To Life: On Earth as it is in Heaven
Editor's note: Hi-ho, LL here. I was going to post this on the weekend as our Easter self-care. But it was so good that I decided to bump it up for some midweek self-care.
***
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, we are in need of moral courage that provides the clarity to do what is right.
There is another 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 might have been describing the contest, held just before his time, to design the bronze doors for the Baptistery of St. John in Florence, Italy that brought out the talents of artists Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi.
Ghiberti’s winning artistic design — a dazzling 20-year labor of love depicting scenes from the Bible, and one of the defining masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance hailed by the artist Michelangelo as beautiful enough to serve as “the gates of Paradise” — also fueled technical advances in casting and metallurgy.
But Brunelleschi years later 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 landmark, seminal project also spearheaded innovations in construction materials and methods, architectural blueprints, and the technology needed to hoist 70 million pounds of brick and stone up to workers stationed nearly 200 feet above ground level, and paved the way for Florence’s city-building campaign and the scientific, cultural and social revolutions of the Renaissance.
The Renaissance featured a rediscovery of classical culture, and fueled a period of great scientific and artistic exploration, innovation, and achievement.
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 famous for his iconic sculpture The Pietà, which poignantly captured the anguish of the Virgin Mary after her son Jesus was taken down from the cross.
This transcendent sculpture of David was created after the enormous block of stone used for the statue had 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 failed to bring their 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 the Cathedral of Florence.
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 faced off against 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 and beautiful.
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 point precisely behind Jesus’ right eye.
So the belief in the omniscience of Jesus is depicted in a modernistic way that more faithfully describes the mechanism by which we perceive location and distance in three-dimensional space, and is rendered visually correct on a flat two-dimensional canvas.
These men all contributed to society by perfecting their craft at the highest level, and their patient, exacting, and lifelong hard work and dedication led to the creation of unsurpassed beauty and excellence that for centuries has inspired others to push 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 medieval edifice 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 aspired to leave something for the ages, something that would make this world better than they had found it.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, ultimately, to God the Creator:
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 beatific vision of God on Easter Sunday – so too can men and women, born in God’s image, reaffirm and celebrate their faith in their Creator by the act of exercising – in imitation of Him – their God-given creative powers to proclaim His glory.
That vision and call to action is expressed in the exhortation, and aspiration, included in the only 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 power, and who grew up to be a radical firebrand and 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 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.
And so, on this very special day – and every day – that vision demands us to have courage, to be brave, to be bold and audacious, to be beautiful, 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 should not perish but have everlasting life.”
