Goodie Bag post for Sept. 7: a new quiz - "Carolingian or what?"
Below the fold: three key medieval thinkers to base your personal reality on.
Sanity and the Real; why am I doing this?
I continue to be encouraged - and not a little humbled - by the constant stream of new people signing up to the Project. I have loved all these marvellous, ancient and beautiful things for most of my life, and I’m only just now sort of realising how much knowing and having them in my mental landscape has shaped my whole worldview. When I was a kid I used to wonder all the time why I didn’t really fit in. To be interested in the meaning of existence since early childhood… who even really knows where that comes from. But it was honestly a bit isolating. Other kids in school never thought about the stuff that occupied me, and thought I was a weirdo, and I guess they were right, really.
I found plenty of other questioning weirdos through high school and my early adulthood, but as soon as I started focusing on the Christian answers, I found myself isolated once again. I was going somewhere my intelligent and seeking friends would not follow. It was really only with the advent of the internet that I started learning how many more people are undergoing the same experiences, conflicts and struggles.
But as I’ve gone along, I’ve also discovered that these Big Questions about the meaning and purpose of life are being answered by our current culture catastrophically wrongly. Not only are people not being given good answers, the answers they’re getting - “create your own reality” in the nihilistic cult of meaninglessness - are actively doing harm. A lot of harm. I could see, even before my reversion to the Faith in my late 20s and early 30s, how Modernist Nihilism was destroying everything.
The more Modernia screeched at me that meaning was meaningless, the more I instinctively turned back to the ancient philosophical and spiritual sources. It just seemed obvious that we didn’t used to have these problems, we didn’t have a “suicide rate,” a “divorce rate” … and still less an “abortion rate”. We didn’t have people diving into drugs or distractions to get away from the horrific void at the heart of the culture. All these evil spiritual illnesses seemed unique to our times.
So it just seemed logical to look back to find out what the differences were. And the more I did that, the more I came to understand just how drastically wrong we’d gone. But a funny thing started happening; the interior harms I’d experienced started being healed the more I understood the discrepancy between the modern way of thinking and the Old Way. That process isn’t finished yet, but the difference between me at 58 and me at a desperately sad and hopeless 31 is like two different people.
This is at the core of what I’m doing, and hoping to give to other people. We have a grave malaise in our time that I think is analogous to a severe vitamin deficiency; it causes a host of symptoms, often very grave, that seem unrelated and baffling until the one thread that connects them all is discovered. We need the Real in our lives and minds, a fundamental orientation toward Reality, and a conscious, daily, deliberate rejection of the fundamental anti-reality of the modern, post-real world.
I hope you’ll consider taking out a paid subscription.
I consider the people who have taken out paid subscriptions to be something akin to or analogous to a community, or maybe a network. They are people who have committed in a small way to the value of the larger project, and who want to participate in what we’re trying to do here. I suppose it can be summed up as an effort to present better thoughts, better ways of looking at the world and at others and at God.
It’s why, though I’m mostly on my own,1 I often refer to the work with plurals; “we”. I really no longer think of it as merely my own work, but as a kind of cache of treasure, a kind of spiritual and cultural fund, I’m trying to build up to share with others, so they can pass it on to still more people, to leave something that will help after I’ve moved on.
In today’s post, in the unpaid section we’ve got another the fun quiz, some new-to-me music of incredible ethereal beauty from the 9th century, that I’m listening to as I type, and a podcast from the great Greek iconographer, George Kordis, talking about the need for sacred art in a heavily secularised society.
Below the fold, we’ll look at three key Christian thinkers of the early centuries, who shaped medieval Christendom’s thought, worldview, framework of reality… whatever you want to call it. I recommend them here as a kind of guide to philosophical self-therapy, a sort of instruction manual in how to throw off the nihilistic disease of Modernia.
The names Boethius, Ambrose and Anselm might make us flinch away a little. These ancient Old White Guys whose times and thinking are so remote from our own. But a very little investigation is reassuring, not only that they are quite readable and easy to understand, (in translation) but that they address and provide answers for our very modern problems. They did not write for academics in their own time, but for believers struggling to get through day to day and finish the course.
I find it comforting to see evidence that people don’t change very much; their ideas and struggles and fears and sins were the same as ours, and so the solutions that were good for them will be good for us.
Let’s have another quiz! - Is it Carolingian, or what?
Now, don’t freak out… You’ll do great! You guys always do. We’ve talked about Carolingian art in six separate posts, and I think the general look of that kind of work is getting more familiar, perhaps a little more recognisable. Anyway, I’m confident that you’ll be able to spot these.
Bonus round:
This is the little church of Santa Pudenziana in the countryside near my home in Narni. It is a little jewel of Romanesque architecture - with some parts dating even further back - that has many very ancient sacred architectural features. Can we name one important one?
All right, enough fooling around…
Kassia’s sacred hymns and a podcast from iconographer George Kordis
I have two online resources that I hope will be more of a balm to the heart, than strictly food for the intellect.
If you like Gregorian Chant and the music of Hildegard of Bingen, but aren’t so sure about Orthodox and Byzantine music, I’ve found something that can help bridge the two. This is a recording of the songs and hymns of a woman of early 9th century Byzantium, named Kassia or St. Kassiani, a Greek-Byzantine abbess and composer.
The Orthodox Wiki website says, “Saint Kassiani was a Byzantine abbess, poet, composer, and hymnographer. She is commemorated by the church on September 7. She is especially known as the composer of the Hymn of Kassiani.”
Kassiani is one of the first composers whose scores are both extant and able to be interpreted by modern scholars and musicians. Approximately fifty of her hymns are extant and twenty-three are included in the Orthodox Church liturgical books. The exact number is difficult to assess, as many hymns are ascribed to different authors in different manuscripts and are often identified as anonymous.
If you are looking for a deeper dive into the meaning of icons and the use of images in Christian worship, there are few more worth listening to than the great Greek iconographer, George Kordis.
I had a heads-up some months ago that this was going to be released to the public, but this is the first time I’ve had a chance to post it.
Dr. Kordis talks in this podcast from the Institute of Sacred Arts at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York about the place of Christian sacred art in a secular world.
Site updates
Again, we’re having lots of new people signing up. Hi everyone!
When I started this project, I started a hand written notebook about all the things I wanted to do, and it took up about half the book. Just the details of the list of things we should cover in our two articles per week - the entire period of Christian sacred art, and all the thought and history that goes with it, from the 4th century to the 15th - was enough to occupy me full time for years. There’s really no bottom to that well. Then there were the other ideas: mini-courses and home school curriculums, podcasts, e-books, downloadable PDF images and extras for paid subscribers…
Certainly easily enough to occupy a team of writers and researchers I can’t afford to hire... Not yet anyway.
September is filling up…
With the summer temperatures finally easing off, my own energy levels are up a bit, and I will be getting back to some projects that were suspended for a while, including the first mini-course, a deep, deep dive into the fabulous Wilton Diptych, that masterpiece of the International Gothic and timeless symbol of Englishness.
We’ll resume our series sorting out the pantheon of Gothic styles, north and south.
And I’ve found a professional e-book editor so I can finish the last edit of the text of our book on “Where did all the monasteries go?” I’ve decided to make it available in full for free to all paid subscribers, and for sale as a downloadable pdf on my shop.
The Sacred Images Project is a reader-supported publication where we talk about Christian life, thought, history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of sacred art. It’s my full time job, but it’s still not bringing a full time income, so I can’t yet provide all the things I want to and am planning for. You can subscribe for free to get one and a half posts a week.
For $9/month you also get the second half of the weekly Friday Goodie Bag post, plus a weekly paywalled in-depth article on this great sacred patrimony, plus our Benedictine Book Club in the Substack Chat. There are also occasional extras like downloadable exclusive high resolution printable images, ebooks, mini-courses, videos and eventually podcasts.
If you would prefer to set up a recurring donation in an amount of your choice, or make a one-off contribution, you can do that at my studio blog.
This helps me a lot because the patronages through the studio blog are not subject to the 10% Substack fee. This is the site where I post photos of my own work as it develops. I have a shop there where some of my drawings and paintings are available for sale as prints, as well as some other items.
Please enjoy a browse around.
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