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My Kind of Church - the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

The Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. A gleaming wonder of white walls. Wide, open plan rooms. A string quartet softly playing in one wing, a flute concet in another and at some point, the lilting strains of a soprano. There is something utterly calm and peaceful about an art gallery; people taking time out of their busy lives just to sit and look at the paintings. The paintings in the Gemäldegalerie stretch from the Medieval era through to the 18th Century, leaving the 19th Century and beyond for the Neue Nationalgalerie next door. The Medieval paintings, from the dark ages of the last millenia, mostly depict grim religious scenes or two dimensional faces leafed in gold, but the real gems in the collection appear after the Middle Ages, and especially in the Dutch paintings at the back of the gallery. The collection includes a plethora of famous artists: works by Dürer, Titian, Vermeer, Velasquez, Canaletto, Gainsborough and Rembrandt gaze at us from the walls, so recognisable and yet such a shock in reality. I always feel moved when I see great art, and especially famous art. The the faces which have felt so familiar, and the compositions which are lodged somewhere deep in our consciousnesses greet us like old friends, at the same time as they shock us afresh with their mastery. The paintings really speak to me. The eyes of Dürer's old man look questioningly, suspiciously towards me; Susanna (below) is embarrassed to be caught getting out of the bath, but also flirtatiously proud of her gleaming, naked body, and the couple in Vermeer's masterpiece (above left) carry on their modest courting blissfully oblivious to the myriad eyes boring down on them from the gallery floor. It is strangely moving to recognise the inescapable humanity of these characters. The artists did not just paint from models or puppets, but from life. We see the emotion of the characters and recognise it as the same we possess. As I wander around the gallery, I recognise more and more that people have been the same since time began. Although we are separated by hundreds of years, I am being given the privilege of staring into the emotional lives of the subjects of these paintings.
The gallery also brought home to the the genius of the artists we now consider to be "great" The paintings of Rembrandt glow with an inner light, his characters resonate with emotion and thought. We picked his paintings out of all those on the gallery walls, without knowing the artist. Vermeer's clean lines and the telling body language of his characters surpass all his imitators: when coupled with his unerring colour sense and his use of rich textiles his painting actually made me gasp when I saw it hanging. The Gemäldegalerie is perhaps the closest I will ever come to knowing what philosphers mean by the sublime: I felt inspired, awed by the acheivements of men, and moved by the realisation that man is unchanging throughout the centuries, strong and weak in equal measure. I also realised that for me, the art gallery is my church. I have no belief in God or the soul, I don't think my body will carry on after I die and I disagree strongly with the ethics of organised religion. Nevertheless, churches have always given me a feeling of peace. This may be becuase a church is a place where people come to be still and quiet, to reflect and to pause, just as an art gallery is. It may be becuase a church is usually a huge building, full of beautiful art and objects, just as an art gallery is. I also love the sense of history, of the years stretching back until we can see into the past, which I feel in art galleries just as much as churches. The gallery is open late on Thursday nights, and I think next Thursday I will relish wandering through the whitewashed rooms, alive with faces from history watching me out of the corners of their eyes.

Judging the Quick (and the Dead)

"Never judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins" Native American Proverb

I have been thinking a lot lately about whether it is possible to make any kind of moral judgement about anyone. This is partly because Hen has been filling me in on the delights of genetics, which suggests that our characters are in part formed through our genes. It is also partly because I have been reading Rabbi Marc Gellman's column in Newsweek. This has led me to think a bit about God, heaven and hell, and the way in which God purportedly comes to judge the living and the dead and section us off into good and bad, lucky sheep and unfortunate goats. This has always seemed to me an unfortunate analogy: goats cannot help being goats, and in the same way, sheep are not really responsible for their innate sheepish nature. Goats are wild and free becuase they are made that way, and sheep follow a shepherd (or one another) because it is in their nature to do so.

It seems to me, that people are not really so different from these sheep and goats. Each person is a product of his genetic make-up, which he cannot change, a product of his upbringing and history (i.e. nurture), which he also cannot change, and a product of his circumstances, which are again usually beyond his control. These factors combine in many different ratios to produce a finished person with a certain character - a propensity for anger, a compassionate nature, or a tendency to give up easily, for example. In order to suggest that a person has any "free will" or ability to combat these influential factors, we need to posit a self-determined force, an individual spirit independent of nature, nurture and circumstance.

This is getting quite philosophical, so let me give an example. Take, for instance, a jobless man. His lack of a job may be put down to laziness. There are obviously many other reasons why he might be unemployed, but let's keep it simple for now. Why might he be lazy? Firstly, he might have laziness inbuilt in his genes- his father and grandfather were lazy, he has inherited their laziness. Is this his fault? Could he overcome it? Perhaps, if he was sufficiently taught by, for instance, his mother, how to overcome his laziness. If he didn't have a helpful mother, however, is this his fault? He could not change his upbringing but perhaps he could find a mentor elsewhere, in the form of a teacher or friend? This is down to chance or circumstance, and is again, not his fault.

Are we, then, never to be blamed for our actions? Is there not a spark of individuality in each of us which can be held responsible for everything which we choose to do? Can an angry man teach himself to be calmer, or a lazy man force himself to struggle out of his inertia? Perhaps, but if his ability to do this is not inbuilt into his genes or taught him at some stage in his life then where does it come from? From that inner voice which urges us to do better, the conscience which pushes us away from bad deeds and towards good ones? And is this not taught us at some point in life, through our parents or our teachers or the media? Is our access to these influences not also governed by luck?

I find these questions very difficult to answer, and the answer I always come to is the same: we are all products of chance, and our luck is assigned to us by fate, leaving us almost powerless to change it. This doesn't mean I will stop trying to be a better person, or that I will encourage people not to try to better themselves. It does mean, however, that at the end of the day, we are stuck with our genetically created, impressionable, bodies and our free will is limited, if not non existent.

I do not believe in a soul, but perhaps if I did, this would answer the problem - God's gift to us of free will allows us to create our own destiny. Even if this was my belief, however, I think i would find it a bit difficult to accept that I had total free will - when I couldn't help bursting into tears, for example, or saw a kid who lacked the self-control to be quiet in class because he had never been taught to listen. If God really sorts the sheep from the goats on the last day, I think this is grossly unfair. Since God knew exactly how each human being would turn out, he deliberately created some sheep and some goats; some bad and some good humans; and condemned the goats to hell before he even put them on earth.

I think the North American proverb is very apt - we can never judge another person until we have actually inhabited their mental space. If I had the same genetic makeup, upbringing and life as Hitler, who is to say I wouldn't do exactly the same as he did. And as God's own son told us,

first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye

One cake too many??

Me: I've got fat, haven't I?

Hen: What particular part of your chubbiness are you referring to?

Way to make me feel better hunny.....

March of the Affectionate (but not spiritually aware) Penguins

Zrenneh on his post 'The March of the Penguins' discussed Rabbi Marc Gellman's article,'The March of the Loving Penguins'. In his article, Gellman debated the ability of penguins to love, and came to the conclusion that although penguins were able to exhibit animal lust and self-sacrifice, they could not actually fall in love. This post is an extension to Zrenneh's counter argument.

Rabbi Gellman's argument has one major flaw. In arguing that penguins cannot experience love, he fails to define the word 'love', hence making his claim impossible to support.

Love is clearly a very difficult concept to pin down to a single definition, but in order for language to be meaningful, a broad agreement on the meaning of the individual words needs to be reached. The Merriam Webster online dictionary gives many ,meanings for the word, but the primary definition of the verb 'to love' is:

1 a (1) : strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties (maternal love for a child)
(2) : attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers
(3) : affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests

In 'The March of the Penguins', the penguins demonstrate all three of these forms of love:
(1) Strong affection based on close personal ties: the mother for the child (evidenced by her selfless nurturing of it), the penguinfor its partner (evidenced by the penguins' cooperation and the personal depravation endured for one another's benefit).
(2) Attraction based on sexual desire: although we may argue that this is only instinctive animal lust, such instinctive animal lust accounts for a great many human sexual encounters and is a large part of the human, as well as the animal, genetic make-up.
(3) Affection based on common interests, i.e. that of looking after their child. The cooperation exhibited by the penguins could teach many modern parents the benefits of working towards a common goal in harmony rather than in conflict.

Rabbi Gellman's only attempt at justifying his rejection of the concept of penguin love is the following:

"Penguins don't plight their troth to one another for fish or no fish, for colder or really colder, for seas full of krill or seas full of leopard seals."

What he appears to be suggesting here, is that love is not really love unless it is everlasting and able to surmount all obstacles. This is manifestly not the case, not only for penguins but also for humans. Literature has taught us that the greatest loves may only be temporary: Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Rhett Butler are proofs that it is just as easy to fall out of love as it is to fall in love. In addition, rising divorce rates in the Western world indicate just how many people declare their love to be everlasting, only to discover that it is not. Very few people suggest that this calls into question the validity of the emotion in the first place.

Perhaps Rabbi Gellman's real problem with the concept of penguins falling in love arises, not out of their lack of eternal committment to one another, but from their inability to love an abstract being, that is, God. As a Jew, Gellman focuses throughout his article on the unique ability of humankind to love. Perhaps it is this abstract, spiritual love which is lacking in penguins and leads Gellman to abandon altogether the notion of penguin love. Whatever Gellman's reasoning, it is clear that, although there are possibly several types of love which penguins probably do not experience, there are also many types (illustrated by the Merriam Webster definitions) which penguins do demonstrate. To say that 'The March of the Penguins' is a story about love is a fair summary. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning so neatly pointed out, there are many different ways to exhibit love, and the penguins on the icy wastelands of Antarctica certainly seem adept at exhibiting many of these.