Letter #231: We're the Shadows

Is this the real life?

Dad,

Nothing could possibly have stemmed the flood tide of bad art that was bound to inundate us both after I said there are no truly great paintings of the resurrection. And some of it, as you say, was truly abysmal. If for example this is your counter-example to my claim,

then I’m not sure we’re even occupying the same dimensional plane. Stuff like this doesn’t just make me convinced I’m right, it makes me want to jump off a bridge.

But it’s not even the tacky art that proves my point best: it’s the good stuff. Because I didn’t say there were no good paintings of the resurrection, in the sense of technically skilled and visually striking portrayals. I included a couple in my post, one by the Italian master Tintoretto and an earlier Gothic example from the famous Třeboň altarpiece. I liked a lot of the works people shared in response to us, particularly the Byzantine icons.

But that only highlights the true distinction I was making, which is that even though these pieces are gorgeous, they’re not great. They don’t capture the full enormity of what they depict in the way that crucifixion art does, because they can’t. As you said, the resurrection is utterly outside the scope of what you might call our lived experience. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t happen in the “real world.”

If “real” is the word we want. There was one response to my post that I really did like: I had written that “the risen body of Christ flickers and wavers along the borderline between our world and another.” Lynn Neergaard responded, “Or maybe Christ’s body was so real, so substantial that our world flickered in its presence.”

And that’s just it, isn’t it? In that greatest of all movies, A Christmas Carol, Alastair Sim as Scrooge asks the ghost of Christmas present whether the visions he’s seeing of other people’s lives are real. His unforgettable response, not in the book: “they’re real. We’re the shadows.”

On some level that must be what it means to believe in the risen Christ: he’s real. We’re the shadows. And yet the whole weight of our experience presses down to hold us on the other side: this hard world of death is the one we can see and touch, the one we experience most obviously and immediately through our own senses.

I never want to deny those basic realities of the senses. Yet sometimes, when I’ve been carried off by a reverie or lost in a strain of music, I think I can discern the outline of a world that’s purer, more perfect, and in a sense more concrete than this shifting life of forms. A world of life so abundant that our lives are just derivatives of it, after-echoes. And then another line from A Christmas Carol occurs to me: “it’s all right, it’s all true, it all happened.”

Love,
Spencer