The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion
Toolan, David
find peace and aware that he has "seen too God-damned many dawns creeping grayly over too many dirty windows," Tyrone is looking for some kind of forgiveness and salvation. He hopes that...
...In the recent Broadway production, director David Leveaux underlines the symbolism of this scene by lighting the two figures on the stage so that they resemble a Pieta...
...How could we have missed the obvious - - that in all those devout representations of Madonna and Child, Adorations of the Magi, Ecce Homos, Deposition scenes, and Pier,is, the principal axis of attention, the "action" of these paintings and sculptures, is the sex of Christ, his genitals...
...She was beautiful...
...For that vision, in the interim, would be all but extirpated by Reformation hostilities, Ignatius's Exercises themselves quickly degenerating into something like a grammatical drill...
...That ascesis consisted of experientially reimagining the self a participant-insider of the Christ mystery - - in effect, as a theophorous or Godbearing creature reminiscent of the Greek patristic path but amplifying it...
...As she loves and understands and forgives...
...He hopes that if he can spend one night with Josie Hogan, daughter of a tenant farmer on Tyrone's property, that somehow his burden of guilt will be lifted...
...I thought -(Abruptly his expression becomes sneering and cynical -- harshly...
...In the interim, that is, we lost the Renaissance thread...
...For it was a theology of joy and gratitude, as if for the first time the soul of the West permitted itself to really absorb, and concretely imagine, what a post-resurrection mode of being, what the accomplishment of redemption, meant to the erogenous zone...
...As Renaissance scholar Father John W. O'MaUey puts the mood of the time, "whereas in earlier times men had to search for the truth and dispute about it, in the Christian era men are to enjoy it...
...Victims of post-Reformation black-out, of what art historian Leo Steinberg calls a "modem oblivion," we have not seen what's directly in front of our noses...
...O'Neill's wish for his brother is voiced in Josie's last lines: "May you rest forever in forgive= ness and peace...
...Books: CONFRONTING THE INCARNATION D ID we congratulate ourselves that a signal difference between Christianity and Greek Dionysianism, or between Christianity and Hindu Shaivite devotion, was the refusal in Western iconography of the latter's phallicism...
...More, in the remarkable integrity of this interlude in Western history, we begin to catch the complementarity and parallelism between the epoch's aesthetic and spiritual movements...
...Our individualistic common sense, confined as it often is to the boundaries of skin, inhibits these expansive rebirthing moves...
...for Renaissance artists, Christ's sexual member became the demonstrative sign of the verity of Incarnation, "the pledge of God's humanation...
...but Doctorow kept the central figures of his story intact and distorted the peripheral figures, while Carroll does just the opposite...
...Renaissance art - - including the broad movement begun c. 1260 - - harnessed the theological impulse and developed the requisite stylistic means to attest the utter carnality of God's humanation in Christ...
...When Tyrone awakens, though he cannot immediately remember the details of the night, he says he feels, "Sort of at peace with myself and this lousy life -- as if all my sins had been forgiven...
...A student of CounterReformation Jesuits at La Fl/~che, Descartes not only appears innocent of the whole incarnational message embodied in Renaissance art (and in Loyola, too), but bespeaks a massive cultural amnesia on this score, For how else do we explain Descartes's enormous influence if his reinstatement of the schism between body and soul were not expressive of Europe's divided consciousness at the time...
...Though their lives are and will remain tragic, Tyrone and Josie under the moon attain what O'Neill viewed as a spiritual success: Tyrone's dream of forgiveness is achieved through Josie's love...
...the pious find it in bad taste...
...Or this consciousness could, like Ignatius's, identify with historical archetypal figures I like Christ and find one's soul, one's true body, "in Him...
...Readers get, they hope a ringside seat on how it was...
...Aside from the erratic case of certain Americans like Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, and Whitman, such a visionary embrace of the world would not surface again in the West until Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prison, or until Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes...
...A scholarly search for tomorrow's answers...
...In some cases, romans ti clef, key novels, are attempts at serious literature...
...But lest the imagination stop at that most problematic area of human life, the artists expanded this vision to sexuality - - to a redeemed sexuality...
...As if Jesus had said, "take my ideas and eat," not "take my body...
...it makes one think...
...The Franciscans, notably, had done their work well...
...The normal viewer overlooks it...
...David Toolan most Renaissance art historians misconstrued it as erotive naturalism or the intrusion of folk elements into the sacred...
...No such vagueness was permitted the makers of images...
...Hybrid but hackneyed I PRINCE OF PEACE James Carroll Little, Brown, $17.95, 488 pp...
...and M.T.S...
...Hence the preacher of the period was not to squander words convincing the convinced...
...That's why I told you...
...And Josie adds: "As she forgives, do you hear me...
...James Carroll's new novel, his fifth, Prince of Peace, falls somewhere in between the two types, half historical soap opera, half roman d clef...
...The former is a low calorie diet for fashion-plate models, no meal...
...And as Steinberg notes: we may take Renaissance art to be the first and last phase of Christian art that can claim full Christian orthodoxy...
...CTU is one of the largest Catholic Schools of Theology in the country...
...up until now I THE SEXUALITY OF CHRIST IN RENAISSANCE ART AND IN MODERN OBLIVION Leo Steinberg Pantheon Books, $11.95, 222 pp...
...She was simple and kind and pure of heart...
...Behind such reactions lurks a latent Gnosticism, Steinberg shows, or a sensibility which separates the earthy and natural from the mystical, two spheres which it was the whole point of this art to join together...
...Forget it...
...but it is as a novel that Prince of Peace falters most: what is verified history is at least Commonweal: 694...
...What better way, moreover, to purge the West's imagination of its congenital Gnostic contempt for the earth, anneal its chronic Manichaean dualism, and stretch the soul into the channels of promise opened out by the God-Man - - than to portray Christ, the exemplar of freedom, in his most vulnerable member without shame, indeed "sliame.less...
...Nuts...
...This split, so different from the Renaissance spirit and nearly definitive of the modem mind, has remained to plague us - - with a soulless materialism on the one hand, with a disembodied conceptualist spirituality on the other - - ever since...
...Durkin accurately describes himself as " a two-bit professor at a second-rate college, a sometime contributor to smallcirculation journals," a fellow who hopes to write a novel one of these days, and who is, apparently, something of an unexamined sexist, a classic homophobe, a licentious prude, and, most injurious to the book, not a very good writer...
...She always did...
...She throws her arms around him, forgives him, and tells him how proud she is that he came to her because he knew she was the only one in the world who loved him enough to understand and forgive...
...WUliam O'Rourke F OR NOVELISTS there has always been the Ripley's-Believe-It-or-Not problem: truth has shown itself over and over to be stranger than fiction: more vivid, alas, more, imaginative...
...In consequence, writers have often cleaved to historical sources...
...They are also my prayer for the insightful, sensitive, wounded thirteen-year-old who could not believe in a benevolent God...
...Carroll can rightly claim that few know that history intimately anyway -- and that his book is a novel and should be judged as such...
...Carroll may have wanted to portray just such a person, but he certainly risks censure (and a flawed book) when he makes such a creature his novel's narrator...
...E.L.Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, which uses the Rosenberg case, is an example...
...The hybrid mentioned earlier, part soap opera history, part roman d clef, though a taxing form, can be handled dexterously...
...Recent scholarship suggests that the chart for another course than the one the West has taken was once available in the Renaissance...
...The theology this art embodied was made to order for the expansive exuberance of Renaissance figures like Benvenuto Cellini, or for modem Catholics like Muriel Spark...
...Unlike some of the humanized Christs of contemporary theology, therefore, the Renaissance took the divinity of Jesus for granted, an unquestionable credo that was in fact the sine qua non for the awe and delight which its artists took in unveiling Christ's sex...
...their theological anatomy lesson, by virtue of their m6tier, had to be bolder, specific...
...To he sure, as Steinberg is well aware, the phallic symbol as portrayed in Renaissance art bears a different meaning than it does in Greek and Hindu symbology...
...as if imitating Byzantine icons, they tended to accent only the upper torso, in their physieo-mystical hierarchy the godly part, and tellingly left the lower, human part vague...
...In any case, there seems to be a basic cultural affinity between the meaning of Renaissance art and the "exercises" Loyola designed to find "God in all things...
...It became the first Christian art in a thousand years to confront the Incarnation entire, the upper and the lower body together, not excluding even the body's sexual component...
...Well guess again...
...We offer you a talented and distinguished faculty, a superior library and a complete theological curriculum, all set in one of the most beautiful cities in the world...
...For those familiar with the actual history and personalities of that period of Catholic resistance, Prince of Peace is an affront...
...The novel reads as an informal biography composed by a friend, but a friend, unfortunately, who is not a likable chronicler...
...the ringside seat books are potboilers, generational sagas, Leon Uris-like fare...
...The emergence of this sexual motif in distinctively sacred Western art isunthinkable except as the fruition of a thousand years of meditation on the "true God, true man" of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A,D...
...Witness Descartes in the seventeenth century...
...We are left," says Steinberg, "with a cultural paradox: Renaissance artists and preachers were able to make Christian confession only by breaking out of Christian restraints...
...Steinberg's thesis ramifies...
...redoing dramatic public events has long been a staple of popular fiction...
...His priest-resister, Michael Maguire (whose last name may be a dig at Cardinal Spellman's chancellor, Archbishop Maguire, who had a hand in giving Daniel Berrigan the bum's rush out of the country in 1965) is a Frankenstein creature: the torso of Philip Berrigan, the head of Dan, arms and legs, ecumenically, of William Sloane Coffin and Daniel Ellsberg, and the fingers of anyone's guess...
...Tyrone sees through Josie's facade of foul mouth and loose morals...
...The narrative method Carroll has chosen may have been the easiest, but it leaves the novel with a plodding structure and a repetitive way of telling the story: which is, roughly, the tale of the 1960s Catholic anti-war resistance, as lived by the war-hero, priest, and movement celebrity, Michael Maguire, told, with some mixed emotions, by his adoring boyhood chum, Frank Durkin...
...Or do we imagine that the recovery of Christ's humanity, redressing a centuries-old Nicene overstress on the divinity,- constitutes an entirely modern phenomenon...
...When recent history is used, the fictional device employed is the roman ~ clef, where foolhardy authors dare libel laws and serve up "thinly veiled" characters lifted from life...
...Steinberg brilA deep respect for our religious traditions...
...There is no ribaldry here...
...If he is right - - and his evidence is overwhelming - - then the monastery's contemplative spirit must have seeded popular culture, animated streets and studios, more than I have previously thought...
...For information or for a catalogue, write or call: CATHOLIC THEOLOGICAL UNION 5401 South Comell Chicago, lllinois 60615 (312) 324-8000 14 December 1984:693 liantly reminds us that this course, interrupted and repressed, is a road worth taking again...
...His sins of drunkenness during his mother's final illness and of fornication near his dead mother's body are torturing Tyrone's conscience...
...His peripheral characters are true to life, but the central figures are distorted...
...degrees as well as the Certificate in Pastoral Studies...
...Usually, the events depicted are at least a generation old, principals dead and buried...
...The ascesis of a Renaissance saint like Ignatius of Loyola, for instance, expresses the same "incarnational theology" Steinberg sees the artists exploring...
...and "Jesus was the ultimate Mister Goodbar...
...You're like her deep down in your heart...
...Accordingly, artists like Fra Filippo Lippi, Bellini, Michelangelo, Roger van der Weyden, Schongauer, Andrea del Sarto, and VerCommonweal: 692 onese broke out of previous iconographic conventions and plotted Christ's physiognomy, inch by bodily inch...
...We are the theological home for over twenty religious communities of men and an ever-increasing number of religious women, lay women and lay men...
...The ostensio genitalium was as basic as the ostensio vulnerum, the showing of the wounds...
...I wonder if such a path is thinkable in Western Europe without the imaginal boldness of Renaissance artists standing behind it...
...I can guarantee it: after reading this monograph and more to the point, taking in its ample illustrations, you will never again stroll through galleries of late medieval and Renaissance artworks with the same innocent, unseeing eyes...
...The power of the play convinces me that agnostic O'Neill wanted for his brother James "the promise of God's peace in the soul's dark sadness...
...And so, too commonly, authentic spiritual impulses in our time deliver a muddled message: they temptus to jump out of our skin or to keep our faith strictly above the belt...
...The depiction becomes both natural and mystical, "each enabling the other," what Steinberg calls a "reciprocal franchise" unique to the Catholic West...
...My mistake...
...But to take it requires some redoing, some concerted psychophysical exercise I think...
...We offer the M.Div., M.A...
...After confessing to Josie, Tyrone says of his mother: , S h e ' d understand and forgive me, don't you think...
...Of course late medieval theologians typically asserted Christ's complete humanity, but it strikes us as fishy, not wholly honest...
...Individual courses may be taken on a limited basis...
...We are treated throughout to such gems of reflection and dead stick prose from Durkin a s , " I was filled with regret, but also stern acknowledgment that opaque hardening is the only law that heartbreak knows...
...For Renaissance artists and saints could take for granted, as part of their "common sense," a participatory mode of consciousness that could, like Michelangelo, identify with solid rock and draw human figures from it...
...Time I got a move o n . . . Josie does forgive him...
...his duty was to dwell on the boon conferred by the Incarnation, and thus stir hearts to gratitude and delight...
...Her purity is important to Tyrone because he wants a chaste love from her that is pure, non-judgmental and forgiving...
Vol. 111 • December 1984 • No. 22
