July 2017 – Theological, Cultural and Educational Reflections

Books read July 2017

BOOKS READ JULY 2017

(Ed.) John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, The Cultures of Collecting: From Elvis to Antiques—Why do we Collect Things? Melbourne University Press, 1994.

An exceptional collection! of articles about collecting from many perspectives including psychoanalytical, economic and historic approaches and a scarifying analysis by post-modern French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In most cases the picture painted of collectors is not pretty so genuine collectors should approach this book with care! Effectively illustrated with impressive academic reference resources. For a collector who wishes to delve into his or her own psyche this is the book!

John Eisner, one of the editors, in his Introduction notes, amongst other things, the following assertions:

– Noah was the first collector! (p1)

– The supreme pioneer is the totalling collector, the ‘completist’ …perhaps a fetishist! (p3)

– ..to collect up to a final limit is to exercise control over existence itself..like God. (p3)

– In the West…the great canonical collections…testify to the paradigm of Beauty as the exclusion of all ugliness, to the triumph of remembrance over oblivion, to the permanence of Being over Nothingness. Absurdly and dementedly eternalistic as they are, they carry such weight as to seem incontrovertible…one of the ambitions of this book is to challenge such self-assurance… (p4)

– [collectors] rivalling God and teetering between mastery and madness (p6)

– [for some]…building a collection of things is inseparable form building up wealth and prestige e.g. Henry Clay Frick, J.Paul Getty or Charles Saatchi. (p6)

– ….less perfective collectors whose vocation sends them across the confines of the reasonable and the acceptable. These last — people like John Soane, Charles Wilson Peale, Kurt Schwitters, Sigmund Freud and Robert Opie — exemplify a genuine exposure to existence: indeed their project, at times melancholy, even morbid, and perhaps ultimately tragic, often carries with it an intimation of the failure that is always on the cards once mortal desire reaches the limits of what can and cannot be done. (p6)

This is a complex, academic and in places quite difficult book and I suspect only a committed collector would stay the distance and even then would have to put up with a fair amount of criticism directed at the character of collectors and/or their motives. Nevertheless, as a collector, I could not put this down and for a look into my own psyche I know of no better book. 4 stars.

Alex Miller, Landscape of Farewell, Crows Nest NSW, Allen & Unwin, 2007

Another stunning novel from the pen of Alex Miller. Set in Hamburg, Germany and in the Central Highlands region of Queensland this novel forces us to become interested in the lives of a recently widowed septuagenarian German History professor Max Otto, haunted by the unknown career of his father in World War 11 and its potential horror and the hopes and dreams of a forty something single female indigenous Australian History professor, Vita, an indigenous activist. They meet at a History Conference in Hamburg and Vita manages to persuade Max to come to Australia to speak at a conference and meet her ageing uncle Dougald, child of a Scottish mother and an indigenous father who has his own ancestral demons to come to terms with. The result is another Millerenian journey of self-exploration and physical exploration of the dangerously enchanting but also forbidding Australian landscape. Underneath these very human people stories is a deeper and more chilling motif of massacre, the continuing human tendency to seek to annihilate others and this story comes with a well-researched and surprising twist from early Australian history. Whenever I read an Alex Miller novel I think “who else has written so many soul-searching novels that are impossible to put down?”. I can’t think of anyone! 5 stars.

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, London, SPCK, 2007

This is possibly the most controversial of N T Wright’s vast theological output and includes his famous assault on a type of Christianity that majors on the question “how do I get to heaven when I die?” Wright answers this question by his full blooded defence of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the future bodily resurrection of believers and probably all people for a judgment “in the body”. Whilst, like John Packer, he stresses that this judgment will be by works he nevertheless reminds his readers that there will be no condemnation for those who are found in Christ and stresses that the vocation of those who respond to God’s call is to be an ambassador for Christ on earth. He articulates a strongly inaugurated theology of the kingdom of God on a renewed earth which will be consummated at the appearance rather than the “second coming” of Christ. I note in passing that the term ‘second coming’ does not seem to appear in Cruden’s Concordance of the Bible.

Wright’s account of “heaven” is that it is a first stage ‘paradise’ of sleep/rest/beatific vision rather than a “disembodied eternal existence” which is followed by his account of a second state recreation of the kingdom of God on a renewed earth. His argument is consistently, carefully, energetically and Biblically defended. His discussion of the replacement of our decaying bodies with undecaying bodies instead of the normal contrast between ‘natural/physical’ bodies and ‘spiritual’ bodies is unique. His robust treatment of how Christians should be busy about caring for the world ecology, people in crisis, beauty and spiritual health is a powerful antidote not only to C21st materialism and selfish self-fulfilment but also to American fundamentalism and much tepid modernist theology.

A useful reminder throughout the book is that Jesus’ resurrection occurred, according to the Biblical text, in this material world. The implication of this is that Jesus at his appearing and our own resurrection will be equally human (a strong defence of the permanent incarnation of Christ) and material even if it is to be some sort of transformed and perfected materiality.This is an area that John Polkinghorne took on regularly in his many writings ..the interface between two tangential worlds and ways of thinking and expression.

All of this runs counter to much of the daily thinking of the average western European or American or Aussie, let alone the thinking of the “average” Christian and to much of “modern” theology. For example the thrust of this book is brought into sharp relief when compared with the “cosmic Christ” which appears so elegantly in the meditations of Richard Rohr for example. It can even be said, I believe, that few evangelicals bother to come to grips with the sort of problems that logically emerge from a thorough going belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Thus one of the effects of reading this book carefully is the challenge to the imagination to conceive of the “material” reality proposed by these central Biblical themes so vigorously defended here.

I found the last few chapters on the functioning church somewhat uneven. Wright’s criticisms of many Anglican churches doing away with formal liturgy and clerical dress need more nuancing. There are ways and ways of making this happen, some more successful than others but the reality is that today’s 30 – 40 somethings haven’t got much energy for Anglican liturgical pomp and dress let alone younger generations…they have too much going on with in their lives. It is enough for them to grapple with the essentials of the faith and how to live it in a post-Christian age without having to worry about the niceties of 500 year old ceremonial or even 1950s ceremonial. I see the UK synod has given the ok for casual dress for clergy at appropriate services and for me, this is the way forward.

A challenging and demanding read. 4 stars.

C S Lewis, The Great Divorce, London, Fount/HarperCollins, 1977 (1946) A brief, curious and, as to be expected, brilliantly clever allegory of heaven and hell. Lewis takes a purgatorial view of hell in which many folk find themselves as thin “ghosts” in an afterlife of their own making but with some “solid people” present to help them re-think, a process better achieved by some than others! An interesting addition is that Lewis’ long time inspiration George MacDonald appears as one of the “solid people” who assists the unnamed seeker after truth. Other famous folk from the past appear from time to time in Danteesque fashion. In the end The Great Divorce leads the reader to the realisation that it is our present life and the actions, motivations, drives and decisions those of us who have any real choice make, which provide the clue to how we will travel in the life to come if there is one (and which direct us to live as positively and humanely and thoughtfully as we can in this life!)

Disturbing and thoughtful! 4 stars.

Rob Bell, What is the Bible? How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything, London, WilliamCollins, 2017

Accessible, thought provoking and well researched analysis of the Bible’s meaning and relevance for today. Written in Bell’s unique dot-point and jaunty style which will either inspire or repel depending on your state of mind. Bell’s strong minded and fresh approach to the many questions which in the past have turned so many people off church and Bible is desperately needed by jaded Westerners, anxious about their own future and thinking the Bible is outmoded. Bell manages to cut through much of the ink wasted in the inerrancy debate using up to date scholarly and Spirit-filled material in a breezy, humorous and hard to put down style. For a defence of the detail of these arguments there is always the wealth of Bell’s online podcasts but for starters and a very helpful bibliography I cannot think of a better gift for someone who has never read the Bible since childhood but needs to. 5 stars and then some!

Wrangling with N T Wright: Surprised by Hope 2007

Wrangling with N T Wright: Surprised By Hope, London, SPCK, 2007

Preface p,xii [In a 1995 British survey,] only a tiny minority, even among church goers, believed in the classic Christian position, that of a future bodily resurrection. Should we then give up on the idea and take it out of our creed?

2. – What is the ultimate Christian hope?

– What hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities with the world in the present?

3 What words would we like at our own funeral? Do we agree with Wright’s criticism of common forms of words in chapters 1 and 2 especially p20.

4. pp25-6…there is very little in the Bible about ‘going to heaven when you die’, and not a lot about post-mortem hell either….the language of heaven in the New Testament doesn’t work that way. ‘God’s kingdom’ in the preaching of Jesus refers, not to post-mortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but about God’s sovereign rule coming on earth as it is in heaven……Heaven in the Bible , is regularly not a future destiny, but the other, hidden dimension of our ordinary life. I think this is the key idea and distinctive in this book. The idea of Heaven and Hell referring to this life syncs with John Milton in Paradise Lost Book 1….a man’s mind is its own place and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. See also the paragraph at the bottom of p209. As long as we see ‘salvation’ in terms of ‘going to heaven when we die’, the main work of the church is bound to be seen in terms of saving souls for the future…

5. p27 Many have embraced a universalism in which God will endlessly offer to the unrepentant the choice of faith, until all at last succumb to the wooing of divine love. fn14 refers to John Hick: Evil and the God of Love

5A p32 Wright seems to be iffy about cremation..Of course there were reasons of hygiene and overcrowding which led reformers towards the end of the last century to propose this step—which, as not all western Christians know, is still firmly opposed by the Eastern Orthodox…as well as Jews and Muslims…cremation has tended, classically, to belong more with a Hindu or Buddhist theology..when people ask for their ashes to be scattered in a favourite place..the underlying implication, of a desire simply to be merged back into the created world, without any affirmation of a future life of new embodiment, flies in the face of classic Christian theology. …I am not of course saying that cremation is heretical…I am merely noting that the huge swing towards it in the last century reflects at least in part some of the confusions, both in the church and in the world, which we have observed.

6. p44 Is the problem with the Wittgenstein/Popper argument analogy that although people disagree re important details, nothing in either argument was “supernatural”?

7. p49 The commonly held belief (when I was growing up) that when we die we shall become angels.

7r p53 ..within early Christianity there is virtually no spectrum of belief about life beyond death. i.e.. unlike Judaism (different views from Essenes (a little holy group will rise); Sadducees (no resurrection); Pharisees (resurrection of the pious) or Stoicism (no resurrection) Mystery religions (spiritual resurrection). But in early Christianity all writers speak with one voice re the bodily resurrection of Jesus and in time all believers..all people.

8. p55 I Corinthians 15:44 How should we translate ψυχικον (psychikon) and πνευματικον (pneumatikon):

RSV/NRSV/GNB a physical body …………….a spiritual body

ESV/AV/RV/NIV/Phillips a natural body………..…….a spiritual body

NEB an animal body…. .……….. a spiritual body

NLT as natural human bodies….as spiritual bodies

JB it embodies the soul………..it embodies the spirit

LB human bodies………………superhuman bodies

The Message Remix natural……………………….supernatural

Moffatt an animate body……………a spiritual body

The NT for everyone (Wright) a decaying body……………an undecaying body

In either case what could a ‘spiritual body’ actually look like? Wright: It can be demonstrated in great detail, philologically and exegetically, that this is precisely not what Paul meant. See also p 168 When Paul declares that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit God’s kingdom’..he doesn’t mean that physicality will be abolished. ‘Flesh and blood ‘ is a technical term for that which is corruptible, transient, heading for death.

9. p59 Two key mutations from Jewish views of resurrection. 1. That resurrection signalled not just the renewal of Israel but renewal of human beings in general. 2. That the Messiah would die and be resurrected.

10. p60 …how impossible it is to account for the early Christian belief in Jesus as Messiah without the resurrection. (There were many claimants to Messiahship in the early N T period. They were all killed off by the Romans and left little trace. With Jesus the history is entirely different….this means we can already rule out the revisionist positions on Jesus’ resurrection that have been offered by so many writers in recent years.

11. p67 Despite a thousand Easter hymns and a million Easter sermons, the resurrection narratives in the gospels never, ever say anything like ‘Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death,’ let alone ‘Jesus is raised, therefore we shall go to heaven when we die.’… Jesus is raised, so we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world, making his kingdom come on earth as in heaven. [cf 2 Corinthians 5: 15ff If anyone in Christ he is a new creature. The old has passed away, behold the new has come. All this is from God , who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the ministry of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal to us. We beseech you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.]

11r p81 Wright considers Thomas’ doubt to be almost scientific (Thomas, like a good historian wants to see and touch…Jesus presents himself but Thomas doesn’t . He transcends the type of knowing he had intended to use, and passes into a higher, richer one..) Is this a new way of reading the ‘doubting Thomas’ story? Is it a good way of reading it?

12. p82 The epistemological weight is borne, not simply by the promise of ultimate resurrection and new creation alone, but by the narrative of God’s mighty action in the past. [The resurrection makes sense of the O T as well as the N T]

13. p83 We are to be the stewards of the new creation IN THIS LIFE…..faith in Jesus risen from the dead transcends but includes what we call history and what we call science….God …has raised Jesus from the dead within history, leaving evidence which demands an explanation from the scientist as well as anybody else. [So also Polkinghorne, Berry, Collins, Barbour, Miller, Eagleton, Ruse, et al]

14. p86 Against…. the intellectual coup d’état by which the Enlightenment convinced so many that ‘we now know that dead people don’t rise. as though this was a modern discovery rather than simply the reaffirmation of what Homer and Aeschylus had taken for granted. [which is why the Athenians scoffed at Paul when he spoke about the resurrection in Athens. (Acts 17)]

15 p87 Oscar Wilde’s play Salome in which Herod Antipas, on hearing of reports of Jesus rising from the dead says: “I do not wish him to do that…I forbid him to do that…I allow no man to rise from the dead. This man must be found and told that I forbid him to raise the dead.”

16. p93 Against the progress myth. Are we making progress or not? Give examples. (p94 particular impact of evolutionary optimism and the philosopher Hegel and in the Christian world (p97 Teilhard de Chardin.

17, pp100-103 The impact of Platonism, Buddhism, Gnosticism on Christianity…a purely spiritual future existence…’Modern’ Gnostics include Blake, Goethe, Melville, Yeats, Jung and I would add Harold Bloom ..hugely influential literary critic. Followers of such a view in the end do not care about the material future of the world…similar to Fundamentalist Christians of the “left behind” variety.

18. p105-6 evil is real and powerful …but physical matter is not evil…nor, does evil consist in being transient, made to decay…rather the transience of the good creation that serves as a pointer to its larger purpose …Transience acts as a God-given signpost, pointing not from the material world to a non-material world, but from the world as it is to the world as it is meant to be one day to be; pointing, in other words, from the present to the future which God has in store.

p106 What matters is eschatological duality (the present age and the age to come), not ontological dualism (an evil ‘earth’ and a good ‘heaven’)….Evil then consists, not in being created, but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honour elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them. Evil is a world out of joint with its intended purpose.

BUT SURELY, ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE, EVIL WAS IN THE WORLD BEFORE HUMANS….EG THE BENT SNAKE AND FALLEN ANGELS. What about the origins of evil from the Biblical perspective. Is it all the fault of humans as Wright here implies? What is truly Biblical is that death of humans spread to all, because all sinned. (Romans 5:12)

19. p111 …if after his death [Jesus] had gone into some kind of non-bodily existence, death would not be defeated. This discussion comes back to the doctrine of “the permanent manhood of Christ.” cf Wright p126: It’s quite another to be able to envisage or imagine it, to know what it is we’re really talking about when we speak of Jesus being still human, still in fact, an embodied human —actually, a more solidly embodied human being that we are—but absent from the present world . We need, in fact, a new and better cosmology, a new and better way of thinking about the world, that the one which our culture, not least post-Enlightenment culture, has bequeathed us.

20. p113 …if creation was a work of love, it must have involved the creation of something other than God. That same love then allows creation to be itself, sustaining it in providence and wisdom but not overpowering it. Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic.

20r p119..and a new creation born to which the present one will stand as mother to child. Wright talks a lot about redeeming the earth. How can that happen if we’ve destroyed it?

21. p121 the question of the failure of the Church to explain clearly the meaning of the Ascension. Wright quotes Douglas Farrow:…where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood one can trace a slide into muddled and even dangerous ideas and practices.

22. p122 Basically, heaven and earth, in biblical cosmology, are not two different locations within the same continuum of space and matter. They are two different dimensions of God’s good creation..

23. p128 …today’s muddled world view …the whole point of the Christian faith is to follow Jesus away from earth to heaven and stay there forever. So Away in the Manger …and lead us to heaven to live with thee there…

24. p 132 ….the idea of judgment makes many people think of a vengeful, wrathful deity, determined to throw as many people as possible into hell. We have learnt to distrust people who love accusing and punishing others. [so Rob Bell: Love Wins.]

25. p134 ‘Eschatology’, which literally means ‘the study of the last things doesn’t just refer to death, judgment, heaven and hell …it refers to the strongly held belief of most first-century Jews, and virtually all early Christians, that history was going somewhere under the guidance of God; and that where it was going was a new world of justice, healing and hope…a matter not of the destruction of the present space-time universe, but of its radical healing.

26. p137 …despite widespread opinion to the contrary, during his earthly ministry Jesus said nothing about his return. [I think i am correct in saying that the term “second coming” does not appear in Cruden’s Complete Concordance of every word in the Bible]. …when Jesus speaks of ‘the son of man coming on the clouds’ he is not talking about the second coming , but, in line with the Daniel 7:13 text he is quoting, about his vindication after suffering. Similarly Jesus’ parables about the departing and returning King and his subjects refer to Jewish beliefs about God leaving the temple during the exile and returning again to judge and make good.

27 p138 The fact that Jesus didn’t teach it [the second coming] doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

28. p140 …if the gospel accounts of Jesus’ teaching do not refer to the second coming , where does the idea come from? Quite simply from the rest of the New Testament. …’This same Jesus who’s has gone from you in heaven…will return in the same way that you saw him go into heaven… The Greek word παρουσια (parousia) is usually translated “coming”; but literally it means “presence.”

29. p145 Against the “rapture” and the “Left Behind” films. 1 Thessalonians 4 “meeting Christ in the air” refers to Christians being drawn to Christ at his appearing to celebrate his coming just as folk thronged out to meet a conquering hero or a bike rider as they near the city.

30. p152-3 Wright, like John Packer before him, reiterates that the final judgment will be by works….the future judgment according to deeds, a judgment exercised by Jesus at his ‘judgment seat’, is clearly taught in, for instance, Romans 14:9-10, 2 Corinthians 5:10 and elsewhere….the picture of future judgment according to works is actually the basis of Paul’s theology of justification…..justification by faith is what happens in the present time, anticipating the verdict of the future day when God judges the world….it is common early Christian belief. [fn6 cites as refs:2 Tim.4:1; 1 Peter 4:5]

30. p155 -6…Jesus remains other than the church, other than the world, even while being present to both by the Spirit…..And, precisely because Jesus is not collapsed into the church, or indeed the world, we can renounce on the one hand the triumphalism that conveniently makes his sovereign lordship and excuse for its own, and on the other hand the despair that comes when we see such hopes dashed, as they always will be, in the follies and failings of even the best and greatest Christian organisations, structures, leaders and followers.

31. p167 Wright quotes Paul: We must all appear before the judgment seat of the Messiah; and for that we shall need bodies….it may be at this point that Paul hints after all at a re-surrection of the wicked (in order to be judged in the body) as well as the righteous. In my view it is much more than a hint…it is crystal clear. Why would Christ judge some and not others when all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and he who is guilty of one sin is guilty of all.?

32. p169 ..the early fathers at least as far as Origen insisted on [the bodily resurrection], though the pressures on them to abandon it must have been very great. Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Tertullian—all of them stress the bodily resurrection. The doctrine of bodily resurrection is linked very closely to the doctrines of creation and judgment…As in Judaism, resurrection is the point where creation and judgment meet. Where one is abandoned, for whatever reason, the others soon follow.

33. p170 What we today call atoms and molecules pass through us with continuity of form but transcience of matter….it’s a good argument: as we now know, we change our entire physical kit, every atom and molecule, over a period of, at most, every seven years or so. I am physically a totally different person now from the person I was ten years ago. And yet I am still me.

34 p170-1 A brief history of the doctrine of bodily resurrection. Many of the leading theologians in the Patristic and mediaeval periods were quite clear about the two-stage post-mortem future [ie first sleep/“the rest”/paradise/“the beatific vision” and second the resurrection in the kingdom of God. e.g. Gregory the Great, Anselm, Hugh of St Victor, Thomas Aquinas, Bernard of Clairveaux. But a good deal of western mediaeval piety then took a very different turn, in which the twin destinations of heaven and hell, and the possible intermediate destination of purgatory, became far more important. [esp. the influence of Dante (The Divine Comedy) …and later Milton (Paradise Lost); later still Newman: Dream of Gerontius]

35. p171 …for Paul at least there is a special sense of resurrection which clearly applies to those who are in Christ and indwell by the Spirit ….that of ruling in the kingdom of God…even judging angels! ….Christians will still be busy….. forget those images about lounging around playing harps! (p173)

36. p172 Wright commends C S Lewis as one of the few modern writers who has tried to help us with the task of imagining what the risen body might look like. e.g. the Narnia stories and The Great Divorce. [although on p 173 he criticises Lewis for promoting the idea of the immortality of the soul.]

37. p172 The ancient world did ask questions about which of our present characteristics and indeed present blemishes, will remain in the transformed physicality? e.g. Jesus’ wounds were still visible after his resurrection…not now as sources of pain and death but as signs of his victory, so the Christian’s risen body will bear such marks of his or her loyalty to God’s particular calling as appropriate, not least where suffering is involved. what of those who were burned at the stake for Christ, or eaten by sharks, or disembowelled? and what about cremation?

38. p174. The problem of rewards in heaven (1 Cor 3.10-15) and p 181

39. p179-180- 183 …the tendency towards universalism so evident in the last hundred years of Protestant thinking has produced a new situation, where not only professed Christians, but the mass of professed non-Christians, are going to have to be got ready for salvation in a the time after death. Like a badly sprung double bed, this has propelled the people who used to be positioned at either side, in either heaven or hell, into an uneasy huddle in the middle….we thus have a sort of purgatory for all…but Paul makes it clear here and elsewhere [e.g. in Romans 8] that it’s ithe present life that is meant to function as a purgatory. (p183)

40. p184 Prayers for the dead…Love passes into prayer; we still love them; why not hold them, in that love, before God?

41. p185 Against the departed saints including the Virgin Mary as ‘friends at court” working on our behalf.

42. p188-9 Re hell…when Jesus was warning his hearers about γε’εννα (Gehenna)- the C1st Jerusalem rubbish tip) he was not, as a general rule, telling them that unless they repented in this life they would burn in the next one. As with God’s kingdom, so with its opposite: it is on earth that things matter, not somewhere else….We cannot therefore look to Jesus’ teaching for any fresh detail on whether there really are some who finally reject God, and who as it were have that rejection ratified. p190 All this should warn us against the cheerful double dogmatism which has bedevilled discussion of these topics – the dogmatism, that is, both of the person who knows exactly who is and who isn’t ‘going to hell ‘, and that of the universalist who is absolutely certain there is no such place. or that if there is it will, at the last, be empty.

43. p191 The problem is that much theology…has become depressingly flabby, unable to climb even the lower slopes of social and cultural judgment, let alone the steep reaches of that judgment of which the early Christians spoke and wrote….

44. p193 …the massive denial of reality [Hiroshima/Darfur/Auschwitz/Pol Pot/Stalin/Mao/Rwanda/Armenia/Syria/etc etc] by the cheap and cheerful universalism of western liberalism has a lot to answer for.

45. p195 Re the problem of a place of eternal torment in the kingdom of God Wright rejects “annihilatiionism’ because it seems like active destruction (p194) and comes to a scenario that includes beings that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all…these creatures [will] still exist in an ex-human state, no longer reflecting their maker in any meaningful sense…..hmmm […very speculative…] Wright adds: The last thing I want is for anyone to suppose that I (or anyone else) know very much about all this. Nor do I want anyone to suppose I enjoy speculating in this manner…in my view pp196-198, Wright’s summary, demonstrates the best resolution of these complex issues. ( e.g. p196 [In Paul’s Letter to the Romans ] his great emphasis is that God has shut up all people in the prison-house of disobedience in order that he may have mercy on all .. (p197)..God is always the God of surprises…) These pages deserve a second read!

46. p203 Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now.

47. p204 Wright majors on 1 Corinthians 15:58 (always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain). ….the surprising hope that comes forward from God’s ultimate future into God’s urgent present, is not a distraction from the task of ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ in the present. It is a central, essential, vital and life-giving part of it….not about saving souls for a disembodied eternity, but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way the world presently is so that they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose.

48. p211 We are saved not as souls, but as wholes. (All sorts of things follow from this. We might notice, for example, that theories of ‘atonement’ , of the meaning of the cross, are not simply a set of alternative answers to the same question. They give the answers they give because of the questions they ask. If the question is ‘how can I get to heaven when I die despite the sin because of which I deserve to be punished?’, the answer may well be ‘because Jesus has been punished in your place.’ But if the question is ‘how can God’s plan to rescue and renew the entire world go ahead despite the corruption and decay which has come about because of human [and angelic] rebellion?’, the answer may well be ‘because on the cross Jesus defeated the powers of evil which have enslaved rebel humans an so ensured continuing corruption. Please note, these and other possible questions and answers are not mutually exclusive.)

49. p212-3 [We should not suppose] that we are saved, as it were, for our own private benefit, for the restoration of our own relationship with God (vital though that is!) and for our eventual homecoming and peace in heaven (misleading though that is!)…[We are saved] …designed-it isn’t too strong a word- to be a sign and foretaste of what God wants to door the entire cosmos [and]…part of the means by which God makes this happen.]

50. p213-14 …Paul makes it quite clear that those who believe in Jesus Christ, who are incorporated into him through baptism, are already God’s children, are already themselves, ‘saved’; this stewardship cannot be something to be postponed for the ultimate future. [note: we are saved for stewardship; cf Clarke Pinnock’s view that predestination is for vocation not for salvation. God’s desire is for Israel and the Church to be a light to the nations and a steward of the earth’s bounty.

50r p223 …idolatry is always the perversion of something good…the proper response to idolatry, therefore, is not dualism…but the renewed worship of the Creator-God.

51. p224 We cannot get off the hook of present responsibility, as many Christians try to do….by declaring that the world is currently in such a mess and there’s nothing that can be done about it until the Lord returns.

52. p227-8 [on the other hand] we must ..avoid the arrogance or triumphalism of…imagining that we can build the kingdom of God by our own efforts without the need for a further divine act of new creation….But we must ….reject the defeatism…that says there’s no point in even trying.

53. p230 The heirs of…liberal theology today are keen to marginalise the Bible, declaring that it supports slavery and other wicked things, because they don’t like what it says on other topics such as sexual ethics. But if you push the Bible off the table you are merely colluding with pagan empire, denying yourself the sourcebook for your kingdom-critique of oppression.

54. p231 Many conservative churches ..[in America] still live by the belief that what’s good for America is good for God….the irony is that those American churches that protest most vocally against the teaching of Darwinism in their schools are often, in their public policies, supporting a kind of economic Darwinism, the survival of the fittest in world markets and military power….any attempt to work for God’s justice on earth as in heaven is condemned as the sort of thing those wicked anti-supernaturalists try to do.

Wright has been accused of producing a ‘baptised neo-socialism’ by some conservative American commentators.

55. p232-3 If people tell you that after all there isn’t very much they can do…press for some form of inaugurated eschatology. You would insist that the new life of the Spirit, in obedience to the lordship of Jesus Christ, should produce radical transformation of behaviour in the present life, anticipating the life to come even though we know we shall never be complete and whole until then. Love this! This is real hope for the rest of our lives!

56. p234 A much needed theology of beauty!

57. p237 An amazing paragraph of honest self-analysis by N T Wright! He finishes the para with:..as every generation has known, it isn’t the quality of the preaching that counts, but the faithfulness of God. Here Wright is channelling Barth who was channelling Luther!

58. p243 ..when people cease to be surrounded by beauty, they cease to hope…

58r p244 The church, because it is the family that believes in hope for new creation, should stand out in every town and village as the place where new creativity bursts forth for the whole community, pointing to the hope which, like all beauty, always comes as a surprise. It seems to me that churches should be at the forefront of charitable works, art, evangelism etc.

59. p245 re re-shaping the church: …without a hope-shaped mission, there is always the danger of mere pragmatism. And with pragmatism there often comes opportunism — for the advancing of agendas which are driven, not by the imperative to mission, but by one or other of the old models of church life which are now running out of steam.

60. p246 The resurrection is not an isolated supernatural oddity proving how powerful, if apparently arbitrary, God can be when he wants to…it is the decisive event which means that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.

61. p247 If the resurrection is an event that actually occurred (in some sense) in time and space, as well as in the materiality of Jesus’ body…his Kingdom has been established. And this kingdom is to be put into practice by his followers summoning all nations to obedient allegiance to him, marking them out in baptism.

62. p252 Wittgenstein’s famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus….tellingly, section 7 consists of a single sentence: ‘What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence….Some things, Wittgenstein indicates, go beyond speech and philosophy, and about them one can and must remain silent. What I want to suggest, with great temerity, is that in the resurrection one is given the beginning of a new knowing, a new epistemology, a new coming-to-speech, the Word born afresh after the death of all human knowing and speech, all human hope and love, after the silent rest of the seventh-day sabbatical in the tomb.

63. p253 In John 20:19-23 Jesus called Peter to be a shepherd rather than a fisherman…the challenge to a new way of life, a new forgiveness, a new fruitfulness, a new following of Jesus which will be wider and more dangerous that what has gone before. [We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us…2 Cor 5]

64. p255 There could not be a clearer statement of intent; the kingdoms of the world are now claimed as the kingdom of Israel’s God, and of his Messiah.

65. p270 Tom Wright here argues for a ‘mixed economy’ in worship …it would be silly to suppose that any one size or shape will ‘fit’ all worshippers…not to dampen the enthusiasm of new expressions of Christian life, but…they must not throw the banana away with the skin. [when you peel the skin and throw the bone away there’s nothing left to eat in a banana!]

66. p277 …the split between ‘saving souls’ and ‘doing good in the world’ is a product, not of the Bible or the gospel, but of the cultural captivity of both within the western world. We return to the themes of justice, beauty and evangelism.

67. p283 If the gospel isn’t transforming you, how do you know that it will transform anything else?

68 p284ff Evangelicalism has been faithful in preaching new birth as a vital spiritual experience…what has proved much harder to do is to articulate a theology of baptism [and sacramental theology] to go with it.

69. p294 [the Book of Revelation] …is a vision of present reality, seen in tis heavenly dimension.

70. p299 I’d rather have a live church with problems than a dead church offering the spurious peace of the tombstone…

Why do Collectors collect what they collect?

WHY DO COLLECTORS COLLECT?

I have been making lists and been a collector of various bits and pieces since I was seven years old. This collection of essays has helped me to understand a little about who I am.

(Ed.) John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, The Cultures of Collecting: From Elvis to Antiques—Why do we Collect Things? Melbourne University Press, 1994.

John Eisner, one of the editors, in his Introduction notes, amongst other things, the following assertions:

– Noah was the first collector! (p1)

– The supreme pioneer is the totalling collector, the ‘completist’ …perhaps a fetishist! (p3)

– ..to collect up to a final limit is to exercise control over existence itself..like God. (p3)

– [collectors] rivalling God and teetering between mastery and madness (p6)

– [for some]…building a collection of things is inseparable form building up wealth and prestige e.g. Henry Clay Frick, J.Paul Getty or Charles Saatchi. (p6)

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote Le Système des objets (Paris, 1968), which has never been translated in full but some sections are contained in chapter 1 of this collection entitled The System of Collecting. Baudrillard is scathing about collectors as a “class” and his criticisms sound very harsh and yet most collectors would own the truthfulness of many of his criticisms of collectors. Some points he makes are as follows:

– For the child, collecting represents the most rudimentary way to exercise control over the outer world. (p.9)

– …one invests in objects all that one finds impossible to invest in human relationships. That is why man so quickly seeks out the company of objects when he needs to recuperate…..this sort of passion is an escapist one….all kinds of neuroses are neutralized, all kinds of tensions and frustrated energies are grounded and calmed. Indeed, this is what lends them their ‘spiritual’ quality; (p11)

– ….the ridiculous facility with which they afford us a glorious, if illusory, gratification….the singular object never impedes the process of narcissistic projection. (p12)

– Here, indeed, lies the whole miracle of collecting. For it is inevitably oneself that one collects. (p12) …he plays the game of constituting himself as a serial progression, at the same time as he constitutes himself as a serial progression, also at the same time as he constitutes himself as the ultimate term of the series —the one that wins. Here we find an explanation of the psychology of the collector: in collecting privileged objects, he constantly confirms himself as the one who wins. (fn 5 p175)

– …the collection is never really initiated in order to be completed (p13)

– The man who collects things may already be dead, yet he manages literally to outlive himself through his collection…

– …possession derives its fullest satisfaction from the prestige the object enjoys in the eyes of other people, and the fact that they cannot have it ..…The jealousy complex, symptomatic of the passion of collecting at its most fanatical… What now comes into play is a powerful anal-sadistic impulse that tends to confine beauty in order to savour it in isolation….(p18)

– One is always jealous of oneself. It is always oneself that one watches over like a hawk. And it is always in oneself that one takes pleasure. (p18)

– …the reader who cannot settle down to read unless he is surrounded by his entire library of books…it is not the book that matters so much as the moment when it is safely returned to its proper place on the library shelf.(p23)

– ….can objects ever institute themselves as a viable language? Can they ever be fashioned into a discourse oriented otherwise than toward oneself?…By the same token, the discourse voiced through his collection can never rise above a certain level of indigence and infantilism.

Chapter 2 of the book is a remarkable interview and defence of the value of collecting with collector Robert Opie who has spent a lifetime amassing over 3 million examples of marketing, packaging and advertising materials. He founded the Museum of Advertising and Packaging in the UK.

John Windsor is a teacher of transcendental meditation and spent two years with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who introduced TM to the West. His contribution in chapter 3 of this collection of essays is entitled Identity Parades and deals with the Hindu texts of the Vedas (and the Pali texts of Theravada Buddhism)…the fulfilment of the individual becomes pitifully dependent on the objects and circumstances of the outside world….Object-referral instead of self-referral. Its symptoms are tiredness and frustration…. (p49). This is in line with the tradition of Indian, Sri-Lankan, Tibetan and South East Asian Hindu and Buddhist holy men and women for whom possessions are not sought and who rely on the gifts of others (who earn good karma for generosity) for their survival. When Ghandi was murdered (by a devout Hindu!) his possessions numbered his scuffs, staff, very thin garment and I think one or two pieces of written material. Clearly collecting objects was very low indeed on the list of priorities in Eastern religious thinking!

Roger Cardinal’s essay in chapter 4 is entitled Collecting and Collage-making: The Case of Kurt Schwitters. Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) was an amazing multi-media artist in Germany who escaped to Norway to avoid Nazi imprisonment for producing “degenerate art” in Goebbels’ definition. After the German invasion of Norway Schwitters fled to Scotland and was interned in England. Cardinal’s essay focuses on the extent to which Schwitter’s famous collages called Merz art [from comm-merce?] pictures could be called collections. This was because Schwitters built his collages basically from bits of flotsam picked up from the street- paper scraps, fragments of newspapers, billboards, transport tickets and anything else left lying around on the street. Nevertheless close analysis of many of his Merz art reveals that certain clear messages are being sent from words that can be read within the collages and from the arrangement of seemingly totally abstract and haphazard bits and pieces. Amongst many other artistic endeavours Schwitters produced over 2000 collages throughout his career from his earliest days experimenting with Dadaism in Germany to his final exile in Britain. Cardinal writes:

– ….Inexorably categorised as we are under the category of mortals we may envisage collecting as an existential project that seeks to lend shape to hapless circumstance. To collate and arrange any objects, culturally marked or otherwise, is to invent a space of privileged equilibrium offering at least some respite from the pressures of life. What is curious to behold is that, for many collectors, existential tensions tend to derive not just from the plain business of living, but also from the collecting activity itself, by means of which they had hoped not to repeat life but to transcend it. I see the collector as one caught in a constant vacillation, between the hankering for perfection and the need to tolerate imperfection, between an ideal of wholeness and the anxiety of incompleteness, between mature composure and the immature thrills of hunting and scrounging. (p70)

– …The final element that, I believe, clinches,my comparison [between a collection and a collage] is that there is almost always an intention eventually to place the collage or the collection on display. Both ultimately exist to be shown, and implicitly to be shown to impress. We can say that both aspire to be noticed, inspected, admired, even envied? (p71)

– [Schwitters] routinely labels the completed set with a number and a title….the practice is symptomatic of a collector’s scrupulous devotion to itemising and listing…(p78).

– [Merz art was] …a diary in which the individual subject records his struggle to hold together a few meagre certainties in a world that is being torn apart.

– Cardinal quotes Susan Stewart, writer of several books on aesthetic theory; …’the possession of the metonymic object is a kind of dispossession in that the presence of the object all the more radically speaks to its status as a mere substitution and to its subsequent distance from the self.’ (p93)

– Cardinal writes …while it may be true that Schwitters was conscious of handling the myths and mirages that help soothe the collective libido, documenting the little gratifications of contemporary Londoners in an epoch of austerity, his compilations of cigarette wrappers, food ads and jam labels can equally be read as a sublimation of private longings and grieving. (p95)

….the aroma of nostalgia the collages insinuate to us has to be measured against our own proclivity to romanticise the text of the past.. (p95)

– Chapter 5 of this collection is written by Mieke Bal, a tertiary teacher in the Theory of Literature and lecturer in Visual and Cultural studies.Theories of literature regularly ask the question what is the true nature of narrative?

– Bal writes: Objectively narratives exist as texts, printed and made accessible; at the same time, they are subjectively produced by writer and reader. (p98)

– ….it is also obvious that verbal texts are not the only objects capable of conveying a narrative. Language is just one medium, perhaps the most conspicuous one, in which narrative can be constructed. Images, as the tradition of history painting demonstrates, can do so as well ….[cf the use of stained glass window images in Gothic cathedrals in the C13th and C14th when many worshippers could not read.] …not to speak of mixed media like film, opera and comic strips….What if the medium consists of real, hard material objects?…In other words, can things be, or tell stories? (p98f) [eg a stamp collection teaching history such as the gradual change in images of Hitler on German stamps of the 1930s.]

– Bal quotes cultural and museum historian S M Pearce as follows: …the emotional relationship of projection and internalisation which we have with objects seems to belong with our very earliest experience and (probably therefore) remains important to us all our lives. (p102 and ref. fn7)

– Bal continues: From motivation in childhood Pearce moves to phenomenologically defined essential humanness — and storytelling is again an indispensable ingredient. [Pearce’s work shows that ] collecting is an essential human feature that originates in the need to tell stories..(p103).

– Hence, collecting is a story, and everyone needs to tell it. (p103)

– Bal notes that Pearce identifies 16 different possible motivations for folk commencing collections. They are as follows: leisure, aesthetics, competition, risk, fantasy, a sense of community, prestige, domination, sensual gratification, sexual foreplay, desire to reframe objects, the pleasing rhythm of sameness and difference, ambition to achieve perfection, extending the self, reaffirming the body, producing gender-identity, achieving immortality! (p102)

-Bal notes that some of these motivations require wealth e.g. aesthetics…can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency…[Pierre Bourdieu, fn13] (p103)

– Bal quotes W. Durose: If the predominant value is aesthetically pleasing it is not a collection. But, if it bears a relation to some other object e.g. one of a series, it is a collection. (p111)

– replotting an existing collection….the objects as signs become radically different. (p112) [eg changing a book collection from alphabetical by author to arrangement by content; or a stamp collection from by country to by theme e.g. animals].

– If completion is possible, perfection is dangerous. (p113)

– Perfection, the equivalent of death in the sense that it can only be closely approximated, not achieved ‘during the life time’ of the subject, is one of those typically elusive objects of desire like happiness….

In chapter 6 Nicholas Thomas, senior research fellow in anthropology at ANU writes about the nature of traditional museum methods of displaying collections. He writes about the fetishism, the lack of context and dehumanising factors involved in the collection of native items during early European exploratory voyages to Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific including Cook’s journeys. He is equally critical of the clinical display of such objects without context in C19th European museums and presentation documents.

Challenging the almost sacred vision of James Cook’s work and that of Robert Banks, his naturalist on his first journey, in the annals of Australian history, Thomas is quite critical of Cook’s voyages. He describes them as dedicated to the disclosure of the novel, and shifted restlessly from one discovery to the next, in a fashion reminiscent of Burke’s giddy curiosity, but affected a “great command’ through its assertiveness with respect to novelties, expressed graphically in charts and coastal profiles… (p128). Thomas draws attention even more strongly to the failings of Robert Banks to adopt an appropriate scientific discipline….The editor of Cook’s account, John Hawkesworth, was less circumspect than he might have been in alluding to the sexual contacts between the sailors and Tahitian women, and the prominence of Banks in his account suggested to many readers that Bank’s botany was fraudulent, ‘that he was more interested in exotic women than exotic plants.’ Banks’ doubtful behaviour was satirised on his return for example in the satirical verses entitled Transmigration, which read in part:

Ye who o’er Southern Oceans wander

With simpling B——ks or S——r;

Who so familiarly describe

The frolicks of the wanton Tribe,

And think that simple Fornication

Requires no form of palliation… (p129)

Thomas further notes the presentation of dislocated and out of context Chinese and Iranian artefacts in the early drawings by John and Andrew van Rymsdyk as presented in the British Museum….The giddy and random vision that this eclecticism prompted is distinctly Borgesian. (p134).

Thomas further draws attention to the fact that in addition to the scientific work of “scientific” men like Robert Banks many ordinary sailors were busy collecting their own supply of native curiosities …it is clear …that many common sailors acquired substantial collections, often with a view to sale at home. [p135]; The availability of these on-sold objects appearing on the open market would again be presumably without geographic or scientific context. The whole article draws attention to the different motives behind collections…especially formal museum collections …the curious, the scientist, the true connnoisseur, the commercial, the licentious….Even the triumph of capitalism did not enable this shadow of commerce to transcend the ambiguous licence of an endless, rapacious, unstable and competitive pursuit of novel objects.

In chapter 7 Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann, Princeton Professor in the Dept of Art and Archaeology writes about the treasuries and collections of the Hapsburgs as a precursor to Museum collections.

The Hapsburg treasury goes back at least to the rule of Duke Rudolf 1V of Hapsburg in the C14th whose records refer to keeping family property together, undivided by bequests; we also have information about the second Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Albrecht 11 whose historical records refer to a jewellery collection and in addition references to ornaments, silver plate, documents, insignia, royal regalia, crowns, sceptres, orbs and sacramental relics, books, reliquaries, as well as works of art. These collections were reorganised by Frederick 111 Hapsburg (ruled1440-93) and his successor Maximilian 1 (1493-1519) through new impulses transmitted from Burgundy and Italy. Justifications for a doctrine of magnificence were able to be found in Aristotle’s Ethics! and the hapsburgs were influenced by the example of the rulers of Medicean Florence and Aragonese Naples who justified the notion of expenditure on objects not just for their use but for their splendour, rarity or expense, thereby expanding the reputation of a prince. Jacobo Pontano of Naples thought that magnificence could be demonstrated by collecting objects such as bronzes, tapestries, furniture, carpets, carved ivory, precious boxes, books, vessels made of rock crystal, gold, onyx and other precious stones.

The Hapsburg collections were further refined by Ferdinand 1 and his brother Charles V, Holy Roman Emperors of the C16th where the term kunstkammer referring to a work of art (kunst) began to take over from schatzkammer (treasury). Ferdinand 11 maintained and added to the collection including a library and a collection of arms and armour. (a rustkammer). The collection was continued under the reign of Maximilian 11 and reached a peak in the reign of his son Rudolf 11 (reigned 1576-1612) developed at the Hradčany Palace in Prague which included formal gardens, wild animals, tamed deer and aviaries.

Kaufmann notes that Rudolf’s possession of a universal collection could symbolically represent his claims to mastery of the macrocosm of the greater world, and over the body politic of which he was sovereign. There was also an occult element to this collection….the sort of Hermetic project encouraged by Francis Bacon and reflected in some of Newton’s studies. The Hapsburg collection was diminished by the Thirty Years War but continued in the C17th under the Ferdinand 111 who ruled to 1657 and by now included a coin collection. During the reign of Emperor Leopold 1 (1658-1705) another collection was established in Vienna with an emphasis on northern European paintings and sculptures. Kaufmann notes that these tendencies came to fruition in the C18th with Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach [who] adumbrated an independent history of architecture….Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten [who] developed a philosophical aesthetics, …Gotthold Ephraim Lessing [who] laid the ground for an independent criticism of the visual arts …and Johann Joachim Winckelmann [who] established an independent history of art. (p147)

During the reign of Charles VI (died 1740), [the impact of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) ], ..a rationalized and orderly approach continued to be applied to the collections….some of the collections were even made accessible to the public…Fundamental transformation in the organisation of the collection had to wait until the reigns of Maria Theresa (d.1780) and Joseph 11 (d.1790) with new positions including a “Schatzmeistev”, a gallery inspector and other curators. In Maria Theresa’s reign and independent public picture gallery was established and the collections were organised with new goals resulting from the imposition of what could be called modern rational principles of organisation. Educational or didactic goals, rather than a quest for rarity or a desire for splendour became the norm. (p148f)

Before the Musée Napoleon, the British Museum or the Altes Museum in Berlin, a public museum was created in Vienna that was devoted to the presentation a separate category of visual art….The importance of these innovations may be insufficiently appreciated, perhaps because their further consequences for both the museum and academic milieux were somewhat slow to be realised due to the Napoleonic wars and the era of reaction that set in after Prince Metternic’s direction after 1815. (p151). It remains clear that the succesion of Hapsburg rulers who maintained the royal collections from the C14th can be genuinely regarded as the forerunners of the modern museum culture.

John Elsner, an editor of the whole book and Lecturer in classical art at the amazing Courtauld Institute (study centre and art gallery) in London wrote chapter 8 called A Collector’s Model of Desire: the House and Museum of Sir John Soane.

Sir John Soane, (1753-1837) was a major British architect and artist who designed many of the C18th and early C19th civic buildings of London. He was also an avid collector of art (amazing Canaletto and Hogarth and much more) and European historical artifacts and books especially the sculpture and artifacts of classical history. His collection was donated to the nation on condition that it remained in his house in Lincoln’s Inn and that it be kept in its original state and order that he left it. I have been several times to this house museum and it is a truly wondrous place of joy, delight and awe for collectors. Eisner’s rather jaundiced view is that Soane wanted this memorial to himself to stand egotistically as evidence that he himself was the C19th successor to the classical architects of old and his British forerunners like Wren and that the arrangement of his three storied collection is designed to prove this case. Whilst I am sure that Soane had his normal share of egotism which belongs naturally to “the great” my own view is that this collection has a unique charm and power in its original setting and it is a wonderful privilege to have a glimpse into Soane’s passions, gifts and interests displayed just as he himself wanted. Soane is the collector’s collector and in my view one of the greats and a must see for anyone interested in history and art who gets to London.

Anthony Alan Shelton wrote Chapter 9 in this collection of collections. His topic is Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the Incorporation of the New World. Shelton notes that some scholars thought of mediaeval attitudes and modes of persisting through the ‘Middle Ages’ from the third century A D to the mid-nineteenth century. Nevertheless all sides agree that the discovery of the “new world” made a significant impact on Renaissance thinking. Shelton comments that cosmological uncertainty shadows the difference behind, and organisation of, Renaissance collections that attempted to incorporate representations of the fourth continent. (p177)

Shelton comments that the Mediaevals traditionally attributed marvellous and exceptional craftsmanship to communion with the divinely sanctioned order or the world (p180). On the other hand the mediaeval world also saw the marvellous as including contingent and altogether exceptional events. (p180). In particular William of Ockham, who denied the existence of any cosmic order or chain of being that linked phenomena or events. According to Ockham, objects had only a nominal existence, and were unregulated by the mind of God. (p180)

For collectors of a nominalist persuasion, what was important were curiosities, rare or near-unique phenomena that were thought to have resulted from some exceptional condition or circumstance….collections of this kind flourished from c.1550, began to wane in the seventeenth century, and by 1750 were very rare indeed. (p180). Renowned collections included those of Ulisse Aldrovandi at Bologna who used his collection for teaching and research, (p185); Antonia Giganti and the University of Leiden. Other collections included those of the Copenhagen Museum and the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Museum of Ferdinando Cospi in Bologna.

The perfection of the secularised model of the encyclopaedic ideal was achieved by the Medici when Francisco 1 became Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1574..[who] put his collections on public display in the newly bullt Uffizi Palace in Florence….a representation of creation that allowed each princely ruler symbolically to claim his dominion over the world as a means of glorifying and celebrating a family’s influence, and legitimating its titles and position (p186)….This transfer to the public gallery of sumptuous private property, paralleling a change in its perception from souvenirs to the ‘great world’ metaphor, consecrating collection as an expression of the worthiness of an individual life. (p187).

This highly academic article proceeds to demonstrate with how much difficulty European collectors and the public struggled to cope with New World artifacts and works of art that were not modelled in gold or precious stones but were in fact uniques and highly creative works of heart requiring enormous artistic skill and merit. A particular example is that of feather costumes and other exceptional items made of feathers which the “old world” did not value and managed to lose or destroy. On the other hand exceptional articles made of gold and precious metals from the new world were often sent back in vast quantities to Europe as “tribute” to European overlords seeking to avoid annihilation.

Much of this work was melted down and re-made in a European tradition and the protection of the new world was most usually not completed. In particular Motecuhzoma 11 sent to the Spanish explorer and overlord over 13 massive collections of gold and precious items in a vain bid to save his civilisation from rapacious Spanish acquisition. In addition to the treasures from Mexico the conquest of Peru in 1533 yielded further quantities of Indian bounty. The objects obtained by Pizarro from the ransom of Atahualpa alone were said to be sufficient to fill a room 25 feet long and 15 feet wide even when piled higher than the upraised arms of a tall man. P195)….none of the Peruvian artefacts from this period are thought to have survived. Much of the state treasure formerly belonging to Axayacatl was melted down and cast into ingots, while the jewellery was ‘undone and taken to pieces.’ (p197)

Shelton’s article moves forward to demonstrate that individual items of “paganism” from the New World were collected and analysed in Europe ..to consciously substitute the terms of the indigenous discourse to those commensurate with sixteenth-century Europe. (p202)…The subordination of accurate cultural data to the vastly more important need to demonstrate the inclusiveness of paganism created an apparent homogeneity between the different high civilizations of the Americas, as well as blurring the their distinctions from other ‘pagan’ cultures. (p202)

Whether they mirrored the God-centred universe inherited by the Renaissance, or the emergent man-centred, pragmatic world manipulated by merchant princes and aristocrats, cabinets expressed a visual image of the inclusiveness of the European view of the world and its facile ability to incorporate and domesticate potentially transgressive worlds and customs. The truly marvellous and extraordinary accomplishment of mediaeval thought was that it made marvellousness itself a category of the mundane. (p203)

This article I found perhaps the most depressing of the analyses in this collection by reminding me of my own love of European culture and the danger of thinking of European hegemony over thought and art as the only way to look at this world of wonder and delight.

Chapter 10 in this collection is written by Susan Stewart, Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia who writes on literary and aesthetic theory. Her particular interest here is the extraordinary life of the multi-talented revolutionary soldier, propagandist, civic official, engraver, museum keeper, zoologist, botanist, inventor, painter and founder of the first American museum…Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) (p205)

Charles Willson Peale is probably the most amazing single life described in this collection of essays which has already dealt with some very amazing folk. It is difficult to imagine anyone with the multifarious talents and courage and self-belief of Charles Willson Peale. Perhaps William Morris or Benjamin Franklin are the only other individuals that immediately spring to mind as bearing comparison.

Stewart notes that there is a passage underlined in a copy of Rouseau’s Emile that was once owned by Peale, which urges teachers never to substitute representation for reality, or shadow for substance, but to teach only from actual objects and the underlining is probably in Peale’s hand. (p209).

Peale’s Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures of 1800 is perhaps the fullest statement of his philosophy of collecting. He links himself in a great chain of largely unrecognised founders of national museums, from the Alexandrian library and repository of Ptolemy Philadephus (a kind of historical pun on his own name and location) to contemporary British and Continental museums. (p217).

Stewart notes in conclusion of this essay…Peale develops his museum as an antidote to war’s losses and as a gesture against disorder and the extinction of knowledge. In this nexus of motion and emotion, arrested life and animation, loss and memory, that Peale has bequeathed to us we can begin to recollect, with both a sense of difference and sense of urgency, a central issue regarding representation. (p223) I felt impelled to add, after reading of Peale’s life (he was a Deist)…a sense of a deeper pool, a wider vision, a longing for eternity, a sure and certain hope of resurrection life in the eternal kingdom of God. This is a man we need to know more about!

Chapter 11 in this collection is written by John Forrester, Cambridge Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science and discusses Sigmund Freud and his collection of Egyptian artifacts.

Sigmund Freud, arch demystifier of religion and darling of the liberal left surprised many to learn that throughout his life he amassed a substantial collection of over 3000 Renaissance, ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Chinese sculptures and other figures. Freud criticised one of his biographers, Austrian Stefan Zweig, for the emphasis he placed ‘on the element of petit-bourgeois correctness in my person’ (p228) and responded by saying, amongst other things I have actually read more archaeology than psychology…(p229). Forrester notes that his daughter Anna fostered the transformation from living collection into dead museum by preserving Freud’s study, with his collection intact and untouched over four decades. (p229).

Timms and Segal, who edited a collection of studies of Freud in exile in London (1988) noted that when Freud parted with most of his professional library when forced to leave Germany, very few books on archaeology or editions of the classics were sold—an indication of what lay closest to his heart. (noted in Forrester p296 fn6)

The majority of historians agree that the death of Freud’s father was a major turning-point in his life and work, precipitating him into a neurotic crisis of self-doubt and obliging him to undertake his self-analysis. (p232)….Beginning with the father’s death …Freud’s collection of antiquities elegantly demonstrates how a collection can symbolise the battle of life within death, of life being infiltrated by death, of a space cleared for the expression of this battle by the objects the collector has chosen as his personal representatives. (p232)

Freud himself wrote about the collector who directs his surplus libido onto the inanimate objective love of things. (p236) and that some collectors talk to their collections, just as dog-owners talk to their dogs. Forrester notes that Freud is a collector of farts and grimaces, an archeologist of rubbish avant la letter, as well as a collector of the fading, yet precious detritus of Western civilisation. The public Freud, with his reputation for shocking, distasteful and immoral claims about all human beings; the private Freud, with his well-ordered life and his bourgeois collection of culturally respectable art objects….how could the founder of the quintessentially modernist movement that is psychoanalysis have had such unimpeachably conservative taste in art?….this criticism has often been illustrated by referring to Freud’s own confessions of his inability to appreciate beauty in art in any other way than by analysing and understanding it. (p239)

Forrester notes that collections of jokes and dream texts must, without the benefit of hindsight, rank with stamp collecting and bottle-top collecting as narrowly conceived and single-mindedly eccentric. (p241). In Freud’s defence against eccentricity, Forrester notes that collected antiquities represent the first appearance of Freud’s vision of his work as embodying essential elements of the cultural traditions to which he was selfconsciously heir. Winckelmann the archaeologist; Goethethe worshipper of Italy; Akhenaten the founder of monotheism; Moses the Egyptian; Aeschylus the teller of ancient family tragedies; and Athena, representative of justice, mercy and wisdom: all these are embodied in the collection of objects, and it is their possession that realises Freud’s desire to be a universal and public citizen of this world, walking through the Museum of history and culture. (p241)

…all of Freud’s collections were permeated by a public and enlightenment ideal….like all other ideals, it was revealed as an illusion by the First World War.

The remainder of Forrester’s analysis of Freud’s collections is an attempt to demonstrate the value of his collections to illustrate his psycho-analytical techniques. The degree to which the reader will find this analysis persuasive will depend on the value placed by the reader on Freudian psycho-analysis. I personally find Forrester’s argument unconvincing..but then I would, wouldn’t I!

The final essay in this collection of essays on collecting is written by Duke University Romance Studies and Literature Professor Naomi Schor and is called Collecting Paris. It focusses on her personal collection of magnificent black and white Paris postcards of the belle epoch.

Schor’s essay is a useful summary of the whole collection. She begins with a very helpful analysis of the ideas of German/Jewish philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin who channelled Proust in arguing that most closely approximates that of the author in that collecting and especially (though not exclusively) book-collecting involves the retrieval and ordering of things past; (p252) Schor quotes a Benjamin lecture: ‘every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.’ (p252)

Schor notes that ..collecting, is for Benjamin a form of psychotherapy, a healing anamnesis, a means of re-membering his fragmented past (p253) ..and that act is figured as profoundly magical. (p254)

Schor usefully re-summarises the “phallo-centric” view of collectors demonstrated by Jean Beaudrillard and Susan Stewart’s distinction between souvenir and collection.

Schor’s belle epoch postcard collection beautifully illustrated in this book demonstrates the recording of a place in time, in this case Paris, arguable the world’s most visited city. Schor notes that being and collecting are intimately related (p259) The poignant part of this collection is her ambivalent relationship with Paris having Jewish parents who fled Poland to Paris and then fled Paris successfully to Spain (sadly unlike Walter Benjamin who was caught at the Spanish border). The anti-semitism rife in Paris leading up to and during World War 11 conflicts deeply with her architectural and lifestyle love affair with Paris as demonstrated in belle epoch post-cards. The essay doubles as a useful history of post-cards…a major collection area for many. Along the way Schor notes that post-card collecting is largely a feminine affair…men do not write post-cards to each other. (p262).

In a way Schor’s essay is a fitting conclusion to this collection of collections because it demonstrates that collecting fulfils many important functions central to human existence, eccentric and at times chaotic though many collectors may be.