The Fantastic Beauty of Ugliness

The thing about Paradiso is that perspective matters. Sts. Dominic and Francis have different emphasis in their spiritual life and both are needed. In an important way the only reconciliation between the intellectual life of the Dominicans and the transcendent life of the Franciscans is that they are both part of the kingdom of God. Every human is created in some way to contribute to the tapestry of God's plan. So, let's try to unpack this by analogy. 

Picasso is the master of Perspective, introducing cubism and going beyond this late into his career like TÊTE DE FEMME below from 1958. 

The Crisis of Modernity for Art

It isn't obvious what it is about Picasso's work that is so appealing. That doesn't stop people from explaining it. In my own understanding, the artist, was among the best realist painters from the end of the 19th century (following his father, a portraiture artist). At the point where photography threatened the place of portraiture as an art form, there wasn't much to aspire to within this category of painting. To gain perfection in realistic representation isn't a goal when the camera can produce this same effect with little effort. So, in this sense the camera with all of its technological sophistication is the perfect embodiment of modernism. It is the presentation of reality, in some sense, just the way it is. It is a colder version of reality like the one you get from the scientific perspective. It lacks the messiness and the ascendence of humanity. What we are told when the shutter on the camera flickers is that this was the reality of that exact moment in time from that one perspective. Add up all the perspectives and you have truth. Done. Simple. 

Dante's context and the Rise of Modernity 

Dante is not a post-modern. He is a pre-modern. He is among the first major figures to struggle with modernity. When G. K. Chesterton writes his brief and assessable biographies of Sts. Francis and Thomas he uses these two figures to illustrate the problem of modernity. The 13th century was an important time in the history of The West because in some sense the introduction of eastern mysticism and the reintroduction of Greek thought through the embrace of Muslim scholarship (In the court of Frederick II) elevated a world that was previously content to bathe in the Latin consensus of the Church. 

This was not the first time that the Latin world had struggled with its philosophical boundaries, Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy in AD 524 which is an important landmark in expanding the boundaries of thought to unify the church with the wider intellectual tradition of The West. Unifying the Christian view in this broader context clarified Christianity in ways that made clear the important connections between dogma and philosophy, but not without risk. The so-called dark ages are a time where Christianity had closed in on itself in order to recover from the persecution that it had faced in the past. Like any school of thought that wins an intellectual battle the closing of ranks eventually resulted in rather weakened institutions designed to fight an enemy that was no longer a real rival. To engage alternative world views was to become more robust as an intellectual tradition and added to the faith.

With this expansion, however, the act of reconciling seemingly contradictory perspectives would require extraordinary insights. The challenges of eastern mysticism had to be met by a person that was committed to living like Jesus as a poor friar in order to answer the challenge to Christianity's materialism. The scholarship of the Muslim Caliphates could only be integrated by someone whose intellectual rigor was second-to-none. The Franciscans and the Dominicans reacted to the same cultural earthquakes and become midwives to a rising modernity that would take hundreds more years to be born. 

The legacy of the 12th and 13th centuries was a church with greater intellectual merit, less reliant on material displays alone, and in many ways more contested as a political unity. Total political fracture would have to wait until the 16th century, but the Albigensian heresy and 14th century Papal exile to Avignon are evidence enough of faction.    

 The Post-modern Artist 

Picasso was a post-modern artist. His work comes at modernity from the other side. For him what was missing in the photograph was the art of perspective. I can only imagine how his mind gravitated toward the realization that the artist's true calling was to put perspective on paper. His art transcended the limitations of a single perspective. This is not totally unlike the saintly icons of the eastern orthodox church whose rendering reminds us of something standing outside of time and place. Picasso represents multiple views of the same thing at once. In any one moment multiple perspectives could induce a threatening sence of corruption. If we saw someone this way, we would be horrified, but in a way Picasso is celebrating something more dynamic than one perspective can capture. 

I think Picasso was different than Dante, though, since Dante, who longed for his home of Florence while in exile, was constantly aware of how much place and perspective roots you as a person. I would call this commitment to place pre-modern because it anchors something in tradition, duty, and loyalty that isn't explicitly referenced in modernity and is simply not there in the post-modern vision.  Dante's beatific vision is so uniquely rooted in his description of Beatrice that it is often confused with a baser type of obsession. We have a hard time recreating Dante's view of Beatrice as a redemptive fulfillment of desire. 

Picasso gave the world distorted perspectives. His desire gives bawdy and seductive presentations of women. In a way he is a pornographer and a womanizer. He must be more. The salience of his vision of perspective surely contributes something, but we all know that his works are not necessarily for children's eyes (at least in most contexts).  Dante gave the world descriptions of saints and demons in their clearest forms and challenged us to see how our own souls correspond to these particular representations. Dante helps us root in the particular, while Picasso asks us to transcend the particular. Dante is parochial while Picasso is cosmopolitan. 

What we like about Picasso, I think, is that we see ourselves in is work. We see our mixed up, confused, and ugly post-modern constructed selves. We are after all the result of a buffet of culture and our lives are a choose-your-own-adventure novel. Dante wants us to be rooted, grounded, consistent, loving. He wants us to have hope and to work hard at the process of purgation during this life as an aid into reaching ultimate perfection. It is very hard to see one's self in the perfection that Dante describes. It is so much easier to see ourselves in Picasso's work. 

Picasso gives us multiple perspectives all at once. Picasso depicts in one 2-dimensional canvas the absurdity that is human life. We try so hard to simultaneously be all things to all people.  To the extent that we are aware of what other people want us to be, we try to be that for them. Picasso confronts us with what we look like in this absurd game of hypocrisy. We see ourselves in his work in a way that we can't see ourselves in the perfection of a photograph. The representation of our real selves the way God made us seems like background noise to the dance of trying to be what we think others want us to be. 

Real Romanticism 

In an artistic jargon romanticism is when we inject human psychology and subjectivity into art. We see this in the expression of scenes and images of people who are supposed to be ideal types. The artist gives us what we want to see, but not reality. The beauty of painting in the romantic style is that we get what flatters us. A great artist will paint a portrait that is simultaneously false and believable to the person who is flattered by the romanic version of reality. Art, in this pejorative sense, is the seduction of the senses to a false reality. If my deepest fear is that my nose is too big, the artist normalizes the representation of that feature and feeds my ego. I never learn to appreciate my own features, but learn to hope others are distracted from them.

Picasso, like Dante, pushes back on this type of flattery. Forcing us out of our comfort with conflicting perspectives we have a new standard for beauty. A profile view is combined with a head shot, both might have elements of beauty, but the whole is absurd. The magic of the artist's approach is that it appeals pre-cognitively to us. Picasso, by representing our hypocrisy in his art could help us see ourselves as the deeply flawed individuals that we are. Perhaps this is the secret of his near-universal appeal. 

Dante, unlike Picasso, pushes us to take who we are and to appreciate the ultimate artist, the creator, who made us to be part of his perfect artistic vision. We need to inhabit a perspective to understand it. It is becoming more like what God created us to be that is perfection. A husband only understands what it means to be a husband through faithful devotion to his wife (even the kind Hosea had). In that sense perspective is rooted. Dante accepted his fate as an exile and turned it into poetry. To understand Paradiso, we have to accept that the moon is light and less light, that the angle of the sun changes, that some people see truth more clearly than they see love and humility. Where there is excess in some personalities there are others with a corresponding excess in what they lack. Relationships make up for deficiency in what we lack through complementary parts of God's creation. Dante pushes us toward a type of perfection that is not hypocritical, but is instead revealing. 

What to Do with Perspective

All of this leaves me grasping with the idea of perspective. Do I use the knowledge that I am created different to justify my shortcomings? What is universal in the human experience that defies this tendency to ex-post rationalize all my sin? I have reason, but it is unclear to me how to use it well without suffering form some sort of trap. The better I am at reason, the better I am at rationalizing my own vanity. This is where there is some sort of communion. I have to join my understanding of reality to others in order to find those points where my own heroic assumptions are met by others who create tension in the system. Heaven is a place of balance just as much as it is a place of unity and perfection. Dante's vision of unity is more like a heterogeneous soup with lots of unlike chunks, not like a puree that is perfectly homogenous.  

It is delightful to think of heaven as a hodge-podge of different personalities that are vying with each other to one unique end, the glory of God. In this world our differences create division. In the next world, as Dante has it, our differences only bring unity and the contrast helps to illuminate what is good in the other parts. We are only ugly alone. When we join in a community we are beautiful as parts of a bigger whole. What a great romantic vision. It is fantastic.