Sunday Pages: "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

A painting by Hieronymus Bosch

The Seventh Seal has been opened, Dear Reader: Donald Trump has found religion.

For months now, as White House Kremlinologists have theorized that he is terminally ill and not long for this world, Donald has been openly wondering, in a way that makes him seem almost normal, if he will make it into Heaven. On Halloween, he channeled Charles “The Hammer” Martel, warning the sixth largest country in the world by population that it was “a ‘COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN’ because of its alleged mistreatment of Christians:

Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter. I am hereby making Nigeria a “COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN” — But that is the least of it. When Christians, or any such group, is slaughtered like is happening in Nigeria (3,100 versus 4,476 Worldwide), something must be done! ….The United States cannot stand by while such atrocities are happening in Nigeria, and numerous other Countries. We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian population around the World!

Yesterday, he ratcheted up the tough-guy rhetoric:

If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, “guns-a-blazing,” to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities. I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!

Trump has bellowed empty threats countless times, but I don’t recall previous ultimatums being overtly Christian. The kooky Christian nationalists with whom he has festooned his Administration have, it seems, finally triumphed over (what’s left of) his soul.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the loutish lush with the white Christian nationalist tattoo, could barely contain his tumescence for war against the Moors Nigerian Muslims: “The Department of War is preparing for action,” he posted on X. “Either the Nigerian Government protects Christians, or we will kill the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

Meanwhile, at a Turning Point USA event in Mississippi on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance stopped fondling Erika Kirk long enough to bemoan his Hindu wife’s stubborn determination to resist coming to Jesus. “Do I hope, eventually, that she is somehow moved by the same thing I was moved by in church? Yes. I honestly do wish that, because I believe in the Christian gospel and I hope that eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”

Christian Nationalism, it seems, is having a moment.

But the Christianity, so called, practiced by the Trump regime is informed less by the teachings of Jesus Christ than by the religious philosophy of Arnaud Amalric, the Languedoc papal legate who, when asked before the 1209 massacre at Béziers how he advised his Catholic charges to tell the heretical Cathars from the True Believers, said (and I’m paraphrasing): “Kill them all and let God sort them out.”

Hegseth is a proud and loud Christian. One month ago, before tying one on, he told the silent assembly of generals, “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country,” and called for “maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”

Mike Johnson is a proud and loud Christian; he has shut down the House of Representatives, and is about to consign millions of needy Americans to starvation, to cover up for pedophiles.

The federal budget director, Russ Vought, another proud and loud Christian, said he wanted thousands of “bureaucrats” to be “traumatically affected” by losing their jobs. “We want to put them in trauma.”

Who would Jesus traumatize? Who would Jesus force to go hungry? Which army of apostates would Jesus slaughter? Which widow would Jesus feel up?

I am no longer a practicing Catholic, and am hardly an authority on theological matters. But I did go to Mass almost every Sunday for 18 years, and MAGA Christianity has little in common with what I learned in church.

Is this perversion of Jesus’ teaching akin to what compelled Martin Luther to nail his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church? What is Christianity, anyway? If we’re to be a Christian nationalist nation, it might be instructive to know.

The Church that Luther found fault with was—like the U.S. government after Citizens United—corrupted by money. Luther was born in 1483, and came of age during the papacy of Alexander VI, otherwise known as Rodrigo Borgia. Like Trump, Borgia had many different side-pieces, siring a half dozen children with various mistresses. He bought his way into the Vatican, spending vast sums to secure the conclave vote, in much the same way Elon Musk did for Trump. “Alexander sells the Keys, the Altar—Christ Himself,” it was said at the time. “He has the right to, for he bought them.” Assuming the duties of the new gig did not stop Borgia from sleeping around.

To recoup the initial investment, Borgia leaned into the selling of indulgences—pardons for sins, granted by the Pope, that had currency in Heaven. Basically, you gave Alexander VI a pile of gold coins, and in return, he handed you a signed document guaranteeing you could jump the line at the Pearly Gates. (As a pure moneymaking scam, it may well be the cleverest ever devised.)

Rodrigo Borgia reigned as Pope Alexander VI for almost exactly eleven years—from August 1492 (a consequential year in world history!) to August 1503. It was during his pontificate that Jerome van Aken, a painter from ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a medieval city in Brabant, in what is now the Netherlands, produced his greatest masterpiece, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” under one of the coolest pen names of all time: Hieronymus Bosch.

I’ve always liked that painting—or, rather, the three paintings that form that triptych—but I didn’t know much about it or Bosch. Given that the Christian nationalists in Washington want to Make Christianity Medieval Again, I decided to look more closely at both the work of art and the artist who made it, hoping I might learn something about our current moment of religious crisis.

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As it turns out, I’m not the only one who doesn’t know much about Hieronymus Bosch. There isn’t much to know about Hieronymus Bosch. He was born around 1450, to a family of painters. In 1463, a great fire ravaged ‘s-Hertogenbosch, burning down his house and some four thousand other homes; it is assumed that the fiery tableau informed his later paintings of Hell. In 1480 or thereabouts—late in life for that time period—he married Aleid Goyaerts van den Meervenne, an older woman of considerable means. This allowed him to set up shop and paint full time. In 1486, he joined the Brotherhood of Our Lady, the Opus Dei of fifteenth-century Brabant. He finished “The Garden of Earthly Delights” circa 1503, the year that his presumed patron, Henry III of Nassau-Breda, married Françoise Louise of Savoy; the painting is thought to be connected with the Count’s wedding. And he died in 1516, a year before Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of All Saints’ Church.

Although Bosch didn’t know him, and likely didn’t even know of him, he was a coeval of Leonard Da Vinci (1452-1519). “The Garden of Earthly Delights” was painted at exactly the same time as the “Mona Lisa!” Bosch’s work was enormously popular, often reproduced, and even more often imitated. As the delightfully pretentious art critic Thomas Craven writes in A Treasury of Art Masterpieces (1939):

Esteemed in his own time for his fantastic variations of popular scenes, [Bosch] was superseded, after his death, by pseudo-classical devotees of the Italian Renaissance; forgotten in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and only a few years ago restored to his position as one of the greatest of Flemish masters. His rehabilitation, in part, may be ascribed to the laudations of the Surrealists who discovered in him the highest authority for their own private nightmares and symbolical paraphernalia….

Bosch appeared during the last convulsive superstitions of medieval thought—when the fears of death, haunting rich and poor alike, were personified in grotesque forms and diabolical imagery, most of it indecipherable claptrap of a departed day. Helping himself to the accumulated emblems of witchcraft and inventing many of his own, he created pictures which astonish, delight, and mystify the modern beholder.

As for the work itself, “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is what the kids might call extra—in the best possible way. It is six feet eight inches tall (and not, regrettably, six-seven) and, when opened on its hinges, twelve and a half feet wide. The 85 square feet of oak panel is densely packed with human figures, birds and beasts, fish and fowl, mountains and fountains, water and grass, flowers and trees, God and Satan, and everything in between, like a giant tattoo sleeve—all of it loaded up like a plate of nachos with symbolism and Biblical allusion. It draws from the medieval grotesqueries and bestiaries that preceded it, and informs every dark and trippy hellscape that came after it, from the paintings of Salvador Dali and Joan Miró to the album covers of Pink Floyd and Iron Maiden.

There is way too much going on to properly analyze the work in this space; entire books have been written on the subject. I spent an hour yesterday watching a fascinating video by James Payne, of Great Art Explained, that goes into the nitty-gritty, covering every last brush stroke in greater detail than I ever could. (If you’re bored this afternoon, it’s apropos to invest the extra hour of the Day of the Dead watching the Bosch video.)

The apparent chaos of the painting, Payne explains, is actually the result of meticulous planning. In this still shot from the video, he shows how the action radiates outward from a single unhatched egg, directly in the center of the work but scarcely noticeable:

As far as Bosch was concerned, the chicken did not come first.

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What I did not realize, and had never before seen, is that the triptych can be, and often was, closed, and on the closed doors, Bosch painted an entirely different scene—God, in the upper left corner, looking ancient and bearded and conventional and already exhausted, presiding over the Third Day of Creation:

It looks like a snow globe: the sphere, the see-through dome, the gleam of the light (created two days before) along the glass (or whatever it’s made of). Like Pangæa, the earth is just beginning to come into shape. The painting is a grisaille—grayscale, devoid of reds and yellows and blues and greens. Only when the shutters are open does the full range of lush color emerge, rather like Dorothy opening the front door to step into Oz. Life was simpler, back on Day Three—but man, was it dull.

The triptych proper comprises three panels. The first is known as “The Joining of Adam and Eve,” and shows God in Eden, introducing a seated Adam, perhaps recovering from having his chest cut into, to the lovely creature He has fashioned from his rib. The second is the titular “Garden of Earthly Delights,” and is presumably the world as we know it: naked human beings left to their own devices, which involves many creative and perverse ways of achieving carnal pleasure. And then the third panel is “Hell,” where the Prince of Darkness, rendered as some sort of birdman, literally eats up sinners and shits them out.

What is going on here?

At first glance, Bosch appears to be reveling in both the erotic debauchery and the sadistic punishments; the creativity of the latter rivals if not surpasses Dante’s. Too, the little scenes depicted in every corner of the painting range far away from anything described in the Scriptures. This is Biblical fan fiction, not canon. Is Bosch himself heretical? Is this an endorsement of the debauch? Because the center panel—the main thing we’re looking at—feels like an invitation to take off our clothes, leap into the painting, and join the frolic.

Is this blasphemy? Not so fast.

Bosch, the sardonic art historian Craven tells us, “is often construed as an iconoclast, or heretic, far in advance of his period, hurling cryptic satirical dramas and profound pictorial attacks at his benighted countrymen”—man, I love how this guy writes!— “but this conception is specious and unproved. Bosch was known to be an orthodox Catholic and his diabolical machinery, though critical and irreverent, was not necessarily of malicious purport.”

Payne goes a step further, characterizing the work as “religious propaganda.” Given the well-known lasciviousness of the contemporary Pope, it may well be a pre-Lutheran dig at the sexual improprieties of Rodrigo Borgia. We know Bosch’s paintings were collected by Philip II of Spain, a great lover of art (which is why the work is in Spain) but also a driving force in the Spanish Inquisition. And we know Bosch was the member of a Christian cult of some sort.

But what I see in the painting is an artistic genius struggling to hew to a religion some of whose tenets don’t make much sense. He knows what he is supposed to believe; he wants to believe it; he can’t understand why or how.

Let’s go panel by panel:

The exterior, as discussed, is dull and gray. The world without humans, and without flowers and plants and birds and beasts, is boring. Even God looks like his heart isn’t really in it.

The left interior panel shows Adam and Eve in Eden. While there are trees and fruit all around—including the tree that produces the fruit of knowledge, of which Eve will later entice Adam to eat—the serpent and the apple are not what Bosch focuses on. Instead, we are shown the moment when Adam meets Eve for the first time:

God is there—a grown man but younger than how he looks on the exterior, more human in form; more like Jesus than Jehovah, as many observers have pointed out—and He’s staring right at us, as if commanding us to witness what is about to happen. His left hand clasps Eve’s dainty, fragile wrist. Adam is seated, his legs out in front of him, feet crossed, as if trying to suppress the strange new feeling coursing to his root chakra. His skin is pale but his cheeks are flushed. He is looking not at Eve but at God.

Eve is fully naked. Her eyes are cast down. She is on her knees before her God and her Master, but the rest of her body is erect, displaying her pudenda. Behind her is a rabbit—an animal known for being cute, for being scared, and for being fecund. Eve does not look like an adult woman, but like—well, like the sort of figure Donald Trump drew in his “birthday book” sketch.

Even nonbelievers understand who these characters are supposed to be, project the Book of Genesis connotations onto them. But put that aside for a moment. What do we actually see? An older man, fully clothed, inviting us with his eyes and the raised fingers of his right hand to watch him, delivers a submissive, naked girl to a naked younger male friend of his who is clearly aroused. This is God as procurer, as pimp, as sex trafficker—as an almighty Jeffrey Epstein. What we actually see here is off-putting, if not actively disturbing. Sure, it’s in the Bible, but that doesn’t make it normal or okay. Bosch seems to understand this, or at least to intuit this, because why else would he paint the subjects in this way?

And we all know, from hearing about it for thousands of years, the story of the Garden of Eden: how Eve is the one who got us eighty-sixed from Paradise, how it was all Eve’s fault, how women are the root of all evil, how the pain of childbirth is punishment for the lapse, and blah blah blah. But look at the left panel again. Who, among those three characters, is the most vulnerable? Where does the power really lie? How can Eve, in that group dynamic, be blamed for anything? For the trafficked girl, getting kicked out of the cult of Eden is not expulsion but escape. Adam’s fall is Eve’s liberation.

The center panel is situated between Eden and Hell. We might expect a more wholesome, “Make America Great Again”-style fantasia, but all we get here is pure, uncut orgiastic pleasure. Mike Johnson’s wife, Kelly Johnson, runs an outfit called Onward Christian Counseling Services, which promotes “covenant marriages” (like the one Eve entered into with Adam) and, on its since-deleted website, stated, “We believe and the Bible teaches that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God.” (Not mentioned: pedophilia.)

In the “Garden of Earthly Delights,” Bosch shows all of those things and more. And whatever he may have believed, what he’s showing us is that, once left to their own devices, human beings are going to indulge themselves in pleasures of the flesh. I mean, God commanded Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply,” hence all the strawberries and other fruit in the painting. But how can men and women fulfill that command while at the same time denouncing sexual pleasure? What sense does that make? It’s a glaring plot flaw.

In the patriarchal Biblical view, women are temptresses, men are supposed to control their lustful urges, and God can say it’s on us for straying, because He gave us “free will.” But maybe, just maybe, it’s His fault, for rigging the game against us? Once again, Bosch is showing us something that doesn’t quite gibe with his hardline Catholic belief system.

And then, the third panel, is Hell. Nothing here is natural. Everything—the towers in the background, the musical instruments, the knives, the gold pieces—is manmade. What draws the eye here is the “tree man:”

Inside the hollow shell of his body is a tavern—which looks not hellish at all but chill. His tree-trunk legs end in boats that cross the icy River Styx. And the face, looking back behind him with a wistful smile, is that of Hieronymus Bosch himself! He has put himself in Hell! And he looks perfectly content, despite the horrors all around him. What does this mean? Is he telling us that he knows that, despite his religious observations and outward good works, he realizes that he is damned?

Is this religious propaganda, as Payne claims? Or is Bosch using religious propaganda to show the preposterousness of what we are expected to believe, without question, without a second thought? Does his likeness smile because he has solved the riddle—figured out that the whole mythology makes no sense, and therefore cannot be true, and therefore we have nothing to fear after death?

In Anno Domini 1500, there was no greater exemplar of the Seven Deadly Sins—which, incidentally, are not in the Bible but are the creation of my namesake, Pope Gregory the Great—than Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, with his obscene wealth, his orgies, his luxury goods, his palaces, his wine, his mistresses. Also in Anno Domini 1500, a rich man could simply buy an indulgence and guarantee himself entrance to Heaven. And the guy signing those Paradise pardons was Borgia himself! If the diabolical Rodrigo Borgia’s ascent to Heaven was assured, the whole system was upside-down—or, more probably, all a fairy tale to begin with.

Fast forward 525 years and the tiny hand signing the corrupt pardons for his rich buddies belongs to Donald Trump. The Christians, so called, who hold power in the current regime are, by and large, sexual abusers, ugly misogynists, closeted sexual deviants, sadists, weirdos, hypocrites, liars—all greedy, all hateful, all simping for a cabal of pedophiles—who are either deliberately perverting the teachings of Jesus Christ, or never understood them in the first place.

Like God in the first panel, they are creepy. Like the tree man in the third panel, they are hollow. And like the egg at the center of the middle panel, they are rotten. If there is a God—and despite ample evidence to the contrary, I like to believe there is—may He silence the indecipherable MAGA claptrap, and, while He’s at it, dispatch its cruel and evil exemplars to a Boschian Hell.

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ICYMI

Our Halloween Special was fantastic! Thanks to our special guests: Jamie Schler, Cheri Jacobus, Martha Swann, Nina Burleigh, Donnie Gillespie, and Sandi Bachom.