The critical consensus about Mel Gibson's hugely popular Jesus movie (over $200 million in box office and it's only the second weekend) is that it's a sustained exercise in audiovisual pain: why just lower the crown of thorns onto Christ's head when you could pound it into his scalp with a hammer? There's a centuries old tradition of depicting this kind of suffering, especially in painting and sculpture, which frankly I'd rather read about than see reenacted in Dolby Surround with the latest special effects technology. Alex Wilson discusses the "Man of Sorrows" tradition of devotional images here, particularly those of Albrecht Durer, who did what you know Mel wanted to do and probably would have done if he'd been Rich Mel rather than Mad Max 20 years ago: cast himself as Jesus. ionarts has some additional, interesting historical detail on another famous Man of Sorrows, the one in Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, discussed here earlier. I first learned about the latter work reading J.-K. Huysmans' grueling description from his occult novel Là-Bas. This is art criticism at its most committed and unstinting; Mel's got nothing on this account."Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulae touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia.
"Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous, enormous, encircled by a disordered crown of thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eye half opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow traversed the expiring figure. The face was furrowed, the brow seamed, the cheeks blanched; all the drooping features wept, while the mouth, unnerved, its under jaw racked by tetanic contractions, laughed atrociously.
"The torture had been terrific, and the agony had frightened the mocking executioners into flight.
"Against a dark blue night-sky the cross seemed to bow down, almost to touch the ground with its tip, while two figures, one on each side, kept watch over the Christ. One was the Virgin, wearing a hood the colour of mucous blood over a robe of wan blue. Her face was pale and swollen with weeping, and she stood rigid, as one who buries his fingernails deep into his palms and sobs. The other figure was that of Saint John, like a gipsy or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his beard matted and tangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff cut in wide strips like slabs of bark. His mantle was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught up at the sleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe lemons. Spent with weeping, but possessed of more endurance than Mary, who was yet erect but broken and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an access of outraged loyalty had drawn himself up before the corpse, which he contemplated with his red and smoky eyes while he choked back the cry which threatened to rend his quivering throat.
"Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at the opposite pole from those debonair Golgothas adopted by the Church ever since the Renaissance. This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, the Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth with the curly brown tresses, divided beard, and insipid doll-like features, whom the faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ of Justin, Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church, the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of our sins and clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms.
"It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of the most miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of the beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greed of their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by the Father until such time as no further torture was possible; the Christ with no recourse but His Mother, to Whom--then powerless to aid Him--He had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant's cry.
"In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passion with all the suffering permitted to the human senses, and, obeying an incomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of the scourging and of the blows and of the insults spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor had He resumed it when, after these preliminary mockeries, He entered upon the unspeakable torment of the unceasing agony. Thus, dying like a thief, like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had sunk himself to the deepest depth of fallen humanity and had not spared Himself the last ignominy of putrefaction.
"Never before had naturalism transfigured itself by such a conception and execution. Never before had a painter so charnally envisaged divinity nor so brutally dipped his brush into the wounds and running sores and bleeding nail holes of the Saviour. Grünewald had passed all measure. He was the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue Redeemer, his sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be truly transcendent. A divine light played about that ulcerated head, a superhuman expression illuminated the fermenting skin of the epileptic features. This crucified corpse was a very God, and, without aureole, without nimbus, with none of the stock accoutrements except the blood-sprinkled crown of thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestial super-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn Virgin and a Saint John whose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears.
"These faces, by nature vulgar, were resplendent, transfigured with the expression of the sublime grief of those souls whose plaint is not heard. Thief, pauper, and peasant had vanished and given place to supraterrestial creatures in the presence of their God.
"Grünewald was the most uncompromising of idealists. Never had artist known such magnificent exaltation, none had ever so resolutely bounded from the summit of spiritual altitude to the rapt orb of heaven. He had gone to the two extremes. From the rankest weeds of the pit he had extracted the finest essence of charity, the mordant liquor of tears. In this canvas was revealed the masterpiece of an art obeying the unopposable urge to render the tangible and the invisible, to make manifest the crying impurity of the flesh and to make sublime the infinite distress of the soul."
As an adolescent I thought Grunewald’s crucifixion was really cool. The Time-Life book on Durer has a great treatment of the whole Isenheim altar where you fold the pages over so it opens up just like the real thing. Little did I know how deep this stuff goes. The altar was done for a church dedicated to St Anthony Abbot (the desert hermit; not the more familiar Anthony of Padua) and they also ran a hospital, where they treated victims of St Anthony’s Fire. In extreme cases this disease leads to gangrene, putrification, and loss of limbs; seeing its victims may have affected Grunewald’s vision of Jesus’ body. Initial stages of the disease involve wild hallucinations, which recall the devilish visions depicted in the Temptation of St Anthony, hence his association with the pathology. It turns out the illness comes from the ergot fungus associated with rotten rye flour. The same fungus, and its visionary capacity, is the source of LSD. This makes St Anthony the patron saint of psychedelia. A few long-time Tree-ers may recall an Hermetic program I devised, in word and image, with the aim of using Anthony as a point man to ameliorate the West’s conflicted attitude toward visionary drugs, via a Goddess-powered revisioning of the Christian dialectic of indulgence and asceticism. I’m not sure if such arcana belong on the web, but maybe one day I’ll think about it…
On another note, the succe$$ of Gibson’s Passion has emboldened ABC to air (tonight) a Gospel treatment called Judas, which they’ve had on the shelf for a couple of years. I suppose it’s another humanizing treatment. Judas is typical of the “bad guy who’s more interesting than the good guy,” and typifies Christianity’s insoluble conflict between predestination and free will. He has to betray Christ for the sake of the plot, so why is he condemned? Oh well, it’s like you always see athletes thanking God after a big win, but you never see the Red Sox saying “clearly we have sinned; we must stop whoring around and taking steroids.” In discussing The Passion I mentioned Jesus Christ Superstar. That too is really more about Judas than Jesus, but with a rockin’ score, including Ian Gillan of Deep Purple. My prog-rock obsessed friends and I loved it when we were teenagers.
Judas
I don't want your blood money
Annas
But you might as well take it
We think that you should
Best movie of the Passion of Christ is one called "Jesus of Montreal". Amazing movie, very low key. Obviously it's a variant on the story but, for my money, captures the spirit and soul (puns intended) like no other movie I've seen. I can't recomend it enough.
I agree, loved that film as well. Denys Arcand.
speaking of god.
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The critical consensus about Mel Gibson's hugely popular Jesus movie (over $200 million in box office and it's only the second weekend) is that it's a sustained exercise in audiovisual pain: why just lower the crown of thorns onto Christ's head when you could pound it into his scalp with a hammer? There's a centuries old tradition of depicting this kind of suffering, especially in painting and sculpture, which frankly I'd rather read about than see reenacted in Dolby Surround with the latest special effects technology. Alex Wilson discusses the "Man of Sorrows" tradition of devotional images here, particularly those of Albrecht Durer, who did what you know Mel wanted to do and probably would have done if he'd been Rich Mel rather than Mad Max 20 years ago: cast himself as Jesus. ionarts has some additional, interesting historical detail on another famous Man of Sorrows, the one in Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, discussed here earlier. I first learned about the latter work reading J.-K. Huysmans' grueling description from his occult novel Là-Bas. This is art criticism at its most committed and unstinting; Mel's got nothing on this account.
"Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulae touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia.
back to Tom Moody
"Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous, enormous, encircled by a disordered crown of thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eye half opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow traversed the expiring figure. The face was furrowed, the brow seamed, the cheeks blanched; all the drooping features wept, while the mouth, unnerved, its under jaw racked by tetanic contractions, laughed atrociously.
"The torture had been terrific, and the agony had frightened the mocking executioners into flight.
"Against a dark blue night-sky the cross seemed to bow down, almost to touch the ground with its tip, while two figures, one on each side, kept watch over the Christ. One was the Virgin, wearing a hood the colour of mucous blood over a robe of wan blue. Her face was pale and swollen with weeping, and she stood rigid, as one who buries his fingernails deep into his palms and sobs. The other figure was that of Saint John, like a gipsy or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his beard matted and tangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff cut in wide strips like slabs of bark. His mantle was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught up at the sleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe lemons. Spent with weeping, but possessed of more endurance than Mary, who was yet erect but broken and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an access of outraged loyalty had drawn himself up before the corpse, which he contemplated with his red and smoky eyes while he choked back the cry which threatened to rend his quivering throat.
"Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at the opposite pole from those debonair Golgothas adopted by the Church ever since the Renaissance. This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, the Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth with the curly brown tresses, divided beard, and insipid doll-like features, whom the faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ of Justin, Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church, the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of our sins and clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms.
"It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of the most miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of the beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greed of their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by the Father until such time as no further torture was possible; the Christ with no recourse but His Mother, to Whom--then powerless to aid Him--He had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant's cry.
"In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passion with all the suffering permitted to the human senses, and, obeying an incomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of the scourging and of the blows and of the insults spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor had He resumed it when, after these preliminary mockeries, He entered upon the unspeakable torment of the unceasing agony. Thus, dying like a thief, like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had sunk himself to the deepest depth of fallen humanity and had not spared Himself the last ignominy of putrefaction.
"Never before had naturalism transfigured itself by such a conception and execution. Never before had a painter so charnally envisaged divinity nor so brutally dipped his brush into the wounds and running sores and bleeding nail holes of the Saviour. Grünewald had passed all measure. He was the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue Redeemer, his sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be truly transcendent. A divine light played about that ulcerated head, a superhuman expression illuminated the fermenting skin of the epileptic features. This crucified corpse was a very God, and, without aureole, without nimbus, with none of the stock accoutrements except the blood-sprinkled crown of thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestial super-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn Virgin and a Saint John whose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears.
"These faces, by nature vulgar, were resplendent, transfigured with the expression of the sublime grief of those souls whose plaint is not heard. Thief, pauper, and peasant had vanished and given place to supraterrestial creatures in the presence of their God.
"Grünewald was the most uncompromising of idealists. Never had artist known such magnificent exaltation, none had ever so resolutely bounded from the summit of spiritual altitude to the rapt orb of heaven. He had gone to the two extremes. From the rankest weeds of the pit he had extracted the finest essence of charity, the mordant liquor of tears. In this canvas was revealed the masterpiece of an art obeying the unopposable urge to render the tangible and the invisible, to make manifest the crying impurity of the flesh and to make sublime the infinite distress of the soul."
- tom moody 3-08-2004 8:18 am
As an adolescent I thought Grunewald’s crucifixion was really cool. The Time-Life book on Durer has a great treatment of the whole Isenheim altar where you fold the pages over so it opens up just like the real thing. Little did I know how deep this stuff goes. The altar was done for a church dedicated to St Anthony Abbot (the desert hermit; not the more familiar Anthony of Padua) and they also ran a hospital, where they treated victims of St Anthony’s Fire. In extreme cases this disease leads to gangrene, putrification, and loss of limbs; seeing its victims may have affected Grunewald’s vision of Jesus’ body. Initial stages of the disease involve wild hallucinations, which recall the devilish visions depicted in the Temptation of St Anthony, hence his association with the pathology. It turns out the illness comes from the ergot fungus associated with rotten rye flour. The same fungus, and its visionary capacity, is the source of LSD. This makes St Anthony the patron saint of psychedelia. A few long-time Tree-ers may recall an Hermetic program I devised, in word and image, with the aim of using Anthony as a point man to ameliorate the West’s conflicted attitude toward visionary drugs, via a Goddess-powered revisioning of the Christian dialectic of indulgence and asceticism. I’m not sure if such arcana belong on the web, but maybe one day I’ll think about it…
- alex 3-08-2004 9:25 pm
On another note, the succe$$ of Gibson’s Passion has emboldened ABC to air (tonight) a Gospel treatment called Judas, which they’ve had on the shelf for a couple of years. I suppose it’s another humanizing treatment. Judas is typical of the “bad guy who’s more interesting than the good guy,” and typifies Christianity’s insoluble conflict between predestination and free will. He has to betray Christ for the sake of the plot, so why is he condemned? Oh well, it’s like you always see athletes thanking God after a big win, but you never see the Red Sox saying “clearly we have sinned; we must stop whoring around and taking steroids.” In discussing The Passion I mentioned Jesus Christ Superstar. That too is really more about Judas than Jesus, but with a rockin’ score, including Ian Gillan of Deep Purple. My prog-rock obsessed friends and I loved it when we were teenagers.
- alex 3-08-2004 9:49 pm
Judas
I don't want your blood money
Annas
But you might as well take it
We think that you should
- tom moody 3-08-2004 9:59 pm
Best movie of the Passion of Christ is one called "Jesus of Montreal". Amazing movie, very low key. Obviously it's a variant on the story but, for my money, captures the spirit and soul (puns intended) like no other movie I've seen. I can't recomend it enough.
- Kevin 3-13-2004 2:24 am
I agree, loved that film as well. Denys Arcand.
- sally mckay 3-13-2004 2:32 am
speaking of god.
- bill 10-16-2009 1:14 am