In the seventeenth century we come upon extraordinary examples of believers who have internalized their faith so personally and deeply that it has lost all comradeship with the combative religious assertions of the partisans who waged the Thirty Years’ War. In these later figures there is also no verbal indirection, no hiddenness. Their faith is boldly stated, yet utterly lacking in aggression.
When last we met John Donne (this page), he was a young, lascivious poet stripping his mistress of her garments. He was also a convinced Catholic (related to Thomas More on his mother’s side), who lived with a notable lack of security on account of his known affiliation. He was deeply affected by the sad fate of his younger brother Henry, imprisoned for harboring a Catholic priest, horribly tortured, dying of plague while confined to Newgate Prison. The poet began to question some of his family’s religious convictions.
He married for love, incurring the enmity of his powerful father-in-law, and was reduced to penury. His wife, Anne, bore twelve children, two of whom were stillborn, three of whom died in childhood. After sixteen years of marriage, always pregnant or nursing a child, Anne died. The carefree, even reckless lover—called “Jack” by his friends—gradually turned into a thoughtful, even grave older man whose only evident links to his younger self were his razor-sharp mind and lightning-quick wit. When he was nearly fifty, having been ordained an Anglican priest at the insistence of King James, Donne was named dean of Old Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. His sermons there were as dazzling as his poems had been and laid the foundation stones for an Anglicanism built on Catholicity.
Perhaps nothing reveals the inner Donne more nakedly than his famous meditation on death:
Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die. Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him. And perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingraffed into that body, whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.… The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet, when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Hemingway stole from this meditation, as did Thomas Merton. As do we all.
Holland is the home of genial, fair-haired, red-cheeked people whose genius for business and whose general inventiveness have always been admired by outsiders. Dutchmen are skilled, sensible, down-to-earth doers; they do not encourage fantasy and they discourage wildness of any kind. There are, therefore, among them logicians, mathematicians, and practical, thoughtful, mildly humorous folk (like Erasmus and Santa Claus); but there are not among them many famous painters and sculptors, poets and dramatists, or even composers (though the Dutch excel at performing the musical compositions of others).
The monumental exception is Rembrandt van Rijn, a painter who genially inhabits the exclusive circle of the colossi. There is no way to approach Rembrandt adequately as this book draws to its close, but I wanted at least to bow deeply in his direction, for he is a prime example of the quiet and uncombative deepening of personal belief that begins to manifest itself throughout the seventeenth century.
Born in Leiden, Rembrandt lived most of his life in Amsterdam, already in his time the most tolerant city in Europe, tolerant not so much of extravagant eccentricity as of personal privacy: in Amsterdam one could quietly be whatever one wanted to be. Because of this we have no idea whether Rembrandt considered himself Catholic or Protestant. Some have, not without reason, tried to assign him to the Anabaptists, but that assignment runs up against the significant difficulty that he allowed his children to be baptized. His life, like Donne’s, was beset with sadness (his wife died after eight years of marriage; three of his four children died in infancy) and financial woes (which included bankruptcy). His art has many subjects: his landscape drawings, according to John Walker, “mark a limit of Western art. Only the Chinese have gone further.” His paintings, especially the late ones that lost him his early popularity with Dutch buyers, reveal a grasp of physical reality suggesting, in Walker’s words, “the touch-resistance of compact atoms, the density of substance Rembrandt renders so irresistibly that one’s finger tips tingle with the same intense tactile impulse one feels before certain pieces of sculpture, the bronzes of Donatello, for example.” This Dutchman is at heart an Italian.
Throughout his life as a painter he was himself his favorite subject. Reproductions of four of his many self-portraits are given here. The first, of 1627 [Plate 58], shows us Rembrandt as a serious twenty-one-year-old, but in shadows, suggesting that the young man was then a mystery even to himself. The second, of 1634 [Plate 59], shows us a self-assured, successful painter, nearing thirty. The third, of 1659 [Plate 60], reveals a resigned middle-aged man, who has been battered by life. In the fourth, finished perhaps in 1669 [Plate 61], the year of Rembrandt’s death, we behold a laughing subject, not cynical but surely not merely happy-go-lucky or pleased with himself. Rather, this last Rembrandt is a man who has found the comedy even in his tragedies, not so much a man who simply accepts his reverses as an old codger who shakes his head, and can even chortle, at the absurdities of life.
The painter, in addition to relying on his own image, returned again and again to the Bible for complex and dramatic subjects. His scenes from the Old Testament are many, often modeled by Jewish neighbors who were Rembrandt’s friends and acquaintances. Perhaps the most profound of these many arresting canvases is The Return of the Prodigal Son [Plate 62] painted, like Rembrandt’s laughing portrait, in the last year of his life and based on one of Jesus’s most affecting parables. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus replies to his critics, who have been speaking against him for welcoming “sinners” and even entertaining them, by informing the critics of the “joy that shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.”
By way of illustration Jesus narrates three parables, the last about the Prodigal Son:
A certain man had two sons: And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living. And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.
Having spent all his father’s money, the Prodigal ends up feeding pigs and sharing their food, which leads him to think a new thought:
How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.
The tenderness of the scene as imagined by Rembrandt is exceedingly physical: the head of the tattered, shamed, kneeling son pressed against the father’s chest, the father’s prominent hands pressing down on his son’s shoulders, the father’s face, full of both tenderness and ecstasy. Everything else on this earth, including the three detached observers, is beside the point; only this embrace, this very physical embrace of reconciliation, matters. When the (typical) older sibling has a hissy fit about the party in progress for his unworthy younger brother, who “transgressed” the father’s “commandment” and “devoured thy living with harlots,” the father quickly sets him straight: “It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”
The picture doesn’t tell us whether Rembrandt was a Catholic or a Protestant. But it may have a message for all religious controversialists: the only thing that matters in this world is forgiveness, which God gives freely, as should we.