Abstract
Martien E. Brinkman’s book is an examination of ‘hidden Christ’ imagery in modern Western art (films, literature, and visual arts). Brinkman defines the hidden Christ in these works as a figure that is not explicitly identified with Jesus (thus ruling out fictional biographies of Jesus such as Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ or José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ) but who embodies a set of Christ-like qualities, such as the sense of bearing a message from a radically different and more hopeful world. Brinkman suggests that his interest in the book is to bring art and theology closer together, in order that the two increasingly separate disciplines can share insights and provide each other with new perspectives.
In the first section, on film, Brinkman looks at the hidden Christ in a series of European films. His selection tends towards the sombre and introspective: Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, Ingmar Bergman’s The Communicants (better known in Britain as Winter Light), Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love, and Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. Brinkman interprets the films as being about individuals (as in The Communicants and Short Film) or communities (as in Babette’s Feast and Breaking the Waves) that are ‘curved in on themselves’, from Luther’s concept of self-love as being incurvatus in se. The Christ figure in these films is the figure that breaks through this insular self-absorption, sometimes with tragic results.
In the second section, on literature, Brinkman looks at hidden Christ imagery in the works of the novelists Peter de Vries, J. M. Coetzee, and Arnon Grunberg and the poets Les Murray and Czeslaw Mislosz. Locating the significance of the work very much in the writers’ biographies, Brinkman discusses the significance of forgiveness of God in de Vries’ Blood of the Lamb and forgiveness by God (as the only legitimate source of forgiveness for sin) in Coetzee’s Disgrace, but most interesting is his discussion of Grunberg’s The Jewish Messiah, which deconstructs the Christ-figure in general by portraying a protagonist whose obsessive and impossible desire to atone for the crimes of his Nazi grandfather leads to disaster, suggesting that there are some things for which no atonement can be made, and that the urge to be Christ-like is essentially megalomania. Murray’s and Milosz’s poetry, on the other hand, is about what Christ’s sacrifice offered humanity: the opportunity to transcend the Darwinian struggle and the brutal law of the jungle, even if only hypothetically.
The final and shortest section, on the visual arts, focuses on the theme of the Last Supper and compares work by Andy Warhol, Frans Franciscus, and Harald Duwe with the painting by Leonardo da Vinci.
Brinkman’s book is an intriguing, though very dense, read. The translation from the Dutch is not always clear – for instance, Brinkman refers to a number of different ‘lines’ in Grunberg’s novels, apparently meaning themes or motifs. It is also rather disappointing that he at no point considers hidden Christ imagery in any female artist’s work (besides a couple of references to Renée Cox). But the book is otherwise an impressive study in art and theology.