EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Celebrating Good Friday

Isn’t it rather morbid and paradoxical for Christians to celebrate the death of Christ on Good Friday? What’s so good about killing your God? Ah, you’ll be told, that was the day He died for our sins for all humanity? But doesn’t God forgive everyone anyway? There was no need for Him to die like that. So why celebrate it?

The literal sense of The New Testament, like the Old, is similar to that of a great masterpiece, full of inconsistencies that make no sense through conventional perception: was Mary really a Virgin? Did Christ really resurrect after three days? Why is that figure out-of-scale in Manet’s picnic in the park? Did Dürer really depict himself as God? The explanations are always the same: don’t worry about those details! Just believe Mary was a Virgin mother. Believe Jesus came back from the dead, and believe Manet’s masterpiece is a picnic in the park. And, of course, Dürer didn’t depict himself as God; that would have been heretical. It’s just a self-portrait that happens to look like God. The fact that none of these jarring ideas make sense only seems natural because the Establishment says so and so many other people believe them. Our ability to think critically, one of humanity’s most glorious characteristics, is snuffed out by the power of convention. Don’t think about what does not make sense. Think like an animal; behave like a sheep. Just believe it.

Thank God there have always been those few who question orthodoxy. They appear everywhere in all centuries. First and foremost within the Christian tradition came the Africans Origen and St. Augustine; from Italy St. Francis, Giotto and St. Bonaventure; the Germans Hildegard of Bingen, Albrecht Dürer and Meister Eckhart. St. Teresa and El Greco left their mark in Spain; Nicolas Poussin in Rome and Paris; and from England the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. In the privacy of cloister and studio these thinkers and many more, poets and composers too, came to their own conclusions about the nature of divinity by thinking critically and they all, essentially, were brought to the same heretical conclusion: only by understanding our own minds can we understand the divine. God is in all matter. As above, so below. God is everywhere and nowhere and cannot be expressed in words, only in silence.  And the goal of each human life, if it is capable of thinking critically, is to become at one with God by shaking off what is impure in our minds, including those mistaken beliefs about God and art peddled to the masses by the Church and academia respectively. It is not fashionable to say so but, yes, art is elitest as are all religions. Only self-questioning minds can understand the truth and they are taught privately as were the disciples. When they questioned Jesus about why he spoke to the masses in parables, his answer was crystal clear:

“He answered and said unto them “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given…….Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing, see not; and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand…..For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed……But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.”¹