To Life: On Earth as it is in Heaven
If there is any one message of Easter, it is one of hope, of light coming out of darkness, and the eternal triumph and renewal of life over death.
We speak of the need for courage in today’s world, and, yes, undoubtedly we are in need of the moral courage that provides the clarity and strength to do what is right.
But there is another important quality we need to rediscover: virtu.
Derived from vir, the Latin word for man, virtu has been described as one of the “manly virtues” and gave us the word virtuoso, for excellence in achievement and skill operating at the highest level and attaining the realm of art.
The Renaissance-era Italians had a special meaning for virtu. Unlike the concept of virtue as in innocence and a virginal absence of sin or vice, virtu emphasized the active, generative values of skill, leadership, pride, bravery, civic humanism, and strength.
Niccolò Machiavelli, whose book The Prince provided a manual for statecraft, described it as necessary for maintenance of the state and “the achievement of great things.”
Machiavelli just might have been describing the contest, held just before his time, to design the gilded bronze doors for the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, Italy that brought out the talents of artists Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi.
Ghiberti’s winning artistic design, a 27-year labor of love painstakingly illuminating timeless passages from the Bible, was hailed as one of the defining masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, and its spectacular beauty and exquisite craftsmanship inspired the artist Michelangelo to proclaim it “truly worthy to be the Gates of Paradise.”
Dazzlingly beautiful, it also fueled important technical advances in casting and metallurgy.
But years later Brunelleschi went on to beat Ghiberti in a later contest and achieve a landmark success of his own: the 150-foot dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in Florence, Italy.
This long-awaited technical breakthrough successfully capped a century-long effort to complete and crown the world’s largest church with the world’s largest masonry dome unsupported by columns, pillars, buttresses or scaffolds, eclipsing the concrete dome of the ancient Roman Pantheon, which until then was the world’s largest unsupported masonry dome.
This landmark, seminal project — 18 years in the making — also spearheaded innovations in construction materials and methods, architectural blueprints, and the critical technology needed to hoist 70 million pounds of brick and stone up to workers stationed nearly 200 feet above ground level.
The project also paved the way for Florence’s city-building campaign and the scientific, cultural and social revolutions of the Renaissance.
The Italian Renaissance ushered in a rediscovery of classical culture and fueled a period of great scientific and artistic exploration, innovation, and achievement.
Ancient Greece, birthplace of classical culture and western civilization, reveled in the capabilities of humankind. In contrast to earlier, static depictions of man, Greek artists portrayed the human form in motion — part of a celebration of the dynamic, active, creative principle guiding all people. The conception of the common man and woman as a conscious agent of his or her own self-fulfillment and destiny has been a rallying cry for all free people ever since.
And so, the leaders of Florence, frustrated after unsuccessful attempts over 60 years to transform a costly 20-foot block of marble into the Biblical story of the beloved hero David, finally recruited a young Michelangelo, who was already acclaimed for his iconic sculpture The Pietà, which poignantly captured the heartbreaking anguish of the Virgin Mary after her son Jesus was taken down from the cross.
Michelangelo’s transcendent sculpture of David was created after the enormous block of stone used for the statue had already lied abandoned for 25 years in the courtyard of the Opera del Duomo because the two artists originally hired had thought the marble, which came from the famed quarries in Carrara, had too many imperfections, and after chipping away at it both failed to bring their artistic vision to completion.
Michelangelo was hired to complete the project, which was to be one of a series of statues depicting Old Testament figures to be placed in Florence’s cathedral.
His interpretation of David differs from earlier versions by artists Verrocchio, Ghiberti and Donatello, who depicted a triumphant version of the young hero standing victorious over Goliath’s severed head.
Michelangelo instead chose to depict David before the battle: alert and ready for combat armed only with a slingshot, his muscles tense and his eyes narrowed in deep concentration — a quality prized in the Renaissance that celebrated the thinking man — as he bravely faced off, without the protective covering of armor, against his opponent, the fearsome giant Goliath.
And instead of rendering David as a wizened Old Testament religious elder and patriarch, Michelangelo risked offending pious Church leaders by celebrating an ideal young male form in all its humanistic glory: David as a young Greek god, larger than life, naked to the world, and beautiful.
Leonardo da Vinci also attempted to reconcile scripture and classical culture while providing a new way to portray the God-centered physical world of his patrons in his painting The Last Supper. But the scene, a rendering of the Passover meal of Jesus and His disciples just before His crucifixion, was already a popular subject of earlier artists; what more could he possibly add to this tried-and-true artistic convention?
Da Vinci’s contribution to this familiar theme incorporated three-dimensional perspective — a newer, more realistic way of rendering the world than the flat perspective prevalent in the mosaics of pre-Renaissance Byzantine art.
The shocking moment he captured, when Jesus reveals His foreknowledge — “One of you will betray me” — is framed by the horizontal lines of the dining room, which extend past the horizon to a vanishing, or infinity, focal point precisely behind Jesus’ all-seeing right eye.
So the belief in the omniscience of Jesus is depicted in a modernistic way that more faithfully describes the process by which we perceive location, depth and distance in three-dimensional space, and is also rendered visually correct on a flat two-dimensional surface.
These men all contributed to their society by perfecting their craft at the highest level, and their patient, exacting, and lifelong hard work and loving dedication led to the creation of new, unexpected, and unsurpassed beauty and excellence that for centuries has inspired others to strive for new levels of their own achievement.
This dedication was evident as far back as the design of the majestic Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. This grand, imposing monument to enduring and sustaining faith most certainly wasn’t built on a budget, or by the lowest possible bidder, but was created in that timeless moment when artisans, builders, popes and monarchs all breathed the same charged air and, together, aspired to leave something for the ages, something that would make this world better than they had found it.
And although Catholic, it speaks and belongs to all of humanity. And before it was tragically damaged in a fire, it had attracted millions of visitors each year, and through the ages has inspired people from many faiths and nationalities near and far, just as its extensive restoration does now.
Similarly, in The Divine Comedy, his epic poem of ultimate spiritual redemption, Dante Alighieri invokes the phrase “il miglior fabbro” — literally, “the greater craftsman” — to refer to previous renowned poets and artists and, ultimately, to God:
For just as Dante’s narrative traces his allegorical journey from darkness and error on the evening of Good Friday to the revelation of the divine light — culminating in the momentary blissful vision of God on Easter Sunday — so too can men and women, both born in God’s image and kissed with that immortal spark of divinity that we call soul, reaffirm and celebrate their faith in God their Creator by the act of exercising, in imitation of Him, their own God-given creative powers.
And it is in this intersection of personal faith and shared public life that we can see a harmony, a mutual balance and affinity between the sense of wonder and discovery that leads us to explore and study the physical world and the laws of nature using the scientific method while we also contemplate the deeper mysteries and human dimensions of our life here on this Earth, which are best expressed in art, literature, music, architecture, philosophy, and religion:
It is in the dizzying, tempestuous rush of time, when it can be so easy for us to miss those small fleeting moments of recognition — so full of clarity and awesome in their unknowable, unnameable beauty and stillness — when we suddenly, truly understand what it means to walk this Earth in love and grace as brothers and sisters in God, to burn brightly with a passion and a purpose to leave behind a world better than the one we found, and to seize upon the exhilarating possibilities of what could yet be amid this constant, titanic, age-old struggle between chaos and community.
That vision and call to action is expressed perfectly in the exhortation and aspiration included in the one prayer that Jesus left us:
“On Earth, as it is in Heaven.”
And so, in that spirit, today we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a man born in the humblest of circumstances and in a land occupied by a brutal foreign superpower at the height of its earthly power, and who grew up to be a radical firebrand and wandering itinerant preacher who preached about love, non-violence, and the rejection of worldly wealth.
Who overturned the money changers’ tables at the temple, was rejected by the religious elites of his faith, and betrayed, at times, by the men around him — but never by the women, who stood vigil at the cross and proclaimed the empty tomb to the unbelieving.
Who was executed by the Romans as an enemy of the state but who lives on as the embodiment and the epitome of God and man’s moral evolution from the jealous, vengeful God of the Old Testament to the undying principle of universal, selfless love.
So, rejoice!
Because as Mary Magdalene discovered, and that empty tomb attested:
He is risen!
And so, on this very special day — and every day hereafter — that vision commands us to have courage, to be brave, to be bold and audacious, to be beautiful and true to ourselves, and to love and be loved.
Because, as the Gospel of John assures us:
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
So here’s to love, and its gift of everlasting and undying life!
By Randy Abraham
