Category: Theology and art

This morning a book arrived in the post, yet another book.

This is an all but weekly occurrence that whether it puzzles others, frequently puzzles me.

Whence the imperative to read, and to own and handle the word made matter?

Is it self-indulgence, or sacrament – means of survival or means of grace?

Philip Toynbee said books were his royal road to God.

Not all books that lead to God are books about God.

But

To confer with and consult minds other than our own.

To see what others point out to our limited sight.

To feel the impetus of those who push us beyond the restrictive horizons 0f what we know.

To revel in the intellectual humility that provides the humus out of which good learning grows.

To keep alive curiosity and pay attention to the world and listen to our own lives.

To take and read, and to wonder and ponder on goodness, beauty and truth.

To nurture imagination, refresh the wells of thought, replenish our emotional capacity.

Books do this, and much more for me.

And in that sense they are a means of grace, constant sources of new understanding, encounters with minds different from mine and no less valid.

As a matter of interest the book that arrived is an updated classic of art investigation. Beautifully written, it explores the intricacies and complexities involved in establishing the provenance and authenticity of paintings attributed to Vermeer.

But it is Gowing's analysis of Vermeer's temperament and character, and of how these inevitably influenced his technique and artistic expression, that makes this a profound study of genius. When much has been said about cultural milieu, historical context, social influences, and political background, there is still the mystery of temperament and personality, and the complex intertwining of accident, circumstance and personal intention. These may be all but insoluble, but in the attempt, much comes to light that otherwise would remain hidden. Gowing as noted above, is an impetus pushing the reader towards new horizons, teaching us to pay attention to our world, itself a sacrament of creation.

Few artists paid more detailed attention to the sacrament of the ordinary than Jan Vermeer.

I went to visit an old friend on Wednesday. Actually two old friends. One I've known for over 40 years, the other I first encountered 30 years ago. My friend of 40 years shared a coffee, then lunch, then much talking about the things that matter and some things that don't. That friendship has settled into an unspoken but mutually understood trust that enables us to speak with freedom not merely in confidence, but in the confidence that what is said is heard, listened to and attended to.

The second old friend now resides in a setting that does justice to its beauty, power and commanding presence. Salvador Dali's Christ of St John of the Cross needs neither accolade nor commendation. It is a masterpiece. That it excites argument and admiration, creates controversy while depicting reconciliation, and draws you into the spiritual realities of Christian faith while resisting facile devotional reductionism, simply confirms its status as on of the greatest paintings of the 20th Century.

It also excited the hostility of someone with a knife who ripped and scarred it half a century ago, and subsequently inspired the restorers to work with painstaking patience to repair it. Which brings me to one of those epiphany moments that perhaps it takes the context of Kelvingrove Art Gallery, and the love Glasgow folk have for their art collection, and this particular painting.

I am sitting on the bench and all but paddling in the sea shallows at the edge of the painting. In came two Glasgow punters, one who had never seen the painting before and one who thought it was a "braw picture". They stood up close and the experienced art guide who had seen it "hunners o' times" helped his pal to stand at just the right angle, in line with the lights, and pointed out the L shaped scar, barely visible, but there to be seen if you knew where to look. They talked for a while describing in Glaswegian discourse the perpetrator of the damage, and spoke with wondering gratitude (but in that same Galswegian discourse) of those who "sorted it". Then they went away. At no time did they stand and look at the painting as it is. Having inspected the damage and the repair, away they went. I was offended for my friend, and should have gone and asked them to come and meet the masterpiece properly. I'm glad I didn't.

A few minutes later as I walked out of that small place of peace and prayer that is the right setting for this painting, there the two of them were, sitting there and taking in the visual presentation of the history of the painting and how it came to be in Kelvingrove, and how £8,200 was an enormous amount of money 60 years ago, and how one man's vision and persistence resulted in Glasgow owning a work of art that is now all but priceless. It was just ending, and they got up and went back in to the painting. And I smiled a deep inner smile – now they were going to meet my friend properly, having done their background research.

Several times I've taken a class to look at this painting – online just doesn't work. They go having discussed it in class, looked at the background, and with some idea of what to look for. What they don't have an idea of, is what it will be like to stand before this astonishing artistic statement – Dali's professed aim to paint a beautiful Christ of the Cross. Then we go walkabout, in company or alone, and meet some time later for round the coffee table discussion in the cafe downstairs. Some of my most rewarding and moving experiences of teaching and learning (and both are so intermingled we are all learner / teachers) have taken place round such a table, having encountered Dali's masterpiece. And the irony is, in achieving his aim, an act of vandalism has left a scar that is still visible if you know where to look. And in that irony is one of the great theological mysteries, of created beauty, damaged and restored, having the power to subdue our worst and renew our best.

 

Yesterday at the National Galleries I stood for a while looking at this painting, now recognised as a work that finally defined Gaugin's own style, artistic voice and vision. It's called Vision after the Sermon. My first responses to Gaugin have been lukewarm, and I struggle at times to see beyond, or to want to see beyond, the sophisticated way he uses a more primitive style and naive or even crude choices of colour.

I don't think this is a beautiful painting. But it is powerful and arresting, though it presupposes the prior knowledge of the story of Jacob wrestling the Angel of the Lord. As an expression of piety, prayer and how the religious imagination encourages, even compels spiritual devotion, it is a profoundly moving painting. Gaugin loved to paint the Bretons, men in the fields, women at domestic tasks and just as often at prayer. 

The use of the tree to divide the people praying from the action taking place off centre, almost off stage, suggests strongly the importance of the real, the imaginary and the ways of bringing them into relationship. The angel figure is ambiguous too – who is going to overcome whom, and what is at stake, and for Gaugin the deeper agitation of what goes on inside the human mind and heart when looking for the meaning and value and direction of life. This is a disturbing not a devotional painting, with its contrast of prayer and struggle, real and unreal, this world and that spiritual world that breaks through with life enhancing or life shattering power. 

Whatever else Gaugin's painting does, it takes with unflinching seriousness the awe and dread of some Old Testament stories that make it clear God is not to be messed with, and to encounter the Holy One of Israel is an experience from which at best we will limp away towards the sunrise, blessed but forever changed. "I will not let you go unless you bless me", said Jacob. Gaugin has captured the immensity of what is at stake when we wrestle with angels, when we see beyond the immediate realities of our lives to the reality of God, whose presence and mercy, power and love, challenge and comfort pervades all reality, and with infinite costly patience and struggle persists in His holy and wholesome purposes of redeeming, renewing, reconciling and reawakening to worship, and life and joyous completion, the whole of creation. 

Or so it seemed to me as I pondered and go on pondering this strange painting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just framed a print of this painting by Chagall and hung it in my study at College. It's a bit loud in its red frame alongside other prints in more sedate burnished bronze, pine and gold.

Is the mood in this scene anxious, expectant, hilarious, poignant, tense?

All of these and more – how else draw the artist into the trap of painting the impossible communion of heaven with earth, eternal purpose with quotidian humanity, outrageous promise with long familiar disappointment, God's laughter of future joy and human laughter of disbelief subverted by the glimpsed beginning of risky trustfulness.

The angels are central to the picture, but Sarah is central to the story – no wonder she laughed. And no wonder we always fail to explain in our superior cleverness what that laugh meant. Chagall depicts hospitality in all its mutuality, ambiguity, inconvenience and possibility.

…………

Came away to College without my copy of Buechner – will be a couple of days more waiting before the second part of the quotation from the previous post – hope it feels worth waiting for!

………….

 

Recent absence from here has been because I have been on a work related visit to Austria on behalf of the University. But there was time for some sightseeing, and my kind hosts arranged for me to visit the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna.

 
Some of the finest paintings in Europe are held there, and one of them I have wanted to see for a long time. The Madonna of the Meadows is widely recognised as one of the finest paintings by Raphael, and one of the most influential images of Mary for subsequent artists. I've written about it here before, but seeing it is an altogether different experience. John's Gospel uses several different words for seeing, because he recognised there are several different ways of looking, gazing, contemplating – and when he means to see and recognise the truth and reality and beauty of what he says he uses the word we translate into English as "Behold"! And the mood is both imperative and an invitation. Indeed in chapter One of John's Gospel John the Baptist says "Behold the Lamb of God" and Jesus says to Andrew and Peter "Come and see".

This painting does the same, because the two children represent these same two imperatives, Behold, and come and see. But actually it is Raphael who commands attention here. To stand before this painting is to encounter some of the deepest religious truth in Christian tradition, mediated by beauty and depicted as goodness. The three late medieval transcendentals of beauty, truth and goodness are here distilled into a painting of profound and persuasive theological image. The incarnation as infinity diminished to infancy, the red of the flowers complementing the red robe and both reminding of the passion and atonement, in the background the human world of city, land and sea. And dominating yet conjoining sky and earth, the face of Mary, her smile wistful, the face pensive, her eyes looking down the trajectory of the cross to her child, and the face subtle and emotionally ambiguous – there is tenderness, and determination, acceptance and sadness, the surrender and resistance of love shown in two hands that hold her child, while the infant Jesus has one hand on her and one gripping the cross. 

But I am not offering analysis – merely finding inadequate words for the fifteen minutes I spent being drawn into a theological world made real by image and symbol, the genius and gift of the artist illustrating a quite different and soul searchingly persuasive articulation of Christian truth that needs no such analysis. The above is not me daring to say what the painting means, but what the painting said as it addressed me and commanded attentiveness and stillness and obedient looking. A painting like this has its own way of announcing great truth with the imperative word, "Behold". So I did.

The Museum allows non flash photography, but it isn't always possible to get the angle right for a photo – maybe the imperfect photo is a recognition that you don't take with you anything other than the photo- the real experience is standing there, beholding, wondering, and praying.

This close-up shows a Renaissance artist's portrait of the Three Transcendentals, Beauty, Truth and Goodness, expressed in the complex miracle of a human face. In the long tradition of honouring Mary as the mother of the Saviour of the World, few approached the vision of Raphael. I'm no authority, but I doubt if anyone surpassed it. 

This painting by Vermeer is a masterpiece of exegetical imagination. It seems to me impossible to tell where Vermeer's sympathies lie. Traditional interpretations of Christ in the home of Martha and Mary take at face value Jesus' words in praise of Mary and the quite gentle but dismissive words to Martha.

Mary sits attentively at Jesus' feet, listening and learning; Martha is harassed and hassled trying to fulfil the obligations of hospitality and the duties of kindness. The story is often used to illustrate the superiority of the contemplative over the activist, as if devotion to Jesus all comes down to attentive passivity (prayer) rather than distracted activity (service). What is at the centre of Vermeer's painting is a loaf, bread, the substance that nourishes and sustains. And bread isn't made in five minutes – it takes work, energy, time, and the patience to let the yeast work, the oven bake and the loaf to be ready. 

Jesus is pointing at Mary and talking to Martha – who looks not a little miffed that her efforts are so quickly and lightly demoted as distraction, compared to her sister's unhelpful passivity. And for me, that loaf is Vermeer's comment. Not Martha or Mary, not contemplative or active, but the one loaf that signifies the heart and energy of Christian devotion – both prayer and service, what Merton would call contemplative action, and what Dag Hammarskjold  meant when he said of the modern Christian (as true for postmodern ones!), "The road to holiness lies through the world of action".

This is the only extant biblical picture Vermeer painted – but it has a depth and warmth to it that is lacking in some less accommodating interpretations of Mary's piety and Martha's too easy dismissal. Apart from anything else, Jesus is so relaxed – that hand over the arm of the chair and the other open, palm upwards and pointing to Mary doesn't convey tension and criticism, but a conciliatory persuasion. I doubt Jesus ever dismissed the importance of bread, – sure he refused to magic bread out of stones, but he also enshrined daily bread at the heart of the Lord's Prayer, and the breaking and sharing of bread was to become the way he was remembered, celebrated, and yes, served.

I love this painting, not only for its beauty, but for its exegetical fairness to Martha, its softening of the tradition as to Jesus demeanour and tone to Martha, for that loaf, forever the gift of our Lord to a church often too quick to judge, too ready to criticise, and always tempted to overplay its pieties at the cost of its service to others – that loaf is decisive for Christian devotion and discipleship. Did Vermeer mean all that? Almost certainly not. But that's the joy and fascination of gazing for a while at a picture, and allowing it to question and unsettle unexamined assumptions. Vermeer was no biblical scholar – but sometimes the amateur exegete, using the tools of an altogether different discipline, provides the human texture that prevents the exegetical tradition being monopolised by the professional guild.