Christos Anesti

Happy Easter!  One of the things I do love about being in graduate school is that I’m often thinking very deeply (er, at least trying to) about the way we think of the world.  More specifically, as a student of English literature, words are the primary lens I/we use to think about these big issues.  I’m currently writing one of my final papers on how William Blake uses tears in his poetry for this class called “Romanticism & the Emotions.”  As a part of the paper, I’m thinking a whole lot about Jesus and the important role that sorrow plays/has played in forming a Christian concept of the divine.  So, it’s interesting to have been writing the majority of this paper during holy week. 

But that’s not exactly where I’m trying to go right now.  My friends got me out of the house yesterday – thank you! –to finally visit the Gauguin exhibit at the National Gallery of Art.  I nearly got hit by a bus on my way there and got yelled at by the driver for being on my cell phone even though I was walking in a cross walk, with the pedestrian light telling me to walk...but alas, I'm only a mere human life, and I was on my cell phone, so surely I deserved to die in that moment.  Anyway, I survived the idiot bus drivers of DC -- by a hair since I felt the bumper on my leg -- and got to enjoy this exhibit.  

I was particularly struck by Gauguin’s representations of Christ.  The Yellow Christ  was one of the more interesting paintings to me because of the rich symbolism, but also admittedly because it is part of his series of paintings from Brittany, France…which many of you know is the region of France where I lived.  So it got me thinking, what in the heck does a yellow Christ mean?  The museum booklet's description simply talks about the bold use of colors.   Here's my interpretation. This painting was done in 1889.  In that time, there was a phenomenon happening world-wide as a result of industrialization -- and the previous century's rapid growth of public participation in politics and consumer culture -- called “yellow journalism.” It referred to the endless circulation of print journals and daily newspapers that was full of biased reporting and misleading images that paraded as objective journalism.  Sound familiar?  A yellow Christ in this time period wouldn't just be radical because Christ is transposed into a folk setting.  It would also make a bold statement about how religious institutions produce endless interpretations of the crucifixion under the guise of divine authority, but created with strong bias.

William Blake believed that Jesus was the imagination.  He believed that religion distorted the expansive qualities of Jesus and reduced them to images and rituals and rules.  If Jesus is imagination, then it follows that institutions that rely on logic and dogma and certain justifications to establish their authority inherently limit the imagination and thus, reduce the value and meaning of Jesus.  Art is integral to gaining a more comprehensive understanding of Jesus because art brings us out of the space of simple rule following (we know from earlier posts how much I value rule following) and into the imagination as the art demands a response that is personal and is based on the observer's experience with the art.  

Easter is one of the times when spiritual leaders who are self-conscious of the limitations  that the structure of religion imposes have an opportunity to draw their flocks into the imagination.  Lent is strongly rooted in ritual and rule following.  The resurrection, on the other hand, pushes every limit because it cannot be fully explained in words or with logic.   


Alithos Anesti!