EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Where on earth is the Kingdom of Heaven?

Occasionally, while studying art, I achieve a breakthrough quite unlike my normally slow and incremental progress. One of those moments was discovering that key words and phrases in the Bible and other esoteric texts intentionally mislead, allowing only those aware of their hidden meaning to understand them. For instance, names describing inner divinity, our awareness of it or how to reach it include the Kingdom of Heaven, Kingdom of God, Narrow Path, Straight Gate, Life, A Second Birth, A Little Child. The latter was the actual name used by early esoteric Christians for an initiate into their group, someone who had just taken his or her “second birth”.¹ Today we might call them “reborn” though the term is grossly over-used. Death, just as surprisingly, is what most people experience daily, living without self-understanding. Life, on the other hand, is knowing yourself and being aware of divinity everywhere, inside and out. I realized then that artists use these very same double-meanings visually, showing one thing to mean another.

The Kingdom of Heaven, for example, which I used to think referred to a place after death is instead our inner being, the only place we can feel at one with nature and the divine. That’s why heaven in art is sometimes shaped like an eye, as in Fra Angelico's Last Judgement (above) dated 1425-30. We are on the inside of his eye, in his mind. It even has a tear duct on the right. In The Gospel According to Thomas Jesus explains the phrase to his disciples in secret. He warns them not to believe people who tell them that heaven is in the sky and it was later denied inclusion in the canonical Bible, perhaps for that very reason. He also advises that self-understanding is the only path to truth which is yet another reason why every painter paints himself.

“These are the secret words which the Living Jesus spoke…..: “If those who lead you say to you: “See, the Kingdom is in heaven,” then the birds of the heaven will precede you. If they say to you: “It is in the sea,” then the fish will precede you. But the Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves then you are in poverty and you are poverty.”²

Poverty, that’s a big one too. It does not mean financial misery but spiritual blindness even in contexts where coins are discussed. That means that a treasure-house does not store physical assets either. In the 7th century the ascetic St. Isaac the Syrian wrote:

“Enter eagerly into your inner treasure-house and you will see the treasure-house of heaven: for the two are the same, and one and the same entry reveals them both. The ladder leading into the Kingdom of Heaven is within you, hidden in your soul. Plunge into yourself, washing yourself from sin, and you will see the rungs of the ladder by which you can ascend.”³

So remember when you look at paintings, a poor man may not lack money, a child may represent an adult mind, a door may not be a real door nor a path a path. Heaven is not in the sky either and a king is probably something else entirely. Even Isaac Newton spent most of his time trying to figure out the secret meaning of biblical words and was mocked for doing so. Yet the Bible, like art, is full of such metaphors that seem at first to depict the exterior world of nature but are code for our inner being.

 

1. Annie Besant, Esoteric Christianity [orig. publ. 1905] (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books) 2006, p. 75

2. Robin Amis, A Different Christianity: Early Christian Esotericism and Modern Thought (Albany: State University of New York) 1995, p. xix

3. Amis, p. 73