Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  In time, Inigo’s hotheaded temper would cool somewhat—or, what is more likely, he would come to find more conventionally approved outlets for the passion that burned within him. Or, as Meissner puts it, “his ego … assimilated [a] new set of values” as he “gained an awareness of the imperfection and inadequacy of the value system that had previously guided his life.” He spent a year in a cave, emerging in simple pilgrim’s sackcloth and hemp belt, having long since given away his fine clothes and even the mule. (He had left his beloved sword and dagger on the grille of the Monserrat shrine.) His plan was to spend his life helping other poor pilgrims in Jerusalem, a plan which he was certain had been inspired by God but which political realities prevented him from carrying out. Inquisitors then drove him from Spain and into a bachelor’s program in Paris. Though Inigo surely liked to torture himself, even he remained but a short time at Montaigu. By the autumn of 1529 he had matriculated at Sainte-Barbe.

  On the parchment of his later degree of 1535 as master of philosophy he is named “Ignatius de Loyola” for the first time. Though this was long thought to be a clerical error, it now seems more likely that the new name was part of the man’s new identity, less ethnic and more classical than Inigo. It was during his Paris years that he gradually attracted a small company of young men, who would eventually form the nucleus of a new religious order, the Society of Jesus, usually known as the Jesuits, which would play an essential part in the coming Counter-Reformation.

  While fasting and beating himself in the cave—near Manresa, just north of Monserrat—Inigo was often beset by “visions” that to the modern reader may appear closer to hallucinations than to forms of divine enlightenment. This is especially true of a frequently seen serpent “in the air close to him,” “bright with objects that shone like eyes” and that “gave him great consolation because it was very beautiful.” Meissner sees the snake as a manifestation of Inigo’s “unconscious libido, the symbolism expressing phallic erotic conflicts.” We might put the matter a shade more bluntly: here was a young man who had been deeply in love with his own organ of generation.

  Out of the cave experience, however, there also came one of the permanent religious classics of all time, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, which are used to this day by spiritual directors to guide those who go “on retreat,” usually in some sylvan setting. Nor are the Exercises confined to Roman Catholic retreats; other Christians have come to find them increasingly helpful. The Exercises employ a technique that has been widely successful, which Ignatius labeled “composition of place,”17 in which the exercitant summons up from his own imagination a scene: say, the birth of Jesus in the stable at Bethlehem, the Crucifixion, even Hell and its torments. In this way, by tying prayer to pictures in one’s imagination, a more concrete, more fleshly spiritual life is made possible, leaving an unforgettable imprint on one’s memory and perhaps enabling an encounter with God Incarnate.

  The Exercises take with utter seriousness the existence of Satan, of personal evil at large in the world, as well as of the far greater power of God’s grace. The retreatant is urged to examine his or her conscience regularly in the light of these opposing forces and to judge which urges (or inner voices) are from Heaven, which from Hell. The techniques often exhibit the plodding, earthbound nature of their author and his not very imaginative imagination. They can also manifest a sort of military crassness, even at times the sensibility of the bully who intended to kill the Moor, as in the most important of Ignatius’s “Rules for Thinking with the Church”: “To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it.” Meissner comes to our aid here by speaking of “the tendency of the authoritarian disposition” to “suppress freedom” and asserts that to such a disposition freedom is always “threatening because it allows for unpredictability.”

  Though many of the pictures in the Exercises are vivid, they are not Protestant. “To be right in everything” must strike today’s reader as a hopelessly foolish pursuit that could be entertained only by the most unattractively rigid of personalities. And yet, there are many similarities between Ignatius and not a few of his Protestant contemporaries. “To be right in everything” is often the tone reformers wish to strike, whether they admit it explicitly or not; and a profoundly neurotic fear of Hell and its power haunts the nightmares of leaders on both sides of the widening divide.

  1525?–1569: THE ICE IS MELTING

  When it comes to making pictures of sixteenth-century life, no one is more bold or more subtle than Pieter Bruegel, the Dutchman who more than any other captured for us the look and feel of ordinary life, while enriching his images with a depth of perception seldom equaled in any art. Bruegel was most likely born in a village in Brabant, now part of the Netherlands, sometime between 1525 and 1530, but we know nothing more than that. When he died in Brussels in 1569, he may have been in his late thirties or his mid-forties. He was by then quite famous, and a number of his paintings had already entered some of the most important collections of his time and place, including the collection of the emperor himself.

  Any number of his early drawings and prints, however, have been lost, so we have a somewhat broken narrative of his early development. He appears to have begun in the creative shadow of his fellow Dutchman Hieronymus Bosch, born at least seventy-five years earlier and best understood as a late medieval painter, who provides the viewer entry into a world of dreams and nightmares replete with both delicious and deformed creatures, as in his famous Garden of Earthly Delights, which contains, besides the panel of delights, a panel illustrating the torments of Hell. Luther would have had no trouble understanding Bosch, nor would Loyola—though the delights might have made both men more than a little nervous.

  Though Bruegel appropriates some of Bosch’s medieval-style surrealism, he comes gradually to serve a less sensational, more meditative, more profound point of view. Good examples of Bruegel’s Boschian aspects may be found in his earlier images, such as his drawing Big Fish Eat Little Fish, which illustrates a typical folk saying. Pulsing with activity and a multiplicity of forms, the drawing is a ghoulish nightmare that depends on excess to make its point. But neither sixteenth-century viewers nor we in the twenty-first century could fail to grasp immediately what Bruegel is telling us. The drawing might even be employed to illustrate the predatory nature of certain leading businessmen or churchmen and their collaborating politicians, whether then or now. (What a sensational logo for a super PAC such as the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity or Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.) I particularly admire the detail of the grandfather (in the lower right) lovingly instructing the child in how to go about the depredation of others, and the fish (upper right) that has grown innovative legs to assist him in his spoliating—and this long before anyone had thought of the evolution of species.

  (illustration credit 83)

  When Bruegel made this drawing he was already a resident of Antwerp, then one of Europe’s largest cities, and a regular contributor to the press of the famous printer Hieronymus Cock. Big Fish was made with the intention of turning it into an engraving, though we have but one extant copy of the engraving, attributed—wrongly—to Bosch. It’s certainly possible that some now-forgotten news item of the day made someone feel that mass distribution of this image was imprudent, or Bruegel himself may have decided not to put his name on it, though his signature and the date, 1556, are clearly seen in the lower right corner of the drawing. (He would later change the spelling of his name from “Brueghel” to “Bruegel.”) Or it may be that someone thought the Bosch name would make for better sales.

  While in Antwerp, Bruegel studied with a local artist, Pieter Coecke. He also took at least one extended trip to Italy, by now an almost required venture for any ambitious northern artist. And years later he would marry Coecke’s daughter, Mayken, who was considerably younger than Bruegel. According to one witness, Bruegel “often carried her in his arms when she was a
child.” By the time of the wedding, Coecke was long dead, but Mayken’s mother insisted, before she gave her consent, that Bruegel agree to move from Antwerp to Brussels “in order to separate himself from his former relationship and forget it,” according to the same witness. Bruegel had lived in Antwerp with a young woman whom he loved but who was “niggardly with the truth,” which led to their parting. Bruegel was not niggardly with the truth.

  The longer he worked, the further he seemed to move away from his early, Bosch-like visions, his images becoming simpler, his scenes less crowded with alien forms. But he never lost his flair for suggesting that the real world is as full of odd, even nightmarish realities as are our dreams. Beekeepers (facing page), a drawing he made twelve years after Big Fish, is, though much pared back visually, full of the feeling that the world is indeed a very strange place. The three faceless beekeepers, lugubriously dressed, silent, and ghostly, could almost be beings from another planet, carrying out some incomprehensible ritual. In the branches of the tree we spot a bird-nester, a character that appears in other Bruegel images. He could not be more earthbound, more usual: he is stealing eggs. The legend in the lower left says in Dutch: “He who knows where the nest is has knowledge, but he who raids it possesses it.” Another folk saying, but what does Bruegel mean by it here? Are the out-of-this-world beekeepers, whose work is approved by social convention, not stealing from the bees as the bird-nester steals from the birds? Does their weird getup somehow render them absolved from the social condemnation that falls upon the scared little bird-nester? Is there something skewed about the way we human beings make our moral judgments? Are we all victims of convention, unable to see straight and judge aright because of differences in costume, class, and convention? Should we rather applaud the pluck of the humble bird-nester and stand back a bit from the conventionally approved but somewhat creepy beekeepers?

  (illustration credit 57)

  Of course, if some busybody, especially some magistrate or religious censor, were to inquire as to the meaning hidden in the drawing, Bruegel could easily claim that there was no hidden meaning. It’s just a local scene I happened on, nothing more than that. It is, after all, entirely realistic: no Boschian symbolism, no excess, no challenge intended to anyone’s intelligence or spirit. (Had the young antecedent-less Bruegel himself possibly been a bird-nester?)

  In the same year that he drew Beekeepers Bruegel painted one of his smallest oils, Beggars [Plate 54], little more than seven inches square. It would be easy to mistake this panel for a simple genre painting, a slice of contemporary life and nothing more. But the picture is “full o’ the milk of human kindness,” as Lady Macbeth puts it scornfully. We are shown five crippled beggars, at least three of whom lack feet. They are managing on crutches and assorted crude appendages. Four of the five wear foxtails, which, in a time when clothes defined who you were and where you belonged, were the badges of beggars and other licensed fools—that is, of those allowed to play the fool in designated public spaces for the occasional penny.

  The three whose faces we can see are brutish, probably moronic. Are these their constant expressions or are they playing expected parts? All wear hats, the man on the left wearing a sort of red crown, the man on the right a pretend bishop’s miter. Whether we know it or not, we are being asked: Is this the best we can do for these poor souls, one of whom might be our secret king, another of whom might be our spiritual superior? Can our society offer them nothing more? Look, they are human beings. How would you like to be one of them?

  Beyond the beggars a woman walks by. She is not handsome but ordinary—but she can walk and go about the normal business of life. What a difference that makes, how lucky is this ordinary woman. Is she a beggar? She carries a plate: will it be used as a beggar’s bowl? Her coat looks like the remnant of a torn sack. Whatever her status, she is far better off than the beggars in the foreground.

  And beyond the beggars and the woman, who takes no notice, there is an open, arched portal, leading to a lovely orchard and private garden, the very symbol of the good life, a life our beggars can have no part in. There we can just make out the horizon, the place where the earth touches the sky, where our poor, sad human hopes touch God’s great cosmos. So take pity on the beggars.

  One of Bruegel’s most famous paintings is the (supposedly) jolly The Wedding Dance [Plate 55], which can be viewed at the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the few Bruegel paintings to be found on American soil.18 It is a spectacular demonstration of painterly rhythm. Of course, we are watching people dance, which should be rhythmic. But here the rhythm is in the multiplicity of lines and shapes, coalescing and separating against one another, and in the ballet of colors, clashing and complementing one another. Let your eye follow the eruptions of red, for instance, from foreground to farthest figures, and you will see what I mean. The last grouping to be seen before the horizon is a kissing couple, though not the only kissing couple to be spotted within this assemblage. Are they perhaps the next bridal couple? Well to the right of the kissers, near the horizon, is the traditional place for the bride in front of an unfurled sheet, in this case extended between two trees and bearing the bride’s paper crown above her chair. But the bride is not sitting beneath her crown, as would be expected. There, instead, two old crones are conferring, gossiping no doubt; and perhaps they have plenty to gossip about. The bride, after all, is close to the front of the dancers, distinguished by her bare head and flowing bridal hairdo. She is dancing. With her new husband? I don’t think so. And where is he? Who knows.

  So Bruegel gives us here a complex sociogram, full of questions and possibilities for both happiness and misery. The three strapping lads who occupy the foreground positions sport red, white, and blue erections, seen quite prominently beneath their bursting codpieces. (The codpieces look nearly transparent because so many censors in so many earlier eras tried to disguise or erase these swellings.) Two are dancing with ladies who may or may not be their wives or girlfriends. The third lad is single, playing the pipes, to which everyone else is dancing. Is this single musician, who sparks the joy of all the dancers, the eternal artist, Bruegel himself, the one who gives pleasure but never wholly owns it?

  Are the dancers simply full of joy? Rather, they seem a little subdued, certainly less than ecstatic, knowing that the dance will end and the party be over, that tomorrow their usual, dreary lives will resume once more. In most other northern artists, a genre painting like this one would exude a certain contempt: Look at those silly, feckless peasants. But in Bruegel’s art, peasants are always people, just like you and me. And don’t forget to contemplate that long, mysterious horizon.

  Bruegel made many pictures like The Wedding Dance, employing scads of individuals, discovered in an immense variety of attitudes. Not a few of Bruegel’s larger paintings cannot be reproduced here, requiring as they do a large-format art book if there is to be any hope of presenting them adequately. This is true especially of Christ Carrying the Cross, an immense oil panel, nearly seven feet across, hanging in Vienna. Though Christ, fallen under the weight of his cross, is to be found at the exact center of the painting, the viewer is unlikely to spot him right away. He is so small against the foreground figures, and there is so much human activity in this painting to distract the eye. The casual viewer might take away the impression that Bruegel believed that the way to Calvary and the subsequent crucifixion were not all that important. Rather, what is being said is that the most important things happen while we are distracted by unimportant things and fail to take note of the life-altering moments that should claim our full attention.

  But there are so many themes pulsating through this complex field that a great many critics have found here proof of Bruegel’s subversive political and religious opinions: he hated the Spanish overlords of the Netherlands, sneakily depicted as red-coated Roman soldiers, just as the Spanish mercenaries then occupying the Netherlands wore red; he is anti-Catholic, pro-Protestant, because Mary, prominent in the foreground and ackn
owledged symbol of the Catholic Church, turns aside from her son, whereas a peddler, also in the foreground (and probably having Protestant tracts in his enormous backpack, as many peddlers had), turns toward Christ. The vivid red coats are undeniable and would surely have sent the imaginations of contemporary viewers in an anti-Spanish direction. The partisan religious intentions are teasingly less certain.

  Fortunately, there is a complex Bruegel image—one with very nearly the same theme as Christ Carrying the Cross, though depicting an ancient pagan story—that we can reproduce here, The Fall of Icarus [Plate 56]. Daedalus, the legendary Greek inventor, made wings for himself and his son Icarus, so that they could fly away and escape their imprisonment by King Minos. Daedalus warned his son to take a middle way, neither too near the earth nor too near the sun, lest the sun melt the wax to which the wings’ feathers were affixed. In his pleasure Icarus, young and soaring, forgot his father’s advice, flew too near the sun, crashed into the sea, and drowned.