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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2436 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 6, 2025

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Scott is clearly very interested in Christian thought judging by his substack — does anyone know the extent of this interest?

Anyone have thoughts on Colors of her Coat? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat

Is no one going to mention the elephant in the room? He takes it seriously enough to write 72 chapters of compare and contrast with an Old Testament cosmology.

Colors of Her Coat was beautiful. In better times, it would stand with some of Scott’s most recommendable work.

I’ve been trying for some time to put into words my model of postmodernism, and Colors hits one of the key points. The very process of refining an art form pushes it into familiarity. Familiarity breeds contempt. Contempt insists that there’s no difference between good things and bad things, you fool, you absolute moron. That’s how we get solid-blue paintings and noise music and nihilistic, deconstructive fiction.

Maybe the public hates modern architecture. To a critic, though? The kind of person who is paid to think about buildings day in and day out? Novelty is essential. It’s new training data. His job is not to tell us about good buildings, but to participate in a conversation, no matter how Advanced it gets. Who cares if it alienates the proles? They’ll catch up eventually, right?

This is what’s missing when reactionaries criticize progressive media. Most of the time, they aren’t actually trying to erase your aesthetics. It’s more that your preferences are old news.

Wasn’t Scott a philosophy major in undergrad? He seems interested in Christian thought to the extent that it overlaps with the overall western philosophical tradition. There are also plenty of Bible references peppered throughout his work.

True but he’s gone down the Chesterton rabbit hole, which is a gateway drug to apologia and finally authentic religious interest

I'm surprised. In Orthodox theology she is usually clothed in red, since she is putting on divinity.

Western Christianity uses blue=Virgin Mary very extensively. There’s a few codified depictions which are not blue, of the ‘Our Lady of whatever’ variety, but nearly all depictions of the ‘default’ Virgin Mary show her in blue.

In the West, she's almost always portrayed as wearing blue, though it's not given symbolic thought the same way it is in Eastern iconography. Red permeates the coloration of Eastern sacred art, but it just doesn't have the same meaning of divinity in the West and instead red is concentrated on the celebration of martyrs. If you asked a thoughtful Catholic what the color of divinity and grace is, they'd say white or gold, like baptismal gowns and haloes.

I've sometimes seen Western art where Jesus has a blue sash, but blue, especially light blue, is really strongly associated with the clothing of the Virgin Mary and so you'll find it called "Mary's color." But white is also always used, usually for her veil. I've heard that blue became prominent because lapis lazuli was expensive and so spending a lot on her coloration was a way of showing her status, but I just think blue was a calming color and there's a strong association between her and peace and quiet. ("Peace on earth")

That being said, I have a coffee table book of medieval Catholic art, and you can notice that red covering blue was common in early medieval Roman art, with Byzantine imitations being a big trend. There was a flip flop at one point, with blue over red becoming more common in Western art. This morphed into just blue being an option. But if her gown has any color other than blue, it's probably red. Black is occasionally an option: the color of mourning. Nevertheless you can still find red-over-blue artworks in the West for hundreds of years, like this artwork from 12th century Spain.

I'm sure there's an enterprising Russian or Athonite who's written a screed describing this artistic history as evidence of Latin perfidy, but even if we stick with the blue=humanity, red=divinity model, there's an argument to be made for both colors. She was overshadowed by divine grace, covering humanity with divinity, but also contained the divine son and granted him humanity, concealing the image of god inside her human body. I wish we could go back and interview 800s Frankish painters, but as far as I know figuring out what these colors meant to them is mostly guesswork.

I have a coffee table book of medieval Catholic art

That sounds neat, what's the title?

She's usually clothed in blue or blue over red in traditional Western art, though from a cursory Wikipedia search once "blue is the most expensive color" might have been the reason why that color was used.

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