Politicising Arthur Boyd and other matters

SIR: I am grateful to Christopher Heathcote (March 2016) for his thorough dismissal of attempts by feminist academics and curators to reinterpret and politicise Arthur Boyd’s Bride series. The overwhelming openness and ultimate mystery of these humanist paintings is central to their universal resonance.

The “Angry Penguins” painters believed in artistic autonomy. They were deliberately apolitical, partly because they believed that art transcended politics and partly because of their bitter fight and narrow victory over the communist Realists in the Contemporary Art Society who demanded social, as opposed to individual and personal, “responsibility”.

Recent attempts to politicise the Bride series serve only to diminish the original vision of Arthur Boyd, whose creative force came out of personal experience, including of literature, the old masters and the Bible.

Felicity St John Moore
South Yarra, Vic

The Foundations of Western Civilisation

SIR: It was with interest that I read Peter Sellick’s review of Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual (December 2015), having read the book earlier last year with equal interest and profit. It is encouraging to have the historic and Christian foundations of our society addressed in a scholarly manner. The relation of the individual to society seems to be a uniquely Western issue of tension and Siedentop’s contribution to its understanding is welcome indeed. It also raised questions which, I suppose, is what any good book is meant to do.

As a preliminary but basic observation, it is disturbing how often, in discussions of Christian foundations, St Paul’s New Testament writings are singled out as ground-breaking while the life and words of Jesus himself are hardly taken into account. So Siedentop devotes a chapter to the Christianity of St Paul with barely half a page given to the “sparse facts … [of Jesus’s life about which] little can be asserted with confidence”. It could be wished that readers would return to such an old but useful book as Hoskyns and Davey’s The Riddle of the New Testament or Paul Barnett’s recent Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity, to appreciate the reliance of the whole New Testament on the life and teaching of Jesus and his role in ushering in a new and living way for individual persons to relate to their maker, themselves and their fellows.

An overarching theme of Jesus’s (and Paul’s) theology was the rejection of a legalistic approach to God, this being replaced by the direct access of every person to God the Father by trusting him and his forgiveness through Jesus Christ. Christ’s opposition to the Pharisiac Law and Paul’s emphasis on the historical priority of Abraham’s faith to the Mosaic Law forms the basis of a person’s relation to his or her maker. Siedentop, however, regards the development of Canon Law (Church Law) as the important step in the rediscovery of the individual which was lost in the period between the New Testament and the early Middle Ages. Every individual in the Church and the Carolingian empire was equally responsible under the law to the Pope and the Church. But this was what Jesus overthrew in the old system of the “scribes and the Pharisees”. There everyone was indeed responsible to keep the Law, but only the hierarchy could actually know what their Law contained. So with the Canon Law, its interpretation and application were in the hands of the ecclesiastical hierarchy again.

Inherent in the very nature of “law” is the need for its authority to be recognised and its sanctions acknowledged. The ultimate penalty for its infringement is removal from its sway (by exile or execution in the ancient Roman system) or excommunication (church); in each case the individual becomes a “non-person”.

So back to Jesus (about whom little can be asserted): he claimed to open direct access to God of which access he is the only mediator. Siedentop ends his book before the Reformation and with only one brief (and dismissive) reference to it. It would be interesting to have from him a fuller reflection on the Reformers’ historical significance. Luther’s “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise!” shook the power of the canon lawyers and reaffirmed the significance of the individual and also the individual’s responsibility for his or her own integrity.

Ricardo Duchesne also considers the significant contri­bution of Christianity to Western development and the process of the emergence of the “self” in his book The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. He includes the Reformation via Max Weber which is fair enough considering his intended object, but it still limits the understanding of the influence of the personal sense of uniqueness for the individual in relation to his maker through grace rather than law, which was central to Jesus’s teaching and mission.

Historical and societal forces certainly operate upon the individual powerfully (for good and ill), but the individual’s own nature is what they influence, and how that nature is formed, in all its infinite variety, is more than the sum of the impinging influences. Current social science might try to deny the existence of “human nature” and replace it with whatever is the result of material and economic forces on the collection of nerve cells we call human beings, but life is more than this—ask anyone. As with many studies of human life—anatomy, physiology, pathology—the subject studied is either dead to start with or ends up dead as a result of the study: so it can seem with studies of the individual in relation to society, self and others. The living, functioning individual does not come into being by his legal recognition by the state or the church, but by his very existence and his recognition of the origin and purpose of that existence. The study of the relation of the person to society (and vice versa) is, and will always be, a work in progress, and Siedentop reminds us not to leave the divine out of the process.

How people view their relation to God—as on the basis of law mediated by trained experts, be it Canon Law, sharia or even the laws of nature (mediated by neo-atheist scientists), or on the basis of grace—direct, personal and responsible—makes a great difference to how the individual perceives himself and herself. And how one sees oneself affects how one interacts with society (and vice versa), so here’s an infinite field for future interdisciplinary studies, including theology.

Hugh Scott
Bowral, NSW

Religious Doubt in Adversity

Sir: Peter Smith (March 2016) raises the question of doubt in God in adverse circumstances.

This goes back to the religious presentation of God. It is inferred that God is a director, but churchmen have always been careful not to imply that He will certainly direct. Proponents of religion have used non-specific words to present it, similarly to politicians, leaving one to interpret their meaning personally. This does recognise the near infinite differences in people and their perceptions. The purpose is general proselytisation. If one asked 100 believers present in the same church precisely what they believed about God, none would give the same reply. Everyone has their own exact but different beliefs.

Formal religions are supposed to be aids to one’s beliefs and right conduct, but they allow ethics and morals to have synonymous public meanings. One is man-made and one is innate in humans and hence related to God. This obscures the understanding of morals. In his novella The Old Woman the Russian writer Daniil Kharms has the narrator say to his companion, “I don’t think there are people who believe or who don’t believe. There are only those that want to believe and those who want not to believe.” This seems close to our general situation, shown by public debate.

Down through the ages people have used religion as relief from their day-to-day trials. There are other non-violent recourses, but prayer is direct and immediate. As well, they have prayed for intervention in adversarial situations, but the problem is that their opponents are probably doing the same thing. Humans are more comfortable with certainty, hence we enlist the superior being.

It is a fallacy to separate the formation and the evolution of the universe. Darwin did not intend his thesis as an anti-God argument. Evolution is a continuation of the formation of the universe. The hydrogen atom, vital to all of organic chemistry including us, took 380,000 years to evolve after the big bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

Our own brains have always evolved. Julian Janes (The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), in tracing the development of the human brain over the last 10,000 years, points out the increased sophistication of the book of Ecclesiasticus, published in 250 BC, compared with the Book of Job, dated about 850 BC. The brain has evolved further since then. Janes’s assessment that the human ego only evolved about 4500 years ago may explain why God the Son took so long from the formation of the visible universe to come down to earth. Humans were now ready to see that death was not the end. The earliest known cave drawings are 1.57 million years old in the Herault of Southern France. Their artists saw themselves only as part of nature. We have long demonstrated with almost exponential addition that we are increasingly much more. Churchmen have not tried to raise the sophistication of their message to the level of mental capability today.

The massacre which occurred recently in Paris is the result of evil human conduct. This is permitted by God because it is possible under the test system that He set up for us. The loss of Father Graham’s loved one in the film story has to be accepted by him without blame or expectation of intervention. It is part of human and all life systems as they exist.

Rather than a director, it is far better to see God as a producer. One is then able to better answer the obvious questions that arise from daily life—such as God and the problem of pain; God and the permission of evil; God and the psychology of prayer; God and the psychology of religion. God is the producer who can be, but chooses not to be, involved in our day-to-day affairs because He set them up long ago and has no reason to instantly change anything. Meanwhile evolution continues.

K. de Courtenay
Nedlands, WA

Staggered

SIR: I’ve just been leafing through the latest edition and was staggered to find at page 55 an advertisement for something called “another-stolen-generation”. The “stolen generation” story has been debunked (in previous editions of this very publication), so printing an advertisement that refers to this myth as though it were fact is more than a little surprising.

Perhaps in your recent appeals for donations you should have warned us just how desperate things were, and alerted us to the depths to which the publishers were prepared to go to keep the publication alive, so that we would have dug a little deeper into our pockets to avoid this sort of thing.

Andrew Wedekind
via e-mail