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Atlantic
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
How to Look at a Still Life
If still-life painting is the art of arresting decay, then it makes a lot of sense that Rachel Ruysch grew up to become one of the greatest still-life painters in the history of art. In the 17th century, Frederik Ruysch, her father, was an internationally famous embalmer. His job was to make a natural object seem permanently alive and pleasing to the eye. He could transform the corpse of a bullet-pierced admiral into the 'fresh carcase of an infant,' Samuel Johnson once said. He could turn dead children into the serenest version of themselves—their faces so full of life that people wanted to kiss them, as Peter the Great once did. The house where Rachel grew up, near the town hall in Amsterdam, had an annex for her father's skeletons, organ jars, and severed limbs, which he collected along with a growing stockpile of dead insects, amphibians, and flowers. It was a rich soil in which to live and work if you were an ambitious Enlightenment-era man of science, as Frederik was. To be a child in that environment, though, would have been incredibly weird. Imagine your father coming home day after day smelling of organ meat, his clothes speckled with blood and vague fluids. He keeps trying to show you his newest cow's heart or amputated foot, or a skink shipped in from one of the colonies. What's that under the chair? Ah, yes—a piece of lung. The barrier between life and death starts to seem thinner, more porous. Your sense of beauty dilates and shifts. Rachel Ruysch (1664 –1750) did not spend her time dissecting stray dogs or making fake fiddles out of human thigh bones, as her father did. Instead she devoted herself to the most conventionally beautiful object in nature: the flower. In fact, she became one of the top flower painters in Europe. Even though Ruysch is now a footnote in art history, she was more famous in her own lifetime than Rembrandt and Vermeer. The first major show devoted to Ruysch, which arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in August (after opening in the United States at the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio, in the spring), is one of the most intelligently curated and sensory-rich shows a museumgoer could ask for. It includes boxes perfumed with the scents of Ruysch's flowers, jars of pickled toads and lizards that feature in her paintings, cases of beetles and botanical illustrations, new translations of Dutch primary sources, and a sorely needed crop of research on her work. The only sticking point, really, is Ruysch's paintings. They are easy to like but harder to love—at least for viewers marooned in the 21st century. Over the course of her nearly 70-year career, Ruysch shunned radical innovation and experimentation, and opted for the subtlest of variations on a theme. No grand gestures or avant-garde maneuvers. Just refinement, focus, and perfection. Flowers and fruit. In the gilded arena of Dutch stilleven, or 'still life,' there are banquet pieces, with wine-filled goblets and oysters and corkscrews of lemon peel, and breakfast spreads, with everyday nibbles, such as cheese and nuts. Pronk, or 'show,' paintings display piles of gold vessels and jewels and silk. Vanitas pieces depict items such as skulls and pocket watches, reminding you that you're going to die soon. What might be considered the lowest subgenre today is bloemstilleven, or 'flower still life.' A seemingly decorative object (a flower) is represented in another decorative object (a painting), which rates as an even lesser decorative object—a flower painting. To anyone who has spent more than a few minutes with a flower piece by Ruysch or her predecessors Ambrosius Bosschaert or Jan Davidsz de Heem, this ranking will seem mostly pea-brained. Start with the fact that flower paintings are the most visually sumptuous portraits of nature's most freakish and colorful sex organs. You are staring at a highly evolved specimen whose entire appearance is predicated on seducing living creatures—yourself included—to propagate its existence. Unlike some pollinators, we're not in the business of sticking our proboscis into flowers, but we do eat them, collect them, place them on coffins, give them to prom dates, throw them at weddings, decorate our homes with their odor and shape. Flowers have consoled people, driven them to obsession and despair, and sent them into the pit of legal turmoil and financial ruin. They've also made people extravagantly rich. Before the tulip speculation bubble burst in 1637, about 30 years prior to Ruysch's birth, Semper Augustus bulbs were being sold for as much as 5,000 guilders—a single tulip cost more than 10 times the annual salary of a highly skilled artisan. The genius of a flower still life is that it converts a perishable commodity into a stable one. It can also yoke together blooms from different seasons and continents to create as many retinal fireworks per square inch as possible. The savviest artists pick 'the downy peach, the finely dusted plum, the smooth apple, the burnished cherry, the dazzling rose, the manifold pink, the variegated tulip,' all in their maximum ripeness, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, and apply an understanding of botany 'from the root up.' More than imitating nature, the flower painter elevates it. One artist whose masterpieces dared to accomplish this 'impossible' task, Goethe said, was Rachel Ruysch. When we first meet Ruysch in the exhibition, she's already a teenage prodigy. Her first known work, Swag of Flowers and Fruit Suspended in Front of a Niche (1681), is a dangling bouquet loaded with irises, hollyhocks, marigolds, grapes, and wild berries. Around the age of 15, she was apprenticed by her father to the renowned flower painter Willem van Aelst (reportedly a difficult man). The twisting vines and mint-green leaves in the piece are very Van Aelstian, but the general setup, with flowers strung together and nailed upside down, is likely borrowed from de Heem. Even though Ruysch's style and method will evolve in the coming years—new cultivars and pigments dropping in (Prussian blue), more bustling compositions and tighter brushwork—the main ingredients of her mature output are already here: the spare background and the glowing flowers and fruit, raked by natural light but seemingly lit from within. My favorite touch is the mini-bramble of pale-gold lines in the bottom right that yields the words Rachel Ruysch. It's less a signature than a wink. We're looking at the hand of a highly precocious teen who knows she's very good and isn't afraid to boast. By the time Ruysch was in her 20s, poems were already being written about her. She was hailed as a 'floral goddess,' better than Maria van Oosterwijck (a celebrated flower painter in Amsterdam). In her 30s, Ruysch became the first woman admitted to the Confrerie Pictura, the painters' guild in The Hague. In her 40s, she was handpicked to be a court painter for Johann Wilhelm, a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire and a high-ranking German duke. In her 50s, Ruysch won the lottery—literally won the lottery, to the tune of 75,000 guilders. (For comparison: The townhouse her father bought on the Bloemgracht —'flower canal'—in an upscale Amsterdam neighborhood cost 8,000 guilders.) This kind of good fortune is difficult to interpret. The 'obstacle race' long faced by women artists, to borrow from the title of Germaine Greer's pathbreaking 1979 work of feminist art history, often looks more like a gravy train with Ruysch: one stroke of predestined luck after another. She grew up in a wealthy and well-connected family. Her great-uncle was a painter, her cousins were painters, and the whole town was swimming in painters, artist-botanists, and horticulturalists. But her life was not frictionless. Barred from Latin schools, universities, and professional guilds in Amsterdam, Ruysch couldn't have pursued any genre of painting that spoke to her. She was likely steered toward flower still lifes by her father, as a suitable subject for someone of her gender. She then had to fight her way into a fiercely competitive art market—in a city, country, and century more obsessed with flowers than any other—all while giving birth to 10 children, only six of whom survived into adulthood. After Ruysch won the lottery, she stopped painting almost entirely for 15 years. What set Ruysch apart throughout her career was a trademark style and subject: big, blossomy bouquets set against a dark, velvety background; high-wattage light that's coming from somewhere over your left shoulder; tons of insects and crawling creatures; a simple stone or marble ledge to support the vase; and a dizzying variety of cultivars and blooms. While other flower painters were building bouquets from cut flowers widely available in Western Europe, Ruysch had a direct line, through her father, to exotic blooms in the Amsterdam botanical gardens. A single arrangement of Ruysch's from a 1700 painting has more than 22 species in it: devil's trumpets, passionflower, coral honeysuckle, an African pumpkin, a cheeky-looking pineapple (rare in Dutch still life). Another, from about 1735, has flowers from every single continent except Antarctica. You could get your hands on anything in a port city in an aquatic empire, whether it was Brazilian sugar or Indonesian pepper. From 1602, when the Dutch East India Company was chartered, to the 1660s, when Ruysch was born, the Dutch Republic boomed. Colonies and outposts sprouted up everywhere from New Amsterdam (now New York City) to Nagasaki. Dutch fluyts crisscrossed the globe, carrying all manner of cargo (Baltic grain, Caribbean salt), as well as hundreds of thousands of human beings bought and sold as chattel—the Dutch transported approximately 600,000 enslaved people across the Atlantic from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Wealth flowed into the coffers of merchants and regents back home, and turned consumption into a national pastime. A well-fed mercantile class with lots of money, and time to spend it, created the perfect conditions for a popular art market and a new stand-alone genre: 'still life.' What is the best way to interpret a painting of motionless stuff ? Theories abound. In Ruysch's case, one can apply several different lenses, viewing each piece as an aesthetic object, a scientific illustration, and a moral message. Take a pair of paintings from 1710: Still Life of Flowers in a Glass Vase on a Marble Ledge is a monumental bouquet; Still Life With Fruits and Insects is a large spillage of fruit on a forest floor—both commissioned by a Leiden textile merchant for a whopping 1,300 guilders total. What we have are two pieces of eye candy. Every rose and grape is clamoring for your attention. Even the dark background is colluding with the waxy petals and fruit to pop toward you. It's a mouthwatering visual buffet. (Arthur Schopenhauer once argued that Dutch still life was a low form of art because it made you want to eat the bouquet, Edible Arrangements–style, instead of contemplate it, grinding your aesthetic faculties to a halt with hunger. I can see what he means.) When the initial dazzlement wears off, your focus sharpens. What's that—a katydid? A sand lizard? Even if your eye is glued to the painting, your brain is elsewhere. The flame tulip sends you to Turkey, the common sunflower to North America, the butterflies and insects to the entomologist's corkboard. It's an informational trove for the science-minded viewer (and indeed, the patron, Pieter de la Court van der Voort, was a crafty horticulturist with a flair for new hothouse techniques). Then, suddenly, something changes. At first, the insects seem to be having a little fiesta with the fruit—ants, wasps, and spiders nibbling at a peach or scurrying toward a chestnut. Now you notice that the sand lizard's forked tongue is just milliseconds away from snatching a butterfly. Another lizard in the corner has just infiltrated a bird's nest filled with fresh eggs and seems to be emitting a barbaric yawp. The painting starts to flex under the pressure of death. The spongy forest floor looks fungal; the pomegranate teems with its own seeds; the corn kernels become warts; the grapes are fish eggs. The entire composition is slithering and crawling with itself. It is, in a word, monstrous. As a viewer, you can xylophone your way up and down these notes—the aesthetic pleasure; the scientific stimulation; the cruelty of nature as moral warning—or play them in your head all at once. Sometimes it just depends on how close you're standing to the painting. For decades, scholars have wrung their hands over how the Dutch saw their still lifes. Was a grape just a grape? Or was it a reminder of the Eucharist? Perhaps every pineapple was a portal to a colony keeping the empire afloat. Or maybe a still life was a stimulus for consumption, its decorative slickness training your eyes to move on to the next thing you wanted to buy or sell. By the late 1700s, the genre had been marinating in its own juices for too long—some of its tropes were now 150 years old. The golden age of Dutch art was over (whether its painters were aware or not), and many viewers must have felt bored by the grape rather than inspired or rebuked by it. Ruysch finished her last piece when she was 83 years old. Posy of Flowers, With a Tulip and a Melon, on a Stone Ledge (1748) is a small miracle of a painting. About the size of a floor tile, it has more feeling and tenderness than all of the trumpeting bouquets and whirlpools of color. A little striped tulip, its petals barely open, seems as if it's trying to lift itself out of bed. A shy melon sits behind it, with wildflowers huddled around. The signature is lightly painted and barely there. Even the veins of the stone table are daubed on like afterthoughts, as if the world of hard surfaces and sharp edges has less meaning here, in the domain of flowers. Ruysch's work can do that: turn a flower into the most important thing in the world, at the moment it's being painted and seen. What more could a flower want?
Hindustan Times
01-08-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
A dark, bitter truth: Mridula Ramesh spills the beans on coffee
About a thousand years ago, in the mountains of Ethiopia, a shepherd boy named Kaldi saw his goats acting strangely. The next day, he followed and saw them eat red berries growing in clumps on a short tree with waxy, dark-green leaves, sheltered by the rainforest canopy. Coffee cherries dry in the sun, post-harvest. (Shutterstock) He plucked a berry and popped it into his mouth. Its meagre flesh was sweet, encasing twin seeds. He bit into these too and found them hard and bitter, but within 15 minutes, he had a spring in his step and was hopping along with his goats. This is coffee's origin tale, told in the highlands of the Kaffa region. The berry spread from these cool and wet climes around the world, but this is the climate that still suits coffee best. Back then, as word spread of this bean and its effects, priests began to chew on it to help them stay awake through long rituals. It took hundreds of years, journalist Mark Pendergrast writes in his book Uncommon Grounds (1999), for coffee beans to be roasted and brewed. Then, plantations came up in Yemen, and the port city of Mocha became the hub for global exports. The Ottoman Empire later inherited and reinforced this monopoly. Venetian traders then popularised the brew in Europe, but they still relied for their supply on roasted beans from Arab traders, who tightly guarded live plants. By the 17th century, coffee houses had spread rapidly across Europe, with England, particularly London and Oxford, becoming renowned for their vibrant 'penny universities', where people from across social backgrounds engaged in lively discussion, news-sharing and intellectual debate. Unlike taverns, these venues promoted the exchange of ideas and served as breeding grounds for Enlightenment-era thought. Several major British institutions originated in coffee houses: the Lloyd's insurance company began at Edward Lloyd's coffee house; the London Stock Exchange grew out of trades made at a café called Jonathan's. Members of the Royal Society frequently met in coffee houses. The coffee house catalysed Britain's intellectual transformation. *** In rainforests such as the Amazon, trees are levelled and the debris set ablaze, to make room for the lucrative plantations. (Shutterstock) Caffeine lay at the heart of this. It is structurally similar to adenosine, a naturally occurring neurochemical that builds up in the brain over the day and signals, by evening, that it is time for the body to rest. Caffeine resembles adenosine closely enough to bind to its receptors in the brain, but unlike adenosine, it does not activate them. These receptors, when activated, promote calm and sleep and regulate mood and motivation. By occupying these receptors without triggering them, caffeine blocks adenosine's calming effect, leading to increased neuronal activity and the enhanced effectiveness of dopamine pathways. Ingesting caffeine makes one feel less sleepy, more alert, improves reflexes and makes one more energised. In short, it made people more industrious. As demand grew, Europe's merchants began to ask themselves: Can we not grow this bean ourselves? The Dutch were the first to break the Arab monopoly by acquiring live coffee plants — historical accounts differ as to whether this was through smuggling or a gift — and cultivating them first in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and then in Java (Indonesia), in the 17th century. The French then obtained a plant from the Dutch botanical gardens in Amsterdam, which they successfully cultivated on Reunion Island and then in the Caribbean. Incidentally, another origin tale has it that Baba Budan, a 17th-century Sufi saint, smuggled seven seeds to India, hidden in his beard, to set up the country's first coffee plantation, in Karnataka. *** Cultivation of this crop is time- and labour-intensive, requiring several steps that must each be executed with precision. First, seeds must be selected and nursed into seedlings. These must be transplanted and tended to (with regular weeding, pruning, pest and disease control, and irrigation). At harvest, the cherries must be hand-picked, often selectively and over several phases, since they ripen unevenly. Post-harvest, the cherries must be processed, dried, hulled, sorted, graded and roasted, each step involving at least a certain degree of skilled manual labour. In a coffee plantation that I recently visited in Tamil Nadu, harvest coincides with the winter rains and the manager must cajole workers to stand in the downpour, braving leeches, to pick the cherries. Wages exceed ₹1,000 a day, with bonuses for productivity, but still, plantation ownerShakerNagarajan says, labour is not easy to come by. Incidentally, in one of the world's most expensive coffees, the Kopi Luwak, much of this process is outsourced to Asian palm civet cats, who eat and pass the bean, their stomach enzymes enhancing the flavour. Someone still has to collect the scat, extract the beans, clean, dry and roast them. Back in the 17th century, the need for all this labour spurred coffee's cruellest avatar: that of a plantation-grown crop enabled by deforestation and slavery. And it was brutal. Haiti, in 1788, provided nearly half the world's coffee, but under conditions so inhuman that a slave's life expectancy was 21 years. Then coffee began to eat into the rainforests of Brazil. The story goes that the seeds entered Brazil, then a Portuguese colony, hidden in a bouquet given by the wife of the governor of French Guiana to her Portuguese lover. After the country broke free of Portuguese rule in 1822, coffee plantations grew swiftly, clearing enormous, almost unfathomable swathes of the Amazon in the process. In his book With Broadax and Firebrand (1997), ecological historian Warren Dean describes how a crew of loggers would ascend a hillside, cutting through a swath of trees without felling them, until the foreman severed the 'master tree'. Its fall would trigger, like dominos, the entire hillside of timber to collapse in a 'tremendous explosion'. The felled trees were later set ablaze, leaving the land looking like a battlefield, 'blackened, smouldering, and desolate'. The ash, writes Pendergrast, provided a boost for the coffee seedlings, and when the soil grew tired, the plantation owner moved on and burned a fresh patch of forest. The irony of destroying a forest to plant a shade-loving crop was lost on the farmers. To meet soaring global demand, large swathes of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, particularly the upland slopes, were also cleared. Brazil became, and remains, the world's leading producer of the bean, but at a cost that is now coming due for us all. *** Meanwhile, Brazil's gigantic coffee harvest caused prices to fall enough to make this a mass-market drink. As it entered the home, a cultural revolution was unleashed. Historian AR Venkatachalapathy writes that, in the early 20th century, families in Tamil Nadu drank neeragaram or kanji, essentially fermented rice water. Conservative commentators bemoaned the abandoning of this nutritional beverage for the amoral, probably unhealthy, new brew. In the US too, there was a raging battle over coffee's possible health impacts, with dubious arguments and counterarguments playing out in advertisements. But too many had grown accustomed to the alertness that the morning cuppa provided. Then, in the 1950s, climate struck, with a frost decimating the Brazilian crop, causing coffee prices to skyrocket. From the ashes of this disaster, another variant rose like a phoenix: Instant coffee, where cost, convenience and nifty advertising combine to triumph over taste. Now, the hardier Coffea canephora aka Robusta rose to prominence, despite its harsher flavour. Native to Africa's lowlands, the higher-yielding crop marked a new era, with the plant now devastating new geographies in Brazil, Uganda and Vietnam. Separately, in the 1960s, scientists began to develop new strains of Arabica. These could grow under sunlight, but needed far more fertiliser. This became a double whammy for soil health. Then, caffeine began to be packaged in new ways. A 350 ml can of Coca-Cola contains about 34 mg of the substance compared to the hefty 94 mg provided by a regular cup of coffee. The caffeine in soft drinks re-sculpted humanity's biochemistry once more. Neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman calls caffeine a reinforcer. It does this by making the dopamine circuits more effective in brain areas that make you feel alert and good, encouraging you to indulge in behaviours that accompany that shot of the substance. Studies have shown, for instance, that, particularly in older adolescents, caffeine consumption is strongly linked to reduced sleep time. Now consider that many energy drinks today contain nearly as much caffeine as a cup of coffee, and are ingested by sleep-deprived teens while scrolling mindlessly through Reels, not by a young adult at the beginning of their day. Imagine the brain being re-sculpted, not towards enlightenment but towards the mindless consumption of content designed to make tech companies wealthier. Meanwhile, climate is wreaking havoc on the plant. In many places, farmers are having to move to higher altitudes. Rising temperatures and humidity levels, meanwhile, tilt the balance in favour of pests such as the coffee bean borer and coffee leaf rust. In 2015, a study found that, based on current climate projections, about half the land currently used for coffee production would no longer be suitable for the crop, by the 2050s. As though to prove them right, coffee harvests have suffered in recent years across Vietnam, Brazil and Colombia, leading to record prices. Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly asking for fair-trade beans and sustainably produced brew. This may be just what the doctor, and the planet, ordered. And India is well-placed to benefit from such a trend. Stay tuned for more on this, in the next Trade-Offs. (Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watershed. She can be reached on tradeoffs@
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Can humans spontaneously combust? The baffling cases explained.
In December 2010, Michael Faherty died in his home in Galway, Ireland. His body was found burned and the fireplace was lit, but there was no other apparent source of flames nearby nor accelerant. The house was largely unscorched. The only damage were soot marks on the ceiling and floor immediately below and above where the 76-year-old retiree met his end. At a loss for an alternate explanation, the coroner chalked Faherty's death up to spontaneous combustion. Such deaths are rare, especially in the 21st century. But in Europe in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, upwards of a dozen cases of supposed spontaneous combustion (and potentially as many as 200, depending on who you ask) were reported or described retrospectively. Most share a few unifying hallmarks. The victims were largely older, overweight women. Often, they were believed to be heavy drinkers or alcohol was present at the scene. The bodies were found with the torso burned away, bones and all, and puddles of a dark, greasy substance left behind, while extremities and immediate surroundings–including furniture were left unmarred. The grim scenes were frequently written up in tabloid-esque periodicals of the time, says Michael Lynn, a historian of early modernist Europe at Purdue University Northwest. Lynn has researched and published on the spontaneous combustion trend that emerged in his study region and era. Stories of spontaneous combustion were treated akin to sensational oddities that functioned like Enlightenment-era clickbait, he tells Popular Science, often with a heavy dose of exaggeration, moralizing, and hand-wringing over the perceived indulgences of modern living. The idea that, at any moment, a living person could burst into deadly flames, permeated the cultural zeitgeist of the time– showing up in literature as well as newspapers. Charles Dickens' Bleak House is the most famous example. In the story, alcoholic landlord and rag merchant, Krook, leaves only a pile of ash behind when he is consumed by sourceless fire. Herman Melville and Emile Zola also killed off characters through spontaneous combustion. But the phenomenon wasn't just a convenient plot device. For some, it was a firmly held belief. Dickens included a defense of the possibility, citing multiple alleged real-world reports, in a preface added to an early edition of the book. 'I shall not abandon the facts,' he wrote. But what exactly are the facts behind this fiery phenomenon? Scientifically speaking, spontaneous combustion is a real phenomenon. Certain extremely flammable chemicals–like phosphorus–or materials, such as wet hay or compost, can flare up at relatively low ambient temperatures and without any ignition source. Exothermic chemical reactions and accumulating heat from decaying organic matter and fermentation explain the sudden fires. But human bodies are a whole other issue. It's deeply improbable, nigh impossible that 'spontaneous combustion' is a valid explanation for any of the alleged cases, says Roger Byard, a forensic pathologist and emeritus professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia. 'It's never been witnessed,' Byard tells Popular Science. 'If people could spontaneously burst into flames, you'd be down at Walmart and suddenly the little old lady beside you, pushing a trolley would explode.' [ Related: Charles Dickens's belief in spontaneous combustion sparked Victorian London's hottest debate. ] Instead, the incidents all concern people who die isolated and unobserved. There's also never been a report in any other animal species, he notes–it's a strictly human phenomenon. (Although whale carcasses washed up on beaches sometimes 'explode,'that's simply a buildup of gasses from internal decomposition that release suddenly, there's no intense heat or fire.) In his view, the missing factor is that other animals don't tend to 'wrap themselves up in blankets and drink whiskey and smoke,' he says. A handful of hypotheses have been proposed for how and why spontaneous combustion might occur in humans, none of which are especially scientifically rigorous nor have been demonstrated. Conspiracists and 19th century scientists alike have blamed acts of God, lightning, trace amounts of phosphates, static electricity, unspecified particles in the blood, and intestinal gases. More recently, an independent researcher suggested acetone accumulation resulting from the metabolic state, ketosis, could explain it. But one explanation seems far more likely than the rest, and doesn't really involve any 'spontaneous' combustion at all. Instead, Byard thinks the wick effect is the most plausible. 'These people are essentially human candles,' he says. The wick effect describes how human fat burns under blankets and clothing lit with the help of a little bit of accelerant (for instance, spilled liquor), when ignited by a spark or ember. Under these conditions, a fire can burn low and slow, producing hot temperatures, but without high flames and with little collateral damage. If a sleeping or intoxicated person spilled some alcohol on themselves, then dropped a cigarette or caught a stray ember from a fireplace, that could kick off the deadly process. In 1998, an experiment conducted for a BBC science documentary series demonstrated that the wick effect could replicate the types of scenes found in instances of alleged spontaneous combustion. John DeHaan, a forensic scientist, set fire to a pig carcass wrapped in blankets, and found that it continued to burn for hours. Eventually, the entire midsection of the pig was gone, including the bones, while the less fatty legs remained intact. It's not a nice way to go, for a pig or a person. But at least it's more avoidable than a sudden fiery act of divine punishment or an unforeseen internal gas explosion. This story is part of Popular Science's Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you've always wanted to know? Ask us.
Atlantic
01-04-2025
- General
- Atlantic
What to Make of Miracles
How should we understand miracles? Many people in the near and distant past have believed in them; many still do. I believe in miracles too, in my way, reconciling rationalism and inklings of a preternatural reality by means of 'radical amazement.' That's a core concept of the great modern Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel. Miracles, insofar as Heschel would agree with my calling them that—it's not one of his words—do not defy the natural order. God dwells in earthly things. Me, I find God in what passes for the mundane: my family, Schubert sonatas, the mystery of innate temperament. A corollary miracle is that we have been blessed with a capacity for awe, which allows us 'to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance,' Heschel writes. Every so often, though, I wonder whether radical amazement demands enough of us. Heschel would never have gone as far as Thomas Jefferson, who simply took a penknife to his New Testament and sliced out all the miracles, because they offended his Enlightenment-era conviction that faith should not contradict reason. His Jesus was a man of moral principles stripped of higher powers. But a faith poor in miracles is an untested faith. At the core of Judaism and Christianity lie divine interventions that rip a hole in the known universe and change the course of history. Jesus would not have become Christ the Savior had he not risen from his tomb. Nor would Jews be Jews had Moses not brought down God's Torah from Mount Sinai. From the November 2020 issue: James Parker on reading Thomas Jefferson's Bible Those who wish to engage with religious scriptures are not relieved of the obligation to wrestle with how miracles should be understood. Do we take them literally or symbolically? Are they straightforward reports of events that occurred in the world, perhaps ones that are no longer possible, because God no longer acts in it? Or are they encoded accounts of things that happened on some other, less palpable level, but were no less real for that? In her book Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, Elaine Pagels asks different questions about New Testament miracles. She is less interested in whether Jesus performed them than in what accounts for their power. Her larger quest is to understand the enduring appeal of Jesus to so many people 'as a living presence, even as someone they know intimately.' Pagels, now 82, is a historian of early Christianity who also writes about her own efforts to find an experience of Christianity, a sense of intermittent grace, consonant with her experience of extreme loss: Her first son died at 6 of a rare disease; her husband died in a hiking accident shortly thereafter. She has spent a lifetime thinking about the multiple dimensions of the gospel truth. What problems did the miracle stories solve; what new vistas did solving them open; what religious function did they serve? Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels (1979) is a liberal theologian's cult classic—it has gone through more than 30 printings. Though not her first work of scholarship, it marked the beginning of a long career as a gifted explainer of abstruse ideas. Her overarching ambition has been to restore a lost heritage of theological diversity to the wider world. The Gnostic Gospels reintroduced forgotten writings of repudiated Jesus sects, produced over the course of the first and second centuries, before a welter of competing perceptions of Jesus's story were reduced to a single dogma, codified in the apostolic creed, and before the New Testament was a fixed canon. Sounding faintly Buddhist to the modern ear, those writings interpreted miracles as symbolic descriptions of real spiritual revelations and transformations, available only to those with access to secret knowledge (gnosis). 'Do not suppose that resurrection is an apparition,' one gnostic teacher wrote in his Treatise on Resurrection. 'It is something real. Instead, one ought to maintain that the world is an apparition.' From the August 1993 issue: Cullen Murphy on women and the Bible The subtitle of Miracles and Wonder is slightly misleading: The Historical Mystery of Jesus seems to imply that Pagels will revisit the old debate over whether Jesus existed. That he did is settled doctrine, at least among historians. Rather, she takes us back to what biblical scholars call the Sitz im Leben, the 'scene of composition,' in an effort to reconstruct where miracle narratives came from and how they evolved. Using the tools of the historian as well as the literary critic, she tries to unearth the writers' concerns and influences, and she considers miracles from a bluntly instrumentalist perspective: What problems did they solve; what new vistas did solving them open; what religious function did they serve? Among their other uses, miracles helped the evangelists overcome challenges to the authority of the Christ story. For all his enigmatic teachings and at times mystifying behavior, Jesus the man is not that hard to explain: He was one among many Jewish preachers and healers prophesying apocalypse in a land ravaged by Roman conquest and failed uprisings. But Jesus the man-god was more difficult for outsiders—Roman leaders, Greco-Roman philosophers, other Jews—to accept. They asked a lot of hostile questions. Why worship a Messiah whose mission had apparently failed? Didn't his ignominious end—crucifixion was Rome's punishment for renegades and slaves—contradict his claim to be divine? The Romans were incredulous that anyone would glorify a Jew. To the Jewish elite, he was a rube from the countryside. We think of the virgin birth as a basic element of Christian faith, yet only two of the four canonical Gospels refer to it. Mark, the first known writer of a Christian gospel, could have produced a traditional hagiography. Instead, wishing to publicize Jesus's singular power—to spread the 'good news'—he appears to have invented the gospel genre, the Greek biographical novella as a work of evangelical witness; the subsequent chroniclers followed his lead. Writing around the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, in 70 C.E., he gave Jesus's story cosmic dimensions. Now it was the tale of 'God's spirit contending against Satan, in a world filled with demons,' in Pagels's words. Mark may have been recording oral stories developed by Jesus's followers to convey perceptions of real experiences, but Mark, and they, would also have wanted to defend their certainties against the skeptics. Pagels isn't trying to shock the faithful. Reading sacred texts as the products of history, rather than the word of God, has been standard practice in biblical scholarship for more than a century. Her book demonstrates that the Wissenschaftliche, or 'scientific approach' (the pioneering Bible scholars were German), doesn't have to be reductive; indeed, critical scrutiny may make new sense of difficult texts and yield new revelations. As Pagels portrays them, the evangelists were men of creative genius, using their defense of Jesus as an occasion to draft the outlines of a new world religion. 'What I find most astonishing about the gospel stories,' she writes, 'is that Jesus's followers managed to take what their critics saw as the most damning evidence against their Messiah—his crucifixion—and transform it into evidence of his divine mission.' In some cases, recontextualizing the old stories gives them an unexpected poignancy. A good example is her analysis of the virgin birth. It yields a less sanctified Mary, but by highlighting darker currents in the text perhaps obscured by tradition, Pagels imbues the young mother with a haunting sadness. We think of the virgin birth as a basic element of Christian faith, yet only two of the four canonical Gospels refer to it: Matthew and Luke. Mark doesn't mention Jesus's birth and says little about his family background. When we first encounter Jesus, he's a full-grown Messiah being baptized in the wilderness. John's Gospel has a bit more on Jesus's family, but no birth scene. When we first see Jesus in the Gospel of John, he is already both the Son of God and a man—that is to say, not an infant. Matthew and Luke, by contrast, not only depict Jesus's birth, but herald it at length. They supply genealogies that stretch back to King David, the founder of Israel's dynasty, giving Jesus a lineage commensurate with his stature. Matthew stresses royalty, prefacing the birth with heavenly portents; afterward, Magi bear royal gifts to a future king. Luke's version is more rustic but heightens the dramatic tension between Jesus's humble background and his divinity. Joseph and Mary are turned away from an inn. Mary gives birth in a barn, and shepherds worship him. Both feature an Annunciation, in which an angel appears and announces that Mary, a virgin who is engaged to Joseph, is to have a son by God. In Matthew, the angel comes to Joseph, who has already discovered that Mary is with child, and advises him to marry her—he was planning to send her away before she disgraced them both. Luke's angel goes directly to Mary. Why did Matthew and Luke add all this material? Among the many possible answers, Pagels focuses on the likelihood that after Jesus's death, talk began to circulate that he was the illegitimate son of an unwed mother. The second-century Greek philosopher Celsus used the charge to discredit the Gospels. In an anti-Christian polemic citing Jewish sources, he writes, 'Is it not true … that you fabricated the story of your birth from a virgin to quiet rumors about the true and unsavory circumstances of your origins?' That Mark himself seems to have called Jesus's paternity into question complicates matters. When his Jesus comes home to Nazareth to preach at the local synagogue, his former neighbors mock him for his wild ideas. 'Where did this man get all this?' they sneer. 'What miracles has he been doing? Isn't this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon?' (The italics are Pagels's.) Mark's readers, who knew how Jewish patronymics worked, would have understood what the villagers were throwing in Jesus's face. They would not have said 'son of Mary' if they'd known the name of Jesus's father—even if his father was dead. Matthew and Luke excise that 'son of Mary' and make Jesus not just legitimate but doubly legitimate. His mother acquires both a husband, Joseph, and a father, God, for her child. Her marriage and Jesus's divine paternity purge the implied stain of wantonness. And yet disturbing hints of sexuality still run beneath the surface of the evangelists' Gospels. In Luke's Annunciation, after the angel Gabriel delivers his message, Mary asks, 'How can this be, since I am a virgin?' Gabriel replies, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the Power of the Most High will overshadow you.' Pagels doesn't cite this exchange or address the disconcerting aggressiveness of 'come upon you' and 'overshadow you,' but she does look closely at Mary's response: 'I am the Lord's slave; so be it.' This is Pagels's translation; the word she gives as slave, doule, is in this context more often translated as ' servant ' or ' handmaid.' Soon after, Luke has Mary, thrilled about the pregnancy, burst into song. But her first response, Pagels says, sounds more resigned than joyous: 'An enslaved woman was required to obey a master's will, even when that meant bearing his child, as it often did.' At a minimum, 'a girl with no sexual experience might be startled and dismayed to hear that she is about to become pregnant, given the potential embarrassment and shame she might suffer.' Pagels goes so far as to conjecture how Mary got pregnant, a thesis very much based on circumstantial evidence. Around the time of Jesus's birth, tens of thousands of Roman soldiers marched into Judea to suppress an insurrection, a brutal campaign recorded by the Jewish historian Josephus. As they fanned out through the countryside to hunt down rebels, they kidnapped and raped any women they could find. Pagels asks, 'Was Mary, as a young girl from a humble rural family,' one of those women? 'We have no way of knowing,' she adds, though she is struck by one coincidence. Unfriendly rabbinic sources from the first few centuries after Jesus's death cited slanderous gossip claiming that Mary was promiscuous and had a lover who was a soldier named Panthera, and that he was Jesus's father. Modern scholars have found the gravestone of a soldier with that name, said to have served in Judea until 9 C.E.; Pagels wonders whether he could have been one of those rapists. Thinking of Mary as a victim of sexual assault is horrifying; it feels sacrilegious. But that she gave birth to her son in an age of cataclysmic violence does make his ultimate triumph seem even more miraculous. An appreciation of context also yields a new reading of the Passion of the Christ. This account of Christ's trial and torture in the days leading up to the crucifixion, which shows the Jews baying for his death, has been thought by some to have contributed to centuries of anti-Semitism. In Pagels's version, the evangelists are motivated less by sheer hatred of Jews than by the need to solve some difficult theological and political problems. What leads them to demonize the Jewish priests and elders, even as they turn Pontius Pilate, Judea's Roman governor, into an honorable man who perceives Jesus's innocence and is loath to sentence him? That the leader of a notoriously cruel occupying power would have shown such compassion for a militant rebel strains credulity and defies the historical record. Pilate was infamous for his 'greed, violence, robbery, assault, frequent executions without trial, and endless savage ferocity,' according to the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo, among many others. 'I find no simple answer' to the conundrum of the revisionist Pilate, Pagels writes. But she has her theories. For one thing, by acknowledging Jesus's innocence, the Pilate of the Gospels safeguards Jesus from the charge that he died a criminal. A good Pilate is implausible though not impossible—that is to say, not miraculous—but he plays a crucial role in the larger miracle of the crucifixion, the transfiguration of a degrading death into the salvation of all mankind. Another reason for the evangelists to absolve Pilate of blame, according to Pagels, would have been to protect themselves. The Roman authorities persecuted Christians harshly, subjecting them to torture and deaths even more gruesome than crucifixion. To vilify a high Roman official was to invite retribution. As the Christians grew more Gentile, the Gospel writers made Pilate more sympathetic and the Jews less so. The writers could not have foreseen that their scapegoating of the Jews would have such lethal consequences and for so long. I should stress that the Christian miracle narratives have multiple sources. Most important, they interpret other texts. Sure that Jesus was the Messiah, his followers scoured the Jewish Bible for prophecies that foretold his coming. The virgin birth elaborates on a verse from Isaiah that could be construed as predicting it: A virgin 'shall conceive, and bear a son.' ('Virgin' is a famous mistranslation. The Hebrew word is almah, or 'young woman.' But Matthew would probably have been reading the Hebrew Bible in Greek, where the word appears as parthenos, 'virgin.' ) Drawing on existing holy writ was in no way scandalous. Even as Christians moved away from Judaism, the evangelists continued to work within a Jewish scriptural tradition that expected later writers to build on earlier ones. The presence of the old texts in the new ones served as validation. In Matthew and Luke's view—and in the view of Christians throughout the ages—Isaiah proved them right. What do biblical miracles do for believers today? In Pagels's final chapter, she visits Christian communities around the world, many of them poor and subject to political oppression, to explore some of the ways in which the story of Jesus continues to offer comfort and inspiration. In the Philippines, for example, she finds the Bicolanos, Catholics living in remote villages, who worship a syncretistic Jesus inflected with Filipino tradition; they are particularly focused on Easter week, because to them, Jesus represents the promise of a glorious afterlife. Miracle stories also have applications outside a strictly religious context. They are indispensable fictions, tales to live by. They re-enchant the world. Or so I feel. I read the Bible, Christian as well as Jewish, not for spiritual nourishment—or not for what is generally considered spiritual nourishment—but to be reminded that the universe once held more surprises than it does now and that hoping when all seems hopeless is not unreasonable, at least from the vantage point of eternity. Miracles are useful insofar as we take their poetry seriously. We are talking about encounters with the Almighty. Human language falters in the face of the indescribable, which reaches us only through the figures of speech we are able to understand.
