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To understand the Christian aspect of the art of the West, we must be clear on the Christian aspect of the Western culture. And this means carving through historical deception to get at where this comes from, what it means, and why it matters. It's one thing to hear that morality needs some sort of objective ground. It's another to see how that works.
This took longer than planned, so we'll start by gathering some threads.
This is the next in a series of posts that started with the "arrival" of Modern art to America at the Armory Show in 1913. We keep bringing this up for two reasons - to stay on track when looking into the essential background and to remind readers that this is all connected. Reality isn't linear but human experience is. It's why we rely on timelines and sequences to understand how events come to pass. But thinking of things in single causal chains is a human limitation, not a reflection of reality. And one downside is misunderstanding the world around us.
Mort Kunstler - Charleston - Autumn, 1861, General Lee at the Mills House, print
The Band uses the metaphor of shifting ranges as one way to address this complexity. Historians have to deal with the differences between general and specific approaches - overviews and deep dives - and distortions that come with the necessity of historical periods. The nature of publishing is that professional historians have to choose one or the other so the limitations of both become more pronounced - they're practically baked into the discourse, or language of the trade. This becomes a blind spot in the profession - the split between general and specific gets taken as implicit to history itself - history qua history - and not a limit in communication vectors.
The Band isn't constrained by professional discourse and and can take a more fluid approach to the general/specific split. The Armory Show is very specific - close range. Looking at the broader cultural inversions around the arrival of Modernism in the West is more general - moving to medium range. Considering the underlying epistemological and ontological issues - what we can know and how we can know it - is very general - long range. But they are all connected. The general informs the specific and the specific points to the general with countless intermediaries in-between.
Rather than settling on one range, the Band prefers the martial arts concept of distance management as a metaphor - moving in and out as the circumstances require.
Here Mayweather, a brilliant defensive fighter creates the illusion of being at mid-range while actually out-fighting. Moving between ranges at the appropriate times lets him correctly address the problem in front of him - in this case, win the exchange.
Deceivers like to jump between ranges to sow deliberate confusion and hide the truth - making sweeping general mischaracterizations then jumping to anecdotal outliers when called out.
Truth-seekers need to be attentive to range so they understand what is happening in a more accurate, non-linear way. We flow between distances to show the patterns of false reasoning behind individual lies and to make it easier to recognize new ones. Keeping the Armory Show as a touchstone lets us light up the multidimensional connections without getting get stuck in philosophical abstraction.
That's Modern the style or attitude, and not "modern" the adjective meaning recent or contemporary in time. Modernism in the arts is the same as Modernism anywhere - an inversion of reality that pretends advances in technology and engineering are signs of an endless metaphysical Progress! that defines human nature.
Modernism is a secular transcendence - the Band's term for category of
Satanic inversion that pretends metaphysical things that we know partly or completely by faith have material causes. It is as logically impossible as it sounds, but seductive because it lets you claim supernatural effects while denying the supernatural. And guess who gets the be priest? Teleological materialism in Marxist historiography is one particularly good whopper, the subconscious as a gateway to "higher truths" is another. These generally involve what the Band calls a Philosophical Bait and Switch - where something is presented as a universal truth but is really just a reaction to specific circumstances. Because it doesn't actually fit universally - the range issue - it fails, often disastrously. Consider Equalism:
You're sold the idea that man has reasoned his way to an objective moral truth:
But what it really is is a poorly-reasoned reaction to a historically and culturally-specific grievance:
You don't have to agree with the Enlightenment to see how this position makes sense from the perspective of opposing the hereditary aristocracy of the Ancien Régime. But there is nothing in that extremely specific social conflict that even suggests it could be universally applicable. Here "equality" refers to a blood-based class structure - when the Revolution tried to apply it more broadly, it failed miserably. The idea doesn't have any relationship to the general, moral absolute level of society that it is forced onto. It literally spins "faith" out of policy dispute.
Secular transcendence is a category error that generates false prescriptions when put into practice. It is based on the epsistemological and ontological falsehood that something beyond the natural can be found within it. By analogy, it is the same problem as attempting to pour an infinite stream into a finite container. This is the terminal flaw in Progress! - you can only grow for a finite time in a finite geography. Then you have to switch to debt. But that is also finite, so what next? We're about to find out.
The webs of nonsense only make sense when you realize secular transcendence - like any subset of lie - is a negative concept. You can only recognize it by what it isn't. So we have to consider what is being inverted. This can be complicated because the nonsense piles up in layers - not one inversion, but inversions on top of inversions.
Start with empirical truth: art expresses the ideas and values of its culture. Then the inversion the fiction that there there was a timeless, objectively superior class of images called "art" that is really the most "important" form of visual expression.
David Teniers the Younger, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and the Artist in the Archducal Picture Gallery in Brussels, around 1651, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum
A name artist and an aristocrat. Not exactly champions of the values of the common man. One speaks the discourse, one has the money and both desire the prestige. It's like the pre-modern version of Super-Villain Team-Up to a nationalist.
This is the immediate secular transcendence: art forms develop from real material circumstances. Timeless principles are external to maternal circumstances. Claiming one is the other builds the
Art! that follows on sand. Modernism accepts this initial premise, meaning it was rebelling against an already-inverted secular transcendence. The inversion of an inversion - doomed from the start, but money can buy a long ghost run
John Atkinson Grimshaw, The Lady of Shalott, circa 1875, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art;
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2005, acrylic on canvas
The Twombly pulled $46,437,500 at a 2017 auction. Described as one of his "last great works" - channeling "the imagination of a life force and the certainty that the most profound abyss and the lightest heights represent not a dualism but rather the breath of all things...”
Antonio Corradini, Bust of a Veiled Woman (Puritas), 1717-25, Ca' Rezzonico, Venice
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Picasso is considered one of the most "important" paintings for dissolving distinctions of shape and form, swapping deliberate ugliness for conventional beauty, and bringing in African masks because they are non-Western and were considered culturally primitive.
It is a clinic in inversion.
Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, Winding the Skein, around 1878, oil on canvas, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Czardas Dancers, 1908, oil on canvas, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
Modern artists were drawn to places of moral inversion. Like Picasso's brothels and debauched nightclubs.
Francis William Edmonds Facing the Enemy, 1845, oil on canvas, The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA
Stuart Davis, Lucky Strike, 1921, oil on canvas, MOMA, New York
Modernism tries to combine Art! and modern mass consumer culture as a way of deconstructing the idea of "high" culture. If you really dig into the discourse, it turns out to be as retarded as you'd think.
John George Brown, The Country Gallants, 1876, oil on canvas, Toledo Museum of Art
Kazimir Malevich, Black Circle, 1924, oil on canvas, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
A picture that deliberately avoids depicting is peak inversion. It's only possible when the art-money alliance fully separated Art! from national culture. Modern art is just a shadow of globalism, where organic social structures are dissolved into indeterminate goo under an authoritarian elite.
There is a moral lesson in the pattern.
The last post looked at how secular transcendence piles up historically - or historigraphically, to be more accurate. Each new era claims to reject the old ways, but somehow always manages to hang onto whatever advanced the fiction that humans determine metaphysical relationships. It uses the model of history in a devious way. History is a series of change, but the progressive self-deification of humanity - or march of vanity, depending on your relationship with truth - is never questioned. The fact that historians built timelines around this theme becomes the "proof" that
Progress! is historical truth. Inversion
Domenico Tojetti, Progress of America, 1875, oil on canvas, Museum of California, Oakland
There's a look. Classical rhetoric got ridden hard by secular transcendence. The march of human freedom defies the changing tides of history! It must be "deeper" then the superficial fashions and customs of a particular era.
It must be True.
It isn't. It's just dishonest post-Enlightenment historians subverting the structural limitations inherent in historical periodization. Periods look different because they have to be differentiated.
Progress! looks like a constant progression because it is fake - each new crop of fabulists could cherry-pick past nonsense use it as source material or "evidence" for another layer of nonsense. Just relabel them universal archetypes or teleological materialism. The point is that when we are dealing with Modernism, we aren't looking at a single secular transcendence, but a deep web of invversions, stacked like geological strata.
Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition, from March 2-April 19, 1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Click for the catalog where it came from.
Curator Barr's diagram is a classic of Modernism. It also shows the density of the nonsense. The general view seems to be that the diagram fails because it is too limited. And this just for Cubism. Remember, there is no substance, only inversions of the traditional arts. There is no limit to the absurdities, because there is no check.
But it goes deeper.
Bundle all the movements and wizardry together and you get Modernism - an undefinable blur of high-density nonsense posing as the complete transformation of art. But this illusion presumes that there is a distinct and objectively definable thing called art in the first place. The Modernist revolution was an inversion within a larger set of inversions - pretending to change the pretend "essence" of an organic cultural practice. The only way to see through this fog is to go back to the roots..
Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500, oil on panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
We can actually identify when the idea of "art" as a special form of imagery first appeared. Before the Renaissance, artists were defined by their craft, not a body of theoretical drivel. It was the humanists with their notions of ancient glories that introduced the idea that art manifested the beauty of a higher ideal and that artists were worthy of celebrity and remembrance. This is a problem, because it means that the entire discourse around art is empty.
Dürer was the main conduit for Italian humanist ideas into German art. He deliberately paints himself after depictions of Christ to make a statement about artistic creativity. Artists create little worlds and are in a way like God - artistic talent is a divine gift. This idea was important in raising Art! to a special place.
There is value for non-Western readers. The Band is supportive of national determination for all, and the same fake universalism that has trashed Western nations has imposed colonialism, imperialism, and globalism on the rest of the world. You could say that the one true universal in Enlightenment thought is that is is fake everywhere. But you know what is consistent anywhere? Empirical observation and logic. The West grew out of the Classical tradition, Christianity, and the national cultures of Europe. Other places need to reject globalisms for their cultural identities, and that starts by asking what can you know and how can you know it?
Looking to the roots of Western culture sidesteps the whole mess of discourse that gradually gave us
Art! We started the historical dive with the Greeks because they invented the basic idea of art theory, and found some concepts that are completely foreign to today's 'express your creativity by splattering paint or bodily fluids' approach to the artistic process. It is worth recapping these because like useful new idea, the more you think about them, the more the implications come into focus.
Techne: the notion of skilled craft or artistry with internal rules that determine quality but don't claim to be timeless metaphysical absolutes. This pulls us out from the fake transcendence of
Art! and its theories and puts us back in the empirical world of real people and organic culture. The Greeks took for granted that when they talked about "art", they meant art as it was understood by themselves. They had a word for those that didn't share their mental world: barbarian. Why would they feel the need to justify cultural expression with timeless ontological categories? They didn't take the time to explain why rabbits can't sculpt either.
Headless statue of Hermes with traveller's cloak and caduceus, Roman copy from the 1st century AD after a Greek original from the 5th century BC, marble, Museo nazionale di palazzo Altemps, Rome
Greek art develops organically for various reasons, the theorists accept these arts as empirical facts, then conclusions are drawn about best practices. As noted in an earlier post, this resembles Greek natural science for its structure of observation and inference. It boils down to we make paintings and statues - what are the best ways to make and use them? "Art" and "our art" are the same thing - forms of visual expression that developed over time that reflect cultural norms.
Techne referred to ordered practice and aesthetic preference - there's an order to it but it is a material human one. It is organically-evolved, culturally expressive creation taught by masters to apprentices, the most talented of which become the next generation of masters.
It was not the metaphysical part of Greek art and can only reflect Truth in a conditional and imperfect way. Forcing the West to somehow justify choices of medium and style on ontological grounds is a way to deny the legitimacy of traditional cultural practices and pave the way for globalist relativism.
Kanō Masanobu, Zhou Maoshu Appreciating Lotuses, 15th century, ink and light color on paper, Kyushu National Museum, Dazaifu, Japan
As a general concept, techne is applicable to any image culture. Any society that expresses itself visually will have conventions and assumptions about how to do it - what materials, styles, subject, and standards. They can all judge skill, they just do so according to the internal order of their own values and traditions. If you are into art, once you understand the terms of a culture's techne, you can even appreciate qualitative distinctions as well.
It doesn't just apply to art either - techne can refer to any skilled artisanal or craft work. This is important because it indicated how the secular transcendence of Art! jams everything together on one level and misses central distinctions. There is no ontological distinction between art and craft in Greek thought. Every medium differs in how it applies techne, but it's techne at the base for all of them. It's what defines them as a type of human activity.
When the Renaissance began the process of separating art from other forms of craftwork that led to Art! and the myth of autonomy, there are rebelling against the idea of techne as a larger category. Obviously skill was still assumed - ingrained cultural assumptions can linger - but the foundation in technical skill was replaced by faith in unknowable things like "inspiration", "sensitivity", and a critical position towards the culture that feeds you. None of which involves technical standards and can be easily subverted. Techne became assumed, then incidental, then Modernized out of art entirely.
This sheds a bit more light on the lies and distortions around the Middle Ages. The standard line is that they fell into darkness because they lost/rejected Classical learning. The term Dark Ages is out of vogue, so the new strategy is to marginalize and distort - repugnant treachery against both the historian's vocation and the culture that invented it. What actually happens is change at the superficial, material level - different styles, media, and uses for art. Consequently, it looks a lot different. But the notion of techne on a general level - skilled ordered making - doesn't go anywhere. Medieval art is shot through with technical concerns. It is a much richer and more nuanced form of symbol and allegory that anything from antiquity. It just looks different.
The struggle between St. James and Hermogenes from The Golden Legend, 15th century reliefs from Amiens Cathedral, Somme, France
The inversion around the Renaissance "rebirth" of ancient art is pretending the specifics of Greco-Roman art - style, medium, subject matter, etc. - are the same thing as Classical techne as a concept - art as a material shaped by ordered skill. Medievals would agree that the specifics changed, but would correctly reject the assertion that their art is unskilled. Of course, the Renaissance is a self-declared rhetorical movement, so it is unsurprising to see lies and distortions in the name of cultural politics. By pretending art is style and not techne. they can dismiss the Middle Ages out of hand. And because the distinction is fake, it has no positive identity to hedge against more lies and distortion.
Erwin Blumenfeld, Charlie, 1920-1, collage, India ink and watercolour on paper, private collection
Modernism can turn on academic "Classicism" and still claim to be Art! without even having to address issues of technical skill because technical was redefined as incidental to art. It's all theoretical.
But art is a material fact. Any theoretical meaning begins with making something. And visual art decides what a culture looks like to itself and its posterity. It has indescribable rhetorical power to shape attitudes - personal and national, conscious and unconscious.
So the only way that space for a visual arts scene can be justified is if it offers something to the culture making it - purpose, myths of autonomy aside. This doesn't have to be moral fables, but there is no place for inversion and subversion. Art needs to earn the creative freedom afforded it. It has to be good, and techne as a concept is the standard for judgments of quality. Modern art is only possible when you are made to feel unsophisticated for expressing a qualitative judgment.
So how do we judge between comparable levels of techne? The metaphysical aspect comes from
episteme, and that brings us to the level of ontology and epistemology - where ideas about nature of reality and knowledge come in. Episteme is also applicable as a general concept because it refers to the metaphysical beliefs "behind" a work of art. But in this case, the Greek concepts are more relevant than what their art actually looked like, because Greek metaphysics are a
precursor to Western culture in a way that Greek art wasn't. Precursor is highlighted because the relationship between antiquity and the West is shrouded in wizardry.
The Greeks thought the universe reflected logos or higher order and that an image could do likewise. Art had the ability to visualize an ideal underneath the variations of real human bodies. But it didn't have to. Art is material and techne comes first. Hellenistic art applied it to pleasing the senses, as in these tame examples.
Practice and metaphysics are ontologically different. They may or may not correspond in any instance. This raises an interesting question.
Does techne need episteme to be art?
Phronesis was the word that the Greeks used for techne guided by episteme - visual works that express higher logos. This is also generally applicable - any sane culture judges its art according to its principles. But pay attention to how this relationship was defined.
If it appears we are talking about combining different things, we are - techne and episteme belong to physics and metaphysics. Phronesis is a mechanism for representing the transcendent in material terms. It isn't secular transcendence, because the representation doesn't claim to be ontologically True, just an analogy to truth in culturally determined terms.
Transitioning between physical and metaphysical is a central theme in Greek ontology, and the reason why it is important to understand the concept of
logos. Because logos is how we move from the unknowable certainty of the transcendent to the visual uncertainty of the material world. Consider why its a challenging term - it has a wide range of meanings that no English translation comes close to catching. But in this case, the breadth is the brilliance: the different meanings line up with different metaphysical levels. This means that each meaning is are constrained by the inherent limitations of that level.
Techne has an order, but it is expressed by subjective artists in material means. It is by necessity arbitrary and therefore requires a faith-based knowledge of metaphysical order to judge whether it does point towards truth, or is mindless stimulation. Logic and mathematical reasoning can conceptualize immaterial abstractions, but are still relational - they aren't ultimate reality. Metaphysical logos - Neoplatonists called it the nous - exceeds empirical or logical comprehension but descends directly from ultimate reality. One is an essence imperfectly understood, the other an echo clearly seen. But all three are expressions of logos in ontologically-appropriate form. There is an inverse scale for us where the higher or more "real" the level, the blurrier or less certain the conception.
The challenge for art, philosophy, history - any venue supposedly seeking truth - is to grasp the certainty of the higher levels in the fog of the lower.
Phronesis attempts this by translating the perfection of the nous into the messiness of culturally-determined art forms. On the most basic level, translation is putting something in different terms. It is by definition a transformation. Even if an idea could come through with perfect clarity, your experience of the vehicle or medium is objectively different. Don't overthink this. A classical statue and temple look very different because they belong to different art forms with different techne. But both express the idea of higher logos behind ephemeral surface appearances.
Temple of Concordia, Agrigento, 440-430 BC, renovated, 1785, Agrigento, Sicily
Greek architecture was closer to the abstract relations of math or music. Simple geometry and harmonic proportions created objects of supernatural perfection in a chaotic world. The Orders were unprecedented in for their systematic consistency. There are subjective aspects but the nature of architecture lends itself to mathematical abstraction in a way that pictures don't.
Marble grave stele with a family group, around 360 BC, Pentelic marble, Metropolitan Museum, New York
Pictorial representations communicate because they look like something. The Greeks defined mimesis as an imitation that also transforms - it is a translation. With mimetic art, the translation is visual. This means that it connects with the audience directly through the same sensory pathway as our main means of perceiving the world. And that means triggering the kinds of reactions associated with sensory appeal. In other words, emotion.
There is no explanatory context for this sculpture, but the sad expressions make you feel a definite emotional tone.
This brings us to
Pathos, the emotional mode of persuasion often contrasted with logos. It is more accurate to say they are different - something can express a rational order and evoke strong feelings at the same time. Where they become opposed is in their "direction". Logos in rhetoric is a human-level manifestation of logos the entire concept. This distinction is important because it is where the Classical concept of beauty comes from.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Innocence, 1893, oil on canvas,
Beauty what the Good and the True "looks" like. It is the appeal or attraction exerted by logos in whatever level we're talking about. This style of this painting is Academic techne of the highest level. The subject matter - Innocence as Virtue - is a metaphysical abstraction. No one can show you what it looks like in itself. You analogize it in a material form, trading the certainty of ontological truth for something you can see. The color scheme, the unsexualized beauty, the healthy baby and gentle lamb, the echoes of the Madonna and Child are all consistent with that theme. Not the virtue directly, but an impression.
This consistency expresses logos, as does the underlying structure that makes the arrangement so harmonious. But an impression is subjective and rooted in feelings. You basically "feel" what Innocence is metaphysically. This pathos created by techne guided by logos.
But false things can evoke feelings - elicit pathos - without being true.
Franz Stuck, The Sin, 1893, oil on canvas, Neue Pinakothek
Art can be alluring and morally bankrupt at the same time. Stuck is playing an old subversive game - inverting pathos and logos to induce moral confusion. The techne is there - Stuck was an excellent technician if not quite Bouguereau's equal. But consider the subject. Another personification of a moral abstraction based on a Biblical prototype - in this case Sin with connotations of Eve and the Serpent.
The squid ink is that the painting uses erotic appeal to acknowledge the attraction of evil - the lighting of the torso and shadowy faces captures the way carnal allure makes you blind to character and intent. The serpent provides symbolic commentary on the moral truth here. All this is logical. But the pathos - the unconscious emotional reaction to the apprearance of the picture is allure. It works to create the exact mental state that it pretends to be criticizing. Now consider how often this happens all around us. Fake logos as a vector for an inverted moral state.
Pathos, like techne, is amoral - it can exert appeal for good or evil ends. The question, in art and life, is how to judge? More specifically, how do we tell if techne aligns with logos?
The range of meanings makes logos impossible to translate into a single English word, but ontologically, this breadth is brilliance. Think visually.
Logos is a vertical concept. Use directional metaphors since we are limited by the blog post medium. Like the familiar vertical diagram to define proximity to ultimate reality in ontological terms - higher and lower states:
The Band's version from an earlier post. The hierarchy captures level of reality - proximity to ultimate reality /the One - but we have to remember that the One is also the all-encompassing source of creation. The One shares that with God, but is indifferent to material reality. Neoplatonic mysticism resembles Buddhism more than Christianity in that it seeks unity with abstract transcendence.
Each level up gets more "real" and less possible to conceptualize, until we reach the One which is beyond even the concept of transcendence. Something that is to actual infinity as infinity is to us.
If we think of ontology as a vertical hierarchy,
logos is the connecting axis running through them. It is the single unifying theme that crosses every level of reality and ties it all together. We can visualize the concept like this. Note: the Band is not using the specific terminology from any one "system". The words are labels for the concepts that we have been mapping out over the last few posts.
The arrows represented metaphysical relationships in the original. The One is all that can and can't be. It is. So its creative impulse - logos - is the perfect emanation - of this ultimate reality. At this level, Truth and Good are expressed perfectly, but as it flows away, the source becomes less clear. At the same time, lower states seek the higher so the whole system is a continuous simultaneous motion with only the One eternally fixed. Logos as the vertical axis would look like this:
Greek ontology put humans in the swing position between the physical and metaphysical - however defined - because we have two aspects: material and immaterial. body and intellect or soul - the details vary, but the important point is the basic dualism. Man has a base animal nature and a higher spiritual one and how we conduct ourselves determines our outcome. Align with logos and fly with the angels or let desire and will take over and wallow with the animals.
Leonardo, Vitruvian Man, around 1485
The genius of this model was that it identified the natural order behind our chaotic and temporal reality, then observed that humans share the same dualistic nature - corruptible material form veiling an immaterial soul/spirit/intellect/whatever. Greek metaphysics created a conceptual framework to describe and discuss ontological relationships in a way that was intellectually and empirically coherent.
Moderns like to scoff at the ancients because of what they lacked technologically. But what is truly remarkable is how much they actually figured out. Their grasp of the nature of truth and existence far surpasses the globohomo's tepid primordial soup.
Where they fell short is in determining how to align with logos. The logic of the vertical concept is sound, but what does it look like in practice? How do we make moral judgments without falling into secular transcendence and false faith? And for artists, how do we express logos in techne? The seriousness of the physical-metaphysical transition is clear from the number of attempts to bridge it.
Circle of Hendrick Bloemaert, Heraclitus, mid-17th century, oil on canvas, private collection
The notion of a higher order behind ours first appears during the Ionian Enlightenment of the 6th century BC - Heraclitus (circa 535-475 BC) was the first to use "logos" in reference to the order of the universe.
The choice of the term associated with logic and coherent speech is not a coincidence - the immanent reason of logos in the universe is analogous to the structured ordering of words that puts meaning in language. Level-specific expressions of the same fundamental theme.
Jusepe de Ribera, Pythagoras, around 1630, oil on canvas, Museu de Belles Arts de València
But it was Pythagoras - another leading Ionian thinker who has turned up in the Band before - who had the critical insights into how the levels connect.
The first was that math bridged material and immaterial aspects of logos.
Consider the the famous Pythagorean theorem again:
Mathematically, the theorem is absolute and unchanging relationship. So long as one angle is 90 degrees, the proportions are exact, regardless of the size, location, or area of the triangles. It describes a higher, immaterial order behind the appearance of things. But this triangle is purely conceptual. Every measurement has an element of uncertainty, because every instrument and every craftsman is only accurate to a certain point. We live in a universe where the mathematical precision of pure quantity is impossible. Click for a post. No actual, material triangle is actually perfectly 90 degrees.
Pythagoras has described an ideal.
This is important, because it illustrates the relationship between the conceptual ideal of the theorem and the imperfection of our fallen finite world. Idiot Postmodernists see this as "problematic". Realists understand that the gap between absolute principles understood conceptually and material reality is why we need moral judgment. Discernment and discrimination.
We can't frame mathematically perfect triangles because they are manifestations of logos on different levels - abstract reasoning and material techne. One can't simulate the other because they are ontologically different - you can't "see" mathematical precision any more than you can build a house out of geometric concepts. Material reality is more visible but less clear - it is entropic and uncertain, a darkling glass. But there is an important thing about uncertainty - it's limited. If the machinist or carpenter measures and cuts carefully, the error within the acceptable range of their medium, and the theorem works in a practical way. In an imperfect world, we have the wiggle room of good enough.
Great Hall with hammerbeam roof, begun 1532, Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey, Surrey
You don't have to align perfectly with logos. You can't. It is ontologically impossible. But align within your material limits, and you will wind up with a workable facsimile. It manifests in the appropriate way.
This makes sense in a functional art like carpentry where the efficiency of careful measurement is obvious. It doesn't tell us how to avoid secular transcendence and seek truth in mimetic arts like painting or sculpture.
The other Pythagorean insight opened the way to pathos. Pathos is not the enemy of logos as much as a reality of the human condition. It is material animal response - our unthinking emotions rather than refined intellect. It is more visceral and obvious, and allowing it to rule us is far more destructive than an "excess" of logos because it doesn't lead upward. It traps us here. If we add what we know about moral entropy, we realize that there is a downward potential - sensory pleasures grow stale, leading to ever increasing appetites for stimulation.
Zeus and Ganymede, Late Archaic terracotta statue from around 480 BC, Olympia Archaeological Museum
It is important to remember that Greek metaphysics are not the same thing as the historical reality of ancient Greek culture. Classical Greece, for all it's intellectual achievements, was a hive of sexual perversion and degeneracy. This is the moral judgement problem in another way. Because it's one thing to recognize that the universe is ordered, but another things altogether to see how it plays out in real life.
Greek Classicism tried to bridge this by aligning pathos with logos. The understated genitals on classical statues indicate that physical perfection isn't erotic - it's beautiful, like Truth, and not just alluring. The catharsis of a tragedy takes the audience on an emotional ride with intense stories and eerie costumes in a dramatic form known for internal structure and themes of moral consequence.
They were trying.
Pythagoras's breakthrough was to observe that music brought pathos and logos together.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Song of the Angels, 1881, oil on canvas, Forest Lawn Museum
Sound is an immaterial phenomenon that can only be detected by one sense. You can't see or smell it, and once the source stops, the sound is gone without a trace. The lack of other physical characteristics means that there is nothing to contextualize or filter the experience other than our own prior experience. Music is structured sound - structure without physical qualities to interfere with aural uptake. Unlike speech, which is also structured sound, it doesn't convey discursive information content through visible symbols. The response is pure feeling, pure pathos.
Notation isn't music - it is the translation of musical structure into a symbolic written form, like speech to text, only without words. This is important.
Pythagoras recognized that music has a higher order - his harmonic scale is one of the great insights in human culture. The idea that mathematically perfect progressions of notes registered emotionally as right, consonant, or harmonious to the subjective human ear was immanent reason behind the chaos of material existence. Words try and describe higher order, but music could make you feel it. Logos and pathos in perfect harmony.
Pythagoras determined his scale using a stringed instrument where changing the notes meant lengthening or shortening the strings. The most harmonious relationships correspond to changes of length based on 3:2 ratios or perfect fifths, and this remains consistent at any frequency.
You can visualize it as a spiral, rising in frequency but maintaining the same ratios. The problem is that the fifths don't divide perfectly into an octave. This diagram shows the discrepancy between an octave divided in twelve equal parts and a sequence of perfect fifths.
Equal-tempered tuning divides the circle into even parts. This requires a slight deviation from the actual distribution of Pythagorean fifths and is... wait for it... a 20th century invention. The alternative is well-tempered tuning, where the fifths are followed so the qualities of the octaves differ.
The discrepancy is known as the Pythagorean comma.
On the surface, this would seem like a deviation from the idea that music expresses logos aurally. But when you look deeper, a familiar mathematical order appears. If you graph the differences between Pythagorean and equally-tuned cycles, the plot converges to phi (1.618. . .), the golden ratio of a Fibonacci sequence. Order runs deeper than Pythagoras.
Shaped sound without words lets you experience order on the conceptual, abstract plane without anything discursive - logos as word on discursive level - to read and ponder over. This is higher than material imperfection because it is mathematical - it is closer to Truth hierarchically, but less clear to our senses. In short:
Where this went off was in assuming that these same relationships applied to the structure of the physical universe in a direct way.
The "music of the spheres" was based on the idea that the distance between earth and planetary spheres corresponded to the notes in an octave. The same logos you can hear in musical harmony is seen in the astronomical version. An elegant theory, but the ancients couldn't know that this entire visible world is fallen and entropic.
An intricate system developed by late Antiquity combining Neoplatonic ontology, Aristotelian causality, Ptolemaic astronomy, etc. into an continuum between our material world and ultimate reality. The creator may not be discernible in itself, but its mode of operation is. It moves the world through causation - logical, orderly relations that are compatible with logos understood on the ontological hierarchy.
Andreas Cellarius, Scenography of the planetary orbits encompassing the Earth, plate 3 from the Harmonia Macrocosmica, published 1660 by Johannes Janssonius
This treated the physical universe as a sort of transition machine transmitting the metaphysical into the physical. The planetary spheres represent bodies in the sky as well as an ontological intermediary space that is metaphysically "higher" than the material, but "lower" than ultimate reality.
The Greek model failed at least partly because it assumed that the transition between physical and metaphysical, or temporal and internal, would be visible to the senses. That the planetary system could mechanically effect the transition between the eternal and the corruptible. We know this is impossible because it puts the metaphysical within the empirically discernible - it is a secular transcendence. And once you pretend that the transcendent is directly observable, your pretense becomes subject to the realities of the empirical world. If the "spheres" don't move in eternally unchanging cycles, the whole system collapses.
This is a similar problem for modern cosmologists. As the Band has noted, they are attempting the impossible task of understanding ultimate reality through partially empirical means. Like the ancients, when empirical reality contradicts their conclusions, there is nowhere to go.
It could be interesting to look into how charlatans come up with pictures for fake concepts - like this bit of graphic design for dark matter and energy. It has no relation to what those phantasms are supposed to be, but tries to create an unrelated feeling that you transfer to the article. To make you feel insignificant and timid, not laugh at the absurdity. The picture preconditions you by putting you in the right mood. Pathos, not logos.
There is an obvious causal logic ordering the universe. Math works and music is harmonious. Humans can sink into carnal depravity or show high levels of moral reasoning. And ontology is properly ordered between a unitary, generative ultimate reality and the complex, atomized, and corruptible world of experience. The problem isn't with the overall concept - they grasped that logos was there. They whiffed on the mechanics - they didn't understand
how logos could make the transitions between ontological layers along its vertical axis.
Which brings us to our next pillar of the art of the West:
The relationship between Christianity and ancient thought is fascinating, but is unfortunately the site of a lot of wizardry and inversion. As always, we will begin with what actually happened and build conclusions from there.
Christianity appeared in the 1st-century Holy Land and quickly spread through the Roman Empire. Over the next several centuries the Bible was codified and a series of theologians, bishops, and Councils ironed out the doctrine. During this time, the Empire became Christian, and with imperial sanction, the Church began to develop the structure that would make it the connective tissue of the Western Middle Ages.
Obviously, a lot went into this, but we can identify two main ancient roots in the underlying thought: Old Testament theology and the same Greek metaphysics that we've been looking at. The first is obvious from a glance at a Bible. The second was the intellectual culture of the Roman Empire of the time, especially in the recently Hellenistic eastern provinces.
Annibale Carracci, Domine, quo vadis? (Christ Appearing to Saint Peter on the Appian Way), around 1602, oil on copper, National Gallery, London
The religion naturally spread westward along the stable highways and folkways of the Pax Romana, ensuring that its formative years remained steeped in Greco-Roman thought.
Carracci was painting for the counter-Reformation Church, so the emphasis on Peter was timely. But it is a reminder that Peter and Paul established Christianity in the Caput Mundi in the 1st century. The story comes from the apocryphal Acts of Peter and tells how the apostle had a vision while fleeing Rome to avoid certain persecution. When he meets Jesus heading to the city, he asks "Domine, quo vadis" - Lord, where are you going. When He replies "to Rome, to be crucified again", Peter screws up his faith and returns to his own future martyrdom.
Misrepresenting the relationship between Christianity and its formative context has been a common attack vector for enemies of the West. It's how we get abhorrences like Christ as a version of Apollo or Mithras and Judeo-Christian values. There is an intellectual complexity to Christianity that can make it confusing, but it is imperative to understand
how it transforms the traditions that it emerges out of, to avoid these deceptions. It's not enough to know where it comes from - you've got to know how.
It is necessary to hold two ideas that seem contradictory in mind at once. Christianity is rooted
and radical at the same time. It looks like this:
Tomasso Laureti, Triumph of Christianity (detail), 1582, fresco, Vatican Museum
Same basic context of religious image in an antique hall, but the meaning is utterly different. The relationships with the Old Testament and Classical metaphysics are for combining similar continuity and transformation.
One basic way that Postmodern "culture" distorts reality is by oversimplifying - dumbing complex things down into false binaries and coloring book-level linear thinking - until there is nothing beyond the slogan. The Band spends a lot of time on the falsehoods promoted by the institutions of official culture, but how simplistic they are is just as crazy. One of the many ways that Christianity threatens this order is with its complexity - if you want to understand it, you have to be able to think at a level beyond stimulus-response.
Giovanni di Paolo, Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, 1445, tempera and gold on wood, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Looking back to the roots of art theory gave us terms that are much more realistic and useful then the dishonest modern versions. The roots of theology also has concepts that can articulate more complex ontological relationships than orange man bad.
Like cosmic order and the fallen world in a single picture.
The way that Christianity transforms its foundations is best described as a
fulfillment - but not in the organic sense of an embryo becoming an adult. It is easiest to visualize in terms of the hierarchy of levels of reality that we've been talking about - the foundations are "less real" - less close to Truth, more conceptually opaque, a shadow - of the fully "realized" form that supplants it. The Old Testament is referred to as a prefiguration of the New - a prophetic allegory that is completed and surpassed. The New Covenant completely replaces the Old, but the Old retains wisdom where not directly contradicted because it is a foreshadowing, and the shadowy outline is of Truth. This is more complex than linear binaries so it is important to be clear on the prefiguration-fulfillment relationship: Truth foreshadowed and Truth revealed.
Redemption Window detail, 1200-1207, Canterbury Cathedral
These are known as a typological relationships, in the allegorical sense of something being a "type" or standing for something. Old Testament things are interpreted as figures, types, or allegories of the Gospels.
Here the Resurrection is surrounded by Old Testament prefigurations: clockwise from left: Noah releasing the dove; Jonah released from the whale, David escaping from Saul, and Moses and the Burning Bush
Fulfillment is an odd formation to ears raised on the honeyed poison of modern relativism. It implies a value judgment, making it racist or something. But seeking the truth requires value judgments - assessing plausibility is judgment. Notice how servants of the lie have demonized the word "discrimination". Without discrimination - judgment - there is no truth. Here, our judgment will be guided by the usual lights: what can we know and how can we know it? Turns out fulfillment is historically and ontologically coherent.
The ontology of the Old Testament
Rembrandt, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630, oil on panel, 58 x 46 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
The Old Testament presents a relationship between the physical and metaphysical that is different from the Greeks in important ways. Ultimate reality is personalized in the form of God, in the sense that He has a will that He communicates directly through a sacred text. But He is completely separate from us - after the Fall, He speaks through prophecy and angelic messengers and on the rare occasion where He does appear, he does so through abstract theophanies like the burning bush. The Fall inaugurates a meaningless history of repetitive error awaiting a messiah - there is no metaphysical hierarchy or connective logos like the Greeks had.
We can visualize the relationship like this:
God has will, but there is no rational mechanism to bridge His transcendence and material reality. In fact, one of the most common criticisms of the Old Testament God is that he is "irrational". Truth is an absolute, a transcendent quality of ultimate reality that is beyond us.
The physical/metaphysical split makes the logic/logos-based approach to truth impossible because there is no rational path - transcendence is literally irrational.
Both recognize a temporal, chaotic, contingent, etc. material world opposite a transcendent, unified ultimate reality, but define the relationship differently. Old Testament metaphysics had answers to things that the Greeks didn't, like what the One wants from creation, and how to behave in a way that is Good, since God is ultimate reality and, as with the One, ultimate reality is the Good. But as noted, law and prophecy are not logical, in the sense that they are not argued syllogistically from agreed first principles. They can be, but the point is that their authority comes from God, and whether they appear reasonable is incidental. It is accepted on faith that God is Good, and therefore His will is morality. Empirical observation reveals that disobeying ends badly while faith is rewarded, but this is inductive and takes time.
Rembrandt, Belshazzar’s feast, 1634-1639, oil on canvas
There is no visible logos in the Old Testament world. It's divine command.
Greek metaphysics understood that there was a mechanism pointing towards transcendence - a natural order behind the Fallen entropic order of the world that couldn't exist materially under such corruptable conditions. They understood that animal passions were spiritually harmful but had no way to make moral judgments - to accurately identify how to apply the abstract notion of logos in practical ways.
Pietro Testa, The Symposium of Plato, 1648, etching, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
There is no moral direction in the Classical world. It's extrapolated reason.
The Incarnation bridges the radical separation between the physical and metaphysical in Old Testament theology by bringing the divine into the material world directly.
Resurrection mosaic, around 1900, Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, Lourdes
This mosaic is a surprisingly clear representation of this bridging of the ontological divide. The vertical axis connects the door of death - the end state of material life in a finite world - and the incomprehensible transcendence of ultimate reality through the body of Christ. The Bible is clear on this one: "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6 KJV).
If we think of our Old Testament metaphysical hierarchy, Christ is a vertical concept - the Son/2nd hypostasis of the Trinity on the metaphysical level and the physical Jesus on earth.
Vertical concept...
When John opens his Gospel by identifying Jesus
as Logos, he brings two frames of references together to describe something that supersedes them both.
The divine will/moral direction of Old Testament theology provides the grounds for judgment that Greek philosophy lacks - the how to recognize higher logos in techne problem that we looked at above. And the "irrationality" of the legalistic Old Testament ontology is shown to align with the immanent reason behind the chaos of the visible universe. Theology and rational order are compatible
Christianity offers the grounds for moral reasoning. For aiming logic and art - logos on the intellectual and material levels - towards the True and the Good.
A closer look at the actual passage, with λόγος translated as Logos rather than the English Word:
The first three verses set up a paradox - the Logos is and is distinct from God, and this raises the issue of the nature of the relationship between the Father and the Son. The Trinity is an article of faith so speculation on its precise nature is outside our empirical focus.
Jean Bourdichon, The Holy Trinity, from the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, around 1503-1508, Bibliothèque nationale de France Latin 9474, f.155v
The Band prefers the theological terms ousia and hypostasis for the divine/Godhead in general and for the three individual aspects or persons in which He can be conceptualized. Anything outside of that is beyond our pay grade.
This miniature is also a good example of how pictures shape create associations by simply showing you things together. This is from a royal manuscript - note the robes in royal purple and gold - God is identified with monarchy. Note also the papal crown on the Father's head. You literally see divinity in terms of an ecclesiastic institution. The dove of the Holy Spirit may be racist.
The next two passages help guide our interpretation if we understand what logos meant to a Greek speaker in the eastern Roman Empire. The Bible doesn't go into deep explanations partly because it is a darkling glass - the
point of moral reasoning is to chart a course in an chaotic and unpredictable world - but also at times because the frame of reference is taken for granted.
This is not a claim that Greek metaphysics explains the Trinity. It doesn't. But the concept of the nous as an extensive or creative aspect of the One that allows the transcendent to cross into the finite is a good partial analogy. The immanent reason that we can conceptualize in the world is an ontological echo of this fundamental logos at the root of existence. John just tells us how to understand better within our means.
Likewise the connection between transcendence and moral order in personal existence.
Peter Adams, The Resurrection, 2018, oil on panel
Comprehension works here as both understanding and as mastery. The Incarnation creates the vertical axis that aligns human nature, material reality, metaphysics and ethics to ultimate reality through logos. This begins with personal alignment - get this right and the darkness and chaos of the world lose their power.
This is what we mean by fulfilling - the Incarnation reveals something hinted at prophetically by Old Testament theology or called for logically in Classical metaphysics and reveals it in its full, ontologically coherent form, across all levels, in complete unity. Brilliance doesn't begin to describe it. But it goes further.
Don Simone Camaldolese, Nativity, historiated initial from an Antiphonary, tempera and ink on vellum, around 1400, Florence, Bibl. Medicea-Laurenziana, Cod. Cor.39
Jesus was born at a particular moment in time, which brings us to another secularist distortion - the pretense that history is an abstract atheistic academic discourse disconnected from questions of metaphysics. This is another artifact of post-Enlightenment solipsism - we can call it History! to be consistent. And as is typical, it offers a demoralized vision of the past, where events like the signing of the Magna Carta are given more attention than the Incarnation.
The Band has pointed out how timelines are both necessary for making sense of the past and a place where reality can be subverted to false narratives. Attempts to memory hole the Christian aspect of the history of the West is the one that came up recently here. St. Paul came up with a different timeline back in the 5th century that actually considered the relationship between the physical and metaphysical and linked back to human nature. St. Augustine and others elaborated.
Saint Augustine, 6th century, fresco, S. Giovanni in Laterano, Rome; the earliest known picture of the saint.
Augustine identifies four sequential states that are applicable to the progress of Christian life and history in his commentaries on the Pauline Epistles.
Ante Legem - before the law: a wild state with no guidance in a fallen world and no knowledge of Sin
Sub Lege - under the law: knowledge of sin from the law but no direct connection to God to resist desires
Sub Gratia - under grace: God provides the means to strengthen resolve in pursuit of good.
In Pace - in peace: Salvation - the soul reunited with God in the afterlife.
We could add a Prelapsarian state - before the Fall, but more a contrast or standard against which to judge fallen nature rather than historically applicable to us now.
Historically, Augustine's
In Pace refers to the City of God, the metaphysical final state of the saved soul and doesn't apply to material existence. Which leaves us with the three Pauline states that were the backbone of Western historiography prior to the Renaissance. Let's look at the three, but see how logos fits in, and whether there is a larger pattern that makes it more than an intellectual exercise.
Jan Brueghel II, Adam and Eve in Paradise, oil on copper, 53 x 86 cm, private collection
Think of the prelapsarian as a reminder that perfect human knowledge and goodness are beyond actual history. Secular transcendence is only realistic outside the temporal, physical, and psychological limits of material existence.
John Martin, The Destruction of Sodom And Gomorrah, 1852, oil on canvas, Laing Art Gallery
Humanity ante legem is human nature unchecked - prelapsarian clarity has been replaced with our reality - unclear, entropic, and driven by vanity and desire - and there is no reliable guide to morality. This is where the Greeks would be - they just had a better handle on the ontology.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Study for Moses and the Burning Bush, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Without guidance, things go badly for humanity. History sub lege runs from Moses to Jesus - man is given clear moral rules, but as commandments. There is no rationalization provided, and nothing to drive them to overcome fallen human nature. The Old Testament is a sequence of law-breaking and dire consequences. There is law, but no logos.
Francesco Botticini, The Assumption of the Virgin, 1475-1476, tempera on panel, National Gallery, London
The Incarnation and Resurrection brings humanity sub gratia - grace being the dispensation that allows the faithful to overcome the worst aspects of their fallen nature and move in a moral direction. The law becomes logos and moral reasoning becomes possible.
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This has been a long post, but it is necessary to clarify the relationship between Christianity and its ancient roots to understand the Christian aspect of the arts of the West. The transformation of logos is a transformation in episteme, which changes phronesis or the moral direction of art and its relationship to culture. So the implications of the Logos becoming flesh will wait until the next post. For now, we'll note an interesting pattern in the Pauline timeline.
If we think the ontological hierarchy, history unfolds down on the material levels. It's people interpreting the world around them. The Pauline timeline has a metaphysical foundation, but modern timelines are faith-based as well. The difference is that the Pauline one maps onto empirical reality rather than the self-idolizing impossibilities of secular transcendence. In either case, the periods are expressions of the higher beliefs - Progress! or logos as seen through the organization of history.
The single most important historical event from a Christian perspective is the coming of Christ, which we have seen described as logos and now grace - the fulfillment of Greek metaphysics and Old Testament theology. It's the universal inflection point - a vertical concept that registers on every level of the ontological hierarchy. History is a material-level expression. So how does the Incarnation show up on the timeline?
Historically it marks the transition between
sub lege and
sub gratia - under law and under grace. Conceptually, 'under grace' is the revealed logos - the ontological/theological vertical axis between man and God that we spent most of this post diagramming out. So we can think of the transition as between life under law and life under logos:
Gustave Dore, Moses Comes Down from Mount Sinai (Ex. 19-25,20-1-17), illustration for La Grande Bible de Tours, 1866
Carl Bloch, The Transfiguration of Jesus, 1872, oil on canvas
We live in legalistic society of unprecedented complexity and pervasiveness. So there is a natural tendency to assume law is logical on a conceptual level - obviously there can be bad laws in practical terms. But this is an artifact of the old Enlightenment bait and switch - a king secular transcendence called Rationalism where solipsists proclaimed that their whims were ultimate reality because... reason. Literally.
Click for an older post. This gave us the fantasy that our legal and governmental systems were inherently Just because they were "rational" - checks and balances and so forth.
Milos Forman, director, The People vs. Larry Flynt, 1996
The title of this homage to exploitation and degeneracy is accurate. The question to ask is what sort of social order ensures that it's the degenerate that wins because of obvious falsehood?
Spiritually we can forget about logos - there isn't even obedience to the law. This is ante legem without the insights of Greek ontology.
Martin sees this trajectory:
Simple observation indicates that with increasing centralization there is greater ability to impose control on culture and greater incentive for the wicked to compete to do so. And the more legalistic a society, the less opportunity for communities to respond - and evolve - organically to changing circumstances. The problem with legalism is the problem with isms in general - the vehicle becomes more important than the original point. The very idea of a "loophole" being a case in point.
Rembrandt, The Woman Taken in Adultery, 1644, oil on oak panel, National Gallery, London
Consider the transition from under law to under logos in terms of moral reasoning. Jesus' radicalism historically - what drove his enemies to seek his destruction - was his attitude towards laws. To be clear, this is religious law - he clearly distinguished between God and Caesar in terms of the deference owed. But in his context, religious "law" is secular transcendence in that men are claiming to know higher truth. Laws founded on false ontologies like equalism and Progress! blur the boundary.
James Tissot, The Man with the Withered Hand, 1886-1896, opaque watercolor over graphite on paper, Brooklyn Museum
Jesus himself places little emphasis on laws - he reaffirms the commandments but sweeps away the complex rules that had developed by that time. It isn't about the letter of the law - it's about logos. The actual rules remain quite simple - the difference is that logos allows us to apply them to a chaotic fallen world. We don't get certainty here beyond what we already have, but logic can bring us into the ground level of the vertical axis and grace provides the mechanism to move up. It places tremendous responsibility on the individual. But it beats the alternative.
On a cultural level, the use of universalized legalistic systems to impose unpopular conditions on communities is the opposite of organic growth from individual logos through family to group. It attempts to break down natural social orders in the name of a demoralized monoculture where relative values are stretched to dyscivic extremes by fake faith in universalism. It also seems inevitable once the state reached a certain size.The alternative requires modest scale and high homogeneity - something like a common law system, where general principles are interpreted in light of particular circumstances. There is no way to guarantee honest dealing, but that's the point - there are no "guarantees" with fallen human nature. Hence logos.
Thinking vertically, secular transcendence flattens the three-dimensional into two and has to pretend that metaphysical things can be squished into material reality. The obvious case is rationalism, but there are lots of other distortions.
Consider discrimination - a cardinal sin to globohomo and the "reason" why communities are forced to tolerate the wicked and degenerate on their streets. But this is 2D secular transcendence - human circumstance posing as a moral absolute. With the vertical hierarchy, the problem isn't discrimination per se, its discrimination without logos.
The vertical axis also reminds us not to become overly fixated on the material world. Work for positive change how you can - that is life
sub gratia - but even
sub gratia is a prelude to
in pace. Make the material an end in itself, and it will be your end. Ideals poorly realized in practice? Perhaps, but as we are learning, ideals matter. They set the moral undertones of our society. When you consider the difference between moral reasoning through logos and grace and the lying, venal, authoritarian, monoculture of globalism, it becomes clear why Christianity is a central pillar to the West. And that's before even touching the problem of evil - it's arguably the central pillar.
Unless there's another system that fits reality like this.
