On Moral Movement and Moral Vision: The Last Supper in Russian Debates

Comparative Literature, Winter 2004 by Medzhibovskaya, Inessa

". . .you have made him a man-God, and not a God-man. However, I know that's what you meant to do". . . ."I could not paint a Christ whom I do not have in my soul," Mikhailov said sullenly.

(Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky 475)1

I. The Last Supper: Stereoscopes versus Stereotypes

The writing of this essay was prompted by several themes (or grievances) that have been central to art theory and art criticism in recent years: first, a general lament that moral vision is no longer possible in the absence of verbal commentary; second, uneasiness about the new kind of totalizing stygmata that visuality consciously assumes-and the trickery to which it supposedly resorts-in order to break free from logocentric confines and postmodern slippages; and, finally, complaints about the postmodern viewer's inability to be moved by art. In addition to these theoretical concerns, this essay was also inspired by the resumption of the so-called "Last Supper debate" as a result of the recently completed restoration of Leonardo's mural in Milan.2 All of these seemingly unrelated problems connect most powerfully if we examine the problem of representing the Eucharist in religious art. Drawing on the theology of vision and various aesthetic ideologies, this essay discusses the poorly known Russian contribution to the "Last Supper debate": a Russian tradition in which, originally, the icon itself is the Eucharist and the flesh of the word, and which also assumes that vision is an informed emotional-volitional act, in which the viewer is not simply moved by what he sees but moves with how he sees. My investigation will be restricted to the high era of realism, of which Nicholas Ge's Tainaia vecheria [The Last Supper] (1862) is arguably the culmination. Because Ge's painting was so ambivalently received during a period of interpretation dominated by the school of the "historical Jesus," and because it has itself been a subject of so many artistic commentaries, it has rightfully earned a place as an important modern successor to Leonardo's masterpiece.

My fundamental point is that nineteenth-century Russian artistic visions of (and commentaries on) the Last Supper are inseparable from the Orthodox notion of the Eucharist, to which the scene of the Last Supper itself is paradoxically not central. For the Russian mind, the scene of the Last Supper is typically a social, not a theological or liturgical, phenomenon. Thus, when the social and theological come dangerously close to one another-Ge's painting in this regard was a most powerful statement-a disruption of values and spiritual terms of reference inevitably occurs. Because Russian literature holds up a mirror to this agon, recording points of view in the debate and taking sides in it, I also undertake a detailed comparison of Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's reading of Tainaia vecheria and of Ge, readings which brought the Last Supper debate into the mainstream of European social and aesthetic discourse. Addressing the three theoretical concerns mentioned above, this essay further discusses the Eucharist in relation to the ethics of vision by extending the comparison between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who disagree in their understanding of moral movement and moral vision, to include Mikhail Bakhtin, the conventional watershed for their differing logocentric convictions. Bakhtin's comments on the aesthetic space of the Last Supper, supplemented by his ideas on participative and form-shaping action, open a new dimension in the discussion of the Eucharist both as a topic in art and as an example of reciprocal, responsible sacramental vision, which is precisely the burden of today's most heated discussions on visuality.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, religious themes flourished in European art. The lasting influence of Schleiermacher, David Friedrich Strauss, and Renan's La Vie de Jesus (1863) posed a serious challenge to artists. In their emphasis on the human qualities of the "historical Jesus," these writers urged artists both to imbue traditional religious subjects with naturalism and to impose religious meanings on scenes from everyday life. In the context of "graduated" (mature) Academic art, the human face of Jesus sparked debates about what was and what was not allowable in a recreation of the archetype.3

Understandably, Leonardo's Last Supper (Il Cenacolo) was again a focus of interest within these debates, because it creatively disentangled the "finished . . . combinaisons" of its medieval precursors, yet remained enigmatic. We are offered a dual vision of Christ in his quintessential image and as the Catholic Eucharist (Figure 1: Leonardo da Vinci, Ji Cewacoio). Leonardo created an emotional stereoscope by harmoniously yet nonreductively including sequential events from the Last Supper of the dospels, so differently reflected in Mmthew 20, Mark 14, Luke 22, and John 13. Leo Steinberg, an authority on the nature of/Z GmacoZo's everlasting conflicts, puts it thus: