Let's Wait and See.
CIA 2018 Lent Lectures 3.
Waiting with The God of Surprises. Seeing the Damascus Road
If the practices associated with drawing near to God in prayer, especially in a spirit of contemplative prayer, are mostly associated with Roman Catholic spiritualities, our theme this evening is more familiar to a Protestant and evangelical spirituality — conversion. Of course, Catholic spirituality also has a central place for conversion, but with evangelical spirituality one might say it becomes the defining moment in faith's journey. That much popular evangelical practice fails to move much beyond initial conversion, with the exception of a developed set of practices associated with the reading of Scripture, should not diminish its significance for a post-Christian, or secular, culture where becoming a Christian assumes much greater importance than in one where many grow into faith through a Christian upbringing.
Conversion, however, properly understood, is a life-time's work of transformation. Yes, it begins with that change of direction, or change of mind, in Greek metanoia, and in English 'repentance' which sets our life's direction back towards its creator and saviour, but the process of converting our lives to those that image Christ, as Paul asserts in 2 Corinthians, takes a life-time, "And, all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord, as in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit." (2 Cor. 3:18.)
Last week we encountered the writing of Rowan Williams on contemplation and mission, and his belief that only through contemplative prayer, or some equivalent set of prayerful practices, can we be changed at the deep level of our desires. This too, is conversion — conversion of our basic drives and desires from those that seek self-satisfaction, the dramatic excitement of religious experience or the craving to be happy. Indeed, to state that the goal of our human condition is not to be assured of happiness, as so many assume, seems almost perverse. Ask many parents what they most desire for their children and they'll tell you 'to be happy', but this is a very modern expectation, and one not at all secured in Christian faith. For Christians, the goal of our human existence is to be united with God in Christ by the Holy Spirit — with happiness somewhere down the list of expectations. behind joy, at least. That we have bought-into this very Modern desire and barely noticed how it has supplanted those other goods of the Christian life so thoroughly, is testament to how impoverished our spirituality has become. An example is the way in which we have almost completely lost the essence of that other penitential season, Advent, in our collusion with our consumer culture's obsession with 'getting ready for Christmas', which mostly involves spending a great deal of money and an encouragement to 'party.' Drawing forward the happy atmosphere of Christmas, and avoiding the demanding and desolate experience of Advent, simply confirms the shallowness of our spirituality — neither the penitence of Advent, nor the true joy of Christmas can then exercise their deep transformative work. We need a fresh conversion!
To help us in these lectures, we have focused each week on a major work of art, or theme in religious art. This evening we move from the early Renaissance of the mid-15th century to the late 16th and early 17th century Baroque. The trajectory of Renaissance artfrom Fra Angelico and Pierro della Francesca through those High Renaissance artists like Raphael and Titian in the mid-15th century eventually led to a movement of exaggerated style called Mannerism.
The picture we shall focus upon is Michaelangelo Merisi'sThe Conversion of St Paul. You'll know the artist by his nickname — Caravaggio (from his home town). But first, I want to visit a portrayal of the death by crucifixion of the Apostle Peter. Painted as a pair (The Crucifixion of Peter and The Conversion of St Paul) they were commissioned by a rich Papal banker, Monsignor Tiberio Cerasi for his burial chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, in July 1600, from the star painters of their generation, Caravaggio and Carracci. Cerasi was keen for the work to be completed, sensing his own approaching death. St Paul and St Peter were closely associated with Rome, their heads reputedly preserved at St John Lateran, their bodies buried beneath the high altar at St Peter’s.[1] The two paintings by Caravaggio, facing one another on the side walls of the chapel, were accompanied by another, one by Annibale Carracci.He was fifteen years Caravaggio’s senior, and responsible for the painted altarpiece in the chapel, The Assumption of the Virgin. The style of this was pure, sweet High Renaissance Mannerism, ‘Swathed in drapery the color of a summer’s sky, arms outspread, and expression of beatific serenity on her perfectly round face, Carracci’s Virgin Mary rises from the tomb like an ecstatic doll.’[2] It represents stylistically everything Caravaggio was opposed to. Caravaggio's, The Conversion of St Paul, and The Crucifixion of St Peter are tense, dynamic, vernacular, and intuitive. Both figures are cruciform in pose: St Paul prone, blinded, meets the risen crucified Christ as if on a cross himself in a pose of spiritual empathy, while St Peter is literally crucified, albeit, according to legend, upside down.
Caravaggio shows Peter already nailed to the cross, half raised up yet transfixed by the nails, he tenses against the pain, stomach muscles tight. He looks away (in its situation in the chapel, he looks towards the altar) and understands that his own salvation is achieved, not by his death, but by Christ’s. The three executioners strain to raise the cross: in the foreground the stooping figure braces his back against the cross, while the figure at the top of the painting pulls on the rope that raises the bottom of the cross to its upside-down configuration. The third figure pulls at the same wooden base to aid his companion. None of their faces are seen clearly (only the face of the figure on the left, grasping the base, and, with it, Peter’s legs, is seen at all, and then in shadow) and they wear working men’s clothes. They ‘grunt and sweat under the burden of his weight, grimly immersing themselves in the practical business of hoisting up a human body nailed to a cross.’[3] The perspective is close, so that we are drawn into the scene, which threatens to spill out of the canvas into the space we occupy. This is gritty real life, devoid of the elegance and transcendence of the Mannerism epitomized in Carracci’s altar piece, with its costly blues (the Virgin’s cloak is painted in expensive ultramarine, as specified by Cerasi, with an eye on the verdict of posterity, and in no mind to be thought of as a cheapskate.) Caravaggio’s palette is composed of earth colors—ochre, umber, carbon black—and when he does use ultramarine, as his patron requested, it is reduced to a muddy green in the cloak of the crucified Peter lying crumpled in the bottom right hand corner. Much about this painting by Caravaggio, as also its counterpart on the opposite wall, is proletarian, poor. As Graham-Dixon remarks, ‘As a parting gesture to his rival, as if to stress the disdain for Carracci’s brand of vapid magnificence, Caravaggio contrived a cunning insult: the rump of St Paul’s proletarian carthorse is pointedly turned towards Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin.’[4] However, what Caravaggio loses in color by way of a subdued palette (dull compared to Carracci’s reds, yellows and golden light) he makes up for in the contrast between the dark background and the flood of light upon Peter. Where Carracci has an evenly diffused light, Caravaggio brilliantly uses chiaroscuro, the dramatic lighting of the subject against a dark ground that resembles a theatrical stage.
In both Cerasi paintings Caravaggio paints bare and dirty feet — of the executioners and Peter in the one, and the attendant's in the other. Feet were controversial, for they symbolised the poor and humble in 17th century theology. St Francis went barefoot, and renounced his wealth, and thepauperist wing of the Catholic church called upon the rich and wealthy to follow this example. In including ordinary people with dirty feet in his pictures, Caravaggio was firmly allying himself with this wing.[5] This message was not always welcome. In his first painting of the three in the Matthew cycle, St Mathew and the Angel,[6] Mathew is a peasant with bare heavy feet, toes thrust almost in the viewer's face. It was rejected for the Altar Piece for which it was commissioned, and in the second version, still in place, Mathew's "poverty and humility are not rudely proclaimed, but politely whispered. ... the apostle's feet are ... still bare, but unlikely to offend anybody."[7] In a powerful church, supported by many rich people, the church's humble origins and the call to renounce worldly wealth and power, proclaimed in Caravaggio's piety, would be dangerous, and although his genius was recognised, his politics were unwelcome.
If the meaning of della Francesca is found in a hermeneutic of Medieval belief and legend, the meaning of the Caravaggio is all about the structure. Not that the della Francesca Baptism is unstructured. Far from it: it is a broadly geometric composition, utilizing the square and circle. It is what gives the picture a great deal of its stillness. The Caravaggio, however, is all tension and energy, with triangles dominating the overall diagonally-biased cruciform composition. The backs of the two figures to the right of the third form one large diagonal, from bottom left to top right, while Peter’s legs, torso and left arm give shape to its cross piece, sloping from middle left of the canvas towards the bottom right. Within this overall structure, triangles repeat: the bent leg of the crouching executioner, and the arc of his right arm and the cross beam; the heads of the other two executioners and Peter’s own; and the dark, brooding, background is etched out from the light cast upon Peter and his executioners in shapes that are broadly triangular.
Is it too much to see in this interaction between cross and triangle, with all of the energy of the action to raise the crucified Apostle, the two great themes of Christian theology: redemption by Christ upon the cross wrought by the One-in-Three? Behind human action and seeming evil there is a deeper purpose, just as in the passion of Christ. In the words of the Patriarch Joseph, making sense in later life of his betrayal by his brothers: you meant it for evil, but God meant it for the good of many people. (Genesis 50:20).
The whole picture, however, draws your attention to one point: the face of an old man, the eyes rheumy, the cheek lined with age and weather, the expression one of pain and longing, ‘the still point around which the visible effort pivoted.’[8] This is the only face we really see, the face of a man facing death, in all of its cruel agony, without glamour or transcendence. There is more tension in this face than in the bulging veins of the executioner’s hands, or the tightened muscles of crouching figure. There is no charming assumption about to happen here: just death in its inevitability. Yet, beyond it, does Peter see something of his welcoming Lord, here at the end of life, as Paul sees the same Jesus at the moment of his conversion, blinded by too much reality, in the picture on the opposite wall of the chapel?
This depiction of an old man facing death takes us immediately back to the words of Jesus following his stinging rebuke of the younger Peter, still known as Simon then. Peter had gone from the glow of acclamation and the light of revelation (‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church…’ Matt 16:17–18) to the darkness and opprobrium of ‘Get behind me Satan.’ (Matt16:23) — all in the space of a couple of minutes. Jesus then tells all the disciples what following him will mean: deny yourself, take up a cross and follow, lose your life to gain it, (Matt 16:24–26) Here is Peter discovering literally the truth of this vocation.
This is focused discipleship, a life of cross-shaped obedience, of cross-bearing following, of losing a life otherwise chosen in order to gain a richer life. Formation as disciples must in no small way prepare men and women to encompass disappointment, bear other’s disloyalty, carry other’s pain and suffering, and sometimes share it. It must be a life that ensures the first task of the church, (which is, as Stanley Hauerwas insists, learning to be the church, and not the world), is borne through that long obedience in the same direction. Caravaggio’s Peter reminds us that the gospel turns the world’s values upside down, even as Jesus did, so that death becomes life, and too-close a clinging to the rights and privileges of this life issues all-too easily in death. Sometimes discipleship means ‘“when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you, and take you where you do not wish to go.” (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me”’ (John 21:18–19).Discipleship imagined as Carracci’s Assumption—colorful, glorious, sunny, carried on the wings of angels amidst general adulation—is the stuff of fantasy. Discipleship as seen in Caravaggio’s Peter is the stuff of hidden glory and true discipleship. We form men and women to expect the former at our peril: but form them to live the latter, and the church lives true to itself and its Lord.
The accompanying painting, The Conversion of St Paul, is equally dramatic in its composition. What you see first of all is an enormous horse, illuminated from the upper right-hand corner, lifting its right front leg, and the light shining on its glossy flank. Only then do you see the figure of St Paul — at this point Saul of Tarsus, on his mission to arrest followers of Jesus of Nazareth in Damascus — on his back, his arms raised in .....well, what quite? Is it wonder and worship, or alarm and supplication? It is hard to tell from his face, for all we really notice are his blinded eyes. His helmet has fallen from his head, his sword lies useless by his side. All worldly power and instrumental action has been lost, and all that is left is a helpless plea for help, while also in unconscious echoing of Jesus' outstretched arms on the cross. But what enables us to distinguish is the pose of the stricken persecutor of Christ. His eyes might be blinded to the mundane, but with his inner eyes he sees Jesus calling him. "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" and all his inner darkness is flooded with divine light. Later, in his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul would write,
"Indeed, to this very day, when Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds, but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit...... For it is the God who said 'Let light shine out of darkness', who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ." (2 Cor. 3:15–18; 4:6.)
The only other figure is another of Caravaggio's workmen, holding the horse's bridle, steadying the horse from its fright, its mouth still foaming. The event is removed from the false exaggeration of the Mannerist style, with its knowing clues for the cognoscenti, and here in the Church of St Mary of the People — the first church that pilgrims entering Rome from the North would encounter within its city walls — is 'everyman' playing his part in the great story of redemption by preventing the prone Saul from being trampled to death by his own horse before his mission to the gentiles ever got started.
The other conversion painting by Caravaggio in Rome is one of three paintings of the life of St Matthew in the church associated with the French community, San Luigi del Francesi. Together with his writing of the Gospel, and his martyrdom, Caravaggio paints the story where Jesus calls him. Painted in 1599–1600, there is once again Caravaggio's dramatic use of light (which was to influence a whole generation of painters), more figures modelled by ordinary Romans, including one of Caravaggio's pretty boys, which root the whole story in everyday life, and gestures in the hands and arms that speak. The light falls on Matthew's face, while it just glances Jesus' to the right-hand of the painting. As with the horse in his Conversion of St Paul, the first thing you notice is almost incidental — then, the horse, here, the boy whose face is in full light. It makes you work at the meaning. Then you notice Matthew, gesturing 'me?', and you trace the eyes back to the figure who is calling him with an arm that exactly copies that of God in Michaelangelo's creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. Here is not just a holy man calling Matthew (notice his halo) but God. At the other end of the painting, the two figures on the left remain in ignorance, focused upon the money, the old man's spectacles "do not extend his vision beyond the money lying there, over which hunches a young man equally blinded by material things."[9]