By John Hirschauer
Thursday, November 14, 2019
If anyone does not accept
representation in art of evangelical scenes, let him be anathema.
If anyone does not salute such
representations as standing for the Lord and His saints, let him be anathema.
— Second Council of Nicaea
Mass literacy is a very modern miracle.
Clerics in the medieval Church did not have the luxury of
literate pew-sitters. They, rather creatively, used the architecture,
sculpture, and paintings in cathedrals to convey the biblical narrative to the
unlettered faithful. Gothic architecture so arrests the modern eye not only for
its structural and formalistic brilliance but also because the ornature itself
narrates the story of salvation.
The climate clerics have erected their own Biblia
pauperum for the unwashed masses in San Francisco. One Atmosphere, an area
non-profit, dedicated a mammoth mural yesterday of the teenage climate activist
Greta Thunberg. The Putinesque
mural, painted on the street-facing side of an urban mid-rise, took an
estimated 700 cans of aerosol spray paint to complete. Hypocrisy? No, says the
non-profit: syncretism. “The finishing details can only be done with spray
paint, but we are using spray cans without CFCs,” the organization said in a
statement. “We are using low pressure cans with a minimal footprint.”
The mural’s financiers seem intent on pushing a sort of
potted theology with the display. The executive director of the non-profit,
Paul Scott, said that Greta Thunberg “is a bright light in a dark time and we
hope people will follow her lead and make some changes.” Not only is Scott a
voice crying out in the wilderness, heralding the virtues of the Thunbergian
project, but he is an outright evangelist for the faith: “We’re hoping to have
other building owners who like this idea and support our objectives and want to
have something similar on their buildings.” Scott hopes the mural will “open up
their hearts and minds to the unbridled conviction of Greta’s message.”
Much has been said on the religious undertones of the
cultish affection many adults have shown this Scandinavian teenager, but the
mural elevates the metaphor to the level of analogy. The aims of the mural’s
financiers mirror those of the Gothic architects: Make sacred truths available
to the feeble masses who, but for the pre-chewed theology rendered in imago
by their clerical superiors, would be unable to engage in the prevailing moral
discourse.
The Gothic architects and the clergy who directed their
artisanal creations had a much stronger case to make about the incompetence of
their audience than do the Thunbergians. The population in the Middle Ages was
largely illiterate and uneducated, if England can be taken as a representative
hub of medieval Christendom — Saint Thomas More in his Apology in 1533 placed
the national English literacy rate at about 40 percent; Latin, the Church’s
universal tongue, was understood by a similar proportion of the bourgeois
merchant class at the time. Both figures suggest that the Church’s preachment
would be inaccessible to the majority of the English people in both Latin and
the vernacular without some sort of visual aid.
In 2019, the once-illiterate masses can read. They’re
just not that interested in what the Thunberg cultists are selling. The
Thunbergian clergy might claim that the public is functionally
illiterate on issues of climate change, but the mural seems to suggest that
they are more interested in selling indulgences than in informing the masses of
the putative virtues of climate conversion. It might be that the great majority
of people are “illiterate” on, for instance, the literature of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the mural is not a Biblia
pauperum of the 2019 IPCC report. It doesn’t reduce the “scientific
literature” down to an image — the mural is not a scatter plot of
computer-generated climate models. Instead, it’s meant to evoke the nagging
guilt one feels for disappointing an earnest, if misguided, child.
Thunberg is drawn with her gaze fixed on passersby,
leering on in perpetual contempt. She’s wearing much the same face she did when
she accused strangers of having “stolen my dreams and my childhood” for,
ostensibly, disagreeing with her proposed remedies to projected changes in
global temperatures. Don’t ruin Greta’s childhood, the image says to the
passerby — turn off your air conditioning. Recycle your beer cans. Limit your
meat intake. Vote for Democrats.
Saint Greta Thunberg is watching.
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