The Shadow of God: A Journey Through Memory, Art, and Faith - Hardcover
The Shadow of God is part memoir, part spiritual autobiography, and part tour of great works of art, literature, and music. In the form of a journal written over the course of a year, Charles Scribner shares childhood recollections of a household where figures like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were family friends. He tells stories from his own noteworthy publishing career, from his journey toward faith, and from his deep knowledge of Baroque art.
Born an Episcopalian, he charts the story of his interior life and the importance of the arts in helping him choose the spiritual, emotional, and intellectual paths he would follow, including his Catholic conversion. He asks himself questions like “How far back can we trace the roots of faith?” Scribner writes with contagious enthusiasm about the pivotal truths he discovered in the novels of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and the inspiration he found in art, music, opera, and the Bible.
The Shadow of God is a journey through memory, art, and faith that shaped Scribner’s year as it passed through the seasons, from Epiphany to Epiphany. It is a moving portrait of a man who has devoted his life to words and the Word and a work of rare power by a writer whose grace, humor, and candor will touch readers.
Born an Episcopalian, he charts the story of his interior life and the importance of the arts in helping him choose the spiritual, emotional, and intellectual paths he would follow, including his Catholic conversion. He asks himself questions like “How far back can we trace the roots of faith?” Scribner writes with contagious enthusiasm about the pivotal truths he discovered in the novels of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and the inspiration he found in art, music, opera, and the Bible.
The Shadow of God is a journey through memory, art, and faith that shaped Scribner’s year as it passed through the seasons, from Epiphany to Epiphany. It is a moving portrait of a man who has devoted his life to words and the Word and a work of rare power by a writer whose grace, humor, and candor will touch readers.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Charles Scribner III received his BA, MFA, and PhD from Princeton University in art and archaeology. He has worked in publishing for nearly thirty years and is a prominent authority on Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, and other artists. He has written biographies on Rubens and Bernini; articles for Vanity Fair, Art & Antiques, and other publications; and has lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Smithsonian, Christie’s, and various universities. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ritchie, an artist and teacher.
Sunday, January 6, 2002
--Feast of the Epiphany
Today the three Magi, Wise Men, Kings--thank God no longer the "astrologers" of the first New American Bible translation--presented their legendary gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christ Child in Bethlehem two millennia ago, and here I sit to begin writing a book I meant to begin months ago. I care nothing for birthdays or for the symbolism associated with those mounting numbers. Yet recently, on turning fifty, I felt a gnawing dissatisfaction with the prospect of another half century ahead of me. My father, at this milestone, while I was a junior at Princeton, confided to me, "I feel as though my life is almost half over." He added that Jack Hemingway, the eldest son of his most famous author, had remarked, "I've spent the first fifty years of my life being my father's son, and will spend the next fifty being my daughters' father." That story came back to me last year while I was having breakfast at the Ivy Club in Princeton during a visit to my freshman son. Hearing my name mentioned, a girl looked up from her reading and asked with all the eagerness of youth, "Oh, are you Charlie Scribner's father?" I burst into laughter, explaining that for four years at that very table I had been "Charlie Scribner's son" (my father was the real one, a university trustee); and now I come back to be "Charlie's father." Independent identity remains elusive.
I told that story at Jack Hemingway's memorial service at the Explorers Club a few weeks later. I felt a kinship with Jack--well beyond the fact that my grandfather and Ernest Hemingway had been best friends, or that my father had been his final publisher. No, it was that I had always felt that Jack's amusing comment was leavened with love for both his father and his children. It was a love I shared with him and with most of fortunate humanity, the love for one's parents and for one's children, and the pride--the good pride, not the deadly sin--that goes with it. But if truth be told, of the two roles I have always felt far more qualified for the first, that of a professional son. It is one I have played for most of my life, and one develops comfort, not to say confidence, with decades of practice.
Up until that breakfast, I had been able to prolong that role for more than five years beyond my father's death, in 1995. I am still not ready to retire from it: I like being his son, first and foremost. But in doing so, especially during his final years of illness and then in the flurry of activity that followed--estate, memorials, and the excavation of memories--I had slipped into neglecting two key activities in my life, two keyboards in fact: the piano's and this laptop's.
Music has always been my first love. Writing came later, although inescapable through birth, profession, and even surname (originally Scrivener, until the late-eighteenth-century change to Scribner), which means "scribe." Within the past year, I bought three pianos for our new apartment: a baby grand for the living room, an electric one for late-night practice, and finally a new Steinway grand for what I have since dubbed the Music Room. Here I finally face this silent keyboard and the book I now know I must write. Its outlines are dim; the mists have not yet risen as it is late at night, with only twenty-some minutes left in this Feast of the Three Gift Givers.
My books on Rubens and Bernini were easy to tackle: I had both their lives and their (illustrated) works as instant structures. But now I have only a theme--if not a title--"The Shadow of God," taken from an inscription my father gave me to post on my study carrel in Princeton's Marquand Library, my senior year, as I faced writing my thesis. Lux Umbra Dei--light is the shadow of God. It seems to fit Epiphany, the feast illumined by the light of that wondrous star and following, by a few weeks, that more ancient festival of lights, Hanukkah.
Last evening, during the Epiphany homily, the priest at St. Gertrude's in Bayville, Long Island, noted that this feast is really about taking a risk for faith. The Magi followed their star for a long journey, but with no guarantee that they would achieve their goal; nor even, after they reached the manger and delivered their gifts, that they would be able to return home as planned. We never learn what happened after they received a warning in a dream and returned home "by another route." Were they able to go home again? Were their lives forever changed in other ways?
Tomorrow I shall begin the journey toward the next Epiphany. WQXR has just played the midnight chime. Time to rest until daylight may reveal the path to take.
Monday, January 7, 2002
The workweek having begun, already I find myself breaking a writing habit that served so well in times past--to write early in the morning, then reflect at night and plan the next day's work. That's what it was all about--having a good plan. My father's driving motto--his recipe of marital success, at least in an auto--was "No new routes." (They often lead to getting lost, and spousal consternation.) How did the Magi fare? They went home "by another route": was it a new one? In some ways, it could not have been otherwise. The world was renewed by a baby's birth, but would they have known that? They had left behind the most precious of gifts in a rude hovel. How could that have seemed anything but reckless extravagance?
Perhaps that very extravagance gives this feast its special allure--like a High Mass celebrated with solemn splendor in the simplest surroundings. I should like to visit the Cave of the Nativity someday; it's the very contrast of the royal trappings and the rustic place that gives those paintings of the Magi at Bethlehem their majesty, as in Rubens's at the high altar of King's College Chapel, Cambridge: it's the world upside down, kings paying homage to a poor baby on a straw bed. "Contrast" is too weak a word, "juxtaposition" too technical; the Italians come closer with contrapposto and chiaroscuro--if it were music it might be "divine dissonance"--the convergence of metaphysical opposites.
Walking home tonight from work, I was saddened to see men already beginning to dismantle the base of the great Rockefeller Center tree. Didn't they know that the Christmas season still has six days to go, until next Sunday, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord? At least it still stood and shone with its colored lights, this year all red, white, and blue--a patriotic response to the tragedy of 9/11. Then, along Park and Lexington Avenues, all those sad discarded trees--like Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs"--to be picked up and disposed of in the earliest morning hours. Is there a sadder sight? There was.
Just as I felt melancholy dispersed by the still brightly lit manger outside my parish church, St. Vincent's (those wise and wily Dominicans know better than to close up the stable early), a woman on the corner asked softly for help. I thought she wanted directions, but she asked for a dollar. I was stunned: she was dressed simply, but with a dignity that was reinforced by her voice and manner. She said she lived at the women's shelter across the street, at the Armory. I asked if she knew about the help to be had at St. Agnes Parish, about a mile away. No, she said, she had a place to stay, but she needed some money for another woman in special need, "and it's so hard to ask for money."
I was so struck by the unlikelihood that such a lady would be in such need that I pulled out the largest bill I had and was grateful that she didn't look down at it before she gave a blessing in return. How many epiphanies have yet to be had before the manger, even a miniature one with plastic figures? There are so many such encounters on the streets of New York. What made this one seem so different?
When I got home I pulled out a Christmas card from the pile. It was a poem written by Father Andrew Greeley.
We live in a cosmos that is oddly forgiving.
It is never too late to begin again.
There are always second chances and more.
Like Ulysses it is possible to go home again.
We will all be young again and laugh again.
Love is always and necessarily renewable
And life is stronger than death.
How can a whole city full of discarded trees negate the joy promised in these verses? Greeley's words literally saved the day. And the book that accompanied them, his prayer journal My Love, which he had published so that readers might be encouraged to keep their own journals--well, that has saved me from my worst instinct: to second-guess myself and abandon a project before it is hardly begun.
I am not ready to write to God, but I'll take up the good Father Greeley partway and keep a journal until Epiphany, to follow that star back to its rising again. My father's favorite saying was "The secret of a happy life is to do a little work every day" (to which I, the wise-guy college student, replied, "OK, Dad, I will . . . as little as possible!").
Tuesday, January 8, 2002
This morning, after the 9 a.m. mass at St. Vincent's, I stopped at the Rosary Altar, which I had restored in the millennium year as a memorial for my father; it's now in the midst of a plywood construction site of church renovation, which added a certain ambience to the manger scene set up behind the prayer rail. I knelt and took in the carved figures of Magi and shepherds and animals and the Holy Family, with the Babe aglow in his creche. Three Charleses came to mind. First, my father, whom I now associate in a very vivid way with this richly carved altar of saints. "For all the saints, who from their labors rest" was one of his favorite hymns, a staple of Episcopalian funerals. I like to think of him in their company now. The second is my son Charlie, a sophomore at Princeton; when he was two, I showed him this altar an...
--Feast of the Epiphany
Today the three Magi, Wise Men, Kings--thank God no longer the "astrologers" of the first New American Bible translation--presented their legendary gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christ Child in Bethlehem two millennia ago, and here I sit to begin writing a book I meant to begin months ago. I care nothing for birthdays or for the symbolism associated with those mounting numbers. Yet recently, on turning fifty, I felt a gnawing dissatisfaction with the prospect of another half century ahead of me. My father, at this milestone, while I was a junior at Princeton, confided to me, "I feel as though my life is almost half over." He added that Jack Hemingway, the eldest son of his most famous author, had remarked, "I've spent the first fifty years of my life being my father's son, and will spend the next fifty being my daughters' father." That story came back to me last year while I was having breakfast at the Ivy Club in Princeton during a visit to my freshman son. Hearing my name mentioned, a girl looked up from her reading and asked with all the eagerness of youth, "Oh, are you Charlie Scribner's father?" I burst into laughter, explaining that for four years at that very table I had been "Charlie Scribner's son" (my father was the real one, a university trustee); and now I come back to be "Charlie's father." Independent identity remains elusive.
I told that story at Jack Hemingway's memorial service at the Explorers Club a few weeks later. I felt a kinship with Jack--well beyond the fact that my grandfather and Ernest Hemingway had been best friends, or that my father had been his final publisher. No, it was that I had always felt that Jack's amusing comment was leavened with love for both his father and his children. It was a love I shared with him and with most of fortunate humanity, the love for one's parents and for one's children, and the pride--the good pride, not the deadly sin--that goes with it. But if truth be told, of the two roles I have always felt far more qualified for the first, that of a professional son. It is one I have played for most of my life, and one develops comfort, not to say confidence, with decades of practice.
Up until that breakfast, I had been able to prolong that role for more than five years beyond my father's death, in 1995. I am still not ready to retire from it: I like being his son, first and foremost. But in doing so, especially during his final years of illness and then in the flurry of activity that followed--estate, memorials, and the excavation of memories--I had slipped into neglecting two key activities in my life, two keyboards in fact: the piano's and this laptop's.
Music has always been my first love. Writing came later, although inescapable through birth, profession, and even surname (originally Scrivener, until the late-eighteenth-century change to Scribner), which means "scribe." Within the past year, I bought three pianos for our new apartment: a baby grand for the living room, an electric one for late-night practice, and finally a new Steinway grand for what I have since dubbed the Music Room. Here I finally face this silent keyboard and the book I now know I must write. Its outlines are dim; the mists have not yet risen as it is late at night, with only twenty-some minutes left in this Feast of the Three Gift Givers.
My books on Rubens and Bernini were easy to tackle: I had both their lives and their (illustrated) works as instant structures. But now I have only a theme--if not a title--"The Shadow of God," taken from an inscription my father gave me to post on my study carrel in Princeton's Marquand Library, my senior year, as I faced writing my thesis. Lux Umbra Dei--light is the shadow of God. It seems to fit Epiphany, the feast illumined by the light of that wondrous star and following, by a few weeks, that more ancient festival of lights, Hanukkah.
Last evening, during the Epiphany homily, the priest at St. Gertrude's in Bayville, Long Island, noted that this feast is really about taking a risk for faith. The Magi followed their star for a long journey, but with no guarantee that they would achieve their goal; nor even, after they reached the manger and delivered their gifts, that they would be able to return home as planned. We never learn what happened after they received a warning in a dream and returned home "by another route." Were they able to go home again? Were their lives forever changed in other ways?
Tomorrow I shall begin the journey toward the next Epiphany. WQXR has just played the midnight chime. Time to rest until daylight may reveal the path to take.
Monday, January 7, 2002
The workweek having begun, already I find myself breaking a writing habit that served so well in times past--to write early in the morning, then reflect at night and plan the next day's work. That's what it was all about--having a good plan. My father's driving motto--his recipe of marital success, at least in an auto--was "No new routes." (They often lead to getting lost, and spousal consternation.) How did the Magi fare? They went home "by another route": was it a new one? In some ways, it could not have been otherwise. The world was renewed by a baby's birth, but would they have known that? They had left behind the most precious of gifts in a rude hovel. How could that have seemed anything but reckless extravagance?
Perhaps that very extravagance gives this feast its special allure--like a High Mass celebrated with solemn splendor in the simplest surroundings. I should like to visit the Cave of the Nativity someday; it's the very contrast of the royal trappings and the rustic place that gives those paintings of the Magi at Bethlehem their majesty, as in Rubens's at the high altar of King's College Chapel, Cambridge: it's the world upside down, kings paying homage to a poor baby on a straw bed. "Contrast" is too weak a word, "juxtaposition" too technical; the Italians come closer with contrapposto and chiaroscuro--if it were music it might be "divine dissonance"--the convergence of metaphysical opposites.
Walking home tonight from work, I was saddened to see men already beginning to dismantle the base of the great Rockefeller Center tree. Didn't they know that the Christmas season still has six days to go, until next Sunday, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord? At least it still stood and shone with its colored lights, this year all red, white, and blue--a patriotic response to the tragedy of 9/11. Then, along Park and Lexington Avenues, all those sad discarded trees--like Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs"--to be picked up and disposed of in the earliest morning hours. Is there a sadder sight? There was.
Just as I felt melancholy dispersed by the still brightly lit manger outside my parish church, St. Vincent's (those wise and wily Dominicans know better than to close up the stable early), a woman on the corner asked softly for help. I thought she wanted directions, but she asked for a dollar. I was stunned: she was dressed simply, but with a dignity that was reinforced by her voice and manner. She said she lived at the women's shelter across the street, at the Armory. I asked if she knew about the help to be had at St. Agnes Parish, about a mile away. No, she said, she had a place to stay, but she needed some money for another woman in special need, "and it's so hard to ask for money."
I was so struck by the unlikelihood that such a lady would be in such need that I pulled out the largest bill I had and was grateful that she didn't look down at it before she gave a blessing in return. How many epiphanies have yet to be had before the manger, even a miniature one with plastic figures? There are so many such encounters on the streets of New York. What made this one seem so different?
When I got home I pulled out a Christmas card from the pile. It was a poem written by Father Andrew Greeley.
We live in a cosmos that is oddly forgiving.
It is never too late to begin again.
There are always second chances and more.
Like Ulysses it is possible to go home again.
We will all be young again and laugh again.
Love is always and necessarily renewable
And life is stronger than death.
How can a whole city full of discarded trees negate the joy promised in these verses? Greeley's words literally saved the day. And the book that accompanied them, his prayer journal My Love, which he had published so that readers might be encouraged to keep their own journals--well, that has saved me from my worst instinct: to second-guess myself and abandon a project before it is hardly begun.
I am not ready to write to God, but I'll take up the good Father Greeley partway and keep a journal until Epiphany, to follow that star back to its rising again. My father's favorite saying was "The secret of a happy life is to do a little work every day" (to which I, the wise-guy college student, replied, "OK, Dad, I will . . . as little as possible!").
Tuesday, January 8, 2002
This morning, after the 9 a.m. mass at St. Vincent's, I stopped at the Rosary Altar, which I had restored in the millennium year as a memorial for my father; it's now in the midst of a plywood construction site of church renovation, which added a certain ambience to the manger scene set up behind the prayer rail. I knelt and took in the carved figures of Magi and shepherds and animals and the Holy Family, with the Babe aglow in his creche. Three Charleses came to mind. First, my father, whom I now associate in a very vivid way with this richly carved altar of saints. "For all the saints, who from their labors rest" was one of his favorite hymns, a staple of Episcopalian funerals. I like to think of him in their company now. The second is my son Charlie, a sophomore at Princeton; when he was two, I showed him this altar an...
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- PublisherDoubleday Religion
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 0385516584
- ISBN 13 9780385516587
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages304
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