Philistine

Philistine (pronounced fil-uh-steen, fil-us-stahyn, fi-lis-tin, fil-us-teen, or fi-lis-teen)

(1) In historical use, a non-Semitic native or inhabitant of ancient Philistia, a region in the southwest Levant in the Middle East (initial upper case).

(1) A person lacking in, hostile to or smugly indifferent to cultural values, intellectual pursuits, aesthetic refinement etc, or is contentedly commonplace in ideas and tastes; a vulgarian or lowbrow.  Of late it has been extended also to those thought too materialistic, especially if the objects of their desires are big televisions, jet skis, McMansions etc.

(3) One’s opponent (a usually humorous use, often in the plural).

(4) In historic university slang, a person not associated with the university; a non-academic or non-student; a townsperson (originally German, adopted elsewhere as an imitative form although largely now replaced by other regionalism).

1350-1400: From Middle English Philistyne & Philisten (there were many other spellings, often from misunderstandings by Medieval scribes), a descriptor of the Old Testament people of coastal Palestine who made war on the Israelites, from the from Old English Filistina (Fillestina the genitive plural), from the Old French Philistin (which persists in modern French) and the Late Latin Philistinus (Philistīnī in the plural), from the Koine Greek Φυλιστῖνοι (Phulistînoi), a variant of Φυλιστιίμ (Phulistiím), Φυλιστιείμ (Phulistieím) (which may be compared with the Koine Greek Παλαιστῖνοι (Palaistînoi)), all ultimately derived from the Hebrew plural noun פְּלִשְׁתִּים (p'lishtím) (people of P'lesheth (Philistia)), from the adjective פְּלִשְׁתִּי (p'lishtí) (Philistine), from פְּלֶשֶׁת (p'léshet) (Philistia).  The English word was cognate with the Akkadian KURpi-lis-ta (Pilistu), KURpa-la-as-tu (⁠Palastu), KURpi-liš-ta-a-a (⁠Pilištayu) ((people) of the Pilištu lands) and is a doublet of Palestine.  In Egyptian the form was Palusata.  The archaic noun plural form Philistim was from the Middle English Philistiim and the Late Latin Philisthiim.  The synonyms: include the now obsolete Philistee & Philister (used adjectively as philister) and the archaic (except in historic use where it remains rare) Philistian.

The now more familiar adjective was derived from the noun.  The meaning "person felt by the writer or speaker to be deficient in liberal culture" dates from 1827, used originally by Scottish polymath Thomas Carlyle (1798-1881) and popularized by him and English poet Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), both borrowing from the German Philister (enemy of God's word (literally "Philistine," inhabitants of a Biblical land, neighbors (and enemies) of Israel)).  In English, philistine had been used in the humorous figurative sense of "an unfeeling enemy" since circa 1600.  Philistine is a noun & adjective, philistinism is a noun, philistinic & philistinish are adjectives, and philistinely is an adverb; the noun plural is philistines (the spelling Philistim is archaic but still used by historians and Biblical scholars).  The form philistinistic is non-standard but persistent and the usual convention in English applies: it’s Philistine with a capital P if referring to those of biblical description and philistine with a lower-case p when deriding those whose lives are thought culturally barren.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

The figurative sense was popularized in German student slang as a contemptuous term by the “gownies” for the "townies" and hence, by extension, to “any uncultured or uneducated person” (as judged by students).  In English, the expression of difference in university cities (“town and gown”) remains.  As late as the early twentieth century it was still common to see printed the claim the figurative use was derived from a sermon delivered in 1693 (cited sometimes as 1689) by the ecclesiastical superintendent Georg Heinrich Götze (1667–1728) at Thuringia’s Jena University.  The event was a memorial service for a student who died as the result of a town versus gown squabble which had turned more than usually violent, several Germans beating each other to death and the pastor’s phrase was the biblical “Philister über dir, Simson!” (The Philistines are upon you, Samson! (Judges 16:9, 12, 14, & 20).  However, the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) entry notes the word was in use in this sense as early as 1687, the sermon picking up rather than the origin.  The words philister and philistine were introduced into English by the British author Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and greatly popularized by the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), particularly in essays first published in The Cornhill Magazine (1860-1975) between 1867 and 1868 which were collected into a book entitled Culture and Anarchy (1869).

Writers

Stooping to conquer the Daily Mail's readers: Photograph of Bernard Levin (1963) by Lewis Morley (1925-2013), held by the Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, London.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) thought finding obscenity in works of art was philistinism and that art should be criticized only if banal or technically inept.  Art could explore any number of obscenities but, however representational, could not be obscene.  Even before he went mad, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) felt himself surrounded by philistines, identifying the worst of the breed as those critical of his writings; such behavior he reduced to an almost clinical condition, accusing them of lacking “true unity” and able to understand any form of style only“...in the negative”.  Sir Martin Amis (1949–2023) may have harbored a similar notion, although the quote attributed to him as finding philistinism “…in anyone who preferred television to his novels” may be apocryphal; whatever the provenance, it was something his father (Sir Kingsley Amis (1922–1995)) might have thought but never said.  Fleet Street’s Tory tabloids liked to hire philistines as columnists and few seemed to display much self-awareness in their shark-feeding populism though Bernard Levin (1928-2004), while a Daily Mail columnist during the 1960s affected the style of a philistine proud of his ignorance.  The Mail’s readership enjoyed the solidarity but after a squabble with the proprietor he moved to The Times.

The Battle between the Philistines and the Israelites (circa 1580), oil on canvas by Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti (1518-1594)), an Italian Renaissance painter of the Venetian school although this work is in the style of Mannerism which emerged during the Late Renaissance.

Aesthetic

Aesthetic (pronounced es-thet-ik or ees-thet-ik (mostly non-US))

(1) Relating to the philosophy of aesthetics; concerned with what is regarded as attractive and what is not.

(2) Relating to the science of aesthetics; concerned with the study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty.

(3) Having a sense of the beautiful; characterized by a love of beauty (and, used loosely: “good taste”).

(4) Relating to, involving, or concerned with pure emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality.

(5) The philosophical theory or set of principles governing the idea of beauty at a given time and place.

(6) A particular individual’s set of ideas about style and taste, along with its expression:

(7) An individual’s (or a collective’s) set of principles or worldview as expressed through outward appearance, behavior, or actions.

1798: From the mid-eighteenth century German Ästhetisch or the German-derived French esthétique, from the New Latin, ultimately from the Ancient Greek aisthetikos (pertaining to sense perception, perceptible, sensitive perceptive and (of things) perceptible), the construct being aisthēt(ḗs) (aesthete) + -ikos (-ic), from aisthanesthai (to perceive (by the senses or by the mind), to feel, from the primitive Indo-European awis-dh-yo-, from the root au- (to perceive).  The ikos suffix was from κός (kós) with an added i, from i-stems such as φυσι-κός (phusi-kós) (natural), through the same process by which ῑ́της (ī́tēs) developed from της (tēs), occurring in some original case and later used freely.  It was cognate with the Latin icus and the Proto-Germanic igaz, from which came Old English iġ (which in Modern English ultimately was resolved as y), the Old High German ig and the Gothic eigs.  The historic alternative spelling is æsthetics, still see in the odd literary novel.  Derived forms include the adjectives nonaesthetic (which if hyphenated seems to be used as a neutral descriptive and if not, as a critique) & pseudoaesthetic (which is always in criticism).  Aesthetic is a noun & adjective, aesthete & aestheticism are nouns and aesthetically is an adverb; the noun plural is aesthetics.

The noun aesthete (person of advanced and fine artistic sensibilities) dates from the early 1880s and was from Ancient Greek αἰσθητής (aisthētḗs) (one who perceives), the construct being aisthē- (variant stem of aisthánesthai (to perceive)) + -tēs (the Greek noun suffix denoting agent).  It was a Victorian back-formation from aesthetics and there no exact synonym, the closet being “connoisseur” but it conveys a slightly different implication and the derived noun hyperaesthete is used sometimes as a term of derision directed at the “excessively civilized”.  The rarely used alternative spellings esthete & æsthete are now used only as literary devices and are otherwise obsolete.  Aesthete is a noun and aesthetic is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is aesthetes and the idea long predates the word, descriptions of such figures appearing (sometimes as slurs hinting at a lack of manliness) in texts from Antiquity and aesthetician (professor of taste) was in use by 1829, aestheticist by 1868.  The original edition (1911) of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COD) noted that in English university slang the opposite of an aesthete was a “hearty”, the former tribe devotes of John Ruskin (1819–1900), the latter lot lusting after a rugby blue.

Ms Andrea Ivanova who is pursuing (from head to toe) a particular aesthetic.

For specific purposes, estheticians can induce localized instances of angioedema (in pathology, a swelling that occurs just beneath the surface of the skin or mucous membranes).  Ms Andrea Ivanova (b 1998), a student from the Bulgarian capital Sofia, has had over twenty injections of hyaluronic acid in her quest to have the world’s plumpest lips but, seeking additional fullness, indicated recently she intends to pursue another course of injections.  Ms Ivanova is also a collector of Barbie dolls, the aesthetic of which she admires, and these are said to provide the inspiration for some of the other body modifications and adjustments she's undertaken.  Like the lips, other bits remain a work-in-progress, Ms Ivanova documenting things on Instagram where she enjoys some 32K followers.

The alternative spelling esthetic began life as one of those Americanisms which annoy some but it reflected simply the wholly sensible approach in US English that it’s helpful if spelling follows pronunciation.  However, in the early twentieth century the US cosmetic surgery industry (even then inventive and profitable), re-purposed the word; linguistic differentiation to create product differentiation: “esthetic surgery”, the business of performing surgery for aesthetic purposes rather than reasons strictly medical or reconstructive and the most significant figure in this was the German-Jewish cosmetic physician Jacques Joseph (1865–1934), now remembered as the “father of modern cosmetic surgery”.  Under the auspices of first the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS, 1931) and the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS, 1967), the business of esthetic surgery has since boomed and related (even if remotely) professions such as nail technicians, the lip-plumpers and the body-piercers also append “esthetic” to their advertising; the first “estheticians” were the skin care specialists (exfoliation, massage, aromatherapy, facials and such) but the title soon proliferated.  

A classic reference which can be read for pleasure (by word nerds).

JA Cuddon (1928-1996) was a writer of extraordinary range and one of the great characters of twentieth century literary life in England and while some of his works sold more, none have been of more enduring than his typically comprehensive and amusing Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, first published in 1977 by Penguin and the entry on aestheticism is typical of his style, beginning with the observation the term was “'pregnant' with many connotations” before exploring the history.  In English, “aesthetic” first came into wider use after appearing in translations of the work of the German philosopher of the Enlightenment Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) although the original use was in the classically correct sense “science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception” and Kant’s use had been an attempt at reclamation on behalf of academic philosophy in reaction to his fellow German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762) heretically using it in his Aesthetica (1750) to mean “criticism of taste”, something which so appealed to English speakers it became (despite the doughty scholarly rearguard) after the 1830s (in the wake of the Romantic poets) the dominant meaning, freeing the word from the jealous grasp of the philosophers.  This was cemented by the literary critic Walter Pater (1839–1894 and one of the century’s most exquisite stylists of language) who in 1868 applied it to the l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake) movement, a place which proved its natural home.  The English academic polymath William Whewell (1794–1866) had suggested callesthetics for “the science of the perception of the beautiful” but that never caught on.  The shift is illustrated by the track of the adjective which was in 1798 was recorded to mean “of or pertaining to sensual perception” while by 1821 there was the parallel “of or pertaining to appreciation of the beautiful.”

Cuddon defined an aesthete as “one who pursues and is devoted to the 'beautiful' in art, music and literature” while aestheticisrn was the “term given to a movement, a cult, a mode of sensibility (a way of looking at and feeling about things) in the nineteenth century [which] fundamentally… entailed the point of view that art is self-sufficient and need fulfil no other purpose than its own ends. In other words, art is an end in itself and need not be (or should not be) didactic, politically committed, propagandist, moral - or anything else but itself; and it should not be judged by any non-aesthetic criteria such as whether or not it is useful).”  Cuddon reminded his readers that Kant as well as Goethe (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832), Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) & Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) were all in the vanguard of the l'art pour l'art “movement or cult”, arguing “art must be autonomous”, the political implication being “the artist should not be beholden to anyone.  From this, in turn, it followed that the artist was someone special, apart, from others and from this came the post-Romantic idea of the artist as superior to ordinary mortals”, a view which infected many who concluded they deserved to be judged on the basis of being artists, rather than by virtue of the art they produced.  In the dark mist of late Romanticism, this had a certain appeal but it cumulated in post-modernism and while it’s true that even in the nineteenth century high art there really wasn’t one agreed construct of the aesthetic, by the late twentieth century there were so many that Cuddon was probably right in suggesting it was the “long-term result of Romantic subjectivism and self-culture; of the cult of the individual ego and sensibility.”

Cuddon detected “a widespread disenchantment in the literature of the aesthetes, and especially in their poetry” which he contrasted with the popular novelists of the era such as early realists like Charles Dickens (1812–1870) or Émile Zola (1840–1902).  The poets showed a “tendency to withdrawal or aversion”, aspiring to “sensuousness and to what has become known as ‘pure poetry'” and while that was criticized by figures as diverse as Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, UK prime-minister 1868 & 1874-1880) and Karl Marx (1818-1883), at “its best, aestheticism was a revitalizing influence in an age of ugliness, brutality dreadful inequality & oppression, complacency, hypocrisy and Philistinism.  It was a genuine search for beauty and a realization that the beautiful has an independent value.  At its worst it deteriorated into posturing affectation and mannerism, to vapid idealism and indeed to a kind of silliness which is not wholly dead.”  Cuddon was writing in the mid-1970s and it’s doubtful anything he saw in the last decades of his life much changed his mind.

Deconstructing the Lindsay Lohan aesthetic

PinkMirror is a web app which helps users optimize their facial aesthetics, using an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to deconstruct the individual components an observer’s brain interprets as a whole.  Because a face is for these purposes a collection of dimensions & curves with certain critical angles determined by describing an arc between two points, it means things can be reduced to metrics, and the interaction of these numbers can used to create a measure of attractiveness.  Pinkmirror cites academic research which confirms a positive canthal tilt is a “power cue” for female facial attractiveness and while it’s speculative, a possible explanation for this offered by the researchers was linked to (1) palpebral (of, pertaining to, or located on or near the eyelids.) fissure inclination being steeper in children than adults (classifying it thus a neonatal feature) and (2) it developing into something steeper still in females than males after puberty (thus becoming a sexually dimorphic feature).  Pinkmirror notes also that natural selection seems to be operating to support the idea, data from Johns Hopkins Hospital finding that in women, the intercanthal axis averages +4.1 mm (.16 of an inch) or +4^o, the supposition being that women with the advantage of a positive medial canthus tilt are found more attractive so attract more mates, leading to a higher degree of procreation, this fecundity meaning the genetic trait producing the characteristic feature is more frequently seen in the population.  Cosmetic surgeons add another layer to the understanding, explaining the canthal tilt is one of the marker’s of aging, a positive tilt exuding youth, health, and exuberance where as a line tending beyond the negative is associated with aging, this actually literally product of natural processes, the soft tissue gradually descending under the effect of gravity, as aspect of Vogue magazine’s definition of the aging process: “Everything gets bigger, hairier & lower”.

The Pinkmirror app exists to quantify one’s degree of attractiveness.  It’s wholly based on specific dimension and thus as piece of math, is not influenced by skin tone although presumably, its parameters are defined by the (white) western model of what constitutes attractiveness.  Users should therefore work within those limitations but the model would be adaptable, presumably not to the point of being truly cross-cultural but specifics forks could certainly be created to suit any dimensional differences between ethnicities.  Using an industry standard known as the Photographic Canthal Index (PCI), one’s place on Pinkmirror’s index of attractiveness is determined by the interplay of (1) Nose width, (2) Bi-temporal to bi-zygomatic ratio, (3) chin length, (4) chin angle, (5) lower-lip height & (6) eye height.

Lindsay Lohan scored an 8.5 (out of 10), was rated as “beautiful” and found to be “very feminine, with great features of sexual dimorphism”, scoring highly in all facets except lower lip height and eye height.  Her face shape is the heart, distinguished by a broad forehead and cheekbones, narrowing in the lines of down to the jaw-line, culminating in a cute pointy chin.  Pinkmirror say the most attractive face shape for women has been found to be the triangle, scoring about the same as the oval while the heart, round, diamond, rectangle and square are also attractive to a lesser degree.  Within the app, pears and oblongs are described as “not typically seen as attractive” and while the word “ugly” isn’t used, for the unfortunate pears and oblongs, that would seem the implication.

Other aesthethetics

A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

The mysterious “experimental aesthetics” is a discipline in psychology taking “a subject-based, inductive approach to aesthetics”; it was founded by German physicist and experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) who had a background in psychophysics before changing direction so experimental aesthetics is the second oldest research area in psychology.  It is a field of study which investigates how individuals perceive and evaluate aesthetic experiences using empirical methods, merging principles and techniques from psychology, neuroscience and the arts to understand the underlying mechanisms of aesthetic appreciation and creativity.  Essentially, it was the examination of the way people perceive beauty, art and design, and how they form aesthetic judgments, the resulting metrics gleaned from measuring sensory processes, cognitive mechanisms and emotional responses.  Given these things are inherently hard to quantify in a way which is both statistically sound and has some meaning, what Fechner was attempting was really quite adventurous and those who have continued his work have produced something sprawlingly interdisciplinary, involving collaborations between psychologists, neuroscientists, artists, designers, and philosophers, all with their own traditions of measurement. From this interplay emerged the sub-field of neuroaesthetics which focuses on the neural basis of aesthetic experiences, something made possible by the development of various brain imaging techniques like Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the electroencephalogram (EEG).  Being academics who publish, experimental aesthetics has also yielded theoretical models, the most pleasing of which is the “processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure” which explores what contributes to the ease with which information is processed in the human mind, a significant factor in the way people experience beauty.

In the same vein as ethnomusicology (the study of non-Western musical forms), ethnoaesthetics is the study or description of “the aesthetics specific to or adopted by a particular culture”.  Perhaps surprisingly, both continue to be used although some might consider them at least microaggressions which can be read as implying a cultural hierarchy and even if not, it certainly suggests “separate but equal”, a concept with its own troubled history.  Phonoaesthetics is the study of the aesthetic properties of sounds, particularly in the context of language. The phono- prefix (relating to sound) was from the Ancient Greek φωνή (phōnḗ) (voice, sound).  The word φωνή primarily referred to articulated human or animal sounds in contrast to ἠχή (from which is derived “echo”) which referred to sounds in general.  Phonoaesthetics involves the analysis of how certain sounds, words, or phonetic patterns are perceived as pleasing or displeasing to the ear, the field combining elements of linguistics, psychology, and aesthetics to explore the sensory and emotional responses elicited by different sounds.  If ever you’ve wondered why a word like “succulent” is so “delicious” to say, phonoaesthetics has the answer.  The inherent beauty or appeal of sounds exists both in isolation and within linguistic structures, most obviously in the phonemes, syllables & prosody but there are also associative factors; a word with a positive association can impart pleasure and that experience can exist across a culture or be specific to one individual.  Somaesthetics is an interdisciplinary field that studies the body (soma, from the New Latin, from the Ancient Greek σῶμα (sôma) (body) as both a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning.  Not taken seriously by all critics, it’s seems essentially the “New Age” with an academic gloss.

Purgatory

Purgatory (pronounced pur-guh-tree (U), pur-guh-tawr-ee (non-U) or pur-guh-tohr-ee (non-U)

(1) In the orthodox theology of the Roman Catholic Church (and in some other Christian denominations), a condition or place in which the souls of those dying penitent (in a state of grace) are purified from venial sins, or undergo the temporal punishment that, after the guilt of mortal sin has been remitted, still remains to be endured by the sinner.

(2) In the Italian Purgatorio (pronounced poor-gah-taw-ryaw), the second part of Dante's (Dante Alighieri (circa 1265–1321)) Divine Comedy (1320), in which repentant sinners are depicted.

(3) Any condition or place of temporary punishment, suffering, expiation, or the like; any place of suffering, usually for past misdeeds.

(4) Serving to cleanse, purify, or expiate.

1160-1180: From the Middle English purgatorie (place or condition of temporal punishment for spiritual cleansing after death of souls dying penitent and destined ultimately for Heaven), from the Old French purgatore & purgatorie, from the Medieval Latin pūrgātōrium (means of cleaning), noun use of neuter of the Late Latin pūrgātōrius (purging, literally “place of clensing”), the construct being pūrgā(re) (to purge) + -tōrius (-tory), the adjectival suffix, from purgat-, past-participle stem of pūrgāre (to purge, cleanse, purify).  The adjectival form developed in the late thirteenth century, independent of the evolution in Church Latin.  The figurative use (state of mental or emotional suffering, expiation etc) dates from the late fourteenth century, originally used poetically especially despairingly when speaking of unrequited love, or (and this may seem a paradox to same and merely descriptive to others), of marriage.   In old New England it was used of narrow gorges and steep-sided ravines, a reference to the difficulties to be dad when negotiating such terrain.  Purgatory, purgatorium & purgatorian are nouns and purgatorial is an adjective; the noun plural is purgatories.

Mankind's Eternal Dilemma: The Choice Between Virtue and Vice (1633) by Frans Francken the Younger (1581–1642), Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston.

In the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, the purgatory is the condition of souls of the dead who die with punishment but not damnation due them for their sins committed on Earth.  Purgatory is conceived as a condition of suffering and purification that leads to union with God in heaven and is something thus inherently temporary and has always been a bit of a theological problem because it’s not mentioned (or even alluded to) in the Bible.  The usual rationalization of this scriptural lacuna is the argument that prayer for the dead is an ancient practice of Christianity and one which has always assumed the dead can be in a state of suffering, something which the living can improve by their prayers.  Theological positions have hung on thinner strands than that and within Roman Catholicism, purgatory has never attracted the controversy which so excited critics of limbo, a rather more obviously unjust medieval conjecture, but many branches of Western Christianity, notably the Protestant tradition, deny its existence although among the more ritualistic, there are those who conceive purgatory as a place and one often depicted as filled with fire.  The transitory nature of the condition has often encouraged misunderstanding for it is not a place of probation; the ultimate salvation of those in purgatory assured, the impenitent not received into purgatory.  Instead, the souls in purgatory receive relief through the prayers of the faithful and through the sacrifice of the mass, the confusion perhaps arising from the imagining the destructive nature of fire on Earth whereas upon the soul with no earthly attachment, it can be only cleansing.

So purgatory is the state of those who die in God's grace but are not yet perfectly purified; they are guaranteed eternal salvation but must undergo purification after death to gain the holiness needed to enter heaven.  The purgatory, the framework of which was fully developed at the Councils of Florence (1431-1449) and Trent (1545 and 1563), is totally different from the punishment of the damned who are subject to a cleansing fire, the scriptural explanation being "The person will be saved, but only through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15) but even then the Church recognized degrees of sin as Pope Gregory I (Saint Gregory the Great, circa 540–604; pope 590-604) helpfully clarified: "As for certain lesser faults, there is a purifying fire."  The possibilities were made explicit during the Council of Trent in the statement “God predestines no one to hell” which made clear that damnation is visited upon sinners only by a persistence in mortal sin until death and God would much prefer "all to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).   In the Roman ritual, the relevant line is "save us from final damnation and count us among those you have chosen" and through purgatory, souls "achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven".  Mortal sin incurs both temporal punishment and eternal punishment, venial sin ("forgivable sin” in this context) incurs only temporal punishment. The Catholic Church makes a distinction between the two.

Dante and Virgil Entering Purgatory (1499-1502) by Luca Signorelli (circa 1444-1523), Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto, Italy.  The pair are shown in the first terrace watching souls of the prideful being made to cat stones on their backs.

The noun purgatory appeared perhaps between 1160 and 1180, giving rise to the idea of purgatory as a place but the Roman Catholic tradition of purgatory as a transitional condition has a history that pre-dates even the birth of Christ.  There was, around the world, a widespread practice of both caring for and praying for the dead, the idea that prayer contributed to their purification in the afterlife.  Anthropologists note the ritual practices in other traditions, such as the way medieval Chinese Buddhists would make offerings on behalf of the dead, said to suffer numerous trials so there is nothing novel in the practice which is mentioned in what the Roman Catholic Church has declared to be part of Sacred Scripture, and which was adopted by Christians from the beginning, a practice that pre-supposes that the dead are thereby assisted between death and their entry into their final and eternal abode.

Whether purgatory is actually a place has in Roman circles been discussed for centuries.  In 2011 Pope Benedict XVI (b 1927; pope 2005-2013, pope emeritus since), speaking of Saint Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), said that in her time the purgatory was pictured as a location in space, but that she saw it as a purifying inner fire, such as she experienced in her profound sorrow for sins committed, such a contrast with God's infinite love.  The failing of man she said was being bound to the desires and suffering that derive from sin and that makes it impossible for the soul to enjoy the beatific vision of God.  Noting that little appeared to have changed, Benedict noted "We too feel how distant we are, how full we are of so many things that we cannot see God. The soul is aware of the immense love and perfect justice of God and consequently suffers for having failed to respond in a correct and perfect way to this love; and love for God itself becomes a flame, love itself cleanses it from the residue of sin."

The Eastern Catholic Churches are Catholic churches sui iuris of Eastern tradition, (in full communion with the Pope) but there are some differences with Rome on aspects of purgatory, mostly relating to terminology and speculation.  The Eastern Catholic Churches of Greek tradition do not generally use the word "purgatory", but agree that there is a "final purification" for souls destined for heaven and that prayers can help the dead who are in that state of "final purification".  In neither east nor west are these matters thought substantive and are regarded as nuances and differences of tradition.  The Eastern Catholic Churches belonging to the Syriac Tradition (Chaldean, Maronite and Syriac Catholic), generally believe in the concept of Purgatory but use a different name (usually Sheol) and claim there is contradiction with the Latin-Catholic doctrine.  Rome appears never to have pursued the matter.

La Divina Commedia di Dante (Dante and His Poem), oil on canvas by Domenico di Michelino  (1417–1491) after Alesso Baldovinetti  (1425–1499), collection of Florence Cathedral, Italy.  This work, in depicting the seven terraces in the form of the mountain were one approach to Dante's Purgatory, the other a focus on one level. 

The Eastern Orthodox Church rejects the term "purgatory" but does admit an intermediate state after death, the determination of Heaven and Hell being stated in the Bible and it notes prayer for the dead is necessary.  The position of Constantinople and environs is that the moral progress of the soul, for better or worse, ends at the very moment of the separation of body and soul; it is in that instant the definite destiny of the soul in the everlasting life is decided.  There is no way of repentance, no way of escape, no reincarnation and no help from the outside world, the eternal place of the soul decided forever by its Creator and judge.  Thus the Orthodox position is that while all undergo judgment upon death, neither the just nor the wicked attain the final state of bliss or punishment before the last day, the obvious exception being the righteous soul of the Theotokos (the Blessed Virgin Mary), "who was borne by the angels directly to heaven".

Generally, Protestant churches reject the doctrine of purgatory although more than one Archbishop of Canterbury may have come to regard Lambeth Palace as Purgatory on Earth.  One of Protestantism's most cited tenets is sola scriptura (scripture alone) and because the Bible (from which Protestants exclude deuterocanonical books such as 2 Maccabees) contains no obvious mention of purgatory, it’s therefore rejected as an unbiblical and thus un-Christian.  There are however variations such as the doctrine of sola fide (by faith alone) which hold that pure faith, apart from any action, is what achieves salvation, and that good deeds are but mere manifestations of that faith so salvation is a discrete event that takes place once for all during one's lifetime, not the result of a transformation of character.  What does seem to complicate that is that most Protestant teaching is that a transformation of character naturally follows the salvation experience; instead of distinguishing between mortal and venial sins, Protestants believe that one's faith dictates one's state of salvation and one's place in the afterlife, those saved by God destined for heaven, those not excluded.  Purgatory is thus impossible.

Divina Commedia, Purgatorio (circa 1478), illuminated manuscript commissioned by Federico da Montefeltro (1422–1482), Vatican Library collection, Rome.  Again, the carring of stones on the first terrace, the style is recognizable in the later schools of mannerism and surrealism.  

Wishing to excise any hint of popery from religion, purgatory was addressed in two of the foundation documents of Anglicanism in the sixteenth century.  Prayers for the departed were deleted in the 1552 revision to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer because they implied a doctrine of purgatory (it was the nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic that saw them restored to some editions) and Article XXII of the the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571) was most explicit: "The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory . . . is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God."  In the twenty-first century, the Anglicans, finding it hard to sit anywhere but on the fence, now say “Purgatory is seldom mentioned in Anglican descriptions or speculations concerning life after death, although many Anglicans believe in a continuing process of growth and development after death.”  The post-modern church writ small; one wonders if the PowerPoint slides of Anglican accountants and Anglican theologians greatly differ.

In Judaism, Gehenna is a place of purification where, according to some traditions, sinners spend up to a year before release.  For some, there are three classes of souls: (1) the righteous who shall at once be written down for the life everlasting, (2) the wicked who shall be damned and (3), those whose virtues and sins counterbalance one another shall go down to Gehenna and float up and down until they rise purified.  Other sects speak only of the good and the bad yet, confusingly, most also mention an intermediate state.  There’s also variance between the traditions regarding the time which purgatory in Gehenna lasts, some saying twelve months and others forty-nine days, both opinions based upon Isaiah 66:23–24: "From one new moon to another and from one Sabbath to another shall all flesh come to worship before Me, and they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against Me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched"; the former interpreting the words "from one new moon to another" to signify all the months of a year; the latter interpreting the words "from one Sabbath to another", in accordance with Leviticus 23:15-16, to signify seven weeks.  Whatever the specified duration, there are exceptions made for the souls of the impure which prove resistant to the persuasions of the Gehenna.  According to the Baraita (a Jewish oral law tradition), the souls of the wicked are judged, and after these twelve months are are consumed and transformed into ashes under the feet of the righteous whereas the "great seducers and blasphemers" are to undergo eternal tortures in Gehenna without cessation.  The righteous however and, according to some, also the sinners among the people of Israel for whom Abraham intercedes because they bear the Abrahamic sign of the covenant, are not harmed by the fire of Gehenna even when they are required to pass through the intermediate state of purgatory.

Relief sculpture on a side wall at the Chapel of Souls, (Capilla de Animas) in Compostela, Spain.  These are the souls of the lustful on the seventh terrace, praying for release, which they have been promised will (eventually) be granted by the cleansing flames, something dependent on true repentance.

It was the Florentine poet Dante (Dante Alighieri, circa 1265–1321) who, in the second cantica of the epic poem Divine Comedy (1320) gave the world a vivid depiction of the place he called Purgatorio.  Dante described Purgatory as a mountain which rose on the far side of the world, opposite Jerusalem, with seven terraces, each corresponding to the one of the seven deadly sins, each terrace a place of purification for souls who are penitent and seeking to cleanse themselves of their sins, so to be judged worthy of entering Paradise.  In the valley at the base of the mountain is Ante-Purgatory and here sit the souls of the excommunicated and those who delayed repentance (the so called the “late repentant”) as they await their turn to begin their ascent of the terraces.  Throughout Purgatory, angels and guides assist the souls and Dante's guide is the Roman poet Virgil (symbolizing human reason).  Virgil leads Dante until they reach Earthly Paradise where Beatrice (representing divine wisdom) takes over as the guide to Heaven.

The seven terraces

First Terrace (Pride): Here the souls are humbled by being made to carry heavy stones on their backs, forcing them to bend and contemplate humility.

Second Terrace (Envy): Envious souls are punished by having their eyes sewn shut with twists of iron wire so they may learn to appreciate the beauty of charity and generosity.

Third Terrace (Wrath): Souls of the wrathful Souls enveloped in a thick smoke that blinds them, teaching them to cultivate patience and peace.

Fourth Terrace (Sloth): The slothful are punished by being forced incessantly to run, encouraging diligence and zeal.

Fifth Terrace (Avarice and Prodigality): These souls have to lie face down in the dirt and weep, teaching them to balance their desire for material wealth with the virtues of generosity and moderation.

Sixth Terrace (Gluttony): The gluttonous are starved so extreme hunger and thirst constantly will remind them of the importance of temperance.

Seventh Terrace (Lust): Souls here walk through walls of flames, purging the sin of lust, teaching chastity and love for God.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

That all sound rather grim but at the mountain’s summit sits the reward: Earthly Paradise (the Garden of Eden).  Here, in this place of peace and beauty, symbolizing the restored innocence and grace, souls are purified completely and ready to ascend to Heaven.  So, the purpose of Dante's Purgatory is less the punishments which must be endured than the possibility of redemption from sin through repentance to purification, leading ultimately to the soul's readiness for Paradise. In this it contrasts with the eternal sufferings which are the fate of those souls condemned to the circles of Hell.

Mannerism

Mannerism (pronounced man-uh-riz-uhm)

(1) A habitual or characteristic manner, mode, or way of doing something; distinctive quality or style, as in behavior or speech; a distinctive and individual gesture or trait; idiosyncrasy.

(2) Marked or excessive adherence to an unusual or a particular manner, especially if affected; adherence to a distinctive or affected manner, especially in art or literature.

(3) A style in art, a principally Italian movement in art and architecture between the High Renaissance and Baroque periods (1520–1600) that sought to represent an ideal of beauty rather than natural images of it, characterized by a complex perspectival system, elongation of forms, strained gestures or poses of figures, and intense, often strident color (usually initial capital letter).

1795–1805: A compound word manner + -ism.  Manner was from the Middle English maner, a borrowing from the Anglo-Norman manere, from the Old French maniere, from the Vulgar Latin manāria (feminine form of manuarius (belonging to the hand)), from manus (hand).  In Romance languages, there was also the French manière, the Italian mannaia (ax, axe), the Portuguese maneira and maneiro (handy, portable), the Romanian mâner (handle), and the Spanish manera (way).  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Mannerism & mannerist are nouns, manneristic & manneristical are adjectives and manneristically is an adverb; the most commonly use noun plural is mannerists.

After the Renaissance

Classic Mannerism: Madonna dal Colla Lungo (The Madonna with the Long Neck (circa 1537-1540)) oil on wood by Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, 1503-1540).

Historians of art use (sometimes a little loosely) the term Mannerism to refer to a style of painting, sculpture and even architecture which developed in Florence and Rome in the first two decades of the sixteenth century, the later years of the High Renaissance and although it’s a bit of a cliché, mannerism can be thought of as the transition between the idealized style of Renaissance art and the dramatic theatricality of the Baroque.  Early Mannerism (circa 1510-1535) tends to be known for what it was not: it was “anti-Renaissance” or “anti-classical” and a reaction against what had evolved to be a formal and prescriptive style while High Mannerism (circa 1535-1580) adopted a formalism of its own, intricate, self-referential and a visual language which focused on technique and an appeal to the sophisticated critics and patrons of the age.  A deliberate retreat or advance depending on one’s view) from the naturalistic traditions of Renaissance painting the artificiality became the an exaggerated idiom associated with the era and was applied to the strained poses, elongated human figures, distortions of scale, tricks of lighting or perspective which were often depicted in vivid, contrasting colors.  More than anything, it was an attempt to find a way in which the attributes of the emotions could be depicted by technique alone.  Because Mannerism is now so associated with its distinctive markers such as the wan-like necks and facial expressions suggesting something between bemusement and constipation, it’s often forgotten artists as diverse as Correggio (1489-1534), noted for his sentimental narrative paintings, Federico Barocci (1526-1612) the devoutly religious painter of sacred images and Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) known for his monumentally bizarre portraits which were collages of fruit and vegetable (still popular as posters) were all significant figures in the mannerist tradition.  The best remembered of course remains Michelangelo (1475-1564) who influenced for centuries the portrayal of the Christ child by showing light radiating from the infant, his Sistine Chapel frescoes such as The Last Judgement (1536-1541) a landmark of the movement.

High Mannerism: El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz (The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586) oil on canvas by El Greco (Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos, 1541-1614) 

Mannerism did not develop merely as an artistic novelty.  The idealized works of the High Renaissance were an expression of stability in society which had by the sixteenth century evolved into what at the time seemed to many not only the highest level of civilization ever achieved but the highest that was possible to achieve.  That didn’t last and the turmoil which followed in the wake of the religious war of the Reformation against the Catholic Church shattered the certainties of centuries, something exacerbated by what was discovered and uncovered by science; not only was it clear that Europe was not the centre of a flat Earth, but the Earth itself was not something around which all the universe revolved.  The ordered harmony of the world explained by the church was crumbling and the adventurism of Mannerism was there to reflects the new uncertainties.

Vista de Toledo (View of Toledo, circa 1599), oil on canvas by El Greco.  Although most associated with depictions of the human form, Mannerism also spawned a school of landscape painting.  Vista de Toledo is the best known of El Greco's surviving landscapes, a portrayal of the city in which he lived and worked in for most of his life.  Mannerist depictions of the built environment actually belonged to the long tradition of emblematic rather than faithful documentary descriptions of city views and here, there's also a bit of artistic licence; viewed looking north-east, the artist has shifted the cathedral to the left of the Alcázar (the royal palace), just to provide the desired compositional balance.  The ancient Alcántara Bridge and the Castle of San Servando are both faithfully represented.

Some historians have argued that although Mannerism wasn’t at any time inevitable, something was because the artistic forms of the Renaissance had been perfected by Old Masters like Raphael and Leonardo who had refined their techniques to the point where their ability to render the natural and realistic transcended the two-dimensional space in which they often worked; at what they did, they couldn’t be improved upon.  This wasn’t an attractive thing for younger artists who wished to be more than just imitative and foreshadowing the iconoclastic movements which centuries later would remake what art could be thought to be, the mannerists formed a new pictorial language, one which was individualistic and mapped symbolism onto a visual structure in which the symmetry and balance so prized by the Old Masters were replaced by a dynamism so challenging that a viewer might be uncertain where their gaze should be focused.  It was a confident and exaggerated artificiality.

Nozze di Cana (The Wedding Feast at Cana, 1562–1563), oil on canvas by Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari, 1528–1588).  Nozze di Cana is sometime used in fine art studies, lecturers asking students to identify the elements associated with the High Renaissance and those then exclusive to mannerism.

From Mannerism can be traced the path which led via almost a dozen different movements to the art of post-modernism in which the real & unreal, the spiritual world and the perceptible world, can not necessarily be distinguished, a notion which the masters of the High Renaissance would have thought absurd but just as Mannerism was once a disrupter, it became an orthodoxy so of course there were those who wanted to create their own unique things and the school begat “High Mannerism” which in the seventeenth century became “the Baroque” and, in a nice twist, the style (which at its core was illusionist) was with alacrity embraced by the Church which understood what needed to be done to make faith attractive.  It was at the Council of Trent (1562) when the framework for the strategy of the Counter-Reformation was first thrashed out that it was decided the mystical and supernatural would become a prominent part of the religious experience: Baroque art could do that like none other.

The mannerist tradition: Lindsay (2019) by Sam McKinniss (b 1985) (left), from a reference photograph taken 22 July 2012, leaving the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, LA (right).

A distinctive feature of Mannerism was the use of figurative serpentinata (serpentine figure) in the depiction of the human body with extended limbs and the elongation of forms, the figures presented an otherworldliness that departed from classical renditions and many Mannerist works presented individuals or scenes in non-naturalistic settings, oftentimes without any contextual basis, inviting the viewer to regard the work as something beyond the literal renditions of the Renaissance.