Explorations in the Contribution of Art to Homiletics: Salvadore Dali and the Freedom of Christ Mary Moorman Armstrong This paper proposes that visual works of art might lend needed depth, suggestive dimensions, and cultural coherence to contemporary homiletics; as such, works of art should be creatively referenced with the same credence generally reserved for textual sources. For instance, let us consider Salvadore Dali s strikingly simple sculpture entitled Christ of St. John of the Cross. The sculpture is a simple image, originally modeled in wax and then cast in pure gold after Dali s interior conversion and return to the Catholic Church in 1949. The sculpture was inspired by another piece of art on which Dali meditated: a drawing by the same name, which was attributed to Saint John of the Cross himself, and was housed in the Monastery of the Incarnation at Avila. In contrast to most visual celebrations of creaturely assent, as we see in depictions of the martyrs who share in Christ s self-offering by wielding the instruments of their torture, or perhaps undergoing their torture itself, Dali s sculpture seems to hover, weightlessly and freely. The first thing that strikes the viewer about this gentle weightlessness is that here, in contrast to other iconography, there are no instruments of martyrdom attached to the body. As a study in the pure freedom of form, Dali s sculpture hearkens to two of his paintings: The Crucifixion, of 1954, and Dali s painted depiction of Christ of St. John of the Cross, of 1951. In both of these paintings, we find the same utter freedom of Christ s body; we look at his hands and his feet, and we see that there are no nails for binding Him. The cross itself is suspended in mid air, and Christ seems merely to align himself with it, as though He were bound only by some mysterious gravity that we cannot see. I offer here an exploration as to how such a work offers a compelling point of 1
departure for considering such homiletic themes as the free human assent to the offer of salvation which was first enacted in Jesus of Nazareth s freely assenting self-offer at Calvary. These images are beautiful, as Dali intended them to be; the story goes that Dali, like St. John of the Cross, had been experiencing dreams about Christ, and wished to depict a Christ who is beautiful, like the God who He is. In this regard, Dali s sculpture is a radicalization of his personal vision of the crucifixion; here, there are no ugly instruments. There is not even a cross. Rather, critics have noted that the image conveys a sense of the flame of Christ s own divine love rising up to consume the offered sacrifice of His body; or, as Dali describes it, Christ Himself has become His cross. The idea conveyed is one of unconstrained freedom. At this point, I propose that the preacher of a Lenten sermon, or the homilist who offers a reflection on Christ s agony in the garden, might find no better resource than an image such as Dali s to convey the idea that the freedom of the decision to offer one s self totally makes it worse, and indeed the dreadful anticipation is often the worst part; in this way, the audience is drawn to consider the dreadful freedom that Christ endured before His crucifixion and to consider personally how it was that the omniscient and omnipotent Lord of the universe, with our nerve endings, and our stomach, freely chose His death, on the logic of John 10:18- No one takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord. Dali s image of a body that has deliberately become its own instrument of death provokes us: when you have nothing to restrain you, nothing to compel you, nothing to hold you in place, how do you consent to your own suffering such that it continues one moment after another after another, each moment a willful decision? If a poignant visual image has provoked such questions, the same image can provoke an imaginative search through the presumptively more authoritative textual resources of the Christian tradition to answer those questions. 2
The history of Christian theology resounds throughout the ages with a clear set of responses. With respect to His divinity, the Patristic sources explain that Jesus walked to His cross in such perfect freedom that nothing is needed; no instrumentality, no compulsion. For instance, as we find in the writings of St. Augustine: For He who was manifest as man, was hidden as God; and He who was manifest suffered all these things, and He Himself arranged them all Who can thus die when he pleases, as Christ died when He pleased? Who is there that thus puts off his garment when he pleases, as Christ put off His flesh at His own pleasure? Who is there that thus departs when he pleases, as Christ departed this lifeat His own pleasure? 1 Thus commensurate with the classic notions of God s unchanging, perfect, undivided and underived self-sufficiency and freedom, Dali reminds us that God incarnate needs nothing, reacts to no exigency; in Anselm s terms, the creative and cherishing Being who supports and surpasses all, who surpasses and fills all things, who is highest and best and greatest of all existing beings, from and through whom all other beings gain their existence, and in whom we hope, does not need a cross to hold in place His self-offering, as Lord and ruler of all, for the sins of all. 2 As Augustine taught further, Christ s suffering on the cross can only be rightly understood in terms of the free, self-sufficient power of His Godhead, by which He was raised from the dead on the third day; we see how freely He laid down His life for us when we recall that He had it in His power thus to take it up again. 3 In the medieval period, St. Bonaventure similarly equates this divine freedom with the total power that is both hidden and revealed in the act of Christ s total suffering: Truly it is clear, how inexplicable (is) the fortitude of Him, whose infirmity was so 1 Augustine, Tractate on the Gospel of John 19.4, 6. 2 Drawing from St. Anselm s Monologium, On the Being of God. 3 St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I.14. 3
strong. 4 At this point, the homilist has employed both visual and textual sources to emphasize to his audience the extent of Christ s infirmity on His cross; and such notions hearken to even deeper tenets of Christian theology, where we find the classic explanations that with respect to His humanity, united to such perfect freedom and such utter power that He makes a cross of Himself, the young man from Galilee is in mortal agony. And here affective questions can be presented to the audience with great efficacy; in light of the visual image, the preacher points out that Jesus of Nazareth is a young man with sorrows and fears, and a body. How does He muster the human will to offer Himself, moment by moment while He remains utterly free? How did He focus His mind? How did He pray in order to endure His cross? The answer could be useful to us, since we are told that we too must take up our crosses and offer ourselves totally to the Father; but the fact is, we are not told how. We are just told that Jesus did so, by His own human and divine will. As Dali vividly shows us, Christ does so with nothing to force Him or to bind Him, here again hearkening to the Christian tradition s cherishing of the role of Christ s human freedom in His offering. A spiritual director of the fourteenth century wrote a series of Meditations on the Life of Christ for Lent, and he suggests that we imagine the point of crucifixion not as Christ being stretched out upon His cross with great submission, but rather that we think of Jesus eagerly embracing His cross by ascending a ladder to its center, where He voluntarily turns Himself around stretches out His arms to be nailed, first one, and then the other, saying to the Father Behold, I am here; I accept; I offer myself to you for those whom you gave to me; for the love and salvation of mankind, it pleases me. 5 It s as though Christ were seizing His own agony. The same sentiment was expressed even earlier by the second century martyr Polycarp, who 4 Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences, Book I. 5 Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, trans. Isa Ragusa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. 4
refused to be bound to the pyre at which he was to be burned, proclaiming with joy that on Christ s example he expected that the grace of God would enable him to remain on the pyre unmoved, without being secured by nails. 6 In the theme of Christian selfoffering, the events that follow are freely embraced by the one on whom they fall, for the joy that is set before Him, and we see Jesus going to His dreadful death for our sakes, as though He were running to it, as though He would make a cross of His own body if there were no other cross to hold him at the end. The death that Christ chooses on Golgotha is a voluntary death at every moment, and involved an ongoing, agonized decision, made moment by moment, so that we might be reconciled to God. For this reason, Jesus not only chooses Golgotha at the outset; He chooses to endure it. Augustine taught that Christ thereby showed His deriders that He was the Son of God; and having allowed Himself to be lifted on to the cross, He does not come down as they challenge Him to do, although He could. The cross does not constrain Him. Rather, He bears with His insulters when they challenge Him, throughout His pain, because ultimately His cross is taken not as a proof of power, but of profoundest patience. In Augustine s words, there He cures your wounds, where He long bore His own; there He heals you of death eternal, where He vouchsafed to die the temporal death. What a death is this, which slew death! 7 And the contemporary exponent of the Christian faith, C. S. Lewis, puts it this way in The Problem of Pain: In self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm of all creation and of all being. For the Eternal Word gives Himself in mortal sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary. For when He was crucified on Calvary He did that in the wild weather of His outlying provinces what He had done 6 The Martyrdom of Polycarp, 13. 7 St. Augustine, Tractate on the Gospel of John III.3. 5
at home in glory and gladness. From before the foundation of the world, Christ surrenders begotten deity back to begetting Deity, in obedience. Indeed, the Christian tradition holds that there is no cross that can hold this Son of God. He makes Himself the sacrifice; and He is held in place for His offering not by nails or stakes or weakness, but rather by constant free decision at each moment on His cross, because of love. In sum, I propose that such homiletic themes are greatly enhanced by the ancillary illustration provided by poignant works of art, produced by artists who have personally experienced their subject. Thank you. 6