A Common Faith

[A] bishop [episkopos], as God’s steward, must be blameless;…hospitable, a lover of goodness, master of himself, upright, holy, and self-controlled (Titus 1:7)

The battle of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) was one of the most traumatic crucibles of conflict in the Second World War. Close to 2 million people died. Although it is one of the identifiable points at which the tide of the war turned, the human cost to those caught up in it, on all sides, resists any meaningful calculation.

The maker of this work (now known as the Stalingrad Madonna) was Dr Kurt Reuber. He combined three vocations: those of a trained artist, a Lutheran pastor, and a physician. His pre-war, anti-Nazi views did not prevent his being drafted into the Wehrmacht as a military doctor, and he found himself in a bunker in Stalingrad at Christmas in 1942, enduring the city’s long and devastating winter siege.

‘Amend what [is] defective’, instructs the Letter to Titus, in a summons to reparative living (1:5). The fourth-century bishop John Chrysostom would later acknowledge just how radical the demands of this duty to repair might turn out to be on those whose calling was to teach Christianity (he describes them as ‘physicians of souls’):

But the physician does not strike, but heals and restores him that has stricken him. (Titus 2.7)

Reuber regularly treated the Russian population in Stalingrad as well as his own men, gaining a reputation among the former for his sympathy and compassion, restoring even those who—as, technically, ‘the enemy’—might at any point ‘strike him’.

Four terrible words—along with the date—acknowledge the violence and horror out of which his Madonna and Child emerged: ‘IM KESSEL’, and ‘FESTUNG [fortress] STALINGRAD’:

‘Kessel’ means ‘kettle’ in German as in the modern verb ‘to kettle: to encircle a group of people’. [I]ts older meaning is ‘cauldron’. (Davies 2023: 20)

Yet four other words push back. At top right we read ‘LICHT’ (light), and down the right-hand side, ‘LEBEN’, ‘LIEBE’ (life, love). At left: ‘WEIHNACHTEN’ (‘Christmas’).

Like the Letter to Titus, Reuber—in his pastoring, his medicine, and his art—was seeking wellsprings of repair that were deeper than the ‘unprofitable and futile’ destructiveness (3:9) that surrounded him. Faced with a human violence and sin rarely surpassed in history, he brought something to birth in this artwork that he believed the cauldron would not consume.

References

Davies, Hilary. 2023. ‘Sacramental Landscapes: Coventry Sixty Years On’, The British Art Journal, 24: 15–20

Schaff, Philip (ed.). 1995. Chrysostom: Homilies on Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, vol. 13 (Peabody: Hendrickson)

‘Cretans are always liars’ (Titus 1:12). The Letter to Titus endorses this slur (v.13) but didn’t author it. The early Christian theologian John Chrysostom traces it to a legendary prophet and poet called Epimenides—himself a Cretan—who probably lived in the seventh–sixth centuries BCE. The words are a rare example of a pagan source being quoted in the New Testament.

Chrysostom offers an explanation for Epimenides’s verdict:

[T]he reason he was moved to say it is necessary to mention.…The Cretans have a tomb of Jupiter, with this inscription. ‘Here lieth Zan, whom they call Jove’. (Titus 3.12)

The ancient tradition of a ‘Tomb of Zeus’ on Crete (Jove or Jupiter in his Roman incarnation) is widely attested. It may be a literary invention—though a pre-Hellenic Minoan tomb discovered in 2018 has recently been claimed as the original.

So why did this make liars of the Cretans?

What Epimenides’s lost poem and Chrysostom’s commentary both want to highlight is the naked inconsistency (indeed, the lie) of giving the name ‘god’ to something or someone that can die.

But they differ in their reasoning. Epimenides was unlikely to have had a problem with the idea of Zeus’s (or Jupiter’s) divinity. The lie for him was claiming his mortality. By contrast, for Chrysostom (and, presumably, the Letter to Titus), Zeus’s mortality presented no difficulty at all. Indeed, in a sense Zeus had ‘died’ already. For Christians, the Graeco-Roman deity was a discredited fiction, like the shattered fragments of the idol in Tommaso Laureti’s painted ceiling in the Vatican. The lie was proposing that so unworthy and inconstant an object should ever deserve the dignity of being considered divine.

As in Paul’s sermon on the Areopagus in Athens, related in Acts 17, we have a window here onto the running argument of early Christianity with the religiosity of its Hellenistic environment. The ‘unknown God’ of Acts 17:23 is the only god worthy of the title: immortal, eternal; before all things, and above all things. In such a divinity (to recall the second—and only other—quotation from Epimenides’s lost poem in the New Testament corpus), ‘we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17: 28).

And although, in the humanity he took to himself, this God might be crucified—and even, indeed, buried—no tomb could ever confine such a deity.

References

Schaff, Philip (ed.). 1995. Chrysostom: Homilies on Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, vol. 13 (Peabody: Hendrickson)

In 1912, the French painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger published the first theoretical work on Cubism: Du ‘cubisme’.

In the winter of 1918, while living in New York, Gleizes announced to his wife: ‘A terrible thing has happened to me: I believe I am finding God’ (Robbins 1964: 22).

In 1922, he wrote Painting and its Laws.

Gleizes would not formally be received into the Roman Catholic Church until 1941, but this book was nevertheless an affirmation of faith: faith that the activity of painting was answerable to deep structures and rhythms in reality; faith that—as in this work (For Contemplation)—art could take the parts created by Cubism’s ‘fragmentation’ of our perceptions of objects and ‘interweave’ them into a ‘cadence’ (Gleizes 1999: 36).

‘[R]eality...may be open to discussion’ but ‘is, in itself, nonetheless, sure’ (Gleizes 1999: 47).

Titus is written for a context where unity is at stake and ‘sureness’ highly prized. The pressures towards fragmentation in the infant Christian congregations are repeatedly acknowledged. There are partisan factions to contend with, containing ‘insubordinate…talkers and deceivers’ (1:10). There are ‘myths’ (v.14) and ‘lies’ (v.12) in circulation. The community feels the temptation of ‘various passions and pleasures’ (3:3), and ‘stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels’ (v.9). All of this threatens the Cretan congregation with disintegration.

It is not surprising, then, that the letter is such a sustained call to integration, even subordinating the liberties of redeemed life (rooted in Christianity’s proclamation of the loving regard of God for women, slaves, and the morally outcast) to an urgently felt need for good order. Emerging authorities in the earliest stages of the Church’s ministry—presbyteroi (‘elders’; 1:5) and episkopoi (‘bishops’ or ‘overseers’; 1:7; 3:2)—are, like heads of caringly-managed households, to maintain the discipline that will prevent the ship of faith from foundering and breaking up.

Thus, the letter is peppered with the words ‘sure’ [pistos; faith-worthy] and ‘sound’ (1:9, 13; 2:1, 2, 8; 3:8).

Gleizes felt a comparably urgent need to address the problem of how to relate the sheer variety of individual experience to some sort of collective order. It left him somewhat isolated as other Cubists turned in new directions. The Dadaists made him a target of ridicule. Yet he persisted in wanting his art to lead ‘towards deeper, more certain, more absolute joys’ than a fragmented, war-wounded world seemed willing to believe possible (Gleizes 1999: 47).

References

Gleizes, Albert and Jean Metzinger. 1912. Du ‘Cubisme’ (Paris: Figuiere)

______. 1999. Art and Religion, Art and Science, Art and Production, trans. by Peter Brooke (London: Francis Boutle)

Robbins, Daniel. 1964. Albert Gleizes 1881–1953: A Retrospective Exhibition (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)