There is an episode of Seinfeld in which George and Jerry are talking at the coffee shop about George’s schemes to combine a few of his favorite things: sex, food, and television. If my memory of the episode is correct, his dilemma is how to incorporate the food and the television into the sex without the woman involved knowing. Jerry’s response is something to the effect of the following: George, we’re trying to have a civilization here.
We’ve been trying to have a civilization for a long time now, and it seems to me that we’re always getting the hang of it as things are falling apart, and things are always falling apart as we’re getting the hang of it. In other words, civilization has been going downhill pretty much from the beginning of civilization. Many of our voices of wisdom have been warning us of our decline for millennia. At least some of the reasons for these dire reports should by now be clear: because civilization is not merely one thing, but rather a multitude–from laws to infrastructure to arts to customs to ceremonies: the kinds of things that Aeneis encounters Dido’s people establishing from the ground up in Carthage–some parts of it are always falling apart while other parts are doing fine or even flourishing. At times, it’s even necessary for some parts of a given civilization to fall apart so that newer and more vital things can take their place; often it’s not the end of the world, but rather the end of the world as we know it, as R.E.M. sang. Sometimes a given culture must give up some of its nasty habits if it is to continue to be called cilvilized, as has been the case in the United States with our racist laws and practices–we’ve done fairly well with the former, but with the latter we still have a long way to go (subject matter, perhaps, for another blog). But if I’m too in love with the world as I’ve known it, I can miss the benefits of allowing some parts of this world to fall apart. But civilization continues, I’ve long thought, only by falling apart; that is, civilization continues by constantly changing, continuing to explore what it means to be human, what it means to be an embodied consciousness in this material world that we discover and create at the same time, continuing to ask how we can be responsive and responsible, compassionate and caring in this world, and continuing to make the choices that best bring to pass what we find to be of value. To do these things, we must, it seems to me, learn all that we can from the past (its stories, its laws, its philosophies, theologies, and beliefs) while we continue to ask old and new questions and create new languages to respond, including new languages of action. Sometimes the flurry of the new can feel like a decline, though it’s often enough better described as renewal.
Because civilization is, in my view, complex and often wayward, what at times appears to be decadence or a cheap stunt might be better viewed as a healthy sign of the ongoing experiment with what it means to be an embodied consciousness in this material world. To say this is not to say that all experiments succeed, nor that there are no cheap stunts, but rather that I suspect we’re better off seeking to understand before rendering a judgment, and that we do well to continue seeking to understand even after a judgment is made, for a new judgment might need to be made as new insights occur. One hardly need be Bernard Lonergan to know that human intellection is inherently dynamic, and that a given judgment on a given understanding of some part of experience will likely call forth further moments of experience, understanding, and judgment.
For better or worse, I am still seeking to understand Cosimo Cavallaro’s “My Sweet Lord,” a six-foot-tall sculpture of Jesus crucified, all done in milk chocolate, which was scheduled to be displayed at New York’s Lab Gallery, though the display was canceled after several complaints. For the sake of full disclosure, I should specify that while I believe in civilization, I believe far more deeply in Jesus. I am devoutly Catholic and would not think of missing Sunday Mass. My daily round includes a morning meditation and recitation of at minimum some small part of the Divine Office. The creed that I recite on Sundays is one that I believe fully, though I also know that what it means and what its words imply continue to develop as we move through history and seek to understand who we are in relationship to each other, to the world, and to the Divine Other.
Like my coreligionist Sister Wendy Beckett, I try to understand the world of art with a spirit of openness and intellectual curiosity. Of Andres Serrano’s famous “Piss Christ” photograph, Sister Wendy said to Bill Moyers that she undertsands it as a commentary on the way we’ve treated Jesus and his teachings. While she does not think the photograph stands as an example of great art, she also does not simply reject it or seek to deny its display.
Whatever the status of Cavallaro’s milk-chocolate statue might turn out to be for me or anyone else, for the moment I find the photograph of this vulnerable, naked image of Christ suspended in the air, in the position of a crucified body but without so much as the support of a wooden crossbeam, to be uncannily compelling. The expression on the face is some ambiguous combination of serenity, pain, and resignation. The body looks like it might have been vigorous once, but now it hangs there helpless.
Is it the medium of milk chocolate that the statue’s critics find objectionable? I tend to think of this medium in terms similar to those that Sister Wendy voiced about the effects of Serrano’s “Piss Christ”: Cavallaro’s choice of medium hints at something of what so much of our culture, what so many of our intersecting cultures–including those of the religious tradition to which I belong–have done to the teachings and person of Jesus. We have taken this courageous and challenging person and turned him into a sweet, a kind of after-dinner treat rather than the disquieting figure that one encounters in the Gospels. If one is seriously to encounter this Jesus about whom the Gospel writers, St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Theresa of Avila, Kierkegaard, Rudolf Bultmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others have written so powerfully, then one must encounter him in more complex and challenging terms than the sweet and sentimental dessert so much of our culture has turned him into.
Is it the fact that one can see Cavallaro’s Jesus’s penis that so upsets certain critics? If one believes, as I do, that Jesus was God incarnate, then one must also accept that he had a fully functional penis. Furthermore, as I understand the practice of crucifixion in the ancient world of which Jesus was a part, he would have been crucified nude, putting his penis fully on display, as it is in Cavallaro’s statue, adding to the compelling vulnerability of the image. Back when I was a college student in a Catholic seminary–I did not go on to be a priest, though I’ve carried my seminary education with me these years–one of the professors of religion suggested that the church might not have served itself well by its long preoccupation with matters of sex–that is, its at times obsessive preoccupation with, I take it, which actions are to be prohibited when, where, and how. There are many ways to talk about what is appropriate and of value in one’s sexuality, including which actions are best avoided and which pursued, but a language of simple prohibition may never have done well to respond to the depth and complexity of what sexuality is. Nor is simple repression likely to help much either. It’s unfortunate that so many of our cultures, including (perhaps especially) our religious cultures, have yet to develop a widespread and nuanced vocabulary to talk about sexuality, Jesus’s or anyone else’s–and I should specify that when I refer to sexuality here, I do not mean simply, or even primarily, explicit genital activity, but rather the whole array of issues involved in what it means to be a sexual creature. For one continues to be a sexual creature irrespective of whether one is having sex at a given moment, or whether one has made a vow involving abstinence from explicit sexual activity. I have known priests, observant celibates, with very healthy attitudes toward sexuality. It’s regrettable that in many Christian circles the issue of sexuality, whether that of Jesus’s or our own, is met with either vulgar jokes or silence.
If such an experiment as Cosimo Cavallaro’s nude, chocolate Jesus might help us in even a very small way, as I think it might, confront some of these issues with a little humor and insight, then I’m in favor of its display. But then I’m in favor of all manner of artistic experiments. Often enough it’s the free play with the materials of one’s art–whether these materials happen to be words, sounds, paint, wood, stone, chocolate, or something else–that yields something compelling and new, something that will call forth new experiences, insights, and languages of commentary. To tolerate such free play, a culture must also have a high tolerance for what is ephemeral, for most of the artistic experiments of any age fall away–and yet this often ephemeral culture also forms much of the matrix out of which more lasting work grows. For the health of our culture, I hope these experiments continue.