Lady as the Pearl of Great Price

A virtuous Woman who can find? Her price is far beyond pearls. – Proverbs 31:10

Again, the kingdom of heaven is as if a merchant were looking for rare pearls: and now he has found one pearl of great price, and has sold all that he had and bought it. – Matthew 13:45-46

Cornelius a Lapide mentions that one can take the pearl of great price to mean Our Lady. But in that case who is the merchant? The merchant is God Himself Who searched through all generations till He found the “virtuous woman” who was to be the Mother of His Son. And He was willing to pay all He had for her. In an earlier post I looked at how the Our Lady can be seen as the final cause of the entire universe; she is more than all other purely created things the end and motive that God had in mind when He created the world. And it was above all for Her that the Divine Son paid the ultimate price on the Cross. There is a beautiful meditation on this in Fr. Antonio Maria Sicari’s Way of the Cross for the Jubilee of Priests:

Monstra te esse matrem

 

Monstrance of silver, gold, and precious stones. 66 cm high. Vienna 1704.

I never understood how some people can object to the custom of praying the Rosary before the Blessed Sacrament exposed. What could be a more appropriate response to the real, true, and substantial presence of the Incarnate Word than to call out to his Blessed Mother the very greeting with which the Incarnation itself was announced: “Hail, full of grace!” The baroque goldsmiths knew this perfectly, as this Monstrance from  the Schatzkammer in Vienna shows. It is, as the official guide book points out, a kind of Latin version of the Byzantine “Platytera”.

Industrial vs. Cistercian Austerity: Dominikus Böhm’s Modernism

Domikus Böhm’s Heilig-Kreuz Kirche in Dülmen

The Romanesque Facade of the Abbey Church in Heiligenkreuz

In a fascinating series Shawn Tribe and Matthew Alderman, have been examining what they call “The Other Modern” in sacred architecture: architecture which learns from the tradition rather than rejecting it, but which nevertheless has a peculiarly modernist flair. One of the questions which they have raised is whether it is possible to make use of elements of modernist minimalism and austerity in an authentically Catholic fashion. Even if the avante garde of modernism tended to use minimalism as an expression of nihilism, or the as a revolutionary demonstration of man’s self-alienation in his works, are there no other uses possible? Could one use a form of modernist austerity to achieve “noble simplicity”? There have certainly been architects who thought that it could, and the “Other Modern” series has brought some interesting examples to light. There have, after all, been examples of austere architecture in the Church’s past, Tribe and Alderman raise the example of Cistercian architecture.

The question of modernist vs. Cistercian austerity came to my mind last summer when I took a tour of the Heilig-Kreuz Kirche in Dülmen, built by the German architect, vestment designer, and composer Dominikus Böhm. Now, Böhm’s architecture is not an example of the “Other Modern”–it is simply modern–but I think a consideration of  it can help to show what it is about modern austerity that a successful Other Modern has to avoid. Böhm was an enthusiastic proponent of the twentieth century Liturgical Movement, and, while a convinced modernist, he included allusions to traditional architectural styles – especially the Romanesque – in his buildings for the sake of better expressing his theology. The tour guide, who lead some of my confreres and me through the Church, made a point of comparing Böhm’s architecture in general with Cistercian architecture, and Dülmen in particular with our Abbey Church in Heiligenkreuz, which has some striking coincidental similarities to Heilig-Kreuz Dülmen.

This has set me thinking on what exactly the meaning of austerity was for the Cistercian Fathers, and how it relates to the turn to austerity in the ecclesiastical architects of the industrial age, especially those associated with the Liturgical Movement. For S. Bernard austerity in architecture was part of monastic perfection. In the Apology to William S. Bernard writes the following:

Scruton on Disordered and Ordered Places

In his lecture “The Face of the Earth,” Roger Scruton compares the following two photographs:

What is it that makes the picture of the canal so different from the one of urban sprawl? The canal is, as Scruton says, “just as jumbled up,” with “just as many things competing for our attention.” Scruton’s explanation for why the canal is beautiful and the urban sprawl is not, is that if one looks at the details of the canal one sees what Wallace Stevens called the “blessed rage for order.” But Scruton doesn’t explain exactly what he means. How does the “jumbled” canal manifest rage for order? I think the key is Scruton’s statement that there are “just as many things competing for our attention.” That’s not quite right. In the picture of the automobile wasteland things are competing for attention—especially the commercial signs, each one seems to be saying “look at me!” But the details of the canal are not competing for attention. Newman once said “the very idea of order implies the idea of the subordinate,” and that is what one sees in the canal; each detail subordinates itself, it does not try to pull attention away from the whole, and therefore the jumble is ordered and beautiful. So it really isn’t what Wallace Stevens was talking about. It’s not a rage for order, it’s a love of order; it’s not the imposition of meaning on meaningless jumble, but the courteous subordination of each detail which allows the whole to emerge.