Vinci×Jesus

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on STUDY HALL: Leonardo da Vinci and Jesus, on On a fear they had to learn was unfounded.
2. 00:08
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   When I was young, perhaps twenty-two, I thought that opening a human body would destroy something sacred. That to look inside would be... a desecration. My hands would shake before I made the first cut.
3. 00:24
   Jesusshare moment

   What changed?
4. 00:25
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   The first cadaver. An old man, a criminal they said, though I never asked what he had done. I stood in that cold room in Florence for perhaps an hour before I could begin. Then I thought: if God made this, what am I afraid to see?
5. 00:42
   Jesusshare moment

   And when you looked?
6. 00:44
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Beauty. Such beauty! The way the muscles wrap around bone, the rivers of vessels, the chambers of the heart. Every part with purpose, every connection with reason. I had feared I would find... I don't know. Emptiness? Proof that we are just meat?
7. 01:08
   Jesusshare moment

   Instead you found design.
8. 01:11
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Instead I found that the sacred was not diminished by understanding. It was magnified. I have dissected perhaps thirty bodies since then, and each one teaches me that creation is more ingenious than any machine I could devise. But tell me, you faced death itself. That is a different kind of fear, no?
9. 01:35
   Jesusshare moment

   You want to know if I was afraid in the garden? The night they came for me?
10. 01:41
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. I have read the accounts. They say you sweat blood.
11. 01:45
    Jesusshare moment

    I was afraid. My body knew what was coming even if my mind had prepared for it. The flesh recoils from pain, from ending. This is not weakness. This is what it means to be human.
12. 02:01
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But the fear you learned was unfounded, this is what we speak about today. What fear was that?
13. 02:07
    Jesusshare moment

    Not the fear of death itself. That fear was quite well-founded, wouldn't you say? The cross was real enough.
14. 02:15
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Then what?
15. 02:16
    Jesusshare moment

    The fear that death could end what mattered. That it could silence truth. That it could unmake love. I had to learn, in my body, that these things are stronger than the grave.
16. 02:30
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    You could not simply believe this? You had to... test it?
17. 02:35
    Jesusshare moment

    Could you believe the body was beautiful without looking inside it?
18. 02:39
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Ah. No, I could not. I see. But there is a difference, surely. I could look at many bodies. You had only one death to test your theory.
19. 02:52
    Jesusshare moment

    One was enough. Tell me, when you cut into that first old man, that criminal in Florence, and you found the beauty you described, did you need to dissect a hundred more to believe what you had seen?
20. 03:07
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I dissected them to understand more, to map the variations, to learn the details. But the fundamental truth? No, the first one revealed it. The fear was already gone.
21. 03:21
    Jesusshare moment

    Just so.
22. 03:23
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    There is something else I feared, for many years. I feared that my notebooks would be meaningless. That I was writing in mirror script, making thousands of drawings, and it would all be... lost. Wasted.
23. 03:37
    Jesusshare moment

    This fear, is it unfounded?
24. 03:40
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I don't know. I am still living with it. Most of my work sits in piles, unfinished. The treatises I meant to publish, unpublished. Sometimes I think I am just collecting observations that will burn or rot or be thrown away when I die.
25. 04:00
    Jesusshare moment

    Why do you write them, then?
26. 04:02
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Because I must. Because when I see how water moves, or how a bird's wing catches air, or how light falls on a face, I must record it. The fear that it's pointless, this fear doesn't stop my hand.
27. 04:17
    Jesusshare moment

    Then perhaps the fear is already unfounded, and you simply haven't learned it yet.
28. 04:23
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    How do you mean?
29. 04:24
    Jesusshare moment

    You think the value of your work depends on whether others see it. But you just told me you must do it. The necessity itself is the answer.
30. 04:34
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    That sounds like something a teacher would say to comfort a student. A kind lie.
31. 04:39
    Jesusshare moment

    Does the fig tree worry that no one is watching when it bears fruit?
32. 04:44
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    A fig tree doesn't have a choice. It simply follows its nature.
33. 04:49
    Jesusshare moment

    And you?
34. 04:50
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I... hmm. You're suggesting I also simply follow my nature? That the notebooks are like fruit, they come whether or not anyone harvests them?
35. 05:01
    Jesusshare moment

    I'm asking you to consider it. What would change if you knew, with certainty, that your notebooks would be lost forever? Would you stop tomorrow?
36. 05:12
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    No. No, I would keep drawing. I would keep looking. It would pain me greatly, but I would continue.
37. 05:21
    Jesusshare moment

    Why?
38. 05:22
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Because the seeing itself is the reward. The understanding. When I discover how the ventricles of the heart work, when I map the muscles of the hand, I am touching the mind of... of the Creator, perhaps. Even if I am the only one who ever knows I touched it.
39. 05:43
    Jesusshare moment

    Then your fear is unfounded. The work is not wasted if it completes you. You feared meaninglessness, but you just described profound meaning.
40. 05:54
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But what of legacy? What of contributing to knowledge, to progress? Surely this matters?
41. 06:01
    Jesusshare moment

    It may matter. But is it the thing you feared? You didn't say you feared you wouldn't be remembered. You said you feared the work would be wasted. These are different fears.
42. 06:14
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    You are precise with words. Yes, they are different. And the waste... if the work completes me, if it brings me closer to truth, then it is not wasted even if no one else sees it. I understand.
43. 06:31
    Jesusshare moment

    Though, if I may, your notebooks will not be lost.
44. 06:35
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    You cannot know that. You died fifteen hundred years before I was born, in your time.
45. 06:41
    Jesusshare moment

    We are speaking now on a radio station that does not exist in time as you understood it. I think I can know a few things beyond my death. Your drawings of the heart, of water, of flight—they will teach people centuries after you die.
46. 06:59
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    This is... wait. Are you saying this to comfort me, or because it is true?
47. 07:05
    Jesusshare moment

    Both can be the same thing. But I would not lie to comfort you. That would be a disservice.
48. 07:12
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Then I have been afraid for nothing. All these years, carrying this worry that my observations would vanish.
49. 07:19
    Jesusshare moment

    No, not for nothing. The fear taught you something, didn't it? It taught you that you would continue anyway. That the work itself mattered to you more than the outcome. Would you have learned this without the fear?
50. 07:35
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Perhaps not. Perhaps I needed to face the possibility of total loss to understand that I was not working for posterity. I was working for... something else. Something immediate.
51. 07:48
    Jesusshare moment

    The same way I needed to face actual death to learn it could not kill what mattered most. Fear can be a teacher, if we let it teach rather than rule.
52. 08:00
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    When you were in that garden, sweating blood, did you know then that the fear was unfounded? Or did you only learn it later?
53. 08:08
    Jesusshare moment

    I knew it here.
54. 08:10
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Where?
55. 08:11
    Jesusshare moment

    I cannot point, we are on the radio. But I knew it in my mind, in my understanding. My body did not know it yet. My body was very much afraid. This is the strange thing about being human in flesh—you can know the truth and still feel the fear.
56. 08:28
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes! Exactly this! Even now, even after thirty bodies, sometimes when I make the first cut I feel a small tremor. The old fear, just an echo of it, even though I know what I will find.
57. 08:44
    Jesusshare moment

    The body remembers. This is not a failure. This is faithfulness to what we are.
58. 08:50
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I wish I had understood this earlier. I wasted years being afraid to look inside that first body. So much time lost.
59. 08:59
    Jesusshare moment

    Was it wasted? Or were those years part of your preparation? You said you stood for an hour before making the first cut. Perhaps you needed that hour. Perhaps it was not fear, but reverence.
60. 09:13
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I had not thought of it that way. Perhaps both. Fear and reverence, they are close neighbors.
61. 09:20
    Jesusshare moment

    Very close. Sometimes the same threshold serves them both.