Nicole Newell
GCON218: Synthesis Paper
Galbraith
Spring 2013
Four Testaments: The Sacred and the Profane Intertwined
The Great Conversation, with its texts spanning from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the
philosophical treatises of the contemporary post-modern era, has borne witness to various
progressions of history and thought in the western world. As the courses build, old texts
become interpretive lenses for newer works; each encounter is enriched by and enriches the last.
The character of contemporary thought is rapidly shifting as people, ideas, philosophies, and
lifestyles exchange—the world is in constant conversation with itself. Even amidst all this flux,
there are texts in the western tradition that endure over generations; they speak to something
transcendent, something sacred, perhaps even something true. One of the most enduring and
influential of these texts is the biblical cannon, which includes the Hebrew Bible and the New
Testament. Many authors and artists throughout history have wrestled deeply with the person
of Jesus Christ and the tradition of Christianity—myself included. The biblical cannon is a rich
part of my intellectual and spiritual life; I see scripture as a witness to God’s existence and
involvement with humanity. Many of the texts in the Great Conversation have engaged with
the narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. I will argue that these non-sacred
works, though sometimes profane, secular, and unorthodox, are able to greatly enrich a faithful
understanding of sacred texts and Christian orthodoxy.
To explain and defend this, I will look at the intersections between four “testaments”:
Genesis and the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels from the New Testament, the paintings of
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, and Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of
Solitude. Genesis is a collection of different myths and stories written over several centuries
from oral and written traditions. The Hebrew Bible traces the history of the chosen people of
Israel and their relationship to YHWH. Building upon the established authority and tradition of
the Hebrew Bible, the Synoptic Gospels give accounts of Jesus’ ministry to the poor and broken
of society, his great suffering, and his resurrection. These Gospel narratives become the subject
of Caravaggio’s paintings in the late sixteenth century as part of the Counter-Reformation in the
Catholic Church. Centuries later, in 1967 South America, One Hundred Years of Solitude was
published and praised as the “first piece of literature since Genesis that should be required
reading for the entire human race.”1 The novel is akin to a Genesis narrative of Colombia’s
history. The sacred and the profane are intimately intertwined in all of these works as they
describe the human condition and suggest the nature of reality.
The first few chapters of Genesis describe a lovingly creative God, God’s relation to
people, and how people came to be so ‘fallen.’ In the beginning, “the earth was a formless
void”2 in which God created order, filling the formless void with light, sky, land, vegetation,
stars, living creatures, and beings made in His own image. The opening chapter of Genesis
describes God as a Being3 whose very Word is a creative force. When God speaks, he speaks
something into being. God surveys all that He has made and calls it good—creation has the
Marquez, back cover
Genesis 1:1 NRSV
3 A nod to Tillich here, another player in our great conversation who contends that God is not
being, but Being Itself.
1
2
mark of goodness upon it. But accompanying the magic of creation is the terrible tragedy of the
fall: the two beings in closest communion with God are forced to leave the garden with curses
upon both themselves and their descendants. Adam and Eve experience solitude removed from
God, as do all of their descendants.
One Hundred Years of Solitude recounts the story of seven generations of the Buendía
family whose lives are rampant with sinful behavior and solitude. The narrative interwoven
through the story of the seven generations of the Buendía family places a family history, rather
than any one individual, as the principal character of the story—much like the Hebrew Bible.
The arc of this story is one of the flux, the shifting, and the staying the same. Things change,
time passes, but life repeats itself; personalities repeat themselves generationally. Memory loss
feeds the cyclical nature of time, and though time moves forward, linear time is a false
perception of the Western world. Reality is magical, alive with occurrences that the present
western mind knows are false. He writes his stories in the style in which his grandmother told
stories:
She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete
naturalness… What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not
change her expression at all when telling stories... In previous attempts to write, I tried to tell the
story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and
write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: a brick face.4
Because Márquez believes in his stories, they have the character of being both fantastic and
convincing at the same time. He does not write about a fairy tale world completely separate
from our own; he writes about a colony in the deep of a jungle where alchemy, magic and
science are all synonymous. The book’s events are meant to reflect, as the mirrored Macondo,
various moments of Colombian history to give a commentary on the cultural, political, and
social changes that came with colonization and enlightenment, including the political wars
between the liberals and conservatives and the United Fruit company scandal.5 The book begins
with the founding of Macondo in a dense jungle teeming with life but completely devoid of
civilization. The village in its utopian beginning was “more orderly and hardworking than any
known,” a happy village in which youth and life reigned and no one had died.6 However, the
picturesque village quickly dissolves into lust, adultery, incest, and scandal, much like the
biblical narrative. The fall weighs heavily on the village as it grows older.
The life of Caravaggio, the 17th century artist, was also, like Macondo and Genesis after
the fall, marked by scandal and debauchery. He was a Catholic man and a mortal sinner. His
life is documented mainly through his disobediences to the law. He had an uncontrolled temper
and easily got into fights and brawls until finally he murdered someone over a petty quarrel.7
Despite his awful temperament, Caravaggio painted some of the most theatrical and evocative
representations of scriptural scenes because, true to life, his paintings depict the sacred in the
midst of the pedestrian, the humble, and the profane.
In the Calling of St. Matthew, several
important theological concepts about the
character of Christ come to light. Jesus, his face
partially lit by a ray of sunlight, looks at
Matthew, who is drawn to Jesus while everyone
Marquez, P.S., p.9
Marquez, Chapter 5 & 6, 15
6 Marquez, 9
7 Wilson-Smith, 10
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else pulls slightly away. The ray of light brightens Jesus’ outstretched hand, which is the mirror
image of the hand of Adam in Michelangelo’s famous Creation of Adam. This particular element
of the painting artistically represents Jesus as the new Adam and the incarnate God reaching
out to man. In the New Testament book of Romans, Jesus is the perfection of Adam. 8 “The
Word became flesh and dwelt among us” as God reaches towards man by becoming a man.9 The
light source is only one, as is the case in most of Caravaggio’s paintings. This seems to
symbolize the source of light and life being from God alone. The pictures with Christ in them
usually depict light coming from a place such that it shines on the Christ figure; this may
theologically symbolize the light of the Father on the Christ figure. In the Calling of St. Matthew,
there is just one source of light. This is often the case in Caravaggio’s paintings; the illuminating
agent comes from one source, just as God’s illuminating light comes from God alone. The focal
point, Matthew and Jesus, is depicted in partial shadow. There is no fanfare about Jesus calling
the tax collector.
The identity of Jesus as God incarnate and the nature of his message are central to the
New Testament, which builds upon the traditions and beliefs established in the Hebrew Bible.
In the midst of Israel’s adulterous and sinful acts, psalmists proclaim God’s desire for clean,
repentant hearts. The prophets of the later books speak to the desire God has for authenticity in
his people. There is a reality of the heart that is much more important than the appearance of
piety, and it is this reality that Jesus shows himself to care about in the Gospels. The Gospel of
John claims Jesus is the Word of God; the logos—this points back to the way that God speaks
reality into being.10 Jesus associates himself with the lowly, from his humble birth to his eclectic
collection of disciples. In particular, when Jesus calls Matthew the tax collector, he eats with
other tax collectors and sinners afterwards.11 Another important part of the New Testament is
the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the promise of new life, as well as the advent of the
Kingdom of Heaven coming to earth. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Melquiades comes back
to life and it is believed he has achieved immortality; but it is a false hope, only another instance
of life swept away by death. Jesus is no false hope in the New Testament; He is the only hope.
The message of Jesus is closely tied with the resurrection accounts and his life on Earth as God
incarnate, most especially in the way that Jesus associates himself with sinners even as he is
sinless; again, there is this intermingling of the sacred and the profane, as we have seen in the
other works. Reality is neither in appearances nor in the hearts of the Pharisees, but in the
sinners who repent of their wrongdoings. God wants authenticity even though that means
brokenness.
Yet the message in the New Testament is not always relayed with great fidelity to the
person of Christ or his teachings. With the arrival of a priest in Macondo, at first people do not
care: “they would answer him that they had been many years without a priest, arranging the
business of their souls directly with God, and that they had lost the evil of original sin.”12 Yet
upon the levitation of the priest (in a town where no end of magical things happen on a normal
basis), they are convinced of the infinite power of God and realize their sin. Márquez seems to
be critiquing the presence of the Catholic Church in Latin American culture as an institution
that perhaps disrupted the connection people had to God. Faith is not about cathedrals in the
New Testament, though that is what the priest immediately begins to raise money for upon his
arrival in Macondo. Caravaggio’s artistry does faithfully capture the humanity of Christ and the
Romans 5:12-21
John 1:14
10 John 1:1-5, 14
11 Matthew 9:10
12 Marquez, p.81
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humility of his followers and circumstances in a way that the town of Macondo may not have
experienced from their priest. But the Catholic Church in Caravaggio’s time was not totally
accepting of his method of using well-known prostitutes as his models, even though this is part
of what makes Caravaggio’s paintings true to the New Testament and the type of people Jesus
loved.
Caravaggio seeks to paint what he sees of human depravity, anguish, and suffering; the
trials of ordinary people rather than the pomp and pride of rich commissioners. An important
aspect of Caravaggio’s paintings is his deliberate painting of sinners in the places of saints. Most
infamously, he models the body of Mary after a well-known prostitute in the Death of the Virgin.
His paintings are emotional, natural, dirty. The fruits in his Bacchus paintings rot and split
open: the fingernails and hands of his models are filthy. One novelist interpreted Caravaggio’s
thoughts towards his depictions of the ordinary poor sinner: “I always got into trouble for that;
for using common people as models. They, the priests and my patrons, told me it was profane.
Hah. Of course it was profane. That's the point.”13 Few of his figures are graced by halos; halos
signify sainthood, perfection, and stainlessness. They remove the painted saint from the viewer
and separate the sacred from the profane. Caravaggio’s works express the way in which the
two, while absolutely different, are more often intertwined in our lives than distinctly separate.
Returning to the opening chapters of Genesis and the fall, the first thing Adam and Eve
notice after they have eaten the forbidden fruit is their nakedness—their vulnerability.
Nakedness throughout history has connoted sex, lust, and pornography—but in the garden it
spoke to unashamed vulnerability and innocence.14 Michelangelo’s idealistic bodies in the
Sistine Chapel paintings and the sculpture of David provide counterpoint to Caravaggio’s
portrayal of the naked human body. The nakedness Caravaggio portrays is sometimes sickly
and jaundiced, but at times pure and innocent. Angels and some male saints appear naked in
his paintings, as does Jesus as an infant. Nakedness is innocence, but nakedness is also shame; it
can be sacred or profane, sacredness perverted.
For the Buendía family, the sacred is often perverted—love into lust, sex into adultery,
and family into incest. The great curse upon the Buendía family is solitude; they are estranged
from each other. 15 Related to this individual solitude is the continual inward turning of the
family upon itself, an expression of solitude that results in incest. This major theme of
Marquez’s work, solitude, is the blessing and burden of individuality that becomes more and
more conscious with enlightenment. The characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude seek to fill
their voids of solitude with the bodies of others in the desperation of the sexual act.16
In the Hebrew Bible, it is YHWH alone who fills voids completely, as in the creation
story. History continually repeats itself as the past disappears from memory in both the Hebrew
Bible and One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the fall occurs again and again as people seek to be
like God rather than to know God. The fruit Adam and Eve eat in the garden is from the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil, the only forbidden tree in the garden. This knowledge tempts
them, for with it they are told they will be like God. The first José Arcadio Buendía is constantly
tempted by the alchemy of the gypsies; knowledge slowly tempts him to seclusion and isolation
from his family. It is José that becomes delusional yet also rational at the end of is life as he
begins to demand empirical proof for God’s existence. Reality slowly slips away from the first
José Buendía as he goes insane; he could not make a daguerreotype of God and would no
longer believe that God exists—if God ever existed, as the whole town tried to remind
Peachment, 75
NOAB, p. 15
15 Marquez, 417
16 Augustine, in his Confessions speaks of his own sexual life in this context
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themselves during their period of amnesia, He had been booted out of His power. Many an
intellectual has found knowledge to defeat and falsify God’s being—thus knowledge is
heralded as power.
Interestingly, it is the knowledge of good and evil that God did not want Adam and Eve
to have.17 With it came a consciousness and, despite the attempt they and all people make to
protect themselves, an increased vulnerability to pride and to lies. The memory of knowing God
is quickly lost with the passing of time and generations, yet God still involves himself with
humanity. Human sin, incest, and disobedience clearly exist and are an intimate part of these
stories and the lives of their heroes—for example, the marriage of Abraham to his half-sister
Sarah and the affair of David with Bathsheba.18 God is willing to do great things through
sinners, even mortal sinners such as David and Caravaggio.
The memory of knowing God is quickly lost with the passing of time and generations,
but God, above all, remains as the realest reality. A book such as 100 Years of Solitude, with its
use of magical realism, serves to remind twenty-first century readers that not all stories must be
factual to bear witness to reality, a truth that has been forgotten as our definition of knowledge
has begun to correlate with empirical certainty.
Both Caravaggio and Márquez present rather troubling accounts of what it means to be
human in an effort to exhibit more plainly human identity; in the case of Márquez, this effort
produces a repulsion at the power of the human sexual drive, a remembrance of how our innate
forgetfulness, a frustration at how political shifts and wars and massacres take place; in the case
of Caravaggio, this effort exhibits the frailty, strength, tragedy, curiosity, and rawness of
humanity along with the prospect that it is the sinners that God saves. These works provide
counterpoint for each other, as do many of the works studied in the Great Conversation, and
illuminate sacred texts. The sacred is intertwined with the profane in scripture and in life; this is
the sacred story of the fall and redemption.
References
Wilson-Smith, Timothy. Caravaggio. London: Phaidon, 1998. Print.
Márquez, Gabriel García. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Print.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible: With the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. New York:
Oxford UP, 2001. Print.
Peachment, Christopher. Caravaggio: [a Novel]. New York: St. Martin's, 2003. Print.
17
18
Genesis 2:16-17
2 Samuel 11