ILL ARTERHOUSE CHRONICLE41 By Lionel Grady

Theology by pictures
ECENTLY I had the
privilege of attending a dinner at the olders Hall. The Innholders is an ancient London livery company founded in 1514. On entering the hall I noticed a splendid statue of St Julien the Innkeeper, and my mind at once went back to a short story by Gustave Flaubert which I had read some 30 years previously, and which had made a deep impression on me.
The story, which Flaubert wrote in 1877, is called La Legende de StJuhen l'Hospitalier. In it he narrates in great detail over some 20 pages how Julien, the son of a warrior seigneur, becomes an obsessive hunter, killing animals for the sake of killing. Once, after a particulady brutal and senseless slaughter of a giant stag he is warned by the dying animal that one day he will HI his own parents.
To avoid such a danger Julian becomes a soldier in a distant country. As a great commander he wins many victories and eventually marries the Emperor's daughter. Retiring from warfare he resumes the chase. One evening he returns tired from the hunt and in the dark finds a bearded man in the marriage bed. Filled with rage he slays the man and the woman whom he assumes to be his own unfaithful wife, only to find to his horror that he has killed his parents. They had arrived unexpectedly and his wife had given them the marriage bed.
Filled with remorse Julien undertakes heroic penances and eventually founded an inn for travellers. He himself lived in a hovel by the inn and undertook the most menial of tasks, including ferrying pilgrims across the adjacent river.
One wild night the summoning bell called him and he was aghast to find that his passenger was a leper. Dutifully Julien carried the leper across the stormy water and laid him in his own bed. The leper, who was frozen with cold, asks Julien to warm him. Julien gives him his own clothes and then lies on the leper to warm him. At this moment the leper is transformed into Christ and takes Julien to heaven. Flaubert concludes his story, "...and that is the legend of St Julien the
innkeeper, more or less as I learned it from the stained glass windows of my village church.'
Although he may have only existed in legend, Saint Julien is understandably the patron of innkeepers and boatmen. He was very popular in the late middle ages, and according to Farmer "seven ancient English churches were dedicated to him." There is a screen painting of St Julien in the Parish Church of St Margaret of Antioch in Suffield, Norfolk, and he is shown in a stained glass window in the church of St
Mary Magdalene at Wiggenhall, near Wisbech. There are also windows dedicated to St Julien in the Cathedrals of Chartres and Rouen, but I do not know the church where the young Flaubert learned the legend with such imaginative insight.
In the days before printing, and for long afterwards, pictorial art was used universally by the Roman and Orthodox Churches to reinforce preaching and tell the Gospel stories to a largely illiterate population. But religious art evolved far beyond the simple narrative of Flaubert's Stiulien, and by the 15th century had achieved a high degree of theological sophistication.
Anyone who has visited the recent exhibition of Russian Icons at the Royal Academy will have been struck by the copies based on Andrey Rublev's famous interpretation of Abraham under the oaks at Mature, which was executed about
1411. Abraham sees three men but addressed them in the singular (Genesis 18). The Christian understanding of this event is that Abraham was beholding the Trinity. The icon shows three men sitting round a table which is open towards us. The inclination of their bodies indicates their Unity and the colour of their robes indicates their persons. The chalice on the table, the sign of Abraham's hospitality, symbolises the communion cup in which Christians are invited to partake.
ERHAPS the most theo ogical literate painter was Roger van de
Weyden (1400 -1465). The Triptych now in the Koninklijk Museum in Antwerp, is a highly sophisticated interpretation of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church and a good example for detailed study. Dominating the picture in the central panel is a massive representation of the Crucifixion. All
the figures here are double the size of the figures in the side aisles, a fact which tells us that the Crucifixion is the central event of the picture and from it all the other figures and events take their meaning.
The Crucifixion itself is conventional enough and shows the dying Christ with his grief stricken mother supported by St John and the holy women.
What is unconventional is that the event is taking place within a massive and beauti
fully Gothic church. The church, ecc14.4, ia, is in reality the assembly of the people of God, but as the people of God meet in a building, the building itself symbolises the Church. By placing the depiction of the Crucifixion solidly in the very centre of the church building the artist is telling us that Christ's sacrifice on the cross is the source of all the graces that come to us through the sacraments of the Church. In his painting van der Weyden is thus revealing a hierarchy of truths. Not only is he saying that Christ's cross is the source of all grace, but he is also emphasising that the Church is the visible sign or sacrament of Christ in the world. The Church in her turn, therefore, has the authority to pass on Christ's grace to us through her own seven sacraments.
Directly behind the Crucifixion scene and occupying the centre ground of the nave, a priest is saying Mass at the main altar. He is shown raising the Host at the consecration, the most holy moment in the liturgy when Christ becomes truly present in the bread and wine on the altar. The Mass is thus seen to connect the church and her sacraments to Calvary by representing the once and for all yet never-ending sacrifice of Jesus on the altar of the cross over and over again on the altars of the Church.
From this central sacrament of the Eucharist all the other sacraments devolve. They are shown in chronological sequence with baptism in the foreground of the left sided panel and proceeding clockwise to the last sacrament of extreme unction in the foreground of the right sided panel. Thus we see first the sacraments of initiation, baptism and confirmation. They are vividly shown in a virtually contemporary form. In the third scene a priest is hearing confession as part of the sacrament of penance, while a second penitent waits his turn.
Overhead appropriately coloured angels flourish the Gospel text which validate each of these sacraments.
On the right side we see the ordination of a priests, a wedding and finally the anointing of a dying man in what used to be called the sacrament of extreme unction as it was then usually reserved for those in danger of death. Once again appropriately coloured angels red for the fire of the Holy Spirit, royal purple and finally black hover overhead and link the world of the human present with the unending world of the eternal sacrifice of Christ.
HISTORICALLY it IS interesting that Roger van de Weyden painted this altarpiece nearly a century before Henry Vlll's Asset-tin septum sacramentorum in defence of the seven sacraments for which he won the title `defender of the faith' from Pope Leo X in 1521. The meaning of van der Weyden's painting would have been evident to any illiteratel5th-century Flemish peasant If a picture is worth a thousand words., for me this picture says more than a thousand words of any theological text.