Across the river

The 17th-century French artist Philippe de Champaigne painted “Christ Healing the Deaf-Mute” when he was in his forties and at the height of his powers. Originally from Brussels, Philippe went to Paris at age 19, and quickly obtained commissions, collaborating with others, such as Nicolas Poussin, to work on decorating palaces, among them the Palais du Luxembourg, eventually catching the eye of the French Queen, Marie de Medicis, who quickly appointed him her court painter.

The painting depicts a scene from the Gospel of Mark, in which Jesus, after he had left the district of Tyre and gone by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, into the district of the Decapolis, met a deaf man who had a speech impediment and who begged him to lay his hand on him.

Jesus took him away from the crowd and when they were alone put his finger into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue. Jesus then looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him, “Ephphatha!” (The is Aramaic for “Be opened!”)

Immediately the man could hear and speak plainly.

Jesus told the crowd that had witnessed the healing to keep the matter to themselves, but the people spread word about the miracle all the more.

Philippe himself was no stranger to “miraculous” healings. His daughter, Catherine de Sainte Suzanne Champagne, had fallen dangerously ill and gradually lost the ability to move. But she recovered after prayers that continued for nine days—a novena. In gratitude, and in fulfilment of a vow, Philippe did a painting of his daughter and her superior, Mother Agnes Arnauld, who had taken care of her. This portrait of the two nuns of the Convent of Port-Royal often finds its way into art books in which Philippe is featured.

The daughter’s healing must have factored in Philippe’s decision at the end of his life to live in the Convent of Port-Royal.

What I find unusual in the painting is the predominance of the landscape. Much of the canvas is given to a river and the trees which it flows by. Jesus performs the healing act on a small lot beside the river, towards the lower right corner, as though this were but a minor detail of the work.

Art kibitzers remark that this was Philippe’s way of making the biblical message contemporary, by giving it a Parisian setting. Indeed, the scriptural purpose aside, the scene, which includes swans, could have been of any bank along the Seine River, which idles from Paris across the plains to the sea.  Aside from that, it was likely that Philippe, a court painter, had a mind to have the painting hang in some stately room.

For all that, the focus remains on Jesus, and this Philippe accomplishes by intensifying the light that falls on the Lord, and goes up all the way to the sky above him, to which he looks up in prayer.  Still, thanks to the artist’s genius, the illumination seems a natural part of the whole picture.

Is it not that all healing happens with the least disturbance to the natural world? Indeed, it is on varying scales a restoration of that world, possessed of imperfections, to wholeness. Such that when the deaf-mute finally recovered his speech and hearing, the surroundings likewise regained something it had lost. The river became more of a river and the trees more of trees. The two swans became whiter, white enough to turn into the very symbols of purity.