Corinth, Concrete and Communism

It was one of the saddest hours in their lives. The great chimney rose up before them; and as they drew near the old village across the Water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking outflow. All along the Bywater Road every tree had been felled.

--from The Return of the King (Book 6, Chapter VIII, "The Scouring of the Shire")



I’ll start in Corinth, though I’ve never been there. Paul has, though. He started a church in that thriving center of Greek culture. Then God took him elsewhere, to plant other little pockets of redeemed humanity around the ancient world.

Some time later, he wrote them a letter, which we still have. Its tone is one of paternal anguish, occasional anger and sarcasm. In my opinion, it is one of the most useful and poetic letters in the entire Bible. According to Paul, his Corinthian church had been getting a lot of things wrong. At one extreme, they were proud that one of their church members was sleeping with his stepmother. At the other, some super-spiritual teachers were preaching that all sexual activity, even in the context of marriage, was low and wrong.

These problems, along with a few others, were the products of a popular brand of thinking--I will refer to it broadly as “Gnosticism,” though I know I’m oversimplifying--which taught that anything physical was intrinsically bad; at best, a prison for the pure spirit. Matter was so bad, in fact, that God--a remote “unmoved mover”--had not bothered to dirty his hands by creating the world at all, but had had subordinate deities mess about with physical stuff.

This sort of thinking produced two main sorts of cults--on the one hand, there were extreme ascetics who tried to curb any physical enjoyment--even lawful enjoyment--and on the other hand, there were the sensualists who reasoned that no matter how many prohibitions we made, our spirits were still imprisoned in flesh; why not, then, satisfy any demand for pleasure the senses made? “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food.”

The church at Corinth, no doubt accommodating itself to these philosophies in order to win converts, was in turn infected by them. Paul’s desperate, severe letter was written to correct these problems before they tore the church apart.

Paul was the first of many. Throughout the first several centuries of the Christianity’s existence, Gnosticism continued to crop up in the form of various heresies, many of them well-meaning. In response, the doctrine of the Incarnation was articulated more fully than it had been previously:

Since in Christ, God became man, then the Divine did not merely create the physical world, but also entered it, becoming a creature; he was smelt, heard, touched and seen. Christians now worshiped a God who not only made himself known through physical creation--but who had also become one with it, despite being distinct from it. The material world did not merely stir the senses meaninglessly; rather, nature, and even art could be used as a link to the absolute because they expressed realities more concrete than themselves. Also, because Christ had revealed himself through the material and redeemed it, physical things (icons, incense, eucharist, liturgy) could be used to access special revelation of who God was. Provided this was done “in Christ,” it was not idolatry. The nature of Jacob’s ladder--the link between Heaven and Earth--had been discovered, or rather revealed, and it was Christ.

Over time, the Greek and Eastern Churches affirmed this doctrine more than any other Christian tradition has (occasionally even underplaying the value which the understanding has in worship). They burned incense, sang long and beautiful liturgies, drew holy pictures (traditionally St. Luke the Greek was the first iconographer), and built churches. If God was the source of beauty, and the Resurrected Christ was beautiful, then a church which did not display “the beauties of holiness” did not do Christ justice. Of course, making a building as beautiful as God is an impossible task; but then, we Protestants don’t give up trying to be moral simply because our efforts to be “perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” are similarly doomed. If morality is one aspect of God’s goodness, then so, to the Greek Church, is beauty. The medieval Catholic Church, following the schism, had a similar theology of aesthetics. It was possible to have artistic standards; to say when something was ugly or beautiful or merely sensual (distinctions which Western artists have failed to make since). But for the Orthodox Church, this was almost the central element of their worship. In fact, one of the primary proofs the Orthodox offer for the legitimacy of their church is its beauty. This is, according to an early historical account, the reason Russia converted to the Eastern faith.

Historian Orlando Figes cites a story in the Primary Chronicle:

Vladimir, the pagan prince of Kievan Rus’ in the tenth century, sent his emissaries to visit various countries in search of the True Faith. They went first to the Muslim Bulgars of the Volga, but found no joy or virtue in their religion. They went to Rome and Germany, but thought their churches plain. But in Constantinople, the emissaries reported, ‘we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere on earth’.

--Natasha’s Dance, p. 297

Constantinople’s seed budded and flowered in Russia and Eastern Europe, even after iconoclastic Islam bulldozed its way through what is today called Turkey and even subdued the Greeks for a time. The Muslims, despite their return to the Judaic prohibition of images, nevertheless at least held that God had created the senses and the material world; much of their architecture, though bereft of images, is quite beautiful.

But what is remarkable to me, having traveled through the culturally Orthodox lands, is that Communism--so utterly intolerant of beauty--should have first grown up in Russia as well, and then taken root throughout the East. It even (a bit more superficially) implanted itself in the Catholic countries of Central Europe such as Poland, Croatia and the Czech Republic, though the Catholics, likewise, have had a very high regard for beauty. One need only look at the skyline here in the “city of a thousand spires” to observe this.

By contrast, I live just outside of Prague in an ugly concrete building called a “panelák.” Few foreigners live as far out as me, so I like to think of myself as a sort of “man of the people.” I’m not, of course. But I need to imagine that I am to compensate myself for waking up at 5:30 every morning, and waiting outside under the bleak sky and bleaker panelky (plural of panelák) for the bus, which takes me on what I’ve come to refer to as the “ugly tour” of the fringes of the world’s most beautiful city, passing dingy Communist building after dingy Communist building, as well as run-down, grey factories, taverns and casinos. It is probably very familiar scenery to anyone living in a post-Communist city.

Let me attempt to be fair to the Communists: There were lots of eyesores in Prague, Braşov, Beograd and Beijing before these concrete buildings. They’re not around anymore because, being eyesores, and the abode of the unimportant, they were torn down. The Communists came along, built the concrete buildings in place of the unsanitary squalor, and put everybody, rich and poor, into small apartments within monstrous buildings. The Communists’ intentions were very good. They were, at least to begin with, very moral people who wanted to serve mankind by providing the most economical type of housing possible. Much like the ascetic Gnostics, they did not want the frills or decadent aesthetic thrills which they believed were, at best, merely sensual and at worst, used to keep the poor man down. And as I get off the bus and file into the metro, observing the kind of visual stimulation which consumer capitalism has since brought with it, it’s easy to begin to sympathize with them:

The halls of the metro are lined on either side with larger-than-life advertisements featuring women in lingerie. These, and other false images, pull at your eyes like magnets. Anyone with a sense of shame looks down at the ground, but not, in contrast to the panelky, because there is nothing to see. At the same time, I do say they look down because there is too little to see. There is a shameful emptiness present in this overstimulation, a wrenching of human beings out of their contexts, until that which is partially sexual becomes, to millions of others, merely sexual. Stepping out of the metro, up to a “modern” area of Prague, like Wenceslas Square or Narodni Třida, the images continue to invade. Postmodern architecture, gleaming steel and glass, corporate eatery logos, Soviet Kitsch shops, clothing and computer advertisements, sex and coffee shops, all shout “Come Buy, Come Buy! Food for the stomach and the stomach for food!”

This adoption of the corporate aesthetic--physical (art) for the sake of the physical (products) has been taking place rapidly in many post-Communist countries. Many of these countries are, I believe, compensating for the dreary, image-less world bequeathed to them by the previous generations. But it is a cheap trade-off.

The Communists looked at art and nature, and did not recognize beauty, for beauty transcends. Without belief in the transcendent, there can be no beauty, only meaningless “pretty” things used to please the senses. This may seem like an oversimplification, but despite philosophies which he may adopt that allow him to do what he likes, man, upon encountering beauty, feels it to be somehow true. The thrill I feel when I see the older, beautiful buildings in this city, or snow, or low-hanging clouds, is intrinsically self-forgetful. If it was all meant merely to please me, it would draw me, not up out of myself, but down. Everyone, in his heart, acknowledges beauty--that multiplicity of gleaming ladders connecting the sensually stimulating (be it nature, sex, architecture art, the pleasure of a good meal or a bath) and the true. Even the former Material Girl herself, sings, “Don’t tell me love isn’t true--that it’s just something that we do.” Or, to put it in a more Corinthian way: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not Love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Noise with no meaning--“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But if the material world really “signifies nothing,” then why do Macbeth’s words resonate so beautifully with our own sense of despair when we contemplate a world with nothing to signify?

The new crop of modern artists, in their turn, like the Communists, rightly feel that merely sensual corporate art is somehow cheap and debased. But they fall into the same error in swinging back to the other extreme. I recently went to an exhibition here in Prague, and, tellingly, the only piece that was even slightly visually appealing was the advertisement for the exhibition, which lured people in to buy tickets. All the other pieces simply made “statements.” It is hard to be a good artist when one does not believe in beauty. I would submit that the failure of modern architecture (and art) to attain beauty is the result of modern man again disassociating the physical and spiritual worlds.

It was not always thus. Continue to walk, down the winding cobblestone streets packed with tourists, beggars and merchandise, and it is not long before you come out to gorgeous Art Nouveau buildings (somewhat decadent and commercial, it’s true, but still retaining the beauty of previous movements in addition to their novel pretty-ness), then to sensual but heavenly Baroque statues and churches, awe-full Gothic spires and Romanesque bridges. The Vltava River, at times, seems to me to be a type of the River of Life which flows through the City of God herself. Foreigners like me ooh and ahh, speaking too loudly. But the Czechs walk steadily on through the cold, not even rolling their eyes, back to whichever panelák they inhabit. It seems to me that Communism, through factories and panelky, subdued the people it loved in a way that no imposing triumphal arch or temple built by grand old kings ever could have; these concrete monstrosities got them to stop looking up, even at the stuff worth seeing.

And so, the irony is manifest: Lack of belief in the Concrete in heaven resulted in a proliferation of concrete on earth. Not concrete molded into anything more lovely--that would be dishonest and wasteful, after all--but concrete for concrete’s sake, useful, but ugly and oppressive. “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me,” said Christ, insisting that Mary of Bethany, in pouring the nard at his feet had “done a beautiful thing.” The words seem cruel to our modern fairness-based, aesthetic-less, Protestant morality. But I wonder if they are crueler than the view outside of Prague, its lasting psychological effects on its people, and the mere objects we have become in the eyes of one another.

Chris