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Date: 2008-07-17

Servant of the Sick; the Michelangelo Code

St. Camillus de Lellis Honored

ROME, JULY 17, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Now that the Holy Father has been transported Down Under with a mighty gust of jet engine, in orphaned Rome the summer doldrums are setting in.

A final few flashes of excitement light up the month, including the delightful “Festa dei Noantri,” the holiday celebrating the singular identity of the residents of the Trastevere district, when the statue of the Madonna of Mount Carmel is paraded by the local churches and then taken for boat ride along the Tiber.

A chain of parties commemorate, among others, the national independence days of the United States, Canada, Columbia, Peru, Egypt and France (July seems to be a popular month for declaring independence).

But a quiet celebration surprised both Romans and tourists as a flurry of activity surrounded the tiny church of St. Mary Magdalene, one block from the Pantheon.

Locals and visitors alike were learning about the extraordinary life of St. Camillus de Lellis who lived at the church until his death on July 14, 1614.

Camillus de Lellis was born in 1550 in the nearby town of Chieti, the son of a mercenary soldier. With one of the more inauspicious stories of saintly origins, Camillus was a gambling addict, a soldier-of-fortune and a twice-failed Franciscan.

As with many others, the Eternal City helped St. Camillus find his path.

Afflicted with foot abscesses, Camillus found his way to the Hospital of St. James for the Incurables, now hidden in the back streets of Rome’s chicest neighborhood. In return for treatment for his feet, he offered to help care for the sick and dying in the hospital.

Here, Camillus found the cure for his spiritual illness in giving himself to others. The man who could not join an order wound up founding one. The Ministers of the Infirm, as they were called, would become one of the most familiar sights in Rome and later the world.

In the annex to the Church of the Magdalene is the residence of the “Camillans,” as they are called locally. For his feast day, all are welcome to climb the stairs to the former chapter hall and view the history of the order and its saints.

At the end of the hall, a tiny room, the quarters of Camillus, has been transformed into a chapel. It was hard for me to find a place among all the people kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament and the relic of St. Camillus’ heart, which had been placed next to the Lord.

Two stunning oil paintings lined the entire length of the chapel. Painted with the photographic vividness of late 18-century art by Matteo Toni, they allow visitors to witness the last moments of the saint’s life.

The first represents the viaticum, or last Holy Communion of Father Camillus, given to him lovingly by a cardinal. Camillus raises his head toward the Eucharist, his body weak, but his spirit still strong in his yearning to be with God.

The second canvas captures the moment of the saint’s death. From the doorway of the chapel, it seems that several Camillans are gathering around the feet of the saint. A Franciscan and another religious appear from the direction of the altar to converge on the body of Camillus.

The saint seems peacefully asleep -- almost smiling -- witness to a good and peaceful death in hope of heaven.

From the scenes of Camillus’ passage into heaven, and his personal objects displayed in a case outside the door, one steps into a larger room filled with objects recounting the Camillans and Rome.

St. Camillus’ followers took a fourth vow: to serve the sick even if their own lives were at risk. Many times the Ministers of the Infirm kept this vow as they forayed into areas of the city struck by plague or cholera or, as was immortalized in art and history, carrying the sick out of the hospital when the flooding Tiber threatened to submerge the building.

The Bull of Clement VIII in 1594 that approved the order, the lists of those nursed during epidemics, the stories and relics of Camillans who have begun the road to sainthood, and the portraits of the 57 superior generals of the order recount the long history of the order and the Eternal city.

One striking document was issued by General Stahel during the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1943. It declared that the house of the Ministers of the Infirm would be exempt from search and seizure by the invading soldiers.

Amid all festivities of national identity and self-governance, the feast of St. Camillus stood out as a gentle nod to all those who have come to Rome and were given the grace to find themselves and their purpose in life.

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More Vatican Secrets "Revealed"

I suppose it was inevitable. After Dan Brown cashed in by selling out Jesus -- with Mary Magdalene and Leonardo da Vinci thrown in for good measure -- it was only a matter of time that some enterprising author would turn his attention to Michelangelo. But this book, unlike "The Da Vinci Code," doesn't even have the decency to acknowledge it is fiction.

"The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages at the Heart of the Vatican," by Rabbi Benjamin Blech and tour guide Roy Doliner, purports to reveal how Michelangelo embedded hidden messages of Kabalistic thought and anti-papal sentiment while painting in the Sistine Chapel.

The book is a "Michelangelo Code" of sorts, but like Dan Brown's novel, it offers no documentary evidence and nary a footnote to back up its claims.

As someone who has led many a tour in the Sistine Chapel, the first thing that struck me about the book was how the claims of Blech and Doliner revolve around the most frequently asked questions by visitors to the chapel.

Why is there so much Old Testament imagery in a Christian chapel, many query as they see the cycle of Moses on the walls and Genesis, painted by Michelangelo across the ceiling.

The authors declare that Michelangelo changed his original commission from the Twelve Apostles requested by Pope Julius II to the Genesis cycle out of a secret sympathy for Jews. But Pope Sixtus IV, the uncle of Julius, had already hired the finest painters in Florence 25 years earlier to decorate the lower panels with the stories of Moses paralleling the life of Christ.

As art historians and theologians know, the point of these images was to represent the seamless flow from the Old Testament to the New Testament, the fulfillment of God's covenant with man through the coming of Christ. As a consecrated chapel where the Pope would celebrate the Eucharist some 40 times a year, the theme of God's plan for man's salvation starting from the origins of our need to be saved was an apt choice for the ceiling.

But for Michelangelo, the subject of Genesis offered the possibility of accomplishing a feat never done before: Painting a narrative 60 feet off the ground and making it readable from the floor through his unique sculptural painting.

Doliner and Blech insist that Michelangelo learned about Kabala, a form of Jewish Gnosticism, in the garden of Lorenzo de Medici in Florence, when at 15 the young artist went to study sculpture there.

They hypothesize that Pico della Mirandola was the origin of Michelangelo's interest in Kabala.

Pico, a philosopher and humanist, had formed a syncretistic theory of all ancient thought from Plato to the Arab writings of Averroes to Kabala and the Bible. Like Thomas Aquinas' "Sententiae," Pico dreamed of defending his thesis before an international congress of scholars, but many of his theses were condemned as heretical and ultimately Pico retired to Florence.

Pico, at the time Michelangelo met him, was closely tied to Giacomo Savonarola, the famed Florentine Dominican preacher. By then Pico had already recanted his heterodox theories.

The authors overlook that Michelangelo was a third order Franciscan, like his hero Dante, as well as the fact that while Michelangelo never mentioned Pico, he often recalled the sermons of Savonarola throughout his life.

But what they conspicuously neglect is that Michelangelo was taking a hammer and chisel into his hands for the very first time and embarking on the greatest love affair of his life, with the art of sculpture. Michelangelo's messages would not be interesting to us if his art were not so powerful, and that richness of his works comes from the ceaseless practice of his art. We honor him today for his extraordinary talent, which he knew was God-given.

So how do Doliner and Blech turn him into a propagandist with crypto-Jewish sentiments and an anti-papal agenda?

Drawing on Dr. Frank Meshberger's 1990 article in the Journal of American Medicine, where he proposed that the cape of God in the creation of Man was shaped like a cross-section of the human brain, the authors seize on the idea, speculating that it is the right side of the brain, which according to Kabala contains secret God-given knowledge.

Even if Meshberger's theory were correct, one would only have to look at the Gospel of John 1:1, "In the beginning there was the Word," a source with which Michelangelo was certainly more familiar, to find the idea of God as Logos.

Many tourists over the years have wondered why God, in the creation of the sun and moon, is so prominently featured from the back.

In the hands of these authors, the tired old tour guide joke that this was the origin of the term "mooning," becomes the basis of their anti-papal theory. They claim that Michelangelo made God "moon" the Pope, because he was so angry about having to paint the chapel instead of work on the sculptural commission he had been promised.

From here they extrapolate that Michelangelo was disgusted with the corruption of the papal court, as well as the Church's treatment of the Jews and added figures making other obscene gestures at the Pope. Besides the fact that these other gestures are nowhere to be seen, it is ironic that two writers purporting to be familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures missed the most obvious scriptural reference to God's "back parts," when Moses in Exodus 33 asks to see God's glory and is denied because no one can see God's face and live.

God, to show his favor of Moses, allows him to look upon His "back parts." The Christian understanding of this event is that in the Old Testament man cannot see God, but with the Word made flesh, everyone could finally look upon God's face.

This theological point, which justifies Christian art, explains why Christians have a visual culture and why Michelangelo could dare to paint God.

The reason why Doliner and Blech have a chapel to study is because the people who gathered in that space and the man who painted it believed that God descended among men as Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, and in that space during the Mass, we could relive the encounter with the living God.

Ultimately, the authors claim that Michelangelo, gainfully employed and greatly respected within the Vatican walls, was betraying the trust placed in by the Pope and theologians of the court, to advertise his own interests on the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

It is perhaps not surprising that this idea occurred to co-author Roy Doliner, who despite a lack of any formal education in art history or theology has been able to earn a living giving tours at the Vatican Museums. He hangs his own agenda on isolated images from the chapel without any consideration of the chapel's meaning and function as a whole.

The book is redolent with anti-papal sentiment, despite lip service paid elsewhere by Blech to Pope John Paul II and the "good Pope John XXIII."

According to these authors, the Pope, his court and the endless stream of theologians, historians, saints and philosophers who have meditated on the chapel, were blind to this "code"; only the wisdom of Doliner and Blech could see to the mind and heart of Michelangelo. Gnosticism at its best.

In the end, Doliner and Blech's interpretation of the chapel mirrors others that see the chapel as a sort of Protestant manifesto, and is only slightly more plausible than another recent theory that the chapel contains encrypted messages from aliens.

Gender studies, psychologists, gay activists and thousands of others have seen themselves reflected in the ceiling and have co-opted Michelangelo for their own agendas over the years.

Bottom line: If everyone can find him or herself reflected in the ceiling of the chapel, it makes Michelangelo pretty universal. And isn't that the definition of Catholic?

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Elizabeth Lev teaches Christian art and architecture at Duquesne University's Rome campus. She can be reached at lizlev@zenit.org.