“They Saw That His Suffering Was Very Great”: Beauty, Injury, and Seeing
John Brewer Eberly, Jr., MD, MA, Theology, Medicine, & Culture Initiative Duke Divinity School
In 1985, philosopher Elaine Scarry published her first book, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Fourteen years later, she published On Beauty and Being Just. Her analysis of pain and injury laid the soil for her future work in justice and beauty.
For Scarry, beauty’s antithesis is not ugliness, but injury. If beauty is that which is “fitting” or “fair,” then pain is that which is unfair, unjust, or injurious. As pain and injustice catalyze an “unmaking” of creation, encounters with beauty become particularly important in helping to heal an injured world.
The artistic portrayal of an injured thing in a particularly efficacious or beautiful way offers a sort of redemption from it. Beauty helps us tell the truth about painful realities. Indeed, the body in pain and the body in beauty have always shared a strange tension on the artist’s canvas—one that challenges our ability to speak faithfully about the suffering we encounter.
Artist Adam Granduciel sings, “Am I just living in the space between the beauty and the pain and the real thing?” This presentation will consider the spaces between beauty, pain, and the “real things” by exploring artwork at the intersections of medicine and suffering.
First, we will see how art helps “tell the truth” about beauty and injury, particularly the profound solitude that pain brings as it destroys the sufferer’s ability to use verbal language. “A picture is worth a thousand words” may be particularly true in injury, where the arts can “speak” on behalf of the sufferer when speech fails them.
Second, we will examine the famous postures of Job’s friends as envisioned by the artist. In the second chapter of Job, after Job’s health is attacked, his friends visit him. While Job’s counselors eventually offer infamous words that are more accusation than comfort, they initially demonstrate a faithful paradigm of lament (“...they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads...”), presence (“...they sat with him on the ground...”), and silence (“...no one spoke a word to him...”) in the face of their friend’s pain. We will therefore consider how the artist portrays lament, presence, and silence.
But we will also look at our seeing itself. As Thoreau writes, “the question is not what you look at, but what you see.” The visitation of Job’s friends is itself bookended by sight (“And when they saw him from a distance [...] they saw that his suffering was very great”).
Third, finally, and most importantly, how do these lessons make their way from the canvas to the clinic? The cultivation of aesthetic taste is necessary for the formation of phronesis—practical wisdom—and here we will imagine how to inhabit the practices of aesthetic sight, so often imprisoned within the jurisdiction of “the medical humanities,” and free them into practical, attentive habits of encountering the body in pain.
For Scarry, beauty’s antithesis is not ugliness, but injury. If beauty is that which is “fitting” or “fair,” then pain is that which is unfair, unjust, or injurious. As pain and injustice catalyze an “unmaking” of creation, encounters with beauty become particularly important in helping to heal an injured world.
The artistic portrayal of an injured thing in a particularly efficacious or beautiful way offers a sort of redemption from it. Beauty helps us tell the truth about painful realities. Indeed, the body in pain and the body in beauty have always shared a strange tension on the artist’s canvas—one that challenges our ability to speak faithfully about the suffering we encounter.
Artist Adam Granduciel sings, “Am I just living in the space between the beauty and the pain and the real thing?” This presentation will consider the spaces between beauty, pain, and the “real things” by exploring artwork at the intersections of medicine and suffering.
First, we will see how art helps “tell the truth” about beauty and injury, particularly the profound solitude that pain brings as it destroys the sufferer’s ability to use verbal language. “A picture is worth a thousand words” may be particularly true in injury, where the arts can “speak” on behalf of the sufferer when speech fails them.
Second, we will examine the famous postures of Job’s friends as envisioned by the artist. In the second chapter of Job, after Job’s health is attacked, his friends visit him. While Job’s counselors eventually offer infamous words that are more accusation than comfort, they initially demonstrate a faithful paradigm of lament (“...they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads...”), presence (“...they sat with him on the ground...”), and silence (“...no one spoke a word to him...”) in the face of their friend’s pain. We will therefore consider how the artist portrays lament, presence, and silence.
But we will also look at our seeing itself. As Thoreau writes, “the question is not what you look at, but what you see.” The visitation of Job’s friends is itself bookended by sight (“And when they saw him from a distance [...] they saw that his suffering was very great”).
Third, finally, and most importantly, how do these lessons make their way from the canvas to the clinic? The cultivation of aesthetic taste is necessary for the formation of phronesis—practical wisdom—and here we will imagine how to inhabit the practices of aesthetic sight, so often imprisoned within the jurisdiction of “the medical humanities,” and free them into practical, attentive habits of encountering the body in pain.