Niebuhr

H. Richard Niebuhr
1894-1962
(http://www.centropian.com/religion/academic/theologians/HRNkit/)
no copyright infringement intended

I wrote on the blog about how I came to the name of Niebuhr, the two brothers. H. Richard and Reinhold. Among them Reinhold was perhaps more famous, but each one had actually his own field of interests in the large realm of theology. I already talked here about Christ and Culture, a book by H. Richard Niebuhr that impressed me a lot, and I am now reading another of his books: The Social Sources of Denominationalism. I will talk about it here as soon as I finish the reading.

Reinhold Niebuhr
1892-1971
(http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/02/05/Obama.theologian/)
no copyright infringement intended

What I didn't know was about the existence about other two scholars bearing the same name, Niebuhr. There is no connection of any kind between them and Reinhold and Richard. These other two Niebuhr's were father and son and lived in Denmark and Germany. Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815) was born in Germany and spent his life as a mathematician, cartographer and explorer in the service of Denmark. He remained well-known for his participation in the 1761 Danish Arabia Expedition. His son  Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831) was a leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography. I think each of them deserves here a separate entry, maybe I'll do it after a bit of search. All in good time.

• Reading Niebuhr - Christ and Culture
• Credinţă şi Cultură - Citindu-l pe H. Richard Niebuhr
• Thu Nguyen - La Salle Hotel
• Jafar Panahi: The Mirror (1997)

Barthold Georg Niebuhr
1776-1831
detail from an engraving
credit: Bavaria Verlag
(http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/13224/Barthold-Georg-Niebuhr-detail-from-an-engraving)
no copyright infringement intended

Carsten Niebuhr
1733-1815
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carsten_niebuhr.jpg)
no copyright infringement intended

(A Life in Books)

(Church in America)

Thu Nguyen - La Salle Hotel

La Salle Hotel
- Thu Nguyen -

Is this art giving the illusion of reality, or reality giving the illusion of art? Maybe the video creates this magic.

I'm thinking again at the Niebuhr model: image and reality in paradox. Or maybe this time they are in sync: reality agreeing with the image; image revealing the unseen, reality following the image, discovering in itself what image has revealed.

(Contemporary Art)

(Niebuhr)

Reading Niebuhr - Christ and Culture

(click here for the Romanian version)

I didn't know anything about Niebuhr. I learned about him one day from a material maintaining that to shape your spirit you should start with a classic language (Latin or Greek); also for getting a large religious perspective, beyond any dogmatic seclusion, any parochial confinement, you should read Niebuhr.

Actually there were two brothers Niebuhr; both of them were great theologians. They lived in the US and belonged to the Protestant Church. Reinhold Niebuhr was the most famous; but I started by buying a book of the other, H. Richard Niebuhr, for a very cheap reason (as I was completely ignorant on both brothers, I bought the cheapest book I found). It was a very small book, annotated on almost all pages. The annotations were in Chinese: the guy who had read the book before me was a Chinese. The book was Christ and Culture. I think it is one of the most important theology books I have read.



Christ and Culture - you can think also at it as Faith and Culture: what is the relationship between them.

Niebuhr considers five different types of Christ-Culture relationships (of course, nobody could be strictly framed in one type or another):

1. Faith against Culture (Tolstoi) - faith denies culture, you should make the choice - the risk is that denying the culture can lead to denying the world, it means denying God's Creation - also denying culture is actually a cultural fact, which leads to paradox

2. Faith framed in Culture (Jefferson, Renan) - faith is a cultural phenomenon, explained through cultural facts - it means that faith is rationalized - which leads to keeping from faith only the rational

3. Faith and Culture in sync (St. Thomas Aquinas) - faith and culture do not deny one another (as it was in the first case) - they live in agreement - the elements of faith that cannot be explained rationally belong to the realm of Revelation

4. Faith and Culture in paradox (Luther, Kierkegaard) - though faith and culture do not deny one another (as it was in the first case) they do not live in agreement (as it was in case 3) - any act beyond faith (it means any cultural act, even keeping God's commandments, even good deeds) is alien to faith, alien to God, because it fatally belongs to this world, so it is idolatry - the faithful has to realize this tragic paradox; there is no escape from culture as we have to live in this world - keeping faith is the only way to salvation (while living in the world)

5. Faith transforming Culture (Calvin) - the faith should be used as a driving force in transforming the culture (the society), leading it towards Divinity

Let me quote here a little bit from the foreword (written by Martin E. Marty): Augustine left us The Two Cities, Pascal left us the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Kierkegaard brought us the Either/Or - they polished the archetypes; we have in the twentieth century I and Thou (Martin Buber), The Nature and Destiny of Man (Reinhold Niebuhr) and Christ and Culture (H. Richard Niebuhr).

I tried to read The Nature and Destiny of Man, but I was not in the mood - I should take it sometime later. I also started to read I and Thou, several times, I was too lazy. But Christ and Culture, I read it breathlessly.

It's not my first theology book. I have read some books of the great Christian Orthodox theologians of the Twentieth century (Schmemann, Lossky, among others) and I could talk days in a row about them - about their rigor, about the beauty of Eastern Christianity, that I belong to. The book of Niebuhr is different, and maybe one should start with it, to read then Tillich, to continue then in his own ways, while free of any parochial closeness.




(Church in America)

(Niebuhr)

Jafar Panahi: The Mirror (1997)

Mina, a young girl, finds her mother has failed to pick her up from school, so she decides to walk home on her own. The movie is about her endeavor to find her way home amidst the noise, confusion and chaos of Tehran. Mina is dressed in traditional Iranian clothing (with a head scarf), has one arm in a cast and is holding a school bag in the other. She meets a lot of people on her way and most of them try to help her while others are surprisingly apathetic to her situation. This movie beautifully captures the little girl's progress from timidity to cautious bravery. Eventually the movie takes a turn when the girl looks into the camera for the first time and someone shouts Mina, don't look into the camera and the movie is a real life capture of events thereon (at least it seems like that). Mina announces that she doesn't want to act in the movie any more and wants to go home. So, she actually becomes the character she is portraying. It is not clear if this is part of the screenplay and made to look that way or if it's really like that. In the end she goes home after returning the microphone. Presumably the name Mirror comes from this transition of reel life into real life and mirroring its story.

(wikipedia)

The Mirror (آینه - Ayneh) , made in 1997 by Jafar Panahi. It is his second feature and received in the year of its release the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. Two other awards followed the next year: the Golden Tulip at the Istanbul Film Festival and the Silver Screen at the Singapore Film Festival.

It starts with a little girl trying to get home from school by herself, and as in any story of this kind, there are all kind of funny events. It is always interesting to see the world of grown ups through the eyes of a kid, also the Ciné-Vérité style of the movie is amazing in catching the street universe of today's Tehran.

All this is true, but after five minutes you start asking yourself what's the big deal. As director Jafar Panahi is known to be one of the big names in the Iranian movie world you'd expect with each new film coming from him to see something really new. The Mirror came in 1997, two years after The White Balloon, another movie with kids: that one had been remarkable. Was The Mirror just an attempt to live on the account of the previous movie?

Well, no. First of all, the universe is very different in the two movies. The White Balloon pictures a world in fair tale tones: it's from the girl point of view. In The Mirror the universe is also interacting with the girl reaction, but it's clearly the universe of Tehran street, as it is really. It's a delight: it's a poem dedicated to the chaos and trepidation of the street of a large Mid Eastern city, where modernity and specificity collide.

Actually both movies are in some way deceptive. The kid story hides a deeper level. It is made known in The White Balloon just at the end. Here in The Mirror this deeper level enters the center of stage in the mid of the story. It does it abruptly: the girl declares out of the blue that she doesn't want to play any more in the movie! She just wants to leave and go home truly by herself! The incident takes place in a crowded bus, and suddenly we notice that there are no passengers there, just the crew surrounded by equipment. Director Jafar Panahi is in the bus, sited near the cameraman, and he doesn't know what the hell to do. He decides to follow anyway the girl with candid camera. As one of the reviewers observed, that moment makes the movie a masterpiece! We had in the first half Ciné-Vérité, now we have simply Vérité.

They faint to forget taking the mike back from the girl, so the camera will follow her and the sound will be captured. Sometimes the camera looses the girl, while the sound continues to be heard. Some other times we see the girl, but the sound is missing. On her way home the girl encounters an old lady who played in the first part and now is complaining about the conditions of filming, about the director, etc. A man recognizes the girl as he has seen the shooting of a scene two weeks earlier: we have seen the same scene twenty minutes ago, in the first part. We meet then the man who recommended the girl for the film production. And so we are forced to realize that the first part was a movie, while this second part is no more. What is it then? Well, it is kind of movie, of course: in the same time a movie about its own making and a movie deconstructing itself.

Two questions arise here. Firstly, is the first part a movie, or just reality caught with (candid) camera? Because everything seems too natural to be a movie. And secondly, is the second part reality caught with candid camera, or just a movie telling a story about a girl and a candid camera? Frankly, we'll never know.

So, beyond the story of the little girl, funny and interesting, beyond the universe of Tehran streets, remarkably rendered, there is the hidden level: The Mirror is interested to study the relation between movie and reality. Panahi is interested here in the issue tackled by Kiarostami in almost all his movies!

The tile comes from this hidden level: for Panahi a movie is a mirror of the reality. And the mirror works in both ways: for Panahi also the reality is a mirror of the movie.

To analyze this relation I am tempted to use the Niebuhr model (see H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture). It could sound blasphemous, but I think we can see in the relationship between art and reality the same types that H. Richard Niebuhr discovered in the relationship between Christian religion and culture. I will come back to this issue, as it seems extremely interesting for me. I have here on the blog a post discussing the book of Niebuhr; it is in Romanian and maybe I should start by translating that post into English.

I think the way Panahi sees the relationship between movie and reality is in terms of paradox: movie and reality are different; the movie remains a prisoner of the reality, regardless of any efforts to escape; the reality remains prisoner of the movie, though it's unaware. That the movie is the prisoner of the reality, that we can grasp. Why is the reality, in turn, the prisoner of the movie? I think for two reasons: because of the Big Brother presence (what else is a candid camera?), also because it is in the nature of reality the tendency to embellish itself.

So the two categories, movie and reality, are condemned to live together, though each one tries to run away. A tragedy defined by a paradox. It's the way Luther or Kierkegaard were seeing the relationship between a Christian living his faith and the universe surrounding him.

I will come back to this.



------------------------------
Here are some excerpts from the movie:


A young schoolgirl (Mina Mohammad Khani) navigates the busy streets of Tehran after her mother fails to pick her up from school. The story takes on a whole new level when the actress playing the girl quits the production and the camera in turn follows the actress's journey home.

(video by FirouzanFilms)

The little girl stares at two engaged people. A street musician with his son playing darbuka performs a short piece with his accordion. An emotional one...

(video by ngokcek)

The moment of denial to act.

(video by psychedelickija)

(Jafar Panahi)

(Niebuhr)

Credinţă şi Cultură - Citindu-l pe H. Richard Niebuhr

(Click here for the English version)

Nu stiam nimic despre Niebuhr. Am aflat despre el citind ca daca vrei sa iti formezi spiritul ar trebui sa incepi prin a studia o limba clasica (latina sau greaca, la alegere se pare), iar daca vrei sa capeti o larga perspectiva religioasa, deasupra oricarei inchistari dogmatice, a oricarui provincialism, ar trebui sa il citesti pe Niebuhr.

De fapt sunt doi frati Niebuhr, si amandoi au fost mari teologi. Au trait in secolul trecut, in America, au apartinut bisericii prezbiteriene, Reinhold Niebuhr a fost cel mai celebru dintre ei - eu am inceput insa cumparand o carte a celuilalt frate, H. Richard Niebuhr - pentru simplul motiv (care poate parea meschin) ca era mult mai ieftina decat celelalte. Nu am regretat, si este una din cele mai importante carti de teologie pe care le-am citit.

Christ and Culture - se poate insa vorbi prin extensie de Credinta si Cultura. Care este raportul dintre credinta si cultura?

Niebuhr distinge patru tipuri (sigur ca nimeni nu poate fi incadrat exclusiv intr-unul din tipuri):

1. Credinta impotriva Culturii (Tolstoi) - credinta neaga cultura -trebuie sa alegi - riscul acestui tip de credinta, observa Niebuhr, este acela ca negarea culturii conduce la negarea lumii, deci la negarea Creatiei lui Dumnezeu - pe de alta parte negarea culturii este tot un fenomen de cultura, ceea ce conduce la paradox

2. Credinta incadrata in cultura (Jefferson, Renan) - credinta este socotita un fenomen al culturii, este explicata prin fapte de cultura, este rationalizata - si sigur ca se ajunge la negarea credintei de catre cultura - din credinta ramane numai ceea ce poate fi explicat prin cultura

3. Credinta in acord cu Cultura (Sf. Thomas Aquinatul) - credinta si cultura nu se neaga una pe cealalta (cum e cazul 2) - ele traiesc in acord si se sprijina una pe cealalta - exista domeniul relevat, care apartine credintei

4. Credinta si Cultura in raporturi de paradox (Luther, Kierkegaard) -credinta si cultura nu se neaga una pe alta (cum e cazul 1) dar orice manifestare in afara credintei (inclusiv indatoririle religioase, inclusiv faptele bune) sunt de fapt in contradictie cu credinta - toate (inclusiv cele religioase) sunt fapte de cultura (in sens larg, bine inteles) si ca atare sunt straine de divinitate, apartin lumii, sunt de fapt inchinare la idoli - credinciosului ii ramane sa recunoasca acest paradox tragic, sa isi dea seama ca se poate mantui numai prin credinta, continuind sa isi traisca viata in lume, deci in cultura, deci in paradox fata de credinta - el nu poate scapa de idoli, de pacat, de cultura - pentru ca trebuie sa traiasca -dar daca isi da seama, se va mantui prin credinta

5. Credinta ca forta transformatoare a Culturii (Calvin) - credinta ca misiune de a transforma cultura si de a o aduce spre divinitate.

Citez putin din cuvantul inainte, al lui Martin E. Marty: Augustin ne-a lasat cele doua cetati, Pascal ni l-a lasat pe Dumnezeul lui Abraham, Isaac si Iacob, Kierkegaard ni l-a adus pe Either/Or - ei ne-au slefuit arhetipurile. In sec. XX avem I and Thou a lui Buber, Natura si Destinul Omului a lui Reinhold Niebuhr, Cristos si Cultura a lui H. Richard Niebuhr.

Am incercat sa citesc Natura si Destinul Omului, am imprumutat-o dela biblioteca, dar nu eram in the mood - a trebuit sa o duc inapoi. Dar Cristos si Cultura am citit-o pe nerasuflate - pasionat si de notitele facute de un cititor anterior, care era chinez si nota pe marginea paginii ba cu grafie latina in engleza, ba cu hieroglife in chineza.

Cartile marilor teologi ortodocsi ai sec XX (Schmeman, Lossky, Evdokimov, si nu numai ei) le consider extraordinare si as putea sa vorbesc zile si nopti intregi despre rigoarea lor si despre frumusetea ortodoxiei - cartea lui Niebuhr este altceva - aduce alta perspectiva - si este si ea foarte necesara. Poate intr-adevar trebuie inceput cu ea, pentru ca apoi sa poti avansa senin si echilibrat, eliberat de ingustimi parohiale, prin cartile care iti explica religia ta, in cazul meu ortodoxia.

(Niebuhr)