Reflection
The Agony and the Ecstasy
Feast of St. James, Apostle
Irving Stone’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy” is a powerful biography of the Renaissance artist, Michelangelo. The work is less an historical record of dates than historical fiction, a psychological portrait: Michelangelo’s suffering is real, but so is his sense that creating beauty can be a kind of deliverance.
The reader (or viewer of the movie starring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II) is immersed into this dramatic arc of conflict, artistic struggle, and eventual creative bliss. The title suggests two dispositions that Stone repeatedly contrasts: the “agony” of pressure, illness, politics, and personal turmoil …and the “ecstasy” of inspired creation—when Michelangelo’s genius seems to break through the suffering around him.
Such a title could be applied to the lives of Van Gogh, Mozart, and numerous other artists, but we could also apply the title to the life of today’s saint, James the Greater. St. James accompanied Peter and John, in Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and in the ecstasy of Jesus’ Transfiguration earlier in the Gospels. Together, they experience Christ’s glory, as Jesus is speaking with Moses and Elijah, and the divine splendor shining out in Jesus. On the other occasion, he finds himself face to face with suffering and humiliation, and he sees with his own eyes how the Son of God humbles himself, making himself obedient unto death.
The journey from the Transfiguration to the Garden of Gethsemane was an opportunity for St. James to mature in faith… from the triumph of the former experience to the disillusionment and humiliation of the latter.
We honor St. James because he embraced that pilgrimage (repeated by the countless pilgrims today who journey the Camino de Santiago), eventually realizing that Christ’s glory was fulfilled on the Cross, precisely in his sharing in our sufferings, as early in the first century, King Herod Agrippa, the grandson of Herod the Great, Luke tells us, “laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the Church. He had James, the brother of John, killed by the sword” (Acts 12: 1-2).
As today we journey from our own tribulation to glory, St. James, pray for us.
