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Painting in the evening of the world. by Gerardo Muñoz

That painting was an activity at the end of its long tradition – a tradition that perhaps coincides with the very genesis of anthropogenesis – appears explicitly in Cézanne’s late conversations with Joaquim Gasquet, which is full of rambling thoughts and anxieties. At some point in the dialogues, Cézanne says in context of the pictorial tradition: “Rubens…that is another age, all that. We are in the evening of the world. Painting, like everything else, is vanishing….” [1]. Cézanne’s work is already the painting of the evening of the world, which is the closure unto itself, not so much a deprived world of certain elements or things, but a privatized space of intelligence and logic. This structure is alien to the painter who only pledges alliance to what is seen and revealed: “The painting owes allegiance to that lone. Never to the logic of the brain…and if he abandons that logic, he is lost. Painting is first and foremost an optical affair” [2]. 

What the essence of technology enhances in its computational and logical capacities to make the world legible, it loses in the optical capacity for the thinking of vision, that flickering and always novice opening to the world. The calamity of the automation of the world resides in the blinding legibility where thinking-eyes, as in Cézanne’s expression, are rescinded and a thing of the past. Of course, in the name of the present legibility of blinding lights, the past will also be reduced to a pile of stuff that can be assembled and registered – as in the vulgar poet Carlos Argentino Daneri in Borges’ “The Aleph” – but in exchange for abandoning the truth and sensation. 

Well before the argument of Veblen on the centrality of engineers in this new world, Cézanne was aware that the future belonged to the engineers of nature, who can both bend and straighten the crooked lines of the world, and whose final realization is the nuclear organization and the pacing of energy distribution. It does not take too much to see an overtly furious Cézanne around 1890s: “Nature abhors a strain line. And to hell with engineers! We are not road surveyors. A lot they care for color, whereas for me sensation is at the root of everything” [3]. The personal outcry ‘to hell with engineers!’ is still being heard today, although we are less convinced that such an imperative has any chance at halting the ongoing vanishing sensations of the world. 

Michael Fried has argued that Fraggonard’s The Swing and Blind Man’s Bluff are two pictures that appear to us as also harbingers of an extinction of a world (the world previous to 1789 that is) [4]. Whether it is Fraggonard or Cézanne, there is an imperturbable core in painting in witnessing the moment that the world is vanishing, and retaining whatever remains of the “world” for generations capable of seeing and feeling. Borges’ aleph (a supreme optical affair) once again comes in handy when faced with the vision of the infinite: “Algo, sin embargo, recogeré”. In other words, something remains imperturbable at the end of the world. Is this what painting stood for in late Cézanne? To gather something from the world, to make it imperturbable appears as the supreme task of painting.

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Notes 

1. Joachim Gasquets. Cézanne: A Memoir with conversations (Thames & Hudson, 1991), 170.

2. Ibid., 161.

3. Ibid., 166

4. Michael Fried. Collected Writings, Volume II (Eris, 2026), 281.

Nuclear deterrence and Christian silence. by Gerardo Muñoz

Almost at the end of the Cold War, arguably the most important natural law jurist of the West, John Finnis, published a very acrimonious and provocative essay in dialogue with the Christian theological morality and dogmatic tradition entitled “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988). In many respects, this essay speaks volumes to our present, but it also solicits new questions around limits that have been severely traspassed in the current atomic age headed towards extinction. It is worth noting that from the outset, Finnis reminds us how a fellow Catholic liberal theologian, Jacques Maritain in a lecture of 1955, claimed with surprising conviction that “America is today the area in the world in which…the notion of Christian-inspired civilization is more part of the national heritage than any other spot-on earth. If there is any hope for the sprouting of a new Christendom in the modern world, it is in America…” [1]. If this sounds completely analogous to the current program of “national conservatism” that today animates American political elites, defined by the ruthless attempt at the convergence of instrumental Christian vocation and political imperium, it is because these prophetic words have been thoroughly realized. 

Finnis does not hesitate to put his thumb on the theological monstrosity maintained by Maritain at mid century – although he does not say it explicitly, it is a concrete restitution of imperial Eusebianism decades before denounced by Erik Peterson in his famous essay on political monotheism – that by accepting nuclear deterrence as a form of uncontested ‘minor evil’ in face of the Soviet menace Christians were endorsing heretic positions at odds with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. As Finnis argues, the logical structure itself of nuclear deterrence, precisely due to its affirmative promise to exclude “target populations”, fails to differentiate between combatants and non-combatants in an endgame that promises the potential massacre of innocent human beings [2]. This means, first and foremost, that nuclear deterrence (as well as its new preventive forms that have become normalized among global hegemonic powers) terrorize human communities as a direct public act of forthcoming devastation [3]. 

Even though Finnis does not stop to reflect about the notion of “public act”, it is very clear that this action, insofar as it is a linguistic act, aims at the effective cancellation of the possibilities of language and communication. Nuclear deterrence and proliferation are instruments that speak publicly, and that by doing so, it contributes to the atrophy of human language. As a rebuttal to Maritain’s celebratory artificial gnosis, Finnis sees in the language of nuclear deterrence coincides with the language of ‘utopia’ as a new absolutization of morality. This means that Maritain’s philosophical error – which Finnis calls the “theologian’s position”, since it also implicates an official sector of the Church – is to abandon practical reason of allocated goods (including human life) in the name of a comprehensive aim of building a civilizational “Christendom” coupled in a national community [3]. But whoever fully identifies the spiritual-providential realm with the political-legislative order is already at the mercy of an utopian project embedded in the sacrificial structure promoted by nuclear deterrence.

Towards the end of his essay, Finnis laments (implicitly repeating Karl Barth’s well-known 1930s essay but in an opposite direction) that the relationship between Church and State from the point of view of the atomic age and nuclear deterrence has now been completely altered. From now on, the atomic age demands a Christian vocation based on conscience. Specifically, Finnis calls for a position of refusal and minoritarian observance against the general options of radical evil: “The choice to reverence human life by refusing to participate in public choices to destroy it, is thus a choice is material of the Kingdom and has real and truly lasting effects…even when worldly wisdoms understand it only as a choice of greater evil’ [4]. And citing Cardinal Ratzinger, Finnis endorses the position of Christians as “belonging to a minority” finding courage in nonconformity within the normative order of social space [5]. The Finnis-Ratzinger’s position was still oriented by a Catholic commitment to dogmatics and public reason and virtue, which depends on the luminosity of the subject of religion. 

But the objection of conscience is a subjective reduction of modern secularization. In this sense, it might be pertinent to compare Finnis’ position to Ivan Illich’s own stance in the wake of nuclear testing in Germany in the 1980s, which he witnessed in “horrified silence…in order to make the horror visible” [6]. For Illich, who had come to see the triumph of civilizational mysterium iniquitatis in the institutional deformity of the conspiratio of the human species towards controlled subjectivity (conjutario) amounting to “intolerable realities”. The language of Christian prophecy is not the same as the language of silence, because only in the second we can become witnesses through the voice of pain and experience, because pain can uplift a contact with the world without redemption. As Illich made clear in his text “The Eloquence of Silence”, it is through the condition of silence that the word can become flesh and prepare a new life. It is very telling that in a later footnote to the essay in the 2011 edition, Finnis appears doubtful about the religious ground stating that: “Over twenty years later, the unsatisfactory state of Catholic teaching on the matter remains just as it was in 1988” [7]. What changed? At the end of the eighteenth century Novalis had noted that for any orientation of public reason in the West to materialize there needs to be a substrate of the divine mystery, but this is precisely the substrate that desecularization has effectively untied and obliterated from the public. A public where general annihilation percolates without restraints.

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Notes 

1. John Finnis. “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988), in Religion and Public Reasons, Collected Essays: Volume V (Oxford University Press, 2011), 

2. Ibid., 280. 

3. Ibid., 286-287.

4. Ibid., 288.

5. Ibid., 289.

6. David Cayley. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journal (The Penn State University Press, 2021), 80. 

7. John Finnis. “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988), 290.