Images of Christ: (Non)violent upheaval?
Rowena Loverance, in the second of her twelve-part series, considers a work by Eric Gill
In selecting works for this series, I didn’t want them all to be safely immured in churches, or in museums and art galleries. But it has to be said that Christ driving the Moneychangers from the Temple hasn’t fared too well outside them. It’s down some steps in a foyer in one of the more undistinguished buildings of University of Leeds, in an area used by students for casual conversation. It feels rather forlorn.
Eric Gill created this monumental piece in 1917-23 in response to a commission from Leeds’ art-loving vice-chancellor: it was intended as a war memorial, so represented from the start a controversial choice of subject matter. Gill saw it as commemorating ‘the most just of all wars, the war of Justice against Cupidity’, and updated the money-changers of Jesus’ day into contemporary types: a Fashionable Woman, a Pawnbroker, a Politician and so on. The moralistic tone is perhaps a little too heavy, but Gill was prescient in linking the two themes: he wrote ‘modern war… is mainly about money… the effort to bestow the advantages of “civilisation” upon “those unenlightened natives” who happen to be living where gold or oil is available’. He hammered home the theme in the Latin inscriptions: not just the obvious descriptive text from John 2.15, but also the assault on the evils of wealth from James 5.1. The dog is a reference to the Dominicans, the ‘domini canes’, dogs of the Lord, of whom Gill was a lay member. (It is now, inevitably, also a reminder of Gill’s paedophilic and zoophilic sex life, which has come to light in the last thirty years.)
At this time, Gill was a long way from the pacifist views he later espoused – in 1936 he was to co-found PAX, the first Catholic peace organisation (now Pax Christi), and he worked indefatigably for peace, both as an artist and public speaker. At the beginning of the first world war, however, he was still writing: ‘The Gospel records the occasion upon which God in the person of Christ used violence to enforce His will. Thus, for all time the use of violence in a just cause is made lawful’; and he made some wood-engravings of Christ driving out the money-changers (1919, Tate) that offer no distraction from the violence Christ is dispensing.
Using John’s account as a proof-text to justify violence has had a long Christian history. This may, however, be one case in which even the greatest artists (Dürer, Rembrandt, El Greco…), in their enthusiasm for a dynamic scene, have misled us. The scene appears in all four Gospels, but only in John is there a whip. And even there, a close reading of the text makes clear that Jesus was driving out, not the people, but sheep and cattle. It turns out, once again, that Augustine is responsible for giving the text its violent edge; before his intervention many commentators, such as Origen, pointed out that taking a whip to human beings would have been entirely out of character for Jesus.
So, maybe we should leave Gill’s great carving languishing at the bottom of its stairs, and rather take Stanley Spencer as our guide. In his, almost contemporary, treatment of the theme (1921, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham) there is no sign of a whip. The emphasis is on the upturning of the tables – the upheaval of all our cherished values which responding to Jesus will entail.
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