Love, Light, and Catholic Mysticism in Vincent Van Gogh

Love is a mystery within a mystery.

On the last day before … the face of death, there was in [Socrates] something … of a god, a ray of light from heaven.

I just entered for a minute the Catholic Church where evening service was being held. It was a beautiful sight … the church looked so cheerful in the evening light.

Vincent Van Gogh

Love and light in art as in mysticism

In Love: A History, Professor Simon May suggests that love is everywhere, writing: "Academic books, chat shows, pop lyrics, internet dating sites, self-help manuals—all buzz with curiosity about the conditions for suc cessful love." After exploring the many philosophers and writers who have written on love, May concludes that "The nature of love—what exactly it is; what we demand from it—is sacred territory."¹ If Professor May had asked St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) whether love could be defined, he would have been mystified at the answer; because, unlike the figures he treats who seem to know what love is, St. Teresa believes that she is "not sure that [she] know[s] when love is spiritual and when there is sensuality mingled with it, or how to begin speaking about it."²

It is not until the nineteenth century—with the advance of science in all its aspects, natural, physical, mathematical, psychological, and social—that love loses its "sacred territory," and the tension between the "spiritual" and the "sensual" is broken. Today we speak of love or erös as though we "know" what it is: sexual desire, what Freud calls "libido," and Darwin associates it with the "selfish gene." But love involves real self-denuding that can propel us toward spiritual self-awakening, toward "sacred territory," toward completeness, toward a Presence. Mystics have long spoken of Presence as God within us and in the world. Perhaps St. Augustine (354-430) says it best: "You were with me, and I was not with you."³ In The Varieties of Religious Experiences, William James (1842-1910) cites from the life of Dr. Burke—a Canadian psychiatrist—to demonstrate a larger and a more fulfilling love than ordinary love, a love that leads to seeing the universe a living Presence:

There came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life … that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love.⁴

This love is thus an integral, generative, illuminating, and sustaining feature in the web of Life itself; it is the door to "eternal life," to a universe that is alive, Present, and that, according to St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), it is a gift of God's love, in which, consequently, even mountains, valleys, flowers, winds, and birds could sing the spiritual canticle of the Song of Songs.⁵ The twentieth century Russian Orthodox theologian Nicolas Berdyaev (1879-1940) observes that this love is by its very nature creative. Hence it is "an ascent … from the world to God. It moves … towards eternity. The Products of creativeness remain in time, but the creative act itself, the creative flight, communes with eternity."⁶ Hence the creative act, like the mystical experience, communes with eternity through love, real, sincere, true erös: sacred, mystical, mysterious, enlightening, not reduced to pure sensuality, as it is today. Today some men see in a woman nothing, but flesh used for the satisfaction of his physical desires; his encounters with a woman is self-fulfilling rather than harmonizing, than enriching, than completing.

In the following pages I will concern myself with the theme of love and light in Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) as it exhibits a parallel vision to Catholic mysticism. Although scholarship on van Gogh has focused...