The Wonder In Bruegel

And, A Surprising Turn Of Events Since Chicago In September

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Hunters In The Snow”

Good morning from London Heathrow. By the time you Americans read this, I will be in the air on my way to Budapest. How strange, and strangely delightful, it is to look forward to being at home as a stranger in a strange land. But there it is. I’ve noticed lately an unusual calm passing over me when I get into the taxi at the Budapest airport, and hear the familiar sounds and rhythms of Magyar, a language I do not speak.

I see this is making the rounds:

I am so proud of my friend J.D. Vance. This is who he really is.

Watching it, instantly what came to mind was my older friend, a literate, kind, educated woman I had been close to for forty years, who ended that friendship with a text message. Why? She had read a letter to the editor I wrote in 2021 in which I defended Trump’s post-January 6 impeachment, but said in the letter that Trump did some good things in his presidency.

Can you imagine? Forty years of friendship, gone because I did not dislike Trump with sufficient purity. I’m better off not being friends with someone like that. She’s like Dickens’s Madame Defarge, the sort of woman who would calmly knit at the foot of the guillotine in support of the Revolution.

For over a decade in my younger life, my father and I disputed strongly over politics. We finally quit talking about it, because the love we had for each other was more important than our political convictions. Even when we grew closer in our understanding of politics, we still never talked about it. Why risk love?

I have heard over the past eight years of a handful of people whose MAGA parents cut them off for not being MAGA. But easily the overwhelming number of people I know who have lost family or friends over politics have been conservatives whose left-wing friends abandoned them. To be fair, that could be because most of my friends are conservative, so it stands to reason I would be far more likely to meet that sort of person than the other. Still, it has been my experience that leftists, in general, are far more personally invested in politics, and political purity, than rightists.

I disembarked to see this shocking news:

House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday said the U.S. should consider taking “direct military action” if North Korean troops enter the war in Ukraine, following the revelation that thousands of soldiers from the isolated country are in Russia.

The White House said earlier Wednesday that Washington had assessed at least 3,000 North Korean troops are undergoing training at military bases in eastern Russia, with fears they will eventually be sent to Ukraine to fight alongside Kremlin forces.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Tuesday the U.S. has seen evidence that North Korean troops were in the former Soviet state.

“The Biden-Harris Administration must make clear that North Korean troops entering this conflict are a red line for the United States,” Turner said in a statement.

“If North Korean troops were to invade Ukraine’s sovereign territory, the United States needs to seriously consider taking direct military action against the North Korean troops,” he added.

Is he out of his damn mind?! Of course I don’t like seeing North Korean troops in Ukraine, but what business is it of ours to risk World War 3 because Little Rocket Man has sent soldiers to Ukraine? Seriously, this is insane. If Dick Cheney’s sweetheart Kamala Harris wins, the bellicose Republican Mike Turner might well get his big war. Keep that in mind as you vote.

On the flight back, I dug deeper into a novel one of you recommended to me, Headlong, a novel from the year 2000 by the playwright Michael Frayn. It’s about an English philosopher who, on a country holiday with his art professor wife, stumbles upon what might be a lost Bruegel in the down-at-the-heels estate of a dissolute country squire. I’m only halfway through the book, but the plot is about how Martin, the philosopher, conspires to con the wily countryman out of the shabbily cared for painting, and use it to get rich and famous — all the while convincing himself that he is doing a moral deed.

What’s most interesting to me about the novel (so far) is that Martin is an expert on nominalism, the late medieval philosophy that says there is no intrinsic value to material objects, that they only mean something if we say they do. If you’ve paid close attention to my writing over the years, and especially if you’ve read Living In Wonder, you know that nominalism is a central concern of mine. I believe, with Richard Weaver and others, that the 14th century triumph of nominalism over the metaphysical realism of the Scholastics was the signal event of Western intellectual history that led eventually to disenchantment. (Reformation haters, please understand that the triumph of nominalism happened long before Martin Luther was born.)

From Living In Wonder:

Of course, the Scholastics believed, as the Easterners did, that the material world was enchanted, in the sense that it was charged with spiritual force. The key difference between East and West was in how humankind is to know God. In the High Middle Ages, the mind of the Latin Church began to separate “nature” and “supernature.” Nature becomes supernature when it is charged with God’s grace. The word symbol started to take on the meaning we use today. For the East, God could not be grasped simply through rational contemplation of Scripture and the natural world but had to be known primarily through participation, via prayer, liturgy, and so on. In the view of Eastern Christians, the Scholastics, without meaning to, construed the world as an object to be contemplated, not a subject to be integrated through the spiritual penetration of the divine energies.

In time, the medieval Franciscan friar William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) feared that the Schoolmen were putting God in a rationalist box, binding him by the rules of logic and dangerously limiting his sovereignty. Ockham taught that the material world did have meaning, but to say that meaning was intrinsic—bound up in the very existence of phenomena—was to limit God. Ockham was what we now call a nominalist, from the Latin word for “name.” He said that material phenomena were neutral and had meaning only because God said they did. For Ockham, the world meant something not because the transcendent God was somehow entangled with it but because God exercised his sovereign will imputing value to it.

It may seem absurdly subtle to us, but it was a revolution at the time. Nominalism had the effect of separating God metaphysically from creation and its design—of making explicit what the Christian East said was implicit in Scholasticism. God was no longer mysteriously both transcendent and immanent but located radically outside of his creation, which he observed from afar, and upon which he imposed his will. Scholastics believed that all things in the natural world pointed to God; to nominalists, that was nonsense.

(I am aware that some philosophically informed Catholics — like Sebastian Morello — dispute this characterization of Scholasticism. That’s fine — it needn’t trouble us here. The point is that both Thomists and Orthodox agree on what nominalism accomplished.)

In Headlong, Martin takes a deep dive into the life and times of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (d. 1569), in an effort to discern meaning in his paintings. At this point in the narrative, Martin doesn’t consciously understand that he’s exploring the meaning of nominalism as well. He has glimpsed a dirty old painting in the squire’s breakfast room, a canvas the owner thinks is rubbish — but as I said, Martin is nearly convinced that it is a long-lost Bruegel. Halfway through the narrative, Martin still hasn’t been able to examine the painting closely, and is in great turmoil over whether or not it’s the real thing.

In his long narrative discourse, Martin describes Bruegel as seen by some scholars as “a painter consciously transforming reality and adapting it to his formal ideal” — which is what nominalism says we do when we encounter reality. That is, we make it conform to what we believe is true. This seems like common sense, which is no doubt why nominalism triumphed. Remember, the chief proponent of nominalism was William of Ockham, of the so-called Ockham’s Razor, which holds that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is usually the correct one.

But is that really true? What if the simplest explanation is … wrong? What if there are layers of mystery built into a thing, and the purpose of the viewer (that is, you and me) is not to impute meaning to it, but to discover the meaning, the logos, that already exists in it? I think you can see why coming to believe that there is no intrinsic meaning to material reality can lead, over time, to disenchantment.

This is not to say that it is not permitted to have different interpretation of a phenomenon. There is, for example, no absolute fixed meaning in a work of art. Two people can look at the same canvas and interpret it differently. That’s not the point. The point, rather, is the extent to which the artist, and those who behold his art, are creating meaning, and the extent to which they are revealing meaning.

Honestly, I don’t think the two are always exclusive. Here’s a passage from Living In Wonder that speaks to my point:

Some narrative theorists today contend that literature’s function is to train readers to become comfortable with the idea that some things can be true and not true at the same time. This is how the parables of Jesus work. Their purpose is not to convey literal factual information but rather to draw the hearer into a frame of mind that can accept the double nature of truth. That is to say, parables and other stories are such effective ways of conveying some truths because they appeal to the embodied right-brain way of knowing, as opposed to the just-the-facts left-brained way.

Enchantment always exists at the border between the real and the surreal. To be enchanted by a lover is to see her as both more than a mere person but also less than a goddess. To be enchanted by the city of Jerusalem is to grasp that this unprepossessing ancient settlement built on a modest desert hill is the most sacred city to three great world religions. To be enchanted by the story of a moral hero is to regard the person as saintly while recognizing his humanness—for example, Franz Jägerstätter chose to die rather than betray the Lord by swearing allegiance to Hitler, a heroic act by a plain Austrian farmer. Writer Patrick Curry says that, in cases like this, “the resulting tensive truths exceed mere knowledge.”

The key point is to realize that enchantment is not something you add to the material world, like putting a ball gown on a chambermaid, but is rather a quality that inheres in the thing itself. To become enchanted, then, is to become aware that the enchanting thing is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary.

Metaphor, which Patrick Curry says “connects and affirms two truths, even though they are strictly contradictory,” is an example of how this works. A metaphor does not represent something else but makes present a hidden dimension of a thing. When we are under enchantment, we sense that there is something real about the enchanted object that nobody else sees. We have stepped outside the frame or the ordinary, so to speak, to commune with the hidden essence of the thing.

Curry, a Canadian Tolkien scholar who has written extensively on enchantment, says that to think of enchantment as an injection of wonder into dead matter is only to reinforce the false split between matter and spirit responsible for disenchantment in the first place. It’s a paradox, says Curry: the transcendence of enchantment is immanent. “It doesn’t take you away from where you are,” he writes, “but further into it.”

To go further into a thing, in the sense Curry means, is to gain awareness that things are connected intrinsically to the divine, to the infinite. This has been largely forgotten by contemporary Christians, but the faith has always taught that the universe holds intrinsic meaning, and not in a superstitious way. Premodern Christians believed that God imbued all created things with a logos, a reason for existing, and that their own logos was mystically bound to these other logoi, and to the divine Logos, which is Christ. As Paul wrote to the Colossians, “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16).

It seems clear to me that enchantment in a nominalist world is a wispy thing, one that can be dissipated when the winds of fashion change.

Anyway, in the novel, Martin surveys the various scholarly interpretations of Bruegel. For example:

He doesn’t see man represented in Bruegel as insane or as helplessly subject to forces beyond his control. Human actions are not “manifesting a rootless existence” on the surface of the world but participating in its underlying order. Harbison takes a similar view. The cycle of the year in particular, he says, demonstrates the human “response” to the passage of time and the rhythms of nature.

If Bruegel’s meaning was crystal-clear, we wouldn’t have so many divergent opinions — in the passage cited, the idea that Bruegel is more or less a metaphysical realist, but in an unquoted part of that same section, other scholars disagree. Here is Martin struggling with what the painting would mean to him if it weren’t a true Bruegel:

Would I want it as much? Yes! Really? Enough to go through with all the financial and moral complications of the deal? Certainly! All it would mean is that the picture was valuable for itself alone, and not for what it told us about Bruegel and his works. And that it was worth a few thousand pounds instead of a few million. Not that this is what I’m thinking about. Though of course I’d have to reconsider the finances rather radically …

You see? Yet it is not at all clear that this is what Martin really thinks of the canvas, or if this is part of his attempt to rationalize what would be a clear act of theft from the unsuspecting squire — an act that would make Martin very rich after selling the canvas he seeks to buy from the squire for a relative pittance. The point here, it seems to me, is that we can never be entirely sure about our own motivations, and why we value the things we value.

Here is Martin arriving back at the country train station to be greeted by his wife Kate:

“Oh,” she says, and I realize how much she was looking forward to the moment when my smiling face would separate itself from all the meaningless faces emerging around it into the station yard.

The meaning of Martin’s face among the others is particular to Kate, his wife. So there clearly is a sense in which we impute private meaning to things by loving them. It’s a wife’s love for her husband that gives him value, but only within the sphere of their relationship. Martin’s value, in this sense, is not absolute, but contingent on Kate’s seeing him and loving him.

Martin goes on:

And love her so much. Perhaps even more at this distance than I do when we’re together. She’s like my picture. No painting in the world has ever meant as much to me as that briefly glimpsed panel, so difficult of access. I think of it all the time, almost as much as I think of Kate—I’m thinking of it now, even while I’m talking to her. By the time I’ve had it on the kitchen wall for three months, I’ll probably have ceased to look at it.

Wow. Do you get that? He’s talking about how eros — desire — has infused both his wife and that painting with deep meaning. Yet Martin is aware that when familiarity dissipates desire, the painting will lose its value to him. What goes unsaid is that this is what happens in marriages too.

Notice this passage:

“Bruegel,” says Friedländer, “was the first artist successfully to eliminate the lingering echo of religious devotion.” A heretic, yes. I think of that little figure in the background of so many of Bruegel’s pictures, the ordinary looking man no one’s paying any attention to, the Icarus, the Saul, the condemned Christ, the one whose view of the world is different, whose fate is against the grain of the everyday world around him, and whose unremarked presence changes everything. The unobserved observer with dissent hidden in his heart.

He’s talking here about the lesson Bruegel teaches about how we value the world. Auden made Bruegel’s Icarus famous in his poem “Musée des Beaux-Arts,” which takes note of how the artist places Icarus falling into the ocean into a forgotten corner of the canvas (lower right). Here is the painting:

And here is the ending of the Auden poem:

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The artist’s perspective is a nominalist one, you might say, in that he reveals that the people in this landscape don’t even notice the extraordinary thing happening among them. On the other hand, might Bruegel’s canvas be a commentary on human folly? On how we become so immersed in the everyday that we remain blind to extraordinary events happening around us? Events that carry meaning even if we don’t observe them, or care? You might remember my diary entry from my visit to Madrid’s Prado museum, in which I observed that the central panel of Bosch’s Triptych On The Adoration of the Magi highlighted how the most important event in the history of the world — the birth of the God-man, the Savior of humanity — had happened hidden away in a barn, far from the gaze of the busy world.

I love this passage from Martin’s fevered attempt to orient himself in this library search for whether or not the briefly-glimpsed painting might be a real Bruegel:

Or am I wandering off into great unpathed Landes myself? Am I getting close to the edge of the dizzy precipice named You-can-fit-almost-anything-into-any-pattern-you-like-to-name? I remember all the hikes and other travails I’ve been on myself where I’ve stood looking from landscape to map and back, seeing the shape of the hills in front of me in six entirely different parts of the contour lines. If only I could see one single detail in the landscape that related unambiguously to one single sign on the map. One church spire. One lighthouse, one narrow-gauge railway.

Here is the struggle of the nominalist, looking for some sign coming from outside his conceptual universe, something to orient him and tell him what means what! And here is Martin examining another old canvas, trying to decipher it:

He’s coming down out of the north, on his way from the Country of Darkness. He’s descending from the Alps, from the high passes through the deceptive hills, into the balmy air of Italy, the New Jerusalem, the promised land of the soul’s peace. No, of course he’s not. It’s just a casual thumbnail sketch, a decorative flourish by the Italian cartographer.

Does it mean something, or does it not? Here is Martin seeing himself in a work of art:

There’s also a travailler here—me, coming down from the winter air in the high passes, heading for the soft lands of summer, where the ship’s waiting to weigh anchor and set sail for Jerusalem. And what a delight it is to have some great journey to undertake, some great enterprise under way, so that all one’s thoughts and efforts are guided by its onward momentum.

Oh, yes it is! This is how I go through life (more on which in a moment). Finally, here is Martin expressing anger at Kate, an art historian, who had a chance to briefly examine the canvas alone, and who reports that she did not see a detail that, in Martin’s theory, would have confirmed it as a true Bruegel:

She should have seen a little walker. She didn’t see a little walker because she was looking in the wrong places, in the wrong spirit. I’ve just remembered how she sank my last theory by failing to see the little walker. I think I’ll keep my new thoughts to myself. Like the little walker, I’ll plod on alone.

See what he’s doing here? Kate is trying to tell him that in her professional opinion, he might be misguided. He has personalized it, though, and is expressing the thought that the Sign he needs for the painting to have Meaning is probably there, but she is too blind to see it. This is what you call “motivated reasoning.”

Well, I can tell you that I cannot wait for the plane to take off for Budapest, so I can return to Frayn’s story and see where it takes me. I forget which reader put me onto this philosophical novel, but thank you!

A little personal comment about the personal pilgrimage, the quest. As you will know, I am a Christian Platonist and metaphysical realist, as all Orthodox Christians must be (but then, I was one before I became Orthodox). I believe God sends us signs, though not everything we think is a sign from God really is. It requires discernment, and a healthy awareness that we might be deceiving ourselves, as Martin does. I have realized something important in recent weeks. I’m still working my way through it, but I can tell you this much.

Some weeks back, I saw Father Nectarios, my confessor, who, you will recall, is also an exorcist. I told him that in prayer, I had developed an intuition that my mild but chronic depression was not merely the effect of miserable and even catastrophic events in my life that began in 2012, with the collapse of my illusions about my Louisiana family, then of my health, and finally of my marriage. All of that would be sufficient to explain my loss of desire for life, and deep melancholy — but (I told him), this simple explanation no longer seems to me to be the true one. There was something else.

I recalled for him the deep sense of Shame I’ve carried since early childhood — Shame that I was not good enough for my father. It is no doubt true that my dad did some things to make me believe that. But Daddy was also very tender and loving, so I am sure that part of my shame was something that I, as a tense, anxious, intellectual child, brought to the relationship. Whatever the source or sources of it, this conviction has brought a certain spiritual heaviness into my life. As I wrote about in my Dante book, God delivered me from much of it, but much remained, and it was impossible for me to think my way out of it.

Could it be, I asked him, that there is some sort of evil spirit of Shame hovering around me, telling me that I am worthless, that I will never be good enough? As crazy as it sounds, I have learned far too much from my research on Living In Wonder, especially on the work of exorcists, to dismiss the prospect. No, I did not think I was possessed, but I did wonder if I might in some sense be oppressed, spiritually. I asked him to pray over me to be released from any dark spirits who might hold me in bondage.

So he did. I felt nothing when he did it. But the next morning, I woke up in a new world. It was a world of light. It felt as if a heavy dark shade that had existed between me and the sun for all my life had been taken away. God all of a sudden felt so very, very near. The barrier between Him and me felt so thin and transparent. It was uncanny! Here we are, one month later, and I feel the same way as I did that morning. Clearly, something has happened. I am no longer tormented, not even a little bit, by dark thoughts of self-hatred. Honestly, I believe God freed me of spiritual oppression through the prayers of that good priest, the exorcist.

I can’t stop praising God, in every spare second, it seems. This has never happened to me. It’s so personal, and, you know, so weird (“So, an exorcist heard my confession then prayed over me in a hotel room in suburban Chicago, and …”), that I have not wanted to say too much about it to you. But then, there are some of you who might really need to hear this, and find hope in it. Reading Headlong convinced me I should say something.

I can hardly wait to get back to Budapest and go out into the streets and walk, and soak in the beauty of my city. Believe me, I have been languishing in my flat, on the couch, for many months, without the energy or desire to do anything but brood and write. Now, though? I have been set free. The world seems to me to be so enchanted. It always was, of course — something I knew in my head as a concept. But now, thanks to God’s extraordinary grace, I experience it as percept. Somehow, it had never occurred to me that the heaviness in my soul, that the dark cloud that seemed always to hover above me, even in my happiest moments, not blocking the light, but reducing it — that there might be some form of spiritual bondage there.

But there was. And now whatever entity or entities that told me I was worthless has apparently been sent back to Hell. Even someone who is as open and confessional as I struggle to say all that publicly, but again, what right do I have to keep this good news to myself, especially if one of you readers might benefit from the same spiritual medicine applied by your own priest or pastor?

[W]hat a delight it is to have some great journey to undertake, some great enterprise under way, so that all one’s thoughts and efforts are guided by its onward momentum. Yes, that’s how I feel now, returning to Budapest. The clouds have departed, the sun is shining brightly in the sky, and I go home full of expectancy and joy, ready for anything. What a grace! The pain of my many losses remains, of course, but its sharpness has receded, thanks to holy medicine. I’m not limping anymore. I’m not dragging myself, half-sensate, through my days, waiting for the misery to lift. I am alive, and to my great surprise, living once again in the fullness of wonder! Glory to God for all things!

Because I had faith that everything does have meaning, and that the meaning ultimately is about drawing us to unity with Christ, I was able, like Javier Bardem’s Father Quintana in Malick’s To The Wonder, to carry on, while waiting for the wonder to return. Not only has it returned, but I now experience it in a way I never have. Extraordinary, just extraordinary. I’m not going to overthink this; I’m just going to relax into it, and praise God for it.

I do wish you all a good weekend. I hope by now that many of you readers will have gotten through most or all of Living In Wonder (UK readers order it here) and can share in the comments (subscribers only) what you thought about it. Don’t hesitate to criticize it — we’re all friends here.

Last word: please take J.D. Vance’s advice to heart in these waning days of the election campaign: if you are willing to risk losing family or friends over politics, you are making a very serious mistake, one that might not easily be repaired, if it can be repaired at all.