, whom
the faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ of
Justin, Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church,
the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of our
sins and clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms.

It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of the
most miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of
the beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greed
of their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by
the Father until such time as no further torture was possible; the
Christ with no recourse but His Mother, to Whom--then powerless to aid
Him--He had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant's cry.

In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passion
with all the suffering permitted to the human senses, and, obeying an
incomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of the scourging and of the
blows and of the insults spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor had
He resumed it when, after these preliminary mockeries, He entered upon
the unspeakable torment of the unceasing agony. Thus, dying like a
thief, like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had sunk himself to
the deepest depth of fallen humanity and had not spared Himself the last
ignominy of putrefaction.

Never before had naturalism transfigured itself by such a conception and
execution. Never before had a painter so charnally envisaged divinity
nor so brutally dipped his brush into the wounds and running sores and
bleeding nail holes of the Saviour. Gruenewald had passed all measure. He
was the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue Redeemer, his
sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be truly
transcendent. A divine light played about that ulcerated head, a
superhuman expression illuminated the fermenting skin of the epileptic
features. This crucified corpse was a very God, and, without aureole,
without nimbus, with none of the stock accoutrements except the
blood-sprinkled crown of thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestial
super-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn Virgin and a Saint John
whose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears.

These faces, by nature vulgar, were resplendent, transfigured with the
expression of the sublime grief of those souls whose plaint is not
heard. Thief, pauper, and peasant had vanished and given place