What Killed Vincent Van Gogh?

In a recent trip to Amsterdam, and the Vincent Van Gogh museum, I became fascinated by the question: What killed Van Gogh?

Of course, he committed suicide by shooting himself in a corn field. But why? Although he was lucid as he died, he did not say. He had been struggling for a couple of years with hallucinations and other symptoms, diagnosed at the time as epilepsy. But he seems to have been in good mental and physical shape at the time he actually killed himself; and this does not really answer the question, because we do not know what “mental illness” is.

Assuming that “mental” illnesses are spiritual illnesses perhaps gives an insight.

By coincidence, I saw the following recently in a book of Catholic spiritual guidance:

“Natural activity is the enemy of abandonment, without which, … there can be no real perfection. It prevents, obstructs, or spoils all the operations of grace, and substitutes, in the soul which succumbs to it, the impulsion of the human spirit for that of the divine Spirit. In fact there is no doubt that the impetuosity with which we give ourselves up to good works proceeds from a hidden source of self-confidence, and a thoughtless presumption that makes us imagine that we are doing or can do great things.” -- Jean-Pierre de Caussade.

This speaks of “good works,” but rings even more true of working too hard generally. Van Gogh was convinced—rightly—of his own genius, and worked with superhuman energy to accomplish something great. He produced all his paintings in a span of about seven years.

It is a hubris similar to that of the Tower of Babel. He was trying to do something superhuman; he was taking too much on himself. Inevitably, he was going to be reduced to confusion, as Babel was. One of his symptoms was paranoia, a conviction that everyone was trying to poison him. This seems to me a classic symptom for someone who has given himself too much importance.

Van Gogh himself says at some point that he has been risking his life and has lost half his mind to his work. He was right. Van Gogh is admirable in the way the hero in a tragedy is. He was brought down by over-ambition, yet is noble for how close he came to accomplishing it.

Again, a quote from the book of spiritual instruction: “When you feel, however confusedly, that something is acting in your soul, the stronger this impression is, the more necessary it is to keep quiet and still, and as though in a state of inaction, so that you may not spoil all by interfering unseasonably.”

Van Gogh was a good man, a moral man, and deeply spiritually sensitive. He had he longing for something more. And Van Gogh’s hallucinations might well have been “something acting in his soul.” But such things, when they come, are devastating to the ego. Vincent had too much invested in ego. He did not keep quiet and still, but imagined he had to kill himself to compensate: he cut off his ear and shot himself.

Poor man.

Living in Korea, I began to realize that he notion of art divorced from religion is quite a modern and a western idea. There is a reason why all those Renaissance paintings are of religious subjects. In East Asia, traditionally, there is almost no art that is not explicitly religious.

And art divorced from religion is a terrible mistake. For the audience, and, very much, for the artist.