Van Gogh's Hanifism

"...God may only appear once we say the words, those words with which Multatuli ends his prayer of an unbeliever: 'Oh God, there is no God.' You see, for me that God of the clergy is as dead as a doornail. But does that make me an atheist? Clergymen consider me one--que soit--but you see, I love, and how could I feel love if I were not alive myself or if others were not alive, and if we are alive there is something wondrous about it. Now call that God or human nature or whatever you like, but there is a certain something I cannot define systematically, although it is very much alive and real, and you see, for me that something is God or as good as God. You see, when in due course my time comes, one way or other, to die, well, what will keep me going even then? Won't it be the thought of love (moral or immoral love, what do I know about it)?"

"...precisely because I believe in life and in something real I am no longer as given to abstractions as before, when I had more or less [conventional] ideas about God and religion..."

[Vincent to Theo, 21 December 1881].

It is difficult to imagine a more profound religiosity--in the Irano-Semitic vein--than that of Vincent van Gogh. By "religiosity in the Irano-Semitic vein" I mean not a system of beliefs but, rather, a response to opening one's eyes upon the world, upon creation and, like the god of the first chapter of Genesis, blessing whatever one sees ("And God saw that it was good").

With Vincent, every painting was a benediction--some more successful than others in their execution, but that is beside the point.

"Mauve takes it amiss that I said, 'I am an artist,' which I won't take back, because it's self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the very opposite of saying, 'I know all about it, I've already found it.' As far as I am concerned, the word means, 'I am looking, I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved.'"

[Vincent to Theo, 3-12 May 1882].