EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Wisdom in the Chilean Dark

Everyone has their own memorable moment in the story of the Chilean miners. Mine came after the first few of the buried men arrived on the surface. One declared in translation: “Underground, I was with God and the Devil. They fought each other, and God won.” I found it riveting.

Catholic and little educated, this impoverished worker was speaking in the spiritual language of the great masters. These were not the words of an establishment Church which always posits a God on the outside, up there in heaven. Their God looks down on us, all-powerful. For this Chilean miner, as for all mystics and many creative thinkers, God is inside us because we ourselves are God…..and the Devil. This knowledge is key to understanding art. It is such a common way for spiritual minds to make sense of divinity, regardless of period, that it helps explain why artists as diverse as Durer and Gauguin each portrayed themselves as Christ. Many poets and composers think likewise too. James Gaines, a musicologist, explains how: “God and Satan were visibly alive for Bach and his own life was their battleground…[It is] difficult to listen to his music without hearing the warfare raging inside him.”¹

Wisdom like that from a miner deep down in the Chilean desert may also be a distant echo of the desert fathers who, in isolation themselves, gained similar insights into their own minds and the underlying meaning of the Scriptures. I will post a Reading List soon for those of you who would like to know more about the many forms of The Inner Tradition, all of which are linked by the idea that we ourselves can become God. So, my suggestion is forget about the surface meaning of all those stories in the Bible that make no sense, like the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Christ’s body, and do what the miner did in the dark: dig deeper. Both religion and art will then seem much clearer.

1. James R. Gaines, Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (New York: Harper Collins) 2005, p. 136