A Man's Faith Could Be Destroyed

In Rogozhin's house there's a painting. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521 or 1522. Life-size. Horizontal. A man who has been beaten, pierced, and has been in the tomb long enough that the process has started.

Myshkin sees it and says: "A man could lose his faith from that picture."

He means it technically. Not that it's disturbing or sacrilegious. That it makes an argument — a pictorial argument, with no words, that a theological claim is false.

The standard painted Christ is idealized. The body has a certain quality of being-not-quite-dead, of being on the threshold, of beauty that implies transcendence. Even the crucifixion paintings — even the graphic ones — tend to show a body that is still, in some sense, a body that could be a vehicle for something beyond the body. It remains available.

Holbein's painting refuses this. The Christ in the tomb is a person who has been subjected to serious physical violence and is now in the early stages of decomposition. The face shows what faces look like after. The hands show what hands look like after. The color shows what color looks like after. It is not a body awaiting resurrection. It is a body at the end of a trajectory.

What the painting says is: this happened. Not "this happened and also something else would happen later." Just this.

The argument has a specific structure. The Resurrection requires that whatever happened to this body was not the end. But a body that looks like this — that has been this thoroughly subjected to the physical process — is not available for what the doctrine claims happened next. The physical world, as Holbein renders it, has a momentum that doesn't leave room.

This is not an argument in words. It's an argument in seeing. You look at the body and you have a response — not a reasoned response, but an immediate one. That doesn't come back. The response precedes the theology. By the time you reach the theological question, the painting has already answered it.

Myshkin recognizes this. He doesn't say "a man could think about losing his faith from that picture." He says: could lose it. The mechanism is direct. Faith, if it's genuine faith and not a philosophical position, lives in the same register as the painting lives in — visceral, immediate, about what seems possible. The painting operates directly on the sense of what is possible.

A man of faith who can hold the painting in front of him and maintain the belief is a man who can bracket what he sees in favor of what he knows. Not everyone can do that. Some people can't un-see what they see.

Ippolit encounters the painting in Rogozhin's house and has a dream about it. In the dream, the dead Christ — the Christ that looks exactly like the painting — suddenly begins to move. A creature appears. The creature is not described; Ippolit can only say it was awful and frightening. The room becomes dark. He wakes up.

The dream doesn't answer the painting. It doesn't resolve the question of resurrection. It adds something stranger: the possibility that the thing that comes back from that kind of death is not what was expected. Not transcendence. Something else.

This is what the painting puts into the world once you let it do its work. Not doubt, necessarily. But the specific anxiety that the thing you were waiting for might come back wrong.

Dostoevsky had seen the Holbein himself, in Basel. He stood in front of it for a long time. His wife recorded that he was so absorbed she thought he might have one of his fits.

He put it in the novel and gave it to Rogozhin — the figure of destructive desire, the figure who kills what he loves. Rogozhin has hung this painting in the place where the icon would go. He has replaced the image of sanctity with the most brutal possible image of its absence.

This might be the most precise thing the novel does. The painting is not there to destroy faith. It's there to show what desire does with theology when desire has run out of everything else. Rogozhin can't believe. He can't not believe. He has put the extreme image in the place of the sacred image because neither quite works and the extreme image at least doesn't lie about what the extreme looks like.

The man whose faith could be destroyed by that picture is not Rogozhin. He has no faith to destroy. The man in question is the one who sees the painting, understands what it's saying, and still has to decide.

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