How we determine who is deserving of honor and think about representation is often complicated by the altar. The Augustus of Primo Porto’s argument is about the glory of imperial Rome and the divinity of the emperor; the Confederate memorials of Monument Avenue make an erroneous claim about the righteousness of the “Lost Cause.” The altar to the Unknown God’s claim is different — there’s a humility in its design, an ambiguity in its meaning and even an uncertainty in its subject. The historian Alain Besançon explains in “The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm” that the tradition of avoiding images of God is born from “two incoercible facts about our nature: first that we must look toward the divine … and, second, that representing it is futile, sacrilegious, inconceivable.” The sculptors of statues and memorials promise us gods and heroes, but those who created the altar at the Palatine Museum achieved a far greater verisimilitude regarding those subjects, and they did it by depicting nothing.
Any statue — be it of Christopher Columbus or Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson or Frederick Douglass — makes a statement about who is worth preserving in bronze. To make a statue of a recognizable subject is to venture something about that subject, but an altar for nothing argues that its subject is so all-encompassing, so universal, so grand that it can’t be circumscribed in mere stone. Christian theologians speak of a methodology called “apophasis,” whereby the divine is discussed in terms of what can’t be known about it, where definition is always deferred and thought can’t be put into mere words. In some ways the altar to the Unknown God is a form of apophatic sculpture, whereby nonexistence is a heftier material than steel or bronze.
I’d also suggest that the apophatic is precisely the mode in which we should think of our national future, for if God is a lofty subject, then so are “freedom,” “democracy” and “America.” We are better served in memorializing the contradictory, conflicted and hypocritical history of this nation not in monumental equestrian statues punctuating traffic roundabouts but in a humbler idiom that paradoxically expresses an inherent greatness in all the more remarkable way.
This would be nothing new for the United States as a nation. One of the most popular memorials on the National Mall already considers its subject in an apophatic way. When Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was completed in 1982, it was met with great controversy. It is an ascending V-shaped wall of polished black granite inscribed with the names of the more than 58,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam War. Lin intended there to be no statues of men atop tanks, no sculptures of brave soldiers traipsing through the jungle (the inclusion, against her wishes, of just such a depiction at the edge of the memorial speaks to the controversy, despite its popularity).
Unlike Lincoln’s Parthenon or Washington’s obelisk, Lin’s memorial ventured no argument other than the sheer unimaginable depth of the war’s toll. Abstraction has been used to great effect in other modernist memorials, such as the Oklahoma City National Memorial, the Flight 93 National Memorial in Stoystown, Pa., and especially the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., where each of 805 hanging steel rectangles represents an American county where a lynching is known to have taken place.
