DIE SCHERE #46: Notes
With this text EJ ends his notes and reflexions on (and also digressions from)
Antonius which he began in #37. Why this interest in a little-known saint who is,
even for one of his warmest advocates in our days, "so far away from us and has
become so alien to us because of this distance"? [1] EJ introduces A. within the
wider context of his discussion of "Vorschau". In Athanasius's biography of A.
the saint's occult faculties like prophecy, healing over a distance and telepathy
are barely mentioned. Jacopo de Voragine's LEGENDA AUREA, during the Middle Ages
the most widely read compilation of the lives of the saints, omits them
altogether. Even A. himself played them down as nothing exceptional.
However, EJ obviously has a penchant for A., and this is not only explained by
the nonagenarian's interest in a man who "strode on beyond his hundredth year in
spiritual freshness". (#37) To be sure, EJ has the particular axe of Vorausschau
to grind in this context, but he does more than just cite Antonius as another
example for someone gifted with it. To my mind, while discussing A.'s occult
faculties EJ in passing succeeds to sketch a revaluation of the traditional image
of this saint.
It may be that he came across A. for the first time as a collector of old books
and prints. In STRAHLUNGEN he notes that on 13 October 1941 he bought from a
bouquiniste on the Seine quays "ein guterhaltenes Exemplar der großen 'Versuchung
des heiligen Antonius' von Callot". In this engraving Jacques Callot [2] places
A. almost inconspicuously in the middle ground of a grand opera stage which is
crowded with a myriad of devils, demons and monsters, swarming about and busy
with various grotesque and even burlesque activities, among others also to vex
and terrorize A. [3]
Earlier than Callot the painters Bosch, Brueghel and Grünewald had contributed to
the traditional image of A. being almost inseparately linked to temptations
predominantly in the form of a phantasmagoria of demons, trying to intimidate A.
with terror and coercion. There are indeed quite a few passages in Athanasius
like the following which are the basis for this bias:
And when the enemy could not endure it. but was even fearful that in a
short time Antony would fill the desert with the discipline, coming one
night with a multitude of demons, he so cut him with stripes that he lay
on the ground speechless from the excessive pain. For he affirmed that
the torture had been so excessive that no blows inflicted by man could
ever have caused him such torment.[...] But changes of form for evil are
easy for the devil, so in the night they made such a din that the whole
of that place seemed to be shaken by an earthquake, and the demons as if
breaking the four walls of the dwelling seemed to enter through them,
coming in the likeness of beasts and creeping things. And the place was
on a sudden filled with the forms of lions, bears, leopards, bulls,
serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves, and each of them was moving
according to his nature. The lion was roaring, wishing to attack, the
bull seeming to toss with its horns, the serpent writhing but unable to
approach, and the wolf as it rushed on was restrained; altogether the
noises of the apparitions, with their angry ragings, were dreadful. But
Antony, stricken and goaded by them, felt bodily pains severer still. He
lay watching, however, with unshaken soul, groaning from bodily anguish;
but his mind was clear [...] [5]
When mentioning the temptations of A. in #37 EJ puts them between inverted
commas. He thus distances himself from them, he is clearly not much interested.
He plays down A.'s tribulations at the hands of the devils as hallucinations akin
to those of any opium eater.
Another reason for his disinterest may be the fact that what Callot as well als
Grünewald, Breughel and Bosch depict are not temptations in the modern sense.
Today the word, the German "Versuchung" as well the English "temptation", is
used in the sense of "seduction", i.e. when our principles of behaviour are
challenged by the lure of something that appears agreeable or desirable. For us
moderns there is hardly any more a grave or threatening undertone in the word; it
may even be used in a jocular sense: Milka-die zarteste Versuchung, seit es
Schokolade gibt. So we would hesitate to use the word when describing the
situation of a man considering to take to heroin. We have come a long way from
the original existential meaning of the word, though we are still able to
recognize it without much effort as long as there is the element of seduction
implied:
Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of
the devil. […] the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain,
and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And
saith unto him, if thou wilt fall down and worship me […] Matth. 4, 1,9
The Bible uses the word as well in a sense which has no clear connotation of the
lure of the agreeable. It is the more general sense of "test" ("Prüfung"),
usually with a questionable or reprehensible intention:
Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city and setteth him on a
pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God,
cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge
concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any
time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is
written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. (Matth. 4, 5-7)
In Callot's and Breughel's engravings, as well as in Grünewald's and Bosch's
paintings of the TEMPTATION, it is the latter sense of the word which is
illustrated. The temptors we see in their pictures have nothing seductive or
alluring [4]. The grotesque ugliness of these devils and demons and the
absurdity, even burlesque of their doings seems, particularly with Breughel and
Callot, to have become an end in itself. So many a modern gallery visitor may be
puzzled why those pictures claim to show a "temptation". In fact the hideous
demons are the agents of a "test" intended to make Antonius abandon his
principles, particularly his trust in God, by way of intimidation and terror.
EJ does not see the essence of A.'s stature in his steadfast resistence to the
"Versuchungen" but in his "Zurechtweisung des Schreckens". This surprising
formula has implications which amount to my mind to the effect of creating a new
image of a figure that in the traditional rendering appeared odd and of little
interest to the 20th century.
"Zurechtweisung" (reprimand) in its literal sense points to the fact that that A.
did not suffer in silence and like a stoic. He actively turned with words against
his tormentors, he told them that he recognized their essential weakness, he let
them know his principles and his loyalty to his God.
In a more abstract sense "Zurechtweisung" indicates that A. masterfully put the
terror in its proper place, assigning it to the inferior world of matter,
insisting on the superiority of the spiritual world. It is the Christian
platonist A. that the platonist EJ recognized as a brother in the spirit on his
own way to become a Christian.
A.'s precaution to keep secret the location of his grave was of not much avail.
The faithful outwitted him: two hundred years later they claimed to have found
his remains which were then taken to Byzantium; part of his relics even got as
far as France. [6]
[1] Hans Hanakam in: Antonius der Grosse. Stern der Wüste, Freiburg 1999, p. 7 (=
Kleine Bibliothek spiritueller Weisheit)
[2] 1592-1635, born and died in Nancy, but spent part of his life in Italy, one
of the great masters of engraving.
[3] This remarkable picture may be conveniently studied in detail at
http://www.cc.ukans.edu/~sma/callot/callot.htm
[4] One isolated exception is in the Breughel engraving the figure of a naked
young woman next to the saint who goes on reading as unperturbed by her as by the
swarming demons.
For examining the Bosch painting go to
http://192.41.13.240/artchive/b/bosch/tempt_c.jpg,
for Grünewald to http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/grunewald/demons.jpg.html
[5] http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/VITA-ANTONY.HTML (Vita Antonii, 8-9)
[6] "Legende und Kult des Antonius (250-356) beginnen mit der Entdeckung
seines Grabes im Jahre 561 und der Überführung der Gebeine des Heiligen
über Alexandria nach Konstantinopel. Von dort wird 1050 eine Reliquie
nach St. Didier de la Motte, dem späteren Saint-Antoine-en-Viennois,
gebracht." [Ursula Harter, Die Versuchung des heiligen Antonius. Zwischen
Religion und Wissenschaft: Flaubert, Moreau, Redon. Berlin 1998, p. 11]
Markup © John King, 2008. Web archive generated Tue, 21st August 2007.
