Exaltation of the Holy Cross 14 Sep - Salvador Dali
BBC - Scotland - Scotland's favourite painting: Dali's Christ of St ...
www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/.../scotlands_favourite_painting_dalis_christ...
23 Jun 2011 – Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums). Salvador Dali's masterpiece, Christ of St John of the Cross, was first displayed in the Kelvingrove Art ...
Dali's surrealist peers were critical of his interest in religion. He took his inspiration for the painting from a drawing of the Crucifixion made by St John of the Cross, a 16th Century Spanish saint who had a vision in which he saw himself looking down on Christ on the cross from above.
Dali had a similar dream in which he saw Christ on the cross above the landscape of his home, in Port Lligat in Catalonia, northern Spain. After a second dream, he was inspired to paint his Christ without nails through his hands or a crown of thorns on his head. He wanted him to be beautiful.
Edwin Morgan captures Dali's desire in his ode to the painting, 'Salvador Dali: Christ of St John of the Cross.'
The model for Dali's Christ was Hollywood stuntman,Russell Saunders. He strapped Saunders (who was Gene Kelly's body double in Singin' in the Rain') to a gantry so he could see the effect of the pull of gravity on his body.
Using mathematical theories to work out the proportions for the painting, Dali saw himself as the first artist to paint pictures that could combine science with religious belief and called this Nuclear Mysticism.
In 1993, the painting was transferred to the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art and came back to Kelvingrove for the reopening after restoration in July 2006.
When it was suggested that it should be hung in a church, not in a museum, Honeyman's reply was ' … carried to the conclusion of that logic, Rembrandt's The Slaughterhouse should be hung in a cattle market.' (T J Honeyman, Art and Audacity, Collins, 1971).
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"Between the Heathen and the Threefol God there is only one link the CROSS." (Jean Danielou).
The sense of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is strikingly articulated by Jean Danielou from his book, 'The Lord of History'.
It so happens that Benedict XVI opens even more of the mystery of the Cross in a section from his book, INtroduction to Christianity, He says, "There is an important passage on this subject by Jean Danielou. It really forms part of inquiry but it might well help to elucidate the idea we are striving to understand.
The Lord of History, Jean Danielou, pp. 339-340.
The cross
of Christ is the only means of communication between the heathen world and the
blessed Trinity: so we cannot be
surprised to find that when we deliberately establish ourselves in the midst of
these two, and try to bring them together, this is not possible without the Cross.
We must be conformed to that Cross, and carry it,
‘carry about continually in our bodies the dying state of Jesus',1/ as St Paul said of the true missionary: for this dichotomy we
suffer, this strain in our hearts between the love of the most holy Trinity and the love of a world that is
alien to the most holy Trinity, is
nothing but our share which the only begotten Son invites us to take in his
Passion
He bore in himself that duality of opposition and conflict, and brought it to an
end in himself, but he only ended it because he had first borne it.
He reaches from one extreme to the other. Remaining eternally in the Triune Godhead, he yet descends to the
uttermost borne of human want, and fills up all the intervening distance.
This boundless range of Christ's action, symbolized in the four cardinal
points of the cross, is itself the
hidden meaning and the formal principle of the missionary's fragmentation.
It is then the very vocation of the apostle to
unite, however paradoxically, the love of the Trinity and the love of the heathen, to belong to both, and to feel
the separation between them. The whole spiritual life of a real missionary wears this double aspect:
every feature of it is marked with the missionary
character. His prayer is apostolic, for he takes up in it the peoples whom
he has spiritually made his own, offering explicitly to the Father through the
Son everything about them that is capable of consecration.
His poverty is apostolic, for it consists in accepting
the deprivation of all that he has – his time,
his affections, his substance - by and for the sake of his brethren. He is made
over to them, he is their prey: 'henceforward, we do not think of anybody
in a merely human fashion'.2/ We are destitute of human wealth; but we hold our
single treasure in the inaccessible secret heart of hearts, the tabernacle
where dwells the blessed Trinity. 1/ Cor.
4:10. 2/ 2 Cor. 5:16
* J. Danielou, Essai sur le mystere de l'histoire (Paris, 1953).
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinge,
Introduction into Christianity, 1669, pp. 290-293
Introduction into Christianity, 1669, pp. 290-293
In the last
analysis pain is the product and expression of Jesus Christ s being stretched
out from being in God right down to the hell of "My God, why have you
forsaken me?" Anyone who has stretched his existence so wide that he is
simultaneously immersed in God and in the depths of the God-forsaken creature
is bound to be torn asunder, as it were' such a one. is. truly
"crucified". But this process of being torn apart IS identical with
love; it is its realization to the extreme (Jn I3:I) and the concrete
expression of the breadth It creates.
From this
standpoint it should be possible to bring out clearly the true basis of
meaningful devotion to the Passion; it should also become evident how devotion
to the Passion and apostolic spirituality overlap. It should become evident that
the apostolic element-service to man and in the world-is permeated with the
very essence of Christian mysticism and of Christian devotion to the Cross.
The two do not impede each other; at the deepest level, each lives on the
other. Thus it should now also be plain that with the Cross it is not a
matter of an accumulation of physical pain, as if its redemptive value
consisted in its involving the largest possible amount of physical torture. Why
should God take pleasure in the suffering of his creature, indeed his own Son,
or even see in it the currency with which reconciliation has to be purchased
from him? The Bible and right Christian belief are far removed from such ideas.
It is not pain as such that counts but the breadth of the love that spans existence
so completely that it unites the distant and the near, bringing God-forsaken
man into relation with God. It alone gives the pain an aim and a meaning. Were
it otherwise, then the executioners around the Cross would have been the
real priests; they, who had caused the pain, would have offered the sacrifice.
But this was not the point; the point was that inner centre that bears and
fulfils the pain, and therefore the executioners were not the priests; the
priest was Jesus, who reunited the two separated ends of the world in his love
(Eph 2:I3f.).
Basically this
also answers the question with which we started, whether it is not an unworthy
concept of God to imagine for oneself a God who demands the slaughter of his
Son to pacify his wrath. To such a question one can only reply, indeed, God
must not be thought of in this way. But in any case such a concept of God has
nothing to do with the idea of God to be found in the New Testament. The New
Testament is the story of the God who of his own accord wished to
become, in Christ, the Omega-the last letter-in the alphabet of creation. It is
the story of the God who is himself the act of love, the pure "for",
and who therefore necessarily puts on the disguise of the smallest worm (Ps 22:6 [2I:7]). It is the
story of the God who identifies himself with his creature and in this contineri a minimo, in being grasped and overpowered by
the least of his creatures, displays that "excess" that identifies
him as God.
The Cross
is revelation. It reveals, not any particular thing, but God and man. It
reveals who God is and in what way man is. There is a curious presentiment of
this situation in Greek philosophy: Plato's image of the crucified "just
man". In the Republic the great philosopher asks what is likely to be the position of a
completely just man in this world. He comes to the conclusion that a man's
righteousness is only complete and guaranteed when he takes on the appearance
of unrighteousness, for only then is it clear that he does not follow the
opinion of men but pursues justice only for its own sake. So according to Plato
the truly just man must be misunderstood and persecuted in this world; indeed,
Plato goes so far as to write: "They will say that our just man will be
scourged, racked, fettered, will have his eyes burned out, and at last, after
all manner of suffering, will be crucified." 6 This passage, written four hundred years
before Christ, is always bound to move a Christian deeply. Serious
philosophical thinking here surmises that the completely just man in this world
must be the crucified just man;
6 Republic, bk. 2, 361e-362a, in A. D. Lindsay's translation. Cf. on this theme H.U.. van Balthasar, Herrlichkeit IlIlI, Einsiedeln, 1965, pp. 156-161 [English translation: The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vo!. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, trans. Brian McNeil et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 170-75J; E. Benz, "Der
gekreuzigte Gerechte bei Plato, im NT und in der alten Kirche", Abhandlungen der Mainzer Akademie 1950, no.
12.
something is
sensed of that revelation of man which comes to pass on the Cross.
The fact that when the perfectly just man appeared he was crucified,
delivered up by justice to death, tells us pitilessly who man is: Thou art
such, man, that thou canst not bear the just man-that he who simply loves
becomes a fool, a scourged criminal, an outcast. Thou art such because, unjust
thyself, thou dost always need the injustice of the next man in order to feel
excused and thus canst not tolerate the just man who seems to rob thee of this
excuse. Such art thou. St. John summarized all this in the Ecce homo ("Look, this is [the]
man!") of Pilate, which means quite fundamentally: This is how it is with man; this is man. The
truth of man is his complete lack of truth. The saying in the Psalms that every
man is a liar (Ps.116 [115]: 11 [Douay-Rheims])
and lives in some way or other against the truth
already reveals how it really is with man. The truth about man is that he is
continually assailing truth; the just man crucified is thus a mirror held up to
man in which he sees himself unadorned. But the Cross does not reveal
only man; it also reveals God. God is such that he identifies himself with man
right down into this abyss and that he judges him by saving him. In the abyss
of human failure is revealed the still more inexhaustible abyss of divine love.
The Cross is thus truly the centre of revelation, a revelation that does
not reveal any previously unknown principles but reveals us to ourselves by
revealing us before God and God in our midst.
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