Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Oscar Wilde Writing on Jesus as Artist I've never studied the life of Oscar Wilde. But this morning my curiosity is piqued because of an article I came across over at Beliefnet by Dan Wakefield, whose work I am not familiar with, but on cursory glance, appears to be substantial and wide-ranging, including several books on creativity and spirituality. The article is called Jesus as Artist. Wakefield's article refers to a long letter written by Wilde while in prison, published after his death as De Profundis. Wilde was sent to prison in 1895, having been sentenced to two years hard labor for acts of "gross indecency," referring to Wilde's now well-known promiscuous homosexuality. In De Produndis, Wilde speaks of his spiritual journey in prison, about his lack of remorse for any part of his life, and of his discovery of humility. What's interesting is the impact that Christ had on his thinking. I've only read it this morning, so this is a first glance look, but Wilde seems to have found much to love in Jesus. Wilde relates that after he acquired a Greek New Testament, he began each day with reading some dozen verses or so of Christ's life. Wilde sees the Christ bringing an artist's awareness and romantic nature to all of human experience, and while denying the actuality of Christ's miracles (it seems to me that's what he's doing), he gets the idea of the deep beauty of Christ's action in the world. It's a fascinating read, tragic in that he is, in the end, affirming a gnostic notion of the Christ, but in the mix are some beautiful thoughts that are not that far from Merton and others who write of the humility that suffering brings, and its transforming power. From De Profundis: I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. Sounds a bit like the writer of Ecclesiastes, as Wilde does again in the following passage: I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But Wilde realizes through his prison experience that this is only one side of life, that the darkness of suffering has much to teach. And it is here, that he begins talking of Jesus. I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist; and I take a keen pleasure in the reflection that long before sorrow had made my days her own and bound me to her wheel I had written in THE SOUL OF MAN that he who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell, but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the world is a song. To follow Christ and, in the following, to discover one's true self...sounds like Merton. The next passage, some one hundred and ten years later, seems incredibly in line with so much of what the emergent church is telling us about the heart of the Christ, a heart inflamed with empathetic imagination. Nor is it merely that we can discern in Christ that close union of personality with perfection which forms the real distinction between the classical and romantic movement in life, but the very basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the artist - an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy (emphasis mine) which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, 'When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.' How remote was the writer from what Matthew Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either would have taught him that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your house in letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, 'Whatever happens to oneself happens to another.' Do unto others as you would have them do unto you... 8:09:39 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Jeff Berryman .