Finding the Face of Jesus-Obama as Jesus part3

As we’ve observed, Michelangelo destroyed an earlier work in order to bring forth his final Pietà. It is still ‘‘Catholic” in the sense that it still holds out the possibility that representational art can properly testify to the incarnate love of God. However, it is “Protestant” in its profound declaration that Christianity can be proclaimed only in symbols of human brokenness, and in its awareness of the radical tension between nature and grace.<?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O />

Ironically, the more Michelangelo grew in his spiritual knowledge of Jesus Christ, the less able he seemed to find the face of Jesus -- as his final misty crucifixion drawings and, above all, the Pietà Rondanini witness. In the Pietà, the unfinished face has the look of a tortured search. Michelangelo destroyed his earlier face of Christ in order to find a truer countenance. One wonders if the somber genius would ultimately have whittled the head away to nothing.

Michelangelo confronted a paradox which Luther, in his own way, also encountered. We know God through his revealed word, through Jesus Christ; and having “the mind of Christ,” we must witness boldly to that knowledge. However, in the depths of our knowing, born of the experience of faith, there is also the sense of an abysmal mystery, which Luther spoke of as the Deus Absconditus -- the hidden God. Here is where our faith is most sorely tested. When confronted with a depth of mystery which leaves us gaping in awe, do we not despair of what we know? The terrible awareness of the immediacy of God’s mystery can drive us to despair of God’s promise, to despair of God’s love. Both Luther and Michelangelo struggled with an awareness of this dark side of faith. Ironically, the deeper one’s personal faith, the deeper the sense of devastation in the presence of God. “Woe is me! For I am lost. . . . For my eyes have seen the King, Lord of hosts!”

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) came to do Christian art very late in his life, and even then it was decidedly an atypical subject for the great master of sensation, color and line. I have long admired Matisse and his almost hedonistic celebration of beauty, but I had thought that his foray into Christian art could only fail, since Matisse clearly was not a Christian. I had seen pictures of his great Vence Chapel (in the hills above the French Riviera) but because I was so convinced, a priori, that this could have been only a tour de force, I did not really see what I was looking at. Then I went to Vence, expecting to have my prejudices confirmed. However, even the most rock-bound dogmatist could not help but be overwhelmed by the sheer spiritual delight of the chapel. Utterly severe, all white but for the black murals and the black accent tiles on the floor, the interior was tinted in blues and yellows by the gorgeous late Matisse stained-glass windows. Matisse had created a tiny temple in grateful celebration (he seemed incapable of any other mood) of the beauty of life and creation.

Matisse refused to be converted by the theological enthusiasm of his Christian admirers. He said, “The only religion I have is my love of the work I have to do, my love of creation, and my love of absolute sincerity. I made the chapel to express myself completely and for no other reason. To this disclaimer, however, one must at least reply that it is revealing that, toward the end of his life, in order to express himself ‘‘completely” he chose to do a chapel -- free of cost and with the proviso that his design be submitted to church authorities for approval. He wished to make a religious statement about his love of beauty, and it was a characteristically French statement. I am reminded of the French carol that is translated, “Praise we the Lord who made all beauty for all our senses to enjoy.”

In the Vence Chapel there is an astonishing wall of tiles on which Matisse sketched the Fourteen Stations of the Cross. One critic has observed that the drawing “looks like the urgent notes of an eyewitness to Christ’s passion.” The “witness” is certain that the event is of great significance. Therefore he hastily records the tragic details, lest the memory be lost. However, the witness “witnesses” from a detached perspective, without emotion or interpretation. We know only that he recognizes the importance of the event by the bare fact that he records it. He is like a reporter with instincts for the newsworthy.

Matisse, then, is pure reporter. Do not ask for commentary, for he has none to give. Although he cannot ignore Jesus, he cannot penetrate the question of who he was. Thus there is no face in his drawing, save for the image on Veronica’s veil. This image, without expression and once removed, he can record; but Jesus Christ himself Matisse can view only from afar in detached fascination.

Michelangelo found it increasingly difficult to picture Jesus’ face, precisely because he had faith -- showing us that even in revelation, God remains mystery. Matisse’s stations of the cross stand as a magnificent confession of the faith of modern secular humanity. Many moderns can neither embrace nor ignore Jesus: who he was eludes them; that he was haunts them.

If Matisse witnessed to a Jesus Christ he could not find, his lifelong friend, Georges Rouault, a believing Christian. painted the face of Jesus time and time again. It was the great subject of his art: “My only ambition is to be able some day to paint a Christ so moving that those who see him will be converted.”

Rouault’s mature paintings of Jesus have an iconlike quality. They are works inspired by love, and done to inspire love. These later portraits have an increasingly serene quality. Even in the midst of his suffering, Christ is portrayed as patiently offering himself and his suffering to the beholder. The subject is enhanced by Rouault’s technique of laying thick patches of paint on his canvases, so that undercolors glow through to the surface. He achieves the suggestion of stained glass, eternally lighted from within. It is the stylistic characteristics of this later Rouault with which we are most familiar.

However, Rouault’s mature vision of Jesus evolved out of the intense struggle, indeed anguish, of his earlier work. It is the Christ of the earlier period I want to focus on: the Head of Christ, 1905. There is no serenity here; it is a violently painted face that almost looks as if it had been dripped onto the canvas, à la Jackson Pollock. In this radically expressionistic work, Christ’s huge eyes stare in sorrow and distress, and his ambiguously painted mouth is a shattered grimace.

The Head of Christ was done during the same period in which Rouault painted a great number of carnal, yet pathetic, nudes, often prostitutes; a fiercely drunken woman; sad or debauched clowns; cruel judges, and so on. Most of his works of this time are searing representations of human lust, cruelty, pride and brokenness. They reflect a drastically Augustinian sense of humanity as a “mass of perdition.” Seen in this larger context, the Head of Christ is a powerful statement of Christ’s passion as an atoning event. It declares the substitutionary character of Christ’s death and his desperate loneliness. Interestingly; Karl Barth’s early work sounds almost like a commentary on this painting:

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” People have attempted to absolve Jesus from blame for this utterance by the argument, difficult to substantiate, that it was not an expression of real despair -- and the fact has been quite overlooked that it was not less but more than doubt and despair: as our old dogmatists knew, it was derelictio, a being lost and abandoned [The Word of God and the Word of Man (Harper Torchbook. 1957), pp. 118-119].

Although our century has produced little significant Christian art, its first half witnessed a flowering of Creative theology. Twentieth century theology came into being in a time characterized by a drastic and/or existentialist mood. The two most influential theological portrayals of Jesus in our age have been Albert Schweitzer’s and Barth’s.

Schweitzer radically redrew the liberal conception of the historical Jesus in his 1906 The Quest of the Historical Jesus (done almost contemporaneously with Rouault’s Head of Christ). Schweitzer portrayed Jesus as an imperious first century apocalyptic fanatic, beckoning to us from his own age, as an alien in our own. Although Schweitzer’s case for Jesus’ obsessive apocalypticism was overdrawn, we are nevertheless left with an awareness that Jesus must remain historically alien to us. Estrangement and faith mingle in the brokenness of modern Christian awareness.

Barth’s early indifference to the “historical” Jesus was grounded in his realization that the Jesus of history can, indeed, only be an alien to us; he is “the crater made at the percussion point of an exploding shell, the void. Such a shattering metaphor typifies the existentialist, expressionist mood in which the early Barth -- and with him the preponderance of post-World War I theology -- came to see Jesus. The compatible, gentle Jesus reconstructed by earlier liberals was lost in the ‘void.” The only thing that could clearly be known of Jesus was his suffering, his brokenness and his rejection by the world.

Schweitzer and Barth were far from being theological allies, and Rouault was a French Catholic who probably had no knowledge of Protestant theology. Nonetheless, together they helped to create the modern sense of the person of Christ. The modern experience of faith in the context of radical historical and cultural paradox requires that we cannot see Christ in the more serene light of the late Rouault or the late Barth (if we are ever granted such confidence at all) unless we go through the anguish of Christ’s being crucified anew in our age.

Violent expressionism and existentialism inevitably consume themselves. It is not possible to live permanently at the extremes. Faith must either find some resolution or shatter in the icy air blowing from the void. Yet modern Christianity was born in a sense of the void. Rouault’s Head of Christ is a profound symbol of the wellsprings of modern faith. Perhaps the present poverty of Christian art and thought can be traced to our avoidance of the cross and our consequent deprivation of the joy of resurrection, hindering new creation. We tremble to pray for a renewal of creativity within the church, for we sense that it can come only by way of crucifixion. Would that there could be new life without it!