Guiding a capirote-capped character known as the “Penitent One” through the nightmare land of Cvstodia, players explore decrepit cathedrals and dispatch insane victims of an omnipotent divine force. īlasphemous isn’t shy about its inspirations, full of art and imagery drawn from Golden-Age Spanish Catholicism. This year, as I loaded up Blasphemous -a dark 2D action game from studio The Game Kitchen-I watched the pivotal character stand up from a mass of bodies and set off on a bloody path straight out of Goya’s Procession of the Flagellants. Others, such as Diego Velázquez, seemed tempted to ignore such questions by retreating into ideal worlds made possible by paint and canvas. Later artists such as Francisco de Goya nearly drove themselves crazy trying to come to terms with the “prodigious flowering of rage” he saw emerging from Spain’s religious history. I stood before dozens of artworks grappling with a sovereign God who permitted the Spanish Inquisition to march through the streets in his name. I lived in this tension through my tour of the famed Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, hosted-appropriately-by the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. Suddenly, we find beauty doing and saying things we never expected. When we lose sight of this truth, we neglect the negative potentials of images to proliferate and take on lives of their own. It lives in the story, in the drama where redemption takes place and where Christ’s vitality outshines the failures of his church. ![]() We must acknowledge that Beauty lives deeper than our images. The reality of crucifixion demands a different way of looking for its beauty confronting the ugliness of our heritage means a more critical search for grace. ![]() Some legacies, such as colonialism-still gilded and sanctified in our cultural memory-appear beyond forgiving, in part because we distract from them through beauty. Beauty “lies” when, for example, it sanitizes and idealizes parts of Christian history that are far from glorious. We will not get out of this by listing what is ‘really’ beautiful and what is not…but also it is not clear whether the distinction would be useful.” Her work argues that Beauty is indeed transcendental, a splendor uniting the True and the Good-but, she warns, Beauty is powerful in part because of its nearness to human experience, including sin. Carpenter says, lies sometimes : “Beauty does not immediately tell us whether it has any relationship to truth. Jesus bleeds into the hand of an angel in El Greco’s The Crucifixion Sourceīeauty, Anne M. An image intended to portray a spiritual truth instead belies the extent of Christ’s participation in our suffering. Every year I heard that talk, clean and beautiful crucifixes started to look-I’ll be honest-a little more ridiculous. My high school math teacher gathered us into the gym once a year, as Easter approached, to deliver a detailed forensic account of what this ancient method of execution actually does to people. Empty crucifixes signify Christ’s resurrection and conquering of death-but they also remove our need to face his dirt and sweat and screams on a Sunday morning.Įven when I was too young to see the film, I could appreciate Mel Gibson’s handling of crucifixion as a bloody reality in The Passion of the Christ. In cast-bronze statues, uniform metal further blends away the wounds. Only pin-pricks mar his hands, feet and head. Christ hangs from the wood, looking clean and unblemished. The “serenity” of the crucifix dates back to the middle ages and remains common in our own churches despite the oddity of the image. Samuel Rutherford, Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself (1627) ![]() We would either have a silent, a soft, a perfumed cross, sugared and honeyed with the consolations of Christ, or we faint and providence must either brew a cup of gall and wormwood, mastered in the mixing with joy and songs, else we cannot be disciples.
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