RE EX NIHILO
Jerry Harkins


In 1974, the young American sculptor Frederick Hart won the commission to create a suite of works to be installed as part of the main entrance to the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. The work, in six separate pieces, was dedicated in 1990. It includes free-standing, larger than life portraits of St. Peter and St. Paul [1], a large carving of Adam that serves as the front of the trumeau (the post that separates the doors of the main entrance), and three high relief carvings representing the creation of day, the creation of night, and the emergence of mankind. The latter, “Ex Nihilo,” shows eight human figures, four male and four female, appearing to emerge from what Genesis calls the void and what theologians have long referred to as nihilo, nothing.

Most Christians believe that before God created the heavens and the earth, there was nothing except God who then, by an act of will, became the uncaused first cause. Mr. Hart, with just a touch of artistic ambiguity, said that “Ex Nihilo” represents the “…state of rebirth and reaffirmation of all the possibilities in being human.” Of course, there is no reaffirmation of anything if the figures are emerging from nothing. He later said, “That might mean that the eight figures represent eight Christians in the act of being born again.” If so, the work is an elaborate metaphor for the cleansing waters of (adult) baptism. The soul’s release from the chains of original sin is seen has having been pre-figured in the creation of the world. Had this interpretation occurred to him before he began work I suspect he would have given the work a different title, perhaps something taken from Galatians 5, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” He would also have had to change the background as neither chaos nor nothingness is a good metaphor for the law from which St. Paul says Christ is freeing us. Mr. Hart’s life was marked by a remarkable intellectual pilgrimage as his Christianity became progressively more orthodox. His explanation may reflect this process more than it does his original intent. At a minimum, it suggests that he was aware that the sculpture has nothing to do with the biblical story of creation.

I see “Ex Nihilo” as a commentary on the relationship between the human and the divine. The title of the piece is nothing more than an afterthought. The figures appear to emerge from chaos [2], which is not nothing. Elsewhere Hart called the background “the majesty and mystery of divine force in a state of becoming.” The last phrase about mystery and majesty clears some of the fog but leaves the question: What that is divine is or ever has been becoming? Divine simply is. As God said in introducing himself to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.’” [3]

Frederick Hart was arguably the greatest figurative sculptor of his generation and together with Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the greatest of the many Americans who have worked in the classical tradition. He was not, however, by any means a literalist. His “Awakening of Eve,” for example, clearly depicts a navel she could not have had. And “Ex Nihilo,” in spite of its title, is not a representation of the Genesis story. The first two verses of the biblical account read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” It does not say the heavens and the earth were created out of nothing. On the contrary, it is saying that at the time God started his creation, the heavens and the earth already existed but the earth was empty. This is made explicit in Young’s Literal Translation [4] where the line is rendered, ‘In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth, the earth hath existed waste and void…” The recent translation of Robert Alter [5] has the same line as, “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste…” And Everett Fox [6] has it, “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste…” The author of Genesis almost certainly would have been thoroughly befuddled by the concept of absolute nothingness. The ancient idea that creation involves making something out of nothing was seized upon by medieval theologians many of whom resorted to mysticism to confront the emerging empiricism of Roger Bacon and the nominalism of William of Occam. In any event, nothing is not what Mr. Hart meant by nihilo even if that is what both the word and the theologians mean.

You have to look at the work carefully. Four adult men and four adult women are emerging from a chaotic background suggestive of primordial energy. This then is certainly not Day 6 of Creation because on that day only Adam was created. Indeed, Hart’s scene takes place sometime after the “creation” of Eve for neither she nor Adam are depicted. Even biblically, these eight people could not have emerged from nothing. Since Hart was both thoughtful and religious, it is necessary to conclude that the figures represent all of us and the background—the nihilo—is not literal but metaphoric. Perhaps, like E. E. Cummings, he is saying we humans are “lifted from the no / of all nothing.”

For more than a hundred years, it has been clear that the facts of evolution make a literal reading of Genesis impossible. Thinkers like the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, have pointed out that God and evolution are perfectly compatible but this idea has gained little traction within the Catholic church [7] and is actively opposed by Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Hart is known to have been influenced by Teilhard and it seems likely he set out to promote his own similar view. What is important is not how God created us, but why. Teilhard did not say so, nor does Hart, but one answer is that God created us because he had no choice. He was incomplete without something to love and to be loved by. Contrary to what John Milton claimed, God most certainly did need man’s active love. [8] And, of course, vice versa. This is a radical idea because an omnipotent God should need nothing and should not be subject to compulsion of any kind. Which, of course, is the message of Job. But not of Mary. Miraculously pregnant, the Virgin goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth and says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” What does this mean if not that her soul makes the Lord greater?

If this is at all close to what was in Hart’s mind, it offers a satisfying explication of the sculpture. We are all creatures of existential alienation, striving blindly away from our sense of emptiness. Upward and outward we strive with our eyes closed. Upward toward heaven and the love of God, outward from the loneliness of self. The figures are incomplete, still in the process of becoming as is all creation until the last trumpet. Their loneliness is a perfect metaphor for the absence of love. Hart is saying what St. Paul was saying: without love I am nothing, only Hart’s version is an affirmation. Love is everything. Perhaps it is.

Notes

1. The official name of the edifice is the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Both saints are depicted at the moment they accepted Jesus.

2. “The nothingness of chaos” is an oxymoron. Merriam-Webster defines chaos as “a state of things in which chance is supreme; nature that is subject to no law or that is not necessarily uniform; especially the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct and orderly forms.” Only things can be chaotic and they are so when their arrangement or motion is not subject to the laws of probability. No one has ever found a truly chaotic phenomenon .

3. Exodus 3:14.

4. Young’s Literal Translation of the Holy Bible, Revised Edition, Baker Books, 1995.

5. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.

6. The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introductions. Commentary and Notes, Schocken Books, 1983.

7. On October 23, 1996, John Paul II delivered an address to an audience of scientists which was then published as formal statement endorsing the theory of evolution "...as more than just a hypothesis." Subsequently, the International Theological Commission, headed by then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, seemed to endorse this position by saying, “Through the activity of natural causes, God causes to arise those conditions required for the emergence and support of living organisms, and, furthermore, for their reproduction and differentiation." After Ratzinger’s elevation, however, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, commented that the Pope’s 1996 statement was “rather vague and unimportant.” He further said, “Evolution in the Neo-Darwinian sense…is not true” and was “invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science.” His Eminence does not know the difference between Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism and does not realize that his enemies care not at all for purpose and design.

As interesting as all this may be, the present writer was the only one who noticed that the pope had chosen to publish his address on the 5,999th anniversary of the sixth day of Creation, according to the calculations of Bishop Ussher. That, of course, was Adam’s birthday and maybe Eve’s too.

8. “On His Blindness” claims that “…God doth not need / Either man's work or his own gifts.” It is not clear whom “his own” refers to. It could mean God and the gifts he has given mankind. Or it could refer to man and the “gifts” that man bestows on God in the form of prayer and sacrifice. The latter reading is perfectly consistent with the great theme of the Reformation: We are not saved by good works but by faith alone.