In one of his most Chestertonian remarks, Chesterton wrote: “Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.” Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is perhaps the most reproduced work of art there is, one we have all seen hundreds of times. In my house alone, you can find it in books, in calendars, and in multiple copies my children have attempted. While helping my six-year-old daughter build the LEGO version of the painting she got for Christmas (which includes a LEGO version of van Gogh, with a miniature canvas of “Starry Night”), I looked upon it for the thousandth time, which is to say, for the very first time.
Painted in June 1889, while van Gogh was a patient at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, he seems to have thought very little of it, mentioning it briefly in some of his letters, in one case even disparagingly: “However, once again I’m allowing myself to do stars too big, &c., new setback, and I’ve enough of that.” Van Gogh never would have thought that his night scene would become one of his most beloved works. Its artistic merits are undoubtable—the swirling brushstrokes that transcend the static medium and imbue the picture with movement; the masterful use of hue and complementary color contrast by which the stars appear to be made of actual light; the composition opposing the serene and dormant village with the living, flaming night sky—but I had seen all that nine hundred and ninety-nine times. What appeared before my eyes the thousandth time was the deeper truth that was shining through it, the truth that had become veiled from seeing it so many times.
There is a certain view of the world that prides itself on being scientific but that is more grounded in a false philosophy than on science. J.R.R. Tolkien described the view thus:
You walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
One of the many minor globes of Space:
A star’s a star, some matter in a ball
Compelled to courses mathematical
Amid the regimented, cold, Inane,
Where destined atoms are each moment slain.
The claim of this reductionistic scientism is that the Earth is an insignificant rock hurling through an infinite, cold void. There is nothing special about Earth, nor anything special about human beings. The universe itself is the fruit of random fluctuations, of forces pulling and pushing things, of particles colliding in an endless, random process governed by the iron laws of nature. The order of the cosmos, its beauty, is simply a chance occurrence, a meaningless byproduct.
C.S. Lewis, in the first of his Space Trilogy novels, offers a wonderfully worded critique of this view:
A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. . . . No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory—the
“happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye
Up in the broad fields of the sky.”
This “empyrean ocean of radiance” is exactly what van Gogh captured in his painting. In it, we see that the heavens are not a dark and empty wasteland but are teeming with light—even if most of that light is not visible to the naked eye. Vladimir Soloviev, the Russian philosopher, theologian, and disciple of Fyodor Dostoevsky, held that beauty was the embodiment of what he called “Idea,” by which he meant “the absolute freedom of constituent parts in a perfected unified whole.” Whatever embodies this unity in diversity, this harmonic whole, is beautiful. For Soloviev, light is the signifier of this “universal all-unity” and thus the sky “is beautiful first as a picture of universal unity, as the expression of serene exultation, the eternal victory of the light principle over chaotic confusion.” In a heightened way, a starry sky realizes the ideal interplay of unity and variety: “Universal all-unity and its signifier, light, in its elementary separation into a multiplicity of independent foci, embraced, however, by a general harmony—appear in the beauty of a starlit night.”
Because “Starry Night” is a genuinely beautiful work of art, it cannot but speak the truth—even a truth its maker might not have fully intended because it is a religious truth.
We can go further. Yes, the heavens are not dark and void; in their light we are meant to see the “victory of the light principle over chaotic confusion”—that is, we are meant to see that the universe is not random and arbitrary happenstance but willful creation and, thus, that in it, we can see the wisdom of its creator, just as the psalmist sings:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. (Ps. 19:1–4)
Failure to see that all things point beyond themselves, that they have a meaning that transcends the merely factual, is not a gain in objectivity and in scientific understanding. It is to close one’s ears to the voiceless message that the psalmist speaks of. It is to see falsely: a loss in vision, a degraded perception. Tolkien explains this poetically:
He sees no stars who does not see them first
Of living silver made that sudden burst
To flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
Whose very echo after-music long
Has since pursued. There is no firmament,
Only a void, unless a jewelled tent
Myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
Unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.
This is no rejection of science but rather a liberation of science from a false philosophy and a mistaken theology. This materialistic philosophy had taken hold of the Western world during van Gogh’s lifetime, and van Gogh was not free from its influence. “Starry Night” is not without its ambivalence. It would be a misreading to assert that it is a religious work. Van Gogh had abandoned the religious ideas of his youth, and he explicitly declared that “Starry Night” did not imply a return to religion. And yet, van Gogh had also admitted to being haunted by religious ideas: “I’m astonished that with the modern ideas I have, I being such an ardent admirer of Zola, of De Goncourt and of artistic things which I feel so much, I have crises like a superstitious person would have, and that mixed-up, atrocious religious ideas come to me such as I never had in my head in the north.” His time at the asylum, which was housed in a former monastery, had the effect of rekindling some of van Gogh’s youthful religious inclinations.
“Every tangible representation of any object and phenomenon from the point of view of its final, definitive status, or in light of the world to come, is artistic work.”
In “Starry Night,” we find these two contradicting and conflicting views. The cypress, which dominates the left side of the canvas, was, in the Mediterranean milieu of Saint-Rémy, a symbol of death. It is the tree one finds in cemeteries. Its looming presence over the peaceful, sleeping village casts the shadow of death over it and reminds us of van Gogh’s personal struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts, a struggle he tragically lost little over a year after painting “Starry Night.”
And yet, there is that starry sky—a sky that is beyond death’s reach. A sky that is not the blackness of a vacuum, of nothingness, but the infinite shades of blue that refuse to yield to darkness: an ocean of light. Because “Starry Night” is a genuinely beautiful work of art, it cannot but speak the truth—even a truth its maker might not have fully intended because it is a religious truth. This might confuse those who think art is solely about “personal expression” and the pouring out of the artist’s individuality. The Greeks understood the artistic endeavor better in their belief that there was a touch of the divine in the artist. The artist was not expressing himself but what the Muses inspired in him. The artist in that respect was close to the prophet. We can turn to Soloviev for a Christian exposition of the same idea: “Now we can give a general definition of real art in its essence: every tangible representation of any object and phenomenon from the point of view of its final, definitive status, or in light of the world to come, is artistic work.”
The true work of art shows us things as God sees them. What van Gogh glimpsed in his imagination and conveyed in thick brushstrokes is the same truth the psalmist sung, Lewis described, and Tolkien declared. He captured the heavens from the perspective of heaven. He shows us what they really look like, their “final, definitive status.” This vision of his was, nonetheless, filtered through his experience, through his mental illness, through his lost faith. He was asking, what the psalmist had, on another occasion, asked: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Ps. 8:3–4). Van Gogh’s suicide, sadly, shows us his answer to that question was unlike the one given by the psalmist: “Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet” (Ps. 8:5–6). Overwhelmed by the cypress tree, he was overcome by the void and lost sight of the stars, but he left us a testimony of a truth that, if only briefly, he was able to see.