Contemplative Art Critique!

I'm no art critic - but this was interesting to write:

Saint Teresa in Ecstasy: Bernini as our Virgil

Focused inner-contemplation reveals, at first, the nearly immovable obstacle of our sensual attachment to the world. We see, hear, touch, smell and taste our reality. Our senses ground us to the natural truth, and often this sensual relation to reality becomes the default standard by which we measure all other experiences. The senses are difficult cliffs to scale in contemplation, as physical symbols and sensual analogies rise unbidden, obscuring our pursuit of deeper truths. Very easily, through exasperation, we may be tempted to abandon the effort entirely. If earnest in our desire, though, by what method or approach can we transcend these physical boundaries? In our post-modern western society, we practically demand empirical evidence in support of the moves we make. Yet empiricism is of no use to us in finding the way beyond our senses. Dante lamented, “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost.” As with Dante, left to our own devices, perhaps we may never encounter the hidden pass through these peaks. Who, then, shall be our Virgil?

All is not lost, nor must we remain so. Others do know the way, they are the artists. “The saint and the seraph seem to belong to the same sphere of reality, but the reality is neither entirely earthly nor entirely mystical. A strangely indefinite aura surrounds the two figures.” We are considering here an observation of Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini’s rendering in marble of Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, completed in 1652, located in Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Bernini, a fervent practitioner of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, is said to have, “Summoned every resource of his stupendous baroque rhetoric to deny the barrier between the real and the imagined.” Crashaw, the English poet, continues the move from the senses to an inner void, as he writes in response to Teresa’s painful bliss;

O how oft shalt thou complain
Of a sweet and subtle pain!
Of intolerable joys!
Of a death in which who dies
Loves his death, and dies again,
And would forever so be slain!
And lives and dies and knows not why
To live, but that he thus may never live to die.

We are lost, but lost between the natural and the supernatural. Crashaw points to death, the ultimate loss of sensual measure – impenetrable darkness. This is precisely the contemplative location, darkness, which Saint John of the Cross speaks of in his “Dark Night of The Soul.” For to pass from sensual to contemplative vulnerability requires a disavowal of our physical reality, resulting necessarily in complete darkness, it is here that one is pierced by God.

Bernini clearly had these concepts in mind as he set about to bring forth Teresa, subsumed in contemplative union, working from the Saint’s own description;

"It pleased the Lord that I should sometimes see the following vision. I would see beside me, on my left hand, an angel in bodily form…. In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he drew it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed with a great love for God.…The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor will one's soul be content with anything less than God. "

Bernini ties the contemplative darkness into his portrayal of Teresa. “According to an old saying of the mystics, the soul holds the Divine World as a shell holds the ocean. Art also knows something about the contravention of physical laws. In the chapel the spectator’s eye can ultimately enclose the cosmos. Sooner or later attention will come to rest on the pavement, the zone of mortal death. Two half-length figures of death appear there, bone-white skeletons circled in darkness.” In a subtle sense, we perceive the limits of the physical representation of Divine union, the paradox of depicting that which cannot be depicted.

So, we may hesitate at being guided spiritually by physical symbols. If, as with Dante, our direct way is lost, how can we overcome the obstacle of the senses by turning directly to our senses in consideration of Bernini’s work? Others have gone before us. “But her conversion was not complete. Teresa continued to be troubled by her attachment to the world and her desire for a more intimate friendship with God. It wasn’t until the age of forty that she was able to resolve this conflict. While walking through the oratory one day, Teresa came upon an image of Jesus in His agony which so distressed her that she changed her life. Her conversion was complete and was manifest not only in her prayer life but also in her active life as a monastic reformer and spiritual writer.”

Lacking any clearer way to express this, Bernini was completing the circle with his Teresa in Ecstasy. Stimulated by a physical representation, Teresa experiences a final conversion, led over the cliffs. Freed from sensual bounds, she experiences the excruciatingly and exquisitely undeniable wounding by Christ’s love. Bernini captures the moment with indirect light, powerful strokes of the chisel providing illumination and darkness across the piece, the countenance of Teresa seized in rapture, the spear – poised to strike again – Teresa, burdened by physical image to mystical encounter, represented by physical image. These are the circles in which we lose the direct way.

While seemingly paradoxical, the genius of Bernini’s work is not in the details of the sculpture itself. Though Bernini is recognized as the greatest Italian baroque artist, and his mastery of sculpture and architecture is unquestionable, the brilliance of his Teresa is that it leads us beyond the physical. “God produces in each a knowledge and love exceeding all that can be felt or expressed by the faculties although it is experienced by the soul. This is the infused knowledge which offers a reality beyond images and concepts, a reality of Whom no adequate picture can be formed.”

To speak of, or to physically render, the moment of mystical union is, perhaps, to say or represent nothing, commentaries empty of content, as the moment is truly beyond human expression. Bernini, though, in his mastery, gives us that moment as a sensual stimulus from which to move beyond the senses – to seek the dark. Having found the route, we can endure the descent; we can navigate the ledges up to the entrance of paradise guided by our own Virgil – Bernini.

Works cited

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Canto I, (1321 A.D.)

Julian and Teresa: The Company We Keep, Carol A. Jagielnik, Spiritual Life; A Quarterly of Contemporary Spirituality, (Vol. 42, Number 3, Fall 1996).

Peterson, Robert T. The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw, (1970), London Routledge & Kegan Paul / London.

The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Second Edition, (2003), The Catholic University of America, Gale / Farmington Hills, MI

www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Valentin/English/6/645.php3, cited March 8, 2006