Here’s my favorite moment from the first chapter. Auerbach makes his point with a lot of flair:

So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them — Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles — appear to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast! — between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord’s jealousy, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen to be examples.

Isn’t the little detail about Abishag the Shunnamite classic?

Today, whenever somebody tries to risk something politically, you immediately get, “Oh, didn’t you learn the lesson from history, this will end up in Holocaust.” This is the eternal topic of modern liberal-conservative skeptics, that the lesson of the twentieth century is that every radical attempt at social change ends up in mass murder. Their idea is a return to pragmatism, “Let’s strictly distinguish politics from ethics, politics should be limited, pragmatic, only ethics can be absolute.” What I aim at in my rethinking of all of these problems is precisely not to draw this conclusion.

Numerous parallels meet the attentive eye between the incarnation many of us have recently celebrated and the incarnation(s) throughout Avatar. The obvious, Douthat-contradicting moment involves Jake Sully’s final transformation from a human possessing a Na’vi to a single-natured Na’vi — as Kotsko points out. But a more orthodox moment of incarnation seems to be when Neytiri cradles the nearly-dead human body of Jake. This moment involves no supercession, as Jake’s eventual transformation does, but presents the full paradox and poignance of incarnated love: a moment clearly impossible, where the camera even emphasizes the disparity between the physical types of the human and the Na’vi, emphasizes the bridgelessness of their duality, which nonetheless constitutes and crystalizes both Jake (in the gaze of Neytiri) and Neytiri (when Jake reaches his small human hand up to touch her immense blue cheek) as lovers in the “truest” sense. The tension of this incarnation is too strong to maintain, however, as the eventual supercessionist resolution of it demonstrates.

What is intriguing about this moment, beyond the parallel already mentioned, is the altered details which stand out especially in light of the allusions the proximity of Christmas suggests. It’s hard not to see Neytiri as a sort of Mary holding a sort of Jesus, an iteration of that Levinasian moment of constitution by the mother’s face which has fascinated religious painters so much that one of their commonest subjects is the Madonna in just this pose. But the context of Jake’s near-death give the scene a touch of allusion to the Pieta as well. Yet the implied relation of power to impotence which Christmas paintings suggest does not hold true in the film’s allusion. Rather than the weaker (the creature, Mary) cradling the by nature all-powerful (the Creator, the divine Word), we are presented with the more powerful and by nature superior (Neytiri the Na’vi) cradling the weaker (Jake Sully). The theological spur this difference suggests is to ask the following: is this simply a failure of analogy or is there a sense, in the Christmas moment, in which Mary’s cradling of Jesus is God’s cradling of Mary? The waters this question gets one into are deep — issues of the reciprocity of incarnation, of the degree to which God made himself at-risk in being born a man.

The apparent supercessionism of Jake’s final transformation could be interpreted against the orthodoxy of the allusion, but the possibility James Cameron has held out that the film will be the first of a trilogy leaves hope that Jake’s humanity has not disappeared as entirely as his newly acquired Na’vinity would seem to suggest. Similarly, in terms of orthodoxy, the way that Jake takes on the messianic myth of Toruk-tamer — but takes it on not merely as a “trick,” because the trick itself is the reality — reminds me of the way Jesus inhabited the messianic myths of Israel.

All in all, I found Avatar encouraging and even profound from a certain perspective (of which a sampling above) — far, far from added evidence in the case against contemporary culture which conservative critics like Douthat are always so hot to build.

I found the interesting blog Voyou Desoeuvre, which certainly has a striking design—at first repulsive, and then fascinating. Then I found the blog’s colophon. What I love about this little design explanation are the variety of reasons enumerated. Aesthetic: “the way in which it combines cartoonish, pin-up art with a grid layout and geometric sans-serif font;” historical-political: “this seems to me to represent beautifully the peculiar modernism of the 1950s, a modernism of the banal, in which what had been a heroic futurism in the 1930s became commonplace;” concretely allusive: “the inspiration for the current design of the site comes from 1950s commercial art, particularly the collection of adverts at Plan59, and even more specifically a 1954 advert for Jantzen swimsuits by Pete Hawley.”

For the time being, Voyou Desoeuvre takes the prize for most interestingly intentional blog-design. (Even if I personally could never live with that design on my own blog.)

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle.

While I don’t think aesthetically engaging a piece of literature, art, or music necessarily only involves these spinal shivers, certainly they constitute one of aesthetic engagement’s finest moments. Revulsion is also a valuable aesthetic reaction, and analysis or synthesis are valuable aesthetic engagements, but one of the best ways to talk about art of any kind is to share shiver-moments.

Example:

This evening I spent a few hours with my friend Dan, chatting of theology and philosophy, eating Clementines, and listening to his record-player. The first disc he put on the record player was by Leonard Cohen. We paused at one point, listening to the scratchy-record sound of Cohen’s allusive lyrics and lovely voice—and he performed one of those chromatic modulations that mark his unique melodic style.

“Whoa,” I said, “that modulation gave me shivers.”

“Yeah,” said Dan, “some of his lyrics give me shivers…”

Suddenly what I believe is an accurate characterization of Cohen’s over-all aesthetic sprung to my mind: the unexpected chromaticism of his melodies, lyrical, musical, dialectical. The fittingness of some of those (what I can only call) ironic melodies for his ironic allusivity became more apparent. And the synthesized characterization that had resulted from comparing shivers led into a discussion of the fittingness and meaning of the fact that Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has been used both (mistakenly) as a hymn in some churches and also as the altogether appropriate background music for the ironic and anti-heroic sex scene in Watchmen.

The point I am trying to make is this: that Nabokov made a good point. We can certainly do worse, aesthetically, than to follow the shiver of our spines.

Trucking along in his typically hagiographic style, Thomas asserts that “the humility of the incarnation and the love of the passion so occupied” Francis’s memory that “he scarcely wished to think of anything else. Hence what he did in the third year before the day of his glorious death, in the town called Greccio, on the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ, should be reverently remembered.”

What Francis did that year, it turns out, was to organize the first nativity scene. After years of plastic stable scenes, which sadly litter the landscape of my memory, it is almost breathtaking to read Thomas’s description of the event. Clearly this is one part of the biography that he witnessed in person. He writes:

With glad hearts, the men and women of that place prepared, according to their means, candles and torches to light up that night which has illuminated all the days and years with its glittering star. Finally the holy man of God arrived and, finding everything prepared, saw it and rejoiced.

Then Thomas switches into present tense—I believe it’s the only place in the biography he does so—which is why I believe that he witnessed this event himself, and offers the following marvelous description of the first nativity scene:

The manger is ready, hay is brought, the ox and ass are led in. Simplicity is honored there, poverty is exalted, humility is commended and a new Bethlehem, as it were, is made from Greccio. Night is illuminated like the day, delighting men and beasts. The people come and joyfully celebrate the new mystery. The forest resounds with voices and the rocks respond to their rejoicing. The brothers sing, discharging their debt of praise to the Lord, and the whole night echoes with jubilation.

That’s what I want to be able to say of my Christmas celebrations in future: “simplicity is honored there, poverty is exalted, humility is commended and a new Bethlehem, as it were, is made.”

It must [...] be pointed out that in origin the term “conservative” has nothing to do with reaction. When it became a slogan for opposition to the French Revolution it could not be synonymous with ossification since it championed the right of living history over against an artificial state constructed abstractly and proclaimed to be correct. It naturally seeks to preserve or reclaim what has come into being historically, not because it is subservient to the law of sloth, but because what has come into being has proved itself. This cannot be said unless the criteria of reason and conscience are claimed and the judgment thus displays maturity and commitment. (The Evangelical Faith, v.1. p. 36)