Resolving my feud with the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

I’m planning for this to be the second part of a three part series of my thoughts in discussion with Owen Barfield, a friend and collaborator of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. I recommend you read my first article, Everyone is a Wizard, first but I’ll give some background anyway.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to destroy the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I imagined that it would be like that 1984 Apple commercial, where I’d rush into the chapel, holding an enormous sledge hammer. As security closed in, I’d swing around and heave the hammer into the ceiling, bringing the entire fresco crashing down around me. Fortunately for my future (my own mom threatened to have me imprisoned before I could do the deed), I think I’ve been convinced to leave it standing. The reason that I wanted to destroy the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is because I think that it does more harm to the collective understanding of God than it does good from aesthetic qualities. This is a fairly common question: does aesthetic value of a work of art outweigh the moral value? This is what we ask when we talk about innovative movies that we’re also propaganda for Nazis or the KKK. It’s what we ask when we try to decide if we should watch movies that Harvey Weinstein produced. For me the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel violates the Second Commandment in such a way that defeats the original intention of the art (at least why it was commissioned by the Pope). As I see it, people often see things as only literal or only symbolic (this touches on Barfield and I’ll explain shortly), therefore showing God as literally an old man in the sky reinforces the (erroneous) belief that God is just an old (if powerful) man in the sky. Or it reinforces the idea that that is how Christians see God. I think this is such a grave moral harm which is done to humanity (as I believe that proper understanding of Good and Love and Joy are founded in a true knowledge of God), that the Sistine Chapel should be destroyed notwithstanding the aesthetic value of the work of art, in much the same way that we might ban the Birth of a Nation. 

This is easily my worst received idea. My wife (who unlike me has actually seen the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in person) thinks I’m vastly underestimating the aesthetic value, not to mention overestimating the moral harm. My mom thinks it’s just stupid and potentially destroying God. Even my friends that get my point think the inevitable misunderstanding of my position will undermine whatever I was trying to say. Even so, I’m stubborn and don’t like backing down from something I think is right just because other people think I’m wrong. Shockingly, Owen Barfield was able to change my mind in his discussion of literal and figurative understanding of the world found in his book Saving the Appearances: a study in idolatry. For now, the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is safe.

Barfield writes that human consciousness has changed overtime, specifically how we think about the external reality changes how we perceive external reality. I go into more detail in my Wizard Theory, but essentially our expectations, thoughts, and beliefs about what we will perceive is a crucial and inextricable feature of what we in fact perceive. This is an increasingly common view in cognitive science which sees the brain as an ‘expectation machine.’ In the period before the scientific revolution, Barfield states that people know about this link between perception and consciousness and thus participated in the construction of reality. They saw no distinction between what was literally there (a tree for example) and what was figuratively there (a symbol of new life or resurrection). There was no distinction between the literal and figurative, the internal and external world, because one's consciousness is part of the construction of the external world. Our modern (1950s) idolatry is to see the world as exclusive literal. A tree is just a tree. To extrapolate, this kind of exclusively literal thinking leads us to the New Atheist critique of Christianity. Neither the New Atheists nor many Christians could recognize that the Bible and depictions of God simultaneously held literal meaning and figurative meaning. When we see God the Father on the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel he is literally a father, however mighty, who lives somewhere in space.

Michelangelo was operating in a very different environment of consciousness than the New Atheists did in the 1990s. Statements that are viewed as unresolvable paradoxes, like can God create a stone so heavy not even he could move it, would not be a paradox at all to Michelangelo and his peers. The ‘paradox’ relies on a view of God that sees him too literally, God is an object or being among other objects and beings. Medieval and Renaissance thinkers would have been much more familiar with and ingrained in the idea that God is beyond all things. If ‘god’ could create a rock that he could not move then ‘god’ is not God. Neither is that rock more like God than the ‘god’ that creates it, because God is not merely a title given to the most powerful being in the universe. God creates and sustains the existence of all things. He cannot create something greater than himself because nothing can be greater than God. It is not a paradox but a fallacy. Michelangelo depicted God as literally an old man but he would have seen that image as more than an old man, as a symbol of the transcendent Father. This is why I’m now okay with the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It’s not that Michelangelo was blaspheming, but our time and place has a different understanding of objects and so we (including me) misunderstand the purpose of the object.

And as I said before, we seem to be entering a new era of combined literal and symbolic meaning, if not an era where the symbolic meaning is more important than the literal meaning. Think about Covid. Face masks are literally just cloth, but symbolically they have ludicrous importance. The same is true for vaccines and Dr. Anthony Fauci. My next article will discuss this symbolic era in relation to Barfield’s vision of the future: Final Participation. This is not Final Participation by any stretch of the imagination, but perhaps if we can newly imbue objects like masks with a world of symbolic meaning, maybe we can see the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and the Eucharist, and the Word can with new eyes, too.