Actaeon and the Samaritan
Art, dogs and synchronicities
I present to you two synchronicities — one pagan and one Christian — because Mary/Jane is nothing if not ecumenical.
Actaeon
A city like London offers just about any Philistine the chance to develop something akin to an aesthetic sensibility through repeated exposure to great works of art, such as those housed in The National Gallery.1 When you are not in a rush to see everything of note in one visit, you can let your fancy guide you. On my last visit, I decided to pay special attention to any dogs in the paintings. They sometimes appear in the most unexpected of places.2
You are likely to find a pooch or two in the novelistic paintings of Titian — a particular favourite of Murdoch’s. She writes in her 1945 diary of the ‘heavenly bliss’ of going to see Noli me Tangere3 and about fifty other paintings recently returned from a disused mine in North Wales where they were safeguarded during the Blitz.4
I first spotted this terrified looking fellow…
…in the right-hand corner of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon:
The wall text explains the painting:
Wandering the forest after a morning of hunting, Actaeon stumbles upon Diana, goddess of the hunt, and her nymphs bathing. Too late, he sees her undressed. Outraged at his impudence, she transforms him into a stag, and he is torn apart by his own hounds, as shown opposite in The Death of Actaeon.
The reactions of the nymphs unfold left to right, fluctuating from concern, through to curiosity and fear, to Diana's own furious - but perhaps also fascinated - glare. In contrast to the other nymphs' generic facial features, the Black woman is a portrait, surely based on a real person who modelled for Titian.
The Death of Actaeon (a.k.a. the birth of white feminism):
The other night I saw an amateur production of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I noted5 to be “angry and profane and full of that pagan energy that animates all good theatre.”
The first character introduced was Actaeon.
That’s it. That’s the first synchronicity.
The Samaritan
It feels a bit disrespectful to describe the following event as a synchronicity, turning the lives of others into grist for the Substack mill.6 But since there can be no ethical artistic production under capitalism, I’ll do so anyway. Before US Vice-President J.D. Vance started talking about Ordo Amoris, I had the Good Samaritan on my mind, because of the two humble hounds in Jacopo Bassano’s depiction of the parable:
Anticipating the Pope’s clapback at Vance,7 I had already drafted:
To love our kin is natural. Grace demands more of us.
I had thought about quoting from Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life:
The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.
Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.
Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.
They taught us that no one who ever loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.
Simone Weil8 delivers a characteristically melodramatic rendition of the myth:9
Christ taught us that supernatural love of neighbour is an exchange of compassion and gratitude that occurs in a flash between two beings —one who has been provided with human personality and the other deprived of it. One of the two is just a piece of naked flesh, inert and bloody, on the edge of a pit, without a name, whose personality is unknown. Passers-by barely perceive this thing and a few minutes later do not even remember what they have seen. Only one stops and pays attention to him. The acts that follow are only the automatic effects of this moment of attention. This attention is creative. But the moment of this engagement is a renunciation, at least if it is pure. We accept a diminishment when we focus ourselves on dispensing energy that does not extend our own power —that will only give existence to a being other than ourselves, one independent of us. Moreover, to want the existence of the other is to transport oneself into them by sympathy, and therefore, to take part in a state of inert matter where we find it.
I’ve long wondered about this emphasis on the human-to-human attention in the act of charity, as compared to the more rational notions of effective altruism, or the involuntary charity of income redistribution. We no longer need people to be good. So people are no longer good. Oops.
On Saturday, I looked out of my second-story window, slightly stoned, and a saw a man collapsed on the other side of the road. I saw a car pull up and call the emergency services. My first instinct, I’m ashamed to say, was to mind my own business: this is London, after all. But then I saw a woman on a mobility scooter try to attract the attention of passers-by. I went downstairs and found out the man was her partner. After a few minutes, a young female paramedic arrived and attended to the man, who was breathing but unresponsive. I looked on helplessly and then I did what I sometimes did after a Quaker meeting: I made some tea. The man was taken away in an ambulance. I don’t know what happened to him. I wondered, idly, what it would be like to live a life in service of others.
BONUS CONTENT
Can you identify the paintings in which these dogs appear? There may be prizes!
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I would like to thank ChatGPT for spotting some embarrassing typos when I asked it to proofread this post.10 Although I felt quite affronted by this suggestion:
You mention Iris Murdoch multiple times—if this is intentional for emphasis, that's fine, but consider whether each reference adds something new.
If you do not live in London, I suggest checking out their accessible online collection. Images in this post are either from there or from photos I took in the gallery.
I can also recommend the film National Gallery (2014).
There is no doubt a vast literature on the depiction of dogs in art of which I am blissfully ignorant.
might know a good place to start.“Do not touch me” (John 20:17). Jesus is setting boundaries for the borderline Mary Magdalene.
Or if you prefer the Divine Feminine interpretation: Jesus is gaslighting Mother.
Iris Mudorch: A life by Peter J. Condradi, p. 210.
See also the consistently excellent Iris Murdoch Society Podcast episodes Iris Murdoch in the National Gallery and Iris Murdoch and Dogs.
Speaking of St. Augustine, what are we to make of his more problematic takes? I’m not just talking about his homophobia, although, c’mon mate, do better:
“[T]hose shameful acts against nature, such as were committed in Sodom, ought everywhere and always to be detested and punished. If all nations were to do such things, they would be held guilty of the same crime by the law of God, which has not made men so that they should use one another in this way” (Confessions 3:8:15)
I’m more concerned about his indifference towards the natural world (as quoted in Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man):
Christ himself shows that to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition, for judging that there are no common rights between us and the beasts and trees, he sent the devils into a herd of swine and with a curse withered the tree on which he found no fruit.
But if we reject this interpretation, how should we read these perplexing scriptures?
“There are far too many writers -” writes Matthew Gasda, “and too few readers.” And then he gets mean:
Why do people want to be writers when they have no talent? Well—because it’s sort of easy: they can simply learn the trick of commenting on the commentary on the commentary, fictionalizing by numbers, or writing smut.
From the Pope’s letter to US Bishops:
The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
See also
’s earlier response.I was truly honoured when the force-of-nature who is
recently wrote that M.J.E is “one of the only newsletter writers who discusses Simone Weil in a way that I appreciate.”Cameron also mentioned pre-ordering Phil Christman’s forthcoming book Why Christians Should Be Leftists. The tone in his description of the project made me doubtful of how successful he’ll be in making converts:
In the book, I try to be charitable to the people who disagree with me, although in any conflict of ideas, I think there’s a kind of horizon that separates what you can and can’t take seriously, what you can and can’t be charitable to. Worried that government help makes people lazy? I used to think that — granted, it was a long time ago and I was young — and so I tried to answer that respectfully. Worried that socialism will enable the inherently unfit to breed? I can’t speak to that concern respectfully. The nicest thing I can do to a person who has adopted opinions so destructive to their own immortal soul, as well as their ability to see themselves or the people around them clearly, is to say, “Knock it the fuck off.” Put down Bronzed Pervert or whatever and pick up the New Testament. Accept that you are mortal and sinful and cannot save yourself by doing kettlebell swings and saying slurs. Receive Jesus as your savior before you turn yourself into a school shooter.
I’m inclined towards Alan Jacob’s perspective:
The question of how the teachings of Jesus and the more general witness of the Bible translates into political belief and action is a notoriously difficult one. Only for the dim-witted or bigoted (on the Left and the Right) is it utterly obvious. The more we know about the history of Christian faith, practice, and teaching the more cautious we will be, I think, about assuming that we can map our Christian beliefs directly onto the political options readily available to us in our time and place.
Forms of the Implicit Love of God (Bradley Jersak translation)
Apologies to any anti-AI purists.