By PAUL KRAUSE
“Our wounds are not beautiful in themselves; the story behind their healing is.” Beauty is one of the three transcendentals long identified by philosophers and theologians. We all know goodness and truth. We even try to live by those standards in the multiplicity of ways that we understand goodness and truth. Beauty, however, often draws the short stick.
This ought not to be the case, Russ Ramsey argues in his new book Rembrandt is in the Wind. He writes, “In my experience, many Christians in the West tend to purse truth and goodness with the strongest intentionality, while beauty remains a distant third.”
While one might quibble that few Christians pursue the aesthetic life and neglect the power of beauty as a means of grace and faith — the aesthetic power of God is certainly a major component within Catholicism — it is undeniable that even among those Christian movements where beauty has a higher place in its life that the assault against beauty continues full bore in the twenty-first century and those whom we would expect to defend beauty are often sidelined by their own supposed allies.
Ramsey has written a most remarkable little book. “[P]art art history, part biblical study, part philosophy, and part analysis of the human experience,” Rembrandt is in the Wind is a pilgrimage covering 500 years of Western art through nine artists and their broken lives which produced supreme beauty that still attracts souls from all over the world, brings unbelievers to faith, and rejuvenates faith from those weary pilgrims laboring in the city of man.
When I was studying in England, with Sir Roger Scruton, I would give tours through the National Art Gallery in London to friends, fellow students, and the family that so graciously and kindly gave me a room to reside. Art, I said walking through the mythological and religious paintings sections, tells a story. And the stories they tell are gripping.
Russ Ramsey understands the essence of story in art and the story in beauty. Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Jean Bazille, Vincent van Gogh, Henry Tanner (which is an exceptional chapter), Edward Hopper, and Lilias Trotter form the pilgrimage troupe that our guide leads us through. In doing so, Ramsey gives us their rich backstory, their brokenness and plight, their complications as hopeful saints and despondent sinners, and how the complications of the human heart and condition produced the inspiring works of art that have given their names to eternity.
Unlike secular artists and faux aesthetes, Ramsey understands something more fundamental than what the pedantic Avant Garde preach (or, rather, desecrate). Beauty is God. And he doesn’t shy away from the transcendent experience that beauty confers to its participants.
Contra the ruminations of Schopenhauer, we are not detached and disinterested aesthetic observers. From Ramsey’s pen, through this majestic tour of the gallery of the human soul in its ascent to God through the majesty of art, we become intimate participants in the Beauty that calls us to the good things the heavens hold. “[B]eauty arouses belief in God,” Ramsey tells us early on.
While this book is written for Christians to (re)discover the majestic sublimity of art (something that I convinced the family who gave me a room to reside with during my studies), it is also open to any and all lovers of art and beauty. Perhaps, through the generous heart of Ramsey’s implicit evangelizing through the stories of healing beauty he tells, those broken and wounded souls will find the healing that the Beauty of God dispenses. “God uses beauty to woo and warm hearts.” So true!
We live in a world that is being stripped of beauty. Some of us would argue this is intentional. Precisely because beauty is a gateway to God, the desecration and destruction of beauty turns us inward to ourselves to become the idols of our own making. Ugliness keeps our eyes glued to screens and the dirt of the ground. Beauty calls us to gaze high into the heavens. Beauty humbles us.
The shadow of Augustine looms large over this book. It is Augustine’s famous quote, “Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient, beauty so new,” that Ramsey leads with near the conclusion of his introduction. Augustine also wrote, “How can we love anything but the Beautiful?” He also frequently used mountains as his imagistic rhetoric for the Christian believer, pilgrimaging up the lofty heights of rock and stone to gaze upon the face of God signified by the heavens above.
In many ways, Ramsey treats us to the same heart of yearning. But whereas Augustine’s pilgrimage of beauty is something interior, almost psychological, Ramsey takes us into the heart of broken humans and the frailty. He gives art a human face. And in that human face the beauty and love of Transcendence shines through uniting God and man, goodness and depravity, death and redemption.
Brawling And Drinking
Two notable examples stand out in this work. Caravaggio and Vincent van Gogh. Most of us know van Gogh, the artist who cut off his ear and painted in an insane asylum. Maybe some of us know Caravaggio, a degenerate brigand who hung out with sinners but took the Council of Trent’s declaration to offer spiritual meditation to art very seriously and laid the groundwork for the magisterial artists of the Baroque period that still so mesmerize us some 400 years later.
The brokenness, feebleness, and tragedies of Caravaggio and van Gogh are the very stories that Ramsey concentrates on.
Caravaggio was a murderer, a swindler, and a degenerate. He was prone to “brawling and drinking.” As Ramsey so simply and truthfully states, “Caravaggio lived a destructive life.” Yet Caravaggio’s artwork of the Divine, of mercy and weeping through the intensity of the human emotions, pierces our hearts of stone and causes us to weep as Christ wept looking over the grave of Lazarus.
Two of Caravaggio’s greatest religious paintings have the severed head of God’s enemies, Sisera and Goliath, asking for forgiveness (the heads are modeled after Caravaggio’s own). Out of Caravaggio’s brokenness and frailty, the same brokenness and frailty of sinners in need of God’s mercy and grace, the gospel of mercy is revealed.
“Caravaggio’s art reveals a man who seemed to listen to Jesus in some way,” Ramsey notes.
Van Gogh, as we know, was the artist who cut off his ear and created his many masterpieces while suffering from depression which ultimately led him to die by the wounds he suffered trying to commit suicide. Van Gogh has since been immortalized in death. What did he paint, though?
In the often bleak and brutal world we live in, Van Gogh recaptured the awe and majesty of the everyday, the world outside, the heavens that remind us of the beauty, grace, and love of the Creator. Ramsey notes that Van Gogh was no saint, but he also highlights what many Avant Garde critics refuse to acknowledge: Vincent’s complicated relationship to Christianity.
“He is the striving man from Ecclesiastes,” Ramsey writes, seeking God in the midst of a vain and broken world which led Van Gogh to take his own life. But his paintings remind us of the majesty and beauty of God calling us to the abode where all brokenness is healed.
“We are drawn to beauty, and we instinctively know that somewhere, somehow, such a thing as perfection exists,” Ramsey writes. Through the art of imperfect artists, the Supreme Artist still speaks, bringing us to the Beauty that sits alongside the throne of Truth.
So in the words of a great saint, pick up and read.
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