Do you like “Joen the painter”?

We know him as Hieronymus Bosch. If you never saw his paintings before, just look here or here and tell me you were not amazed. I cannot say I like him, but his paintings pulled me for many years and I never could figure out why. The images are unreal and yet very realistic. Similar to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez they make me think and feel deeper than I usually do.

His paintings are filled with the innumerable details. They are creative, informative; some are even funny. How many old masters do you know with so much humor in their paintings? Granted, his humor is often crude and based on bodily functions. But that’s why it is universal. We know exactly what he meant, don’t we?

And how many old masters produced such a scary images? Those matter-of-fact torturers are acting like soulless punishing machines. One cannot avoid them. They do their job with unerring efficiency, like the Officer of In the Penal Colony, by Franz Kafka.

Even more scary are those around Jesus carrying the cross. They are human, but one cannot expect mercy or compassion from them either. They are not just doing their job like those fantastic monsters and demons. They glee from the pleasure of having a chance to humiliate and torture Jesus.

And what about many other people in the details of Bosch’s paintings? In the presence of such horrors, they are going through the life as if nothing special is going on. Is not it the most tragic images?

And what about us? Have we used to something completely unacceptable by any standards too? Yes, we have made ourselves indifferent to many things that looked unacceptable at the first glance. And what is our excuse? We had to because we could not change it. Otherwise, we would either die or be crying since the day we were born into this unfair and cruel world. One cannot miss here the resemblance of the Hamletian “to be or not to be.”

I can go on and on. Just look through the details on Bosch’s paintings. There are hundreds of small scenes and each tells a story or even many stories at once. It is not easy to come with a human story that is not covered by Hieronymus Bosch.

But just encyclopedia of human life did not explain the pull he had on me. There was something else there. Something related to the way he presented his images. The way he clashed them – good and bad, realistic and fantastic, beauty and ugliness, humorous and tragic, reasonable and insane. The clash of incompatibles, the chasm it opens and the weird attractiveness of this chasm is very similar to the effect of the paintings of our senior contemporary Salvador Dali. Just look here.

What do they have that attracted me so much?

Only recently, while reading about Bosch’s The Ship of Fools, I got my answer. It went all the way back to Plato again. In Book VI of the Republic, he describes the weakness of Democracy – its undisciplined and unrestrained way. The populism of the Democratic government leads to mob rule. The loudest voices will dominate and irrational, ill-motivated decisions will be made. He describes it with an allegory of “ship of fools”:

Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are quarreling with one another about the steering –every one is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces any one who says the contrary.

That is only a fragment. I highly recommend to read the full quote here. (By the way, here is what Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) said in his Social Contract & Discourses: “Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.”)

This allegory was used by Bosch’s contemporary Sebastian Brant, who in 1494 published book Ship of Fools: a ship — an entire fleet at first — sets off from Basel, bound for the Paradise of Fools. The cultural motif of the ship of fools also served to parody the “ark of salvation” as the Catholic Church was styled. Some of the woodcuts illustrating the manuscript may have been created by Albrecht Dürer and influenced Bosch.

The tradition of court fools, who were allowed to say whatever they wanted, helped to legitimize the criticism of the church under the guise of a foolish talk.

That was seventeen years before the essay of Erasmus In Praise of Folly (1511), which is considered one of the most notable works of the Renaissance and played an important role in the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation. He was (born in 1466) sixteen years later than Bosch and educated in the same town ‘s-Hertogenbosch.

The works of Martin Luther followed. He was born in 1483.

The change was in the air. And in the period between 1490 and 1500, Hieronymus Bosch – in the prime of his talent – creates this triptych. At upper left is The Ship of Fools. At lower left is Allegory of Gluttony and Lust. Panel at right is Death and the Miser. On the back of the right panel is The Wayfarer. The central panel is lost.

The earlier wayfarer has been interpreted as choosing between the path of virtue at the gate on the right or debauchery in the house on the left. He walks away from the house, looking back as if in doubts. The later one, though, uses his stick to repel a dog that attacks him.

It seems to me that the second wayfarer (and the painter) already made up his mind about his choice and just would like to go along his way. There is another difference: the earlier wayfarer walks away from pleasures, while the second ignores the injustice (the scene of the robbery of another wayfarer and a hanged man at the background). He has learned the deceitfulness of pleasures and does not have illusions about his ability to right the world.

This train of thoughts brings up the memory of several other critical thinkers before and after Renaissance: Ecclesiastes, Jesus Christ, Mark Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, to name a few. Their parables and paradoxes puzzled me too.

But the Ship of Fools brought it all together and explained to me what was the source of the pull these people exerted on me.

It is impossible to express in a few words what much smarter people did in thick books. All I can do is to provide a few statements that describe my new understanding. Here are they:

* We tend to describe the world in an orderly manner, while the world around us is much less predictable than we dare to admit. It is especially obvious in the case of a human life. Whether it is because of our lack of knowledge or because of the nature of things, I cannot say.

By presenting the contradictions of the world around us, Hieronymus Bosch and other great thinkers force us to see the world complexity, and that is one of the reasons of their great appeal. Because deep down we all feel this complexity, don’t we? We are scared a bit and very motivated to know more about what’s going on and how other people are dealing with it.

* I have written already about contradictions as the lighthouses that lead us to the discoveries. Bosch follows their signals too and pulls us with him behind the horizon of visible.

* The struggle between our desires and our rational self – between the rider and the elephant inside – continues inside each of us all the time. We recognize it in the Bosch’s imagery and can relate to it. That’s another reason of his attraction. We are glued to his paintings, seeking to find there a hint how to prevail (or not) in this eternal inner struggle.

* Those who prefer the simpler point of view see in Bosch paintings just moralization and warning to sinners. That’s how his works become popular. Yet, the world is not black and white. It is multi-colored. And those who appreciate the complexity of the world enjoy Bosch’s multifaceted presentation too. That is how, with Bosch, each of us can find validation of their point of view. Me too.

It so happened that, while writing this article, I was also reading Carl Jung and was struck by the alignment between these thoughts and the Jung’s discoveries (those who believe in the law of attraction, you are welcome).

The central concept of Jung’s analytical psychology is individuation — the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious. It has many parallels with self-actualization described by Carl Rogers and brought most fully to prominence in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development. Here just a few quotes from his Red Book where he captured the process of his own individuation:

the highest truth is one and the same with the absurd

immense fullness and immense emptiness are one and the same

[thinking and feeling] are each other’s poison and healing

the melting together of sense and nonsense… produces the supreme meaning

if you marry the ordered to the chaos, you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness

meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning

meaning is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning

if no outer adventure happens to you, then no inner adventure happens either

It is tempting to repeat after Lewis Carroll‘s Cheshire Cat that “we are all mad here”, and I was inclined to think so too. But Jung helped me to find a better resolution. In his Psychological Types he stated:

In practice, opposites can be united only in the form of a compromise, or irrationally, some new things arising between them which, although different from both, yet has the power to take up their energies in equal measure as an expression of both and neither. Such an expression cannot be contrived by reason, it can only be created through living

Each of us tries and cannot completely reconcile the life contradictions. Because life itself is the dynamic balance of opposites and it expires as soon as the struggle is settled. If Jung, Rogers, and Maslow are correct, then our trying is the central process of our human development, and we got it hard-wired in us by natural selection.

So we continue fighting and recognize the same quest in the Bosch’s paintings. We feel the unsettling pulse of life in his images and drawn to them in the same way the inhabitants of Lascaux cave were drawn to and even worshiped the wall paintings 17,300 years ago.