Transcription
A man's faith might be ruined by looking at that picture. The body of the dead Christ in the tomb is a painting by German artist Hans Holbine the Younger, painted somewhere between 1520 and 1522. It depicts the dead body of Jesus right after being taken off the cross. Hans Holbine is perhaps best known for his mastery of realism. Look, for example, at his portrait of Charlotte Doier, which looks almost like a photograph. His most famous painting is arguably The Ambassadors, which also masterfully plays with perspective in the elongated skull on the floor, which attains normal proportions when viewed from an oblique angle or through a glass tube. The same commitment to realism is found in his depiction of the dead Jesus. In fact, some would argue that this painting is simply too realistic.
One of those people is Fodor Dsttovski. In 1867, the newly wetted Fodor Dstki was together with his wife in the Swiss city of Basil. It was one of DSTski's many attempts to run away from his creditors. It's here in the art museum of Basil that Dostki came face to face with this painting of the dead Christ, and it left him transfixed, completely captivated. His wife had to pull him away because she was afraid that the experience would induce one of DSTski's many epileptic fits. She wrote about the experience in her diary. "There are only two really priceless pictures in the whole museum. One of them being the dead savior, a marvelous work that horrified me and so deeply impressed Fodor that he pronounced Halbine the younger a painter and creator of the first rank."
The painting is infamous for its depiction of a dead, decomposing corpse. Legend has it that Holine even retrieved an actual dead body from the Rhine so that he may more realistically depict a body in a state of decomposition. That's probably an urban legend, but it does underscore the commitment to realism, and we see it reflected in the painting's tiniest details. Christ's body is completely emaciated. It bears realistic wounds. The extremities, in particular the hands, are blue with what is called liver mortis, the pooling of blood in the lower parts of the body as gravity pulls down the blood and collects it in the capillaries, circulation having ended postmortem. According to Dstfki's wife, Anna, the writer was so captivated by this painting, he even got on a chair so he could admire the painting for longer and in more detail up close.
But what was so shocking about this painting to DSTski specifically? Two years after this episode, Dostki's novel, The Idiot, was published. The painting appears twice in the novel. First in a short episode where the protagonist, Prince Mishkin, has a conversation about it with Rogoin, who inherited a large estate from his father, including a copy of Holine's masterpiece. Rojin says that he likes to look at the picture, and Mishkin, the idiot from the novel's title, a man of pious faith, cries out, "That picture, that picture, why a man's faith might be ruined by looking at that picture." And Rojin admits that yes, indeed, this painting has the power to rob someone of his faith.
Usually, depictions of Jesus Christ on the cross or depictions of the descent from the cross still have a measure of beauty in them. They are meant to evoke feelings of compassion, piety, guilt. Even though they are depicting a dead or dying body in great pain and agony, beaten, bruised, and bleeding, artists still try to beautify Christ to allude to his divine nature. Look at, for example, the Christ on the cross from Velasquez or Zurbarán, or the masterpiece of Rubens, The Descent from the Cross. These paintings depict a brutal, nasty affair, but in a way, they are also beautiful. They inspire pity. They remind the viewer of the brutality of the suffering of Christ on the one hand, but on the other, there is still a measure of beauty here that tells us that Christ's death, as it is in the Christian story, is not the end. That in three days he will rise again. That death does not have the final say.
By contrast, Hullbine's picture is so realistic, so brutal in its honesty, that Dostki feared that such a true-to-life depiction of death might overwhelm the viewer, stop him dead in his tracks, and make him forget that you are supposed to believe that this death is not the end. But confronted with all this ugliness and decay, can we really have hope that this mangled and destroyed body will come alive again? This is why Prince Mishkin cries out that such a painting might cause the viewer to lose his faith.
And later on in the novel, the painting is brought up again, this time by another character, the nihilistic Epolit Terrantv. In the mouth of this character, Dostki articulates the challenge of this painting. And we may reasonably assume, based on what we know about Dski's life, that the doubts raised by Epolit also plagued Dstfki himself. "There was nothing artistic about it, but the picture made me feel strangely uncomfortable. It represented Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters as a rule represent the Savior, both on the cross and taken down from it, with great beauty still upon his face. This marvelous beauty they strive to preserve even in his moments of deepest agony and passion. But there was no such beauty in Rojin's picture. This was the presentment of a poor, mangled body which had evidently suffered unbearable anguish even before its crucifixion, full of wounds and bruises, marks of the violence of soldiers and people, and of the bitterness of the moment when he had fallen with the cross. All this combined with the anguish of the actual crucifixion. The face was depicted as though still suffering, as though the body, only just dead, was still almost quivering with agony. The picture was one of pure nature, for the face was not beautified by the artist, but was left as it would naturally be, whosoever the sufferer after such anguish."
For Epolit, and presumably Dostki as well, the picture brings to mind the cruelty of nature. Death does not look pretty. A decaying corpse is an ugly thing. There is nothing glamorous or beautiful about it. We know this instinctively, even if in daily life we try to forget it. The appearance of a decaying corpse is a reminder that we are creatures of nature. We are subject to her laws. And her laws dictate that a body after death will decompose, will show discoloration, will swell up, bruise, stiffen, and ultimately, once it's out of our sight, deep underground, decompose entirely and be consumed by maggots. Presumably, this is also what lies in store for Jesus, who died and suffered as a man and is subject to the same laws of nature as everyone else.
We are supposed to be aware of this. The Russian Orthodox Church, and presumably Dostki himself, holds as a core belief the so-called hypostatic union of Christs. They believe, in other words, that Jesus Christ was one person but with two distinct, inseparable natures. Christ was both fully divine and fully human. The fully divine part is easy to understand, but the fully human part tends to raise some difficulties when we think of its implications. For example, if Christ was indeed fully human, then presumably also his corpse went through these ugly stages of decomposition just like any other corpse would. But we are so used to thinking of Jesus, both in theological contexts as well as in popular culture, as this divine being. We know, or rather, if you're a believer, you're supposed to know, that Jesus was both God and yet a fully incarnate human being. But the full implications of this are easy to forget.
Most Christian art, and therefore most depictions of Jesus, have the purpose not to present a faithful representation of Jesus, but they have purposes beyond that: to inspire pity, to strengthen the faith, to glorify God. When doing so, it's easier to focus on the divinity of Jesus rather than on his humanity. It must be especially jarring to someone like Dostki, who grew up in the tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church. One of the most common depictions of Jesus in the Eastern Orthodox tradition is that of Christos Pantocrator, Christ the ruler over everything. Christ in a position of strength and power as judge over humanity. In other words, the complete opposite of the depiction of Christ by Holine. You can imagine how jarring it would be to grow up in a culture that mainly depicts Christ as this powerful judge of humanity and then be confronted with a dead, naked body in an advanced state of decomposition, and then to be told that these are both paintings of the same person, that they both depict the Son of Man, the Savior of the world, God made flesh. You can also imagine why it would be wiser to appeal to the former iconography rather than the latter. Because I do think Dsvski has a point when he lets his character Prince Mishkin exclaim that a painting like this might cause someone to lose his faith.
Christianity is a unique religion in that it was not born in victory but in defeat. The Christian faith started in a moment of total humiliation when Christ was tortured, mocked, and crucified by the Romans. Of course, everything was redeemed by the resurrection. But just think about how different this origin story is from other religions. Zeus won his place on Mount Olympus by defeating the Titans in a cataclysmic struggle for power. Odin sacrifices his eye in exchange for wisdom and power and heroically restrains the world-devouring wolf Fenrir until Ragnarok. The god of Christianity, by contrast, is totally defeated. The redemption of Christ consists in defeating death itself, to be sure, but the origin story of Christianity must have sounded absolutely insane to anyone who grew up in the old pagan order. And we know for a fact that it did. There is a famous legend which says that Clovis I, the first ruler to unite all of France, upon hearing the story of the crucifixion of Christ, cried out, "If I had been there with my valiant Franks, I would have avenged him." Who knows if these legends of history are actually true, but the fact that such a legend exists in the first place tells us something about pagan reaction to the biblical Christian story. Clovis, by the way, would later famously convert to Christianity, and his baptism instigated a wave of conversions among the Franks, leading ultimately to a unification of the area that is now more or less modern-day France.
Anyway, the point is that Christianity, as far as religions go, is the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps that also explains its success. But the fact is that Christianity is an exception. And it also tells us something about the default state of how mankind practices religion. And throughout history, even in parts of Christianity itself, we see the same pattern emerge. We want to worship something higher than ourselves. In other words, it's much easier for humans to worship Christ in his divine nature, as the Pantocrator, as the ultimate judge sitting at the hand of his Father, the Almighty God, rather than to worship Christ as a man of flesh and blood who was inhumanely tortured and killed by a hostile state. Of course, the fact that Jesus was fully human is as much part of the story as him being fully divine. But the point still stands that one aspect of Jesus, when it comes to worship, comes more naturally to humans than the other.
Holine's dead Christ is something like an antithesis to the image of Christos Pantocrator, one of the most common iconographical motifs in the Eastern Orthodox Church. It's not hard to see how this painting was such a shock to Dostki. Christ is usually presented as a powerful judge, other times as a suffering human, but always with a measure of beauty upon his face. In this painting, however, we see pure, naked, honest nature. The thought steps in, whether one likes it or not, that death is so terrible and powerful that even he who conquered it in his miracles during life was unable to triumph over it at the last. He who called to Lazarus, "Lazarus, come forth," and the dead man lived. He was now himself a prey to nature and death. Nature appears to one looking at this picture as some huge, implacable, dumb monster, or still better, a stranger simile, some enormous mechanical engine of modern days, which has seized and crushed and swallowed up a great and invaluable being.
Dstvki is brutally honest here about the doubts that this painting can inspire in the viewer. In fact, Dostki struggled with his own belief in God all his life, most notoriously expressed through the character of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. In a letter to his editor, Dstieski even claimed that Ivan's arguments against God in the novel, focusing on the manifold suffering in the world, especially the suffering of children, are irrefutable. Yet DstiKi chose to affirm Christ in spite of reasonable, even irrefutable arguments. Hence, DSTski's famous quote that even if it turned out that Christ was outside of the truth, he would still prefer to be with Christ.
What's perhaps more interesting than Dostki's personal religious sentiments is the brief discussion on the psychology of the followers of Jesus that Dostki speculates on as he contemplates this painting and the harsh reality of death that it depicts. "All those faithful people who were gazing at the cross and its mutilated occupant must have suffered agony of mind that evening, for they must have felt that all their hopes and almost all their faith had been shattered at a blow. They must have separated in terror and dread that night, though each perhaps carried away with him one great thought which was never eradicated from his mind forever afterwards. If this great teacher of theirs could have seen himself after the crucifixion, how could he have consented to mount the cross and to die as he did?"
What Dostki describes here, the mental state of the apostles as they must have seen the body of Jesus Christ so brutalized, defeat seeming so certain, is explored in more psychological depth by Nietzsche in his final work, The Antichrist. In fact, there is a passage in The Antichrist that some commentators and translators take to be a direct reference to Dostski's book, The Idiot. "Imagine making Jesus a hero. And what a tremendous misunderstanding appears in the word genius. Our whole conception of the spiritual, the whole conception of our civilization could have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in. In the strict sense of the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be used here, the word idiot." We actually don't know for sure if Nietzsche ever read The Idiot specifically, so it could be a real reference, or it could simply be a coincidence. And some extra trivia: these final three words, "the word idiot," were actually scrapped by Nietzsche's sister prior to publication of the work. And some English translations even to this day still don't have the full paragraph in them. That's because The Antichrist, even though it was written in 1888, was only published in 1895, 7 years later. Nietzsche finished the book right before having his infamous mental breakdown. And as friends and family took control of his unpublished manuscripts, they debated on what to do with them. In the case of The Antichrist, they decided to delay publication because they considered the book to be dangerous.
What was so dangerous about it? Well, we have plenty of videos that go deeper into it, but one aspect deserves our special attention in the context of Dostki's encounter with this painting. We talked about how Dstfki speculated that upon seeing the emaciated and brutalized body of Christ, the apostles must have gone through a state of shock as they went home utterly defeated, unsure of what to do next. As Dosski writes, "They must have felt that all their hopes and almost all their faith had been shattered at a blow. They must have separated in terror and dread that night." DSTski allows this thought to enter the mind of his protagonists. But then he doesn't really do much with it. For Nietzsche, however, this moment of shock cannot be so easily discounted. For Nietzsche, the moment where the apostles saw their master and teacher so humiliated and ignobly die on the cross was the real genesis of the Christian religion, but not in the way that we traditionally think.
In the Christian story, 3 days after his death on the cross, Jesus rose from the dead and showed himself to his disciples and spent some time on earth before ascending back to heaven. To put it bluntly, Nietzsche believes this didn't happen. In Nietzsche's version of the story, there was indeed a man named Jesus of Nazareth who gathered disciples around him and wandered around in public ministry, and he was crucified and died. And his apostles, who saw his death on the cross, simply couldn't take it. Psychologically, it was too much to bear for them to see their teacher, the man in whom they placed blind faith, the man for whom they left behind friends and family, be so humiliated and tortured. They must have started to doubt all of their life decisions. As Dstfki said, they must have felt that their faith was shattered at a blow. Nietzsche agrees. "It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death. It was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle. Who was it? What was it? The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury. The suspicion that such a death might involve a repudiation of their cause. The terrible question: why just in this way? This state of mind is only too easy to understand. In their psychological turmoil, they were looking for an explanation, trying to resolve this paradox. The question arose in them of who put Jesus to death. The established order, the ruling class, and rather than following the example of Jesus himself, of turning the other cheek, who gave the supreme example of his teachings precisely in the way in which he died and willingly offered himself up rather than following this example, they turned to the most un-Christian of feelings: revenge."
All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death in itself was to offer the strongest possible proof or example of his teachings in the most public manner. But his disciples were very far from forgiving his death, though to have done so would have accorded with the gospels in the highest degree, and neither were they prepared to offer themselves with gentle and serene calmness of heart for a similar death. On the contrary, it was precisely the most un-evangelical of feelings, revenge, that now possessed them. Here, Christianity is born. Here, Christianity becomes something different than what Jesus himself represented. Here we find the solution to that mysterious but famous aphorism by Nietzsche: "There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." Cognitive dissonance takes hold. It simply couldn't be that this humiliating death on the cross was the final chapter of the story. This total victory had to be only an illusion. There had to be something in the making, something to come, something to set this right. Thus, ideas of the coming judgment day were born.
In the traditional Catholic Requiem Mass, there is a part called the Dies Irae, the day of wrath, of judgment day, when the earth will be engulfed in flames and Christ will come back to judge the wicked and reward the virtuous. Nietzsche seems to ask, is this really what Jesus was all about? Looking at the gospels, does this fit the personality of the man we came to know as Jesus? Or does it rather fit the personality of hurt and injured disciples who started to fantasize about taking revenge on those who killed their teacher. "It seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death. Recompense and judgment became necessary. Yet what could be less evangelical than recompense, punishment, and sitting in judgment. Once more the popular belief in the coming of a Messiah appeared in the foreground. Attention was riveted upon an historical moment. The kingdom of God is to come with a judgment upon his enemies." From this psychological ground, there springs forth an entirely different version of Christ: Christ as judge, Christ as ruler, Christos Pantocrator, the version of Christ that Dostki was so familiar with, the Christ that he came to know while growing up.
This painting by Holine then caused such a psychological disturbance in Dstfki precisely because it opens up the old wound again. The same wound that hurt the earliest disciples. The lingering doubt that was created that this man who died on the cross maybe, just maybe, was a normal human after all. And that is why, in the words of Dostki's character, Dstieski gave voice to his own experience of viewing this picture so many years ago in Switzerland. "A man's faith might be ruined by looking at that picture."
Thank you for watching. If you found this video valuable, please leave a comment for the algorithm, and your subscribes and likes are greatly appreciated as well. Of course, if you found this subject interesting, we have an entire video on how Dstfki influenced Nietzsche. And if you want more material on Nietzsche's unique view of how Christianity came to be, we have an hour-long video dedicated to Nietzsche's view of Pontius Pilate, which deals in great part with the psychological context of the apostles of Jesus. A big thank you also goes out to our Patreons for their tireless support. You can support the work we do here by becoming a patron yourself. You'll get access to exclusive videos on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, poetry, book reviews, and more. In the near future, I'll make a video on those three words of The Antichrist I mentioned that were cut from the book by Nietzsche's sister and how or if Nietzsche was referring to Dostki when he used the word idiot. Stay tuned. With all of that said, thank you again for watching, and we'll see you in the next.