devotional


The Holy Spirit Florence Allshorn


I


n the city of Jerusalem, at a particular moment, as real as this moment, there was given to a group of Jews something literally from Heaven. Te secret of an unearthly Power,


radiant, so bursting with light that they could only describe it in their own words as the like of ‘cloven tongues of fire’. And at that moment the litle concentrated Church of the Saints came into being. Tose men, on whom the Heavenly Ting had fallen,


had not the words; they had no preconceived knowledge or opinions; they had to discover everything; and perhaps the principal thing they had to discover was how to keep open to it, to receive it, and how to build up a new person who would be capable of receiving it.


Certainty and simplicity Te real work, the redemption of mankind, the building


of the new type of person had now to begin. But they had the Ting that had happened. Sheer from Heaven the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ had come as he had said it would. ‘Tarry ye in Jerusalem,’ he had said, ‘until ye are endowed with power from on high.’ All they had to do then was to


sacred vision I


n a way quite different from the monarchical rape of the Church in


early modern England, Church and State were intimately connected in Renaissance Bellini


Venice. to Tintoretto much of


From Gentile the


art of the Republic celebrated the connection. When the body of St Mark was brought to the lagoon – or returned, as legend had it – it was located not in the cathedral of the island (San Pietro in Castello), but in the Doge’s great basilica, San Marco, the ducal chapel. Not surprisingly the legend of St


Mark (not of his life but of his body after death!) became a major pictorial theme. Here Tintoretto, in one of a sequence of pictures now spread around the galleries of Europe, depicts a crucial episode in the story; the removal by Alexandrian Christians of St Mark’s body from a pyre where it was to be burnt. They did so, the story goes, under cover of a great tempest which came suddenly upon the city. Mark’s body, dramatically lit, is being carried to safety across


12 ■ newdirections ■ July 2010


obey his words and wait. A band of very sure men sat in that first great Council of


the new Church and issued their findings, and they issued them with an almost unbelievable certainty and simplicity. ‘It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us.’ Tese were not men set fast in their own opinions, they were not importantly conceited men, they were astonished men, reverent and trembling before a close and clear Fact. Te dignity and authority behind their words Christendom has never questioned, then or since.


The Fact as victory Te Fact was the beginning of a great chain of conversions


and illuminations – Paul, Augustine, Francis, Luther, Ignatius, Wesley and the rest. Tere is no great mystery, in one way, in the lives of these men. In each case the simple fact is that each man aced on his belief in something seen, regardless of consequences; that each man had a revelation to make and he made it. Te Fact was a power that held in its essence a curious,


world-undermining kind of victory. Even when the early Church was perishing bloodily in the merciless wars waged against it by Rome in the years 70–135, they preserved the certain consciousness of the new Fact as victory, and every time they gathered for the Lord’s Supper they answered their blatant conquerors with the defiant cry of ‘ Christ the Crucified is here’.


From the Notebooks of Florence Alshorn, Founder of the St Julian’s Community ND


Tintoretto: Stealing of St Mark’s Body


a great public square. The pagan inhabitants of the city are running, terrified, into the surrounding buildings. The composition of the foreground


figures is irresistibly


reminiscent of a deposition; the others are sketchily painted, losing definition as they fade into the background. The whole composition is linked to the city and state of Venice by a visual trick. The architecture (scarcely more substantial than the drawing of the receding figures) has been identified as a version of Sansovino’s schemes for systematizing the Piazza San Marco, which Tintoretto would have known from their public display in the narthex of the basilica. Here all the varied techniques of


mannerism – a lurid sky, intense colour contrasted with the eerie monochrome of the distant buildings and figures – is used to give dignity and credibility to a legend which has national and political importance. The nation’s palladium is beginning its journey home.


Mark Stevens


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