Being a scientist, I find the views expressed in SOF appear more congruent with a definition based on the word "real" while those of a theocracy appear more comfortably associated with "non-real". This leads me to suggest a modification of the term "non-realist" to become "newrealist"; a reflection of forward thinking coupled with a move away from dogma. This also has the advantage of removing the negative associations that the prefix non-[realist] may create when the definition isn't fully appreciated.
DR ROB WALKER 38 Trinity Court, Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8JZ SOF 48 / July 2001 22 by Seafarer IPostscripts DIVINE COMEDY Sidney Carter used to sing, in fashionable disenchantment:
I was keen on culture once, Bach and Botticelli.
Saw Potemkin forty times - Now I watch the telly...
Well, I was glad to escape the telly to sample the Royal Academy's marvellous exhibition, "Botticelli's Dante: The Drawings for The Divine Comedy", which brought together all 92 surviving sets of drawings by which the master-painter not only illustrated but also re-imagined the epic work of the master-poet. What an exhibition!
What an imagination! A divine comedy indeed!
I always wondered why Dante called his dramatically reinvented version of the Christian story a "comedy", vaguely supposing it had something to do with the descriptions of Hell's devils doing black-comically unspeakable things to unrepentant sinners - which presumably terrified the fourteenth century unfaithful but are more likely to make us giggle. Wrong. In Dante's day, I learn, a comedy was a story which began tragically and ended happily (while a tragedy was one which began happily and ended in grief). Dante's poem was a comedy because it began with Hell, progressed to Purgatory and ended with the blissful ascent of Dante and his beloved Beatrice to the throne of God in Heaven - the happy ending to end all happy endings.
I emphasise the re-telling and re-imagining of the Christian story, because one is struck by how very different is this fourteenth-century Italian version from the firstcentury version of the New Testament, let alone any version we may explore and promote today. The Big Themes need constant retelling, reimagining, remaking.
Myths and stories never stand still. When they do, they die.
But it's the ineffably magical artistry of Botticelli which continues to haunt the imagination long after you've left the exhibition (which closed, I'm afraid, on June 10). Was there ever so exquisite a representation of enlightenment as the delicate, brown-ink drawing of Dante and Beatrice ascending to the heaven of fire? I doubt it.
Dante: what a comedian Too good for the loo!
Stanley Spencer exhibition. (This one Stanley Spencer ended on June 24. You'll have to wait till SOF goes monthly before you get really up-to-date reflections!). We're told that Spencer's paintings were so poorly regarded in the sixties that the Tate hung them on the stairs to the loo.
Now the same works are recognised as masterpieces, their maker as one of the most original and visionary painters of his generation, and this exhibition only confirmed that judgement. ("Love, fear, war, religion, beauty, pain, ecstasy," said the posters - "Just another day for Stanley Spencer").
Spencer grew up in the Berkshire village of Cookham, where his parents, perhaps hedging their bets, were active in both Anglican church and Methodist chapel. For the young Stanley, we are told, "Cookham was a kind of Eden in which every detail of life was enfolded with Christian meaning". An early picture of John Donne arriving in Heaven shows the poet crossing Cookham's Widbrook Common. A small Resurrection, Cookham of 1921 depicts the resurrection as happening in this corner of England's green and pleasant land, much as Blake had imagined the Lamb of God "on England's pleasant pastures seen".
But it is the much larger 20-foot-long work on the same theme, with the same title, painted four or five years later, which brought him the fame of infamy, and which dominated this exhibition. Here the graves in Cookham churchyard are opened, and Spencer's friends and neighbours are clambering out to meet up again and start a new, liberated life. That the liberation is largely sexual is made plain by the prominence given to Hilda Carline, Spencer's first love, who appears several times in the painting. Religious passion and carnal passion are united here. And there is no hint of any Judgement.
Spencer married Hilda, but they divorced in 1937, and a week later Spencer married Patricia Preece, a lesbian with whom he had a one-way, unconsummated relationship.
Preece soon kicked him out of their home, and Hilda came back into his life. Long after she died in 1950, Spencer continued writing her love letters. Another resurrection.
A revelation to me, though, was his later work, particularly a group of paintings recording the building of tramp-steamers on the Clyde. Somehow he manages to infuse an ordinary heap of rusty scrap iron with an On, then, to Tate Britain, and the SOF 48 / July 2001 Hugh Whitmore Conservative supporters, Yorkshire, England extraordinary grandeur. He had done the same for Preece's enormous sagging breasts in Nude Portrait of Patricia Preece, 1935. Spencer, like Blake again, saw heaven in a wild flower, the miraculous in the mundane. He had long ceased to be a church-goer, but resurrection, incarnation and redemption never lost their meanings for him. An atheist maybe, but always a believer.
As others see us...1 Church Times, June 1: "The Sea of Faith movement [follows] the thought of the now retired Cambridge philosopher of religion Don Cupitt. Its main mark has been a radical reinterpretation of Christianity, religion, philosophy and ethics in non-realist terms... This goes with a strong linguistic and aesthetic emphasis, and large-scale rejections of alternative positions.The Sea of Faith has conferences and sustains a journal, though in universities it has been received more as a stimulating set of questions than as a fruitful way of doing theology. It might be seen as the ultimate theological reaction to the mid-20th century 'founding trauma' of aggressive positivism and analytical philosophy. They reject the challenge to link sense and reference in theology in anything like a realist way, and they revel in a post-modern aesthetic freedom. Their main impact is as a small prophetic movement, which tries to reimagine what it means to be Christian in line with Jesus's 'kingdom theology'." Well at least the CT no longer sees us as a bizarre coven of godless vicars.
How others see us...2 The Network Secretary recently received a letter from Channel 4 inviting anyone in the Network who was interested in Rasputin to get in touch for a TV documentary...
Jacobian Drama A well-known philosopher-theologian who shall be nameless, lest we be accused of exalting him to the status of guru, has argued in three brilliantly original books that some of the most deeply-ingrained theological concepts have survived by vacating the corpse of churchianity and taking on new life within our secular society's everyday language and speech. Others have argued as convincingly that it is in the arts that religious concepts are enjoying a new... er... resurrection.
Hugh Whitemore's West End play God Only Knows, starring Derek Jacobi, is the latest piece of theatre to put God and religion centre-frame. A couple of couples are sharing a holiday villa when a stranger lands on them after accidentally running his car off the road. He claims to be on the run from a Vatican hit squad. He happens to have happened on a first-century document which throws doubt on the existence of Jesus and the whole Jesus story, and the Vatican, he says, is out to silence him and suppress the truth in the name of Truth.
Our hapless couples don't believe a word of it. They are not religious, but they can't countenance for a moment that their civilisation is based on an historical lie, that the Jesus story is just a story, that there's no God keeping the world to rights.
What price love, compassion, right and wrong (all conspicuously absent from their own lives) if we are on our own, up the human creek without a divine paddle?
The play has some entertaining moments, but its weakness is the playwright's assumption that we too will find the stranger's claims implausible. And you don't have to be a paid-up member of SoF to line up with the fugitive against his theologically challenged hosts. But God Only Knows asks some good questions before its surprise ending - which I won't reveal (except to say that this time there's no sign of a resurrection).