The Eutychus Perch by Hurricane at Hypocrisy.com

One old saw that I wish people would once and for all recognize for what it is and laugh to scorn is the one about how the church is invalid and can be safely ignored because it has hypocrites in it.  Big discovery!  Those who use this excuse have obviously never read their New Testaments.  Otherwise they would have learned who it was who got Jesus condemned, namely the man reputed to be God’s maximum representative on earth.  Nothing new under the sun, says the writer of Ecclesiastes.

Oh, yes; and then there were the people in the courtyard who overcame Pilate’s initially correct verdict of innocence and forced him to violate Roman law by reversing his decision.  They had tried just about everything when one of them happened to hit Pilate’s hot button:  “He said was a king!”  Well, Pilate had already received a satisfactory answer from Jesus on that one, but since he was in big trouble with Tiberias, an emperor who was especially paranoid about treason and insurrection, he figured he’d better not let it get back to Rome that he had freed a pretender to the throne, true or not.

Then it was the turn of the rest of the mob.  Pilate realized he had one more card to play.  Since it was the Romans’ custom to release whatever prisoner the people wanted freed, he asked whether he should free their king.  Their answer is a classic of hypocrisy:  “We have no king but Caesar!”  They would have been only too glad to roast Tiberias over a slow fire, given the opportunity.

But the charge won’t die.  How many times have we seen television programs announced that are going to deal with the issue of how certain cynical power brokers in the early church managed to maneuver into the New Testament canon only the books that would serve their purposes, and to exclude those that would threaten their power?  If the early church leaders were like that, they were the dumbest people in the history of the world, because when they became bishops they made themselves stand out as prime objects for martyrdom.  Power doesn’t do one a whole lot of good when one is being torn to shreds by a hungry beast or burned at the stake.

The plain and simple fact about the formation of the New Testament canon is that from the beginning the church was virtually obsessed with admitting only books they were certain had been written by apostles or people closely associated with them.  The Gospel of Mark came into circulation early and was immediately accepted because the church knew Mark had long been in close contact with Peter.  (This is undoubtedly why Mark’s Gospel puts Peter down more than the others do; Peter wanted it known that he had failed and was repentant about it.)  In the second century a bishop produced a work that he placed Peter’s name on, clearly explaining that Peter had not written it.  Even at that, he was defrocked for his deed.

This is not exactly the work of a church deviously plotting to exclude from the canon legitimate works that were just as good and true as the 27 we have today, doing so because the rejected books had been produced by rivals for their power.

Something else that needs to be brought to light is the presupposition underlying all this stuff about rival Gospels and the like, which is that nothing supernatural was going on in those centuries—that the Christian movement was nothing more than a new religion invented out of whole cloth by a bunch of semi-literate people in a backwater province of the Roman Empire.  If so, it’s the greatest hoax ever perpetrated, and of course its first victims were its perpetrators, who were such complete fools that they willingly died for what they knew to be a lie.

The real hypocrisy here is on the part of those who refuse to take the history of the Middle East, Europe and Africa in those centuries seriously.

In the meantime, I’m never going to darken the door of a hospital again until they get rid of all the sick people in there.

Someone remarked a couple of decades ago that the United States represents the first entertainment culture since the fall of the Roman Empire.  We’re familiar with the way the Romans looted the empire in order to provide free grain for the inhabitants of the capital city, offering them plenty of increasingly bloody entertainment into the bargain.  “Bread and circus” was the catchphrase, and the assumption was that if they were fed and entertained they wouldn’t be inclined to revolt.  If the people loved to see exotic animals slaughtered, bring them in from Africa.  If they wanted to watch people die, bring in the gladiators, or have condemned criminals executed in public, sometimes by large, hungry predators.  (I understand it’s an open question whether Christians were actually killed in the Roman Coliseum as they were elsewhere in the empire.)

So how does our society compare with that one?  About a year ago, it seems the most popular of all television shows was WWF wrestling, and now I notice that “extreme cagefighting” is quite prominent, not to mention boxing.  I recently saw some footage of Mohammed Ali; he has paid the price.  Oh, yes, and remember when “reality TV” meant people on stage baiting their relatives or other acquaintances, at which point the latter would come onto the stage and start a major fistfight?

I recall taking a date to the midget auto races.  (We were nothing if not pure class on our dates).  Soon the young lady informed me that she was bored out of her skull.  Then the left front wheel of one car ran up onto the right rear wheel of another, causing the first car to flip upside down on an embankment.  My concern was that those phony headrests on the midgets were for appearance only, since they only came up to the middle of the drivers’ backs, so I was sure the driver had a broken neck or worse.  I asked my date whether she was finally happy, and she answered enthusiastically that she was.  (The driver walked away without major injuries.  I don’t recall her reaction to that.)

Decades back we were already deploring sex and violence on television, and with the advance in special effects techniques things have only worsened, at least in the case of violence.  A sure-fire formula for a successful film is non-stop violent action with some sleazy sex thrown in for good measure.  Mention a beautiful, poetic film such as Babette’s Feast or Love Comes Softly and see what kind of response you get.  People don’t even bother to say, “Bo-ring” anymore.  They just look at you as if you had brought a skunk into the room.

Sports play a major role in our entertainment culture.  Leaving aside the “enforcer” in hockey matches, whose role is to start fights to keep the customers stimulated enough to return to their hotel rooms and trash them, we still have sportscasters who praise players to the skies for engaging in “smash-mouth football,” and last weekend there was a series of short videos of college players in boxing poses, feinting blows at the camera.  A few years ago a lot of effusive praise was heaped upon a former player at a Texas school for orphans who had been especially proficient at a move taught by his coach that involved catching an opponent under his chin with one’s helmet and jerking it up sharply.  This was guaranteed to knock the opponent out cold.

And then there are the salaries.  In case anyone doesn’t think this is, after all, an entertainment culture, how about a baseball team that offers a player who goes one-for-three upwards of 27 million dollars per year on a five-year contract, and he and his agent have to think it over?  Let’s face it; we pay for what we value the most, and just this morning I heard people moaning about public school teachers who receive salaries in the mid five figures.  I mean, these sports stars’ salaries are in eight figures.  Then there are those rock stars with the mind of a fern and the morals of an alleycat who make 130 million dollars a year.

Well, what about the bread aspect?  Did you see the woman who was interviewed after Barack Obama’s victory was announced, who was overjoyed because she thought all her living expenses would now be paid for by the government?  Richard Cochrane calls that “salvation without effort.”  Yes, Virginia, there are plenty of people who would love to have a socialist government installed, but who would never, ever consider the cost of it.  After all, there must be someone else out there who will foot the bill, right?  The Roman Empire found a source of bread and circus outside Rome.

And then they paid the price when those barbarians came crashing in and spoiled the party.  We hypocrites had better take a lesson here or we may repeat it.

Something important that we don’t often hear about today is the concept of the artist as prophet.  In treating the topic, we should first go back to the meaning of the word “prophet” in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Hebrew word itself seems to mean something like “mutterer,” which isn’t all that flattering, but the way the theme is worked out is a bit more positive.  When Moses very eloquently tells Yahweh that he isn’t eloquent, Yahweh appoints Aaron to be Moses’s mouthpiece, and that situation is the model for what the prophets do for their Lord.  This is why the prophets so often declare, “Thus says the Lord.”  If they’re what John Madden calls “the real deal,” their words are not their own, but God’s, and they deliver them to the people.

It is essential to note, though, that there are two major aspects to prophecy.  Many people have deluded themselves into thinking that a prophet is just someone who foretells the future.  In fact, the criterion Yahweh gives for discerning whether a prophet is from him or is a phony is to have him predict an unlikely future event.  If it comes to pass, the prophet is real.  This appears to be the basis for one of Jonah’s gripes.  He has predicted that God will obliterate Nineveh, but he knows that if Nineveh repents God will relent.  Ergo, Jonah is viewed as a false prophet.

But just as important as the prophet’s role as foreteller is his role as forthteller, in which he tells the people what God wants them to know about the seriousness of their sin and what they should do about it in present time.

When we speak of the artist as prophet, we mean something of both roles is involved.  As forthteller, the artist shows us what is really going on in our societies, and as foreteller the same artist may give us a pretty good idea of what is coming.  One striking example is El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which on the surface appears to be the most Counter Reformation Catholic of paintings.  It shows the body of the count laid out in all its finery, and surrounding it are some of the greatest dignitaries of church and state.  On the

top, however, is the count’s soul, clad only in a loincloth, bowing before Christ as judge.  Traditional art critics have considered this one of the most important of all paintings in its ingenious and innovative melding of heaven and earth.

In recent times, however, it has been pointed out that the painting is subtly subversive of Counter Reformation Catholicism.  How?  It has two centers, two focal points.  This was the church’s issue with Copernicus and Galileo.  The earth-centered solar system was supposed to reflect the centeredness of the world in the papacy and the empire.  If the earth actually moves, and thus isn’t the center of the universe, then perhaps the papacy and the empire are in danger of being displaced as well.  See:  Luther and the Reformation.  And then there was Kepler, shouting out to the world that the planetary orbits aren’t even circular, for heaven’s sake (no pun intended).  So El Greco, deliberately or not, seems to have been giving us a symbol of a new way of being in the world, in which the observer can focus on more than one center.

In the same era, poised just before Descartes doubted everything right into a dustbin, stands Don Quixote, one foot firmly planted in the Medieval world view and the other stepping uncertainly into what would be Descartes’s new approach to epistemology.  Early on, this ambivalent Everyman lies defeated in a ditch and tells his neighbor that he knows very well who he is, but that he also knows he can be all sorts of heroes of the past.  You see, the latter part of his statement is right out of the Middle Ages, in which to reproduce the deeds of a hero is to become that hero.  The earlier part of his speech shows that he is not merely a psychotic.  The Cave of Montesinos episode, which turns out to be a dream, exposes in a thoroughly modern way the contents of his unconscious, his doubts as to whether he can really bring this thing off.  Even his idealized peasant lady love, Dulcinea, who is right out of the Platonic love tradition of the Middle Ages, shows her true vulgar colors in the dream as she asks him for a loan.

In the second part, Don Quixote stands undaunted in his hope that he can yet impose his will on objective reality.  He tells Sancho that two flocks of sheep raising a cloud of dust down below them

are two armies about to meet in a great battle he has read about.  Sancho cautions him that they are nothing but flocks of sheep, and the knight’s answer is startlingly close to what we would call postmodern; “I tell you, Sancho, and it is therefore true,” that those are the archetypal armies in question.  And he charges down the hill on Rocinante and spears some sheep, which he is then forced to pay for.  Probably no better example could be given of humankind poised between the ancient world, in which the truth or falsehood of a proposition is decided by an authority (in this case Don Quixote’s books), and the modern world, in which materialistic empiricism would reign.

In that sense, Don Quixote is both a forthteller, warning his generation that things were changing radically, like it or not, and a foreteller, illustrating the conundrums with which humankind would find itself confronted.  One critic remarked that all subsequent novels are only variations on Don Quixote.

Of course, the readers of this column will be able to add dozens of worthy examples of the artist as prophet following Don Quixote, for example Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son Maitre, in which the narrator presents an exciting scene portraying Jacques and his master with an angry mob in hot pursuit, only to inform the reader that it never happened.  That underscores the fact that fiction is only fiction, mocking the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”  Of course, philosophers and then physicists got into the act, Kant warning us of the limits of pure reason and Berkeley pointing out that we can’t prove anything or anyone exists outside our own perceptions.  Now physicists inform us that the moon is not there when no one is looking and, as one friend of mine put it, we feel like just going out and playing in the sandbox.

And, true to form, the artists are still forthtelling and foretelling.  The abstract expressionists seem to be warning us, “There is no referent to what I’m painting; its only subject is the paint in a

certain configuration on the canvas.  Sorry, but that’s all the reality you’re going to get.”  So much for art’s “holding a mirror up to nature.”  Of course, one is free to feel that such a painting is beautiful, but that’s all subjective.  It relates to our being told that the only truth is what works for an individual at any given moment.  No wonder Paul Tillich assured us, in The Courage to Be, that

the central anxiety of our times is that of emptiness and meaninglessness.

Perhaps we should pay more attention to what the true artists of our generation might be telling us.  It just might help us understand some highly important sociopolitical processes more than superficially.