A Message From Caravaggio - experts discuss revelation

Commonweal, June 20, 1997 by Luke Timothy Johnson, Kathleen Norris, Sandra M. Schneiders, Donald Senior, Susan A. Ross

A Symposium on Revelation

As the controversy surrounding the Jesus Seminar suggests, the historical-critical methods employed by modern biblical scholars have raised profound questions about the nature of revelation. Is Scripture a human product, or divine--or is this either/or altogether too simple? What sense can we make of revelation given all the human and historical circumstances we now know went into Scripture's composition? We need a new--or renewed--understanding of revelation's power and truth.

Toward this end, we have asked a handful of contributors to reflect on the idea of revelation, and to do so by reference to Caravaggio's great painting, Saint Matthew and the Angel (circa 1603), in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. What can it tell us about revelation? Does this painting give us a window on revelation's nature?

In Saint Matthew and the Angel, Caravaggio gives us a man of flesh and blood, with throbbing feet and a weathered face. And he gives us drama. According to a medieval legend, Matthew's Gospel had been dictated to him by an angel. But in Caravaggio's presentation of this story, it is possible to see in Matthew's expression a kind of resistance to his otherworldly messenger. Is this pride? Or is it, perhaps, fidelity to revelation's ongoing truth?

BERNARD G. PRUSAK Bernard G. Prusak is Commonweal's 1996-97 editorial intern.

Luke Timothy Johnson

Luke Timothy Johnson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. He is the author of The Real Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco).

Caravaggio captures the truth of revelation in much the same way that Scripture itself does, not by providing a blueprint of its mechanics, but by constructing an imaginative space in which the hard surface of things is given depth and shadow so that the wing and whirl of another more profound intelligence, more urgent love, more compelling power, may somehow have room to move.

The living God who creates all at every moment and presses on all creation seeking to disclose the truth that lies beneath the contingency of things, this God cannot be contained directly and surely not adequately by any creature, and so must be disclosed in such moments as this: in a flash of light in a darkened room that one glimpses--while rising from study and putting away the laborious pen--over one's left shoulder, so that one is twisted and unbalanced and anxious, and perhaps a bit embarrassed, trying to catch the urgent whisper of this alarmingly well-fleshed and apparently adolescent messenger from beyond whose ears and fingers are so distractingly red.

The critical study of Scripture has enabled us to appreciate just how fragile and partial, embodied and particular, mediated and dialogical, all revelation must be, not because of a deficiency either in God's self-disclosure or in human receptivity, but because the fragile and the partial, the embodied and the particular, the slow and sometimes unsteady process of mediation and dialogue is at the heart of the mystery of God's shaping, sustaining, saving, and sanctifying presence to creation.

Coming to see the profoundly human character of Scripture does not detract from revelation--just the opposite. It frees us from the fantasy of a false completeness, of a message from God wrapped in eternal verities and stamped with doubt-free postage, and frees us also for an appreciation of the way in which every odd encounter and every ordinary routine can be a visitation to which we must attend.

Take the painting as a parable. We can choose to observe only the surface representation and conclude that Caravaggio, unschooled in higher criticism, was wrong about the process of Gospel composition. Matthew, we reply, was not an angel's scribe but the head of a scribal school that edited Mark's Gospel in order to meet the needs facing his church. We despise the painting for not meeting our standards of historical accuracy. And nothing is revealed to us, for we have not known the painting as an artistic rendering, but have twisted it to our own impoverished epistemology.

Alternatively, we can imagine as the painter imagined, see as the painter saw, and can almost touch the furrowed brow of Matthew, the awed attention, the effort to comprehend what always escapes full comprehension. And with senses so alive and imagination so engaged, we can both see in the ancient texts and hear in the voices of adolescent boys the truth of God's presence seeking an opening for a space in our hearts.

Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Norris's most recent book is Cloister Walk (Riverhead). She lives in Lemmon, South Dakota.

The best definition of revelation that I know is found in the great liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanaugh's potent book, On Liturgical Theology: "It was a Presence, not faith, which drew Moses to the burning bush. And what happened there was a revelation, not a seminar." Caravaggio's painting reveals an ordinary human being experiencing the unknown and unknowable, the mystery we call divine. And Matthew answers with his whole body: His brow wrinkles, his hand and leg muscles tense up. This is what we might call inspiration--not a vague, dreamy state in which a greeting-card angel appears like the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio to grant us our dearest desire, but an attentive response to God's presence.