Part 4
The Sacro Catino of Genoa Cathedral once held drops of the blood; a chapel of marble and gold at Turin still preserves in the glow of ever-burning lamps the Santo Sudario, or Holy Winding-sheet. Strange mementoes of the _plein air_ Prophet who drew his parables and metaphors from the vineyard and the sheepfold! The Santo Volto for which pilgrims stream to Lucca is not the holy face of loving righteousness, but a crucifix miraculously migrated from the Holy Land and preserved in a toy _tempietto_. Of the fifteen mysteries of the Roman Catholic Rosary, five are of Birth, five of Death, five of Glory. But none are of Life. There are also the rosaries of the Five Wounds and the Seven Dolors.
No doubt the majestic and sombre symbolism of the Cross owed its power over gross minds to its very repudiation of the joy of life, but the soul cannot healthily concentrate on death, nor can “Holy Dying” replace “Holy Living.” Those early purple and gold mosaics of the Master with His hand on the Book of Life, placed over altars—as in the cathedral of Pisa—taught, for all their _naïveté_, the deeper lesson: “Ego sum lux mundi.” The rude stone sculptures on the portals of Parma Baptistery depict a Christ grotesque in a skull-cap, yet active in works and words of love, and Duccio’s panels on that reredos in Siena in the dawn of Italian art equally emphasise the life of Christ, and not its mere ending. In fact, the earlier the art the less the insistence on darkness and death. The Christians of the Catacombs, for whom death and darkness were daily realities, turned all their thoughts to light and life. They enjoyed their crypts more than the Christians of to-day enjoy their cathedrals. “_The Acts of the Apostles_,” says Renan in his _St. Paul_, “are a book of joy.” It was the later ages, which found the battle won, that took an artistic and morbid pleasure in depicting martyrdoms and created those pictorial concepts that tend to caricature Christianity. It is worth remarking that Tempesta, who brought pictorial martyrology to its disgusting climax in S. Stefano Rotondo at Rome, came so late that he lived to see the eighteenth century in. A pity that temporary necessities of martyrdom among the early Christians lent colour to the misconception of Christianity as a religion of death. Toleration or triumph robbed the saint of his stake, and left to him a subtler and severer _imitatio Christi_. Buried so long beneath his own Cross, the true Christ will rise again—to the cry of “Ecce Homo!”
On that day the teaching of Arius as to the originate nature of Christ, or the modal trinitarianism of Sabellius by which the same God manifested Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, may cease to be a heresy, or Joachim of Flora’s expectation of a Super-Gospel of the Spirit may find transformed fulfilment. For if Christianity has a future, that future belongs, not to its dogmas, but to its heresies, the thought of the great souls who, instead of receiving it passively, wrestled for themselves with its metaphysical and spiritual problems, and passed through the white fires and deep waters of the cosmic mystery. There is scarcely a heresy but will better repay study than the acrid certainties of St. Bernard or the word-spinnings of Athanasius triumphant _contra mundum_.
Art is, indeed, not sparing of the resurrected Christ who rules in glory, such as He whose majestic figure dominates and pervades St. Mark’s; but this Christ who presides in so many pictures at the Last Judgment, His foot on the earth-ball, His angel-legions round Him, and who, indeed, in some is actually represented as creating Adam or giving Moses the Law; this Christ who—by a paradoxical reversion to the Pagan need for a human God—has superseded His Father with even retrospective rights, is still further removed than the crucified Christ from the Christ of life.
This apotheosis, how inferior in grandeur to his true presidence over the centuries that followed his death! And this death, how infinitely more tragic than the conventional theory of it! Naught that man has suffered or man imagined, no Dantesque torture nor Promethean agony, can equal the blackness of that ninth hour when “Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, _Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?_” Where be the twelve legions of angels, where the seat for the Son of Man at the right hand of power? Why this mockery, this excruciation?
Purblind must be the dry-as-dust who can read this passage and doubt that Jesus was an historical person. As if, despite Psalm xxii, the writers of Matthew and Mark could have invented so wonderful a touch, or would, had they understood its full import, have inserted so flagrant a contradiction of the Christian concept—a contradiction that can only be counteracted by an elaborate theory of _kenosis_. The dying cry of Jesus stamps him with authenticity, as the complaints of the Israelites against their leader guarantee Moses and the Exodus.
What a colossal theme—Ormuzd broken by Ahriman, the incarnation of light and love agonising beneath the heel of the powers of darkness and goaded into the supreme cry: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” I have seen only one _Crucifixion_ that adequately renders this dreadful moment—the supreme loneliness, the unrayed blackness—for most _Crucifixions_ are populated and bustling, like Tintoretto’s or Altichieri’s or Foppa’s or Spinello Aretino’s, or that congested canvas of the brothers San Severino, when they are not also like Michele da Verona’s, a translation of the tragedy into a Carpaccio romance of trumpeters and horsemen and dogs and lovely towered cities and mountain bridges, not to mention the arms of the magnificent Conte di Pitigliano. But what painter it is who has caught the true essence and quiddity of the Crucifixion I cannot remember, nor haply if I saw his picture in Spain and not in Italy, nor even if I dreamed it.
Lucas Van der Leyden and Van Dyck give us the lonely figure, but in Italian art before our own day I can only recall it in an obscure picture of the Parmese school, and in a small painting of the eighteenth-century Venetian, Piazzetta. Tura’s impressive, sombre study is only a fragment of a stigmata picture. Guido Reni suggests the loneliness, but he leaves the head haloed and melodramatic, besides sketching in shadowy accessories. A nineteenth-century Italian, Giocondo Viglioli, places the lonely Christ against the shadowy background of the roofs and towers of Jerusalem. But the picture I have in my mind is Rembrandtesque, the blacks heaviest at the figure in the centre, who, unillumined even by a halo, uncompanioned even of thieves, hangs nailed upon a lonely cross in a vast deserted landscape. For Jesus at this tremendous moment is alone—however vast the crowd—alone against the universe, and this universe has turned into a darkness that can be felt; felt as a torment of body as well as a shattering of the spirit.
When I looked upon the myth of Psyche in the Villa Farnesina at Rome as designed by Raphael, it was borne in on me how the primitive Greek, penetrated by the certainty and beauty of his body, had made the world and the gods in its image. But the race of Jesus, evolved to a higher thought, had demanded that the universe should answer to its soul. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” asks Abraham severely of God in another epochal passage of the Bible. And now here is a scion of Abraham who has staked his all upon the innermost nature of things being one with his own, upon a universe aflame with love and righteousness and pity, and lo! in this awful hour it seems to reveal itself as a universe full of mocking forces, grim, imperturbable, alien. It is an epic moment—the tragedy not only of Jesus, but of man soaring upwards from the slime—
“Such splendid purpose in his eyes”
—and finding in the cosmos no correspondence with his vision. Nor could Jesus, who had outgrown the notion of a heavenly despot, even find the satisfaction of the Prometheus of Æschylus:
“You see me fettered here, a god ill-starred, The enemy of Zeus, abhorred of all That tread the courts of his omnipotence, Because of mine exceeding love for men.”
Yet in a sense the despair of Jesus was unwarranted. The universe had not forsaken him; it contained, on the contrary, the media for his eternal influence. On the physical plane, indeed, it could do nothing for him; crucifixion must kill or the cosmos must change to chaos. But on the spiritual plane he could neither be killed nor forsaken. Infinitely less tragic his death than that of Napoleon, of whom we might say, in the words of Sannazaro,
“Omnia vincebas, superabas omnia Cæsar, Omnia deficiunt, incipis esse nihil.”
It was Moses who more voluntarily than Jesus offered his life that the equilibrium of this righteous universe should not be shaken. “Ye have sinned a great sin; and now I will go up unto the Lord; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.” And the atonement offered ran: “Blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written.” Here, then, in the Old Testament, and not in the New, first appears the notion of vicarious atonement. But the Old Testament sternly rejects it; “Whoever hath sinned against Me, him will I blot out of My book.” Beside which trenchant repudiation the Christian reading of the Old Testament as a mere prolegomenon to the Crucifixion, an avenue to Calvary strewn with textual finger-posts, appears a more than usually futile word-play of the theological mind. One might, indeed, more easily discover the germ of the atonement idea in Iphigenia. And that the Greek mind had spiritualised itself—even before it contributed the _logos_ to Christianity—is obvious not only from its literature and its Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries, but from its art. For the Hellenic art of Raphael was, after all, only the Renaissance view of Hellas, and the Greek myths in his hands were merely a charming Pagan poetry, no truer to the Hellenism of the great period than was the “Endymion” or “Hyperion” of Keats. How can I look at the statue of Apollo in this same Museum of Naples and not see that the very type of Christ had been pre-figured? I mean the Christ with the haunting eyes and the long ringlets, for this Apollo is a nobler figure by far than the Christ of the Byzantine mosaics. And I am not the first to remember that Apollo is the Son of Zeus the Father.
It is very strange. The Greeks, beginning with a Nature-religion, come in the course of the centuries to find it inadequate and to yearn for something beyond—
“Tendebantque manus ulterioris ripæ amore.”
The Nature-religion, therefore, gradually replaces itself by a Jewish heresy, expounded in Greek, largely influenced by Greek Alexandrian philosophy, and organised by a Greek-speaking tent-maker of Jerusalem named Saul or Paul, who, shutting out infinity with a tent, after the fashion of his craft, left a Church where he had found a Christ. Some fourteen centuries later old Greek thought is rediscovered, and operates as the great liberator of the mind from the constriction of this Church which has obscured and overgloomed Nature. But only subconscious of itself, this movement back to Nature, this renewed _joie de vivre_, finds its expression in the adornment of altars for the worship of sorrow, and under the ribs of death a new soul of loveliness is created that can vie with the art of the Greeks. And finally this new Nature-worship grows conscious again of its inadequacy to the soul of man, there is a Reformation and a Counter-Reformation, and then both are outgrown and humanity stands to-day where the old Greeks stood at the dawn of Christianity. The wheel has come full circle. And meantime the original Mosaic cult stands unmoved by these two millenniums of heresy, unbroken by the persecution, still patiently awaiting the day when “God shall be One and His Name One.” What are the fantasies of literature to the freaks and paradoxes of the World-Spirit?
V
It is as the Bambino that Christ chiefly _lives_ in Art, and at this extreme, too, we miss his true inwardness. Yet the tenderness of the conception of the Christ-babe makes atonement. What can be more touching than Gentile da Fabriano’s enchanting altar-piece of the _Adoration of the Magi_, in which—even as the glamorous procession of the Three Kings resteeps the earth in the freshness and dew of the morning—the dominance of holy innocence seems to bathe the tired world in a wistful tenderness that links the naïve ox and ass with the human soul and all the great chain of divine life.
The Christ-child, held in his mother’s arms, lays his hand upon the kneeling Magi’s head, yet not as with conscious divinity: ’tis merely the errant touch of baby fingers groping out towards the feel of things. No lesson could be more emollient to rude ages, none could better serve to break the pride and harshness of the lords of the earth. “A slave might be elder, priest, or bishop while his master was catechumen,” says Hausrath of the early days of Christianity. Yet this delicious and yearning vision of a sanctified and unified cosmos remains a dream; futile as a Christmas carol that breaks sweetly on the ear and dies away, leaving the cry of the world’s pain undispossessed. It was precisely in Christian Rome that slavery endured after all the other Great Powers of Europe had abolished it.
Nay, were the dream fulfilled it could not undo the centuries of harsh reality. Here in Naples, under the providence of a kindly English society, the wretched breed of horses, whose backs were full of sores, whose ribs were numerable, have been replaced by a sleek stock, themselves perhaps soon to be replaced by the unsentient motor. But what Motor Millennium can wipe out the ages of equine agony?
And despite the Christ-child and the Christ crucified, nowhere does the triumph of life run higher than in this sunny land of religious gloom, Mantegna’s conversion of the babe into a young Cæsar being a true if unconscious symbol of what happened to the infant. Flourishing the forged _Donation of Constantine_ to prove its claim to the things that were Cæsar’s, it grew up into that “Terrible Pontiff” whose bronze effigy by Michelangelo was so aptly cast into a cannon, and whose Christian countenance you may see in the Doria Gallery at Rome; or into that Borgian monster who was to bombard a fortress on Christmas Day, and who, crying joyfully, “We are Pope and Vicar of Christ,” hastened to don the habit of white taffeta, the embroidered crimson stola, the shoes of ermine and crimson velvet. God might choose to be born in the poorest and worst-dressed circles of the most unpopular People, but the lesson was lost. His worshippers insisted on thrusting Magnificence back upon Him. Or perhaps it was their own Magnificence that they were protecting against His insidious teaching. Consider their cathedrals, built less in humility than in urban emulation—the Duomo of Florence to be worthy of the greatness, not of God, but of the Florentines; S. Petronio to eclipse it to the greater glory of Bologna; Milan Cathedral to surpass all the churches in Christendom, as Giangaleazzo’s palace surpassed all its princely dwellings. In whose honour did the Pisans encircle their cathedral with a silver girdle, or the Venetians offer ten thousand ducats for the seamless coat? Poor Babe, vainly didst thou preach to Italy’s great families, when in humble adoration of thee they had themselves painted in thy blessed society, the Medici even posing to Botticelli as the Three Magi, and thrusting their magnificence into thy very manger.
And in our own northern land the ox, companion of the manger, for whose fattening at Christmastide St. Francis said he would beg for an imperial edict, is fattened indeed, but merely for the Christmas market, stands with the same pathetic eye outside the butcher’s shop, labelled “Choose your Christmas joint,” and the clown and pantaloon come tumbling on to crown the sacred birthday.
Alas! history knows no miracles of transformation. Evolution, not revolution, is the law of human life. In Santa Claus’s stocking what you shall truly find is traces of earlier feasts. The Christian festival took over, if it transformed to higher import, the Saturnalia of earlier religions and natural celebrations of the winter solstice. Holly does not grow in Palestine; the snowy landscapes of our Christmas cards are scarcely known of Nazareth or Bethlehem; mince-pie was not on the menu of the Magian kings; and the Christmas tree has its roots in Teutonic soil. But even as the painters of each race conceived Christ in their own image, so does each nation unthinkingly figure his activities in its own climatic setting. And perhaps in thus universalising the Master the peoples obeyed a true instinct, for no race is able to receive lessons from “foreigners.” The message, as well as the man, must be translated into native terms—a psychological fact which missionaries should understand.
Nor is it in the Palestine of to-day that the true environment of the Gospels can best be recovered, for, though one may still meet the shepherd leading his flock, the merchant dangling sideways from his ass, or Rebeccah carrying her pitcher on her shoulder, that is not the Palestine of the Apostolic period, but the Palestine of the patriarchs, reproduced by decay and desolation. The Palestine through which the Galilæan peasant wandered was a developed kingdom of thriving cities and opulent citizens, of Roman roads and Roman pomp. Upon those bleak hill-sides, where to-day only the terraces survive—the funereal monuments of fertility—the tangled branchery of olive groves lent magic to the air. That sea of Galilee, down which I have sailed in one of the only two smacks, was alive with a fleet of fishing vessels. Yes, in the palimpsest of Palestine ’tis an earlier writing than the Christian that has been revealed by the fading of the later inscriptions of her civilisation. And even where, in some mountain village, the rainbow-hued crowd may still preserve for us the chronology of Christ, a bazaar of mother-o’-pearl mementoes will jerk us rudely back into our own era. But—saddest of all!—the hands of Philistine piety have raised churches over all the spots of sacred story. Even Jacob’s well is roofed over with ecclesiastic plaster; incongruous images of camels getting through church porches to drink confuse the historic imagination. Churches are after all a way of shutting out the heavens, and the great open-air story of the Gospels seems rather to suffer asphyxiation, overlaid by these countless chapels and convents. Is it, perhaps, allegorical of the perversion of the Christ-teaching?
The humanitarian turn given to Yuletide by the genius of Dickens was at bottom a return from the caricature to the true concept. Dickens converted Christmas to Christianity. But over large stretches of the planet and of history it is Christianity that has been converted to Paganism, as the condition of its existence. Russia was baptized a thousand years ago, but she seems to have a duck’s back for holy water. And even in the rest of Europe upon what parlous terms the Church still holds its tenure of nominal power! What parson dares speak out in a crisis, what bishop dares flourish the _logia_ of Christ in the face of a heathen world? The old gods still govern—if they do not rule. Thor and Odin, Mars and Venus—who knows that they do not dream of a return to their ancient thrones, if, indeed, they are aware of their exile. Their shrines still await them in the forests and glades; every rock still holds an altar. And do they demand their human temples, lo! the Pantheon stands stable in Rome, the Temple of Minerva in Assisi, Paestum holds the Temples of Ceres and Minerva, and on the hill of Athens the Parthenon shines in immortal marble. Their statues are still in adoration, and how should a poor outmoded deity understand that we worship him as art, not as divinity? It does but add to his confusion that now and anon prayers ascend to him as of yore, for can a poor Olympian, whose toe has been faith-bitten, comprehend that he has been catalogued as pope or saint? Perchance some drowsing Druid god, as he perceives our scrupulous ritual of holly and fir-branch, imagines his worship unchanged, and glads to see the vestal led under the mistletoe by his officiating priest. Perchance in the blaze of snapdragon some purblind deity beholds his old fire-offerings, and the savour of turkey mounts as incense to his Norse nostrils. Shall we rudely arouse him from his dream of dominion, shall we tell him that he and his gross ideas were banished two millenniums ago, and that the world is now under the sway of gentleness and love? Nay, let him dream his happy dream; let sleeping gods lie. For who knows how vigorously his old lustfulness and blood-thirst might revive; who knows what new victims he might claim at his pyres, were he clearly to behold his power still unusurped, his empire still the kingdom of the world?
THE CARPENTER’S WIFE: A CAPRICCIO
“Habent sua fata—feminæ.”
Although the Pilgrims’ Way is a shady arcade, yet the ascent from Vicenza was steep enough to be something of a penance that sultry spring evening, and I was weary of the unending pillars and the modern yet already fading New Testament frescoes between them. But I was interested to see which parish or family had paid for each successive section, and what new name for the Madonna would be left to inscribe upon it. For even the Litany of Loreto seemed exhausted, and still the epithets poured out—“_Lumen Confessorum_,” “_Consolatrix Viduarum_,” “_Radix Jesse_,” “_Stella Matutina_,” “_Fons Lachrymarum_,” “_Clypeus Oppressorum_”—a very torrent of love and longing.
At last as I neared the summit of the Way, a fresco flashed upon me the meaning of it all—an “Apparitio B.M.V. in Monte Berico, 1428,” representing the Virgin in all her radiant beauty appearing to an old peasant-woman. So this it was that had raised this long religious road to the Church of Our Lady of the Mountain! I remembered the inscription in S. Rocco, telling how 30,000 men had pilgrimed here in 1875—“spectaculum mirum visu.”
But where was the church that had been built over the spot of the Madonna’s appearance? I looked up and sighed wearily. I was only half-way up, I saw, for the road turned sharply to the right, and a new set of names began, and a new set of frescoes—still cruder, for I caught sight of nails driven into the Cross through the writhing frame of the Christ. But even my curiosity in the cornucopia of epithets was worn out. The corner had a picturesque outlook, and on the hill-side a bench stood waiting. Vicenza stretched below me, I could see the Palladian palaces admired of Goethe, the Greek theatre, the Colonnades, the Palace of Reason with its long turtle-back roof; and, beyond the spires and campaniles, the gleam of the Venetian Alps. A church-bell from below sounded for “Ave Maria.” I sat down upon the bench and abandoned myself to reverie. Why should not the Madonna appear to _me_? I thought. Why this preference for the illiterate? And then I remembered that this very Pilgrims’ Way had served as a battle-ground for the Austrians and the poor Italians of ’48. How these Christians love one another! I mused. And so my mind’s eye flitted from point to point, seeing again things seen or read—in that inconsequent phantasmagoria of reverie—to the pleasant droning of the vesper bell. Presently, telling myself it was getting late, I arose and continued my ascent to the Church of Our Lady of the Mountain.
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