Here is “Musée des Beaux Arts,” W. H. Auden’s great meditation on the painting:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there must always be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
In the lower right quadrant of the picture between ship and shore, the “white legs” are “disappearing into the green water” with a momentary splash, accompanied by a swirl of feathers.
Icarus was painted sometime between 1555 and 1560. In 1568, Bruegel made what may well have been his final picture, The Magpie on the Gallows [Plate 57], which he specified in his will was his gift to his wife. In less than a year he was dead. Magpie contains a sort of reprise of The Wedding Dance, a peasant woman dancing with two men, the picture’s most prominent human feature. Nearby is the inevitable piper, source of the music. But the dancing threesome lacks a second woman. Ah, well, we do what we can, we humans; we manage in this imperfect world of ours, taking our pleasures where we find them, not expecting everything to be just as we would have it. To the left of the dancers, two men and their dog serve as an enthusiastic audience. To the left of them, another man shits in the woods. That’s it, isn’t it? Dancing, defecating, dying: they’re all necessary human actions.
Where does dying come into it? The center of the picture is not the dancers or the musician but the gallows. That is where we dance, do we not, in the shadow of the gallows? Alighting for a moment on its splintery wooden frame is a magpie, the bird that, when it appears singly, foretells the early death of someone nearby:
One’s sorrow, two’s mirth,
Three’s a wedding, four’s a birth,
goes an old rhyme about magpies.
To the right of the gallows is a simple wooden cross (a Protestant-style “old rugged cross”?), something for a condemned man to gaze on while he is being hanged. Well in the distance is a town, bustling with activity. On a promontory high above the town is the extensive castle of the local lord; across the valley atop a cliff is a monastery. In the river valley we can see farms and pastures, fishing boats and seagoing ships, and in the farthest distance another human settlement. We labor as well as we can, conducting our lives with as much merriment as we can muster, always in the shadow of death, always overseen by the forces of church and state, miters and magistracies. But, whether appropriately or inappropriately, we do dance. In the sky above whirl birds of various species, donors of eggs to us poor humans, mediators of a sort between earthlings and Heaven. All this is part of Bruegel’s final message to Mayken. Perhaps in the dancing threesome he is even letting her know that he would have no objection to her taking a second husband. You must do what you can, dearest Mayken.
Surely Bruegel did not want to die just then, leaving Mayken with three small children, the youngest, Jan, but one year old. One child was a daughter, and of her we know only her name, Marie. There were also two sons, Pieter the Younger (who would be known as Hell Bruegel) and Jan (who would be known as Velvet Bruegel). Both sons became artists of considerable skill and reputation, though never surpassing their father, never even coming near him in inventiveness.
In his last days, Pieter the Elder must have felt the forces of social judgment—whether of Catholic inquisition or Protestant reformation—closing in on him. Various European societies were becoming more vigilant, more insistent on utter acquiescence to their norms, less tolerant of any hint of deviation. It was anyone’s guess where the “Spanish” Netherlands would end up, which ideological camp it would finally choose to join. If it got to choose at all. Were the sly messages concealed in Bruegel’s paintings really so capable of stirring the pot of social upheaval? He certainly thought so. He instructed Mayken—no doubt for her own protection—to destroy all his remaining satirical drawings. Apparently, she followed those instructions.
We can say with some confidence that Bruegel felt the gathering forces of political and religious instability impending around him. Just a couple of years before his death he painted what may be his most subtly beautiful panel, Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (see endpaper). The skaters are enjoying themselves on the frozen river, while the silent spires of church and state prick the sky. The whole world is aureoled in a golden glow—to such an extent that we can designate this image the world’s first impressionist painting. The many birds gathering on the snow-laden lawn to the right have no clue that a trap has been set for them, that some of them at least will soon be flattened and caught as the wooden panel crashes down on them. In the slush beneath the trap we note that the snow is melting. Indeed, the golden glow suffusing everything is a silent warning that the temperature is rising and that soon, out on the rural river, there will be a cracking sound, as the ice disintegrates beneath at least some of the skaters. Passing scenes of unearthly beauty, fleeting coalescences of social happiness, moments of restorative peace are just that—passing, fleeting moments. Though they may portend a very different tomorrow, we may easily miss their message, grateful for the present joys, for the seeds scattered so generously beneath the trap.
1 The German artist most closely associated with Luther was Lucas Cranach: the two were friends, even godfathers to each other’s children. A compelling defense of Cranach’s artistic excellence, as well as of his undoubted historical role in Luther’s Reformation, is provided by Steven Ozment in his The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther and the Making of the Reformation. I, nonetheless, confess to finding Cranach cloying and second rate.
2 For an analysis of the actual meaning of Revelation, as opposed to its many wacky interpretations, see Desire of the Everlasting Hills, pages 158ff.
3 The horns of the altar referred to bulges that were part of the construction of ancient Israelite altars. Dürer misunderstands the reference and shows God the Father holding musical horns over the heavenly altar.
4 The preference for condemning church over state is abundant through much of Western European literary history, starting with Dante and Boccaccio, taking us through Chaucer, Langland, and Villon, and ending, if at all, only toward the late twentieth century.
5 This is, of course, classicism much sweetened in the course of the Renaissance by Christian optimism, not the original Greco-Roman fatalism. See this page.
6 Two schematic anatomy sketches apart, this is the only front-and-center, fig-leaf-less nude in all of Dürer’s work. Even his woodcuts of the interiors of bathhouses do not depict complete nudity. The northerners were, at this time, far more modest than the Italians. In time, this would change, very nearly reversing itself over the last century. Today, Italians may appreciate nudity in art, but in swimming pools and on beaches they exhibit far more pudency than the Germanic peoples, who allow and sometimes even prescribe nudity for both sexes in certain public places. The northern European Lebensreform (“life reform”) and “naturist” movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuri
es, which often enough progressed in tandem with hypernationalism and Nazism in Germany, are largely responsible.
7 It was even claimed by the National Socialists, that is, the Nazis, as their kind of art.
8 Our English title, The Republic, derives from the Latin translation, Respublica. In the Greek original, the title, Politeia, would be better translated as Society or simply The State.
9 A third model for Utopia should be mentioned, Augustine of Hippo’s Civitas Dei (City of God). In this work of the early fifth century, the great African bishop (and Neoplatonist) was much preoccupied with defining the characteristics of the Earthly City, preeminently the Rome of his day, against the characteristics of the Eternal City or Heaven. If not quite a utopian/dystopian work, it is certainly the political critique that over the long course of Western history may have had more influence than any other. In his early twenties and while still a law student, More lectured on Civitas at his neighborhood church, Saint Lawrence Jewry. Unfortunately, his lectures are lost and the twelfth-century church itself was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 (though rebuilt in neoclassical style to the design of Christopher Wren).
10 More, though elaborately respectful, even at times servile, toward his sovereign, was never in the dark about Henry’s true character. More than once Sir Thomas predicted that his head might well be removed from his body if Henry had need of it. On hearing that Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second queen, was dancing her days away, More prophetically confided to his favorite daughter, Meg: “Alas poor soul, her dances will knock our heads off like footballs; but ere long her head will dance the like dance.”
11 The phrase comes from the compliments of a contemporary, Robert Whittington, but may ultimately derive from Erasmus’s Latin description of More as a man omnium horarum (for all hours). Nor have such compliments been lacking down the centuries, the great Anglican satirist Jonathan Swift, for instance, bluntly naming More “the person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced.”
12 In Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea (pages 201-2), I point out that this is a form of racism.
13 For a full account of the Roman attitude toward the Germanic barbarians, see How the Irish Saved Civilization, Chapter I.
14 See Mysteries of the Middle Ages, Chapter III (Paris, University of Heavenly Things).
15 One of Rabelais’s grandchildren, Jacques Rabelais, would in time become a respected literary historian, specializing in folktales.
16 The arms of the Loyolas featured a black cauldron suspended between two wolves against a silver field.
17 Ignatius did not invent this technique: evidence of it may be found in Ludolph of Saxony’s Jesus, as well as in the widely treasured Imitation of Christ (see this page and this page). In the thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi had used a similar technique in approaching the scene in the stable at Bethlehem. (See Mysteries of the Middle Ages, pages 235ff.)
18 Besides The Wedding Dance in Detroit, there are but two: the breathtakingly “simple” Harvest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Landscape with the Parable of the Sower at the Timken Art Gallery in San Diego. Besides these paintings, there are three Bruegel drawings in the United States, one each at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The great treasuries of Bruegel’s art are the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, in Brussels.
VI
CHRISTIAN VS. CHRISTIAN
THE TURNS OF THE SCREW
Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!
King Lear
It may be that artists, because they see further than the rest of us, can occasionally foresee the coming of epochal changes to which the common herd may be blind. But it would hardly have taken much perspicacity to note the changes that were enveloping Europe as it rolled toward the mid-sixteenth century. In a continent full of kings, princes, and dukes, there had always been additional power configurations. In addition to the considerable prince-bishops of the church, in addition to the venerable stato della Chiesa surrounding Rome and ruled by the pope, there was the unique role of the Holy Roman Emperor whose uneven powers shadowed the power structures of several countries. There were ancient independent city-states, such as Florence and Milan, and much newer models, such as the Swiss cantons of Zurich and Geneva. Classical, relatively stationary Europe had always looked toward the Mediterranean, but now a larger, venturing Europe was often casting its glances toward the formerly blank Atlantic as it followed the amazing exploits of the rising coastal sea powers of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and even islanded England.
As if this subtly reconfiguring, strategically maddening map were not enough, into the constantly shifting tides and tornadoes of power was now thrown what we might call the Religion Bomb. There have always been people in every land and culture who are willing not only to live by their religion but to die by it. But for what seemed untold centuries there had been for Western and Central European Christians only Roman Catholicism. If you wished to be true to something large and overwhelming, it was to this traditional form that you must be true. Some, surely, were aware of the Orthodoxy of the Christian East, though Orthodoxy never appeared as threatening to the West, only as a bit off base and generally far away. Some few were aware no doubt of occasional heresies—the Bogomils, say, or (more ambiguously) the Hussites—but these movements operated weakly, usually at the margins of societies, and glimmered only for brief periods. Their threat never loomed large in European imagination.
But now whole towns and cities, dioceses and archdioceses, provinces and countries were embracing what seemed to be radical, permanent changes in their basic religious beliefs and practices. And this astonishing, seemingly overnight religious shift was only exaggerated by the normal, if sometimes quick and radical, shifts and instabilities of European power politics. Singular would be the prince who was simply rethinking his religious beliefs and practices; he was thinking about his power. In which camp will I fare more prosperously and securely? Who is going to prevail in my corner of the world? Will I be on the winning team?
In our day, a fairly close parallel to these early modern religio-political developments may be glimpsed in the unsettling, often boiling changes in the current Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Africa. To quote from a recent dispatch from Doha, Qatar, on the instabilities of Islamic countries:
The fury has roots in the slow breakdown of religious authority in the Islamic world over the past century or more, an erosion that has allowed self-appointed interpreters to render instant judgment on issues that might once have been left to established, respected figures. In the past, even an insult to the Prophet [Mohammad] would have to be investigated in accord with Islamic jurisprudence before anyone was licensed to take action.
“People used to look to their local imams on matters of faith and interpretation,” said Michael A. Reynolds,…a professor of Middle East studies at Princeton. “But in a more mobile and transnational world, with more people living in cities and much higher rates of literacy, it’s easier for ideologues and extremists to assert their own views.”1
If what it takes to tell the truth—from a Christian point of view (or from a Muslim one, for that matter)—is a pure heart, we can expect soon enough to be surrounded by a veritable Babel of conflicting truth tellers, for the pure of heart are just as careful cultivators of their own egos as are painters and princes. And thus it was that Luther’s Reformation quickly turned into a nearly endless series of Reformations, each vying for the attention and commitment of masses of human beings, few tolerant of other interpretations, and fewer still willing to abide the flourishing (or sometimes even the continuing existence) of those other interpretations.
1516–1525: FROM ZWINGLI TO THE PEASANTS’ WAR
Huldrych Zwingli of Zurich, a Swiss city, was the instigator of the first of these supposedly separate Reformations.
He insisted that he “began to preach the Gospel of Christ in 1516, long before anyone in our region had ever heard of Luther” and that his thinking was in no way dependent on the German professor. Though Zwingli, who was “the people’s priest,” a lowly appointment at the principal church in Zurich, admitted the influence of Erasmus’s humanistic contempt for the “silly little ceremonies” of Catholic tradition, he would not hear of his owing any debt to Luther himself. Nonetheless, his foundational theology—of scripture as the only guarantor of theological truth, of the human inability to merit salvation, and of God’s freely bestowed forgiveness—sounds exactly like Luther’s. As the British historian Euan Cameron put it skeptically, “If Zwingli really did develop the distinctively ‘Reformation’ message of salvation by free forgiveness, apprehended through faith, simultaneously but entirely independent of Luther, it was the most breathtaking coincidence of the sixteenth century.”
But Zwingli did eventually go further than Luther. As early as 1524, all religious images, scorned as expressions of idolatry, were torn from Zurich’s churches, and all church organs were destroyed. Art had no biblical warrant and therefore could not be made Christian; and music, like art, distracted the people with its sensuousness from hearing the word of God.
For some, however, neither Luther nor Zwingli was moving fast enough to satisfy the requirements of scripture. Though both were careful to align their Reformations with the wishes (or at least the consent) of local magistrates, there were young Turks, so to speak, in each of their movements who felt such alliances unnecessary or even ungodly. In Zurich, Konrad Grebel and his followers adopted a slogan of “not waiting on the magistrate,” intended to encourage individual inspiration. Their devotion to the New Testament also inspired their conviction that only adults capable of making a commitment in faith could be baptized, something Luther had specifically rejected, though a similarly radical interpretation against both gradualism and images and in favor of limiting baptism to adults began to run through Wittenberg during Luther’s absence in the Wartburg, requiring his sudden return. The tug-of-war over these more radical interpretations would continue for generations, as the opprobrious term “Anabaptist” (or rebaptizer) began to be flung about—and rejected by the proponents of adult baptism, who believed that infant baptisms, since they were scripturally illegitimate, had no standing. (They weren’t engaged in rebaptizing since no prior baptism had really taken place.) In particular, Luther’s formerly admiring follower, Andreas von Karlstadt, began to spout these more radical proposals, gradually turning into an implacable enemy whom Luther dismissed as having swallowed the Holy Spirit “feathers and all.”
Heretics and Heroes Page 28