Children of the Light

Caspar David Friedrich created this small painting in 1825. It is called Woman Climbing up to the Light and shows his wife Caroline going up the steep stairs in their house—seemingly an everyday scene. But there is a provocation in this motif. These stairs are a deeply undistinguished part of the house: narrow, cold, dark, ugly—not worthy of being painted. And yet there is a sense of magic, of mystical enchantment in this painting. A secret force, it seems, elevates the woman from the dark and depressing depths to a higher and brighter level. The light is clear and warm—but apparently without a source. There is no lamp, torch, window, or open door to be seen. It is a light from nowhere. Or is it an inner light that only the painter—or the woman—can ‘see’? She does not look up to the light, but her bearing is unusually upright and easy. There can be just one explanation: she is ‘in’ the light.

The first Christians lived in a paradox. They had received God’s redeeming grace and yet continued to lead a modest or even miserable life. Ephesians 5 stresses the newness of Christian existence: ‘You were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord’ (v.8). What kind of a light is this? It must be an inner force that transforms an existence that outwardly may not change all that much. In this sense, Friedrich’s painting can be seen as a modern commentary on this ‘inner light’. It gives an idea of what it means to live in the light, to be light in the Lord, overcoming the barriers between dark and light, down and up, depression and hope, death and life, the immanent and the transcendent. 

References

Hofmann, Werner. 2000. Caspar David Friedrich (New York: Thames and Hudson)

A newborn child can only flourish in a loving relationship. And it gives a whole new life to those that care for it. Therefore, Georges de La Tour shows the newborn Jesus Christ in intimate connection with his mother, and accompanied by a second woman, perhaps a midwife. Everything that matters is here.

Everything else is faded out in darkness: there is no Joseph, no stable, animals, shepherds, or kings. Only these three persons are to be seen in their intense connection. This intimacy is stressed by a special choreography of light. There is just one source of light, that makes the three visible, but itself can barely be seen. The second woman holds it with one hand and protects (and covers) it with the other one.

So one may ask, who actually illuminates whom? Does the candle shed light on the child or is it the child who gives light to the women? This is more than an aesthetic trick. Rather, a symbolic truth is revealed here: the light of faith is fulfilled in a reciprocal illumination. It is as though the child illuminates the two women, whose affection gives him light in return. Here is a spiritual occurrence which—though a quiet moment of peace and love, outwardly silent—is yet at the same time inwardly charged with the most powerful of dynamics.  

This mystical moment carries with it also an ethical motif: it underlines the importance of affection, attention, concentration, purity, and silence. In the light of this painting, Ephesians 5 can be read differently: not as a rigorous catalogue of ethical demands, but as a sermon on the fundamental and complex Christian symbol of light, and on the consequences it may have for one’s own life.

References

MacGregor, Neil, with Erika Langmuir. 2000. Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art (London: BBC)

This is a small segment of a huge stained-glass window (22 x 8 metres) created in 1939 by Elisabeth Coester for the church of St Nikolai in Hamburg. It is one of only a few works by her that have survived.

Coester became famous for the gigantic stained-glass walls (800 square meters!) she formed in 1928 for the avant-garde ‘Steel Church’ in Essen and a similar work for St Nikolai in Dortmund a year later. These two masterpieces of modern church architecture were destroyed or severely damaged during the Second World War.

Today Coester is almost forgotten, for several reasons: she was a modern artist who worked mainly for the Protestant church; she died early at just 41 (in 1941); her work consisted mostly of stained glass and was doomed in the war; and—last but not least—she was a woman.

In her window for St Nikolai, she combines traditional motifs with a modern aesthetic and a courageous message. Christ is not, as was common in German churches during the Nazi regime, portrayed as a heroic man or a powerful ruler, but a defenceless child. Centuries of Western images—from later medieval through to Renaissance times and beyond—have depicted this child as a newborn, naked infant sitting on his mother's lap. But here, he is preciously dressed, sitting upright, presenting himself as a paradoxical Lord of Peace. He—and not an emperor in Rome, or anywhere else—rules the world, and not with armies, but with his light.

In the large glass tableau which is its context, this high-up segment is one of the brightest, thus illustrating the words from Ephesians 5: ‘Christ will shine on you’ (v.14; own translation). It reveals the religious core of the Christian talk of ‘children of light’. It is more than a mere catalogue of virtues and rules, but the appearance of a new image of man—in Christ.

This image of Christ does indeed originate in ‘evil days’ (v.16), created for one of the few liberal churches which in contrast to large parts of German Protestantism kept a distance from the Nazi dictatorship, proclaiming an anti-imperial faith.

References

Senn, Gerhard. 2005. Künstler zwischen den Zeiten, Elisabeth Coester (Eitorf: Wissenschaftsverlag für Glasmalerei)