Doubt, out from the shadows

POOR Doubting Thomas, so misunderstood all these years. For centuries, he’s been attacked from pulpits for wanting, needing, to touch the body of the risen Jesus to believe in the Resurrection. Right around Easter, go to your local church’s Sunday service and you’ll probably hear the minister complaining about Thomas’ weakness, his cold insistence on facts in the face of mystery.

Fact-gathering can certainly seem cold, calculated -- try staying awake in an accounting class -- but the necessity of touch? A child hits his head and seeks his mother’s embrace; a wedding ceremony culminates in a kiss; a woman wakes from a bad dream and is comforted by laying a hand on her husband snoring beside her. Isn’t touch one of the deepest expressions of human intimacy?

Glenn W. Most’s fascinating study “Doubting Thomas” asks us to reconsider Thomas and his need to touch. In this faithless disciple from John’s Gospel Most finds a much more complicated figure -- so complicated, he posits, that this episode is misread and almost every painting since the 1300s has gotten Thomas wrong. Most suggests how Thomas’ presence is more subtle and more deserving of our sympathy.

The book builds to a discussion of a disturbing image painted by Caravaggio at the turn of the 17th century. (Thomas appears to be poking his index finger in the wound in Jesus’ side.) Most ends on a tantalizing note, explaining that Caravaggio’s painting isn’t an opportunity to scold Thomas but to celebrate his weakness, his humanity. Thomas, he concludes, is “a character with whom all modern readers can identify. Thomas stands for us.”

Does he? That’s a new one. “Faith is a gift, doubt is a miserable burden” is what we’re usually asked to understand about this gospel episode. Most’s view is nuanced: His Thomas is hurt, he wants to believe but is jealous that the other disciples “participated in a miracle that has been denied only to him.” He’s “passionately angry,” whereas the other disciples seem like little yes-men. We’ve all felt the bitterness of exclusion in our lives.

While Most examines one kind of cultural character, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons look at another -- the superhero. The pair capsized the field of comic books when they decided that no one, not even a superhero, should be free of doubt. With the arrival of their “Watchmen” saga in 1986, superheroes could be just as tentative and skeptical as the rest of us.

“Absolute Watchmen” is a vibrant, handsome boxed tribute to doubt, to the undeniable fact of human limitations. New readers will be stunned by the power of the storytelling; old fans will relish the new material in this special edition, which includes back stories and early sketches interspersed among the episodes. The heroes of “Watchmen” are as beset with problems when they are fighting crime as they are when they’re in their civvies. Remember the lofty motto Spider-Man learned early in his career: “With great power comes great responsibility”? Compare it with the attitude of the disillusioned hero of “Watchmen,” Nite Owl, as he walks around his high-tech lair: “Who needs all this hardware to catch hookers and pursesnatchers? I mean really?”

Moore and Gibbons’ story line draws heavily on unsettling aspects of the 20th century: the development of the atomic bomb, the Cold War, Vietnam. Their heroes have no better grasp of a higher good than the rest of us. But when they act as though they do, the results are disastrous. Adrian Veidt, a.k.a. Ozymandias, the world’s smartest man, decides that the solution to escalating international tensions is to fake an invasion from outer space because this will scare the nations into unity. His plan, though, kills 3 million people -- a necessary price, he decides, in exchange for peace on Earth.

Settings are bleak, colorist John Higgins’ palette is subdued: Often, a character stands in a grimy, empty street or on a forbidding Martian desert. One of the most poignant scenes comes near the end when the smug Ozymandias, exulting over the “success” of his plan, seeks the approval of the otherworldly scientist Dr. Manhattan. Though the “invasion” killed many, Ozymandias says, “it all worked out in the end.”

The sphinx-like Dr. Manhattan replies: “ ‘In the end’? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” The last image of Ozymandias shows him all alone: stunned, uncertain, frowning. This brilliant hero suddenly realizes that no plan is permanent when human nature is involved.

Ozymandias frowns; so does Thomas in Caravaggio’s painting. In fact, Most says, Caravaggio placed Thomas’ head at the painting’s center to focus our attention on his reaction. Jesus “is merely secondary. Instead, it is Thomas’ emotional state that Caravaggio has depicted for us with ineluctable clarity.” His furrowed brow reflects astonishment -- the moment when doubt and faith are locked in an intense struggle. This struggle is what Caravaggio celebrates, what Moore and Gibbons are interested in and what we should all embrace in ourselves. *