The art of faith

In the beginning was the word. Then the word became flesh, and it has been up for grabs ever since.

For 2,000 years -- from the forbidding severity of 11th century mosaics to the pathos of Giotto’s “Lamentation,” from Dante’s crucified Christ to Caravaggio’s “Deposition,” from Albert Schweitzer’s writerly devotions to Monty Python’s irreverent “Life of Brian” -- the story of Jesus of Nazareth has been fair game.

And why not?

It has high concept written all over it. Kierkegaard summed it up in nine neat words: “Once God walked the streets as a human being.” For some the Christ story as expressed in the Gospels is not only true, it is the ultimate truth, but for others it’s a brilliant archetype.

George Lucas and Peter Jackson played it out in “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings.” It’s a rather basic narrative: A father figure sends the young hero on a mission. Along the way there are helpers and obstacles, and just when defeat seems inevitable, the hero triumphs. Now with Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” slated for release Wednesday, we await yet another version, albeit one that focuses on the hero’s darkest moment and brightest triumph.

With images of suffering, which is the pain of the body, and images of grace, which is the redemption of the soul, artists and writers through the centuries have used the Gospels to explore the paradox and mystery of existence.

Speak with those who have made Christ a centerpiece of their work and it becomes clear that for the faithful and the atheist alike, the story becomes a template upon which hopes, fears, longings and disappointments rise in sharp relief. Through a wide variety of brazen, meditative, profound and profane wrestlings, we see that the greatest story ever told remains the most difficult to tell.

“What strikes me is that works of literature always seem to be defeated by the story they are attempting to employ as material,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Miles. “So far everyone who has charged at the Gospel story has come away with a broken lance.”

Miles, author of “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” and “God: A Biography,” takes a literary perspective. The challenge for writers depicting Christ is different, he says, “from that of, say, Tolstoy, who set out to write about the Franco-Russian war. He was dealing with facts and turning them into art.”

“An artist working with the story of Jesus,” Miles says, “does not begin with fact. He begins with art.” If the artist stays too close to the Gospel, “the result has the tedium and dullness of mere repletion. If he goes beyond it, he competes with it, and it’s like improving Shakespeare.”

Focusing on the graphic depiction of the beating and scourging of Christ -- and the crucifixion itself -- is an old ploy: Artists from Matthias Grunewald in the Isenheim Altarpiece to Martin Scorsese in “The Last Temptation of Christ” have made the stark reality of the Passion centerpiece to the drama.

But the real challenge for artists remains the one laid out by the nearly 600 bishops who gathered in Asia Minor in 451. The Council of Chalcedon articulated the dual nature of Christ: divine and human, “without confusion, without change, without division,” perfectly united in a single person. What had been for the theologian a metaphysical, even an ontological puzzle, became for the artist an imaginative one. How do you create a character in Christ who is familiar, relevant and recognizable without sacrificing his divinity? How do you symbolize the meaning of a life that is both mundane and otherworldly?

The craft of the Gospel lies not so much in its historical accounting of miracles but in its more subtle intimations of the divine. When John describes the moment on Golgotha after Christ died, he tells us that a soldier pierced his side. Blood and water ran from the wound, evidence of death. But John then turns our attention to the mourners who suddenly realize that Jesus is the Messiah: Prophets had predicted that his bones would not be broken, that he would be stabbed. In this single frame, John gives us the picture of God and man seen from the eyes of the nonbeliever and the believer alike.

When novelist Reynolds Price teaches the Gospels in his literature class at Duke University, he hopes his students will approach the text as it was originally written -- as black ink on the page -- but he admits this may not be possible. “The Gospels are now so surrounded with awe and church light and music,” Price says, “that it’s hard for us to look at the words and just see.”

A halo, a dove, a miracle -- we visualize religion according to the way religion has been visualized for us. How could it be otherwise? God the Father is a disappearing act in the Old Testament and nearly absent in the New: a voice from Heaven, a cloud. He dwells, as Paul writes in his first letter to Timothy, “in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see.” As for Jesus, we know little of his physical appearance; Zacchaeus we know is short -- he had to climb a tree to get a glimpse of Jesus -- but what of the man he wanted to see?

Without the traditional symbols of divinity, we are left with the humanness of Christ to tell his story: a simple carpenter who was God. For believers, faith provides the bridge over this mystery; nonbelievers require special effects. Which leads to another quandary: To what extent should the artist do the work of the believer and import the act of faith? And to what extent does the artist challenge you to an act of faith?

Traditional depictions of Christ’s life veer either toward overt aestheticism or austere didacticism, while more recent versions favor the sociological and philosophical. Understanding the motivation of the artist can be as difficult as explaining the mystery of faith -- there is not always a clear line between representation and intent. Perhaps Andres Serrano’s interpretation of the crucifixion -- a photograph of a crucifix immersed in a beaker of urine -- most clearly demonstrates this: Is the artist mournful that Jesus is disrespected in modern society? Or is he gleeful?

Novelist Jim Crace wrote about Christ in his 1997 novel, “Quarantine,” the story of Jesus’ 40-day stay in the desert with the devil. Crace, an atheist, expected believers to be offended by the book, and while there are exceptions -- one man from Columbus, Ohio, in particular wanted him to rot in hell -- he was surprised by the response. “My book gave occasion to believers to exercise their doubt,” he says, “and by exercising their doubt, they’ve managed to strengthen their belief.”

Perhaps Crace’s experience reveals the real genius of the Gospel: That in these words, in these depictions of suffering and redemption is a paradox that can never be resolved. Nor is it ever meant to be. As Lesley Hazleton, author of the forthcoming biography of “Mary,” says: Without paradox there would be nothing to hold the imagination.

“Surely religion, above all, demands an active involvement of the imagination,” Hazleton says. “Otherwise, all you have is a shell, the letter of the law, and religion becomes encrusted to a kind of dogma that can impose all kinds of cruelty.”

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Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer got the idea for his 1997 novel, “The Gospel According to the Son,” one night in a Paris hotel room. He couldn’t sleep, picked up the Gideon Bible and started to read. As much as he admired the story, he was struck by how poorly it was told. He knew there were a hundred novelists in the world who could do a better job, and he was one of them.

It takes a certain temerity to write the life of Christ in the first person, doesn’t it?

It seemed to me the best way, although it has huge obstacles. Moreover, I liked the idea of daring to write about Jesus in the first person because my pride in being a novelist is that we dare things. I want to feel that I’m willing to take chances other novelists wouldn’t take.

It almost sounds as if the challenge of writing “The Gospel According to the Son” was more stylistic than philosophical.

I’m not downsizing the importance of the topic; it’s just that no matter what you’re writing about, you have to find a way to write about it. Some have claimed this is the greatest story ever told, and it may be. It’s an incredible story, but it is not well written. It has extraordinary lines in it. Some of the things that Jesus said are at the least worthy of Shakespeare. But on the other hand, the lack of narrative consideration for the reader is striking.

Your depiction of Christ seems more steeped in Sartre than the Gospels. Did the creation of an existential Jesus get in the way of portraying his divinity?

It didn’t for me because unlike the most orthodox Christian beliefs, which have Jesus not only the son of God but in a certain sense equal to God, I kept going to the other side of it, which is that God chose to give us his only son as a man. In other words, I saw him first as a man, a man who discovers to his deep, profound fear that he is the Son of God.

How do you judge your efforts depicting the life of Christ against the others?

I think most people who write about Christ come in with an agenda. If I had one, it was to tell the story so it becomes readable and believable. Make it as believable as you can within a modest compass. In other words, no extremes. What I was interested in was this story, this wonderful story, this incredibly existential story -- to be the Son of God and not know exactly what to do next, to have a feeling of a destiny larger than yourself and not be totally in command of that destiny.

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Paul Schrader

As a student at Calvin College in the 1960s, writer and director Paul Schrader didn’t find Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel “The Last Temptation of Christ” controversial, so 20 years later when Martin Scorsese approached him to write the screenplay, he accepted. Canceled by Paramount four weeks before shooting and picked up by Universal (and rushed into an early release), the film was damned from the start. Fundamentalists were offended by depictions of Christ’s desire for Mary Magdalene. Jerry Falwell predicted it would set off a wave of anti-Semitism, and when the film opened in New York City in 1988, the police were in the street.

What zeitgeist did “The Last Temptation” tap into?

“The Last Temptation” got caught unwittingly and unwilling in the culture wars. It became a totem of cultural hegemony over who controls the culture. It was a symbol, and you had to take sides. That hurt the film a lot because it was no longer a film but a cultural symbol.

The film opens with a quote from the novel, which suggests that the story is less religious in its intent than metaphysical.

That’s Kazantzakis’ great accomplishment and great sin. He uses Christ as a metaphor for the human struggle. He believes that we create Christ through our human battle. They accused the film of blasphemy when it came out, but what they were accusing it of really wasn’t blasphemy at all; it was some notion that Christ might have had sexual feelings, which of course, if he is a man, he did. But the very notion of using Jesus as a metaphor could be construed in certain theological constructs as blasphemy in and of itself.

In the attempt to humanize Christ in art, is it possible to create a portrait that is also transcendent?

I don’t think you can have transcendental art by using the traditional tools of empathy and psychological realism. I think transcendent art is a form of meditation and a way to achieve stasis. It is much more of a tao than a matter of illustrating famous events in religious history. I don’t find those paintings in the Bible transcendental art. They’re religious art, religious illustration.

And your screenplay was not attempting that sort of transcendence.

No, it was a very, very humanistic film. Very few films have tried to walk this path because film, by its very nature, is not suited toward the stripping away of identification itself. Architecture and music are much better at it. Film is probably the worst medium for it. So “The Last Temptation” was really a story of the human struggle.

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Reynolds Price

Reynolds Price first applied his talents as a novelist, essayist and poet to a translation of the Old and New Testaments in “A Palpable God” (1978). Nearly 20 years later, he published “Three Gospels,” which contains his translations of Mark and John as well as his own apocryphal gospel, “An Honest Account of a Memorable Life.” A paraplegic, Price speaks easily of his disability and of the time of crisis in his life when he was ill and saw Christ. It was 1984; he was unsuccessfully fighting cancer of the spine when Jesus appeared to him, poured water over his back and told him that his sins were forgiven. Price, however, was more concerned with his health, and reluctantly Jesus told him that he was cured. Today, Price teaches at Duke University; his most recent book is “A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined.

Why do you suppose we need to keep telling ourselves the story of Jesus?

Imagine a culture -- and there are many in the world today and there are some in the United States -- in which there’s absolutely no hope of healing. When you or your baby or anyone else gets ill, it’s up to your body to cure you, and if your body doesn’t cure you, then you die. The hope that Christ represents is enormously important, and it’s important for us to realize how just tremendously powerful that hope is. I assume all human beings need consolation just to get through a normal day, and because Jesus stands up in our culture -- in a very salient way -- to say that he bears an intimate, unique relationship with God, then we want to know as much as we can about him in the hope of receiving his power.

Do you believe the humanization of Christ over the last 2,000 years has compromised his divinity?

I think it’s a good thing that we’ve recovered, in a primal sense, the fact that he was a man who had an extraordinary relationship to God, that he was someone who lived with fishermen and carpenters and spent a lot of time apparently with prostitutes and tax collectors. In the Gospel of Mark, he seems at first almost frightened by his ability to heal. He flees from the crowds, and the disciples come back to get him. This is not somebody surrounded by rosy glow. What would he have been like -- as impossible as that is to think through? What would dinner with Jesus have been like? I surely wish I knew.

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Lesley Hazleton

Imagining the Virgin Mother as a Middle Eastern woman -- short, wiry, with dark-olive skin and the trace of a mustache on her upper lip -- is a radical departure from Renaissance standards, but Lesley Hazleton is more interested in history than myth. Gone is the meek and mild. Hazleton’s Mary, in the forthcoming biography “Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography,” is a woman who was pregnant at 13 (possibly by rape), endured the political oppression of her time and watched her son tortured and executed by the state.

Were you concerned that by making Mary real, you might make her seem less divine?

It seems to me quite the opposite. When you look at Mary as a real person and see who she really was, you realize she is so much more than we have ever given her credit for being. The reality of who she was appeals to the imagination in a way that the icon cannot. The icon forestalls the imagination. But the idea that you might discover her as a human being -- and within that human being find the spark of divinity -- makes the spiritual more personal and real.

Why do you suppose scholarship on the historical Mary has lagged behind that of the historical Jesus?

Mary was adopted by the early church as an answer to the great virgin mother goddesses of other religions. She was the church’s way of competing against them, and it would have been dangerous to have a clearer sense of who the actual person was. They needed the image, not the real woman, so she became depersonalized. This is one of the things we do when we worship somebody. You tend to see only what you want.

During the four years it took you to write “Mary,” what conclusions did you draw about spirituality in the world?

I know this flies in the face of what a lot of people are saying nowadays, but I began to believe that we are becoming more open-minded. New historical scholarship helps us understand how people thought 2,000 years ago, so that we can consider that Mary indeed might have been both virgin and mother, or that the father might indeed have been both God and Joseph. I think we’re becoming more accepting of paradox and apparent contradiction, and this is important because paradox surely is the essence of the religious experience.

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Jerry Jenkins

With nearly 57 million copies sold since its debut in 1995, the “Left Behind” series of apocalyptic thrillers is both a publishing and a cultural phenomenon. Written by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, the series imagines the prophecies of Revelation set in contemporary times. In the first book, millions of true believers suddenly disappear into heaven. Planes crash; automobiles pile up on the interstate and the anti-Christ sets up his reign. In succeeding volumes, war, plagues, famine and earthquakes ravage the Earth. The 12th book, “Glorious Appearing,” to publish next month, features Jesus’ second coming, and the final volume -- 14 books are planned -- will look at life during the Millennial Kingdom on Earth.

Your books present a literal view of the Bible. Is this how you understand God?

When I think of God, I think of a person in human form and of course, God has never been in human form, except through Jesus, in our theology. And we always think of the Father and the Son, so I always see God as older than Jesus and looking more like I suppose a Charlton Heston character than like a young man, but to me, it’s refreshing to bring it down to a level where you can grasp it. The key is that you can know Jesus. You can have a personal relationship with him; he’s supposed to be a friend, like a brother.

And the Book of Revelation?

For years, even evangelical pastors would ignore Revelation because they didn’t understand it, and everybody assumed because the language was terrific and horrible in places, that it’s symbolic. Dr. Lahaye takes this view that where it can be interpreted literally, let’s do that and see if it opens it up. If you look at it symbolically, you can probably interpret it 200 different ways. “Left Behind” is sort of our representation of the way it should look, if we can take it literally.

What does the popularity of the series tell you about the world we live in today?

I think -- whether people would admit it or not -- that there is a God-hunger out there. As people get older and go through all the problems that society goes through, raising kids and seeing the Columbines and tragedies, people feel like we’re heading toward some culmination and maybe there is an end to the world, and if there is, maybe we need to think more about the cosmos than we do just about our own lives.

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Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano describes the creation of his most famous photograph as almost accidental: “I had been working with bodily fluids in an abstract way,” he remembers. “At some point I decided to immerse an object into the fluids, and it seemed natural for it to be a religious object because I had been making images exploring my Catholic upbringing.” The year was 1987. Serrano was 38, and his photograph of a crucifix submerged in a beaker of urine set off a national firestorm that still burns today.

Were you surprised by the reaction that your photograph received?

Even though I’m passionate about my work, I’m very dispassionate when it comes to making it. I would say that’s probably a strength of my work: I don’t judge it. For me ideas are never so provocative or so outrageous that they can’t be expressed. As an artist, I feel it’s my job to not only create but to exercise my imagination. So “Piss Christ,” for me, is just that. It’s an exercise of my imagination, like most of my other work.

Do you believe that depictions of the life of Christ have become too aestheticized?

They have become very aestheticized -- even in my own work. Certainly everyone would agree, “Piss Christ” is not a disturbing image to look at. On the contrary, it’s just the idea -- the title -- that disturbs, but the image itself is really quite harmless. But that’s why I look forward to a graphic representation of the crucifixion: It’s a very harsh moment in history, and it needs to be revisited in a disturbing way.

What does the crucifixion mean to you?

I see the crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice. I remember when I was a kid, the nuns in religious instruction taught us to revere not the object but what it stands for. Over time, we’ve come to accept it as this man on a cross, but we really don’t think about what it means. It’s fascinating how every artist has his or her individual interpretation. I once had a collection of several hundred crucifixes of all sizes. It was amazing how I never saw any two that were identical. In a way, Christ belongs to everyone.

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Jim Crace

Jim Crace didn’t intend to write about Christ when he started his 1997 novel, “Quarantine.” One morning he received a postcard from two Jewish friends who were traveling in the Palestinian territories. It was a picture of the Hill of Temptation where Jesus was supposed to have spent his 40 days with the devil. Crace, an atheist, was surprised that the location included hundreds of caves. It led him to wonder who else might have been living there with Jesus, to whom he had planned to devote a paragraph at most. But then the paragraph became a chapter and the chapter became the book.

As an atheist, how did writing a book about an episode in Christ’s life affect you?

It made me think my atheism was too coldhearted, and it made me recognize that there were things in the Christian religion that I was jealous of -- like spirituality and mysticism. I believe that humankind has a need for them and that atheism wasn’t providing them. If the Christian religion were to crumble and the gaps it inhabits were to become fewer and fewer as science proceeds -- and that is bound to happen -- then humankind is in a kind of new peril.

In an age of science, is religion -- and perhaps art -- the last refuge for transcendence?

Certainly science has made us redefine what transcendence is. Remember in the 14th century, a priest could have taken you to the top of a hill and made you listen to the thunder and look at the lightning and said, “That is God expressing anger at your sins.” Or they could have said, “That is God’s indigestion.” Science has forced religion into all of the gaps. It can’t summon up miracles anymore; it can’t send an army to Jerusalem to sort out the infidels with the crusade. All the Christian religion can do, it seems to me, is be defensive.

Were you concerned that readers might be offended by your depiction of Jesus?

I didn’t feel I was treading in dangerous territory in the way that Salman Rushdie did; the Christian religion, unlike the Muslim religion, doesn’t ban depictions of God or Christ. It encourages new depictions of Christ and of God. I was retelling a narrative, and of course what interested me was the context.

And that context was what?

I was interested in depicting people whose lives were all teetering on the edge: people who were on the edge of nervous breakdowns and needed to make contact with their gods in a way in order to make sense of their lives. There are plenty of places I could have set that in a real-life United Kingdom -- in Thatcherite Britain -- because she was a specialist at turning such people out onto the streets, but since I’m a writer that likes to take a current issue and dislocate it somewhere else, that postcard arrived at a convenient time.

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Thomas Curwen can be contacted at thomas.curwen@latimes.com.