The Pre-Raphaelites and the Apostate I Have Become—Really Living (3)

(continued from “Human Drama”)

What began with a quote about how the Pre-Raphaelites viewed the Bible as a source of human drama soon became a theme when I saw the following depiction of the story of Noah’s ark, titled The Eve of the Deluge and painted by William Bell Scott:

 

We see Noah and his crew in the lower right-hand corner boarding the ark while a prince at his leisure gazes on and a storm brews in the distance. The typical interpretation of this story is one of smug, sometimes also sad, condemnation of the worldly for their wicked ways, followed by triumphant declaration of their impending doom.

As I gazed on this work, however, I found that I was more sympathetic toward the prince and his hangers-on and even found something admirable and noble in them. If the purpose of existence is not simply living on but really living, then I would rather be up with the heathens, where there are creaturely comforts and time for reverie.

By contrast, Noah and his family are an indistinct crowd slogging through a cloud of dust to board the ark for what is sure to be one long, miserable hiatus from the world. Their wretchedness, their suffering, puts me in mind of the dying masses who reap death as the deserts of sin in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Triumph of Death, as well as of those whose portion the Book of Revelation says is “in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur.” (Revelation 21:8, ESV)

 

In this light--the light of some freewheeling associations--the heathens in The Eve of the Deluge represent a higher type, those who refuse to grovel in religious terror. For me, the wicked have become the godly while the righteous are now the iniquitous.

How’s that for a neat series of moral inversions?