Van Gogh’s Eyes

Abstract

Vincent van Gogh is surely the most sacred painter of the late modern world, and his impact has been truly universal, thereby establishing Van Gogh as a truly unique artist, but also, and inescapably for us, a unique saint. While sanctity can rarely be recognized in the true artist, it would appear to be undeniable in Van Gogh, perhaps the most humble of modern artists, yet also the most fiercely independent. Passion dominated Van Gogh, even to the point of madness, self-mutilation, and suicide, for it is the deeply passionate Van Gogh who gave us our greatest self-portraits since Rembrandt, and no other artist has revealed so much about himself in his work. Perhaps his eyes are here most self-revealing, and even as he could affirm that he preferred painting eyes to cathedrals, the eyes of his greatest self-portraits unveil a truly new cathedral, a cathedral of a new world, a new totality uniting the sacred and the profane, or eternity and the here and now, or flesh and Spirit. Although Van Gogh is the deepest of modern Calvinists, he is also a truly new Catholic artist, yet here the “natural” and the “supernatural,” or nature and grace, are simply indistinguishable, as he called forth not only a truly new nature, but a truly new grace, and a truly embodied grace, one embodied in the depths of body itself. These are the depths which are most openly embodied in Van Gogh’s eyes, eyes revealing the deepest abyss, but an abyss which is finally a transfiguring abyss, one here not only deeply envisioned, but deeply embodied as well.