4.
Among these important ideas, none has been more significant to Christianity than the notion of suffering. We are all, in the religion’s eyes, inherently vulnerable beings who will not get through life without meeting with atrocious griefs of mind and body. Christianity also knows that any pain is aggravated by a sense that we are alone in experiencing it. However, we are as a rule not very skilled at communicating the texture of our troubles to others, or at sensing the sorrows they themselves are hiding behind stoic façades. We are therefore in need of art to help us to understand our own neglected hurt, to grasp everything that does not come up in casual conversation and to coax us out of an unproductively isolated relationship with our most despised and awkward qualities.
So that we should all know what suffering is like, realize that none of us will escape it and grow kinder through this recognition: Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, 1516. (illustration credit 8.7)
For a thousand years and more, Christian artists have been directing their energies towards making us feel what it would be like to have large, rusty nails hammered into our palms, to bleed from weeping wounds in our sides and to climb a steep hill on legs already broken by the weight of the cross we are carrying. The depiction of such pain is not meant to be ghoulish; rather, it is intended to be a route to moral and psychological development, a way to increase our feelings of solidarity as well as our capacities for compassion.
In the spring of 1512, Matthias Grünewald began work on an altarpiece for the Monastery of St Anthony in Isenheim, in north-eastern France. The monks of this order specialized in tending to the sick, and most particularly to those afflicted with ergotism, or St Anthony’s fire, a usually fatal disease which causes seizures, hallucinations and gangrene. Once the work was ready, it became customary for patients, on their arrival at the monastery, to be taken to the chapel to see it, so that they might understand that in the suffering they were now enduring, they had once been equalled, and perhaps exceeded, by God’s own son.
It is fundamental to the power of the Christian story that Jesus died in more or less the greatest agony ever experienced by anyone. He thus offers all human beings, however racked by illness and grief, evidence that they are not alone in their condition — sparing them, if not suffering itself, then at least the defeated feeling that they have been singled out for unusual punishment.
Jesus’s story is a register of pain — betrayal, loneliness, self-doubt, torture — through which our own anguish can be mirrored and contextualized, and our impressions of its rarity corrected. Such impressions are of course not hard to form, given how vigorously society waves away our difficulties and surrounds us with sentimental commercial images which menace us by seeming so far removed from our reality in their promises.
Christianity recognizes the capacity of the best art to give shape to pain and thereby to attenuate the worst of our feelings of paranoia and isolation. Catholic artists have long been in the habit of producing cycles of paintings known as the Seven Sorrows of Mary, renderings of the most painful episodes in the life of the Virgin, from the prophecy of Simeon to Jesus’s death and burial. Tradition dictates that the faithful should meditate on these works and endeavour through them to better understand not only Mary’s trials but also those endured by mothers more generally. The underlying intention of these Marian cycles, although they were defined by the particularities of Catholicism, could nevertheless be a source of inspiration for atheists. We might consider setting contemporary artists the task of depicting a Seven Sorrows of Parenthood, a Twelve Sorrows of Adolescence or a Twenty-one Sorrows of Divorce.
Bernard van Orley and Pedro Campana, The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin (detail), c. 1520–35. (illustration credit 8.8)
Art attenuates the feeling of being beyond understanding: an image by François Coquerel, from an imagined cycle of the Twelve Sorrows of Adolescence. (illustration credit 8.9)
The most famous of all Catholic cycles of suffering is the Fourteen Stations of the Cross, whose elements illustrate the tragic final chapter of Jesus’s life, beginning with the Condemnation and ending with the Laying in the Tomb. Hung in order around the niches or columns of a church, the Stations are meant to be toured in an anticlockwise itinerary, with each stage throwing light on a different aspect of agony.
While Jesus’s end may have been exceptionally barbarous, the strategy of organizing a cycle of representative images of difficulty, of enriching these with commentaries and hanging them in an ambulatory circuit around a contemplative space could be as effective in the lay as in the Christian realm. By its very nature, life inflicts on us universal pains based on timeless psychological and social realities; we all wrestle with the dilemmas of childhood, education, family, work, love, ageing and death — many of which now bear semi-official labels (‘adolescent angst’, ‘postpartum depression’, ‘midlife crisis’). New secular cycles of representative sorrows could anchor themselves around these stages and so articulate the true nature of their camouflaged dimensions. They could teach us lessons about the real course of life in the safety and quiet of a gallery, before events themselves found a way of doing the same with their characteristic violence and surprise.
Station 9: Jesus Falls a Third Time, from Eric Gill’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross, Westminster Cathedral, 1918. (illustration credit 8.10)
Station 9: The Station of Disability, from an imaginary secular Twelve Stations of Old Age. (illustration credit 8.11)
5.
Christian art understands that images are important partly because they can generate compassion, the fragile quality which enables the boundaries of our egos to dissolve, helps us to recognize ourselves in the experiences of strangers and can make their pain matter to us as much as our own.
Art has a role to play in this manoeuvre of the mind upon which, not coincidentally, civilization itself is founded, because the unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.
As if to reinforce the idea that to be human is, above all else, to partake in a common vulnerability to misfortune, disease and violence, Christian art returns us relentlessly to the flesh, whether in the form of the infant Jesus’s plump cheeks or of the taut, broken skin over his ribcage in his final hours. The message is clear: even if we do not bleed to death on a cross, simply by virtue of being human we will each of us suffer our share of agony and indignity, each face appalling, intractable realities which may nevertheless kindle in us feelings of mutuality. Christianity hints that if our bodies were immune to pain or decay, we would be monsters.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pietà, 1499. (illustration credit 8.12)
A cancer patient after chemotherapy, by Preston Gannaway, 2008. (illustration credit 8.13)