Review

Books

Culture

Wildness

25 October 2024

6 min read

My open letter to Sally Rooney: dilatasti cor meum

You enlarge my heart.

James K.A. Smith

James is a philosopher, cultural critic and author.

A book cover depicts a yellow and white chessboard with pieces casting shadows of people.

This is silly, I realize. You’ll never see this. But I’ve just finished Intermezzo and I’m not sure what else to do with the bright sadness upon finishing it.

I can’t imagine I am your anticipated reader. I have children your age, for heaven’s sake. You write from, and about, worlds that are, in some ways, a foreign country for me. Sometimes I read your novels like Lévi-Strauss’s field notes from his years with the Nambikwara, describing the practices and rituals and mores of some foreign tribe—except that tribe includes my own children and the students I encounter everyday. Sometimes this makes me feel very old, and tired, and a little bit sad. Not in a judgmental way. I can’t imagine how hard it is to be 23 years old today. I feel badly about the world we’ve bequeathed to the twenty- and thirtysomethings that populate your novels. Your novels give me a glimpse into how they experience it. Which is what I love about the best fiction—the way it is a technology of mindreading, teleporting us into another’s perspective.

I don’t know, maybe it’s weird and kinda creepy that an old man like me gobbles up a novel like Intermezzo. Like a kind of voyeurism. I hope not. Because, in the end, what you achieve is at once the construction and revelation of a human world. And as Terence said, nothing human is alien to me.

This will sound crazy, but from the very first pages of Intermezzo I found myself reading with a strange sort of ache in my heart. Not a pain as much as a held-breath sense of ekstasis, of being stretched and pulled out of myself. I think now I’d say I was responding to what I can only describe as the tenderness you show your characters. I don’t mean for a second that you shrink from portraying their brokenness, even their brutality at times. But only that as you track their mystery and monstrosity you situate all of it in their ineradicable humanity. And in contemporary fiction, that is rarer than some might think. It speaks to me of a fullness that characterizes the matrix of your imagination, from which these characters were born. You don’t let them escape judgment; but that judgment comes from their own social worlds, not the caustic condescension of you as the narrator. This is where your mastery of free indirect speech is so uncanny: you stay near your characters, you listen closely, but somehow in the alchemy of your prose even their own harsh self-judgment is portrayed with tenderness and understanding.

Honestly, it reminds me a lot of how the mystical tradition portrays God, that Creator of all creators, the Narrator who is in love with every feeble creature, every loathable antihero, which is to say every single one of us, protagonists in dramas we don’t realize. There’s this marvelous line in The Cloud of Unknowing where the medieval sage says, “It is not who you are or what you’ve been that God sees with his merciful eyes, but what you want to be.” This will make you cringe, but your narration echoes that. You see what Peter and Ivan want to be. And in so doing, you help me look at all the human beings around me with the same sort of eyes. Or at least I want to be that person.

OK, this is, like, crazy word association, but as I was reading Intermezzo a line of prayer kept coming to mind. You might know it. It’s from the Psalms. It’s part of Prime, the first hour of the Divine Office. St. Teresa of Ávila talks about it a lot. Dilatasti cor meum. You enlarge my heart. You dilate my heart. You widen the scope of what my heart can take in and absorb. This, in the end, is what Intermezzo does. For me, at least.

It’s funny, you know. I finished the second half of the novel while I was attending the annual conference of the Hegel Society. (I thought you’d get a chuckle out of that.) So in the margins of Intermezzo I have scribbled notes like: Recognition! Master/slave dialectic!3 But it’s really not so crazy, is it, because, like Hegel, you seem to intuit how much we long to be seen, to be recognized, and why that means passing through the crucible of forgiveness to achieve reconciliation. This is why I think you are attuned to a below-the-surface rumbling in your generation that, against all the forces of capital and Distraction, Inc. and just the bullshit of consumer nihilism, can’t quite shake a yearning, or at least a wondering, if there’s something more—something like “meaning” or significance we could feel pulled into. I love it that, in Intermezzo, this culminates in a vision of community. (I’m trying not to spoil anything here, since, ahem, my wife hasn’t been able to finish the book yet.) Being known, being seen, being forgiven, being loved. Belonging.

My aforementioned (long suffering, forgiving) wife loves a song by the Highwomen called “Crowded Table.” She plays it full blast in our kitchen when she’s preparing for dinners when she gathers beloveds near. “I want a house with a crowded table / and a place by the fire for everyone.” I thought of the bridge of the song at the end of Intermezzo.

Everyone’s a little broken
And everyone belongs.

I finished your book on a packed train from Boston to Philadelphia and decided not to be embarrassed that I was weeping. The older I get, the more paternal I become, I’m realizing. I don’t think that’s an expression of control or “paternalism” in the negative sense. At least I hope not. It’s more that the older our kids get, more of the world is filled with people who look like the children I love. I don’t mean that I infantilize them, either. I treasure the adults they’ve become.

I’m not describing this very well. What I’m trying to say is, I am just an inveterate dad. I can’t help it. So as much as I read your novel as a scholar or a philosopher or a fellow human, I couldn’t help reading it as a dad. And when I spent time with Peter and Ivan and Sylvia and Naomi, I just wanted for them what I want for my own children and their spouses—for them to know they are loved and held dear and for them to find their people. It’s silly and sappy, but I wanted to talk to Ivan and Peter and tell them: It’s possible. There is still love in the world. Even more incredibly: there is forgiveness. Intermezzo has the audacity to not only hope this but to portray it. I know it costs you something to do so in a literary world that prizes cynicism and distance.

Maybe I wept at the end of Intermezzo because it was as much a mirror as an icon. Despite the generational gap, you gave me occasion to see my own life reflected back to me. In the mirror is an us (“The I that is we and the we that is I,” as Hegel put it). I look in the mirror of longing & hope that is your novel, and looking back I see my wife, Deanna, who has been forgiving me for over 35 years, letting me know I am beloved. And we’re surrounded by our children, the overflowing of our own love, these children who have become such dear friends, who have forgiven me more times than I can count. And in that mirror their spouses are alongside them, our dream come true—the beloveds they have found who forgive them and welcome them home over and over again. It’s a crowded table. And there’s always more room. Everybody’s a little broken, and everybody belongs.

I guess what I want to say is: I admire your courage to write a novel that tells the truth—that love gets the last word because it is the first word that speaks us all into being, the origin of the world.

Gratefully,

A reader

This article first appeared as a post on James K.A. Smith's Quid Amo Substack. Reproduced by kind permission.

Article

Art

Culture

10 February 2025

5 min read

Why is religious art still popular?

What looters, curators and today's public find in a genre that survives the centuries.

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A painting depicts a man a prophet pointing skywards while another person sleeps on the ground

Detail from Parmigianino’s The Vision of St Jerome.

The National Gallery.

The museums of Europe and North America are filled with religious art. Why? Certainly, gallery goers of the nineteenth century, when many public museums were founded, were more likely to practice a faith than visitors in today’s global cities, but this does not explain religious art’s continuing appeal. If we are so much more secular than the folks in stiff collars and leg ‘o mutton sleeves who curated and donated to early museum collections, why is the religious art they championed still so popular?

Individual religious paintings’ chequered history, together with the formal elements of their composition, provide two lenses into the genre’s ability to resonate across multiple generations.

Celebrations around the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary, with its reappraisal of the earliest works to enter the collection, offers an ideal time to study the blueprints for public collections, which continue to shape the art we see today. The French Revolution is popularly credited as the genesis of public art institutions, as the art and fine furniture from displaced aristocrat’s palaces was put on display at the Louvre, opened in 1793. But the idea of a semi-public art collections had been present in Italy from the early eighteenth century, as families opened their palazzos and collections of classical art to visitors on the Grand Tour. Rome’s Capitoline Museum opened in 1734, as the papacy saw an opportunity to showcase the heritage of ancient Rome to the city’s wealthy tourists, and position themselves in the role of art patrons.

At the National Gallery, Parmigianino’s The Vision of St Jerome, 1526-1527, (reunited for the first time with rare preparatory drawings until 9 March) pulls on many of the threads that makes religious art, even in a secular age, enduringly powerful.

Painted when Parmigianino was only 24, and already being hailed as ‘Raphael reborn’, the painting is reputed to have stopped looting soldiers in their tracks, when they saw it in the artist’s studio during the 1527 Sack of Rome. The painting itself had an adventurous life, spending far longer in secular surroundings than it ever did in the religious settings it was intended for.

Commissioned as an altarpiece for a funerary chapel in Rome, the upheaval of the city’s occupation by the troops of Charles V saw The Vision of St Jerome stored, but not publicly displayed, in the refectory of a nearby church. Somehow during the terror and mayhem, the 3.5 metres high altarpiece, weighing nearly 100 kilograms, was transported from the artist’s studio across the city to safety.

Thirty years later a great nephew of the original woman patron, Maria Bufalini, took the altarpiece from Rome to the family’s Umbrian hometown of Citta di Castello. Had it instead gone to its intended Roman church San Salvatore in Lauro, it would have been destroyed by the church fire of 1591. The Vision of St Jerome stayed in the family chapel of Sant’Agostino, inspiring artists from the region, until around 1772 when Cardinal Giovanni Bufalini moved the altarpiece to the restored Palazzo Bufalini, placing a copy in Sant’Agostino. If the original stayed in the church it would have been ruined by an earthquake in 1789.

Having spent just over 200 years in a sacred setting, the painting was sold by the Bufalini heirs to an English art agent in Rome, setting sail from Livorno in December 1791 for its new life in England.

After inheriting Parmigianino’s Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene (1535-40), George Watson Taylor, with his heiress wife Anna, added The Vision of Saint Jerome to the significant private art collection, displayed at their London Townhouse in Cavendish Square. In 1819 the painting was exhibited publicly in England for the first time when Watson Taylor lent it the British Institution, the forerunner of the National Gallery.

Four years later the painting fetched £3,202 at the sale of Watson Taylor’s collection, securing a higher price than Rubens’ Rainbow Landscape. It was purchased by the Reverend William Holwell Carr on behalf of the British Institution. The Vision of Saint Jerome hung in the National Gallery within two years of the institution’s foundation.

Once part of the nation’s collection, the mannerist style of Parmigianino, with its elongated limbs, twisted torsos, classical drapery and foreshortened perspective, provided a context to discuss the Biblical figures depicted in the work. A loosely draped, seated Virgin Mary holds a tussle haired child between her knees, who kicks one leg out, as if to step away. Beneath them John the Baptist points a massive arm towards the heavens, while a smaller scale St Jerome sleeps clutching a crucifix. Regency and Victorian Christians such as Howell Carr, and popular art historians Anna Jameson and Elizabeth Eastlake, wife of the Gallery’s first director Charles, saw the potential of art created 400 years ago to speak to the spiritual questions of their day. Shorn of a traditional religious setting, the message, and missional potential, of the work came across as powerfully as ever.

After surviving war, fire and earthquakes, The Vision of Saint Jerome was relocated to Manod Quarry in Wales from 1941 until the end of World War Two to escape the bombing of London. During this period, the National Gallery brought one painting out of storage to view in the empty Trafalgar Square landmark, the war weary public’s Picture of the Month. The tradition continues today.

For sleep -deprived, food -rationed, scared wartime Londoners Noli me Tangere offered a message of love, loss, transcendence and protection.

The first Picture of the Month, in 1942, was Titian’s Noli me Tangere, c. 1514. In a rather Italianate Garden of Gethsemane, with glowing sun and tumbling hills, Mary reaches out her hand to Christ. Having tended Christ’s crucified body in the tomb, Mary is grieving, and at first believes the figure before her is a gardener. To her astonishment he reveals himself to be the Christ, resurrected from the dead. Titian portrays the bittersweet moment after Christ’s miraculous return, when Mary comprehends that although Christ is present, she can no longer have any human contact with him, represented by her rebuffed gesture of touch. In common with all Christ’s followers, it is time to relinquish his earthly presence. While the kneeling Mary is bound to the earth, the standing Christ figure forms an arc over her, representing his protection of humanity.

For sleep -deprived, food -rationed, scared wartime Londoners Noli me Tangere offered a message of love, loss, transcendence and protection.

Religious art’s continued survival, through eras of supposed indifference, amplifies its specialness and continuing popularity.

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