Great Scot May 2020 Great Scot 159_MAY 2020_ONLINE_V3 | Page 72

OSCA
THE LOVERS
WILL RISE UP
The insight of a great artist
REV. GRAHAM BRADBEER
OSCA CHAPLAIN
72
I was greatly taken when I discovered that the US
edition of Tom Holland’s Dominion: the making of the
Western Mind, came with Scotland’s favourite painting on
the cover; Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross. I
already had the UK edition which seemed rather bland by
comparison. The Dali painting was purchased by the City
of Glasgow when I was a boy there. When in Scotland I
like to go to the Kelvingrove Gallery and gaze on it again.
In 2009 the National Gallery of Victoria featured the
work of Dali under the title Liquid Desire. I was resistant
to viewing surrealist images; to me they have little appeal.
But I always wondered how Dali, so renowned for the
melted clocks in the promotional material, had painted
the Christ with such insight. It was a conundrum for me.
However, as the Liquid Desire exhibition drew to a close,
like many of my fellow citizens, I rushed to the gallery. The
NGV opened for extended hours to cope with the surge of
public interest. Secretly I was half hoping my Dali dilemma
might be resolved.
Tom Holland’s book kept me rapt this summer.
The very idea that the book grew out of his changing
self-awareness, as the preface explained, drew me in.
‘Over the course of the last two decades my perspective
has changed,’ he writes. ‘The values of Leonidis,
whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous
form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity
Ubermenschen by night, were nothing I recognised as my
own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have
killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more … In my
morals and ethics I was not Spartan or Roman at all.’
The dawning realisation of the renowned specialist
ancient historian, was that his values were not from
Sparta or Rome. If not his beloved classical antiquity,
whence then? His book traces what has shaped him, and,
he contends, the Western World. To be sure it begins in
the Roman world, but it has more to do with Paul and the
message that he proclaimed as he traversed the ancient
Via Egnatia, recently rediscovered when workmen were
excavating the 1.5 billion euro Salonica Metro.
Paul proclaimed the message of a crucified God. In
Salonica they said it ‘turned the world upside down’ (Acts
17). Like Israel’s psalmist, the prophet Isaiah had written
long before crucifixion had been devised as a capital way
of punishing slaves with so awful a death. Read Psalm
22 or Isaiah 53. (More than 2000 years old, the Dead
Sea Scroll, 1Q Isa, is displayed in the Israel Museum,
CHRIST OF ST JOHN OF THE CROSS, SALVADOR DALI, 1951
Jerusalem, and can be viewed and read online). The
ancient Jewish world found this riveting poetry in its own
prophetic scriptures.
The Dali exhibition explained why Dali returned to the
Christian faith in 1945. I don’t know if you are familiar
with Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross. Raised over the
earth, high above a beach featuring Catalan fishermen
mending their nets, and viewed from higher still is the
cruciform Christ. The light throws shadows on the wood
(as Leonard Cohen’s lyrics imagined back in the early
‘70s). There is no blood, no scarring, no crown of thorns,
no nails. Dali’s Jesus was secured in this place by his
loving commitment to humanity. As if sharing the divine
perspective, the viewer looks down on this scene. ‘Who
would have thought God’s saving power would look like
this?’ The decision belongs to the viewer. Yet, ‘everything
will happen if he only gives the word/the lovers will rise up
and the mountains touch the ground’. (Leonard Cohen).
GRAHAM BRADBEER – OSCA CHAPLAIN
Great Scot Issue 159 – May 2020