The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb
and the idiots who venerate it
I hate this painting.
Yet, I also kind of love it for how viscerally I feel about it.
When I look at this painting, my face twists. It’s offensive, and it’s ugly. Difficult to look at.
I feel like I’m somewhere I’m not supposed to be, peeking into a cross-section of a grave. As though I’m further participating in the humiliation of Jesus by gawking at his disfigurement.
He looks skeletal and green, either with bruising or decay. His face is vacant and disturbed, and his eyes were left open rolling back in his head. His hands look like dead spiders stuck in a glue trap. He looks distinctly unlike the way I tend to imagine Jesus — even dead Jesus. He’s weak, and he’s helpless. He’s already beginning to rot. The most unnerving thing about it is that he actually looks like any typical corpse would: detached and not transcendent.
Aesthetics aside, the implications of the painting are even more troubling — maybe even blasphemous. Now rotting and dead, Jesus failed. Faith is futile under the weight of nature, and death is hot on its way for us too. Meanwhile, God lays dead on a slab, humiliated and powerless. His arms aren’t carefully crossed over his chest, and he doesn’t have a “peaceful” expression on his face like someone who is asleep. He took his misery to the grave. And it sure looks like there’s finality in that.
The Idiot (and my attempt to not spoil It too badly)
In The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky set out “to portray a positively beautiful man.” That man is a character named Myshkin. He’s more or less the picture of purity and an overt Christ figure. Contrasting Myshkin is a character named Rogozhin, a violently indulgent and impulsive man. And they both compete for the love of a woman named Nastasya.
Myshkin’s love is pure (think agape), and Rogozhin’s love is carnal (think eros). The novel comes to a boil in exploring the consequences of Myshkin’s consistent love when Nastasya instead chooses Rogozhin’s abusive, destructive love. (Think humanity choosing brutality and destructiveness over the purity of Christ.)
Early in the novel, Myshkin sees Holbein’s painting hanging on Rogozhin’s wall. He looks away and says, “That picture! A man could lose his faith looking at that picture!” Rogozhin quips back that his faith is already on its way out.
I resonate with Myshkin’s instinct to recoil from the painting. A dead god doesn’t sound like a very good one. Yet, I can also relate to Rogozhin’s inclination to hang it on his wall and ruminate on it. There’s something morbidly fascinating about it.
As difficult and stomach-churning as it is to process the rotting body of Jesus, I think it captures a powerful part of the story. The ugliness and painfulness of the image are what gives it its power. It’s not blasphemous to imagine the decay of Jesus’s body because that is the very heart of the incarnation. That’s the story of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. And it’s the miracle of Easter.
The Idiot and Incarnation
Dostoyevsky was fascinated with John’s Gospel because it focuses so heavily on the significance of the incarnation. And that’s what he explores in The Idiot. A big-boy Christian word generally associated with the incarnation is kenosis. It’s the greek word for the idea of emptying. In becoming a man, God kenosis-ed (Philippians 2:5–11). Dostoyevsky believed that in emptying oneself, room is made for the Holy Spirit. And in that movement, the cycle closes — God becomes like man, man becomes like God.
In that light, the idea of incarnation in itself appears a bit problematic (or maybe even blasphemous). If our holy God can’t be in the presence of sin, then how could he join a corrupt humanity? Because incarnation means that Jesus felt the fullness of every part of being human. That includes the messy and shameful parts. Because he became one of us, God had dirty diapers, went through puberty, and had feet that got sweaty and smelly.
In orthodox Christian belief, Jesus doesn’t belong to a third category somewhere between human and god; he’s fully both. And a full experience of humanity includes being a baby, having embarrassing moments, maturing, and, eventually, dying.
In The Idiot, Holbein’s painting is essentially a litmus test for the faith of the one looking at it. Myshkin, in turning his face from the painting, refuses to accept the world as an ugly, corrupt thing. Ultimately, at the cost of his own sanity and dignity, he remains consistent in choosing to love purely and wholly.
The title The Idiot is, on the surface, a reference to Myshkin’s epilepsy (back then, they were apparently allowed to talk about people with disabilities that way). But more deeply felt, Myshkin is an idiot because, in the face of a bleak, harsh, oppressive world, he goes the same way as Christ, loving at the expense of his own comfort, convenience, and dignity. Loving in a way that empties himself. He’s a “holy fool” as Dostoyevsky says, enacting Christian love so completely that he himself is crushed by its momentum. He is the only character who shudders at the sight of the painting, but he is also the one who actually emulates it through his own self-emptying.
The incarnation is idiocy. It was a pretty bad deal on God’s part. Likewise, following the way of Christ is idiocy. It’s costly, it’s often more than we can handle, and for some reason it denies that things are beyond redemption.
Nevertheless, regarding Christ, Dostoyevsky once said:
“There is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous, and more perfect than Christ; and there not only isn’t, but I tell myself with a jealous love, there cannot be. More than that — if someone succeeded in proving to me that Christ was outside the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, I would sooner remain with Christ than with the truth.”
