Sermons

I went to a lousy sermon today, but it provided an occasion for rediscovering a sublime one. The bad one was the new film "Religulous" (officially opening at the end of the week; I was sent tickets to this free pre-screening, and brought along a bunch of students), in which comedian Bill Maher has silly conversations with variously silly and stupid religious people, as scenes from movies and popular culture are spliced in wittily; eventually, the fun wears off, and by the end we're getting an explosion of stock images of religious carnage and irrationality, and Maher's insistence that "religion must die if mankind is to live." It doesn't work, since what made the start funny - the raised eyebrows, the obviously cut dialogues and the splicing of variously ironic and tangential images, most of them from fiction - makes the finale seem no more than a trite self-indulgence, another stunt of clever editing but unfunny this time. The danger's real, but this isn't the medium for unironic messages. But what were we expecting "From Larry Charles, the director of 'Borat'"?

But I'm glad I went, because it was screening in a cinema on East 68th Street, and that's just a few blocks from the Frick Collection, which I haven't visited in years. (We had no classes today, because of the Jewish holiday.) Amazing collection, beautiful place! I was entranced again by Bellini's remarkable St Francis, by Holbein's Thomas More, by the Rembrandts and Constables, Veronese and Corot, and the Fragonard room... But what particularly moved me, with a quiet deep joy that could easily have expressed itself in tears, were three religious paintings: Duccio's Temptation of Christ on the Mountain (above; the angels at upper right were added later - the picture works better if you imagine them gone); a nearly surreal Pièta attributed to the circle of the Swiss painter Konrad Witz (right; how the Virgin's robes flow off endlessly at bottom like the infinity of her sorrow, what mute sadness in the figure shrouded in red at right, remarkable landscape...); and Claude Lorrain's nearly Poussinian Sermon on the Mount, which I can only describe as depicting and conveying a sublime peace through the uncharacteristic dark knobby center with its vision of harmony in the circle of Jesus with the disciples, telling them the strange good news that it is the poor who are blessed, those who mourn, the meek, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness... (On the Frick website you can look closely at each of these: Duccio, Witz and Claude.)

Ludicrous religion may often be, and a menace, too, especially in ignorant contemporary American forms. But that's not the whole story.