“And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
--1 Corinthians 13:13
As Don McLean sang in 1971, perhaps the world was not meant for someone as beautiful as Vincent van Gogh.
Born at a time of strictly-defined convictions perpetuated by a rigid socio-economic structure, Vincent (as he preferred to be called) was expected to follow his harshly doctrinaire Calvinist minister father both in belief and in vocation. However, like so many other attempts at pursuing “conventional” employment options throughout his relatively short life, he tried and failed.
Vincent’s early adulthood was a slow and painful coming-to-terms with the knowledge that he could never survive the narrowness of mainstream roles his circumstances thrust upon him. He found that a church vocation limited his attention to the Bible and bound him to the austere authority of tradition, while the very things he grew impassioned about -- literature, art, nature -- were viewed as dangerous distractions. He developed a personality which craved largeness and breadth and beauty. If he were to survive; he needed to expand his soul to save it.
And then it came, the break which would lead to his flight toward wideness and beauty that would consume the rest of his days. What would save him, as it turned out, he wrote in a letter to his brother Theo, was the belief “that the best way to know God is to love many things” (Letter 133).
In so doing Vincent suddenly and unexpectedly broke away from the narrow straits of religious exclusivity and carved a new path that saw not threatening distraction but strength. Vincent’s search for the unification of nature, art, literature, religion, and practical service among the poor realized itself in a new phase of his religious transformation.
And that is when he pledged himself to be an artist, by any means necessary.
Vincent was a deeply spiritual man. As he wrote to Theo, "You need a certain dose of inspiration, a ray from on high, that is not in ourselves, in order to do beautiful things" (Letter 625). In his own way he loved God deeply, and came to think of God as "not dead or stuffed but alive, urging us to love again with irresistible force—that is my opinion" (Letter 161). He saw in God a struggling Artist like himself. Vincent's own soul - -a kind of beautiful madness incomprehensible to most people for it bordered on mania--found soothing peace on canvas and teaches us something of the meaning of beauty, and of the wideness beauty needs to breathe.
Vincent’s God was a tender version, creatively alive within all things, offering richly textured possibilities for Beauty in an ever-evolving evolving universe. So it is with van Gogh’s canvasses of interspersed color and light. A gentle, earthy love -- imbued with vulnerability and mystery -- this is the essence of van Gogh’s art.
Vincent looked to a God beyond the usual lawgiver model of his day, to one who is Love incarnate in the world.
Henry David Thoreau wrote that most people live lives of “quiet desperation,” nervous about the future, uncertain of the present, fearful of taking risks, worried about compromising the future all the while plagued with the frustrations that they are existing just to get by. Small wonder then that many of us can identify with Vincent’s stretch towards largeness of purpose, toward bigness of soul, even toward what might be termed a “fat”, well-nourished soul,” which dares to widen itself enough to “love many things” even at the risk of encountering the uncomfortable without and discordant within -- like loving one’s enemy (by this definition Jesus was a fat soul), like compassion and mindfulness (Buddha), like standing up to the most rigidly dogmatic of fundamentalists (Malala Yousafzai), or daring to challenge the boundaries of long tradition for the sake of love (Pope Francis). A fat soul is a beautiful soul, a daring soul, a loving soul, a Vincent van Gogh kind of soul.
But such an expansive soul comes at a price: It must somehow integrate, harmonize, and transform the discordant and contrasting elements that accompany a soul that opens itself up to so many life experiences. These often incompatible and conflicting elements plagued him his entire life, and this is important to beauty.
So it seems to Vincent that the soul -- and civilization itself -- must continually move toward “massiveness,” toward new and not always pleasant experiences in order not only to keep from going cold and sterile, but also to allow discordant elements enough space and time for creating beauty out of the differences, the incompatibilities—even the wreckage. And wreckage abounds. But we are often afraid of “many things” especially when narrowness feels so much more safe and secure. We are afraid of things we don’t understand, of new ideas, of other religions, of other viewpoints and behaviours, of love and death and our own contradictory desires—we are fearful creatures on the whole. Some elements of discord are evil, too. “Discord may take the form of freshness or hope, or it may be horror or pain,” says Whitehead (AI 266). How on earth can anything beautiful come out of all that?
Vincent shows us how with “Flaming flowers that brightly blaze/ Swirling clouds in violet haze,” and with “Weathered faces lined in pain” (Don McLean). He shows us how to blend and shade and use both the light and the darkness to transform the discord into fresh forms of beauty. He shows us how to paint outside the tradition, how to expand our souls, how to become co-creators with the loving and struggling Artist of the world. In short, he shows us by his life and his work what it means to transform raw pain into tragic beauty.
Vincent suffered from bouts of severe depression most of his life. Theories abound as to whether he battled what we now call bi-polar disorder, or perhaps his troubles were due to a brain lesion aggravated by his constant imbibing of absinthe (commonly available at the time) -- his illness (and even his death) have been controversial, much-debated topics. But what we do know is that despite his illness, or in some measure because of it, he was able to create extraordinary works of art in the decade before his death. And in a profoundly spiritual way, his genius had something to do with his inner blooming -- his movement from narrowness to wideness for the sake of love and beauty. It is this triumphant part of Vincent's story needs to be remembered against the more colorful mythology of “the tortured artist.”
We cannot forget that his art, his post-impressionist brilliance, would never have come into existence without an inner burgeoning towards “loving many things.” Without Vincent's painful but necessary spiritual metamorphosis, there would be no "Starry Night" at all, only a sad, troubled, forgotten man.
Vincent’s short life -- so eccentric and strange and troubled -- may have ended in tragedy, but it was, in its own way, a singularly beautiful life – it’s the story of the very universe itself as at the very heart of the nature of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy.
Our lives are filled with tragedy because we are human, because we have the capacity to feel and love and risk and make choices -- and suffer mental trauma, too. Our lives may not always be happy or successful or “on track,” but they can be beautiful nonetheless.
It's hard not to feel some kinship with this man because his life was a search for how to integrate the noblest ideas in religion with art, literature, and nature. His mental illness may have taken his life much too soon, but what he left behind only grows more powerful as human sensitivity catches up to Vincent’s own.
His art speaks to us across the years. It blares out to us in a wondrously explosive kaleidoscope of color and light and texture and form which proclaim's God's presence in the creation of all things. Ergo it is to all things we must give our love.
And that just might be the point of it all.