Hard-fought journey toward inner peace

If, as poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins believed, we can infer the existence of God from the appearance of a beautiful flower, perhaps it’s also possible to infer the existence of God from a depiction of bodily struggle and pain. French author Jean-Paul Kauffmann wonders, in “The Struggle With the Angel,” his quiet and insightful meditation on the human skirmish with divinity, whether we can reconcile the atrocities of the world with a benevolent God. Can we find the divine spark apparent equally in the wretched seasons of life as in moments of exaltation and awe?

Kauffmann, who also wrote “The Black Room at Longwood,” considers these philosophical quandaries by investigating a religious painting he becomes obsessed with and the centuries-old church that houses the artwork. “Jacob Wrestling With the Angel,” by 19th century artist Eugene Delacroix, in the Chapel of the Holy Angels in Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris, depicts the enigmatic story from Genesis in which Jacob, before becoming father of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, wrestles through the night with a foe, who is unidentified in the biblical telling. Kauffmann cannot keep himself away from the painting.

“Who is this adversary Jacob is fighting so vigorously?” Kauffmann asks. “Is he an angel?” Although it appears in the Genesis story that Jacob will lose the battle, he emerges victorious but wounded. “This bruising is a sign of his pact with God,” Kauffmann postulates. Or, as the Apostle Paul would have it, he tells us, it is “the indelible mark of original sin.”

That Kauffmann has wrestled through his own dark night of the soul, having been held hostage (with other French citizens) in Beirut for three years in the 1980s when he was serving there as a foreign correspondent, adds depth and perspective to his exploration. He treads lightly on this autobiographical portion of the story: “I have always tended to evade this episode in my life. I don’t really like people confining me to those three years in detention,” he writes. Clearly though, the narrative is informed and propelled by Kauffmann’s effort to find good in the heart of evil, a struggle, he reminds us, none will elude. “[E]veryone inevitably has to wrestle with the angel; everyone has his or her own moment of truth!”

Focusing on this painting, which is often referred to as Delacroix’s “spiritual testimony” and is one of the artist’s last works, Kauffmann spins off onto delightful tangents. He looks deeply into the life of the artist for clues to understanding the divine scuffle Delacroix depicted, rummages through the artist’s journals and scours the countryside where he lived, hoping the physical surroundings and artifacts will supply missing information. Kauffmann prowls as well the lofty towers and underground vaults within the crumbling church itself (which becomes a metaphor for the human soul), searching, always searching.

How can a God of compassion and love also be a God of punishment and exile? He wants to know. Staring at the painting, he waits for it to reveal its secrets. Is Jacob wrestling with himself? With God? With evil? Why can’t he get the painting out of his mind?

The more he investigates, though, the more complicated and conflicting the answers become. In such paradoxes, he discovers delicious intrigue and peace. “I’ve had the feeling from the beginning that this chapel is the grotto of misunderstanding, the holy place of mistakes, the oratory of false pretenses. I find this confusion quite fascinating.”

Kauffmann finds similar contradictions in Delacroix’s commanding work: light and shade, classic and romantic tendencies, moderation and excess are present. The artist’s ability to live in harmony among these opposing claims is, ultimately, the solace Kauffmann uncovers, a kind of redemption through art.

Embracing, rather than denouncing or explaining away, these contradictions and acknowledging the shared nature of struggle -- no one escapes unscathed -- Kauffmann finds uneasy communion with the human condition.

Far more than an art history text, “The Struggle With the Angel” is a passionate narrative of making peace with incomplete explanations, of finding faith amid obscurity, of looking behind surfaces for the true story that lies beneath. With an abundance of sense details -- the smell of decay in the chapel, the cast of light falling across the painting and shifting throughout the course of day, the haunting timbre of the organ -- Kauffmann makes his obsession with this painting and all it represents vivid and visceral. “It was not a painter’s secret that I was trying to discover,” he realizes near the end of the narrative, “but the secret of another man who one day found himself in the kingdom of darkness.”

Once the tussle to analyze and comprehend the unfathomable passes out of him, a kind of quiet surrender takes over. This crucial moment is the eventual root of Kauffmann’s lyric mediation: the struggle with the angel within oneself.