THE CASSANDRA CURSE

In Greek mythology, the luckless Cassandra resisted the advances of the god Apollo.   His revenge was to enable her to see the future; but for everyone to disbelieve her.

     In Greek history, Socrates was condemned to death for undermining the state; but posterity has judged Socrates to have been in the right, and his accusers in the wrong.  A lot of people have heard of Socrates, even if they have only the vaguest notion of who he was.  But how many could name even one of those who prosecuted him?

 

When I saw the film Darby O’Gill as a child, I was on the side of Darby.  He was the only one with the vision to actually see the leprechauns.


 

     Revisiting the film as an adult, I realised that, actually, it is the others who are in the right, and Darby who is deluded.  The captured King Brian is really just a rabbit. The Banshee is just a swaying bush, and her wailing is nothing but the sound of the wind. 

   

     And yet, the impression overall is that Darby is still the one with the truest vision of things.  The credits include an acknowledgment to King Brian, without whose gracious permission the film could not have been made.  There may not be leprechauns, but there are still more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. 

We are in similar territory with the first two Terminator films: set in 1984 and 1995, 1997 and 2029.  1995 and 1997 were still in the future when the second film came out in 1991.   How far the real 2029 might match the film’s nightmare predictions remains to be seen. 

     First some background: for those whose memories are rusty, or who missed the sequence altogether.    

     Skynet, the computer controlling American weaponry develops a malfunction whereby the enemy becomes not the Russians, but the entire human race.  In 1997, Skynet instigates a nuclear war, and then sets itself to creating machines to eliminate any human survivors. 

The worst of these are the cyborgs or terminators:  human-looking killing machines. 

 

     The human remnants in the Los Angeles of the future are rallied by one John Connor.  In 2029, Skynet sends a cyborg back in time to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah,  before he is born  (Film One), and another to kill John Connor’s younger self (Film Two).

     In Terminator 2, Sarah is directly in the Cassandra tradition. Knowing that a war will occur in 1997 unless steps are taken to prevent it, she has tried to blow up the computer factory where Skynet is to be produced, failed, and been declared criminally insane. 

     In the asylum, she is treated by a Dr Silberman, who regards her warnings about Skynet and the cyborg terminators as the ravings of a lunatic. 

    Two episodes from Terminator 2 stand out for me.  The first is when it dawns on Dr Silberman, confronted with two warring terminators, that his patient has been telling the truth all along.

     The second is when Sarah and her allies break into the Cyberdyne complex to destroy the microchip that will create Skynet and, ultimately, the cyborgs.  They are resisted at every stage by the police: who perceive only a felony, and who completely fail to realise that if they succeed in foiling the intruders they will be ensuring the destruction of themselves and the rest of the human race.

 

There is no Skynet, and there are no cyborgs, but the truth of the film is that there are visionaries who suffer for what they see.

     Jeremiah was persecuted for predicting the fall of Jerusalem.  Religious believers were confined to asylums in the former Soviet Union.  

     In terms of strict materialism, there was a logic to that.  If there is nothing but matter, then anyone who believes in spirit must be mad.  But only if the initial premise is correct.  Otherwise, materialists are the victims of truncated vision.

     There is, it seems to me, a similar - though currently less drastic - pattern in modern Britain.  For secular Utopians, Christianity - with its insistence on the uniqueness of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, and objective right and wrong - is a very great evil to be driven from the public sphere.  And, if the Thought Police, could have their way, from the private sphere as well. 

     “Sancta simplicitas.”  Thus John Huss, to an old peasant bringing a piece of wood to help burn him: the peasant who, by his ignorance, would contribute to the destruction of one who sought the welfare of the peasants. 

     Thus Aslan in The Magician’s Nephew:  “Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good.” 

THE MURDER OF LANGUAGE

Today, the 22^nd November 2013, 50^th anniversary of the death of President Kennedy, is the anniversary likewise of Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis:  the latter commemorated with a stone in Westminster Abbey.

      A more natural trio is Huxley, Lewis and Orwell: for all three wrote dystopias, and Orwell’s and Lewis’ both involve the destruction of language.

     Orwell’s Newspeak - successful to a degree that Political Correctness can still only dream of - is designed, by linguistic reductionism, to make certain thoughts unsayable, and ultimately unthinkable.  Hence the glorious “doubleplus ungood”. 

     Lewis’ That Hideous Strength is an allusion to Sir David Lindsay’s description of the Tower of Babel.  During the banquet at Belbury, headquarters of the National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiments, speech disintegrates into such nonsense as, “the madrigore of verjuice must be talthibianised.”  Reason?  As the resuscitated Merlin puts it (in Latin, and here translated):  “’They that have despised the word  of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.’”

   Only fiction?  To read the selected postmodern samples of Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense is to feel that the fictional curse has taken on the horror of actuality.   

            Thus Baudrillard:  “It is in accordance with this same model that information and communication are constantly turning round upon themselves in an incestuous circumvolution, a superficial conflation of subject and object, within and without, question and answer, event and image…”

     Here’s Deleuze and Gauttari.  “…an external framing or exoreference. For these protolimits, outside all coordinates, initially generate speed abscissas on which axes will be set up that can be coordinated.”

     With this sort of stuff, you could slide in Lewis’, “'We shall not until we can secure the erebation of all prostundiary initems.’” and hardly notice a disparity. 

WHAT IS TRUTH?

‘Unique’ used to mean unique: just one, and no other.   Something was either unique, or it wasn’t.

     But now we have expressions like “very unique” (why not: very unusual?), or “almost unique” (why not: very rare?).  This is more than thoughtless use of language; this is a revolt against the very idea of anything being…   well, unique.  The same demolition principle has been applied to the word ‘truth’.

 

“What is truth?”  quipped Pilate.  Depends who you’re asking.  An Enlightenment modernist might have said, “That which exists independently of my opinion about it; that which correlates with the way the world actually is.  Hurricanes occur; and if you don’t believe in them you might find yourself in the middle of one, regardless of your scepticism.”

     But a Postmodernist might say (if a philosopher): “Truth is what a given society/speech community agrees about for the sake of social order.  Thus to drive on the left is truth in Britain; to drive on the right is truth in France.  If we decided otherwise, truth would change. If we decided murder was good, it would become so.” 

     A Postmodernist who is not a philosopher, but who has been subjected to the trickle-down effect of ideas, might lose the community focus in favour of individuality.  “Truth is what’s true for me.  There is your truth and my truth.  It’s true if it works for you.  Etc.”    (And yet it somehow doesn’t apply if my truth is that I was born to be a serial rapist: there the community thing kicks in again, over-riding the personal.)

 

A problem with both these Postmodernist positions is highlighted in the recent film The Debt, starring Helen Mirren.  Without wanting to give away too much of the plot to those who have not seen it, The Debt is about the attempt of three Mossad agents to capture an ex-Nazi doctor and take him back to trial in Israel.  In practice, he escapes.  To return to Israel without him would be to expose Israel to national humiliation.  The three come up with a very Postmodern solution: truth is what the three in the room decide it is.  The truth, therefore, is that the doctor was shot while trying to get away. 

     The tension in the film is the mismatch between this truth and the actual truth: and what denial of reality can do once the past catches up with you.  One might describe the film as post-Postmodern: a rejection of the Postmodern truth that truth is what you say it is, or what you want it to be. 

      A less-cerebral example of the principle occurs in Pretty Woman. “What’s your name?” the client asks the call-girl.  “What do you want it to be?”    Truth, fantasy what’s the difference? 

     But let’s assume high motive, and follow the philosophical position for a moment.  Suppose we had a conversation on Thursday 21^st November 2013.  But did we?  It’s only ‘true’ because we both agree within our speech community to call it ‘Thursday’, and using the Gregorian calendar.  By a Chinese or Muslim reckoning it would be a different  year; in French, it would be a different word.  But, surely, that conversation happened  at a particular (‘unique’: in the original sense)  period of time in the history of the Universe?  It happened, and was unlike any other moment, regardless of how we chose to nominate it.

 

The problem with the ‘your truth/my truth’ position is that it, too, assumes high motive.  But what about low motive: what used – not to put too fine a point on it – to be called ‘lying’?     

      Suppose you are stationary in your car, and I collide into the back of you.  That is your truth. (And also, what actually happened).  My truth might be that you stopped suddenly.   I have a vested interest in saying that; otherwise, it would be my fault.  And an insurance claim won’t be satisfied with different individual truths, not even in an era of Postmodernism. It will suspect that there are simply two variant accounts of the same event: and they can’t both be true since they conflict with one another.  And money is involved in deciding which verdict is the correct one.   When Postmodernism hits reality, it crumples like the rear of a car.

 

During the Profumo sex scandal, call-girl Mandy Rice-Davies was summonsed as a witness.  Told by the Judge that Lord Astor denied a sexual relationship with her, she gave the reply that has passed into legend: “Well, he would wouldn’t he?” 

     Quite so.  How would a Postmodernist deal with that?

 

DISH, CUP OR WOMAN?

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Since The Da Vinci Code the Holy Grail, for some readers and viewers, has come to mean Mary Magdalene.  To me, for whom Arthurian legend was one of the great experiences of my childhood, this feels like a betrayal.   To use Dan Brown’s image of the bloodline, it seems as if the birthright of the Grail has been stolen; as if some minor cousin has usurped the estate belonging to the rightful heir.   In what follows, I am painting with very broad strokes to show general trends: for the Arthurian story is like a great coral reef to which polyps of many different nationalities have added their distinctive contributions.

          Scholarly consensus is that Arthur was probably a Roman-trained British general when Britain suffered the fate of the rest of the collapsing Roman Empire: an influx of marauding tribes.  Arthur led a resistance movement against the invaders, rather as Alfred was later to do against the Danes.  Britons fleeing across the channel to Armorica (now Brittany) took their memories of Arthur with them.

          There is thus a home-grown British version of Arthurian legend, which starts in earnest with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and continues through Wace and Layamon and Gawain and the Green Knight.  In this sequence, Sir Gawain is the greatest of Arthur’s knights.  But the intrinsic interest of the Arthurian story meant that it was also taken up in France, where there was a natural audience rooted in folk memory and fertilized with Anglo-Norman cross-cultural influences.  The French strain is underpinned by the Provençal Troubadours, for whom the focus of relationships was courtly – that is to say, adulterous - love.   This theme is developed by Chrétien de Troyes, for whom Sir Lancelot now becomes the greatest knight; and Lancelot’s illicit relationship with Queen Guinevere becomes the main source of interest.  If all this seems irrelevant to the topic, I mention it of necessity to show how both the British-inspired Gawain and the French-inspired Lancelot are superseded in the development of the Grail story.

          The Grail is a relatively late invention: it is not present in the earliest versions of Arthurian legend.  It is mentioned in Perceval the last, unfinished poem of Chrétien de Troyes, where it is “a grail” rather than “ the Grail”, but its full religious significance can be traced to the Burgundian knight, Robert de Boron, at the start of the Thirteenth Century.  Robert takes a pagan story about a vessel with magical properties, and adds it to the Arthurian corpus by Christianizing it.  The vessel becomes the Grail, the dish – de Troyes - or the cup – de Boron – used at the Last Supper, and later – without any Biblical foundation whatever – used by Joseph of Arimathea at the Crucifixion to catch drops of Christ’s blood. 

          From there, the Grail has somehow to be got across to England to be incorporated into the Arthurian story.  Robert solves this by creating a brother-in-law – Bron – for Joseph.   Bron takes the Grail with him into “the far west” to the suitably-vague Avalon.  This invention then took on a momentum of its own, beyond Robert’s imagination.  The bones of Arthur and Guenivere were supposedly found at Glastonbury.  ‘Avalon’ thus became Glastonbury, and Joseph of Arimathea was duly deemed to have founded the church there.  However, let us give Robert the last word.  For his new material, he introduces the new knight, Perceval: greater – because more spiritual – than Gawain or Lancelot. 

          The addition of the Holy Grail made the Arthurian story of interest to French Cistercian monks, who – in their turn – added the next layer to the legend.   For them, given to an existence of chastity and contemplation, the life of knightly action and worldly success meant spiritual failure.   They disdained even the – for them too secular – spiritual Perceval.  Gawain and Lancelot – both sinful – fail to achieve the Grail.  Perceval retains an identity, but his qualities merge into the new knight Galahad, the sinless and virginal son of Lancelot, the one who finds the Grail – Sir Perceval and Sir Bors are around in the background – because,  as Tennyson later puts it, his “heart is pure”.        

          From the Cistercians, the Arthurian impetus moves back to England in the form in which most of us know it: that of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur.  Malory, in prison, set himself the impossible task of trying to collate all the diverse materials of the Arthuriad.  If he failed, he nevertheless gave the overall story far more coherence than it had had before. 

          But the Grail story gives Malory a problem.  On the one hand, he is trying to be faithful to his sources. On the other hand, he believes in the code of knightly chivalry in a way that the Cistercian monks do not.  For Malory, salvation can be achieved by participating, with due repentance, in the rough and tumble of the world, rather than in retreating from it; so that Lancelot, rather than Galahad, always remains Malory’s real hero. 

          Thus, Malory deals with the Grail narrative because he has to; but the most vivid part of his work is the Lancelot/Guinevere section that follows it.  As a Lancastrian, Malory had experienced directly the ruinous effects of civil war.  Lancelot’s failure, for him, is not some abstract lack of spiritual purity à la Grail.  Lancelot’s adultery is a betrayal of trust: involving him in a conflict with Gawain that deprives Arthur of his two best knights, gives Mordred the upper hand, and leads to the final destruction that tears the fellowship of The Round Table apart.   But even when he disagrees with it, Malory is quite clear that the Grail is a symbol of spiritual perfection.  Dan Brown territory would have been alien to him.

 

The Enlightenment, with its anti-Gothic emphasis, suppressed Arthurian legend, but could not kill it.   With the Victorian Gothic revival, it sprang back to life in the new treatment it received from Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites.  Perhaps its finest re-flowering was in Germany, with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and, for Grail purposes, his Parsifal: de Boron’s Perceval, via Wolfram von Eschenbach,  having finally received his due.   It was at this stage that the Grail legend received a new addition:  that the vessel periodically dripped blood.  That suggested menstruation, and in turn gave rise for the first time to the idea that the Grail was actually a woman: reinforced by the tendency of the time to spiritualise human passion into an alternative to divine love.  It is from this nineteenth-century invention, I think, that Brown’s version of the Grail story is primarily derived. 

          Given that the Grail was a literary invention in the first place, and given all the permutations through which the narrative has gone, Brown is as entitled as anyone else to add his own take on the story.   But dabbling with Arthurian legend – something known by all to be simply legend - is one thing; dabbling with the New Testament is quite another.   It is where Brown starts blending fiction with what are, for believers, life-and-death facts about salvation that he becomes so problematic.

 

If people are content to take The Da Vinci Code at face value, then I think Brown’s influence has been misleading and malign.  But if we treat him as a sort of modern-day Socrates –whether he intended this role or not -  then his effect has been much more beneficial.  Socrates put forward opinions he did not really believe in, in order to stimulate discussion.  And Brown has certainly done that.  For there is no doubt at all that he has touched a significant modern nerve.  His work has given rich fare to the spiritual and imaginative hunger that is a reaction against the restricted diet allowed by The Enlightenment.   With him, the Grail quest lives again.

Brown, in a way that the Church could not, has sent seekers for truth back to biblical sources to find out more about Mary Magdalene.  And about Christ.   Those are, arguably, the most important of the possible lines of exploration.  But important, too - in terms of understanding our history and our culture - is to find out about the Grail.  The real one: the Saint Grail rather than the Sang Real.  And if a new generation is introduced in the process to the imaginative riches of the Arthuriad, then Brown will have played a valuable part in opening for modern audiences what might have otherwise been – like The Bible - another closed book. 

 

THE HIDDEN AGENDAS OF LITERATURE?

When Marx paused from pondering economics to think about literature – more to the point, when he wanted to show how literature reflected the economic reality that underpins everything[1] – he came up with the theory of ideology.

     The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms explains the concept as follows: “Literature is permeated by the ideology of the era and class from which it is derived.”

     That sounds unexceptionable enough: a statement, indeed of the obvious.  Shakespeare’s plays seem primarily to reflect the concerns of Elizabethan and Jacobean England; regardless of when or where they are ostensibly set.    Or consider a fantasy like The Lord of the Rings. Two major wars, one technological, one ideological; the incomprehension with which the returning warriors are treated; post-war socialism.  It all seems very like twentieth-century Britain at one remove.  Marx himself was permeated with his personal ideology: that of a rebellious nineteenth-century bourgeois German Jew who didn’t get a professorship. 

     The sting in the tail is the ‘class’ bit.  If one assumes, as is implied, that all literature is written by, or in the interests of, the ruling class, then literature reflects and reinforces the values of those with the money.

     The problem with this – and it may be the fault of Marx’s disciples rather than of Marx himself – is the impression it gives that writers have automatically been the stalwarts of whatever establishment they found themselves in, and concerned with propping up the status quo.  And while there is an element of truth – especially when writers relied on patrons for economic survival – it is striking just how counter-cultural many literary figures have been. 

     If we include Biblical writers among our examples – for the Bible is literature, whatever else it may be – then Jeremiah was persecuted by his superiors for his opinions, and Isaiah was reputedly sawn in half.  St Paul wrote some of his epistles while chained to a Roman centurion, and the John of Revelation was in the salt mines.  Those who see the Bible as the archetypal establishment text might reflect that Tyndale was strangled and burned by the Establishment for translating it, as Paul was beheaded by the Roman establishment for producing it in the first place.

     Malory was in prison when he compiled the Le Morte Darthur, and prison – for his political views – was where Richard Lovelace wrote what is arguably his best poem. Milton would probably have been sentenced to death if he hadn’t been blind. The Pilgrim’s Progress – with its unflattering depiction of the ruling class in the Vanity Fair episode – is another prison-generated text. 

     Alexander Pope’s Catholicism debarred him from university, and the effectiveness of Swift’s satire cost him promotion.  Voltaire was in the Bastille for an article actually written by some one else; although he would probably have written it had he thought of it.  Thomas Mann, rejecting the plaudits of the Nazis, chose exile... 

     Blake was put on trial for suspected subversion.  Shelley was kicked out of Oxford.  Byron was kicked out of English society, and – effectively – out of England.  And then there was the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. 

    St Paul and Wilde may have been poles part in their opinions, but both were united in their refusal to compromise with their respective controlling classes.  

     In James 4:4, to be the friend of the World (i.e. worldly society) is to be the enemy of God.  Contrary to the tidiness of Marxist reductionism, a significant number of writers seem to have been at odds with the World.  And regardless of actual religious persuasion: in their contempt for the World, the God-intoxicated Bunyan and the God-hating Shelley are at one.

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[1] It is typical of Marx that he should have chosen to focus on Timon of Athens: the most money-driven of Shakespeare’s plays, but hardly the one that the average Shakespeare admirer would take as representative. 

THE GATES OF DEATH

 

 

A friend of mine, a religious sceptic, asked me recently if I think the Church will survive.

            The problem with the question – he had in mind, I think, the dispute within the Church of England about women bishops – is that by the word ‘church’ he and I mean completely different things.

            The question, in fact, is a bit like asking if God will survive.  If God is real, then the question is not worth asking.  If God is not real, then the question becomes not one of truth but of utility: is the idea of God useful enough – socially, morally, politically – for the idea to survive?

The same then applies to the Church.  Is the Church divine or human in its origin?  Is it the mystical bride of Christ, or is it a human institution: unquestionably useful in the past, but less definitely so now?

 

Perhaps a few analogies would be helpful at this point.

In the film El Cid the Cid is fatally wounded by an arrow, but to announce the fact would be to demoralise the Spanish army and encourage the Moors.  He is therefore strapped up dead onto his horse and rides out at as usual at the head of the army and to victory.

            This solution, of course, is limited to the duration of the battle.  At some stage, someone apart from the perpetrators is going to realise the reality.  That is the great problem of promoting the idea of God, even if you yourself believe it to be untrue.  What happens when those you have duped also cease to believe?

            In Auden’s poem on the death of Yeats, we have the line – one of my favourite in poetry – ‘He became his admirers’.

            With this instance, there is no question of pretence.  Yeats unquestionably existed.  Through his poetry he can, in a sense, still survive.  But that is only if there are supporters to keep publishing his poems and to persuade people of the value of reading them.  Yeats can now do nothing for himself; without others, he is dead.

            This is exactly, I think, the point made by Nietzsche about the death of God: the only difference being that the existence of Yeats is a matter of fact, and the existence of God is a matter of opinion.  Nietzsche’s God, it would be truer to say, is the equivalent not of Yeats, but of his poetry.  God and the poems are each a mental construct, kept alive by the efforts of admirers.  If people cease to be admirers, if they stop thinking about God or the poetry, then God and the poems die. 

            In Peter Pan, any time that a child says, “I don’t believe in fairies” then a fairy drops dead. This is a slightly different instance.  Unlike Nietzsche’s God, fairies are deemed to exist.  Unlike Yeats, they are still alive: until an expression of scepticism.   But they cannot survive on their own; they need the efforts of believers to keep them going.

            Compare this with the situation of oxygen.  Suppose I say that – because I can’t see it – I don’t believe in it.  Oxygen, however, will continue to exist: its survival does not depend on its visibility or on my state of belief about it.

            Which of theses instances best represent the survival of the Church?

 

Let us return to my friend’s conception: a Victorian Gothic building, table manners, King’s College Choir on TV at Christmas.  He bears the Church no ill will; he probably even has a sneaking fondness for it.  He would compare it to the hansom cab: the best form of transport in its day, but now superseded by the taxi and appropriate only to the Museum of Transport.  Anything the Church once did can now be done better by the secular state: state education and state medicine, the Civil Service, social workers, psychiatrists. 

And so on.  And I agree with him.  If its works are the sum of what the Church is, then the Church has no future.

To all this, the believer can only say that outcome is being confused with essence. It’s like going to the National Gallery so that you can eat in the restaurant.  Or going to Macdonalds so you can check out the art work.  Or going to a party so you can meet the other guests and ignore the host.

“...and the gates of death will not close on it.” (Matthew 16:18).  The most straightforward answer is that the Church will survive, however precariously, because Christ promised it would. And Christ is God. And God keeps promises.  But that is an answer to satisfy only those who accept the divinity of Christ. 

            But what, exactly, is meant by the Church?   Perhaps the difficult parable of the sheep and the goats is helpful here.   Some of the sheep, you will remember, are puzzled to be among the saved, and some of the goats are equally puzzled not to be. 

            The situation of the goats may be explained by St Augustine’s idea of the visible and invisible church.  Not all within the church are genuine believers, but God can see what human eyes cannot. 

            The sheep situation can be explained by the theologian Karl Rahner’s extension of the invisible – ie genuine – church to the whole human race.  Among those who have never had the opportunity to hear about Christ there are invisible Christians, saved by grace. 

            I like that thought myself, contentious though it is.  The ‘Church’ as I would thus define it is the collective  body of those who have, knowingly or unknowingly, responded to Christ, and which undertakes some – although by no means all – of God’s work in the world.  Within the specific geographical context of England, there are members of this church within the Church of England, but also outside it; and members of the Church of England who are not of this church.    

            That, I suppose, is the best answer I can give.  The Church of England may or may not survive, but the Church in England will.  Because it has Christ’s promise. 

 

FACT, OPINION AND DA VINCI

Long ago now, in my student days, I dipped into a copy of Freud’s Leonardo that I had picked up in Oxfam.  For those who don’t know it – it was never one of Freud’s successes – the key to it is the painting of The Virgin and Saint Anne (Mary’s mother).

            Freud recalls that Leonardo had a dream about a childhood incident in which he was frightened by a bird putting its tail in his mouth.   Freud sees the bird in the picture. Where others might see a fold in a robe, Freud sees an upside down vulture, its tail towards the infant Christ’s mouth.  The tail, of course, is also a nipple and a penis; hence Leonardo’s Oedipus complex, homosexuality and so on.

            In fact, the real-life bird in question had been a hawk, not a vulture, and Freud’s interpretation was discounted on the grounds of inaccurate data, unless we are to make every painting as subjective as a Rorscshach ink blot.  But regardless of this, the whole thing seemed to me when I read it – and still seems to me now – to be nonsense. Apart from the evidence of the black-chalk drapery study - which really looks like some one trying to get the folds of the fabric right, rather than some one trying to sneak in a phallic bird – the shape of the robe is determined by the theme of the painting:  Christ trying to pull himself towards the lamb (sacrificial victim – ie himself) and Mary trying to pull him away from it (ie from his fate). “A rose is a rose is a rose,” as Gertrude Stein said, and in this instance a robe is a robe is a robe. 

 

 
 
 

 I’m not much good at interpreting pictures, never having had any training in the skill.  For a lot of my youth, when I looked at any picture that was not an illustration in a book, I was more concerned with how it looked – form, texture, colour – than with what it might mean: given that it was usually about some person or event I had never heard of. 

            My encounter with The Virgin of The Rocks in The National Gallery was of this ilk.  I knew it must be good, since it was by  Leonardo, and I liked the rocks, which reminded me of seaside caves I had seen as a child; and which served as background to the pretty girl, the two rather repulsive male babies, and the fourth figure of indeterminate sex who made up the rest of the picture.  What they were all doing posed among the rocks was beyond me, but I was going through a period of puzzlement at the time and did not really expect the world to make sense.   Obscure paintings, and the poetry of T S   Eliot, merely reinforced the general incomprehensibility of things. 

            I suppose I never gave the painting another serious thought until startled into doing so by reading The Da Vinci Code.  Brown’s interpretation of the picture, and its sister in The Louvre, seemed to me quite as problematic as the more obvious nonsense of seeing Mary Magdalene in The Last Supper. 

            As it happened, I had acquired – second hand, as with my Freud – a book about Leonardo’s paintings.  I offer Brown’s thoughts from Chapter 32, along with those of Frank Zöllner – at the time of writing his book, Professor of Medieval and Modern Art History in the University of Leipzig - and let the two accounts speak for themselves.

            I would, however, make just one observation.  Nowadays, we make rather a thing of  saying that one viewpoint is a good as another.  This is laudable in terms of letting everyone have their say, but may it not be the case that getting one’s data wrong – which baby is which, for example; or the sex of the group that commissioned the picture: things that are matters of ascertainable fact rather than opinion – may have a bearing on the validity of one’s interpretation?


Virgin of the Rocks: Louvre Version

Dan Brown

Da Vinci’s original commission for Madonna of the Rocks had come from an organization known as the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, which wanted a painting for the centrepiece of an altar triptych in their church of San Francesco in Milan. The nuns gave Leonardo specific dimensions, and the desired theme for the painting - the Virgin Mary, baby John the Baptist, Uriel and Baby Jesus sheltering in a cave.  Although Da Vinci did as they requested, when he delivered the work, the group reacted with horror. He had filled the painting with explosive and disturbing details.

The painting showed a blue-robed Virgin Mary sitting with her arm around an infant child, presumably Baby Jesus. Opposite Mary sat Uriel, also with an infant, presumably baby John the Baptist. Oddly, though, rather than the usual Jesus-blessing-John scenario, it was baby John who was blessing Jesus... and Jesus was submitting to his authority! More troubling still, Mary was holding one hand high above the head of infant John and making a decidedly threatening gesture - her fingers looking like eagle's talons, gripping an invisible head. Finally, the most obvious and frightening image: Just below Mary's curled fingers, Uriel was making a cutting gesture with his hand - as if slicing the neck of the invisible head gripped by Mary's claw-like hand.

Frank Zöllner

Leonardo portrayed the Virgin Mary together with the infant St. John, Christ and an angel either in, or in front of, a rocky grotto - hence the title by which we know it today, the Virgin of the Rocks. The very youthful Mary, in a dark blue garment, is sitting or kneeling almost exactly in the centre of the composition. She is gazing gently down towards the infant St. John who is engaged in prayer; she has her right hand around his shoulders, while her left hand is raised protec­tively above the figure of Jesus. To one side of the scene is an angel, most prob­ably Uriel who - in the Paris version at least - gazes out of the picture with a quiet smile, establishing contact with the viewer. With his right hand, as John's guardian angel, Uriel is pointing towards the child whose hands are clasped in prayer, with his left hand he is supporting the infant Jesus sitting in front of him, who is also turned towards John, raising one hand in blessing. Thus the figures are interconnected by a rich pattern of glances and gestures, with the viewer drawn into the whole by the figure of the angel.

 

In both versions of the Virgin of the Rocks it seems that the rocky, stony ground falls away sharply in the foreground. This immediately makes it clear that the location is somehow distant and secluded, and this is further emphasised by the wildly rugged rock formations in the middle and background. In several places we can see through to water and a mountain landscape shrouded in light and mist. In addition, in the Paris version, there is a broad area of blue sky closing off the top of the composition. The radiance of the background, the shimmering of the water and the plants here and there soften the inhospitable atmosphere of the rocky loca­tion. This effect is continued in the light entering in the left foreground. Some of these elements may be read as religious symbols: the water and the pearls and the crystal which are used to fasten Mary's robe may all be taken as symbols of her purity. This in itself would make the connection with the Immaculate Conception of Mary, to whom the chapel of the Virgin of the Rocks was dedicated. The rock formations may possibly also be read in terms of Marian symbolism, alluding to similar topoi in prayers to the Virgin - and the same may well also apply to the later painting of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne. The Mother of God was regarded as the rock, not cleft by human hand, and the inhospitable stone formations, eroded by natural forces might therefore be interpreted as a metaphor for Mary, pointing to her unexpected fertility.  In addition, the cleft rock was regarded as a safe refuge for the infant St. John and Christ.

      In Leonardo's painting for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, the infant St. John clearly has a particular role, and indeed his presence in the iconog­raphy of the painting is unusual. A meeting between John and Christ as infants is rare. No such meeting is recorded in the Bible itself, only in the so-called Books of the Apocrypha, These contain accounts of the flight into Egypt including descriptions of Mary and Jesus apparently meeting John in the wilderness. It is possible that the figures and the rather barren surrounding in Leonardo's painting go back to these accounts. The deeper meaning of this masterly portrayal of the meeting between John and Christ in hostile surroundings derives directly from the religious convictions of those commissioning the work. The Franciscan monks who commissioned the altar retable and the Virgin of the Rocks felt specially close to Christ, St. Francis and John the Baptist. Thus they would have identified with the infant St. John worshipping Christ but also being blessed by Christ and in the care of the Virgin Mary. So, in this work the Confraternity was doubly present, as it were: once facing the picture as they performed their acts of worship and devo­tion, and once in the picture itself in the figure of St. John that had particular meaning for them. Moreover, Mary's hand and a section of her robe envelop John, showing that the child and, by implication, the Confraternity is under Mary's pro­tection. The motif of protection is depicted both in Mary's robe round the child and in the location itself, for the rocky surroundings can be read as a metaphor for a safe haven. This might also explain the intense effort Leonardo put into the portrayal of the rocky background and the garments. Mary's robe is almost monu­mental in its dimensions and - certainly in the Paris version - seems to match Uriel's seemingly billowing garment. Similarly the surrounding landscape appears to be sheltering the figures in the foreground.
     The harmonious composition and the masterly design of the Virgin of the Rocks of course give no hint of the irksome legal disputes that Leonardo and his two col­leagues had to weather shortly after the work was completed. There was a bitterly complex disagreement about payment: the artists threatened to sell the work to an art-lover who had clearly offered them more than the Confraternity was prepared to pay. It was probably this dispute which led to the making of the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks - the version which is on view today in London and which in fact adorned the monks' chapel in San Francesco Grande in Milan during the 16th century. The older version was most likely quickly acquired by an art-lover, possibly Ludovico Sforza, who then gave the picture either to the Emperor Maximilian or the King of France.