After all these years, the Lamb of God is looking at you.

That's a closeup of the central figure in the Ghent Altarpiece, before and after restoration. The great masterpiece by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck (1432) had been painted over in the 16th century, and people had gotten used to the eyes way off to the side. But the image on the right puts the eyes back where Hu and Jan had them.

I'm reading "Ghent Altarpiece: Lamb's 'alarmingly humanoid' face surprises art world" (BBC). Smithsonian Magazine is quoted saying "These features are 'eye-catching, if not alarmingly anthropomorphic.'" There's also a lot of reaction in social media.

The new image is the original painting, with layers of "overpaint" removed. The Belgium's Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (RICH) defends its work:

The Van Eyck brothers chose to "represent the Lamb of God with human-like staring eyes", which was a common style in the Middle Ages, it said. "The choice for removing the overpaint was carefully weighed out, and it was fully supported by all involved," the institute said. "The results of the restoration have been praised by experts, the public and St Bavo's Cathedral."

Here's the Wikipedia article "Lamb of God":

Lamb of God ... is a title for Jesus that appears in the Gospel of John. It appears at John 1:29, where John the Baptist sees Jesus and exclaims, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."...

The Lamb imagery in Revelation is counterintuitive. In Rev. 5:5, John hears from an elder about the lion of Judah who conquers, but in 5:6, what he sees is a lamb....

[I]n 375 Saint Augustine wrote: "Why a lamb in his passion? Because he underwent death without being guilty of any iniquity. Why a lion in his passion? Because in being slain, he slew death. Why a lamb in his resurrection? Because his innocence is everlasting. Why a lion in his resurrection? Because everlasting also is his might."

If you want to talk about what's "alarmingly anthropomorphic," begin with Jesus.

ADDED: The oldest usage of the word "anthropomorphic" is about God. It "ascribes human form, character, or attributes to God or a god" (OED). The first appearance of the word is this:

1802 S. T. Coleridge Coll. Lett. (1956) II. 893 Even the worship of one God becomes Idolatry..when instead of the Eternal & Omnipresent..we set up a distinct Jehovah tricked out in the anthropomorphic Attributes of Time & Successive Thoughts—& think of him as a Person.

"Augustine’s ally Saint Jerome abused Pelagius intemperately as a 'huge, bloated Alpine dog, weighed down with Scottish oats.'"

"In 418, after Emperor Honorius demanded action when people calling themselves Pelagians rioted in Rome, Pope Zosimus declared Pelagianism heretical. For those in power, a doctrine that persuaded the mass of ordinary Christians that they were unworthy, powerless supplicants, both temporally and spiritually, was useful.... But Pelagius has had the last laugh, in the liberal, humanist culture of western Europe today. Generally, we believe in free will, in the perfectibility of mankind, in the ability of people to make the right choices, do good, and to make things better ...  Many contemporary clerics in Christian churches in the West could fairly be called Pelagians...."

From "How Pelagius’s philosophy of free will shaped European culture/Like the rebel theologian, we believe in the perfectibility of mankind, the ability of people to make the right choices, do good and make things better" (New Statesman America).

ADDED: The question of free will is important, but I'm interested in the form of fat-shaming in the 5th century. Here's a picture of the "huge, bloated Alpine dog, weighed down with Scottish oats":

"It is a myth that the ancients only or normally read out loud - a myth we appear to want to believe, since the evidence against it is strong...."

Wrote James Fenton in The Guardian, back in 2006. (I'm reading it today, because Arts & Letters Daily linked to "Literature Shrugged/Worse than hatred of literature is indifference," which linked to it.)

Many people are affected by a passage in St. Augustine's "Confessions," describing Ambrose reading silently: "His eyes traveled across the pages and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and tongue stayed still."

Scholars have sparred for decades over whether Augustine's offhand observation reveals something momentous: namely, that silent reading--that seemingly mundane act you're engaged in right now--was, in the Dark Ages, a genuine novelty. Evidence abounds that ancient and medieval readers relished giving voice to their favorite texts in order to appreciate more fully the cadences of Homer and Lucian. Of course, we equally enjoy reading poetry aloud. The question is: Could the earliest readers literally not shut up?

Fenton says:

What shocked Augustine was that Ambrose read silently in front of visitors and refused to share his reading matter, and his thoughts, with them. But Augustine was perfectly capable of silent reading, and describes a key moment in his conversion as a moment of silent reading with a friend. As Gavrilov concludes: "... the phenomenon of reading itself is fundamentally the same in modern as in ancient culture. Cultural diversity does not exclude an underlying unity."

A graduate student talking about "white privilege" sounds like "a Calvinist explaining the T in TULIP."

In "Politically Correct Holy Rollers: The New Campus Revival," Helen Andrews writes:

Not since environmentalism has the prevailing variety of leftism more closely resembled a religion. John McWhorter calls it Antiracism — “it seriously merits capitalization at this point” — and notes that it has its own clergy in such men as Charles Blow and Ta-Nehisi Coates (friendly vicar and hellfire preacher, respectively). Casting his net more widely to include all talk of “privilege,” from male to cisgender, essayist Joseph Bottum has observed that the concept is functionally equivalent to original sin. “I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply embedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose every day to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way,” said a graduate student whom Bottum was able to locate, sounding for all the world like a Calvinist explaining the T in TULIP.

TULIP is an acronym for the 5 points of Calvinism. The T is:

"Total depravity," also called "total inability," asserts that as a consequence of the fall of man into sin, every person is enslaved to sin. People are not by nature inclined to love God but rather to serve their own interests and to reject the rule of God. Thus, all people by their own faculties are morally unable to choose to follow God and be saved because they are unwilling to do so out of the necessity of their own natures. (The term "total" in this context refers to sin affecting every part of a person, not that every person is as evil as they could be). This doctrine is derived from Augustine's explanation of Original Sin. While the phrases "totally depraved" and "utterly perverse" were used by Calvin, what was meant was the inability to save oneself from sin rather than being absent of goodness.

If the explanations of "white privilege" and "total depravity" sound alike, what does that mean? 1. Those who speak in these terms no longer think independently but have surrendered their minds to compulsory doctrine which they strive to incant correctly. 2. Individuals may think independently and find value in recognizing that they have a selfish interest in seeing their usual way of life as normal and appropriate and choose to rouse themselves to the challenge to take a different perspective.  If #2 is correct, why would that happen? 1. They visualize a fearsome authority commanding that the different perspective be taken. 2. They've decided on their own to search for the truth. 3. It can't happen, because it's inherent in the Calvinist doctrine that the individual is incapable of independently choosing to move outside of the depravity that is total.

Huckabee incites civil disobedience to the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision and the Texas attorney general takes the cue.

From yesterday's "This Week" show:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what exactly are you calling on people to do right now? You say resist and reject this judicial tyranny. Spell out exactly what that means?

HUCKABEE: George, judicial tyranny is when we believe that the courts have a right to bypass the process of law and we've really seen it this week in two cases, in both the Obamacare case, which Justice Scalia called it - said we not - should call it SCOTUScare because they have rescued it twice, ex cathedra to the law, and then in the same-sex marriage ruling in which -

Huckabee avoids the interesting part of the question and concentrates on the criticism of the court. It's tyranny, blah blah blah. Stephanopoulos interrupts to pin him down (and make some news!):

STEPHANOPOULOS: So are you calling for civil disobedience?

HUCKABEE: I don't think a lot of pastors and Christian schools are going to have a choice. They either are going to follow God, their conscience and what they truly believe is what the scripture teaches them, or they will follow civil law. They will go the path of Dr. Martin Luther King, who in his brilliant essay the letters from a Birmingham jail reminded us, based on what St. Augustine said, that an unjust law is no law at all. 

But MLK and St. Augustine didn't anything about judicially declared rights — extra rights for the people, found (perhaps in error) by a court, displacing laws on the theory that those laws were unjust.

Huckabee makes that problem harder to see by getting us to look only at those who feel compelled by religion to resist the Court's decision. But the case the Court just decided doesn't require "pastors and Christian school" to do anything. It only presents an occasion for disobedience to government bureaucrats who find themselves bound to issue marriage licenses. These people can quit their jobs if their religion prevents them from doing what government is now required to do to avoid violating the rights of the citizens they have a duty to serve. No law violation is required.

Huckabee continues:

And I do think that we're going to see a lot of pastors who will have to make this tough decision. You're going to see it on the part of Christian business owners. You'll see it on the part of Christian university presidents, Christian school administrators. If they refuse to...

Huckabee is trying to steer the conversation into things he's predicting will happen, requirements that might befall private citizens. It's not wrong to worry about these things. There are conflicts to come that will need to be resolved, but Huckabee is off the path Stephanopoulos invited him down, and Stephanopoulos knows it and asks exactly the right question:

STEPHANOPOULOS: What about county clerks? Should they issue same-sex marriage licenses?

HUCKABEE: If they have a - a conscientious objection, I think they should be excused. I'm not sure that every governor and every attorney general should just say, well, it's the law of the land because there's no enabling legislation...

Huckabee doesn't really want answer to that question. He won't call outright for resistance from the bureaucrats on the front lines of the marriage licensing function of government. The word "excused" suggests a benevolent reassignment of clerical workers with religious objection so they don't need to quit their jobs to avoid participating in what they view as a sin.

But Texas attorney general Ken Paxton steps into the breach and goes big:

Clerks can refuse based on religious objections, Paxton told the Austin American-Statesman, and because the clerks will probably be sued, "numerous lawyers stand ready to assist clerks defending their religious beliefs," he said....

"You can’t have my surname and not be grateful for the blunt, good words that come from Old English..."

"... but I confess a personal predilection for words of Latin origin, with the arch distance they offer from the realm of ordinary speech, and their secret etymological histories, which seem to me to bestow a peculiar romance upon the craft of writing. I cannot say the word 'procrastinate'—a useful word for a writer—without hearing embedded therein 'cras,' the Latin word for 'tomorrow,' which, St. Augustine noted, sounded like the croaking cry of the dilatory raven that was sent from the ark and never came back."

Writes Rebecca Mead in a New Yorker piece titled "Writers Choose Their Favorite Words."

Lying babies.

Did you know that the human being starts lying at the age of 6 months? Early form of lying: fake crying.

IN THE COMMENTS: Original sin! St. Augustine!

ADDED: Commenter Chris digs out the text from "The Confessions":

Then, little by little, I realized where I was and wished to tell my wishes to those who might satisfy them, but I could not! For my wants were inside me, and they were outside, and they could not by any power of theirs come into my soul. And so I would fling my arms and legs about and cry, making the few and feeble gestures that I could, though indeed the signs were not much like what I inwardly desired and when I was not satisfied--either from not being understood or because what I got was not good for me--I grew indignant that my elders were not subject to me and that those on whom I actually had no claim did not wait on me as slaves--and I avenged myself on them by crying. That infants are like this, I have myself been able to learn by watching them; and they, though they knew me not, have shown me better what I was like than my own nurses who knew me.

Audible Althouse #28.

The Blue Christmas Podcast. 36 minutes. (You can stream it right through your computer here.)

UPDATE: If you tried before and found the file way too large, try it now. I needed to change a setting in the software on my new computer.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I notice I said 1418 instead of 418 -- twice! -- referring to St. Augustine. Sorry!

Limbo.

The NYT has a front-page article on the debate over limbo.

"Limbo has never been a definitive truth of the faith," Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI earlier this year, said in an interview in 1984, during his long term as Pope John Paul II's doctrinal watchdog. "Personally, I would let it drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis."...

The theology is complicated, but the bottom line is that Augustine, believing in mankind's original sin, persuaded a church council in 418 to reject any notion of an "intermediary place" between heaven and hell. He held that baptism was necessary for salvation, and that unbaptized babies would actually go to hell, though in his later writings he conceded that it would entail the mildest of conditions....

In the Middle Ages, theologians, notably St. Thomas Aquinas, postulated a slightly cheerier idea: limbo, from the Latin "limbus," meaning a hem or a boundary. Here innocents would live forever in what Thomas called "natural happiness," if not in heaven.

The idea seems to have originated because of the need to moderate the harshness of the religion. But limbo itself may seem too harsh today:

The church is growing most in poor places like Africa and Asia where infant mortality remains high. While the concerns of the experts reconsidering limbo are more theological, it does not hurt the church's future if an African mother who has lost a baby can receive more hopeful news from her priest in 2005 than, say, an Italian mother did 100 years ago.

"You look at the proper theology, but if there is more consolation, all the better," said the Rev. Luis Ladaria, the Spanish Jesuit who is secretary general of the International Theological Commission, the official body working on limbo.

Is religion about consolation? Is it about consolation because it's really about expansion and consolation works? Is it about consolation because it's really about expansion and the greatest potential for expansion is among the poorest people who really need consolation? I don't see how any of that has anything to do with whether limbo in fact exists.

UPDATE: In related news, Pope Benedict said today that God sees embryos as fully human:

"The loving eyes of God look on the human being, considered full and complete at its beginning," Benedict said in his weekly address to the faithful gathered in St. Peter's Square.

Quoting Psalm 139, Benedict said the Bible teaches that God already recognises the embryo as a complete human. That view is the basis for the Church teaching that aborting or manipulating these embryos amounts to murder.

In Psalm 139, the psalmist says to God: "Thou didst see my limbs unformed in the womb, and in thy book they are all recorded."

"It is extremely powerful, the idea in this psalm, that in this 'unformed' embryo God already sees the whole future," Benedict said.

Do the Psalms count as God's perspective?