If a certain number of people read and imagine one passage from the Bible, is it possible to evaluate their imaginings? Will we be able to say that one depiction is better than another? On what basis will we assign Value to the individual depictions?

One way to go about this activity is to declare that the best imagining of a passage from the Bible is the one most faithful to its source. But we immediately run into a problem if the description requires us to imagine something for which it does not itself provide information.

In the passage Mark 14:17–25 we read that Jesus sat at table with twelve other people, one of whom will betray him (“Truly I say to you: One of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.”). From the text we further easily infer that the shared meal, of which we cannot say whether it was lunch or supper, because the text itself does not tell us, consisted of eating bread and drinking wine, which were most likely symbolic acts for those present. Finally we read that the figure called Jesus regards himself as the Son of Man, who will at some unspecified time in the future drink again of the fruit of the vine in the kingdom of God.

I deliberately list the text of the passage so clumsily and literally, because I want to stress that it contains very few anchor points from which one could imagine a coherent scene in one’s head. Nothing prevents our mental image from being incomplete, fragmentary, but it is unlikely that we would imagine Jesus as being entirely without any properties.

A completely faithful visual image based on a text is thus possible only when the description contains, without remainder, all the information. In the extreme case this would mean that we would have to require the text to describe the scene at the level of physical laws. Such a level of precision, however, would be impractical (most likely nobody would be able to transfer the precision of the description onto a mental image), and at the same time it would one way or another be incomplete, because the current laws of physics cannot describe the whole of physical reality (see the incompatibility of quantum physics and the theory of relativity), nor many other phenomena that do exist in our physical reality but are hard to reduce to any physical laws. Scepticism towards this physicalism was expressed, for example, by Nelson Goodman, who said of reducing everything to physics that such a demand is

“[…] obscure, for physics itself is fragmentary and unstable, and the kind and consequences of the envisaged reduction are vague. (How would you reduce Constable’s world-view or James Joyce’s view of the world to physics?)” (Goodman, 1996)

If we intend to imagine the given scene at all, we must give up the demand for complete fidelity of our mental vision, since, as we have already mentioned, our cognitive equipment contains no means by which we could picture in the mind a person, bread or any extended object without height, width, colour and other attributes.

We have thus arrived at the realisation that the scene from the Bible pictured by each of those taking part in this task will necessarily contain something that is not evident from the text. The missing pieces of the puzzle that we fill in, however, are not chosen entirely at random; the brain inevitably fills in the visual cues it needs from its own resources, starting with knowledge and experiences and ending with the structure of its biological make-up. We have been asked to create a world, and its content will stem from our subjective, biological and cultural frame of reference.

It is said that perhaps only God can create ex nihilo. But the perceiving and the making of images by us mortals never takes place against an entirely clean background; we are always bound and influenced by the fact that we belong to a certain biological species, which lives in a socio-cultural context and comes to know this context according to rules derived from the functioning of the relevant organs.

In Goodman’s fashion we would say that

“Worldmakings, the makings of worlds as we know them, always start from worlds already on hand; the making is in fact a remaking or a re-creating” (Goodman, 1996)

The question posed at the beginning thus appears inappropriate: since there is no absolute and neutral frame by which we could objectively compare the visions, the possibility arises of taking the visions as autonomous aesthetic visual objects. Of these we cannot demand an objective truth value, but we are left with the no less interesting work of exploring what inherent logic of their own these vision-paintings have and from which frames of reference they draw this logic. Then the judges of our images will not be scientific researchers, but rather art critics. And these, according to Arthur Danto, can raise some visions to works of art by means of a suitable interpretation.

***

My vision of the biblical passage of the Last Supper takes place in a stone house with a wooden roof. I saw the scene of the supper quite differently from the conventional depictions I can recall at this moment. Neither for the asymmetrical table nor for the inside of the house do I find any clear reference. Neither at the table nor in the room do we even find all twelve apostles. Is it possible that I entered the scene just at the moment when only those closest to Jesus were present? Where convention clearly shows itself, though, is in placing Jesus in a prominent position at the table. Here I may have been influenced not only by cultural depictions, but also, more generally, by the rule that an important figure takes the most important place at the table.

What is interesting is that in the first moments I sensed I was not just some observer hovering above the scene, but one of the apostles himself; I felt myself to be outside the main action, which was suggested by my sitting at the end of the table, furthest from Jesus. I was also the only one to notice that an old woman had entered the room. It is worth pausing over the symbolism of this figure. Could she mean something from my life? Certainly, my first thought was that the woman could be a symbol of my family circumstances. She could further symbolise the whole people of Israel, handing over its long-standing burden to the coming saviour. But why did none of those present notice the woman?

The figure I embodied expressed a feeling of shame several times; first at the thought of a merchant’s earnings, then at violent behaviour towards an indeterminate animal that was present, and finally at the moment when all the faces in the room turned in its direction.

Neither the woman nor the shame, in my view, refers to any cultural motifs; rather, they are the materialisation of my emotional state at the time of the meditation.

Although the assignment said that I should engage sight only as the last of the senses, I did not manage to achieve this, since immediately after the beginning of the meditation I held a rough outline of the whole house in my consciousness. Suppressing visual images was clearly the hardest part of the assignment.

 

Literature:

GOODMAN, Nelson. 1996. Způsoby světatvorby. Bratislava: Archa. Filosofie do kapsy. ISBN 8071151203.