The Ministry of Vincent Van Gogh in Religion and Art

Vaux

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621899563
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Ministry of Vincent Van Gogh in Religion and Art surveys the historical venues where Van Gogh's life and work unfolded--Aldersgate, England, Amsterdam, Au Borinage, Antwerp, Asnieres-sur-Seine, Arles, Auvers-sur-Oise--culminating in an assessment of his legacy. Arguing that he is a painter-evangelist, a man of authentic religious calling, it demonstrates a novel thesis that theological spirituality is the genius of both his religious ministry and his art.

1

Aldersgate

The Sweet Hymns of English Evangelical Theology

The saga of Vincent’s ministry has its palpable beginnings and perhaps its apex in awareness of its calling as a youth in his early twenties in England. Much, of course, had transpired before those crucial years of 1873–1877, spent mainly across the English Channel from his native Antwerpen, Ostend, and Calais.

We will subsequently gather the formative stirrings toward ministry as a family of northern Dutch sophisticates is exiled to be southern hicks with strange dialects in Flanders—this appears within the next chapter under the rubric of Amsterdam. But it was these years in England which would prove vocationally decisive. With the exception of some interlude months in Paris before he finally wore out his welcome in the family art dealership (like the petulant waiter in the film, Italian for Beginners, scorning patrons when they would not want to purchase this or that particular work, realizing too late that candor in business is no virtue), he resided for almost three years beyond the white cliffs of Dover.

The Paris months were not lost in this formative moment in Vincent’s heart, soul, and conscience. In those months in France, he took himself into a period of seclusion for Bible study (modeling Jesus in the temptation wilderness, Moses in the Sinai wilderness), formative months indeed, on which more light needs to be shed.

In London, then post-Paris in Ramsgate and Isleworth, mainly in Methodist, Dissenter and Puritan (Congregationalist) faith-settings, he cut his eye teeth on parish-based and evangelical inner city and rural ministry, preached his first sermon, taught religious lessons and rather unique Bible studies to those perennially unappreciative pubescent young people. He ventured into hands-on pastoral-care and enjoyed the heady, though intimidating, mantle of religious leadership. The notes in inconspicuous church records in Isleworth about an enthusiastic evangelist-Bible teacher are a foreshadowing of what will become the inauspicious tombstone in Auvers—the real story.

Puritanism in Van Gogh

We know that during Vincent’s earliest working years in London, with side journeys to The Hague and Paris, he was fascinated by the Puritans. He pondered Millais, the Huguenot (1852) and Boughton’s Early Puritans of New England (1867). To comprehend who Vincent was in soul and body—mind and art—we have to move back and forth across the English Channel from Puritan London and West Anglia to Holland and Belgium.

In Puritan and Wesleyan England, he found the theistic/humanistic groundings of his own soul. This historical-cultural context explains the phenomenal popularity of Vincent in America—which is sometimes called “the Puritan commonwealth.” His soul was being shaped by the Puritan vision—as it was depicted in art—in the Dutch Gesangbuch and the English Hymnal (see L 96 [11/3/76, Islesworth])—all this working out in the spiritual crises and enactments in his own being—“Have thine own way, Lord, however dark it be,” was his watchword.

To orient the reader to this critical chapter in Vincent’s formation as a theologian and pastor, as well as his artistic temperament, I am guided by Martin Bailey’s excellent study1 which grows out of an exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London (1992). Though Bailey accepts the prevalent caricature of Vincent as one who “ . . . in England sank into deep depression . . . turning to Christianity for solace” (p.8 ff)—a view understandably held by Joanna and her son Vincent—but not corroborated by others, this author included, he does open up a vista of awareness of Vincent’s complexity and sees the importance of this period in the life of “ the only post-impressionist steeped in the English culture” and the fact that this was one of the richest times in his brief, scarcely two-decades-long, adult and productive career.

I write here in my old theological home in England, Cambridge, where for years I have struggled with the meaning of the East-Anglican theology, non-conformity, Puritanism, the escape of beleaguered Calvinist and Lutheran clerics to Belgium and Holland (e.g., William Tyndale)—even the Pilgrim exodus to the “New Land” of America from Port Voorhaven (after praying in the Oude Kirk). Of particular interest to me because of heritage (and to Vincent) has been the French Huguenots (Millais’ engraving, [L 36 [6/29/75, Paris]).

I heard last evening a moving lecture by John Milbank, philosopher from New Castle, on Tyne defining David Hume’s Scottish philosophy as a reflection of “melancholy,” Anglicanism, Puritanism, perhaps even early Catholicism, one where deep emotionality has become a feature of reason and metaphysics itself.

And I think of Vincent—a near contemporary of Hume—yet in the same skeptical ethos—“wish I could believe and live happily without so much pain” (the problem of evil)—one similarly sublimely aware of philosophy and art, literature, history and theology—knowing that he had to speak and portray the truth—without being obsequious to conventional religion. Melancholy, rightly conceived, in other words, is the stigmata of earnest piety. Vincent was a Hume-like figure for sure. He said “We should not blame God for this world. It is a study that failed.” (L 613[4/26/’88, Arles]); (See also Edwards, Mystery of the Night Café [SUNY, 2009, 56] and Naifeh and Smith, Van Gogh [New York: Random House, 2009, 627ff]).

It was like the mischievous children who smeared Vincent’s drawings with their dirty hands. Christ, on the other hand, was the “greatest of all artists” (Letter b-8 to Barnard, quoted in Edwards, Night Café, 56ff).

Hume also shared Vincent’s Scots/Irish irony on the theodicy problem: “Is the whole world visible to us?” It does not seem impossible to me that cholera, gravel, consumption (Theo), cancer are the celestial means of locomotion just as steamboats, omnibuses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to “go there on foot” (Ibid., Edwards, 56 ).

One who, like Vincent, is hurting in the face of personal suffering, persecution and rejection, one connected in sympathy with the poor, the struggling and pathetic of the world, like Lautrec’s and his own Café de la Nuit people—is the truly human—the being-crucified one.

Though the Dutch and French influence on Vincent is far greater—it is London with its teeming four million destitute, yet such noble, simple folk—and England, that first recognize his soul, his penetrating gift—and his ministry of Religion and Art.

From the Calvinist-Puritan influence in England, added to that deep spirit in both Belgium and Holland—embodied in Rembrandt and Rubens—Vincent acquired a naturalism and empiricism (cf: reference to Hume). While in England, this feature of his imagination was intensified by his reading of the pre-Raphaelites and their mainspring: John Keats.

In this ethos, nature became sublime, and human simplicity revered. The religious source of this element of Vincent’s aesthetic imagination is replete in the correspondence from England. In (L 23[5/16/74, London]) to Theo, he remarks, tellingly, “find things beautiful . . . most people find too little beautiful.” Sight—only “beam-free” sight (Luke 11:34) can see the beautiful. After the Sermon on the Mount, only the ethical vision can see beauty. “It’s so beautiful here, if only one has a good and single eye, without many beams in it” (purity of soul).

The ministry side of the England experience occurs after the art-business appointment, which was most unsatisfying in two assignments, which had exposed its lack of challenge. These ministry posts, by contrast, even though he had to shed his top-hat and work pro bono, proved exhilarating to him and edifying to his flock.

He became a schoolmaster in Ramsgate with boys who scarcely realized that in lessons in Bible and other languages, they were dealing with one who in today’s modern world would be the pride of Eton or Phillips Academy—probably even Princeton or Cambridge—a budding polymath steeped in history and culture—well on toward memorizing (and translating) the Bible in the several languages in which he was proficient—a vividly erudite colorist and naturalist—and one not half-bad with the sketch-book.

Ramsgate Head-Master William Stokes transferred the school to Methodist pastor Thomas Slade-Jones in the London vicinity—Isleworth (now Hounslow, near Heathrow) and the Congregational Church in Turnham Green—which I was ready to visit last week when I arrived at Heathrow, until I discovered it had been torn down just a few decades ago, for a business complex—our all-too-prevalent sorry exchange today for art, faith and culture.

Actually, David Hume knew this penchant when he chided Protestantism for becoming the faith of commercialism—as did Vincent’s near–contemporary, Max Weber, when he called the Protestants the epitome of the spirit of Capitalism. The one full sermon we have in the correspondence was preached by Vincent in these London suburbs, i.e., Richmond. This sermon has a simple message: “. . . you and I are pilgrims” (“in this barren land—but (God) You are mighty”).

When Bailey claims that Vincent turned to faith for consolation after he failed at love and the art-business, he fails to remember that for the “sensitive,” not “sick” soul, (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience), such penultimate purposes in life never suffice. Granted the genius of Freud finds wholeness in “work and love”—but vita activa is never “all there is”—though we “keep on dancing” (Patty Page). In this age of prosperity-religion, when even good old Charlie Brown confesses to Lucy that he preaches in the town market, not for the people but for “the lettuce”—we need reminding that enduring vocatio sub specie aeternitatis (“while unending ages run”) involves men and women being called into ministry-quite apart from commercial considerations.

The name of William James calls to mind the phenomenon of New England Congregationalism and Puritanism which must be mentioned as we explore Vincent’s vocation. I would venture in the context of this chapter on England that Vincent was here touching a well-spring of spirituality, world view, sensation and virtuosity that had, and would for 37 years, form his very soul. His is the faith not only of Peter Paul Rubens, but of Rubens’ evangelical Protestant father; of Luther, Calvin and Wesley; of the Protestant Reformation and the Puritan movement founded in places like the Moravian Palatinate...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Aldersgate
• Chapter 2: Amsterdam
• Chapter 3: Au Borinage
• Chapter 4: Antwerpen
• Chapter 5: Asnières-sur-Siene
• Chapter 6: Arles
• Chapter 7: Auvers-sur-Oise
• Chapter 8: Accession
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Six Surprises/ Illuminations on the Journey
• Appendix B: Vincent van Gogh and the Notion of Creativity and Madness
• Appendix C: A Dialogue at the Night Café with Vincent and Three Protégés
• Appendix D: Van Gogh Up Close: The Philadelphia Story