https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yIxx9vpoKBU
But with naked art, it’s something altogether different. You don’t find people sort of being tempted to masturbate in the Sistine Chapel. You don’t find them going to some beautiful art museum and finding that temptation. And yet you see the body and all of its beauty, the breasts and the genitals, and this is all lovely. And it seems like though you’re being drawn into an interior world, there’s something going on. There is a complexity and interiority to the person. Where is it? I mean, I tend to be not, I’m not on the, let’s say, I don’t mind the fact that nudity exists in art, but it’s definitely, to me, when nudity started to reintegrate art, let’s say, during the Renaissance and later, it seemed to me like it was a strange pagan move. Oh, really? Because if you read the early councils, they accepted images in the church. And when you read how the church fathers talk about, one of the reasons why icons look the way they do is because Roman art was erotic. Roman art was extremely erotic. And so what the Christians did is they took the Roman forms and they, if you look at the figures, they’re using Roman tropes. Everything about iconography is based on Roman tropes. The fold, the clothing, the poses, even the contrapposto, all of this comes from Roman statuary and Roman painting, but it was de-eroticized. And so all the figures are covered, and then the contrapposto is adjusted slightly so that it’s not as sensual. So all of it, there’s like a, and you can read, I think it was even Saint Basil, I’m not sure, don’t quote me on that. So one of the fathers talked about how the images that are represented in the church have to be not to attract attention to your desires. They need to have a sobriety to them so that you’re not tempted by them. And so I do think that, because in the Sistine Chapel, even the Sistine Chapel, now it’s been restored, but it didn’t take long for the nuns to paint vines over the genitals. Which were removed. Now they’ve been removed. By John Paul II, which I thought was, that’s cool that we disagree on this, because I think I disagree with you on that. I mean, whatever we might say of Christian tradition and the fathers and their opinions, the argument that one would make would be that the body can be portrayed in a way that is decent and good or not. And so would your argument be that you actually can’t portray the body through drawing or painting in a way that- I think that the best way that I would understand that is mostly that the body or the naked body has two aspects to it. There are two nakednesses, you could say. Those are related to the story in Genesis. One is the nudity in the garden, and it’s the nudity in the secret place where you’re in communion with God. At the fall, that nudity gets turned into the nudity of shame, and in the outside of the garden, then you cover yourself. And so I think that that duality remains the same. So I think there is, of course, like you said, absolute dignity and beauty and power to the human body, but there’s something of the altar in that power. There’s something of the sacredness of the body, which needs to be preserved and hidden for the moment of the bride and the groom, like for the encounter of the bride and the groom in the hidden chamber. So that’s kind of more the way that I understand it. So your idea would be that since the time of the fall, it is no longer appropriate to depict the body naked. Well, I would say that it’s hard to depict it naked without the shame. And so that’s why Christ was represented not fully naked on the cross, but let’s say as naked as possible. And it was somewhat scandalous, even when it started, Christ started to appear that way. On the cross, Christ was represented fully clothed until like the early, let’s say, I didn’t even know what the first time, I think it was in the ninth century around the time of Charlemagne, that Christ started to appear as naked on the cross or as almost naked. And I think that it was meant to represent the nakedness of shame. It was meant to, the nakedness, or in a way you could say joining the nakedness of shame with the nakedness in the garden in a very strange, very surprising way, the way Christ unites opposites and extremes together. But that was one of the only places where that, where the kind of the body was shown was when Christ was dead on the cross. And I would say that it’s mostly that it has to do with the secret. It has to do with a mystical reality, which is still kept. You could say something like, I imagine that in paradise we’ll all be naked, right? Like in the kingdom maybe, or clothing glory, the way the fathers talk about. We won’t be wearing Nike. We won’t be wearing Nike, that’s for sure. Or clothing glory, the way the fathers talk about the nakedness of the garden, something like that. What’s your opinion on those beautiful breastfeeding Madonna icons? I don’t know. I think that they start out okay, and then they get more and more disturbing. And by disturbing, do you mean sensual? Like leading to sexual? Definitely. I think that in the Baroque period, there’s a kind of sensuality. Like you look at a Rubens painting, and it’s just all, it’s very sensual. I mean, the bodies are. What’s that called? Sorry, I wanna look it up. Rubens, so R-U-B-E. I shouldn’t look it up, I guess. Rubens, what would I type, painting? Yeah, Rubens painting. Yeah, okay, yeah, no, I see what you mean, how they become more sensual. Well, I don’t wanna put a pin in that. I do wanna keep fleshing that out, but just kinda back up a little bit. I suppose when we talk about pornography, you could talk about it from different angles, right? Like there’s the one who produces the pornography, there is the one who quote unquote performs in the pornography. Then you have the consumer, right? And I suppose, in fact, I would say it is the case that one can look at pornography and not sin because we have these sort of police officers who have to say look at images of child pornography in order to identify victims and catch these people. Or you might have a mother, say, who accidentally stumbles upon what a child has been seeing and scrolls through to understand it. I would say that this, because of the intention of the viewer watching pornography, while it may always be harmful to some degree, one isn’t always culpable for it. And I suppose it’s possible that someone could look, as you say, upon these Ruben paintings or even the icon of the breastfeeding Madonna and feel lust and have their sexual, their sort of lower passion stirred up. But I’ve always thought, I guess, that especially in regards to, say, the icon or even the Sistine Chapel, that the problem wasn’t with the art. It wasn’t with depicting the body, which is good. It’s always been with the person, that there’s a problem in the heart if I am to look upon something holy like the breastfeeding Madonna icon and feel lust. So that’s not a problem with the depictions. It’s the problems with me. No, I think you’re onto your right in an absolute sense. But I still nonetheless think that it’s a dangerous, it’s a dangerous- Yeah, I think I see what you mean. Healed the slide down. Because at the very least, like let’s say one says, you can depict the body in a responsible way, which it sounds like you’re leaning towards not necessarily after the garden, right? But even if that were the case, there’s the temptation of leading people into sin because there are people who are seriously perverted. And so maybe that’s an argument for why you shouldn’t just be having these- These naked images in churches. I mean, I am definitely a traditional iconographer, so I don’t advocate for the naked people in churches. But if you look at, for example, the way that nakedness is portrayed, like I was trying, as we were talking, I was trying to think of other scenes where the saints are represented naked. And it does happen. And it’s usually ascetics. Like ascetics are sometimes represented naked. Mary of Egypt. Yes, and Mary of Egypt is sometimes represented naked in a way where she’s almost a skeleton. Like she’s a barely, she barely has any flesh on her. And so there is a way in which the nakedness of the aesthetic is also this weird place where scandal and glory come together, you know? So Timothy Aspaslaw. Sorry, Timothy, I never know how to say your name right. So, hey, Jonathan, the more I learn about Renaissance art, the weirder it appears to me. Drawing God the Father, painting St. Peter at the left hand of Christ instead of his right, cherubs as baby saints are drawn in the nude in a weird muscular body. I’m struggling to understand how the Catholic Church ever commissioned and approved these works of art what was going on. And so I agree with you, obviously. If you’ve watched my discussion with Father John Strickland, you’ll see that I obviously, I definitely agree that I think what happened in the Renaissance is a kind of neo-paganism. And, but it’s interesting because it tapered off afterwards. And so like the great artists, whatever in parentheses, these like great artists like Michelangelo and Rubens and all these really excessive artists, you know, they were famous and we talk about them and they’re all these big churches, but that kind of stuff would never have gone into like the normal churches. And so a village church would never have had something that would like that. It would have been way more sober, way more toned down. Even if Baroque, it would have not been, you wouldn’t have like naked women, you know, cavorting around or whatever. It would have been way more sober. And so I think that that’s an important thing to understand in terms of the excesses of the elites that happened during the Renaissance and the post Renaissance period and a village church, which would have been probably way more conservative. But it really is to me a pagan moment in Christianity, the Renaissance and it’s a decadence. There’s a decadence in the art that I didn’t talk about Father John Strickland, but there’s a decadence in the meaning. And so in the middle ages, there had developed this amazing and the powerful relationship, kind of cosmic language of symbolism. And so in the Renaissance and after the Renaissance, the symbolism became more and more kind of hermetic and closed off and a little arbitrary rather than, you know, based in scripture and liturgy. And so in an icon, you can understand what’s going on because it’s bathed in the world of scripture and liturgy. But if you look at, you know, it’s like if you look at the image of the creation of Adam, right? And so look, it’s a great example. So look at the image of the creation of Adam by Michelangelo and you’re like, what’s going on? I mean, that’s not the way, even if you first of all, accept that they drew God the Father, which already is a problem, but let’s say you say, okay, fine, we’ll look over that for now. It’s like, why are they touching fingers? What the heck is that? What does that even mean? Like, what is that? In scripture, it says that he blew air into his nostrils. That’s how he created. And he spoke the world into being and he blew air into Adam. And so what is this? And so that’s one of the problems of Renaissance art is that there’s a decadence in the, not just in the way that it’s represented, but there’s a decadence in the iconography. Where all of a sudden it’s like, these things have become arbitrary and just like the fancy of the artist that is not this deep, deep plunging into the story and kind of engagement into the story. So anyways, the problem of the iconoclastic controversy, it’s something which people, especially as an artist, I take that very seriously, but it’s something which is very important and people ignore how Charlemagne and the Frankish court is meddled, is like mixed in with the whole question of the iconoclastic controversy. And the solution that the Franks gave and that the West ultimately kind of arrived to was something which didn’t totally integrate theologically the image, which kind of said we have these images, but we don’t see them as liturgical. We don’t see them as participating in this, in the reverence and the veneration and then ultimately kind of moving up towards the worship of God. And I think that that’s like a little, I don’t know if you talk about that, but I’ve always thought that that’s a little seed which was already planted in the West. And then as the Renaissance came and then the reformation came, there were no arguments. People didn’t have St. John of Damascene’s incarnational argument to be able to explain why we have this stuff in the church. And so it kind of fell flat by the time the Protestants arrived. No one, I think John Calvin, even in his, when he talks about images, he doesn’t even address St. John Damascene’s argument. He doesn’t talk about the incarnational argument at all. So that was all the way back during the time of the iconoclastic controversy where the excess of the East and the kind of, and the West, this strange mixture created this problem, which just continued on. The West never developed a really clear, coherent understanding of the image. In the East, of course, with iconoclasm, they were forced to, and John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite came forward and articulated, as fathers of the church, articulated what the image is. And like you said, it’s grounded in the incarnation. It’s grounded in traditional Christianity’s understanding that the world is not disconnected from heaven, from God, from paradise, but the world is filled with presence, sacramentally especially, and liturgically, the presence of heaven. And that’s what the image and the theology of the image does in the East. And in the West, Charlemagne’s court, we’re talking Charlemagne for your listeners and viewers, I mean, it’d be like about 800. So this is still before the Great Schism, but it’s about 800 this is going on. And his Frankish theologians, they didn’t get that at all. They saw the image as being pedagogical only, as being something that’s useful for teaching. And that’s fine, that’s good, that’s part of it. But as the fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in the East had said, it’s good for teaching, but primarily, it bears witness to the fact that God became human in the incarnation. The world, the cosmos is not on its own, living out its life for its own sake, it is now joined to heaven and to eternity. And that really is the break, I think that’s it. And after that, you mentioned the Renaissance, boy, I mean, you talk about what was going on in the Renaissance and Calvin’s reaction to it, you look at what the Renaissance did with art, the humanists, I mean, our culture celebrates Michelangelo and Raphael and Titian and all these famous, Leonardo. But if you look at these from a deep, historically deep point of view, it’s just an aberration. It’s so weird to see what they were doing with their art. Yeah, I agree, I mean, obviously I agree, that’s why I’m an iconographer. And I had this interesting discussion recently with a Catholic Thomas about this problem of nakedness in art and why in the West they’ve kind of accepted that. And I really, I see, to me, the Renaissance is a pagan move. It’s a move towards a pagan thinking, a pagan aesthetic and pagan sensuality. And so, like you said, there’s a sympathy for Calvin or the reformers who are reacting to this. Like you’re reacting to a Rubens in a church with all this naked, orgiastic flesh in the altar. And you’re like, okay, so this is it? This is what we’re gonna have in the church now? There’s a certain sympathy for, as you move into extremes, sometimes you can understand the reaction to something which is already excessive, and then it moves into another excess. And then after that, it’s the history of the West. It’s just from one excess to the other, from one extreme to the other, all the way into the, into the utopian age of the modern world right now. But I love, like to me, I’m really happy that you say that because I’ve been kind of secretly, secretly thinking that the iconoclastic controversy and this, the relationship between Charlemagne and the conflict that happened, and the wars of iconoclasm that happened at the time, are one of the key, key moments in the definition of the West and the separation between the two. And how the problem of understanding the incarnation and the transformational aspect of reality appears very clearly in that moment, where, you know, even today, when I talk to Catholics and Protestants, sometimes when I talk about the transformational aspect of what Christ brought and how we are called to be brought into God and to participate in the life of God, you know, like the people, they don’t feel good about that. They feel uneasy about it. But you see an example of that right there in Charlemagne’s court at that time. Yeah, and that’s simply the doctrine of the incarnation. That’s why the Orthodox East is very comfortable using the word theosis or deification when it talks about its understanding of salvation. It’s not just, you know, release from condemnation, escape from punishment. It is, but it’s much more than that. It’s participation in the life of God. And that’s really central to it. Back to Charlemagne, what’s interesting there is that on the one hand, he totally identifies, like you say, he builds his new temple in Aachen, famously built and modeled on Byzantine architecture. He assumes this almost Cesaropapus kind of, he’s almost like a priest. He couldn’t, you know, he was really interested in theology. Had theology read to him, Charlemagne would be sitting at his dinner table in his palace hall, and he would order his servants to read the city of God by Augustine while he’s munching on his dinner. You know, I mean, that’s the mind that Charlemagne had. But his theologians, these Frankish theologians, were so, I mean, they’re like the first cultural activists, you might say, they were shock troops of a new Western identity that is distinctly and by definition, not Eastern. You see, and that’s the break. That’s where it starts. Of course, nothing’s done in a single generation in history, but that’s where it really starts. You start to see the formation of an identity we call the West distinct from the East or the Greeks. So I think what happens after Charlemagne is you get this different culture, which defines itself against the East, not with, but against the East. Then the Great Schism comes up a couple of centuries later, 1054 is the excommunication. Then after that, all these changes start to happen under the influence of the Papal Reformation of that time. You get Papal supremacy. You get the crusades starting within about 50 years of the Great Schism. Beyond that, you get doctrines like Purgatory, which projects the experience of paradise for someone living in that culture. Purgatory is this tremendously intimidating process of punishment after death, post-mortem punishment, that its effect on the culture of the West is profound. That culture becomes inherently, very deeply penitential, pessimistic. The experience of paradise that I tried to document in the first millennium in my first book gets put off until after that Purgatory plays out, thousands of years, whatever a year is beyond this world. So you get all these, the paintings of Giotto, as beautiful as those are in the 14th century, those paintings are intensely, they’re designed to create an intense reaction or response of sorrow and penitential doubt and introspection that itself contributes to a growing pessimism. And so this tendency in the West after Charlemagne and the Great Schism is more and more to lose that incarnational culture that was so strong in the East and so strong in the West too during the first millennium, but now after the Great Schism and that great division, it becomes much weaker. That’s what happens with Petrarch and the Renaissance, so-called, the humanists come forward and they say, you know, this is, they don’t put it this way, Petrarch almost puts it this way, but they don’t quite put it this way, but what they do is they seek human fulfillment no longer in a world that’s been transformed by heaven. They seek human fulfillment in a world for its own sake, a secular, so-called secular world. And that’s their contribution. And that’s why Renaissance painting is so naturalistic and so fleshy and so focused on the artist as genius, you know, Michelangelo signing, you know the story about his Pieta, that famous statue of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ that gets put in St. Peter’s, he finishes the carving of it in one of his most famous works and it’s put for everyone to come look at and he stands back in the shadows, we’re told by a contemporary account to see what the reaction is because artists are very, very competitive then and for commissions and all that. And some bumpkin comes in from the countryside and says, that’s beautiful, who did that? And some guy, some bumpkin standing next to him says, I think it was a guy named Raphael, I don’t know what he says exactly, it’s not Michelangelo. Michelangelo recorded that he became infuriated. He went home that night and came back to the church with a hammer and chisel and he chiseled right across the strap of the Virgin Mary’s chest. This is the work of Michelangelo. And that’s the, there had been autographs before that, but that’s the origin of the artist’s art of art, autograph that’s so necessary in modern art. You know, the artist is pushing the limits, has radical things to say and to reveal, Michelangelo’s decoration of the Sistine Chapel, you talk about like revolutions in liturgical life. This is a chapel with an altar and over the altar you see the sea of naked bodies, right? It’s the last judgment too, it’s not even what you would see. The incarnational icon in the East was the Virgin Mary of the sign with Christ, you know, being born into this world from a human mother. Now it’s the last judgment and all of its terror. You know, the famous creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, he modeled his image of God creating Adam. He modeled him on Zeus. If you go back and you’ll get statues of Zeus, this highway, you know, this like, he’s been to, you know, Gold’s Gym or something is really, you know, the fellow’s chest and he just looks with a white beard and all that stuff. I mean, that’s just, it’s beautiful and it’s in a worldly sense, but it no longer has any liturgical or sacramental significance at all. Yeah, there’s so many things wrong with that painting. I can’t even start. I was like, why the naked, like all the naked babies and why is there like a naked teenager next to him? And it’s just very disturbing. Michelangelo’s paintings are very disturbing. Or Raphael, think about, you know, the famous Sistine Madonna. You know, that’s one of his many Madonnas. By the way, Raphael was writing about this in my new volume, The Age of Utopia. It’s accounted by a contemporary, his name was Vasari, but the history of the wives of the painters, you probably know about it. He said that Raphael was like a total womanizer. And he would, you know, he would seduce his female models that were sitting as models for him. And modeling is a totally new thing too. When he was painting, they were modeling the Madonnas for him. But in a Sistine Madonna, he’s got those two little, what are they, angel thingies, I call them at the bottom. Yeah, they changed, they had these figures in Roman art, which were called putti, where like these little domestic gods, you know, like these little babies with wings. And then they somehow changed the cherubs into these putti. And so the cherubs, which are these like flaming, you know, flaming glories of God with like multi-eyes and wings became these cute little naked babies with wings. You want to poke them in the belly like the Pillsbury Doble. And they become totally insignificant and powerless. And that, I think Jonathan is the sign of the shift in culture now, for the secular transformation of the world from a heavenly one. The heavenly powers, you know, the archangels, angels, Seraphim, Cherubim, stand about the throne of God, you know, we can quote the divine liturgy. These no longer are relevant. So they become these two little bored looking, cutesy little angel thingies at the bottom of the painting. And that really becomes the image in Baroque painting, as you know better than I, of what an angel looks like. Like it’s just a cute little powerless, unintimidating baby, because there are no demons to worry about, because man is autonomous. You know, that’s Pico de la Mirandola’s argument in the Dignity of Man during the Renaissance, that man is autonomous. He’s in control of his own life now. And you just get this demonization, this diminishing of the heavenly presence in this world. And angels are now represented, even as Christ. How do you pray to Christ when he’s a naked little baby? You know, I mean, you know, with his, forgive me, but it’s genitalia exposed. That’s not a liturgical image anymore. Yeah. It’s interesting though, is there something that I’ve been thinking about in terms of art, is that there’s something, like for example, Michelangelo’s work, it never landed. Right, it never landed. It never created a tradition. It never created. So nobody copied his images. Nobody copied those paintings and made them into other, whereas I think that there’s still an implicit thing in the Catholic tradition. There’s still the possibility of, so there are still images which appear later, which become almost iconographic in their use, let’s say. So if you have someone who has little saints cards with a prayer behind it, there’s something about that, which even though they don’t have the theology to explain it, there’s an intuition that people have about their connection to the saint. And the way that say that these little saint cards that are cheap and you can buy at a little gift shop, the way that they’re framed, even though they’re still Western and they still have a kind of photo type realism to them. They’ve been sobered up. They’ve been brought into a kind of more frontal pose. All of these elements of iconography, nonetheless kind of persist in this folk, in a kind of intuitive folk world that continues to exist, even though in the big churches, in the high churches, there’s all these diagonals and all this madness and all these floating vestments and all of this kind of craziness, for the humble pilgrim and the little person who has the card of a saint in their house, it’ll still look something like an icon. There’ll be a little bit of a tinge of a remembrance of that world because it is more connected to how we actually engage people. You don’t meet naked people and you can’t pray. I mean, I don’t know, have this kind of sensual naked person in front of you and you’re supposed to, you can’t look at them in the eye and then invoke them or ask for their prayers. Whereas these little saint cards where you just see the figure looking at you with a bit of a glow in the back, it’s kind of tacky, but nonetheless, it has a little bit of the iconic memory, let’s say. It does, you’re right about that. And I think that’s just instinctive. It’s maybe intuitive. There’s also, of course, this revival of Eastern iconography that you’d see in a lot of Western churches these days. But I think that’s what people are seeking. I think that that’s what human beings were paid for was a connection with heaven. And that’s the way we make it. We don’t make it by looking at a fleshy image, even if it’s in a church, even if it’s over an altar, it doesn’t do any, it keeps us locked into this world, into the secular. It keeps us in the secular. And man was made for more than the secular. And so that’s why people are trying, I think especially today, to find a way out of this. I think it’s really a cultural dead end, artistic dead end. I mean, look at the 20th century, because of the disintegration of the human figure, that just, I think humanism, as it was expressed by Michelangelo, like you said, he never really created a tradition that followed him. I think humanism just spent itself by the 20th century, but it was seen more and more by Fritz Nietzsche, but then artists of the Dada movement, and the Dali, and the surrealists, and others, Picasso for sure, it was seen as a counterfeit, as something that was just, didn’t have substance. And it’s interesting, because even if you look at the history, there’s a little microcosm which happens in the Renaissance, which people don’t like to talk about so much, because by the end of the Renaissance, there was a movement called Mannerism. You see it even in Michelangelo’s late work, where it’s as if this kind of glorious realism, and this kind of glorious sensuality of the beginning of the Renaissance, quickly turned into this strange exaggeration, the stretching of figures, the accessing color. And so you have this weird Manneristic painting, which happens at the end of the Renaissance, which is only broken by the Council of Trent, and this kind of glorious Baroque. But you almost see a microcosm of what’s gonna happen in the whole story, right there in the Renaissance. By the end of it, you have a disintegration of form, and then if you take a bigger loop all the way into modernism, you have the same move, which moves all the way down into, because as you kind of explore the sensual aspect of something, as you fall into the passions, those passions have no limit, right? And they start to turn into weird things, right? You know, the weird, you can see that in the madness of pornography today, where it’s like, it goes into all these weird little like fetishisms and stuff. And so it was already there, like right in the Renaissance at the end of it. And then the whole modernism, like you said, you can see like by the time you get to Francis Bacon, you’re like, you know, that, you know what, a portrait by Francis Bacon was promised to you in Michelangelo already at the beginning. Postmodernism, yeah, Francis Bacon is a good example of where this all goes. Yeah, exactly. 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