Who Shall Separate Us?

Paul tells us that the sufferings of creation are anticipatory, that its groans are labour pains, that a glorious salvation is coming. For Paul, Christ is a Second Adam who makes possible the renewal of creation which the first Adam’s sin had subjected to ‘the bondage of corruption’, to ‘dust and oblivion’ (Barth 1959: 99).

References to suffering (Romans 8:18) and a sense of decay (v.21) are ubiquitous in Vittore Carpaccio’s Meditation on the Passion. Bones, wounds, weeds, and collapsing masonry characterize the foreground, with a skull like the skull of Adam (often depicted at the foot of the cross), particularly prominent. The landscape on the left, with its one, leafless tree, is cavernous and craggy, inhabited by ravaging animals. Jerome, whose hand on his chest recalls the common iconography of him beating his breast with a stone, sought just such a wilderness as part of his asceticism. In this penitential landscape, he and Job wait for ‘the redemption of our bodies’, for the fulfilment of Job’s testimony that his Redeemer lives and that, after his death, he will nonetheless and in his flesh, ‘see God’ (Job 19:25–27).

Despite the groans of creation, Paul views this period of waiting for renewal as a time of hope, sustained by the spirit (v.26), and he reflects on the role of God’s human creatures in furthering divine purposes (v.28). Jacopo Bassano’s St Veronica gives us one way of imagining how those who are ‘called according to [God’s] purpose’ might be ‘conformed to the image of his Son’ (vv.28–29). We cannot see the future portrait of Christ which will be imprinted on her veil, but we see her own conformity to him. Her posture, her hair, her clothing, all mirror him as she voluntarily shares in his degradation.

For the Dominican friars of San Marco, conformity to Christ was an aspiration which guided every aspect of their lives. As they sought to model their behaviour and their spiritual development on that of their saintly role models, Fra Angelico’s frescoes provided instruction and inspiration.

Paul knows that conformity to Christ will not come easily. But, despite trials and tribulations, peril and persecution (vv.35–36), he confidently reassures his readers that nothing can separate them from God’s love (vv.38–39).

Job bore the sufferings inflicted on him with patience. Jerome chose ascetic hardship as a spiritual practice that would bring him closer to Christ. Veronica responded to Christ’s suffering in humility and vulnerability—an uncovered woman, kneeling in the dirt, amongst soldiers. The friars of San Marco tried to imitate saintly examples of suffering, such as the bleeding St Peter Martyr, or St Dominic, weeping at the foot of the cross in a fresco in their cloister.

Whether we take Paul’s translated words in verses 37–39 at face value, or picture a world threatened by the devilish forces and beings he may have been referring to, the certainty with which Paul dismisses any possibility of separation from God’s love, echoes through these paintings.

Neither death nor life can separate Job and Jerome from the redemption which they cannot yet see, but which seems prefigured in the landscape behind Job in which wilderness gives way to a flourishing scene of greenery, cultivation, buildings, and tiny, prosperous-looking people. The red parrot near Christ’s throne may be a symbol of the coming resurrection and the longed-for redemption.

The powers which condemned Christ to that long walk to Calvary do not separate St Veronica from him; on the contrary, it is in that context that she comes closest to God’s love and is transformed by her own participation in God’s purposes.

Neither the ‘things present’—the socially unacceptable and apparently impossible circumstances of the Virgin’s pregnancy—nor the excruciating pain of the ‘things to come’ (v.38) which attend her vocation as God’s mother, can separate her from it.

Separation from God is conquered in Christ (v.37), in the willingness of Mary kneeling at prayer in a room barely distinguishable from the friar’s cell, in the tearing of the Temple curtain (Matthew 27:51) which separated man and God and is echoed in the punctured fabric of Veronica’s clothes. And it is conquered in the luminous, empty space beyond the Virgin and the Angel which indicates the mystery of the Incarnation, in which virginity is no barrier to Christ’s conception.

References

Barth, Karl. 1959. A Shorter Commentary on Romans (London: SCM)

Dunn, James D. G. 1988. Word Biblical Commentary: Romans 1–8 (Dallas: Word Books)

Reddaway, Chloë. R. 2016. Transformations in Persons and Paint: Visual Theology, Historical Images, and the Modern Viewer (Turnhout: Brepols), ch.5