Images of Christianity: Cain and the Pythagorean

Images of Christianity: Cain and the Pythagorean

In memory of the teacher of the least but builder of the most

Gillian

Dedicated to

The Painter Sabrina

Cain

The Pythagorean

The Philosophers and the Lives

"It is memory and not expectation that gives unity and wholeness to human existence"

H. Arendt on St. Augustine

Left: "Golgotha", Govert Flinck, Belgium XVI cent.
Right: "The Crucifixion", Assissi, Lower Basilica, XIII cent.






A) "The church is the community of God in the future eternally disatisfied with the present". E. Bloch.
B) "What is important is to be completely and entirely present". K. Jaspers.
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1) If she, the painter, would set herself on a pilgrimage from Mt. Olives to the Holy Sepulcher (as in the festivities of Eastern but in reverse) the only striking images of the world would be Golgotha and the Crucifixion. She would have then to produce an Oriental painting, atavic, incomprehensible, a painting of the scenes that unfold constantly as a present. However when looked at from the vantage point of the redeemed future, Hamlet's untimely moment of death would have to be looked at as two different mirrors of the Christ's eyes. The insignificant callous discrepancy would reveal two differing philosophical encounters, that of the Nietzschean Death of God (the definitive exodus of Zarathustra toward the ego, without arks, burning fires or parting waters) and its Hegelian counterpart (the death of the Greek gods. The sharp glittering of the jaded green in the eyes of the Christ can be seen only with the cross, the suffering on the cross that became possible only long after the death of Jesus, the Jew. The cross summons Abel and Apollo, the winners of civilization, but they're uninteresting. We want Sabrina's painting because it shatters the cosmic order, summoning Cain and Korach, ecstasic festivities of fools, drunkards and puppets with their parents... Endymion, Diana, Bacchus.
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2) The crucifixion is the history of salvation and Golgotha is just the memory. Yet very little distances Golgotha and the Crucifixion, it is the metamorphosis of a third eye, Hamlet's. Only a philosophical flight back into the world in its rawest leafing turn the eyes of the Christ into two different highways: That of Cain and that of the Pythagorean. Lessing and Goethe knew this; how it's possible to juxtapose Greece and Christianity and overcome both thereafter and at the same time in one person. The Pythagorean is a Greek lover and Cain's already turned into the Hebraic melody of the Psalms of Brecht. Thus tells the Talmud in the Tractate "Berakhot" that King David knew in advance the day of his death, on the Holy Shabbat and he then studied the Torah without taking his eye off for a second until he stumbled upon a branch and fell to this Shakesperean untimely death. The Greek lover didn't understand too much about time on the other hand and was prepared, not unlike Socrates, for Cato's pleasing defeat. O fallacy of truth! King David and Cain are very best friends. And poor Jonathan, the lover and poet, fell in a war like Abel because poetizing the world was never enough lest someone bear the whole burden of a life that knows no soothsaying or prayer other than despair; the Pythagorean hearkened to the oracles everyday while Cain only unheard the distancing God. That's the mark of Cain, his love for the world - the most negative commandment. That's why his mother Eve and the mortally wound Abel can never find him, because the mark of Cain is in every form of humanity.
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3) The painter prefers Cain, the unfinished weeping of the town women in Golgotha, the endless mourning before the law. Antigone! The godless Myriam of the Kabbalists. She loves Cain because as the Hungarian poem goes, "Every newborn is a Messiah, only later he turns into the scoundrel". Cain chooses to be the fugitive, the liar, the sufferer and he sits "amidst the tent of Ya'akov" next to the flames of Auschwitz staring into the Rabbis teaching the Talmud to Helen of Troy. His beauty happens suddenly and as an accident and in the confirmation of the disappointment shines the commandment. Sabrina hates the security of the Greek, because it clashed with her art. She doesn't believe in the Christ or in the history of salvation because if so then Cain should die, for the sake of humankind, for the sake of all and how stupid it could be to die for something that can never be thought; it's only available in nature, in life, in the questions asked by human beings, in simple dinners. Sabrina and Hamlet learn that only on account of Cain's falsehood he wears the eyes of the Christ in the painting while the Pythagorean is already the Messiah and consequently the false one and only because he speaks the truth, like Homer. And it is Hamlet, the resultless philosopher who paints this genesis, always sketching impossible scenes attempting to capture the present, but he knows not how to paint.
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4) Letter of Abel to his mother Eve:

"Dear mother,
I've stood at the fair boots today in the festivities of the Christians and a little painting on an icon stole away my attention, at first it looked rather Byzantine and Greek and displayed the Christ in his whole splendor, this is of course badly unsurprising. Yet from a far it looked like a philosophical book, yet as I drew further I could envisage this painting, I must attempt or rather dare describe it to you. The painting was so small that it could cover an entire wall and at the same time half the canvas was left blank! The woundrous art work depicts a stale and smokeless room where two young men have dinner next to a large window, and a wall is the only thing in sight... thus you can examine from their table the whole of Jerusalem as only God sees it while it's at any rate the most impressive and clear sight of Jerusalem since her last suicide attempt. Small threads for hanging laundry extend from one end of the world to the other and the air is charged with noises from the Mosques, it's the earthliest Jerusalem I saw ever since we looked for Cain in the train waggons. The atmosphere all filled with such beautiful serenity... It was a painting about Cain! I think now that we've searched for him effortlessly because with the painting I realized that Cain and the Christ aren't quite the same, Cain is the whole of humanity but not of humankind and because he's already arrived in this world he can hardly live with himself. He wants to desire but not the desire at all, you see? He's so Hebraic and Oriental that you could hardly distinguish him from the Greek statues and that's how we must search for him there, in a world where all faces are alike but the intentions differ; it's the dead nature of Kant's aesthetics. Yet no matter how impressive, the painting shows very little love while surrounded by an unbearable of it. My brother wants nothing from this world and that's why he must live it, so entirely unthrilled and falsely hopeful, he wants to change the life and for that very reason it's impossible to see him because that's in fact the turning point of the whole of humanity. Only one person can see Cain in this painting... the painter Sabrina and this is so only because she didn't draw it at all, she could at most just endanger the vision. The work itself is the handicraft of a philosopher and I know this because no matter whether the Christ is on the cross as the only visible language unconcealing therein, and even though it speaks much about salvation the scene occurs all the time prior to the Messianic age therefore it can't be a crucifixion, it's a painting of Golgotha. I can't quite tell you who the intriguer is behind this unfinished Last Supper but I can only suspect very few and by no means need mention them to you. I think there can be one intriguer, that one, because he's already deserted the waiting and has made himself too much at home in the estrangement of Cain, he would never let the ark of Noah go astray and because this is the only moral available from the story the boat must sink before Cain be at a long last seen. Yet this isn't bad at all, because the intriguer knows of no compromises, he doesn't promise anything at all. You see? It's true, ""This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live".
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5) Sabrina's signature: "You've become the eternal motif behind all my paintings.... And he wanted the kingdom of God on earth. Title of the work: Jesus the Unchrist.