ABSTRACT
In the Medieval tradition of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, Podmore finds fertile ground for an exploration of what it meant to suggest that God suffers, not as God but on account of human sin. This sorrowing, which is God’s own, is a sorrow into which humanity is drawn through Christ, the Man of Sorrows. It is an idea that for Podmore resides in images of the Man of Sorrows by Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, whose own identification with suffering, melancholy and illness is well known. Podmore moots that it is also at play within the thought of Luther, with whom Dürer identified personally, and in Nicholas Cusa and the Theologia Germanica. Podmore argues that for these figures suffering itself can be a means through which one is brought to that which is beyond one’s self: to God, an idea he sees captured in the gaze of Dürer’s Man of Sorrows. It is God’s own gaze that speaks through the eyes of the sorrowing man, simultaneously inviting the viewer to share in Christ’s suffering while also acting as a forbidding veil to the inner mysteries of Christ’s own suffering.
