Culture and the Cross
Interpretations of the Crucifixion reflect the spirit of the age. Mel Gibson’s vision, argues one theologian and expert in film, reveals our own obsession with violence Tim Williams of Australia draws attention to the followwing piece in the London Tablet…
The dead Christ hanging on the Cross is utterly realistic. His arms are wrenched out of their sockets, his blue lips gape open, his hands claw the air, his feet are gnarled and bloodied, and his scourged body is depicted in gruesome detail.
This is not a scene from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, although like Gibson’s film it is an innovative depiction of the human torment of the Crucifixion. It is one of the panels in the Isenheim Altar, attributed to Matthias Grünewald, painted in the early sixteenth century. The Isenheim Altar is a complex artistic construction, its panels unfolding to reveal different aspects of the life, death and Resurrection of Christ. In one position, the Crucifixion presents a dark scene of death and sorrow. Mary Magdalene kneels grieving at the foot of the Cross, and the mother of Jesus, her face grey with anguish, faints into the arms of a shocked and bewildered St John.
When the panels of the altar are moved, an altogether different perspective is revealed, as a luminous vision of Incarnation and redemption comes into view. In the centre panel, the Virgin Mary cradles the infant Christ in a garden, while to their left celestial choirs make music and in the heavens above them God and the angels form a golden swirl of light. The panel on the left depicts an Annunciation which, like the Crucifixion, achieves a sense of drama and psychological intensity that breaks with artistic convention. Grünewald’s angel swoops down on Mary, his red robe billowing, his bare foot just touching the ground, and his fingers thrust towards her in an insistent, disturbing gesture. Mary, a ripe-cheeked peasant girl, flinches away from him, dropping the book she has been reading with the page open at Isaiah’s prophecy that a young woman will conceive and bear a son. This is an Annunciation that ruptures the ordinary pattern of life and introduces something radically new into the human story.
The panel on the right shows the Resurrection, with the whole composition suggesting an upward movement of life. The shroud floats up out of the tomb and Christ’s red and gold robe swirls around him. He is surrounded by a coloured aureole against a starry sky, and beams of light radiate from his wounded hands, feet and side. All the tensions and anxieties so realistically depicted in the Annunciation and the Crucifixion are resolved in the magnificence of the risen Christ.
The Isenheim Altar was commissioned by a monastic order that cared for the sick and the dying. It belonged in a liturgical setting as part of the sacramental life of the Church, and one can imagine the effect it had on those who knelt praying before it, with their sense of sinfulness, pain and mortality. Grünewald’s work was designed to offer healing and comfort to the sick. This was a Christ who suffered both for them and with them. He had experienced the helplessness of infancy and the agony of dying. His crucified body told them so, and its graphic detail was intended not to shock but to console.
The Isenheim Altar was designed to offer healing and comfort to the sick. This was a Christ who suffered both for them and with them. He had experienced the helplessness of infancy and the agony of dying. His crucified body told them so, and its graphic detail was intended not to shock but to console.
To interpret this great work in its context is to be reminded that every picture tells a story, not only about its subject but, perhaps even more revealingly, about those for whom it is intended. Representations of Christ always tell us more about the cultures that produced them than about the enigmatic subject at their centre. Catholic art, with its madonnas and saints, its annunciations, nativities, crucifixions, lamentations and resurrections is a complex visual history of the psychology and sociology of Western culture. Whereas Orthodox art has resisted the lure of change, retaining its iconic dignity through all the vagaries of history, in Western art each generation projects its beliefs, hopes and fears on to that story. The visual image can be a more potent medium than the written text, because it has an accessibility for literate and illiterate alike. The iconoclasm that followed the Reformation destroyed what for many people was their only real form of access to the Christian story, and it would be several centuries before widespread literacy would enable people to read as well as to see the story for themselves.
Today, the cinema provides us with a new visual medium, and it is perhaps not surprising that we are rediscovering the imaginative power of the Christian story through its cinematic representations. While the churches are emptying, the cinemas are still full, and time and again it is biblical motifs, themes and narratives that form the basis of films. Sometimes this involves a subtle layering of meanings, so that a film might be interpreted as a complex allegory of the Christian story. Films such as The Truman Show, Babette’s Feast, Seven, ET, The Matrix, Fight Club, Breaking the Waves and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, although all very different, lend themselves to such interpretations. Other films are more explicit in the ways they engage with but also reinterpret Christ’s story for a modern audience, often in challenging or subversive ways. These might include Monty Python’s Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ.
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