A Pronounced Feeling for the Inner Life
A Pronounced Feeling for the Inner Life
Arthur Aghajanian
“Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.”
— Thomas Merton
Thinking back, it’s difficult to recall the progression of events. I was immersed in the weekly routine of work and family life, not anticipating the sudden hard turn as California began shutting down in rapid phases. A global health crisis was underway, and my world would soon constrict as the rhythms of daily life inexorably shifted.
Just as unexpectedly, the change of rhythm would carry me along a new current, emptying into a deep pool of sanctity found in greater attention to life lived in the moment. The occasion of the pandemic had provided a space for me to redirect my attention to things that were often lost in the noise of my normal routines.
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Prior to the pandemic, my daily rhythms shifted so rapidly I barely noticed them. But the lessening of external stimulation due to the stay at home orders caused me to begin seeing patterns. Once there were fewer things clamoring for my attention and the pace of the days had slowed, a more pronounced feeling for my inner life arose.
Turning to creative expression is the means by which I have always sought signifiers of my experiences and sensations. Traces of rhythm in the natural world and human activity are visible in our surroundings, but art can make us more conscious of their impact on us. And because our inner life is divine in nature, we can often find its qualities mirrored in great works of religious art.
Following certain developments in the Renaissance period, religious painting in Europe began to exhibit greater expressiveness. This moved me to reassess an artist whose unusual approach to Christian subject matter suggested a point of reference in my renewed appreciation for the interior movement of spirit.
Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco (1541-1614), was a Greek artist who spent much of his career in Spain, where he developed a uniquely personal style that wasn’t fully appreciated until his rediscovery in the nineteenth century. His mature work consisted of fevered images whose expressive vocabulary was so utterly strange that it remained detached from any conventional style or school of painting. His imaginative approach emphasized the subjective and dramatic, breaking away from the norms of classical art espoused by artists of the Renaissance. His aesthetic was unusual even in the context of Mannerism, an exaggerated style practiced by many of his contemporaries in which distortion was commonly applied to the human form.
Seeking an echo of my interior rhythms in an image or object, the quivering energy that is so pronounced in the late work of El Greco suddenly revealed itself in a new way. For him, art was not about imitating nature but embodying the spirit. Here was a visual equivalent for what I had only recently come to feel clearly. The artist was picturing the divine flow: the greater movement of life in and through which we are all joined.
Doménikos Theotokópoulos aka El Greco
All flickering light and twisting form, The Baptism of Christ (1597-1600) depicts the moment of Jesus’s baptism by Saint John as described in Matthew 3:13-17. Yet it does more than illustrate the story. It also celebrates sanctified ritual as a form of witness to the presence of God. Usually represented as a rite of quiet humility (as seen in the artist’s earlier interpretation of the scene painted in 1568), this version of the baptism becomes a rapturous explosion of mystical force.
The composition of the painting is dense, and as my eyes travel it’s surface I am reminded of the crowded events of my own days before the pandemic. I realize how rarely I had glimpsed the interwoven nature of daily experience. I began to think that what we sometimes call the unified field of reality is not actually a blur of activity ceaselessly eluding our grasp. It’s more like a picture composed of interconnected yet distinct parts, each calling out to be loved through our attention. Time spent with El Greco’s painting revealed order in what at first felt chaotic, in much the same way my pandemic days felt when I slowed down to drink in the moment.
We can find anchor points to orient ourselves within the freneticism of El Greco’s painting. Beginning with the general compositional structure, we note that the work is divided horizontally. The Holy Spirit, in its symbolic form as a dove, floats at the center of the image joining together the heavenly and earthly realms. Jesus leans in, consenting humbly with praying hands as John the Baptist sprinkles holy water over his head. Our eyes are drawn to the red cloak that frames Jesus, serving as a symbol of martyrdom. Above him sits the Heavenly Father, surrounded by a host of angels rendered in remarkably foreshortened views.
The energy of the painting draws us upward like a powerful gust or even the breath of life itself. The vertical format of the composition emphasizes the attenuated figures, squeezing out any sense of depth to the space in which the event occurs. Everything pushes forward to the surface of the picture plane, crowding the space and resonating with the tradition of icon painting, in which El Greco had trained as a young man. Indeed, the influence of Medieval art can be felt in the painting’s abstract and symbolic emphasis.
From the perspective of the divine, there is only the ever-present now, and in this tightly organized, almost airless space, everything appears to be happening simultaneously. The gentle pouring of water reflects the humility of Christ, shown in a physically vulnerable way, dressed only in a loincloth. The events of our world are joined to the awesome power of God as Pantocrator—the all-knowing Father and judge who looks on in approval. The humble, quiet, and sanctified gesture of baptism is one with the rapture of the Absolute. The simple act of pouring water, understood in its holy dimension, means everything.
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Being shut in provided me with the space to step back and reexamine what being in tune with the movement of life can mean. Inspired to direct greater self-awareness to the texture of my inner rhythms, I began to understand how love is the intimacy of God as flow, embraced by our attention. When we enter into our daily experiences mindful of this, we are awake to the dance of life.
We enter this dance through the very rhythm of our breathing, infused by the larger movement of life itself. When attentive to our divine nature, we discover the patterns of coming and going, the beat of our hearts and the small gestures we perform to be the ongoing rhythm of our lives in and through God. And if we allow the gospel to become the music of our lives, our commitment to the ritual of spiritual practice through prayer and mindfulness will provide the steps we need to move with it and to live more fully.
The ecstatic display of divine flow and its rhythms in The Baptism of Christ gives a timeless quality to the work. El Greco gives tangible form to our experience of divine energy, representing it as though it were an electric current running through the bodies, objects, and natural elements he has painted. We are drawn into his vision. We are held there by his bold and unusual use of color, seeming to glow from within the painting. We are caught up in the assertion and dissolution of figures and ground as well, as strange proportions and awkward positions accentuate the mutable nature of life. Like a wild dance, nothing is fixed.
The painter’s brush is loose, applied to the surface in what seems like a rush of wild abandon in tones strange and otherworldly. We might imagine the artist swept up in the execution of his vision by the cosmic dance itself, his vision guided by a mysterious force moving through his own being. The divine rhythm plays like celestial music, individual strokes of the brush building to a fiery crescendo of outstretched limbs and wild contortion.
The painting speaks to the abundance of God’s love proceeding from the simple gesture of sprinkling water. The baptism of Jesus, as one of the greatest of Christianity’s ritual moments, stands as an exemplar of the value of humble acts invested with sanctity. At the same time, Jesus’s consent to the ritual reflects the artist’s surrender to the rhythm and flow in the creative act of painting. The artistic process is thus intimately linked with transformation.
Searching for references to the divine dance in other forms of creative expression, I stumbled upon a passage from T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”. I thought about how it could serve as the painting’s caption, and imagined it in an art history book documenting the appearance of divine rhythm in every image made since the mysterious cave paintings of Altamira in Spain, El Greco’s adopted home:
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
El Greco painted the cosmic dance by pressing the pictorial conventions of his time into the service of a personal vision. To some of our eyes his work may seem strange, idiosyncratic, perhaps even off-putting. But when we recognize God’s movements within our own experience, such an image can call to us across the centuries as an invitation to join with the sacred here and now.
Mindful and responsive to the divine presence within us, we find that God takes the lead. We encounter sacred love in the intimacy of our quiet, ordinary rituals performed daily. Treating life’s little moments with reverence means we invest care in the individual brushstrokes that make up the big picture of our lives.
Using this time to go deeper, we gain the opportunity to return to our communities with a more integrated sense of our place in the larger dance. The form of our individual choreographies will vary, but their substance will consist of compassionate engagement with the world and others, and enough grace to move in unity with all of creation.
Arthur Aghajanian
Writer & Educator
Arthur is a Christian contemplative, essayist, and educator. His work explores visual culture through a spiritual lens. His essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Radix, Saint Austin Review, The Curator, and many others. He holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Visit him at imageandfaith.com
Photography by Reginald Van de Velde