Exaltation of the Holy Cross 14 Sep - Salvador Dali
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.
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
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.