On a recent trip to Rome, I happened to spend an evening touring the Borghese, a museum of fine arts that houses a good number of Bernini’s sculptures along with one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ten paintings. While it is some distance from Rome’s center, it is nonetheless worth the taxi ride to get there.
One of the sculptures surprised me. I had to return to it a couple of times to make a proper assessment of it. In the end, I decided that I liked it more than the other works of art that I had seen that night, including the celebrated L'Amore Sacro e L'Amore Profano. It was Bernini's David.
Here was a thug for God, a man of brute muscular strength — a real machine. Bernini had chosen to depict his subject at the moment of the attack, just as he launched his rock toward the horrible edifice of the towering Goliath. His muscles bulge as his upper teeth bite down on his lower lip in such a fashion that one thinks the skin will break for sure. The look on his face is just as piercing as he shoots a searing glare at his opponent. He is the avenger. God has sent him to accomplish a task: to win protection for the weak and justice for the oppressed. In his outward appearance he defines the word “chutzpah.”
This was a David I had never known. Here was someone who might have been read the ersatz verdict of post-modern shrinks. He is frustrated, his emotions are out of whack and unchecked, and he seems to be given into anger much more than peacefulness of mind. He needs some kind of hormonal re-education. He is a danger to himself, a ticking time bomb. Indeed, the sculpture did seem out of place at a museum where visitors were expected to wear wingtips and a black tie.
But, once I had overcome the initial surprise, Bernini's message shot through to me with the same force that David used to hurl his stone at Goliath. God respects the manliness of men, He wishes neither to obfuscate it nor to condemn it. But, rather, God wants us to discipline it and to offer it to Him in praise and thanksgiving. For, in the end, all of man’s strength is derived from God.
What Bernini expressed in stone, male saints have been living across two Christian millennia. Buff muscular strength reflects the readiness of the soul to bring down the full forces of heaven against the wicked snares of the devil. Sport and game, like David's sling and rock, prepare one to live a life of spontaneous and habitual virtue. As we train the exterior, we should also prune the passions of the soul. And, amidst the outrageous sins and evils of this world, men are sometimes called upon to exhibit a just and righteous anger.
In the town of Turin, just a few hundred miles from that museum, one can visit the home of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, who was not unlike David. He was a man who relished the thrills of sports. He climbed mountains and went on hikes, drove cars and danced with girls, and he was known to down a good beer from time to time. He smoked, too. In fact, the portrait that the Vatican chose to use at his beatification mass showed him atop his beloved Italian Alps, smoking a pipe. In the end, that pipe would be airbrushed out of the picture, but Pier Giorgio would remain a man's man.
His saintliness was founded on a life of tireless service to the most marginalized, downcast, and overburdened. He was not afraid to defend with his fists the honor of a woman or the rights of some peasant. Muscular strength was never his first line of defense, though. He preferred the battle of truth and goodness. But, he did not shrink from using it when it was needed. Even at those times, he never fought in order to prove a point. After all, he did not believe that might was the measure of truth. But, he fought instead to protect and to defend those who could not help themselves. When a fascist invaded his own home and threatened the lives of his mother and sister, he hit him in the head so hard that he came to as a Catholic.
As he was well-liked, his death at the age of 24 hit his friends and loved ones like a knife jab to the soul. To them, his muscular training had been usurped before it had ever ripened. His readiness to stand up for justice’s sake had been extinguished with the first blow of polio. It was a painful and hideous joke thrown down from heaven.
Yet, to Pier Giorgio his whole life was a matter of a different kind of training. His motto in life was that “to live without a Catholic faith, without a heritage to defend, and without being embattled at all times in the cause for truth is not to live at all, but to just get along.” He would later conclude that “we who through the grace of God are Catholic must never just get along…we must live.” In his espousal of authentic manliness he learned to live, even at the moment of death, for the greater honor of God.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
John Paul Shimek frequently writes about the JP2-Generation and issues related to men's spirituality. His writing has appeared in the National Catholic Register, the Newark Catholic Advocate, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He lives in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Readers can contact him at intermirifica@hotmail.com .
