Living Wittily

Justification for buying yet another new book on Vermeer!

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.

The use of the adverb Trinitarianly

Was teaching the doctrine of the Trinity yesterday, and we had an interesting session on Trinity and Community. Starting from love that is purposeful, outgoing and creative and which is self giving and combines both trust and risk, we moved back and forward between the inner relations of the Triune God to the outward expression of that life in the economy of creation, redemption and consummation.

It would be misleading and unnecessary to say we all understood what we were talking about! But a lot of learning took place in exploring the realities of human relationships as we work out in our personal lives, the lives of the communities we inhabit, and the life of the world which is a community of communities living with tensions at times creative and at times destructive. Ecclesiology, missiology, spirituality, worship, pastoral care and compassion, ethics and justice, are significant areas of Christian existence and reflection which are profoundly influenced by the way we think of God. And for Christian theology that means thinking of God Trinitarianly. I know, it's not the most elegant of words, but it is a modifying adverb that should be used frequently in our thinking about those key areas of Christian reflection and practice. It's pushing it to talk of a Trinitarian lifestyle, or living Trinitarianly - but to see ourselves as drawn into the life of God, and immersed in the Love that is purposeful, creative, outgoing trusting and risk-taking, and to ask what that might look like in practice, would be to at least make a start on living Trinitarianly.

Meeting the Christ of St John of the Cross.

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.

 

Gaugin: Wrestling angels we never come away unscathed

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.

Inconvenient hospitality and the interruptive grace of God

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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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!

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Circles of Thorns: Hieronymous Bosch and Being Human

One of the most telling and illuminating moments shared in class was when we discovered that we can learn as much from what we don't like as we can from what we do like! It was during the class on Jesus Through the Centuries a year or two ago, when images and paintings of Jesus were shown and we listened to how we reacted to them. I don't mean we listened to what we each thought of them - well we did that, but we didn't only listen to what we each said. We listened to what was going on inside us as we looked at images that were unfamiliar, theologically alien to our tradition, at times disturbing.

An artist has done her job brilliantly if in portraying suffering, evil, cruelty, or anguish, the viewer recoils, is disturbed, is affected by sympathy for the sufferer and moved from bewilderment through to outrage at the perpetrators. This is particularly true of religious art, and in Christian art the portrayal of the Passion of Jesus. I had another of those moments of illumination while reading Justin Lewis-Anthony, Circles of Thorns. The book is subtitled Hieronymous Bosch and Being Human, ande the whole book is a series of reflections on one painting, Christ Mocked. 

Paintings emerge from a context, and are best understood within that context, whether as reflecting or reacting to the cultural, political, social and religious realities. Lewis-Anthony has lived with this painting for years, reflected and read around the historical context, and now offers an exposition that explores what it means to be human against the background of what it meant for God in human form to be the victim of mockery, abuse and violence leading to death. Along the way he explores politics, psychology, science, religious devotion as these developed in the early Modern period. This means at times having to be patient while the context is constructed and we are given the information needed to know what Bosch was about, and why, and how. But each chapter brings rewards and by the end of the book the reader has been educated in context and enabled to look at the painting as the politically subversive and theologically potent statement it is. And on the way Thomas a Kempis, Terry Pratchett, Bob Dylan, Etty Hilesum, Rowan Williams and Brian Eno are all co-opted into the conversation. 

Not everyone is likely to admire Bosch's art - some of his paintings are frankly weird, a kind of proto-surrealism that depicts the nightmares of an age that saw the ravages of war, plague, and political and religious revolution. What this book does is pay attention to one painting, and patiently unfold the mind of the artist, teaching us in the process not only how to read a painting, but in doing so teach us also that great art reads also the human heart.

When all you can do is "Behold"! - and all you want to say is "Thank You".

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. 

The Mystery of the Trinity and the Beauty of the Infinite

"From an aesthetic perspective, David Bentley Hart offers an impressive trinitarian account of beauty that presents Being as primarily the shared life of the triune God: ontological plenitude and oriented toward another. The beauty of the infinite is reflected in the dynamic co-inherence of the three divine persons, a perichoresis of love, an immanent dynamism of distinction and unity embracing reciprocity and difference. The triune God does not negate difference; rather, the shared giving and receiving that is the divine life may be compared to an infinite musical richness, a music of polyphonic and harmonious differentiation of which creation is an expression and variation."

An Introduction to the Trinity, Declan Marmion and Rik Van Nieuwenhove, (Cambridge, CUP, 2011) page 218.

No, it isn't dumbed down theology - and yes, it is a piece of demanding and precise discourse upon the Trinity. But why would we think any serious contemplation of the mystery of the Triune life of God should be immediately accessible in everyday vocabulary? This is a very good book on the Trinity, one that will find its way into our course on Rediscovering the Triune God. It is written as good theology should be - scholarly, lucid, presupposing serious effort from the reader, and rewarding those readers who love to think and for whom thinking deeply and honestly and openly and receptively about God is a way of loving God with mind and heart.

The drawing by William Blake is one of the most delicately subtle pieces of theological art I know. A print of it hangs in my study.

Vermeer and the artist as amateur exegete

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.

Thomas Merton and the Emmaus moment of invitation and recognition

There are some writers who become companions on your road. It didn't start out that way. Just that one day you picked up the book and in reading it you heard a voice that you liked, recognised tone and demeanour that was friendly, felt the kind of ease and trust that only comes when you know, you just know, here is someone who would be good company. And once you've walked the length of that book, there is a kind of Emmaus moment, a reluctance to let this companionship on this journey end. Because your heart burned within, the conversation brought healing, understanding, possibility of newness, opened up a different future, and the friend we met on the way is one we now want to spend more time with. And we have the feeling we didn't meet him - he met us, he drew near, at just that time and in just that place.

That's as near as I can describe my first encounter with Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, seeker of solitude, peace activist, inveterate journal and letter writer, and mercifully fallible human being. Few of his books are sustained argument, constructive theology, or innovative spirituality. Most of his writing is informal, occasional, meditative. The best of it reads as distilled thought, not concentrate that is dense, but a cultivated lucidity, with sentences that have extracted from long thought and experience an uncluttered clarity, and confident humility. He is someone who has shared several decades of my inward journey, a writer to whom I've looked at crisis or pivotal moments, and been glad of his company, his conversation, his opening up of a truth I needed to hear. I'm reading him again.

Here is one of his long sentences, formatted as a prose poem, a constructive piece of spiritual theology that says so much about what is so about the life we each have to live.

Therefore each particular being,

in its individuality,

its concrete nature and entity,

with all it own characteristics

and its private qualities

and its own inviolable identity,

gives glory to God

by being precisely what He wants it to be

here and now

in the circumstances ordained for it

by His Love and His infinite Art.

(New Seeds of Contemplation,  Shambala Library ed. page 32)

Love and infinite Art - to see our self as the cherished product of such purposeful creativity is as near to coming to terms with God, our life and ourselves as we can properly expect. I guess it would take love and infinite art to make something worthwhile out of the bundle of contradictions and cluster of insoluble enigmas that is the human being in all the glory and mystery of human living. When those reverberating questions of meaning and purpose and what makes for our happiness shake the foundations of our self, Merton quietly mentions the ultimate fundaments of human fulfilment - "His Love and infinite Art".

That's the kind of key that unlocks chains and doors. The life I live is sometimes glad and sometimes sad, at times exciting and at times exhausting, determined by my good choices and bad mistakes, touched by love and wounded by hurt, but nevertheless my life, the only one I have. Faith in God is the recognition that in that limited and constrained existence, His Love and infinite Art are what confer worth, affirm identity, and make possible the living of a life that is good, generous, joyful and ever  capable of newness and surprise.