Feast Day of St. Nicholas
1 comment December 6th, 2015 Headsman
Today is the feast day of Santa Claus himself, St. Nicholas.
Nicholas was a real-life bishop in fourth century Asia Minor. He’s among the prelates to sign off on the Nicene Creed, Christianity’s official profession of orthodox doctrine hammered out at the emperor Constantine’s epochal Council of Nicaea.
Living as he did amid the triumph of his once-persecuted faith, Saint Nick was not called upon to offer God his own martyrdom. Our death penalty context comes from one of the stories in his hagiography — that on one occasion, returning to the seat of his diocese at Myra, Nicholas discovered that three innocent men had been condemned to imminent execution by a wicked magistrate. Hastening to the scene, he dramatically averted their beheading by seizing the executioner’s sword.
The great Russian artist Ilya Repin depicted the scene.
Repin did not love this painting — he slinked out of its 1889 exhibition, allegedly dissatisfied with its rigidity and melodrama* — but it did express the liberal-minded artist’s distaste for capital punishment. The era we now know to be the late tsarist period in Russia saw violent (and sometimes indiscriminate) crackdowns on revolutionary terrorism following the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, to the great grief of her dissident intelligentsia. Philosopher Vladimir Solovyov called the death penalty “absolute murder”; with a like attitude, tsarist Russia’s “liberal politicians, academics and journalists repeatedly campaigned against this form of punishment.” (Source)
Around the time that Repin depicted St. Nicholas’s great act of clemency, Leo Tolstoy — who abhorred capital punishment — wrote of his youthful experience witnessing the guillotine in action in Paris, “at the moment the head and body separated and fell into the box I gasped, and realized not with my mind nor with my heart but with my whole being, that all the arguments in defence of capital punishment are wicked nonsense … [that] murder remains murder, and that this crime had been committed before my eyes.”**
Repin was forever being read and misread by the ideologues afoot in Russia, but this Tolstoyan horror at the scaffold he shared unambiguously. In a later era, by which time Repin was the established senior figure of the Russian art scene, the painter was exercised enough by Stolypin‘s wholesale use of capital punishment following Russia’s abortive 1905 revolution to issue a public denunciation of executions. But it was only ever by the hand of St. Nicholas that he had the experience of preventing one.
* See David Jackson, “The ‘Golgotha’ of Ilya Repin in Context”, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, Vol. 50, No. 1 (1991).
** Repin also painted Tolstoy in 1887.
On this day..
- 1816: Marci Zöld, Hungarian outlaw - 2019
- 1787: John Bly and Charles Rose, Shaysites - 2018
- 1889: Two Apaches in Arizona - 2017
- 2012: An unknown organ donor, executed at a hospital - 2016
- 1985: Carroll Edward Cole - 2014
- 1938: Martha Marek, Zeliopaster - 2013
- 2006: A father-daughter drug smuggling team - 2012
- 1769: Two weavers, for the Spitalfield riots - 2011
- 1209: The Oxford clerks - 2010
- 1823: Dr. Edme Castaing, the first to kill with morphine - 2009
- 1638: The melancholy Dorothy Talby - 2008
- 41 B.C.E.: Arsinoe IV, Cleopatra's sister - 2007
Entry Filed under: Ancient,Arts and Literature,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,History,Known But To God,Last Minute Reprieve,Myths,Not Executed,Pardons and Clemencies,Public Executions,Roman Empire,Russia,Turkey,Uncertain Dates,Wrongful Executions
Tags: art, december 6, ilya repin, leo tolstoy, myra, st. nicholas
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