Art helps understand why Tai Ji Men’s suffering is not over yet, despite all its victories in courts of law.
by Marco Respinti*
*Conclusions prepared for the webinar “No Peace Without Justice: A New Look at the Tai Ji Men Case,” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on April 24, 2024, UN International Day of Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace.
An article already published in Bitter Winter on April 25th, 2024.
The architecture of today’s webinar was shaped by two twin concepts. Multilateralism and diplomacy are the couple of words to which the United Nations calls our attention on this day of observance. Peace and justice are the couple of words upon which we chose to reflect in connection to the “Tai Ji Men case.” They are interconnected.
In fact, multilateralism and diplomacy fulfill their aims when they work to secure peace and justice. Art is powerful in conveying messages that may otherwise be quite dry. Artists usually represent peace and justice as beautiful beings, adorned by a number of eloquent symbols. Peace comes with an olive branch in one hand or in connection with a candid white dove to show mildness. Justice is blind and carries a scale and/or a double-edged sword to symbolize even-handedness.
Sometimes, artists depict them as allegories, sometimes as deities. In fact, many religions and traditions of the world, from antiquity to the present day, venerate peace and justice as divine beings. It means that human beings perceive peace and justice both as divine features and gifts from Above. This implies that searching for peace and justice, and operating to grant them to humankind, is a divine endeavor or a divinely inspired mission. Said differently, peace and justice are not merely political enterprises, but also spiritual tasks.
Artists invariably see both peace and justice as female. This suggests a strong connection between peace and justice on one hand, and some of the noblest and universal attributes of women on the other: their energy accompanied by their firmness, their sweetness accompanied by their resilience, their courage accompanied by their endurance, their spousal vocation accompanied by their attitude and leadership, their maternal care accompanied by their strength in overcoming difficulties.
The most important feature of artistic depictions of justice and peace is that they often go together. In fact, they are strictly correlated, but not only: they are faces of the same reality. We could even see them as the same concept considered in two distinct respects—or as two avatars of the same supernatural being, if we want to borrow from the language of Eastern religions and use the metaphor of the divine to signify complementary visible manifestations of the one philosophical unity.
Several painters, many of them Italian, roamed along this path. For example, Jacopo Negretti (1548/50–1628) known as Jacopo or Giacomo Palma “il Giovane,” the anonymous artist in the workshop of German master Hans (or Johann) von Aachen (1552–1615), Alessandro Varotari (1588-1649) known as “il Padovanino,” Pietro Liberi (1605–1687), Laurent de La Hyre (1606–1656), Antonio Domenico Beverensi (c.1624/26–1694), Giovan Battista Gaulli (1639–1709) known as “il Baciccio,” Stefano Pozzi (1699–1768) and Corrado Giaquinto (1703–1766).
Their paintings on this subject show peace and justice as women, bound together, and in a rather intimate posture. They often look like passionate lovers. They even kiss—and it is well known that a kiss is more intimate a gesture than even sexual intercourse. Many contemporary ideological constructions have been inferred from these representations and they all go astray. In fact, the source and reason of justice and peace carnally kissing each other is the Bible. Verse 11 of Psalm 84 in the 1592 edition of the Old Testament in Latin called “Sixto-Clementine Vulgate,” or simply “Clementine Vulgate,” reads “iustitia et pax osculatae sunt,” which in the King James Bible corresponds to verse 10 of Psalm 85 and is translated into English as “righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The Latin phrase is also the explicit title of some of those paintings and is visible in a few.
Indeed, the Bible abounds with kisses. The topic has been famously perused also by an author I mentioned in a previous webinar on the Tai Ji Men case, Aelred (1110–1167), an English Cistercian monk and the abbot of Rievaulx, in North Yorkshire, England. In his manuscript “De spirituali amicitia,” “On Spiritual Friendship,” probably completed around the year 1160, he describes three kinds of kisses. First, the corporal kiss: a sign of connubial love, reconciliation, and true friendship, which can also be perverted into a disguise of evil, as Judas betraying Jesus supremely exemplified. Secondly, the spiritual kiss as the union of souls that uses the metaphor of the mouth, but doesn’t need physical contact, and is ultimately Jesus kissing a person through the mystical action of another person. Thirdly, the intellectual kiss, or when a soul desires a spiritual kiss from Jesus in person as an emblem of total fulfillment.ù
A famous contemporary and kindred spirit of Aelred, Bernard (1090–1153), a French Cistercian monk as well and the abbot of Clairvaux, in north-eastern France, composed his “Sermones in Cantica Canticorum,” “Sermons on the Song of Songs,” between 1135 and 1155. They are his speeches on the most famous love poem in the Bible, a profound unity of the spiritual and the sensual. In them, Bernard repeatedly deals with the communion between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in the Christian Trinity and finds no better metaphor to convey the sense of that unique intimacy than a kiss on the mouth. No matter how many bizarre interpretations of all this have been given, the Roman Catholic Church has canonized both Aelred and Bernard as saints.
But why justice and peace kiss in the Bible and in Bible-inspired art? Because the deeply religious allegory that characterizes their relationship is marital: the two become one, their individuality is exalted in fusion, their union is much more than a mere sum—it is interaction that breeds. The spiritual eye is able to see through the personification of justice and peace into two women and appreciate the profound meaning of the representation of a spiritual generative union that symbolically magnify its capacity by multiplying the number of its maternal references. Something similar happens in a female convent, not only in Christianity, where the superior is called mother and generates daughters that call each other sisters and may in turn become mothers of other nuns.
Justice and peace are spouses because one bears fruit for and by the other. Again, the Bible, in the book of Isaiah (32:7) states it perfectly: “the work of righteousness shall be peace.” Peace does not stand in the void and justice is meaningless without an end. To be fully achieved, peace needs that justice implements its goal. All this bears most clearly on the Tai Ji Men case, where a group of pacific, law-abiding, patriotic, and (most important of all) innocent citizens of the Republic of China (Taiwan) have been denied their fundamental right to religious liberty for almost 28 years.
In that case, justice has been done but theoretically only. Tai Ji Men has been in fact repeatedly cleared of all charges by all levels of Taiwanese justice. Yet Tai Ji Men’s Shifu, or Grand Master, and dizi, or disciples, continue to enjoy no peace, as if they were guilty. This happens because justice has not kissed peace yet. In the Tai Ji Men case, justice has been relegated to an abstract realm that has no concrete influence on reality. There is no intimacy between justice and peace in Taiwan. For sure, the ordeal of Tai Ji Men will continue until justice comes down on Earth and meet peace in a kiss.
This will happen only when political authorities in Taiwan decide to give tangible follow-ups to court decisions and rule that enough is enough—finally kissing Tai Ji Men’s suffering goodbye. The world is watching and waiting.