coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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2hr ago
Everything in traditional Western art served a Point, a Good, which promoted individual and collective health (or wellbeing). They portrayed the horrors of the crucifixion because this is necessary for your ultimate felicity and beatitude. Art featuring the aversive stimuli of the Cross was made and consumed exclusively by people who understood the image within a cohesive and strict narrative involving a combination of dogmas:
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that the pains and horrors shown are the consequence of your own bad behavior (sin), which led to this event;
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that Jesus, innocent and blameless, suffered and died in order to redeem you from these evils and their consequence, out of an interest in your wellbeing and desire to see you in paradise
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that Jesus, as an example for the whole human race, endured all injury and injustice with righteousness, obedience, faith, virtue, compassion, and obtained the ultimate reward in doing so
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that you are in a lifelong and eternal bond with Jesus, and thus have a perfect moral influence exerted upon you continually
The off-putting and shocking nature of it is instrumental according to a complicated list of givens. There would be no point in expressing it otherwise. And importantly, an angel would never be depicted as so weak, miserable, and ugly. Either they are awe-inspiring and powerful, or they are innocent and beautiful. That’s also part of the cultural package of traditional western art.
Nietzsche's critique is something like this, that the crucifix is ugly and the solemn hymns about blood and so one are also unworthy, and a good strong civilization with an inner vitality should only show strong glorious victories
Nietzsche never grasped Christianity. I agree with his critique of a hypothetical strawman Christianity believed by a hypothetical race of strawpeople.
You can't get around the fact that to defend the moral authority of the pictures you linked as positive examples, you have to defend the actions of the Catholic Church
Actually, I have to defend the lifestyle of a community of young devout Catholics over the lifestyle of a commune of young art students, because both are in communion with their respective traditions. Do you have any doubt which one would have behaviors more conducive to wellbeing? I don’t think I would be able to find a clearer divide between people who are halfways to inner hell and people who are at least a little bit close to human felicity.
coffee_enjoyer
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3hr ago
The most dangerous evil is the one that can successfully trick you! In real life it looks like someone politely asking you to construct value and goodness with yourself as sole authority, gently nudging your intuitions in the wrong direction and coaxing you with enticing status gains.
coffee_enjoyer
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3hr ago
If you show a random group of teenage students that “Novus Angelus”, how could it possibly be good for them? I don’t see any rational path toward an argument that this would better their life or make them happy. The figure has an instinctively ugly face and form, and it’s evidently intended to humiliate the angels by depicting them as such. So it is the depiction of something normally glorious as pathetic. Okay. We can rationally see how it would make them worse: they are seeing an ugly and pathetic humanoid-like figure; they are being told it is “art”, which will confuse them; they are desacralizing something culturally important. If you wanted to increase unhappiness among humanity, you would show them this nonsense and say it is art, and they will infer, “hey, this is very important to look at”, so you’re biasing them to internalize filth, inhumanity, even evilness. Why?
Compare that antisocial filth to Tiepolo’s Annunciation. Even having almost no cultural understanding, you can see the good of the work. A student would see: a young woman reading is visited by an angel who points her to something mysterious and glorious above. If you show this to 100 students, all 100 of them would be benefitted. They would internalize a sense of something better, a sense of wonder and mystery, maybe a sense of the importance of reading. Or show a boy Salvatore Nobili’s Sant'Antonio in Campo Marzio and his life could change forever — he would be more courageous, more moral, more humble.
The purpose of art is not to make people very opinionated about art or to try to trick them like an intellectual gypsy. The point is to greaten us. We evolved the ability to make art to display our health and signal our competence. We evolved the ability to appreciate that art because we appreciate health. We evolved the ability to think with complexity because it sustained our common health and civic health over generations. The art instinct would have never developed in humanity if we had the degeneracy of the art snob. The art snob does not understand the point of anything, they are sick and their soul is cut off from the Realm of the Living.
He failed to grasp that the Cross is a superior path to Selbst-Überwindung (self-overcoming) than what he describes, in that it more accurately models the phenomenological experience of struggle and suffering in pursuit of a superhuman aim. Nietzsche hazardly circumambulates around an idol of someone who overcomes his social values to achieve a greater value, while missing that this has been painted better within the Christian story. Christ withstands His culture’s priests and academics (scribes), empire, false accusations, and so on to obtain Glory. This is modeled by the believer who “carries his cross”, denies himself, loses his life to find it. What is the Zarathustra model? To yap in self-pity about how pity is bad. His whole heroic description is woefully cloudy and nonsensical.
The thing is that the Cross Model already proved itself successful for the things Nietzsche claims to love: glory, creativity, greatness, nobility, experimentation, science. The Cross model can produce a JS Bach, who explored the limits of mathematical-music science while keeping beauty in mind, while his culture already moved on to different musical fashions (the fugue was not in vogue). He sired 20 children. He wasn’t afraid of getting into a knife fight or harshly rebuking his students. He synthesized a new style. This is the musical ubermensch! His music expresses glory better than anyone before or after him.
Yet Bach, the ubermensch of note, did this while writing “Jesus, help” at the start of every work, and ending with “To God alone the Glory”. This is because He internalized a better social model. The suffering of Bach’s mind at work was a crown of thorns, not a Zarathustrian self-obsession. His doubts were the leers of the crowd. His obstacles were the heavy beam of the Cross. His work, a taste of the heavenly banquet. It’s all there, Nietzsche missed it and ruined a generation of men. To this day, not a single good thing has ever come from Nietzsche or Nietzscheans. And even the demise and humiliation of Germany in world history was influenced by the social model of Nietzsche! (While, ironically, the “slave morality” Mennonites will continue hymning in Low German until they become half of North America). It is not Zarathustra who successfully “sweetens the dregs and the bitter shame of suffering”.
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